the poor laws to defeat their own purpose--Palliative of the
distresses of the poor proposed--The absolute impossibility,
from the fixed laws of our nature, that the pressure of want can
ever be completely removed from the lower classes of society--
All the checks to population may be resolved into misery or vice.


The positive check to population, by which I mean the check that
represses an increase which is already begun, is confined
chiefly, though not perhaps solely, to the lowest orders of
society.

This check is not so obvious to common view as the other I have
mentioned, and, to prove distinctly the force and extent of its
operation would require, perhaps, more data than we are in
possession of. But I believe it has been very generally remarked
by those who have attended to bills of mortality that of the
number of children who die annually, much too great a proportion
belongs to those who may be supposed unable to give their
offspring proper food and attention, exposed as they are
occasionally to severe distress and confined, perhaps, to
unwholesome habitations and hard labour. This mortality among the
children of the poor has been constantly taken notice of in all
towns. It certainly does not prevail in an equal degree in the
country, but the subject has not hitherto received sufficient
attention to enable anyone to say that there are not more deaths
in proportion among the children of the poor, even in the
country, than among those of the middling and higher classes.
Indeed, it seems difficult to suppose that a labourer's wife who
has six children, and who is sometimes in absolute want of bread,