It is chiefly the contrast between the actual and the possible supplies that makes men incredulous about the necessity of checks; and we may grant that under an ideal government, a perfect people, and faultless social system the produce would at first be so great that the necessity for checks on population would be very much reduced; but, as the earth’s productiveness does not expand with population, it would be a very short time before the pressure of the checks would reassert itself—this time from no fault of man, but from the mere nature of the soil.[139] The bad government of our ancestors left much produce unused, and in consequence we have for the present a large margin to draw on. But, “if merely since the time of William the Conqueror all the nations of the earth had been well governed, and if the distribution of property and the habits both of the rich and the poor had been the most favourable to the demand for produce and labour, though the amount of food and population would have been prodigiously greater than at present, the means of diminishing the checks to population would unquestionably be less.” But, though the laws of nature are responsible for the necessity of checks to population,[140] “a vast mass of responsibility remains behind, on man and the institutions of society.” To them in the first place is due the scantiness of the present population of the earth, there being few parts of it that would not with better government and better morals support twice, ten times, or even one hundred times as many inhabitants as now. In the second place, though man cannot remove the necessity of checks, or even make them press much more lightly in any given place,[141] he is responsible for their precise character and particular mode of operation. A good government and good institutions can so direct them that they shall be least hurtful to the general virtue and happiness, vice and misery disappearing before moral restraint, though after all the influence of government and institutions is indirect, and everything depends on the conduct of the individual citizens.