to Mr Sadler's own statement,
the fecundity is the greatest.

But this is not all. These marriages had not, in 1828, produced their
full effect. Some of them had been very lately contracted. In a very
large proportion of them there was every probability of additional
issue. To allow for this probability, we may safely add one to the
average which we have already obtained, and rate the fecundity of a
noble marriage in England at 5.3;--higher than the fecundity which Mr
Sadler assigns to the people of the United States. Even if we do not
make this allowance, the average fecundity of marriages of peers is
higher by one-fifth than the average fecundity of marriages throughout
the kingdom. And this is the sterile class! This is the class which
"Nature has interdicted from increasing!" The evidence to which Mr
Sadler has himself appealed proves that his principle is false,--utterly
false,--wildly and extravagantly false. It proves that a class, living
during half of every year in the most crowded population in the world,
breeds faster than those who live in the country;--that the class which
enjoys the greatest degree of luxury and ease breeds faster than the
class which undergoes labour and privation. To talk a little in Mr
Sadler's style, we must own that we are ourselves surprised at the
results which our examination of the peerage has brought out. We
certainly should have thought that the habits of fashionable life, and
long residence even in the most airy parts of so great a city as London,
would have been more unfavourable to the fecundity of the higher orders
than they appear to be.

Peerages, it is true, often become extinct. But it is quite clear, from
what we have stated, that this is not because peeresses are barren.
There is no difficulty in discovering what the causes really are. In the
first place, most of the titles of our nobles are limited to heirs male;
so that, though the average fecundity of a noble marriage is upwards
of five, yet, for the purpose of keeping up a peerage, it cannot be
reckoned at much more than two and a half. Secondly, though the peers
are, as Mr Sadler says, a marrying class, the younger sons of peers are
decidedly not a marrying class; so that a peer, though he has at least
as great a chance of having a son as his neighbours, has less chance
than they of having a collateral heir.

We have now disposed, we think, of Mr Sadler's principle of population.
Our readers must, by this time