dimensions, to eat, and drink, and beget children, and bring them up in the usual way, all this could never happen: for it is impossible but they must see and feel that there was only room for a certain number. The moment population became excessive from the _excess_ of virtue and happiness, its inconveniences would return, and people would no longer be _perfectly virtuous and happy_: that is, the old checks of a certain degree of vice and misery would come into play again, and a less degree of them (I suppose about as much as we enjoy the advantage of at present) would be sufficient to deter men from plunging into greater, would put a stop to the further increase of population, and anticipate those tremendous evils which Mr. Malthus apprehends from it, which could never happen unless we suppose people to have come to a previous, deliberate resolution mutually to starve one another to death. There is therefore no foundation for the alarm given by Mr. Malthus, for vice and misery are such ready and sure resources that we can be at a loss for them at no time; and farther with respect to the state of society supposed by Mr. Malthus, that is if we could once drive vice and misery out of the world, I really do not see what occasion we should have for them afterwards. The most important question yet remains, which is not how Mr. Malthus came by his discovery, nor whether he was right in endeavouring to exemplify it in the first instance by shewing its effects on an imaginary state of society where it would be naturally disarmed of its malignity, but whether the practical conclusions he has drawn from it are not of weight and moment in themselves, and whether they are not established so clearly and fully as to make it necessary for us to reverse almost entirely all our old reasonings on the principles of political economy. I confess, I have some difficulty in determining, whether Mr. Malthus’s principles do or do not materially affect the commonly received notions on this subject, because I really do not know what those principles are, and till Mr. Malthus himself tells us, whether he would have us believe in the new revelation or the old, it is impossible that any one should. If we are to consider those as Mr. Malthus’s real and chastized opinions which are the least like himself, which most flatly contradict his former assertions, which being forced from him may be looked upon as confessions of the truth, I see nothing in these that in any manner interferes with the common sense of mankind. And though Mr. Malthus still perseveres in almost all his extreme conclusions, yet as those conclusions are for the most part unwarrantable assumptions, disproved even by his own concessions, and shew nothing more than Mr. Malthus’s qualifications for the delicate office of conscience-keeper to the rich and great, I am so far from considering them as new and important discoveries, that I must be