He proceeds to show how insufficient nourishment always brings a thousand evils in its train, not merely hunger and death, but also epidemics and such terrible practices as cannibalism, infanticide, and slaughter of the old, as well as war, which, even when not undertaken with a definite view to eating the conquered, always results in robbing them of their land and the food which it yielded. These are the “positive” or “repressive” checks. But it may be replied that both among savages and animals the cause of this insufficiency of food is an incapacity for production rather than an excess of population. Malthus has no difficulty in answering this objection by showing how savage customs prevailed among such civilised people as the Greeks. And even among the most modern nations the repressive checks, somewhat mitigated it is true, are never really absent. Famine in the sense of absolute starvation is seldom experienced nowadays, except in Russia and India, perhaps, but it is by no means a stranger even to the most advanced communities. Tuberculosis, which involves such terrible bodily suffering, is nothing but a deadly kind of famine. Lack of food is also responsible for the abnormally high rate of infant mortality and for the premature death of the adult worker. As for war, it still demands its toll. Malthus was living during the wars of the Revolution and the First Empire—bloody catastrophes that caused the death of about ten million men, all in the prime of life. In civilized communities equilibrium is possible through humaner methods, in the substitution of the preventive check with its reduced birth-rate for the repressive check with its abnormal death-rate. Here is an expedient of which only the rational and the provident can avail themselves, an expedient open only to man. Knowing that his children are doomed to die—perhaps at an early age—he may abstain from having any. In reality this is the only efficacious way of checking the growth of population, for the positive check only excites new growth, just as the grass that is mown grows all the more rapidly afterwards. The history of war furnishes many a striking illustration of this. The year following the terrible war of 1870-71 remains unique in the demographic annals of France on account of the sudden upward trend of the declining curve of natality. It was in the second edition of his book that Malthus expanded his treatment of the preventive checks, thus softening the somewhat harsher aspects of his first edition. It is very important that we should grasp his exact meaning. We therefore make no apology for frequently quoting his views on one point which is in itself very important, but upon which the ideas of the reverend pastor of Haileybury have been so often misrepresented.