enough after
their formulation, but never effectively conceded before. He brought
clearly and emphatically into the sphere of discussion a vitally
important issue that had always been shirked and tabooed heretofore, the
fundamental fact that the main mass of the business of human life
centres about reproduction. He stated in clear, hard, decent, and
unavoidable argument what presently Schopenhauer was to discover and
proclaim, in language, at times, it would seem, quite unfitted for
translation into English. And, having made his statement, Malthus left
it, in contact with its immediate results.

Probably no more shattering book than the _Essay on Population_ has ever
been, or ever will be, written. It was aimed at the facile Liberalism of
the Deists and Atheists of the eighteenth century; it made as clear as
daylight that all forms of social reconstruction, all dreams of earthly
golden ages must be either futile or insincere or both, until the
problems of human increase were manfully faced. It proffered no
suggestions for facing them (in spite of the unpleasant associations of
Malthus's name), it aimed simply to wither the Rationalistic Utopias of
the time and by anticipation, all the Communisms, Socialisms, and
Earthly Paradise movements that have since been so abundantly audible in
the world. That was its aim and its immediate effect. Incidentally it
must have been a torturing soul-trap for innumerable idealistic but
intelligent souls. Its indirect effects have been altogether greater.
Aiming at unorthodox dreamers, it has set such forces in motion as have
destroyed the very root-ideas of orthodox righteousness in the western
world. Impinging on geological discovery, it awakened almost
simultaneously in the minds of Darwin and Wallace, that train of thought
that found expression and demonstration at last in the theory of natural
selection. As that theory has been more and more thoroughly assimilated
and understood by the general mind, it has destroyed, quietly but
entirely, the belief in human equality which is implicit in all the
"Liberalizing" movements of the world. In the place of an essential
equality, distorted only by tradition and early training, by the
artifices of those devils of the Liberal cosmogony, "kingcraft" and
"priestcraft," an equality as little affected by colour as the equality
of a black chess pawn and a white, we discover that all men are
individual and unique, and, through long ranges of compar