The commercial policy of England has become what Malthus describes in the latter part of the _Essay on Population_ as a combination of the agricultural and the commercial systems. His views on this subject became modified as he grew older. In the second edition he says:[557] “Two nations might increase exactly with the same rapidity in the exchangeable value of the annual produce of their land and labour; yet ... in that which had applied itself chiefly to agriculture, the poor would live in greater plenty, and population would rapidly increase; in that which had applied itself chiefly to commerce, the poor would be comparatively but little benefited, and consequently population would either be stationary or increase very slowly.” “In the history of the world the nations whose wealth has been derived principally from manufactures and commerce have been perfectly ephemeral beings compared with those the basis of whose wealth has been agriculture. It is in the nature of things that a state which subsists upon a revenue furnished by other countries must be infinitely more exposed to all the accidents of time and chance than one which produces its own.”[558] It is not, he thinks, because of her trade, but because of her agriculture that England is so rich in resources; it is not without danger that our commercial policy has diverted capital from agriculture into manufacture and commerce. About the middle of the eighteenth century we were strictly an agricultural nation, and we were safe, for in a country whose commerce and manufacture increase from and with the improvement in agriculture there is no discoverable germ of decay. But all is changed now; and there is reason to fear that our prosperity is temporary, and we have only risen by the depression of other nations.[559] When the nations that now supply us with cheap corn shall have prospered like ourselves and increased their population till corn is dear among them, then we shall be ruined. The evils of scarcity are so dreadful that it is worth our while to give special encouragements to agriculture, and, in order to be certain to have enough, to have in general too much.[560] Otherwise “we shall be laid so bare to the shafts of fortune that nothing but a miracle can save us from being struck.”[561] “If England continues yearly her importations of corn, she cannot ultimately escape that decline which seems to be the natural and necessary consequence of excessive commercial wealth; and the growing prosperity of those countries which supply her with corn must in the end diminish her population, her riches, and her power,”—not indeed in the next twenty or thirty years, but “in the next two hundred or three hundred.”[562] In 1803 Malthus had much in common with the author of _Great Britain independent of Commerce_, to say nothing of the French economists. He cannot be said to have entirely lost the bias in favour of Agriculture in later years. In the _Political Economy_, reviewing the last five