The _Essay on Population_ deals with the past, the present, and the future. We have tried to follow its account of past and present, and must now consider the author’s view of future prospects and of the various schemes (including his own) for making the future better than the present. To do justice to this half of the essay, we must take further liberties with its arrangement. For the sake of explaining the historical genesis of the essay, we have already taken first[455] that criticism of Godwin and Condorcet which in the later essay comes in the centre of the work,[456] on the heels of the account of population in the United Kingdom, the point where we have now arrived; and the chapter on emigration has been used before its time. There remain, out of the fourteen chapters of the third book of the essay, eleven still untouched; and in all but one[457] a knowledge of the general economical doctrine of Malthus is indispensable to a clear and just understanding of him. No apology is needed then for a somewhat long digression, in which the chief economical writings of our author are briefly analyzed. It is not wholly a digression, as the substance of seven[458] out of ten chapters will be found incorporated with it, and their logical connection with the author’s economical theories (so far as it exists) will be shown. As a thoroughly practical man, Malthus knew that philanthropy can do little without sound doctrine; and his economical theories belong to the substance of his work. They were developed, unlike the _Essay on Population_, in quiet controversy among friends; Ricardo, James Mill, and Jean Baptiste Say, who were critics of the _Political Economy_, had been converts of the _Essay_. These were, however, the very men who came nearest to identify orthodox economics with rigorous abstraction. Malthus himself, labouring to build up the neglected pathology of economic science, was not chargeable with this fault. His first work had happily fixed into an intellectual principle his natural inclination to look at speculative questions in their relations to practice, and to look at “things as they are”[459] rather than as they might be. Ricardo’s first work, bearing wholly on finance,[460] had unhappily fixed for him his inclination to treat every social question as a problem in arithmetic. In both cases the excitement of controversy would make the impression deeper. The two economists both start from Adam Smith,[461] as theologians from the Bible. It was becoming clear that these Scriptures were of doubtful interpretation. Men were to choose between the Calvinism of Ricardo and the Arminianism of Malthus; and, when the two writers turned from their debates with the public to debates with each other, no less a prize was in question than the hegemony of the school.