capital, either for
business, or farming, and unused and therefore unable, to earn a
subsistence by daily labour, their only refuge seems to be a miserable
ale-house, which certainly offers no very enchanting prospect of a
happy evening to their lives. By much the greater part, therefore,
deterred by this uninviting view of their future situation, content
themselves with remaining single where they are.

If this sketch of the state of society in England be near the truth,
and I do not conceive that it is exaggerated, it will be allowed that
the preventive check to population in this country operates, though
with varied force, through all the classes of the community. The same
observation will hold true with regard to all old states. The effects,
indeed, of these restraints upon marriage are but too conspicuous in
the consequent vices that are produced in almost every part of the
world, vices that are continually involving both sexes in inextricable
unhappiness.

CHAPTER 5

The second, or positive check to population examined, in England--The
true cause why the immense sum collected in England for the poor does
not better their condition--The powerful tendency of the poor laws to
defeat their own purpose--Palliative of the distresses of the poor
proposed--The absolute impossibility, from the fixed laws of our
nature, that the pressure of want can ever be completely removed from
the lower classes of society--All the checks to population may be
resolved into misery or vice.

The positive check to population, by which I mean the check that
represses an increase which is already begun, is confined chiefly,
though not perhaps solely, to the lowest orders of society.

This check is not so obvious to common view as the other I have
mentioned, and, to prove distinctly the force and extent of its
operation would require, perhaps, more data than we are in possession
of. But I believe it has been very generally remarked by those who have
attended to bills of mortality that of the number of children who die
annually, much too great a proportion belongs to those who may be
supposed unable to give their offspring proper food and attention,
exposed as they are occasionally to severe distress and confined,
perhaps, to unwholesome habitations and hard labour. This mortality
among the children of the poor has been constantly taken notice of in
all towns. It certainly does not prevail in an equal degree in the
country, but