d for a few years cannot be the real average increase of the
population of the country. If there were no other depopulating causes,
and if the preventive check did not operate very strongly, every country
would, without doubt, be subject to periodical plagues and famines.

The only true criterion of a real and permanent increase in the
population of any country is the increase of the means of subsistence,
and even this criterion is subject to some slight variations.

Other circumstances being the same, it may be affirmed that countries
are populous according to the quantity of human food which they produce
or can acquire; and happy according to the liberality with which this
food is divided, or the quantity which a day's labour will purchase.
This happiness does not depend either upon their being thinly or fully
inhabited, upon their poverty or their riches, their youth or age, but
on the proportion which the population and the food bear to each other.

In modern Europe the positive checks to population prevail less, and the
preventive checks more, than in past times, and in the more uncivilised
parts of the world, since wars, plagues, acute diseases, and famines
have become less frequent.

With regard to the preventive checks to population, though it must be
acknowledged that the preventive check of moral restraint does not, at
present, largely prevail, yet it is becoming more prevalent, and if we
consider only the general term, which implies principally a delay of
marriage from prudential considerations, it may be considered as the
most potent of the checks which in modern Europe keep down the
population to the level of the means of subsistence.

_III.--Remedies other than Moral Restraint for Evils of Over-population_

All systems of equality which have been proposed are bound to fail,
because the motive to the preventive check of moral restraint is
destroyed by equality and community of goods. As all would be equal and
in similar circumstances, there would be no reason why one person should
think himself obliged to practise the duty of restraint more than
another. And how could a man be compelled to such restraint? The
operation of this natural check of moral restraint depends exclusively
upon the existence of the laws of property and succession; and in a
state of equality and community of property could only be replaced by
some artificial regulation of a very different stamp, and a much more
unnatural charact