The working classes by abstinence from early or improvident marriages, or by the exercise of moral restraints after marriage can, it is urged, check that tendency of the working population to outgrow the increase of the work for which they compete.

There can be no doubt that the more intelligent classes of skilled labourers have already profited by this consideration, and as education and intelligence are more widely diffused, we may expect these prudential checks on "over-population" will operate with increased effect among the whole body of workers.

But precisely because these checks are moral and reasonable, they must be of very slow acceptance among that class whose industrial condition forms a stubborn barrier to moral and intellectual progress.

Those who would gain most by the practice of prudential checks, are least capable of practising them.

The ordinary "labourer" earns full wages as soon as he attains manhood's strength; he is as able to support a wife and family at twenty as he will ever be; indeed he is more so, for while he is young his work is more regular, and less liable to interruption by ill-health.