prejudice of independent workmen and their children.[265] In the third place, like the Poor Laws, it promises an impossibility—to relieve all that come. If children are to be received without limit, the resources for maintaining them should be without limit; otherwise an excessive mortality is quite unavoidable.[266] The second reason is no doubt an economical commonplace; it is the first and third that are most characteristic of Malthus. He never forgets that human wants and human wills are an element in every economical phenomenon, and therefore considers that the effects of character on actions and of actions on character are of great economical importance. He will not allow that it can be right, even for a Government, to make promises that cannot be performed. These two plain principles give the tone to the later chapters, where he interprets for us the comparatively full statistics of Central Europe and our own England.[267] The law of population may be described (though not in the exact words of Malthus) as among savage peoples the tendency to increase beyond the food, and among civilized to increase up to it. So Professor Rogers founds his estimate of the numbers of the English people in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on the principle that “there were generally as many people existing in this country as there have been, on an average, quarters of wheat to feed them with.”[268] In the case of highly progressive modern nations such statements would be beyond the truth; and we must either say that they tend to increase not beyond but along with the food, or else we must define food itself very widely. In the first case “tendency” will mean the abstract possibility depending on the one physiological condition; in the others it is the concrete nett possibility depending on all the various conditions together. In a general preface to his chapters on Central Europe, Malthus quite recognizes these distinctions and warns us against exact statements. “It seldom happens,” he says, “that the increase of food and of population is uniform; and when the circumstances of a country are varying either from this cause or from any change in the national habits with respect to prudence and cleanliness, it is evident that a proportion which is true at one period will not be at another. Nothing is more difficult than to lay down rules on this subject that do not admit of exceptions.”[269]