400 Of the Checks to Population Bk. ii. 



in as great plenty as their masters. Their work 

 is easy and their food luxurious, compared with 

 the work and food of the class of labourers ; and 

 their sense of dependence is weakened by the 

 conscious power of changing their masters if they 

 feel themselves offended. Thus comfortably si- 

 tuated at present, what are their prospects if 

 they marry? Without knowledge or capital, 

 either for business or farming, and unused and 

 therefore unable to earn a subsistence by daily 

 labour, their only refuge seems to be a miserable 

 alehouse, which certainly offers no very enchanting 

 prospect of a happy evening to their lives. The 

 greater number of them, therefore, deterred by this 

 uninviting view of their future situation, content 

 themselves with remaining single where they are. 



If this sketch of the state of society in England 

 be near the truth, it will be allowed that the pre- 

 ventive check to population operates with consi- 

 derable force throughout all the classes of the 

 community. And this observation is further 

 confirmed by the abstracts from the registers re- 

 turned in consequence of the Population Act* 

 passed in 1800. 



The results of these abstracts shew, that the 

 annual marriages in England and Wales are to 

 the whole population as 1 to 123^,1 a smaller 



* This chapter was written in 1802, just after the first enu- 

 meration, the results of which were published in 1801. 



t Observ. on the Results of the Population Act, p. 11, printed 

 in 1801. The answers to the Population Act have at length hap- 

 pily rescued the question of the population of this country from 



