f
Sinclair, Young, Sir F. Eden, and others. To collect statistics was
plainly one of the essential conditions of settling the controversy.
Malthus in 1799 travelled on the continent to gather information, and
visited Sweden, Norway, Russia, and Germany. The peace of Amiens
enabled him in 1802 to visit France and Switzerland. He inquired
everywhere into the condition of the people, collected such
statistical knowledge as was then possible, and returned to digest it
into a elaborate treatise. Meanwhile, the condition of England was
giving a fresh significance to the argument. The first edition had
been published at the critical time when the poor-law was being
relaxed, and disastrous results were following war and famine. The old
complaint that the poor-law was causing depopulation was being changed
for the complaint that it was stimulating pauperism. The first edition
already discussed this subject, which was occupying all serious
thinkers; it was now to receive a fuller treatment. The second
edition, greatly altered, appeared in 1803, and made Malthus a man of
authority. His merits were recognised by his appointment in 1805 to
the professorship of history and political economy at the newly
founded East India College at Haileybury. There he remained till the
end of his life, which was placid, uneventful, and happy. He made a
happy marriage in 1804; and his calm temperament enabled him to bear
an amount of abuse which might have broken the health of a more
irritable man. Cobbett's epithet, 'parson Malthus,' strikes the
keynote. He was pictured as a Christian priest denouncing charity, and
proclaiming the necessity of vice and misery. He had the ill luck to
be the centre upon which the antipathies of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin
converged. Cobbett's language was rougher than Southey's; but the
poet-laureate and the author of 'two-penny trash' were equally
vehement in sentiment. Malthus, on the other hand, was accepted by the
political economists, both Whig and Utilitarian. Horner and
Mackintosh, lights of the Whigs, were his warm friends as well as his
disciples. He became intimate with Ricardo, and he was one of the
original members of the Political Economy Club. He took abuse
imperturbably; was never vexed 'after the first fortnight' by the most
unfair attack; and went on developing his theories, lecturing his
students, and improving later editions of his treatise. Malthus died
on 23rd December 1834.

II. THE RATIOS

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