“That an increase of population,” says Malthus, “when it follows in its natural order, is both a great positive good in itself, and absolutely necessary to a further increase in the annual produce of the land and labour of any country, I should be the last to deny. The only question is, What is the natural order of this progress? In this point, Sir James Stewart appears to me to have fallen into an error. He determines that multiplication is the efficient cause of agriculture, and not agriculture of multiplication; but though it may be allowed that the increase of people beyond what could easily subsist on the natural fruits of the earth, first prompted man to till the ground: and that the view of maintaining a family, or of obtaining some valuable consideration in exchange for the products of agriculture, still operates as the principal stimulus to cultivation; yet it is clear that these products, in their actual state, must be beyond the lowest wants of the existing population before any permanent increase can possibly be supported. We know that a multiplication of births has in numberless instances taken place, which has produced no effect upon agriculture, and has merely been followed by an increase of diseases: but perhaps there is no instance where a permanent increase of agriculture has not a permanent increase of population, somewhere or other. Consequently agriculture may with more propriety be termed the efficient cause of population, than population of agriculture, though they certainly react upon each other, and are mutually necessary to each other’s support.” “The author of ‘L’Ami des Hommes’ (Mirabeau’s father), in a chapter on the effects of a decay in agriculture upon population, acknowledges that he had fallen into a fundamental error in considering population as the source of revenue: and that he was afterwards convinced that revenue was the source of population. From a want of attention to this most important distinction, statesmen, in pursuit of the desirable object of population, have been led to encourage early marriages, to reward the fathers of families, and to disgrace celibacy; but this, as the same author justly observes, is to dress and water a piece of land without sowing it, yet to expect a crop.” It is curious that so backward is speculation on this question even in modern France, the most practical Neo-Malthusian country in Europe, that this year has already seen two proposals made by learned Frenchmen to encourage marriage and large families. The first emanated from the son of one of the most distinguished surgeons of Paris, Dr. Richet; the other from a member of the French _Corps Legislatif_.