e towns as destructive cancers in the body politic.

The prevalence of this view explains Malthus's position. To attribute
depopulation to luxury was to say that it was caused by the inequality
of property. The rich man wasted the substance of the country, became
demoralised himself, and both corrupted and plundered his neighbours.
The return to a 'state of nature,' in Rousseau's phrase, meant the
return to a state of things in which this misappropriation should
become impossible. The whole industry of the nation would then be
devoted to supporting millions of honest, simple peasants and
labourers, whereas it now went to increasing the splendour of the
great at the expense of the poor. Price enlarges upon this theme,
which was, in fact, the contemporary version of the later formula that
the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer. The immediate effect
of equalising property, then, would be an increase of population. It
was the natural retort, adopted by Malthus, that such an increase
would soon make everybody poor, instead of making every one
comfortable. Population, the French economists had said, follows
subsistence. Will it not multiply indefinitely? The rapid growth of
population in America was noticed by Price and Godwin; and the theory
had been long before expanded by Franklin, in a paper which Malthus
quotes in his later editions. 'There is no bound,' said Franklin in
1751,[215] 'to the prolific nature of plants and animals but what is
made by their crowding and interfering with each other's means of
subsistence.' The whole earth, he infers, might be overspread with
fennel, for example, or, if empty of men, replenished in a few ages
with Englishmen. There were supposed to be already one million of
Englishmen in North America. If they doubled once in twenty-five
years, they would in a century exceed the number of Englishmen at
home. This is identical with Mirabeau's principle of the multiplying
of rats in a barn. Population treads closely on the heels of
subsistence. Work out your figures and see the results.[216]

Malthus's essay in the first edition was mainly an application of
this retort, and though the logic was effective as against Godwin, he
made no elaborate appeal to facts. Malthus soon came to see that a
more precise application was desirable. It was clearly desirable to
know whether population was or was not actually increasing, and under
what conditions. I have spoken of the contemporary labours o