To this Mr. Malthus replies that the only point in which he differs from Condorcet in the paragraph just cited is with regard to the period when it may be applied to the human race. Condorcet thought that his age of iron would not come until a very distant era. Our author remarks, on the contrary, that the period when the number of men surpassed their subsistence had long ago arrived; and that this constantly subsisting cause of periodical misery has existed ever since we have any history of mankind, and continues to exist at the present moment. “M. Condorcet (says Malthus) however goes on to say that should the period which he conceives to be so distant ever arrive, the human race, and the advocates of the perfectibility of man, need not be alarmed at it. He then proceeds to remove the difficulty in a manner which I profess not to understand. Having observed that the ridiculous prejudice of superstition would by that time have ceased to throw over morals a corrupt and degrading austerity, he alludes either to a promiscuous concubinage which would prevent breeding, or to something else as unnatural. To remove the difficulty in this way will surely, in the opinion of most men, be to destroy that virtue and purity of manners which the advocates of equality, and of the perfectibility of man, profess to be the end and object of their views.” It is from passages such as these that Mr. Malthus differs so much from the so-called New-Malthusians, who look for the solution of the population difficulty to the “small-family system” of the French. It would seem that the great French writer, Condorcet, had a prophetic knowledge of what the effect of the great French Revolution would be, a revolution which, by converting the cultivator of the soil of that state into the proprietor, has made France the most prudent country in the known world in the question of the size of families. Mr. Bonar, too, in a clever pamphlet, published in 1880, shows that Mr. Malthus retained somewhat the same phraseology as he uses here, in his 7th edition, page 512, where he thus speaks: “If it were possible for each married couple to limit by a wish the number of their children, there is certainly reason to fear that the indolence of the human race would be very greatly increased.” Had he lived in 1881, and seen how rapidly the industry of France is increasing, her wealth developing, and poverty diminishing in that happiest of modern European states in the face of the lowest European birth-rate (26 per 1,000), he would have been the first, we doubt not, to retract these crude expressions, and to see wherein the virtue consists.