pleasure; and he was luckily at home again, and passing his proof-sheets through the press, before Napoleon’s unpleasant interference with English travellers. It was a happy coincidence that in the dark fighting days of 1798, Malthus should write only of vice and misery, while in the short gleam of peace in 1802 and 1803, when the tramp of armed men had ceased for the moment, he should recollect himself, and write of a less ghastly restraint on population, a restraint which might perhaps, like the truce of Amiens, hold out some faint hope for the future. For the sake of the world let us hope that the parallel goes no further. The wonder is not that he forgot there was such a thing as civilization, but that amidst wars and rumours of wars he should ever have remembered it. In the preface to the new edition (June 1803), he says he has “so far differed in principle” from the old edition “as to suppose the action of another check to population which does not come under the head either of vice or misery,” and he has “tried to soften some of the harshest conclusions of the first essay.” There was really more change than this. The first essay contained much of the imperfection of the sudden magazine-article; and if the writer had lived half a century later he would probably, instead of writing a small book, have contributed a long article to a monthly or quarterly magazine, giving a review of Godwin’s political writings, with incidental remarks on the Poor Bill of Mr. Pitt. This was evidently the light in which he himself regarded his first work, or he would not have handled it so freely in republication. The new edition had new facts, new arrangement, and new emphasis. He had not written a book once for all, leaving the world to fight over it after his death. He took the public into partnership with him, and made every discussion a means of improving his book. This gives the _Essay on Population_ a unique character among economical writings. It leads the author to interpret his thoughts to us from many various points of view, leaving us, unhappily, often in doubt whether an alteration of language is or is not an alteration of thought. Malthus adds to the difficulty by omitting and inserting instead of rewriting in full. His chapters cease to be old without becoming new. The very face of the book revealed a change. In 1798 it was _An Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society_; in 1803, _An Essay on the Principle of Population, or a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness_. The dreams of the future are now in the background, and the facts of the present in the foreground. In 1798 Malthus had given Godwin the lie:— “Colouring he, dilating, magniloquent, glorying in picture, He to a matter of fact still softening, paring, abating, He to the great might-have-been upsoaring, sublime and ideal, He to the merest it—was restricting, diminishing, dwarfing.”