CHAPTER 5.
The second, or positive check to population examined, in England--The true cause why the immense sum collected in England for the poor does not better their condition--The powerful tendency of 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, should be able always to give them the food and attention necessary to support life.