n; while many
of the most powerful motives which can influence the human mind conspire
to preserve these records from the slightest falsification. Compared
with these, therefore, all other registers, or reports, whether of sworn
searchers or others, are incorrectness itself."

Mr Sadler goes on to tell us that the peers are a marrying class, and
that their general longevity proves them to be a healthy class. Still
peerages often become extinct;--and from this fact he infers that they
are a sterile class. So far, says he, from increasing in geometrical
progression, they do not even keep up their numbers. "Nature interdicts
their increase."

"Thus," says he, "in all ages of the world, and in every nation of it,
have the highest ranks of the community been the most sterile, and
the lowest the most prolific. As it respects our own country, from the
lowest grade of society, the Irish peasant, to the highest, the British
peer, this remains a conspicuous truth; and the regulation of the degree
of fecundity conformably to this principle, through the intermediate
gradations of society, constitutes one of the features of the system
developed in these pages."

We take the issue which Mr Sadler has himself offered. We agree with
him, that the registers of the English Peerage are of far higher
authority than any other statistical documents. We are content that
by those registers his principle should be judged. And we meet him by
positively denying his facts. We assert that the English nobles are not
only not a sterile, but an eminently prolific, part of the community.
Mr Sadler concludes that they are sterile, merely because peerages often
become extinct. Is this the proper way of ascertaining the point? Is
it thus that he avails himself of those registers on the accuracy and
fulness of which he descants so largely? Surely his right course would
have been to count the marriages, and the number of births in the
Peerage. This he has not done;--but we have done it. And what is the
result?

It appears from the last edition of Debrett's "Peerage", published in
1828, that there were at that time 287 peers of the United Kingdom,
who had been married once or oftener. The whole number of marriages
contracted by these 287 peers was 333. The number of children by these
marriages was 1437,--more than five to a peer,--more than 4.3 to a
marriage,--more, that is to say, than the average number in those
counties of England in which, according