the population was, or is, far too scanty to need, on any possible view of the subject, diminution; or second, because wherever it has openly prevailed, in the most luxurious state of society, singular as it may appear, it has been perpetrated by the higher rather than the lower ranks. (5) I do not deny the assertion of Hume, that infanticide was the prevailing and stubborn vice of antiquity. Probably the custom of the Canaanites, so strongly reprobated in the law of Moses, of passing their children through the fire, or offering them to Moloch, was a species of infanticide; we find, too, the Carthaginians, who are supposed to have been of the same origin, persevering in the like horrible rites. In the earliest periods of the history of Greece and Rome, it might have also partially prevailed, till, as we have seen, it was repressed in their better days. But then, in these instances, if it existed at all, it was perpetrated in countries very inadequately peopled, to which an increase of numbers would have been the greatest possible blessing. And still it is, in the wilds of America, one of the most scantily peopled districts in the globe, in reference to its fertility, that the Indian is said to expose and desert his child, that he may spare himself a momentary inconvenience; a habit which we are also told prevailed till of late in the more luxuriant islands of the South Seas, where all the productions of nature, excepting human beings to enjoy them, are found in such astonishing abundance. (6) Whenever this method of regulating the population has generally prevailed, it has been found to be the habit of luxurious wealth, rather than of suffering poverty; and, therefore, cannot have been resorted to as a general means of proportioning numbers to food. This fact may sound rather strange in "ears polite ;" and, happily for our state of civilization, we can only know it from ancient history, or distant report; these, however, concur in substantiating it. Thus in the Polynesian islands, to which Mr. Malthus so pointedly alludes, who are they that constitute the well-known Eareeoie societies? The very same class who perpetrated similar crimes in Rome, whom the satirist contrasts with the poor, so little to the advantage of the former. Hæ tamen et partûs subeunt discrimen, et omnes Tantum artes hujus, tantum medicamina possunt, Those, however, whom the Romans deemed barbarians, "accounted it," says Tacitus," a flagitious crime to "set limits to population, by rearing only a certain "number of children, and destroying the rest." On the contrary, we learn incidentally from Cæsar, that they avoided whatever they supposed would diminish their natural fruitfulness. (7) With the practice of destroying helpless infancy, may be classed the immolation of the weak, the diseased, and the aged, which also must tend to diminish population. But this custom again prevails only in countries which are almost desolate of inhabitants. (8) The remaining "positive checks," which have, in conjunction with the former ones, to rectify the redundance of mankind, are famine and pestilence. But here again the argument for their necessity totally fails. Where, according to the theory under examination, they cannot be wanted, there they prevail with 1 Juv. Sat., 6, v. 592. frequency and severity, and where they ought to operate, there they disappear. Dearth and famine, for instance, are almost peculiar to a scanty state of population, dispersed over a fertile country, as Humboldt has observed; except in those colonies which have sprung from, and which are still dependant, in great measure, for their prosperity, on their access to crowded countries. As to that abject poverty which almost amounts, in individual cases, to what dearth and famine become, more generally considered, it is the most severe and universal where the inhabitants are few. It is interesting to observe, that no perceptible diminution takes place in any well-peopled country from this afflicting cause; in a nation where there are institutions in favour of the poor, it is barely possible that they can occur, except in some very extraordinary instances indeed. Major Graunt, in his Observations on the Bills of Mortality, says, "my first obser"vation is, that few are starved. This appears, that "of 229,250, which have died, we find not above 51 to "have been starved!" And he speaks thus of the most crowded metropolis in the world, where, in the ceaseless crowd and bustle, such circumstances, one would imagine, are the most likely to occur. As to the supposition, that poverty operates as a check in another form, namely, by either diminishing the proportion or the prolificness of marriages, the contrary will be fully demonstrated hereafter. (9) Nor is the supposition, that epidemics are the efficient means of thinning a crowded popolation, any truer than the former ones. Diseases which are communicated by direct contact may, perhaps, be spread more rapidly, and commit greater ravages amongst a full, than a thin state of inhabitants; but even this fact is doubtful, for the greatest of all the contagious pests that ever afflicted the human race, the small-pox, was quite as fatal in country places, as in towns and cities, at all times; and it is remarkable, that the plague itself, during its last tremendous visitation in this country, was much more fatal in a small sequestered village in the north of Derbyshire, than in the metropolis. But as to epidemics of a different kind, it has long been observed, that they are less fatal in towns than in country places. This, Dr. Short repeatedly points out; and during the late dreadful contagious fever in Ireland, Drs. Baker and Cheyne record the same important fact, as established by the communications of the faculty from every part of the island. (10) But these facts are rather curious than essential to my argument, which I shall further proceed to enforce, in a different and far more conclusive manner, in the ensuing chapter. 289 CHAPTER XVII. OF THE DIMINUTION IN THE OPERATION OF THE CHECKS AS POPULATION INCREASES. (1) ONE of the most striking, and indeed irrefragable proofs, that the checks we have been considering, namely, War, Pestilence, and Famine, were not intended to be, nor yet are, the regulators of population, remains to be noticed, and it is this,-that they are utterly misplaced in the system they are meant to support. When, in every view of the question, they are not only unnecessary but highly pernicious, that is, in the rudiments of human associations, when room is abundant, and it is only human beings who are scarce, then are they constantly present, and operate with the greatest vigour. But, on the other hand, when mankind become, comparatively speaking, numerous, and consequently when they ought, according to the theory, to be the most active, they operate very languidly, and remit their effects to very distant and lengthening intervals, so as to encourage a rational and pious hope that the time is not far distant when the anticipations of philosophy and the prophecies of religion will be realized, and they will cease altogether. Meantime they are, in every sense of the word, mal-a-propos; they appear when they are not wanted; when they ought to be present, and unusually active, they are absent: confronting, therefore, at every stage of society, the theory they are brought forward to support. 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