_THE MALTHUSIAN LEAGUE OF ENGLAND. The Origin and History of Birth Control in Great Britain. Reprinted from The Malthusian, April, 1880._ Little improvement can be expected in morality until the production of large families is regarded in the same light as drunkenness, or any other physical excess.—John Stuart Mill, 1872. In obedience to the request of the Nestor of political economists of Europe, the distinguished editor of the _Journal des Economistes_ of Paris, M. Joseph Garnier, we give a short account of the reasons which led to the foundation of the Malthusian League, the latest product of the nineteenth century’s ideas in the direction of social progress. It gives us unfeigned pleasure to be the means of making the most thorough of all French writers on the doctrines of our English latter-day economists acquainted with the position which the great population question has recently assumed in this country. It is not, we believe, too much to allege that the most advanced thinkers of this country are at this moment well aware of the existence of the new-Malthusian remedy for the evils of society. How this has come to pass we proceed at once to show. It was not long after the publication of Mr. Malthus’ work that some thoughtful men began to notice that in modern France the late marriage customs of most European states were replaced to a certain extent by prudence after marriage. Mr. Francis Place was one of the first to write a work on population, in which he recommended the physical checks so commonly made use of by the French parents for adoption in England. He is said to have remonstrated with Mr. Malthus about an expression in the first edition of his essay, in which he spoke of such checks under the head of _Vice_, and the tradition is that Malthus left out the expression in his subsequent edition: and, as he himself had two children, Mr. Porter (of Nottingham) believes that Mr. Malthus was, like Mr. Mill (the father of John Stuart Mill), himself a believer in the _conjugal prudence_ practised by the better class of peasantry and townspeople. Mr. Place is also said to have converted Mr. Robert Owen, the socialist to his opinion, and it is believed that Mr. Owen owed the success of his colony of New Lanark to a knowledge of this point, which he communicated to his workmen. Mr. Robert Dale Owen, a son of Robert Owen, emigrated in his youth to the United States of America, and became before his death, in 1877, one of the foremost citizens of the western republic. That gentleman, having doubtless heard the question discussed by his father, Mr. Francis Place, and other friends in London, was induced in 1830 to publish a now well-known treatise on the population question, entitled _Moral Physiology_, a work written with the most philanthropic design and couched in the most careful language consistent with clearness and the attainment of its end, in which he gave a description of the above-mentioned physical checks.