Since Malthus, every complete reform has needed to face in some way or other the question which he treated; but he left little for others to do. Of the two most prominent schemes of our own day for the reconstruction of society, one, that of Mr. Henry George, involves an unconscious recourse to the old weapons of Godwin, Sadler, and other opponents of Malthus; _Progress and Poverty_ does not contain any argument not to be found in these writers. The conjecture about a “fixed quantity of human life on the earth” (ed. 1881, p. 97) is hardly an argument. It may be compared with what is stated by St. G. Mivart[903] to be the basis of Darwinism. “Every individual has to endure a very severe struggle for existence owing to the tendency to geometrical increase of all kinds of animals and plants, while the total animal and vegetable population (man and his agency excepted) remains almost stationary.” Mr. Mivart’s reason for excepting man seems to be Mr. George’s reason for including him. The latter’s more direct arguments against Malthus are as follows:—first, the difficulty is in the future (p. 85);—second, Malthus shifts the responsibility from man to the Creator (p. 87);—third, Malthus justifies the _status quo_ and parries the demand for reform (p. 88);—fourth, Malthus ascribes excessive increase of numbers to a general tendency of human nature, while it is really due to the badness of our institutions in old countries, as in India and Ireland (pp. 101–114), or the very thinness of population in new (p. 92);—fifth, Malthus does not distinguish between tendency to increase and actual increase, and is therefore refuted by the fact that the world is not yet peopled (p. 94). In the sixth place, we are told, if there had been such a law as the Malthusian, it would have been sooner and more widely recognized (p. 98);—that families often become extinct (p. 99), and it is more certain that we have ancestors than that we shall have descendants;[904]—that better industry would keep a larger population (p. 107);—Malthus says that vice and misery are necessary (p. 109);—Malthus does not see that vegetables and animals increase faster than population (p. 115),—or that the increase of man involves the increase of his food (p. 116), for a division of labour makes man produce more than he consumes (p. 126), and so the most populous countries are always the most wealthy (p. 128);—Malthus forgets that the world is wide (p. 119),—and that the tendency to increase is checked by development of intellect,[905]—and by the elevation of the standard of comfort (pp. 121, 123);—he forgets that “the power of population to produce the necessaries of life is not to be measured by the necessaries of life” it actually produces, but by its powers to produce wealth in all forms (p. 127);—Malthus will not see that twenty men where nature is niggardly (_e. g._ on a bare rock?) will produce more than twenty times what one man will where nature is bountiful (p.