The main position of the essay was so incontrovertible, that when the critics despaired to convict Malthus of a paradox, they charged him with a truism. To the friendly Hallam[154] the mathematical basis of the argument appeared as certain as the multiplication table, and the unfriendly Hazlitt “did not see what there was to discover after reading the tables of Noah’s descendants, and knowing that the world is round.”[155] If the essayist had done nothing more than put half-truths together into a whole, he would have “entrenched himself in an impregnable fortress” and given his work a great “air of mastery.”[156] But he would have convinced the understanding without convincing the imagination. Adam Smith himself would have done no more than half his work, if he had been content to prove the reasonableness of free trade without showing, in detail, the effect of it and its opposites. Even the most competent reader has seldom all the relevant facts marshalled in his memory, ready to command; and he will always be thankful for illustrations. The _Essay on Population_ in its second form certainly excelled all economical works, save one, in its pertinent examples from life and history. Imagination in the narrower sense of the word is to be out of court. Malthus, like Adam Smith, not only leaves little to his reader’s fancy, but makes little use of his own. His own had misled his readers in the first essay, though it had certainly given that little book much of its piquancy; and he resolves for the sake of truth to chain it up, as Coleridge chained up his understanding. The self-denying ordinance is only too fully executed. The style of his essay is truly described by himself[157] as having gradually “lost all pretensions to merit.” Edition follows edition, each with its footnotes, supplements, rearrangements, and corrections, till the reader feels that this writer “would be clearer if he were not so clear.” But the title-page supplies a guiding thread. From the second edition onwards to the last, “Past” and “Present” appear in large letters, “Future” in small. The entire work may therefore be divided according to the three tenses, with the emphasis on the two former. The first book is devoted to the past, the second to the present, and the third and fourth to the future. The First deals with the less civilized parts of the world as it now is, and the uncivilized past times; the Second with the different states of modern Europe; the Third criticizes popular schemes of future improvement; while the Fourth gives the author’s own views of the possible progress of humanity.