But the more complete answer is as follows. We will attempt now to point out an influence which enabled domestic slavery to resist and repair the evils of over-population, vastly better than any other form of labour. As population increases, the size of fortunes which are accumulated increases. Instances of accumulation are more numerous and far more excessive. Density of population, facility of large industrial operations, concentration of number of labourers, with other causes, ensure that rich men will be vastly richer than while population was sparse; and that there will be many more rich men. While a few of these will be misers, as a general rule they will seek to expend their overflowing incomes. But as man's real wants lie within very narrow limits, and the actual necessaries and comforts of life are cheap, the larger part of these overgrown incomes must be spent in superfluities. The money of the many excessively rich men is profusely spent in expensive jewelry, clothing, equipage, ostentatious architecture, useless menials, fine arts, and a thousand similar luxuries. Now the production of all these superfluities absorbs a vast amount of the national labour, and thus diminishes greatly the production of those values which satisfy real wants. A multitude of the labourers are seduced from the production of those more essential values, by the higher prices which luxury and pride are enabled to pay for their objects. Now, although the manufacturers of these superfluities may, individually, secure a better livelihood than those laborers who produce the necessaries of life, yet the result of the withdrawal of so many producing hands is, that the total amount of necessaries produced in the nation is much smaller. There is, then, a less mass of the necessaries of life to divide among the whole number of the citizens; and some people must draw a smaller share from the common stock. Every sensible man knows that these will be the landless, labouring men. The wealth of the rich will, of course, enable them to engross a liberal supply for their own wants, however scant may be that left for the poor. The ability to expend in superfluities is, therefore, a _misdirection_ of just so much of the productive labour of the country, from the creation of essential values, to the producing of that which fills no hungry stomach, clothes no naked back, and relieves no actual, bodily want. And here, after all, is the chief cause why the Malthusian law is found a true and efficient one in civilized communities. For, were the increasing labour of a growing nation wisely and beneficiently directed to draw from the soil and from nature all that they can be made to yield, their fecundity would be found to be practically so unlimited, that the means of existence would keep pace with the increase of population, to almost any extent. The operative cause of the growing depression of the poor is, not that the same acres are compelled to