responsibility for his acts and of his power over his own destiny. To reform a nation, we must reform the members of it, who, if they are good at first in spite of their institutions, will at last conform their institutions to the model of their own goodness. To hold men the creatures of society, and make society responsible for their character, was, he thought, to mistake the order of nature. Society can feel its responsibility only in its individual members; and no member of it can free his own soul by the purity of a collective or representative conscience. The doctrine of Malthus is, therefore, a strong appeal to personal responsibility. He would make men strong in will, to subdue their animal wants to their notion of personal good and personal goodness, which, he believed, could never fail to develope into the common good and goodness of all. Believers in the omnipotence of outward circumstances and the powerlessness of the human will, to alter them or the human character, may put Malthus beyond the pale of sympathy. But all can enter into the mind of Malthus and understand his work, who know the hardness of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit, and yet believe in the power of ideas to change the lives of men, and have faith not only in the rigour of natural laws, but in man’s power to conquer nature by obeying her. BOOK V. BIOGRAPHY. Parentage—Early Education—Graves and Wakefield—Course at Cambridge—Correspondence with his Father—Change in Studies—The _Crisis_ and the Curacy—Effect of the Essay on its Author—Early and Late Styles—Life from 1799 to 1834—_Ingrata Patria?_—East India College—Professor’s Lectures—_Hic Jacet_. The few facts that are known of the life of Malthus bring us nearer to him than we can come in his writings, and show us how well, on the whole, his antecedents and surroundings fitted him for his work. Our chief authorities are Bishop Otter’s biographical preface to the second edition of our author’s _Political Economy_, which was posthumously published in 1836, and Professor Empson’s notice of the book in the _Edinburgh Review_ for January 1837.[943] Otter was the college companion and life-long friend of Malthus; Empson was his colleague at Haileybury. The information they give us, though meagre, is trustworthy; and happily it can be supplemented by hints from other quarters.