who could not afford to marry because they could only muster seven thousand pounds between them. Were they not to be pitied? What could they do in this case? Why, the lady no doubt would behave with all the wonted fortitude of her sex on the occasion: but the poor man must certainly be driven into vicious courses. Oh! no: I had forgot he was a clergyman; and his cloth would not admit of any such thing. Vice does not therefore seem to be _always_ a necessary consequence of the obstacles to marriage. Moral restraint is always practicable, where the opinion of the world renders it necessary. At all events, I conceive that either one or the other of Mr. Malthus’s remedies may be dispensed with: they are not _both_ necessary. By his own account, (as formerly seen) extreme poverty is a very ineffectual bar to population; and as to vice, if it could be administered in doses, proportioned to the occasion, so much and no more, it might be an excellent cure; but the misfortune is, that when it once begins, there is no end of it. To change my metaphor, it takes the bit in its mouth, and sets off at a glorious rate, without the least spur from necessity, always keeping as much a-head of the occasion as Mr. Malthus’s geometrical series keeps a-head of his arithmetical one. Some persons may perhaps argue, that there is a natural connection between vice and misery, inasmuch as without the temptation of want among the poor, the vices of the rich would lack proper objects to exercise themselves upon: so that, there being no one to offer temptation to, and no one having any very great temptations to offer, people would be forced to marry among their _equals_, unless the trifling consideration of not being able to provide immediately for a large family should induce them to moderate their passions for a while. This is an argument which I shall not controvert: the disturbing that beautiful harmony and dependence which at present subsists between vice and misery would certainly lead us back in a great measure to all the evils which Mr. Malthus anticipates as arising out of a state of excessive virtue and happiness, and the most perfect form of society. I shall here quote at large Mr. Malthus’s account of the origin of the distinctions of property as necessarily arising from the pressure of population on the means of subsistence, and from that principle solely. I shall mark what I think the most noticeable parts in italics, and make some observations at the end.