This constitutes a numerous class in every large community, and includes
the criminal, the drunkard, and the pauper, and many defectives such as
epileptics and imbeciles. Now all these propagate their kind. The checks
to the increase of this class, are the checks which are common to the
lower animals, and which were elaborated in his first essay by Malthus.
They are vice and misery.

If it were not for moral restraint (not the limited restraint of
Malthus, delayed marriages simply), but restraint in the wider sense,
within as well as without the marriage bond, and including all
artificial checks to conception, these two checks, vice and misery,
would absolutely control the population of the world.

The mind of man has added to the checks which control increase in the
lower animals, a new check, which applies to, and can be exercised only
by himself, and the problem is, how far will misery and vice as checks
to the population be eliminated, and moral restraint take their places?
And if this restraint must control and determine the population of the
future how far will its exercise affect the moral and mental evolution
of the race?

If moral restraint with the consequent limitations of families is the
peculiar characteristic of the best people in the state, and the absence
of this characteristic expressing itself in normal fertility is peculiar
to the worst people of the state, the future of the race may be divined,
by reference to the history of the great nations of antiquity.

An accumulating amount of evidence shows that society is face to face
with this grave aspect of the population question. The birth-rate of the