130 NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



I need not discuss here what he called the pre- 

 ventive or prudential check of moral restraint, which 

 he considered to consist in a man's abstaining from 

 marrying until he has attained to a reasonable 

 prospect of maintaining a wife and family in the 

 future ; for Malthus expressly states that in the 

 past history of the race he saw little trace of the 

 action of such a check, and he had clearly no hope 

 of its being efficacious in the future. Thus the 

 cardinal principle upon which alone he relied for 

 averting from mankind the curse of over-population 

 was the operation of his positive checks. 



In stating, and characterising, his positive checks, 

 Malthus is delightfully frank. " The immediate 

 check may be stated to consist in all those customs 

 and all those diseases which seem to be generated 

 by a scarcity of the means of subsistence: and all 

 those causes independent of this scarcity, whether of 

 a moral or physical nature, which tend prematurely to 

 weaken and destroy the human frame." 



" The positive checks to population are extremely 

 various, and include every cause, whether arising from 

 vice or misery, which in any degree contributes to 

 shorten the natural duration of human life. Under 

 this head, therefore, may be enumerated all unwhole- 

 some occupations, severe labour and exposure to the 

 seasons, extreme poverty, bad nursing of children, 

 great towns, excesses of all kinds, the whole train of 

 diseases and epidemics, wars, plague, aud famine." 



" On examining these obstacles to the increase of 



