These most ingenious speculations of our author contain undoubtedly a great deal of truth in them. At the same time, it is clear that when society shall begin to replace traditional views of morality by more positive and scientific deductions from experience, when it shall be generally acknowledged in all civilised states of the old world that the basis of true morality must consist in that conduct which will keep the birth-rate very low, Mr. Malthus’s arguments in favour of irrevocable marriage and excessive severity towards those who prefer not to enter the imperfect marriage arrangements of modern European countries, with a full knowledge of what they are doing, must be gradually replaced by some law which shall affix a stigma, not so much upon illegitimacy, but rather upon the production of large families. Those who are well acquainted with the modern position of the marriage question in Europe, and who have studied what has been written on it by Wilhelm von Humboldt and J. S. Mill, will readily acknowledge that, if society would but take care to stigmatise as immoral all those persons who take more than a very moderate share of the blessings of parentage in old countries, it might, as Humboldt proposes, entirely withdraw from all legal interference in the contracts between the sexes. Moral obligations might still remain in full force towards those who have been led to base their future life on the implied continuance of such contracts; but doubtless the law of civilised states is at present tending towards far greater facility of dissolving such contracts than Mr. Malthus seems to have approved of.