244 Of the Checks to Population Bk. i. 



without doubt, the rapid influx of these supplies, 

 which enabled them, like the ancient Germans, 

 to astonish future historians, by renovating in so 

 extraordinary a manner their defeated and half- 

 destroyed armies. 



Yet there is reason to believe that the practice 

 of infanticide prevailed in Italy as well as in 

 Greece from the earliest times. A law of Romu- 

 lus forbad the exposing of children before they 

 were three years old,* which implies that the 

 custom of exposing them as soon as they were 

 born had before prevailed. But this practice 

 was of course never resorted to, unless when the 

 drains from wars were insufficient to make room 

 for the rising generation ; and consequently, though 

 it may be considered as one of the positive checks 

 to the full power of increase, yet, in the actual 

 state of things, it certainly contributed rather to 

 promote than impede population. 



Among the Romans themselves, engaged as 

 they were in incessant wars from the beginning 

 of their republic to the end of it, many of which 

 were dreadfully destructive, the positive check to 

 population from this cause alone must have been 

 enormously great. But this cause alone, great as 

 it was, would never have occasioned that want 

 of Roman citizens under, the emperors which 

 prompted Augustus and Trajan to issue laws for 

 the encouragement of marriage and of children, if 



* Dionysius Halicarn. lib. ii. 15. 



