Ch. xiii. Principles on this Suliject. 421 



tases, if care were taken, at the same time, not 

 to make them so large as to allow of two families 

 settling in them ; and not to increase their num- 

 ber faster than the demand for labour required- 

 One of the most salutary and least pernicious 

 checks to the frequency of early marriages in 

 this country is the difficulty of procuring a 

 cottage, and the laudable habits which prompt a 

 labourer rather to defer his marriage some years 

 in the expectation of a vacancy, than to content 

 himself with a wretched mud cabin, like those in 

 Ireland.* 



Even the cow system, upon a more confined 

 plan, might not to be open to objection. With 

 any view of making it a substitute for the poor- 

 laws, and of giving labourers a right to demand 

 land and cows in proportion to their families ; or 

 of taking the common people from the consump- 

 tion of wheat, and feeding them on milk and 

 potatoes ; it appears to me, I confess, truly pre- 

 posterous : but if it were so ordered as merely to 

 l^rovide a comfortable situation for the better and 

 more industrious labourers, and to supply at the 



* Perhaps, however, this is not often left to his choice, on ac- 

 count of the fear which every parish has of increasing its poor. 

 There are many ways by which our poor-laws operate in counter- 

 actino- their first obvious tendency to increase population, and this 

 is one of them. 1 have little doubt that it is almost exclusively 

 owinfij to these coinitcracting causes, that we have been able to 

 persevere in this system so long, and that the condition of the 

 poor has not been so much injured by it as might have been ex' 

 pccted. 



