In chapter iii. of book III. our author disposes of the so-called “futurity fallacy,” which unfortunately still continues to be opposed to the teachings of the economists, as if it had not been over and over again refuted by the author of the essay on population. “Other persons,” says our author, “besides Mr. Godwin have imagined that I looked to certain periods in future when population would exceed the means of subsistence in a much greater degree than at present, and that the evils arising from the principle of population were rather in contemplation than in existence; but this is a total misconception of my argument. Poverty, and not absolute famine, is the specific effect of the principle of population, as I have before endeavoured to show. Many countries are now suffering all the evils that can ever be expected to flow from this principle, and even if we were arrived at the absolute limit to all further increase of produce, a point which we shall certainly never reach, I should by no means expect that those evils would be in any marked manner aggravated. The increase of produce in most European countries is so very slow, compared with what would be required to support an unrestricted increase of people, that the checks which are constantly in action to repress the population to the level of a produce increasing so slowly would have very little more to do in wearing it down to a produce absolutely stationary.” The great historian Hume had pointed out that in those countries where infanticide was permitted by law, there was greater over-population than in others where it was prohibited, because parents were too humane to betake themselves to such a frightful “positive check.” The excessive poverty of China, where the custom of infanticide prevails, is an example of the truth of Mr. Hume’s remarks. “It is still, however, true,” adds our author (p. 139), “that the expedient is, in its own nature, adequate to the end for which it was cited, but to make it so in fact, it must be done by the magistrate, and not left to the parents. The almost invariable tendency of this custom to increase population, when it depends entirely upon the parents, shows the extreme pain which they must feel in making such a sacrifice, even when the distress arising from excessive poverty may be supposed to have deadened in great measure their sensibility. What must the pain be then upon the supposition of the interference of a magistrate, or of a positive law, to make parents destroy a child, which they feel the desire and think they possess the power of supporting? The permission of infanticide is bad enough and cannot but have a bad effect on the moral sensibility of a nation: but I cannot conceive anything more detestable or shocking to the feelings than any direct regulation of this kind, although sanctioned by the names of Plato and Aristotle.”