This is the argument of the _Encyclopædia_ so far as it relates to the theses of the essay. Malthus follows it up by a remark on the institution of property. The alternatives to his mind are always private property as we now have it, and common property as desired by Godwin. He upholds the first because, “according to all past experience and the best observation which can be made on the motives which operate upon the human mind,” the largest produce from the soil is got by that system, and because (what is socially much more important), by making a man feel his responsibility and his dependence on his own efforts, it tends to cause prudence in marriage as well as industry in work. Common property has not been successful, historically; and the widest extension of popular education would not make men the fitter for it. There is indeed a sense in which common property might tend to carry production farther than private property; cultivation, not being for profit but for mere living, would not, like the present, stop at the point where production ceased to be a good investment. But this would mean[137] that the whole energies of the society were directed to the mere getting of food; neither the whole society nor any part of it would have leisure, for intellectual labour or enjoyment. Whereas private property not only secures the leisure, but, by stopping at the point of profitableness, it keeps an unused reserve, on which society may fall back in case of need. Malthus therefore would stand by private property, though he thinks that private proprietors may damage the national wealth by game-preserving, and injure the poorer classes by not spending enough on what they make.[138] The actual increase of population (he goes on) and the necessity of checks to it depend on the difficulty of getting food, from whatever cause, whether the exhaustion of the earth or the bad structure of society; and the difficulty is not for the remote future but for the present.