The weight of the Poor-rate, which must increase while the present system continues, alarms the corrupt, who plainly see that what is paid to relieve you, they cannot have. Some of them, therefore, hint at your early marriages as a great evil, and a clergyman named Malthus has seriously proposed measures for checking you in this respect; while one of the correspondents of the Board of Agriculture complains of the increase of bastards, and proposes severe punishment on the parents! How hard these men are to please! What would they have you do? As some have called you the swinish multitude, would it be much wonder if they were to propose to serve you as families of young pigs are served? Or if they were to bring forward the measure of Pharaoh, who ordered the midwives to kill all the male children of the Israelites? But, if you can restrain your indignation at these insolent notions and schemes, with what feelings must you look upon the condition of your country, where the increase of the people is now looked upon as a curse! Thus, however, has it always been, in all countries where taxes have produced excessive misery. Our countryman, Mr. Gibbon, in his History of the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, has the following passage: 'The horrid practice of murdering their new-born infants was become every day more frequent in the provinces. It was the effect of _distress_, and the distress was principally occasioned by the _intolerable burden of taxes_, and by the vexatious as well as cruel prosecutions of the officers of the revenue against their insolvent debtors. The less opulent or less industrious part of mankind, instead of rejoicing at an increase of family, deemed it an act of paternal tenderness to release the children from the impending miseries of a life which they themselves were unable to support.'