There are two other critics to whom Malthus replies in some detail, one the visionary Owen, who is embraced in Empson’s classification, the other the practical man Arthur Young, who cannot so easily be classified. “I mean,” says the latter, “to deal in facts alone, happy when I can discover them pure and unalloyed with prejudice.”[890] As this was his practice as well as his profession, it may easily be believed that in his voluminous records of fifty years’ travelling and experimenting[891] he has spun rope enough to hang himself. It ought to be added that, like Godwin, he claims the privilege of being inconsistent. Nothing could be more clear than his recognition in his _Travels in France_ of the evils of over-population.[892] Yet in 1800, in his _Question of Scarcity plainly stated and Remedies considered_, he recommends as his remedy that each country labourer who has three children be provided with a cow and half an acre of potato ground.[893] In other words, he would reduce the English standard of living to the common Irish one, milk and potatoes. Malthus replies by giving reasons why people should “live dear,” and by reminding Arthur Young of his own comments on the proceedings of the National Assembly. Recognizing their duty to grant relief, but wishing to avoid an English Poor Law, the National Assembly set aside fifty millions of francs a year for support of the poor. If it had been really a duty, wrote Arthur Young (in his _Travels_), necessity might have occasioned them to extend the relief to one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred millions, and so on, “in the same miserable progression that has taken place in England.”[894] Malthus hardly needed to go back to the _Travels_, as Young himself confessed in his later writings that his plan did not apply to large cities, and though he still held by the claim of right, he confessed that his faith must be without works; in other words, he claimed the right to be inconsistent. But he continued to question Malthus’ axiom that what cannot be ought not to be; and he thinks that, if a man marries without the means to keep a family, he may justly blame society for not providing him with the means. He argues, too, that Malthus for the success of his scheme assumes perfect chastity in the unmarried. Malthus really assumed only that the evils, which on an average in a civilized country attend the prudential check, are less than the evils of premature mortality and other miseries entailed by the opposite course; he declares himself not against but in favour of schemes that improve the condition of the poor even on a limited scale; and he only asks that every such scheme be tested not by its first success, for hardly any scheme of the kind is unsuccessful at first, but by its effect on a new generation.[895]