Marx is seeking to demonstrate the hopelessness of the labourer’s position; and he is too acute not to know that his demonstration would be seriously weakened if he admitted the truth of the Malthusian doctrine and the bare possibility of the adoption of prudential habits by the labourers. This is the real reason of his bitter attacks on the Essay. He says of it:[917] “When I say Eden’s work on the Poor was the only important writing by a disciple of Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, I may be reminded of the essay of Malthus. But this book in its first form (and the later editions did nothing but add and adapt borrowed materials) is nothing but a plagiarism from Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, full of schoolboy superficiality and clerical declamation, and not containing a single original sentence. By the way, although Malthus was a clergyman of the Church of England, he had taken the monastic oath of celibacy[!], for this is one of the conditions of a fellowship at the Protestant University of Cambridge. ‘Socios collegiorum maritos esse non permittimus, sed statim postquam quis uxorem duxerit, socius collegii desinat esse’ (_Reports of Cambridge University Commission_, p. 172). By this circumstance Malthus is favourably distinguished from the other Protestant clergy, who have cast off the Catholic rule of celibacy....[918] With exception of Ortes[919] the Venetian monk, an original and clever writer, most of the writers on Population are Protestant clergymen,” a contrast, he goes on, to the days when political economists were all philosophers. Marx adopts[920] the common view that Malthus being a clergyman was the bond-slave of Toryism and the ruling classes, and therefore ready to adopt a principle that attributed over-population to the eternal laws of nature rather than to the historical laws (also natural) of the capitalists’ production. Marx does not see that the “eternal laws” in question do not lead to over-population except when the precepts of Malthus are neglected; and never shows how, apart from these precepts, over-population will be prevented in the renovated society itself, which has nationalized not only the land but all the instruments of production. Would the habits of men be so changed by this stroke of nationalization that the want of ordinary commercial motives would not be felt?[921] Would not the millennium of the Socialist, like that of the Christian, postulate a religious conversion on the largest scale for its first introduction, to say nothing of its continuance? Productive Co-operation, depending on the spontaneous action of the labourers for its creation, and on their intelligence and prudence for its success, would nationalize capital more surely; and it would not make the impossible postulate of Socialism, that a passionless unselfishness, which not one in a hundred thousand in our day exhibits at any time, shall at once become the invariable daily rule of all without exception.