number of institutions; and, as a first reform, would repeal at least one obnoxious law. The relation of Malthus to the French Revolution and its English partisans is indeed not to be expressed in a sentence. It has been said that he cannot be justly described as being a reactionary;[777] and, in truth, besides being a critic of Godwin and of Condorcet, he is influenced to some extent by the same ideas that influenced them. The _Essay on Population_ is coloured throughout by a tacit or open reference to the Rights of Man, a watchword borrowed from France by the American Republic, to be restored again at the Revolution. Paine’s book on the _Rights of Man_, in reply to Burke’s _Reflections on the French Revolution_, had been widely read before it was suppressed by the English Government; and Godwin and Mackintosh[778] were not silenced. Malthus himself, as a Whig, does not disparage the rights of man when they meant political freedom and equality, but only when they included the right to be supported by one’s neighbour, as had been asserted by the Abbé Raynal and some other writers of the Revolution.[779] As the same assertion was practically made by the English Poor Law, which had venerable conservative prejudice on its side, our author’s opposition to it was no proof that his politics were reactionary. His economical antecedents and his political views bound him to the French Revolution. In his range of ideas and his habitual categories he could not depart far from the French Economists, who had helped to prepare the way for the Jacobins. Adam Smith himself had felt their influence. Though he had criticized the noble savage and the state of nature,[780] he had himself a lingering preference for agriculture over manufacture; and he himself spoke of a “natural” price, a “natural” progress of opulence, a “natural” rate of wages, and “natural liberty.” To him as to the French writers, Nature[781] meant what would grow of itself if men did not interfere,—the difficulty being that the interference seems also to grow of itself, and it is impossible to separate the necessary protection from the mischievous interference. Malthus retains the phraseology with an even nearer approach to personification. Nature points out to us certain courses of conduct.[782] If we break Nature’s laws, she will punish us. At Nature’s mighty feast there is no cover laid for the superfluous new-comer. The Poor Laws offend against Nature; they interfere with human action in a case where it would spontaneously right itself by ordinary motives of self-interest; if men knew they could not count on parish relief, they would probably help themselves. Be the argument worth much or little, its strength is not the greater because of this figure; and his use of it shows that Malthus had not risen above the metaphysical superstitions of his age. But the charge sometimes made against him is that he was not merely not before his age but positively behind it; and this is certainly false.