treatise remained to the
last, the whole book was altered both in style and character. The
style certainly suffers, for Malthus was not a master of the literary
art; he inserts his additions with little care for the general effect.
He tones down some of the more vivid phrases which had given offence,
though he does not retract the substance. A famous passage[224] in the
second edition, in which he speaks of 'nature's mighty feast,' where,
unluckily, the 'table is already full,' and therefore unbidden guests
are left to starve, was suppressed in the later editions. Yet the
principle that no man has a claim to subsistence as of right remains
unaltered. The omission injures the literary effect without altering
the logic; and I think that, where the argument is amended, the new
element is scarcely worked into the old so as to gain thorough
consistency.

Malthus's survey of different countries showed how various are the
'checks' by which population is limited in various countries. We take
a glance at all nations through all epochs of history. In the South
Sea we find a delicious climate and a fertile soil, where population
is mainly limited by vice, infanticide, and war; and where, in spite
of these influences, the population multiplies at intervals till it is
killed off by famine. In China, a vast and fertile territory,
inhabited by an industrious race, in which agriculture has always been
encouraged, marriage stimulated, and property widely diffused, has
facilitated the production of a vast population in the most abject
state of poverty, driven to expose children by want, and liable at
intervals to destructive famines. In modern Europe, the checks appear
in the most various forms; in Switzerland and Norway a frugal
population in small villages sometimes instinctively understands the
principle of population, and exhibits the 'moral restraint,' while in
England the poor-laws are producing a mass of hopeless and inert
pauperism. Consideration of these various cases, and a comparison of
such records as are obtainable of the old savage races, of the
classical states of antiquity, of the Northern barbarians and of the
modern European nations, suggests a natural doubt. Malthus abundantly
proves what can hardly be denied, that population has everywhere been
found to press upon the means of subsistence, and that vice and misery
are painfully abundant. But does he establish or abandon his main
proposition? He now asserts the 'tend