At the end of 100 years, there will be 8,000 millions. ------------- 200 ------------------- 64,000 --------- ------------- 300 ------------------ 512,000 --------- ------------- 400 ---------------- 4,096,000 --------- ------------- 500 --------------- 32,768,000 --------- And so on, multiplying by 8 for every additional hundred years. So that, in 500 years, there would be more than _thirty thousand_ times as many as at present: and in 1000 years, upwards of _a thousand million_ times as many human beings as at this moment: consequently, _one single pair_, if suffered to increase without check, _would, in 1000 years, increase to more than double the present population of the globe_. It appears evident, then, to a demonstration, that population CANNOT be suffered to increase unrestrained for more than a very few hundred years. We are thus compelled to admit to Malthus, that, _sooner_ or _later_, some restraint or other to population _must_ be employed; and compelled to admit to his aristocratic disciples, that if no other better restraint than vice and misery can be found, then _vice and misery must be_; they are the lot of man, from generation to generation. Let me repeat it: it is no question—never can be a question—whether there shall be a restraint to population or not. There MUST be; unless indeed we find the means of visiting other planets, so as to people them. In the nature of things, there must be a check, of some kind, at some time. The _only_ question is, what that check shall be—whether, as heretofore, the check of war, want, profligacy, misery; or a “moral restraint,” sanctioned by reason and suggested by experience. Let those, then, who cry out against this little treatise, be told, that though they may postpone the question, no human power can evade it. It must come up. Had the friends of reform been left to choose their own time, it might, perhaps with advantage, have been postponed. And it is an imaginable case, that prejudice might delay it until a general famine or a universal civil war became the frightful checks. But will any man of common sense argue the propriety of suffering such a crisis to approach?