Mr. Malthus mentions (chapter xi. p. 67), that in New Jersey “the proportion of births to deaths, in an average of seven years, ending 1743, was 300 to 100. In England and France, he says, at that time the highest average proportion could not be reckoned at more than 120 to 100.” At this date, 1880, the proportion of births to deaths in France is as 111 is to 100, and in England it is as 152 is to 100, whereas in Dublin the deaths exceed the births. In New Zealand the births are to the deaths as 340 is to 100. There is nothing, he says, the least mysterious in this. “The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same, that it may be considered, in algebraic language, as a given quantity. The great law of necessity which prevents population from increasing in any country beyond the food which it can either produce or acquire, is a law so open to our view, so obvious and evident to our understandings, that we cannot for a moment doubt it. The different modes which nature takes to repress a redundant population, do not appear, indeed, to us so certain and regular; but though we cannot always predict the mode, we may with certainty predict the fact. If the proportion of the births to the deaths for a few years indicates an increase of numbers much beyond the proportional increased or acquired food of the country, we may be perfectly certain that unless an emigration take place the deaths will shortly exceed the births, and that the increase that has been observed for a few years cannot be the real average increase of the population of that country. If there were no other depopulating causes, and if the preventive check did not act very strongly, every country would without doubt be subject to periodical plagues and famines.” This is a well-known passage, and shows the genius of the writer as well as any in his work. How immensely superior is his clear enunciation of the attraction between the sexes when compared with the strange speculations of Mr. Herbert Spencer of late years, about the supposed gradual decay of that attraction in proportion to the alleged increase in the weight of the human brain. It is quite deplorable to see what ingenuity has been exercised by latter-day philosophers to get over the plain and inevitable conclusions of Malthus and his common-sense school. The struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest has been put forward as a plea for allowing over-population to grind the masses in constant misery, and the delusive ideal of the equation of mouths to food in the course of ages by a mere fanciful tendency of organisms to become more perfect, without the exercise of volition, are the latest struggles of the ostrich to burrow with his head in the sand in order to avoid the sight of the inevitable.