vice, and misery.

In spite of these checks, which are always more or less in operation,
there is a constant tendency for the population to increase beyond the
means of subsistence. Such increase is followed by lowered wages, dearer
food, and thus a lowered marriage-rate and birth-rate; and the lowered
wages, in turn, induce more agricultural enterprise, and thus means of
subsistence become more abundant again.

More abundant and cheaper food, in turn, promotes marriage, and
increases the population, until again there is a shortage of food; and
this oscillation, though irregular, will always be found, and there will
always be a tendency for the population to oscillate around the food
limit.

Even among savages, where the degradation of women, infanticide, vice,
famine, war, and disease are active instruments of decimation, it will
be found that the average population, generally speaking, presses hard
against the limits of the average food.

Among modern pastoral nations the principal checks which keep the
population down to the level of the means of subsistence are: restraint
from inability to obtain a wife, vicious habits with respect to women,
epidemics, war, famine, and the diseases arising from extreme poverty.

In modern Europe we find similar preventive and positive checks, in
varying proportions, to undue increase of population. In England and
Scotland the preventive check to population prevails in a considerable
degree.

A man of liberal education, with an income only just sufficient to
enable him to associate in the rank of gentlemen, must feel absolutely
certain that if he marry and have a family he shall be obliged to give
up all his former connections. The woman whom a man of education would
naturally choose is one brought up in similar refined surroundings. Can
a man easily consent to place the object of his affections on a lower
social plane?

Such considerations certainly prevent many of the better classes from
early marriage; and those who marry in the face of such considerations
too frequently justify the forebodings of the prudent.

The sons of tradesmen and farmers are exhorted not to marry till they
have a sufficient sure income to support a family, and often accordingly
postpone marriage till they are far advanced in life. The labourer who
earns eighteenpence or two shillings a day, as a single man, will
hesitate to divide that pittance among four or five, seeing the risks
such poverty in