We cannot find much comfort in the fact, that the human race have already inhabited this globe for more than six thousand years, a period surely long enough, with the aid of a geometrical progression, even if the annual rate of increase had been very small, but regular, to have brought into being vastly more than the poor 800 millions who now stock the earth. In former times and in barbarous countries, war, pestilence, famine, tyranny, and all the other ills which uncivilized man is heir to, not only kept down the rate of increase, but often caused the population to retrograde. Practically, down to the present day, the only evil which has been felt has been, not an excess, but a deficiency, of population. Even Spain, once the head of European civilization, had ten millions of inhabitants in the middle of the sixteenth century, and one hundred and twenty years afterwards, it had only six millions. The classi cal scholar need not be reminded of the still more striking depopulation of Italy under the Roman emperors, and, at a still earlier day, of the provinces which now constitute Turkey in Europe. Asia Minor and the region on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates were teeming with inhabitants twentyfive centuries ago, while they are now very sparsely populated, and probably do not increase at all. But the causes which formerly kept down the natural increase of the people have now, in all civilized communities, in a great measure ceased to act. War is, at present, an infrequent and much less destructive calamity. Epidemic diseases no longer lay waste whole provinces; remedies for them, or modes of preventing them, have been discovered. The practice of vaccination alone, by robbing that frightful disease, the small-pox, of its terrors, has added some years to the average duration of human life. The greater prevalence of cleanliness, the improvement of the diet, dress, lodgings, and other accommodations of the mass of the people, and the drainage of bogs and marshes, by which agues and marsh fevers have been prevented, with the many improvements in medical and surgical science, have materially lessened the rate of mortality, and thus caused the population to increase more rapidly.

A comparison, made by M. de Chateauneuf, of the movement of the population in most countries of Europe from 1825 to 1830 with what it was from 1775 to 1780, an interval of

only half a century, supplies some striking illustrations of this point. Out of a given number of children born in Europe, only one third, says the author, now die in the first ten years, while formerly one half died within that period. Fifty years after birth, three fourths of a generation, or 75 in a hundred, had died; now, only thirteen twentieths, or 65 in a hundred, die below the age of fifty. Twenty-three in a hundred, instead of only eighteen, now reach the age of sixty. The proportion of deaths to the whole population is now as one to forty; formerly, it was as high as one to thirty-two.

These facts to most people would seem to afford great cause for congratulation. Human life has been made longer; disease has lost a portion of its power, or has been conquered by care and medical science. Population is kept up, not merely by increasing the number of births, but by lessening the proportion of deaths; thus, among a given number of inhabitants, there are fewer children; and hence the average strength and capacity, the productive power of the community, is increased. "The prevalent opinion," says McCulloch, "had been, that an increase of population was the most decisive mark of the prosperity of a state, and that it was the duty of government to stimulate its increase, by encouraging early marriages, and granting exemptions from onerous public services and bestowing rewards on those who reared the greatest number of children." Many such expedients were tried at Rome under the republic and the empire.

“But Mr. Malthus," he adds, "has set the erroneous nature of this policy in the most striking point of view. He has shown, by a careful examination of the state of countries in every stage of civilization, and placed under the most opposite circumstances, that the number of inhabitants is everywhere proportioned to the means of subsistence; that the tendency of the principle of increase is not to fall below, but to exceed, these means; and that, consequently, wherever the population is not kept down to its necessary level by the influence of moral restraint, or by the exercise of a proper degree of prudence and forethought in the formation of marriages, it must be kept down by the influence of mortality originating in vice, want, and misery."

I cannot trace out here all the gloomy consequences which

Stop up the evil another, on account Put an end to war,

Malthus and his followers derive from his theory; it must suffice to indicate a few of them. He assumes that the population in every country in Europe has already increased to such a degree, that it is actually pressing upon the means of subsistence; and as it tends still to multiply faster than the quantity of food can be increased, the low wages of labor, poverty, disease, crime, and an average duration of life much less than it might be, are the inevitable consequences. in one quarter, and it must break out in of the prolific power which is in reserve. and famine, or some epidemic disease, must take its place, and carry off yearly as many victims as the war would have done. Stop the ravages of the small-pox by vaccination, and the Asiatic cholera, or some other disease, must appear to scourge mankind with an equivalent number of deaths, if they will not learn prudence enough to diminish the number of marriages and births. The vessel is already full, and it is also fed from beneath with perennial springs. Check the overflow in one quarter, therefore, and it must escape in another. I will quote Mr. Malthus's own words. "I feel not the slightest doubt," he says, "that if the introduction of the cow-pox should extirpate the small-pox, and yet the number of marriages continue the same, we shall find a very perceptible difference in the increased mortality of some other disease." Wages, it is further said, depend on the proportion between the numbers of the laboring class and the capital which is devoted to paying for labor. As the number of those seeking employment increases, -and it always tends, like a depressed spring, to increase,— the laborers compete with each other in offering to work at low prices, and wages inevitably fall. Vainly does private munificence or public liberality seek to prevent this evil. Interference, in fact, only does harm; if the laborer can look to a poor fund, or to private charity, to provide against the effects of his imprudence, he will never learn to be prudent. Leave him alone, then, say the Malthusians, to be chastised by fever, hunger, and misery, into a sense of his obligation to society to refrain from increasing the number of his class. Let not the possession of a starving family constitute an additional claim for him who begs your charity; rather let it be his punishment. To devise means for relieving the present frightful condition

of the laboring poor in England and Ireland is a hopeless and insoluble problem. The best advice which the leading economist of this school can give his countrymen, in respect to this subject, is, that they should "fold their arms, and leave the dénouement to time and Providence."

The most effectual means of keeping down the increase of population, it is said, is to raise the laborer's ideas of what is necessary for his maintenance. Thus, says Mr. Thomson, "a laborer in Ireland will live and bring up a family on potatoes; a laborer in England will see the world unpeopled first. Englishmen have the physical capability of living on potatoes as much as other men; but fortunately they have not the habit; and though it might be wrong to say that they would starve first in their own persons, they will utterly refuse to multiply upon such diet, the effect of which on population is ultimately the same. The Englishman will not live and bring up a family on potatoes; because, though he may consent to live on them when he can positively procure nothing else, habit, custom, the opinion of those around him, have made it in his eyes contemptible, irrational, absurd, for a man to be living on potatoes when he has the opportunity of getting anything bet ter. In his hours of prosperity, therefore, he will to a certainty solace himself upon bacon, and most probably venture upon beef; and as this absorbs a greater portion of his income in what he views as necessary to his individual existence, it proportionally reduces his disposition to burden himself with new mouths. If the Irishman had the prospect of all this bacon and beef, he would view it as convertible into potatoes for a family like a patriarch's. The Englishman thinks it but decency to swallow all, and omits the family."

I have endeavored to give as full a view as possible of the theory of Malthus and its consequences, without disguising the force of any of the considerations that may be adduced in its support. Without accusing it of any demoralizing tendencies, it must be admitted to present a very gloomy view of the condition of the human race, and of the ways of Providence with man. It justifies the stoical indifference with which many regard the woes of their brethren, and the evils of the social state, when they wish to avoid any responsibility for their continuance, or when they despair of being able to re

lieve them. I hope to prove satisfactorily, that the doctrine itself is a mere hypothetical speculation, having no relation to the times in which we live, or to any which are near at hand. In those facts which appear so alarming to the Malthusians, I see only indications of a beneficent arrangement of Providence, by which it is ordained that the barbarous races which now tenant the earth should waste away and finally disappear, while civilized men are not only to multiply, but to spread, till the farthest corners of the earth shall be given to them for a habitation.

I begin with the proposition, that the power of the earth to afford sustenance is now so far in advance of the actual numbers of mankind, that no probable, and in fact no possible, increase of those numbers, not even by a geometrical progression, can create a general and permanent scarcity for centuries to come. The great and palpable error of the Malthusians consists in assuming, without a particle of evidence, nay, when all the evidence tends to the contrary, that the time has already come, that population has reached its limits, that there is even now a deficiency of food, so that the only present mode of increasing the happiness of the lower classes is to lessen their numbers. Malthusianism in its simplest form is only the expression of a law that belongs both to the animal and vegetable kingdom, and its truth is undeniable; yet we say that it has no applicability to the present state of affairs, and we have no immediate concern in establishing its truth or falsehood. If a speculatist in natural philosophy should undertake to demonstrate that the sun was gradually but surely expending its stock of light and heat, constant drafts being made upon it in those immense floods of radiance and warmth with which it now inundates every part of the solar system, and there being no means of supplying the waste, so that the time must inevitably come, in the lapse of ages, when this now glorious orb will appear utterly dark and cold, we should listen to his evidence certainly with attention and respect, as to the announcement of a curious truth in science; but if any individual, on the strength of this supposed discovery, should preach up the instant necessity of economizing with the utmost care our fuel and oil, should advise people to go to bed at sundown in order to save candles, and to warm themselves by flannels instead