The rest of the article contains little that is not in the _Essay on Population_ (5th ed., 1817) and the treatise on _Political Economy_ (1st ed., 1820). It gives the historical sketches of the former, some small part of the economical discussions (_e. g._ on wages) of the latter, and a short answer to current objections, together with some tables of mortality and other figures, of more special interest to the professional actuary than to the general reader. The article is an authoritative summary of the author’s doctrines in their final form. It was not his last work. From the fact that he undertook the paper in Sept. 1821,[142] we may perhaps infer that he placed it in Macvey Napier’s hands in the year 1822.[143] But it was his last attempt to restate the subject of the essay in an independent form with anything approaching to fulness of detail, and it shows he had made no change in his position. The _Summary View of the Principle of Population_ (1830) was avowedly an abridgment of the article in the _Encyclopædia_, and is in fact that article with a few paragraphs omitted and a few pronouns altered. The clear statement of the two tendencies was, in his own eyes, the least original part of his work. It had been often perceived distinctly by other writers that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence. “Yet few inquiries have been made into the various modes by which this level is effected, and the principle has never been sufficiently pursued to its consequences, nor those practical inferences drawn from it which a strict examination of its effects on society appears to suggest.”[144] What some people would count the more interesting question remained to be considered——the question that touches individuals and familiar circumstances more nearly, and is not to be answered by a generality, from which we easily in thought except our own individual selves. Since, at any given time, in any given place, among any given people, there is (1) a tendency of population to outrun subsistence, and there is (2) no such excess as a matter of fact, in what way or ways is the tendency prevented from carrying itself out? As was said above,[145] this is effected in two kinds of ways—(1) by the way of a positive, (2) by the way of a preventive check, the former cutting down an actual population to the level of its food, the second forbidding a population to need to be cut down, and being, so far as it is voluntary, peculiar to man among living creatures. Of the positive, all those that come from the laws of nature may be called misery pure and simple; and all those that men bring on themselves by wars, excesses, and avoidable troubles of all kinds are of a mixed character, their causes being vice and their consequences misery. Of the preventive, that restraint from marriage which is not accompanied by any immoral conduct on the part of the person restraining himself or herself is called moral restraint.