CHAPTER V. NORTH AND MID EUROPE. Different Effects of Commercial Ambition in different Countries—No single safe Criterion of National Prosperity—Süssmilch’s “Divine Plan”—Malthus in the Region of Statistics—His Northern Tour—In Norway the truth brought home by the very nature of Place and Industries—In Sweden less obvious—In Russia quite ignored—Foundling Hospitals indefensible—Tendency of People to multiply beyond, up to, or simply with the Food—Author tripping—Facts the Interpreters and the Interpreted—Holland—The best _pater patriæ_—Emigration in various Aspects—Evidence of the Author before Emigration Committee—Switzerland, St. Cergues and Leysin—The _pons asinorum_ of the subject. The broad difference between a savage and a civilized population is, that the positive checks prevail in the one, the preventive in the other,—and between ancient and modern civilizations, that vice and misery prevail in the one, moral restraint in the other.[232] Yet every civilized nation in modern times has not only passed through these three stages in the course of its past history, but contains them all within it now as a matter of observation. Its early history was an endeavour after independence or bare life, its later history an endeavour after full development; but there are strata in it to which civilization has not descended, and in which the struggle for bare existence prevails, alongside of strata in which the struggle is towards ideals of commercial ambition and social perfection. The view which Malthus takes of commercial ambition is substantially that of Adam Smith. As soon as commerce is separated from slavery, as soon as wealth is a man’s own acquisition, got by the sweat of his own brow, then the desire of wealth has a new social aspect. It becomes what Adam Smith calls “the natural desire of every man to better his own condition;” and as such it creates modern commercial society, as opposed both to the ancient society built upon slavery, and to the feudal built upon war.