While Malthus was making such converts as Pitt, Paley, and Parr, and when even Godwin acknowledged the “writer of the essay” to have made a “valuable addition to political economy,”[85] the essay was not beyond criticism. There were some familiar facts of which the writer had taken too little account, and they were impressed on him by his critics from all sides. To use the language of philosophy, he had not been sufficiently concrete; he had gone far to commit Godwin’s fault, and consider one feature of human nature apart by itself, instead of seeing it in its place with the rest. The position and prospects of civilized society in our own day depend on a combination of political, intellectual, physical, and moral causes, of which the growth or decrease of population may be only an effect. If we are part man, part lion, and part hog, it is not fair to assume the predominance of the hog any more than the predominance of the man. In a herd of animals, as distinguished from a society of men, the units are simply the fittest who have survived in the struggle for existence. The principle of population is in the foreground there; there is no check to it but famine, disease, and death. We can therefore understand how the study of the _Essay on Population_ led Charles Darwin to explain the origin of species by a generalization which Malthus had known and named, though he did not pursue it beyond man.[86] The “general struggle” among animals “for room and food” means among civilized men something very like free trade, the old orthodox economical panacea for economic evils; and the essayist agrees with Adam Smith in a general resistance to legislative interference. Bad as are the effects of the irremovable causes of poverty, interference makes them still worse. But at least, when we come to man, the struggle is not so cruel. “Plague take the hindmost” is not the only or the supreme rule. If the fear of starvation, the most earthly and least intellectual of all motives, is needed to force us to work at first, it need not therefore be necessary ever afterwards. The baser considerations are by their definition the lowest layers of our pile; we rise by means of them, but we tread them down, and the higher the pile the less their importance. Within civilized countries, in proportion to their civilization, the struggle in the lowest stages is abolished; the weakest are often saved, and the lowest raised, in spite of unfitness.[87] View man not as an animal, but as a citizen; view the principle of population as checked not only by vice, misery, and the fear of them, but by all the mixed motives of human society, and we recognize that Malthus, with the best intentions, had treated the matter too abstractly. Godwin had over-rated the power of reason, Malthus the power of passion. “It is probable,” he wrote at a later time, “that, having found the bow bent too much one way, I was induced to bend it too