After explaining his principles, Malthus takes a survey of human progress, if not from brute to savage, at least from savage to citizen. He shows us how the rude and simple positive checks become complicated with the preventive; and he leads us up from barbarism to civilization till we find ourselves in a society where the citizens think less of check than of chief end, and less of self-sacrifice than of self-devotion, to some cause or person, and even the inferior members act, at worst, from mixed motives, containing good as well as evil. These are the two extreme ends of his line. It would be useless to deny that he lingers longest over the less pleasing, and gives Godwin some excuse for questioning his logical right to believe in the more pleasing at all.[158] At the same time it would have been (even logically) impossible for him to have attacked Godwin for taking abstract views of human nature, and then to have persisted in an abstraction of his own, after all his own European travel and historical studies. His fault had lain in defective premises, not in false reasoning; and he remedies the fault. Let us take his account in his own order. Beginning with present savagery, which with some qualifications is a picture of our own past, he sifts out the descriptions of Cook, Vancouver, and other travellers, to see what checks to population operate in different grades of savage humanity. At the very bottom of the scale comes Tierra del Fuego, by general consent the abode of pure misery, and therefore naturally the home of a sparse population. Next come the natives of the Andaman Islands and of Van Diemen’s Land. “Their whole time is spent in search of food,” which consists of the raw products of the soil and sea; the whole time of every individual is devoted to this one labour, and there is neither room nor inducement for any other industries. Vice is hardly needed; misery in the shape of perpetual scarcity and famine keeps down the people to the food. Third in the scale of human beings are the New Hollanders, the original inhabitants of North-West Australia, among whom can be traced not only the check of misery, but the check of vice. The women are so cruelly treated at all times, and the children have so harsh an upbringing, that there is no difficulty in understanding how population does not even reach the full limit of the scanty food. War and pestilence make the assurance doubly sure. As savages are entirely innocent of sanitary science, the dirt of their persons and their houses deprives them of “the advantage which usually attends a thinly-peopled country,” comparative exemption from pestilence.[159] Even the North American Indians, who are one step higher than the New Hollanders, come under the same condemnation for overcrowding, and for much else besides. The account which Malthus gives of them may be compared with that of De Tocqueville half a century later. Romance has clung to them only because