III. Others find fault with the details of the doctrine, either (_a_) in regard to the ratios of increase, asserting that no tendency to a geometrical increase of population has been proved, but something much less rapid, even (a few say) a decreasing ratio,[927]—and that no mere arithmetical increase of food has been proved, but something much more rapid,[928]—or (_b_) in regard to the checks on population, asserting that no checks are necessary,[929]—that vice and misery sometimes add to population instead of checking it,[930]—that to include moral restraint is to stultify the original doctrine,[931]—that moral restraint sometimes involves as great evil as excessive numbers, both from the personal practice of it and from the preaching of it to others,[932]—that important checks have been omitted, the chief being misgovernment,[933] bad laws,[934] high feeding,[935] intellectual development,[936] and those of Owen.[937] There is, besides, an _a priori_ criticism, which is either (I.) ecclesiastical,[938] alleging that Malthus contradicts the Bible or some other authority,—(II.) theological,[939] that he denies Providence,—or (III.) doctrinaire,[940] that he denies natural rights and the pre-established harmony of moral and economical laws, and the instinct of equality,—or (IV.) ethical and popular,[941] that he runs counter to the moral sense and the natural benevolence of men and cosmopolitan morality. These arguments have been already considered. The fourth of them has, in its last branch, an appearance of truth, because Malthus has certainly pled less for the cosmopolitan than for the domestic and civic virtues. He wishes to lay the foundations solidly and leave the building to others. Cosmopolitan morality can rarely be the foundation. In the Empire, Christianity may have raised the people, and Stoicism the philosophers, to the wider morality without the training of the narrower, so that the converts were made better members of their own small communities by becoming members of the commonwealth of the saints and citizens of the great world. But it seems to Malthus that, in the world of to-day, the many conditions of a steady moral progress are best secured if the domestic and civic virtues precede the cosmopolitan. We must not legislate for a world of heroes, but for men as we know them to be; and a comfortable domestic life (βίος τέλειος) must be the common highway to goodness in a society of ordinary men. If poverty were no evil, churlishness would be no vice. But extreme poverty[942] is a real hindrance to goodness. In the apparent exceptions, as in the voluntary poverty of St. Francis, the greatest evil is absent, for there is no struggle for bare life. To abolish that struggle, and help men to comfort, is in some degree to help men to goodness; and it was the end for which Malthus laboured. The most sure and solid way of reaching it lay, as he thought, in impressing every man with a strong sense of his