to this contracted horizon, must take up other ground; and must defend their ideas of the Creator's providence as they can, upon the principle of optimism. But, in a world allowed to be initiatory and preparatory, it cannot justly surprise us to find the necessity of labour admitted; or to hear the wisdom of the Creator displayed by a view of a dispensation, which regularly brings the labours of mankind into action. Were our lot cast in a state at present perfect, we should, no doubt, see sufficient reason to adore the wisdom of the Creator. But the inhabitants of Paradise, and the inheritors of a fallen world, are not likely to meet in the same arguments, though they may agree in the same conclusion.

Under these qualifications, I shall endeavour to show, not that the human race is in the best conceivable condition, or that no evils accompany the law which regulates their increase; but that this law makes, upon the whole, an effectual provision for their general welfare; and that the prospective wisdom of the Cre

ator is distinguishable in the establishment of an ordinance which is no less beneficial in its collateral effects, than it is efficacious in accomplishing the first and principal design of its

enactment.

These collateral advantages are, first, the establishment of universal industry, and secondly, the quick and wide diffusion of the beneficial results of that industry. These are secured by the ordinance which regulates the increase of mankind.

I. Fecundity depends upon various causes, some of which are obvious, and others very partially understood: but by the average calculation of marriages in Europe, which is probably a fair average for the world at large, four births may be reckoned for every marriage. No doubt a fiat of the Creator might as easily have ordained that the produce should be less by one fourth, or that every marriage should bring three children. In this case, the result would still have raised the population

VOI. II.

M

fully up to the means of subsistence, with the difference only of doubling the period before it reached that limit.* Therefore it would have protracted for a time, the end proposed by the physical law of increase, without preventing ultimately the difficulties inseparable from a redundant population; it would have delayed the exertion of habitual industry, and the existence of the useful arts and sciences, resulting from that industry, by all that period of years during which the population was protracted, not only in the first peopling and subsequent re-peopling of the world, but in the occupation of all new countries. Eventually the pressure of the population against the supply of food would have been no less certain and regular, unless it had also been ordained, that the supply

* Independent of the longevity attributed in Scripture to the patriarchs, the world may have reached the amount of its present population, supposed to be 1000 millions, in about 550 years allowing ten persons to be alive at the end of the first twenty years, and to double their number every subsequent twenty. Several calculations of the kind occur in Wallace on the Number of Mankind.

of food should always and every where proceed in the same ratio as population.

Any complaint, therefore, must be urged, not against the particular ratio of increase from each marriage, which is, in fact, variable in different countries, and depends upon numerous circumstances with which we are little acquainted; but against the general and incontrovertible fact, that, according to the present constitution of the human race, the increase of the species has a tendency to proceed at a quicker rate, than the increase of the supply of food.

It certainly requires no great stretch of fancy to imagine such a dispensation as might have rendered the ratios, in which population shall proceed, and the quantity of human sustenance be increased, so equal to one another, as entirely to remove all difficulty as to the support of mankind, however large their numbers might become. No restriction, no qualification was set against the original command

in Paradise, "Increase and multiply." But when Paradise was forfeited, then came the subsequent denunciation, that the replenishing of the world should entail the obligation to labour on its inhabitants.

If it was desirable that there should be any exertion among mankind, this obligation was indispensable. The nature of a being living under a dispensation of unlimited abundance, ought to be no less different than the constitution of the world he inhabited. As human nature now is, the implanted principle which leads to marriage is, mediately or immediately, the source of all effective industry. We have no reason to believe that the stream would continue to flow, if the source were cut off by which it is visibly supplied. Could a family be supported without labour, the known stimulus to exertion would be removed; energy would be exchanged for indolence, and the arrival of plenty would be followed by the stagnation of the human faculties.