in order to check the steady decrease of the
ruling classes.

The same phenomenon appeared towards the close of the Middle Ages, after
the nobility and clergy had, in the course of centuries and with the aid
of all the crafty and violent means at their command, robbed unnumbered
peasants of their property and appropriated the common lands to
themselves. When, thereupon, the peasants revolted and were beaten down,
the robber-trade gained new impetus, and it was then also practiced upon
the Church estates by the Princes of the Reformation. The number of
thieves, beggars and vagabonds was never larger than immediately before
and after the Reformation. The expropriated rural population rushed to
the cities; but there, due to causes that have been described in
previous pages, the conditions of life were likewise
deteriorating,--hence "over-population" was felt all around.

The appearance of Malthus coincides with that period of English industry
when, due to the inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright and Watt, powerful
changes set in both in mechanism and technique, changes that affected,
first of all, the cotton and linen industries, and rendered breadless
the workingmen engaged in them. The concentration of capital and land
assumed at the time large proportions in England: along with the rapid
increase of wealth, on the one hand, there went the deepening misery of
the masses, on the other. At such a juncture, the ruling classes, who
have every reason to consider the existing world the "best of all
possible worlds," were bound to seek an explanation for so contradictory
a phenomenon as the pauperization of the masses in the midst of swelling
wealth and flourishing industry. Nothing was easier than to throw the
blame upon the too-rapid procreation of the workingmen, and not upon
their having been rendered superfluous through the capitalist process of
production, and the accumulation of the soil in the hands of landlords.
With such circumstances for its setting, the "school-boyish, superficial
and pulpiteer piece of declamatory plagiarism," that Malthus published,
was a work that gave drastic utterance to the secret thoughts and wishes
of the ruling class, and justified their misdeeds to the world. Hence
the loud applause that it met from one side, and violent opposition from
another. Malthus had spoken the right word at the right time for the
English bourgeoisie; hence, although his essay "contained not one
original sentence,"