e welfare of society." Then
came an admirable statement of the law of population, and of his own view
of the scope of the book which I present in full as our best
justification.

"The author, Doctor Knowlton, professes to deal with the subject of
population. Now, a century ago a great and important question of
political economy was brought to the attention of the scientific and
thinking world by a man whose name everybody is acquainted with, namely,
Malthus. He started for the first time a theory which astonished the
world, though it is now accepted as an irrefragable truth, and has since
been adopted by economist after economist. It is that population has a
strong and marked tendency to increase faster than the means of
subsistence afforded by the earth, or that the skill and industry of man
can produce for the support of life. The consequence is that the
population of a country necessarily includes a vast number of persons
upon whom poverty presses with a heavy and sad hand. It is true that the
effects of over-population are checked to a certain extent by those
powerful agencies which have been at work since the beginning of the
world. Great pestilences, famines, and wars have constantly swept away
thousands from the face of the earth, who otherwise must have contributed
to swell the numbers of mankind. The effect, however, of this tendency to
increase faster than the means of subsistence, leads to still more
serious evils amongst the poorer classes of society. It necessarily
lowers the price of labor by reason of the supply exceeding the demand.
It increases the dearth of provisions by making the demand greater than
the supply, and produces direful consequences to a large class of persons
who labor under the evils, physical and moral, of poverty. You find it,
as described by a witness called yesterday, in the overcrowding of our
cities and country villages, and the necessarily demoralising effects
resulting from that over-crowding. You have heard of the way in which
women--I mean child-bearing women--are destroyed by being obliged to
submit to the necessities of their position before they are fully
restored from the effects of child-birth, and the effects thus produced
upon the children by disease and early death. That these are evils--evils
which, if they could be prevented, it would be the first business of
human charity to prevent--there cannot be any doubt. That the evils of
over-population are real, and not imag