A notable fact in the history of popular Freethought in England has been its association with the social teaching of Malthus, which first came before the world only a few years after Paine's attack on orthodoxy. There is nothing to show that Paine ever realised what a blow was struck at his optimistic Theism, by the essay which his fellow-Theist Malthus wrote to rebut the optimist assumptions on the "Political Justice" of Godwin, a Freethinker who held by the revolutionary optimism in the sphere of politics, while tending away from Deistic optimism in philosophy. Paine, who was certainly as much bent on construction as on destruction, sketched a socio-political system which will be found by many readers as impressive to-day as it was found by Pitt. He proposed on the one hand a progressive income-tax, which should yield new revenue and break up large estates, and on the other hand a system of stipends to poor families; annuities to decayed tradesmen and others over fifty, increasing after sixty; provision for the education of the children of the poor; donations for births, marriages, and some funerals; and "employment at all times for the casual poor in the cities of London and Westminster." Save as regards the old age pensions, which represent a great improvement on pauper relief, and the education scheme, all of this plan comes under the destructive criticism of Malthus, inasmuch as it does not recognise the fatal tendency of an untaught population to multiply in excess of the economic possibilities of maintenance. The plan of allowancing poor families at so much per head would have quickened immensely the progress towards national bankruptcy which was carried so far under the old Poor Law. It would have bred paupers by the thousand.