strenuous advocate for early marriages, as the best preservative
against vicious manners. He had no fanciful conceptions about the
extinction of the passion between the sexes, like Mr Godwin, nor
did he ever think of eluding the difficulty in the ways hinted at
by Mr Condorcet. He frequently talks of giving the prolifick
powers of nature room to exert themselves. Yet with these ideas,
that his understanding could escape from the obvious and
necessary inference that an unchecked population would increase,
beyond comparison, faster than the earth, by the best directed
exertions of man, could produce food for its support, appears to
me as astonishing as if he had resisted the conclusion of one of
the plainest propositions of Euclid.

Dr Price, speaking of the different stages of the civilized
state, says, 'The first, or simple stages of civilization, are
those which favour most the increase and the happiness of
mankind.' He then instances the American colonies, as being at
that time in the first and happiest of the states that he had
described, and as affording a very striking proof of the effects
of the different stages of civilization on population. But he
does not seem to be aware that the happiness of the Americans
depended much less upon their peculiar degree of civilization
than upon the peculiarity of their situation, as new colonies,
upon their having a great plenty of fertile uncultivated land. In
parts of Norway, Denmark, or Sweden, or in this country, two or
three hundred years ago, he might have found perhaps nearly the
same degree of civilization, but by no means the same happiness
or the same increase of population. He quotes himself a statute
of Henry the Eighth, complaining of the decay of tillage, and the
enhanced price of provisions, 'whereby a marvellous number of