“The condition,” says Malthus, “of the laboring poor, supposing their habits to remain the same, cannot be very essentially improved, but by giving them a greater command over the means of subsistence. But any advantage of this kind must from its nature be temporary, and is therefore really of less value to them than any permanent change in their habits. But manufactures, by inspiring a taste for comforts, tend to promote a favorable change in these habits, and in this way perhaps counterbalance all their disadvantages. The laboring classes of society, in nations merely agricultural, are generally on the whole poorer than in manufacturing nations, though less subject to those occasional variations which among manufacturers often produce the most severe distress.” There are two chapters in Malthus’s second volume devoted to the consideration of the Agricultural and Commercial Systems about which so much was written by his contemporaries. Mr. Malthus says in Chapter VIII. that there are none of the definitions of the wealth of a state that are not liable to some objections. If the gross produce of the land be taken as indicating wealth, it is clear that this may increase very rapidly whilst the nation is very poor, and, wealth again may increase without tending to increase the funds for the maintenance of labor and population. “Whichever of these definitions is adopted, the position of the economists will remain true, that the surplus produce of the cultivators is the great fund which ultimately pays all not employed in the land. Throughout the whole world the number of manufacturers, of proprietors, and of persons engaged in the various civil and military professions must be exactly proportional to the surplus produce, and cannot in the nature of things increase beyond it. If the earth had been so niggardly of her produce as to oblige all her inhabitants to labor for it, no manufacturer or idle persons could ever have existed. But her first intercourse with man was a voluntary present, not very large indeed, but sufficient as a fund for his subsistence, till by the proper exercise of his faculties he could produce a greater. In proportion as the labor and ingenuity of man increased, again, the land has increased this surplus produce; leisure has been given to a greater number of persons to employ themselves in all the inventions which embellish civilised life; and, although in its turn, the desire to profit by these inventions has greatly contributed to stimulate the cultivators to increase their surplus produce; yet the order of precedence is clearly the surplus produce, because the funds for the subsistence of the manufacturer must be advanced to him before he can complete his work.”