What an incitement, this, to the prosecution of our enquiry! Here is a principle set up, which is all but an apology for the apathy that prevails among the rich and the powerful—among governors and legislators—in regard to human improvement. How important, how essential for the interests of virtue, that it should be refuted! How beneficent that knowledge, which discloses to us some moral, practicable check to population, and relieves us from the despairing conclusion, that the irrevocable doom of man is misery, without remedy and without end! In the absence of such knowledge, truly the prospects of the world were dark and cheerless. The modern doctrine of population has weighed like a spell on the exertions of benevolence, and chilled, almost to inaction, even the warm heart of charity. Philanthropy herself pauses, when she begins to fear that all her exertions are to result in hopeless disappointment. And yet—such is this world—even the ablest opponents of Malthus stop short when they come to the question, and leave an argument unanswered, which a dozen pages might suffice for ever to set at rest. Let one of the most intelligent of these opponents, a man of splendid and sterling talent—let MILL, the celebrated political economist and talented author of “British India,” speak for himself. I extract from the article “Colony,” in the supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, and which is from the pen of Mill, the following paragraph: “What are the best means of checking the progress of population, when it cannot go on unrestrained without producing one or other of two most undesirable effects, either drawing an undue portion of the population to the mere raising of food, or producing poverty and wretchedness, it is not now the time to enquire. _It is, indeed, the most important practical problem to which the wisdom of the politician and the moralist can be applied._ It has, till this time, been miserably evaded by all those who have meddled with the subject, as well as by those who were called upon by their situation to find a remedy for the evils to which it relates. And yet, _if the superstitions of the nursery were disregarded, and the principle of utility kept steadily in view_, a solution might not be very difficult to be found; and the means of drying up one of the most copious sources of human evil—a source which _if all other sources were taken away, might alone suffice to retain the great mass of human beings in misery_, might be seen to be neither doubtful nor difficult to be applied.”