Unlike Godwin, he relies on the ordinary motives of men, which he regards as forms of an enlightened self-love. Self-love is the mainspring of the social machine;[770] but self-love, when the self is so expanded as to include other selves, is not a low motive. Commercial ambition, encouraged by political liberty, and unhampered by Poor Laws, leads naturally to prosperity.[771] The happiness of the whole is to result from the happiness of individuals, and to begin first with them. He “sees in all forms of thought and work the life and death struggles of separate human beings.”[772] “No co-operation is required. Every step tells. He who performs his duty faithfully will reap the full fruits of it, whatever may be the number of others who fail. This duty is intelligible to the humblest capacity. It is merely that he is not to bring beings into the world for whom he cannot find the means of support. When once this subject is cleared from the obscurity thrown over it by parochial laws and private benevolence, every man must feel the strongest conviction of such an obligation. If he cannot support his children, they must starve; and, if he marry in the face of a fair probability that he will not be able to support his children, he is guilty of all the evils which he thus brings upon himself, his wife, and his offspring. It is clearly his interest, and will tend greatly to promote his happiness, to deter marrying till by industry and economy he is in a capacity to support the children that he may reasonably expect from his marriage; and, as he cannot in the mean time gratify his passions without violating an express command of God, and running a great risk of injuring himself or some of his fellow-creatures, considerations of his own interest and happiness will dictate to him the strong obligation to a moral conduct while he remains unmarried.”[773] Supposing passion to be thus controlled, we should see a very different scene from the present. “The period of delayed gratification would be passed in saving the earnings which were above the wants of a single man.” Savings Banks and Friendly Societies would have their perfect work; and “in a natural state of society such institutions, with the aid of private charity well directed, would probably be all the means necessary to produce the best practicable effects.”[774] The people’s numbers would be constantly within the limits of the food, though constantly following its increase; the real value of wages would be raised, in the most permanent way possible; “all abject poverty would be removed from society, or would at least be confined to a very few who had fallen into misfortunes against which no prudence or foresight could provide.”[775] It must be brought home to the poor that “they are themselves the cause of their own poverty.”[776] While Malthus insists against Godwin that it is not institutions and laws but ourselves that are to blame, he still shares, with Godwin, the desire to lessen the