Sir Francis d’Ivernois, in a work entitled _Tableau des Pertes_, has the following remark: “Those have yet to learn the first principles of political arithmetic, who imagine that it is in the field of battle and the hospitals, that an account can be taken of the lives which a revolution or a war has cost. The number of men it has killed is of much less importance than the number of children which it has prevented, and will still prevent, from coming into the world.” To this Mr. Malthus replies: “And yet if the circumstances on which the foregoing reasonings are founded should turn out to be true, it will appear that France has not lost a single birth by the revolution. She has the most just reason to mourn the two millions and a half of individuals which she may have lost, but not their posterity: because, if those individuals had remained in the country, a proportionate number of children born of other parents, which are now living in France, would not have come into existence. If in the best governed country in Europe we were to mourn the posterity which is prevented from coming into being, we should always wear the habit of grief.” “It is evident,” he continues, “that the constant tendency of the births in every country to supply the vacancies made by death, cannot, in a moral point of view, afford the slightest shadow of excuse for the wanton sacrifice of men. The positive evil that is committed in this case, the pain, misery, and wide-spreading desolation and sorrow, that are occasioned to the existing inhabitants, can by no means be counterbalanced by the consideration that the numerical breach in the population will be rapidly repaired. We can have no other right, moral or political, except that of the most urgent necessity, to exchange the life of beings in the full vigour of their enjoyments for an equal number of helpless infants.”