“We should not, therefore, be too ready to make inferences against the internal economy of a country from the appearance of uncultivated heaths, without other evidence. But the fact is, that no country has ever reached, or probably ever will reach, its highest possible acme of produce, it appears always as if the want of industry, or the ill-direction of that industry, was the actual limit to a further increase of produce and population, and not the absolute refusal of nature to yield any more; but a man who is locked up in a room may be fairly said to be confined by the walls of it, though he may never touch them; and with regard to the principle of population, it is never the question whether a country will produce _any more_, but whether it may be made to produce a sufficiency to keep pace with an unchecked increase of people. In China the question is not, whether a certain additional quantity of rice might be raised by improved culture, but whether such an addition could be counted on during the next twenty-five years as would be sufficient to support an additional three hundred millions of people. And in this country it is not the question whether, by cultivating all our commons, we could raise considerably more than at present: but whether we could raise sufficient for a population of twenty millions in the next twenty-five years and forty millions in the next fifty years. “The allowing of the produce of the earth to be absolutely unlimited scarcely removes the weight of a hair from the argument, which depends entirely upon the differently increasing ratios of population and food; and all that the most enlightened governments and the most persevering and best guided efforts of industry can do, is to make the necessary checks to population act more equably, and in a direction to produce the least evil; but to remove them is a task absolutely hopeless.” We have now arrived at the last part of Malthus’s great essay on population. In Book IV. our author speaks in chapter i. of future prospects of the removal or mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population. He shows that we must submit to the population law as an ultimate law of nature, and that all that remains for us is, how we may check population with the least prejudice to the virtue and happiness of human society. He claims for moral restraint that it is the least harmful of all the checks. “If we be intemperate in eating and drinking (he says) we are disordered; if we indulge the transports of anger, we seldom fail to commit acts of which we afterwards repent; if we multiply too fast, we die miserably of poverty and contagious diseases.... The kind of food, and the mode of preparing it, best suited for the purposes of nutriment and the gratification of the palate, &c., were not pointed out to the attention of man at once, but were the slow and late result of experience, and of the admonitions received by repeated failures.”