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ties and variations of employment are unfavourable to the preventive check among labourers. I may now add, that the same want of precedency, and the scramble which prevails in the whole business of commercial life, is, pro tanto, equally unfavourable to it among the middling classes. The sons of tradesmen and farmers are exhorted not to marry until they are settled in some business or farm. Let us suppose them uniformly to comply with this advice. Then, the rapidity of succession, which will regulate the number of marriages, will be proportional, not simply to the vacancies by death, and the increase of the resources of the society, but, to the sum of these, together with the number of unsuccessful speculations: since every failure must make room for a new adventurer. Hence, in proportion to the number of failures is the excess of marriages, and in the same proportion is the constitution of society deficient, in respect of the motives for moral restraint, which it ought to present to individuals. This is of course to be understood, on the supposition of there being no compensation in some other particular.
One great point with respect to the preventive
