Let it be borne in mind that, when we speak of the duty of restraining from improvident marriage, we are not inculcating any new morality founded upon the recent science of political economy. It is a duty as old as the love of a parent to his child, and needs only for its enforcement an anticipation of this parental affection. No man who _has_ married, and become a father, ever doubted of the existence of such a duty, or spoke slightingly of it. Ask the Scotch peasant, ask the simplest Switzer, who knows nothing of reading-clubs or mechanics' institutes--who has perhaps never quitted his native valley, and all whose knowledge is the growth of his own roof-tree--what he thinks of the morality of him who becomes the father of a family he cannot rear, or must rear like wild beasts more than men--he will give you an answer that would satisfy the strictest Malthusian. The prudence that would avoid famine, the just and righteous fear of having hungry children about our knees--this is no new wisdom in the world, though, like all our old wisdom, it continually cries in vain in our streets. Now the operation of this, in every respect, moral restraint would be materially interfered with, if the notion should prevail, that in the colonies there existed (without any distinct knowledge how it was to be secured) an inexhaustible provision for human life. Numbers would marry, trusting to this resource, yet the offspring of such marriages might never reach their destined refuge, or reach it only after much suffering, and in the degraded condition of uneducated paupers. And men who have calculated that, at all events, without seeking aid from Government or the parish, they shall be able to send their child abroad, when the child has grown up, will hesitate to part with it. They had calculated what they would do, when parents, before they became such. They had not been able to anticipate that bond of parental affection which, we may observe in passing, is by no means weakest in the humblest ranks, but, on the contrary, until we reach the very lowest, seems to increase in strength as we descend in the social scale.