These commonplaces were then a paradox. Even at the end of the eighteenth century there was no party in the English House of Commons identified with enlightened views on the position of the British workman. Whitbread had always some measure on hand for helping the labourer out of the rates, or by some other State interference; it was in opposing one of Whitbread’s bills that the Prime Minister promised to introduce his own memorable measure. Fox was free to follow either, not professing to understand the new economical doctrines. Pitt, who admired Adam Smith,—Fox, Condorcet, and Godwin, who owed Smith no allegiance,[51]—all were equally purblind in this matter. All Pitt’s study of the fourth book of the _Wealth of Nations_, chapter fifth, had not shown him the fallacy of a bounty on children. Yet Malthus had got his light from no obscure sources, but from “Hume, Wallace, Adam Smith, and Dr. Price,”[52] who were all well-known and widely-read authors of the day. “The populousness of ancient nations” had been a happy hunting-ground for learned antiquarian essay writers over half a century. Montesquieu, Wallace, and Price[53] claimed the advantage for the ancients. David Hume, with his usual acute divination, decides for the moderns, though with his usual irony he professes to adopt a sceptical conclusion, and makes several concessions to Wallace.[54] This controversy itself might have been expected to bring men nearer to the truth on the subject of population than it actually did. It was left to Malthus to convert Hume’s probability into a certainty from a higher vantage-ground; but the sifting of the arguments by the various writers before him must have simplified his task.[55] Other aids and anticipations were not wanting. As early as 1786, Joseph Townsend, the Wiltshire rector, had written a _Dissertation on the Poor Laws_, which gives an admirable statement of those wise views of charity and poor relief that are only in these latter days becoming current among us. Malthus records his opinion of Townsend’s work in the best of all possible ways. From his careful inquiry (in the second edition of the _Essay_) into the population of European countries, he omits Spain on the ground that Mr. Townsend’s _Travels in Spain_ has already done the work for him.[56]