246 Of the Checks to Population Bk. i. 



crease ; and, from the manner in which Plutarch 

 speaks of the custom of exposing children among 

 the poor,* there is great reason to believe that 

 many were destroyed in spite of the jits trium libe- 

 rorum. The passage in Tacitus, in which, speak- 

 ing: of the Germans, he alludes to this custom in 

 Rome, seems to point to the same conclusion. f 

 What effect, indeed, could such a law have among 

 a set of people, who appear to have been so com- 

 pletely excluded from all the means of acquiring 

 a subsistence, except that of charity, that they 

 would be scarcely able to support themselves, 

 much less a wife and two or three children ? If 

 half of the slaves had been sent out of the 

 country, and the people had been employed in 

 agriculture and manufactures, the effect would 



have been to increase the number of Roman citi- 

 zens with more certainty and rapidity than ten 

 thousand laws for the encouragement of children. 

 It is possible that t\ie jus trlum liherorum, and 

 the other laws of the same tendency, might have 

 been of some little use among the higher classes 



* De A more Prolis. 



"t" De Moribus Germanorum, 19. How completely tbe laws 

 relating to the encouragement of marriage and of children were 

 despised, appears from a speech of Minucius Felix in Octavio, cap. 

 30. " Vos enim video procreatosji/ios nvncferis et axibus exponere, 

 " 7iitnc adstrangulatos misero mortis gencre elidere ; sunt quae in ipsis 

 *' visceribus medicaminibus epotis originem faturi hominis extinguant, 

 " et parricidum faciunt antequam pariant." 



This crime had grown so much into a custom in Rome, that 

 even Pliny attempts to excuse it ; " Quoniam aliquarum fecunditas 

 plena liberis tali Tenia indiget." Lib. xxix. c. iv. 



