concerning it; and the lady metaphysicians, who discuss the fitness of things at their conversazioni; the shallow, the selfish, the sensual, and the vain.

Rubbish as Mr. Malthus's system is, it stands in the way of an inquiry into the state of the poor, and must be cleared away. The complaint that the land is overstocked, is indeed as old in this country as the Reformation. 'Some,' says Harrison, do grudge at the great increase of people ' in these days, thinking a necessary brood of ⚫ cattle far better than a superfluous augmentation ' of mankind. But I can liken such men best of all unto the Pope and the Devil, who practise the 'hindrance of the furniture of the number of the elect to their uttermost. But if it should come to pass, that any foreign invasion should 'be made, (which the Lord God forbid for 'his mercies sake!) then should these men find, that a wall of men is far better than stacks of corn and bags of money, and complain of the 'want when it is too late to seek remedy.' An opinion of this kind is too foolish, as well as too wicked, ever to become permanently prevalent; the temporary reputation which Mr. Malthus obtained by renewing it is disgraceful to the age, and cannot be excused, though it may be accounted for by the circumstances of the times, and the occasion upon which his system was brought forward.

It has been the consolation of good men, when they contemplated the miseries which man brings upon man, to think, that many of the evils, moral as well as physical, which afflict society, are remediable, and will gradually disappear as the human race advances in improvement: they hoped that

wisdom would be progressive with knowledge, and virtue with wisdom, and happiness with virtue: they formed this hope as they reasoned from the past to the future, and christianity made it a part of their faith. But the French revolution, acting upon political enthusiasm as the Reformation had done, three centuries before, upon that of a religious character, produced a set of speculators as wild as the old fifth-monarchy-men. They announced the advent of a political millenium,..which was to be not the kingdom of the saints,..saints and kingdoms being with them. alike out of fashion,..but the commonwealth of philosophers. Ploughs were to work of themselves, butter to grow upon trees, and man to live for ever in this world,..a very necessary improvement this upon the former state of things; for according to their belief, if he were unphilosophical enough to die, he could not expect to live in any other. These notions were connected with the deplorable doctrines of brute materialism, blind necessity and blank atheism; and with a system of ethics, which, attempting an impossible union between stoicism and sensuality, succeeded just so far as to deprave the morals and harden the heart. Mr. Godwin was the master of this school. He had confounded together all principles pure and impure; he had diluted the wisdom of the ancients with his own errors and crudities; he had kneaded up their wheat, and barley, and millet with his own album græcum; and this precious wafer was to be swallowed as the bread of life,..the sacrament of philosophy!

Against this Goliath of the philosophistical Canaanites, Mr. Malthus stept forth, at a time when

the mirage in which Goliath had made his appearance was pretty well dispersed, and had left him in his natural dimensions, an ordinary Philistine of about five feet six. Mr. Malthus attacked him with an argument which had been long before clearly and distinctly stated by Wallace and Townsend, and which in fact no person who ever speculated upon an improved state of society could by possibility have overlooked. The sum of this argument is, that, supposing a country to be fully peopled, men must multiply faster than food can be multiplied for them. Mr. Malthus puts this proposition in a technical form, and improves upon it by endeavouring to shew that population increases in a geometrical series, but food only in an arithmetical one; this is held up as a discovery in political economy, and this is in reality the first of his fallacies, the fundamental sophism. of his book. That which, if in itself true, could be applicable only if the whole earth were fully peopled and fully cultivated, he assumes to be universally true and applicable at the present time. Admitting then the possibility of Mr. Godwin's scheme of society, he supposes a pure state of philosophical equality to be established, all causes of vice and misery having been removed; . . but in one generation, he contends, the principle of population would disturb this state of happiness, and, in a second, destroy it. The absurdity of supposing that a community, which, according to the hypothesis, had attained the highest state of attainable perfection, should yet be without the virtue of continence, was overlooked by Mr. Malthus; he reasoned as if lust and hunger were

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alike passions of physical necessity, and the one equally with the other, independent of the reason and the will: and this was the pervading principle of a book written in the vulgar tongue, and sent into the world for the edification of all dabblers in metaphysics, male and female! One might have thought that such an argument could never have been advanced by one of woman born;'.. that it could never have been heard without indignation by one who had a wife, a sister, or a daughter. But upon this his whole argument against Mr. Godwin rests! And, as if to shew how happily these rival writers were matched against each other, the arch-philosophicide admitted it in reply, and proposed abortion and exposure as the remedies which, in his Utopia, must be adopted to counteract the power of population!

The direct object of Mr. Malthus's essay in its original form, was to confute the opinions of Mr. Godwin in particular, and of all those persons in general, who believed that any material improvement in human society might be effected; and this object was thus accomplished by means of a technical sophism, and a physical assumption, as false in philosophy as it is detestable in morals. The essay, however, in this state, was consistent with itself. But the author, being a person of decorous life and habits, and moreover a Christian and a clergyman, began to suspect that, to deny the existence of such a virtue as continence, was neither compatible with the wellbeing of the community in which he lived, nor with public decency,.. nor, setting these consider

ations aside, with facts which necessarily fall within the sphere of every man's knowledge. In his second edition, therefore, he recognized the existence of this virtue, admitting, in express terms, that moral restraint,' or in other words, sexual continence, is a virtue clearly dictated by the light of nature, and expressly enjoined by revealed religion:' and with an inconsistency which it would be difficult to parallel, retaining all his arguments against Mr. Godwin in the beginning of the book, he proposes a scheme at the end for abolishing the poor rates by means of this very virtue, upon the denial of which the whole of his preceding argument is founded! Thus the latter part of his essay confutes the former, and he perishes by a stupid suicide, like the scorpion who strikes his tail into his own head.

It is this scheme, with its accompanying doctrine, which rendered it necessary to recur to Mr. Malthus on this occasion; for if the doctrine were true, it would be hopeless to seek for any alleviation of existing misery. The certain and speedy consequence of his remedy will soon be pointed out. We are overstocked with people, he says, and not only are so at present, but always have been, and always must be so. In every

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age, and in every state in which man has existed, or does now exist, the increase of population is · necessarily limited by the means of subsistence.' The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that, unless arrested by preventive checks, premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind

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