“Almost everything that has hitherto been done for the poor has tended, as if with solicitous care, to throw a veil of obscurity over this subject, and to hide from them the true cause of their poverty. A man has always been told that to raise up subjects for his king and country is a meritorious act. In an endeavour to raise the proportion of the quantity of provisions to the number of consumers in any country, our attention would naturally be first directed to the increasing of the absolute quantity of provisions, but finding that, as fast as we did this, the numbers of consumers more than kept pace with it, and that with all our exertions we were still as far as ever behind, we should be convinced that our efforts directed in this way would never succeed. It would appear to be setting the tortoise to catch the hare. Finding therefore, that from the laws of nature we could not proportion the food to the population, our next attempt should naturally be to proportion the population to the food. If we can persuade the hare to go to sleep, the tortoise may have some chance of overtaking her.” In chapter iv., our author replies to some objections. Some of his critics had said that if his advice were followed, the market would be rather understocked with labour. To this Malthus observes that “a market overstocked with labour, and an ample remuneration to each labourer, are objects perfectly incompatible with each other. In the annals of the world they have never existed together; and to couple them even in imagination betrays a gross ignorance of the simplest principles of political economy.” Mr. Malthus then replies to the oft repeated futurity argument as follows: “I can easily conceive that this country, with a proper direction of the national industry, might, in the course of some centuries, contain two or three times its present population, and yet every man in the kingdom be better paid and clothed than he is at present.” “While the springs of industry continue in vigor, and a sufficient part of that industry is directed to agriculture, we need be under no apprehension of a deficient population; and nothing perhaps would tend so strongly to create a spirit of industry and economy among the poor, as a thorough knowledge that their happiness must always depend principally upon themselves; and that if they obey their passions in opposition to their reason, or be not industrious and frugal while they are single men, and save a sum for the common contingencies of the married state, they must expect to suffer the natural evils which Providence has prepared for those who disobey its admonitions.”