numbers in any given case are too great or too small depends always on the quantity of the food that is divided among them; and, where the food decreases faster than the population, a population that has become smaller numerically becomes actually larger in proportion to the food. The statement that England or any other country could bear millions more than it does now is a mere reference to unexplored possibilities, landing us in the infinite. It may be answered in the same way as the Eleatic puzzles about motion; land infinitely improvable does not mean land infinitely improved, as matter infinitely divisible does not mean matter infinitely divided. The position of Malthus is therefore as follows: given a people’s skill, and given its standard of living at any time, its numbers are always tending to be the utmost that can be furnished by that skill with a living up to that standard,—that is to say, with what, according to that standard, are the necessaries of human life. Either a diminution of that skill or an increase in that standard would cause over-population. The question is always a relative one. The human as distinguished from the animal character of the problem appears not only in that relativity (which affects mainly the preventive checks), but in the indirect way in which the positive checks, if we may say so, prefer to act. It is as if they were always desirous of resolving themselves as far as might be into preventive. The ultimate check, Malthus says, is starvation; but, he adds, it is seldom the immediate one. The higher up we go in the scale, the more it is hidden away out of sight. Starvation is interpreted, by all grades of society above the lowest, to mean the loss of what they conceive to be the necessaries not of a bare living but of endurable life; and even the lowest, instead of apprehending some pain, apprehend some bringer of it. They do not allow famine to kill them; they create manners and customs that do the work for it, keeping the famine itself afar off. “Both theory and experience uniformly instruct us that a less abundant supply of food operates with a gradually increasing pressure for a very long time before its progress is stopped. It is difficult indeed to conceive a more tremendous shock to society than the event of its coming at once to the limits of the means of subsistence, with all the habits of abundance and early marriages, which accompany a largely increasing population. But, happily for mankind, this never is nor ever can be the case. The event is provided for by the concurrent interests and feelings of individuals long before it arrives; and the gradual diminution of the real wages of the labouring classes of society slowly and almost insensibly generates the habits necessary for an order of things in which the funds for the maintenance of labour are stationary.... The causes [of the retardation of population] will be generally felt and