We shall not quote a single passage to justify this censure, for the same reason that we should not extract the indecencies of a volume in order to prove the charge of obscenity. Why should the ear be wounded, or the mind soiled and disgusted, when no end is answered except the conviction of an offender who, utterly dead to shame, rejoices to see his impurities or impieties pitched abroad? Notwithstanding that formidable appearance of metaphysics to which we have alluded--his Kant and his Hegel, his thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and all his pretensions to extraordinary profundity--it so happens that the very first elements of that science of political economy, which he affects to look down upon as from a higher level, are often miserably misapprehended; or--what is certainly not more to his credit--they are thrown, for a season, into a wilful oblivion. If he is discoursing upon the division of labour, and its effect upon the remuneration of the workman, he ignores, for the time being, the manifest relation between population and wages, and represents the wages as decreasing only because the nature of the work required becomes more and more simple and mechanical. If he is discoursing upon population, and its pressure upon the means of subsistence, he can venture to forget the very laws of nature. "You state," he says, "that population increases in a geometrical ratio--1, 2, 4, 8, 16; well, I will show that capital and wealth follow a law of progression more rapid still, of which each term may be considered as the square of the corresponding number of the geometrical series, as 1, 4, 16, 64, 256."[6] Since all our wealth is derived originally from the soil, man must, therefore, have it in his power to increase the fertility of the soil according to the above ratio. It will be something new to our farmers to learn this.