Experience too has shown, that the strong impulse in mankind towards procreation is not too strong for the purpose intended by the Creator; that HE who is the author of the impulses is author also of natural counterworkings of them; that, as men under moral and religious training come more and more under the influence of reason and affection, the preventive checks to population come silently and effectually into operation; and that, taking the world at large, food and comforts have more than kept pace with the stride of population, since its inhabitants as a whole were plainly never so well fed and clothed and housed as now. The abstract antagonism of the law of the increase of population with the law of the increase of food, or what we prefer to call the law of diminishing returns from Land, may be admitted, if one chooses to insist on it; but any practical _tendency_ of these to come into collision, as the world is and is to be, is confidently denied. When Malthus wrote, and long afterwards, England was under the dominance of Protectionism; the wretched Corn-laws forbidding the importations of foreign grain, in order that the domestic growers might sell to their countrymen at artificial prices, and thus grow the richer as bread became the dearer, were only repealed in 1846; and the demonstrated ability of Great Britain under free trade to draw on the fertility of the whole world for the steadily and increasingly cheap maintenance of her people, demonstrates the irrelevancy of Malthusianism to the Science of Economics. The Supply of personal services at any time or place in answer to the Demand for them, is affected by several important circumstances, which we shall now proceed to consider in their order.