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of encouraging marriage, rather to discourage it, and by restraining the number of the births, to prevent the sickness and misery, arising from a want of food, which would be otherwise inevitable. In our times, therefore, the influence of different institutions and conditions of society, according as they are favourable or unfavourable to the preventive check[1], will form an interesting subject of inquiry.
Systems of equality, with a community of labour and of goods, are highly unfavourable to it. I begin with these, because, in all the objections to such systems, a common principle is involved, the knowledge of which, in its different bearings, will be useful to us afterwards, when we come to examine the encouragements to moral restraint,
- ↑ To the whole of the preventive check, understood, as I have used the term, synonymously with moral restraint: not to that part of it only, which depends on a scarcity of food, but also to that, of which we see so much in all classes of society elevated above poverty, and which results from the apprehension of lesser evils and inconveniences; the laws of nature, which require merely an equilibrium between the population and the food, being equally satisfied, whatever he the causes or motives, through the medium of which the necessary equilibrium is actually produced.
