APPENDIX. 495 



Mr. Weyland, however, finds it utterly impossible to re- 

 concile the necessity of moral restraint either with the nature 

 of man, or the plain dictates of religion on the subject of 

 marriage. Whether the check, to population, which he 

 would substitute for it, is more consistent with the nature 

 of a rational being, the precepts of revelation, and the bene- 

 volence of the Deity, must be left to the judgment of the 

 reader. This check, it is already known, is no other than 

 the unhealthiness and mortality of towns and manufactories.* 

 And though I have never felt any difficulty in reconciling to 

 the goodness of the Deity the necessity of practising the vir- 

 tue of moral restraint in a state allowed to be a state of dis- 

 cipline and trial; yet I confess that I could make no attempt 

 to reason on the subject, if 1 were obliged to believe, with 

 Mr. Weyland, that a large proportion of the human race 

 was doomed by the inscrutable ordinations of Providence to 

 a premature death in large towns. 



If indeed such peculiar unhealthiness and mortality were 

 the proper and natural check to the progress of population 

 in. the advanced stages of society, we should justly have 

 reason to apprehend that, by improving the healthiness of 

 our towns and manufactories, as we have done in England 

 during the last twenty years, we might really defeat the de- 

 signs of Providence. And though I have too much respect 

 for Mr. Weyland to suppose that he would deprecate all 

 attempts to diminish the mortality of towns, and render ma- 

 nufactories less destructive to the health of the children em- 

 ployed in them ; yet certainly his principles lead to this 

 conclusion, since his theory has been completely destroyed 

 by those laudable efforts which have made the mortality of 

 England — a country abounding in towns and manufactories, 

 less than the mortality of Sweden — a country in a state almost 

 purely agricultural. 



It was my object in the two chapters on Moral Restraint, 

 and its Effects on Societi/, to shew that the evils arising from 

 the principle of population were exactly of the same nature 

 as the evils arising from the excessive or irregular gratifica- 

 tion of the human passions in general ; and that from the 



• • Willi rcoard to the iiidisposttioii to luarriage in towns, I do not believe 

 that it is greater than in the country, except as tar as it arises from the greater 

 expense of maintaining a family, and the greater facility of illicit intercourse. • 



