they may spend all the wages they earn and enjoy themselves while
they can appears to be evident from the number of families that,
upon the failure of any great manufactory, immediately fall upon
the parish, when perhaps the wages earned in this manufactory
while it flourished were sufficiently above the price of common
country labour to have allowed them to save enough for their
support till they could find some other channel for their
industry.

A man who might not be deterred from going to the ale-house
from the consideration that on his death, or sickness, he should
leave his wife and family upon the parish might yet hesitate in
thus dissipating his earnings if he were assured that, in either
of these cases, his family must starve or be left to the support
of casual bounty. In China, where the real as well as nominal
price of labour is very low, sons are yet obliged by law to
support their aged and helpless parents. Whether such a law would
be advisable in this country I will not pretend to determine. But
it seems at any rate highly improper, by positive institutions,
which render dependent poverty so general, to weaken that
disgrace, which for the best and most humane reasons ought to
attach to it.

The mass of happiness among the common people cannot but be
diminished when one of the strongest checks to idleness and
dissipation is thus removed, and when men are thus allured to
marry with little or no prospect of being able to maintain a
family in independence. Every obstacle in the way of marriage
must undoubtedly be considered as a species of unhappiness. But
as from the laws of our nature some check to population must