Note 1400 — Chapter X · RISE OF CIVIL MARRIAGE

This argument is also used by a writer in the Monthly Review, XL, 425, 426, who makes a violent attack on the bill: "Sir Robert Walpole" is declared to be "the first fool of a statesman who thought a kingdom might be too populous" (426).

Mr. Nugent, in the Commons, appears to think that increase of population among the poor must be promoted at all hazards. Even the judicially enforced marriages between wenches and their reluctant seducers are blessings which he fears the bill will put an end to: Cobbett, op. cit., XV, 18. With these conceits of the opposition compare the sound views of the Earl of Hillsborough (ibid., 63): "Poor servants and labourers ... are but too apt to run into matrimony, before they have considered how they are to support either themselves or their children ...; for the prosperity and happiness of a country does not depend upon having a great number of children born, but upon having always a great number well brought up, and inured from their infancy to labour and industry." Essentially modern opinions are likewise expressed by Mr. Bond: "For as to those rash and inconsiderate marriages ... between two poor creatures, sometimes before they have got clothes to their backs" or a lodging or means of support, "I think they ought all, if it were possible, to be prevented." Fleet marriages, he believes, have propagated "beggars, rogues, and the most abandoned sort of prostitutes;" and he appeals to the stricter laws of Holland which have not checked the growth of an industrious population: ibid., 46, 47.