APPENDIX. 489 



early marriages : when it cannot be denied that the alterna- 

 tive of not repressing it must necessarily and unavoidably be 

 premature mortality from excessive poverty ? And is it 

 possible to know .that in few or none of the countries of 

 Europe the wages of labour, determined in the common way 

 by the supply and the demand, can support in health large 

 families ; and yet assert that population does not press 

 against the means of subsistence, and that " the evils of 

 " a redundant population cau never be necessarily felt by 

 " a country till it is actually peopled up to the full capacity 

 " of its resources."* 



Mr. VVeyland really appears to have dictated his book 

 ■with his eyes blindfolded, and his ears stopped. I have a 

 great respect for his character and intentions ; but I must 

 say that it has never been my fortune to meet with a theory 

 so uniformly contradicted by experience. The very slightest 

 glance at the different countries of Europe shews with a force 

 amounting to demonstration, that to all practical purposes 

 the nalurul tendericy of population to increase may be con- 

 sidered as a given quantity ; and that the actual increase is 

 regulated by the varying resources of each country for the 

 employment and maintenance of labour, in whatever stage 

 of its progress it may be, whether it is agricultural or manu- 

 facturing, whether it has few or many towns. Of course 

 this actual increase, or the actual limits of population, must 

 alwavs be far short of the utmost powers of the earth to 

 produce food ; first, because we cau never rationally sup- 

 pose that the human skill and industry actually exerted are 

 directed in the best possible manner towards the production 

 of food ; and secondly, because, as I have stated more par- 

 ticularly in a former part of this work, the greatest produc- 

 tion of food which the powers of the earth would admit 

 cannot possibly take place under a system of private pro- 

 perty. But this acknowledged truth obviously affects only 

 the actual quantity of food, and the actual number of people, 

 and has not the most distant relation to the question re- 

 specting the luitKial tetidencii of population to increase be- 

 yond the powers of the earth to produce food for it. 



The observations already made are sufficient to shew that 

 the four main propositions of Mr. Weyland, which depend 

 upon the first, are quite unsupported by any appearances in 



• P. 12.-. 



