“Alas, what becomes of the picture, where men lived in the midst of plenty, when no man was obliged to provide with anxiety and pain for his restless wants; when the narrow principles of selfishness did not exist; when the man was delivered from his perpetual anxiety for corporal support, and free to expatiate in the field of thought which is so congenial to him? This beautiful fabric of the imagination vanishes at the severe touch of truth.... The children are sickly from insufficient food. The rosy flush of health gives place to the pallid cheek and hollow eye of misery.” In as short a period as fifty years the whole of the worst evils of society will certainly re-appear, if population be not checked (says Malthus) by moral restraint, vice, or misery. After showing that a regime of equality would inevitably end in these shallows, so long as the birth-rate was not restricted, Malthus contends that some such laws of private property, as those which at present exist, would be certain to re-appear and misery to be increased. He then continues to give the best account of the irrevocable contract of marriage, with which we are familiar, that any writer has ever attempted to give. “The next subject which would come under discussion, intimately connected with the preceding, is the commerce of the sexes. It would be urged by those who had turned their attention to the true cause of the difficulties under which the community labored, that while every man felt secure that all his children would be well provided for by general benevolence, the powers of the earth would be absolutely inadequate to produce food for the population which would inevitably ensue; that even if the whole attention and labor of the society were directed to this sole point, and if by the most perfect security of property, and every other encouragement that could be thought of, the greatest possible increase of produce were yearly obtained; yet still the increase of food would by no means keep pace with the much more rapid increase of population; that some check to population, therefore, was imperiously called for; that the most natural and obvious check seemed to be to make every man provide for his own children; that this would operate in some respect as a measure and a guide in the increase of population, as it might be expected that no man would bring beings into the world for whom he could not find the means of support; that when this, notwithstanding, was the case, it seemed necessary, for the example of others, that the disgrace and inconvenience attending such conduct should fall upon that individual who had thus inconsiderately plunged himself and his innocent children into want and misery. The institution of marriage, or at least of some express or implied obligation on every man to support his own children, seems to be the natural result of these reasonings, in a community under the difficulties that we have supposed.”