(_a_) The Malthusian hypothesis has been held to justify _the laissez faire, laissez aller_ policy which held the industrial world in its malignant grip during the latter part of the eighteenth and the earlier part of the nineteenth century, and from which we are not yet completely freed. Workers were exploited and reduced to a position of modified slavery; and this was assumed by clergy and political economists alike to be part of the ordered course of life. This doctrine was made to support the belief that God had ordained the poor man’s lot, with its attendant misery and hopelessness. On page 438 of the sixth edition of his book Malthus says: that the principal and most permanent cause of poverty has little or no direct relation to forms of government, or the unequal division of property; and that, as the rich do not in reality possess the power of finding employment and maintenance for the poor, the poor cannot in the nature of things, possess the right to demand them, are important truths flowing from the principle of population. In the first edition of his book a more extreme, plainer statement of the position, as assumed by Malthus, was given, but was omitted from later editions (the extract is translated by Beale from a French edition): A man born into the world already occupied, if his family can no longer keep him, or if society cannot utilise his work, has not the least right whatever to claim any share of food, and he is already one too many upon the earth. At the great banquet of Nature there is no cover laid for him. Nature commands him to go and she is not long in putting this order herself into execution. Malthus supplied the clue which helped to start Darwin on his epoch-making investigations; and to the present day there are men who do not appreciate that the mutual aid which is fundamental in human society is an enemy to the continued operation of natural selection, and that we cannot revert to natural selection without destroying the characteristic work of civilization. To think otherwise is the secret behind German aggression; to act otherwise is to revert to barbarism. Man has definitely replaced natural by rational selection, and will, I have no doubt, to a steadily increasing extent replace competition by coöperation. (_b_) The Malthusian hypothesis and the policy based on it ignored the human element in industry. Happily revolt against the strict application of the _laissez faire_ policy set in soon after urbanization and industrialism (under the then conditions) began their maleficient work, first in regard to children, then for women, and latterly more general in character.