Malthus himself replies to it as a charge commonly brought against him by others, with no reference to Godwin in particular. For the most part he ignores Godwin’s book on Population, as mere rhetoric and scurrility.[840] Godwin, however, had given more than two years of hard labour to the writing of it;[841] and his biographer regards it as the last work of his best days. He employed his son William and his friend Henry Blanch Rosser to help him, in addition to Booth. His whole mind was occupied with Booth’s calculations and his own deductions from them. He himself “could not pursue a calculation for an hour without being sick to the lowest ebb.”[842] If Booth lagged behind him he was miserable. He rose in early morning to note down an idea and was ill for the rest of the day after it. He is satisfied, however, with the result of his labours. He thinks his chapter on the Geometrical Ratio will delight his friends and astonish his foes. In any case his comfort is that “truth” will prevail, and, whether through him or another, “the system of Malthus can never rise again, and the world is delivered from this accursed apology in favour of vice and misery and hard-heartedness and oppression,”[843] and the world will see that there is “no need of any remedies,” for the numbers of mankind never did and never can increase in the ways described by Malthus.[844] A few of his younger friends[845] believed him successful; and the book was mentioned in the House of Commons as a conclusive refutation of Malthus, especially in regard to the ratios.[846] But the fact remains not only that poor Godwin made no bread and butter by it,[847] but that he converted no one whose opinion in such a matter was of any weight. Mackintosh, though at peace again with his old friend, when he writes to him in September 1821,[848] cannot praise his work; even thinks its tone intolerant; and will only say that he sees nothing in the Malthusian doctrines inconsistent with perfectibility. He takes pains at the same time to disclaim the authorship of the notice in the _Edinburgh Review_ for July 1821, which was lacking in the courtesy due to Godwin, though it did not reproduce the scurrility of the earliest review of him.[849] The inconclusiveness of the book, even in the view of Malthus’ opponents, appears from the stream of new refutations, which made no pause.