A plan of this kind, the preliminary of which should be an abolition of all the present parish laws, seems to be the best calculated to increase the mass of happiness among the common people of England.  To prevent the recurrence of misery, is, alas! beyond the power of man.  In the vain endeavour to attain what in the nature of things is impossible, we now sacrifice not only possible but certain benefits.  We tell the common people that if they will submit to a code of tyrannical regulations, they shall never be in want.  They do submit to these regulations.  They perform their part of the contract, but we do not, nay cannot, perform ours, and thus the poor sacrifice the valuable blessing of liberty and receive nothing that can be called an equivalent in return.

Notwithstanding, then, the institution of the poor laws in England, I think it will be allowed that considering the state of the lower classes altogether, both in the towns and in the country, the distresses which they suffer from the want of proper and sufficient food, from hard labour and unwholesome habitations, must operate as a constant check to incipient population.

To these two great checks to population, in all long occupied countries, which I have called the preventive and the positive checks, may be added vicious customs with respect to women, great cities, unwholesome manufactures, luxury, pestilence, and war.

All these checks may be fairly resolved into misery and vice.  And that these are the true causes of the slow increase of population in all the states of modern Europe, will appear sufficiently evident from the comparatively rapid increase that has invariably taken place whenever these causes have been in any considerable degree removed.

CHAPTER 6

New colonies—­Reasons for their rapid increase—­North American Colonies—­Extraordinary instance of increase in the back settlements—­Rapidity with which even old states recover the ravages of war, pestilence, famine, or the convulsions of nature.

It has been universally remarked that all new colonies settled in healthy countries, where there was plenty of room and food, have constantly increased with astonishing rapidity in their population.  Some of the colonies from ancient Greece, in no very long period, more than equalled their parent states in numbers and strength.  And not to dwell on remote instances, the European settlements in the new world bear ample testimony to the truth of a remark, which, indeed, has never, that I know of, been doubted.  A plenty of rich land, to be had for little or nothing, is so powerful a cause of population as to overcome all other obstacles.  No settlements could well have been worse managed than those of Spain in Mexico, Peru, and Quito.  The tyranny, superstition, and vices of the mother-country were introduced in ample quantities among her children.  Exorbitant taxes were exacted by the Crown.  The