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food but all the conveniences and luxuries of life are not to be had for nothing, motives for prudential restraint must present themselves, more or less imperiously, in every condition of society[1].
Again, as to the positive check. The whole train of common diseases and epidemics, war and plague, are contained in the list. But these, as a whole, are not, either mediately or immediately, the effects of a deficiency of food. The cholera, for example, has appeared in America, to say the least of it, in a form as severe as in England; and though in England it has been most destructive in the abodes of poverty, yet neither has it altogether spared the rich. The like may be said of wars, and other evils which we bring upon ourselves. They are not universally the re-
- ↑ In proportion to the depression consequent upon a change of life, must be the force of the motives opposed to such change, though its consequences would not involve any scantiness of the mere means of subsistence. The prevalence of the preventive check among the middling classes in England does not depend on a scarcity of mere subsistence, and in America similar reasons must exist for its prevalence among all classes elevated above poverty. Were it not that the wild life of a woodsman offers many attractions, it would actually prevail there in a much more considerable degree than it does at present.
