convulsions, produced but a temporary and comparatively slight effect upon such countries as Lombardy, Tuscany, and Flanders, but are fatal to such states as Holland and Hamburg, and though the commerce and manufactures of England will probably always be supported in a great degree by her agriculture, yet that part which is not so supported will still remain subject to the reverses of dependent states.” Writing in 1806, Mr. Malthus adds:—“We should recollect that it is only within the last twenty or thirty years that we have become an importing nation. In so short a period it could hardly be expected that the evils of the system should be perceptible. We have, however, already felt some of its inconveniences; and if we persevere at it, its evil consequences may by no means be a matter of remote speculation.” In the eleventh chapter of his third book our author treats of the prevailing errors respecting population and plenty, and notices some of the arguments which have this very year (1883) been put forward, over and over again, by the disciples of Mr. Henry George, an American writer who has acquired a sudden celebrity for his work on “Progress and Poverty.” “It has been observed,” says Mr. Malthus, “that many countries at the period of their greatest degree of populousness have lived in the greatest plenty, and have been able to export corn; but at other periods, when their population was very low, have lived in continual poverty and want, and have been obliged to import corn. Egypt, Palestine, Rome, Sicily, and Spain are cited as particular examples of this fact: and it has been inferred that an increase of population in any state, not cultivated to the utmost, will tend rather to augment than diminish the relative plenty of the whole society; and that, as Lord Kaimes observes, a country cannot easily become too populous for agriculture, because agriculture has the signal property of producing food in proportion to the number of consumers.... The prejudices on the subject of population bear a very striking resemblance to the old prejudices about specie, and we know how slowly and with what difficulty those last have yielded to juster conceptions. Politicians, observing that states which were powerful and prosperous were almost invariably populous, have mistaken an effect for a cause, and concluded that their population was the cause of their prosperity, instead of their prosperity being the cause of their population; as the old political economists concluded, that the abundance of specie was the cause of national wealth, instead of the effect of it. The annual produce of the land and labour, in both of these instances, became in consequence a secondary consideration, and its increase, it was conceived, would naturally follow the increase of specie in the one case, or of population in the other. Yet surely the folly of endeavouring to increase the quantity of specie in any country without an increase of