Other circumstances being equal, it may be affirmed that countries are populous according to the quantity of human food which they produce or can acquire; and happy, according to the liberality with which the food is divided, or the quantity which a day’s labor will purchase. Compare, on this standard of our author, the condition of an agricultural laborer in England, with beefsteak at one shilling the pound in London, with that of Dunedin, where, as we write, it is at fourpence the pound, and wages are at least two and a half those in England for that class. “Corn countries are more populous than pasture countries, and rice countries more populous than corn countries. But their happiness does not depend either upon their being thinly or fully inhabited, upon their poverty or their riches, their youth or their age; but on the proportion which the population and the food bear to each other. This proportion is generally the most favorable in new colonies, where the knowledge and industry of an old state operate on the fertile unappropriated land of a new one. In other cases the youth or the age of a state is not, in this respect, of great importance. It is probable that the food of Great Britain is divided in more liberal shares to its inhabitants at the present period than it was two thousand, three thousand, or four thousand years ago.” This passage from Malthus shows that he at least does not believe in the view sometimes attributed to him that the position of civilised society is tending continually to become more and more unbearable from pressure of population on food. Malthus saw quite clearly that the prevention of a rapid birth-rate was more and more practised by nations in proportion as they became better educated, and he therefore did not at all take the pessimistic aspect of human society that many believe. “In a country never to be overrun by a people more advanced in arts, but left to its own natural progress in civilisation; from the time when its produce might be considered as a unit, to the time that it might be considered as a million, during the lapse of many thousand years, there would not be a single period when the mass of the people could be said to be free from distress, either directly or indirectly, from want of food. In every state in Europe, since we have first had accounts of it, millions and millions of human existences have been suppressed from this simple cause, though perhaps in some of these states an absolute famine may never have been known.”