Page:Two Lectures on the Checks to Population.pdf/75

69 of society since the time of Swift, and produced an immense accumulation in the labouring class. I here mean the labouring class strictly so called; not including in it all who labour, but those only who live by the sale of their labour without any other source of income.

Moreover, in manufactures, the motives to prudential restraint, which, among labourers, as we have already seen, are at all times weak, have been still further weakened by the extended use of machinery, which, by performing those parts of operations requiring mere force, has opened a wider field for the employment of women and children, thereby, in a great measure, relieving the head of a family of the burden of its maintenance. In agriculture, the poor laws, as they have been administered during the last thirty-five years, have absorbed almost the whole of this burden: so that