e of the
subjugation of the passions to reason, they will be absolutely lawless
and unchecked, and because as men become enlightened, quick sighted
and public-spirited, they will shew themselves utterly blind to the
consequences of their actions, utterly indifferent to their own
well-being and that of all succeeding generations, whose fate is placed
in their hands. This we conceive to be the boldest paralogism that ever
was offered to the world, or palmed upon willing credulity. Against
whatever other scheme of reform this objection might be valid, the
one it was brought expressly to overturn was impregnable against it,
invulnerable to its slightest graze. Say that the Utopian reasoners are
visionaries, unfounded; that the state of virtue and knowledge they
suppose, in which reason shall have become all-in-all, can never take
place, that it is inconsistent with the nature of man and with all
experience, well and good--but to say that society will have attained
this high and "palmy state," that reason will have become the master-
key to all our motives, and that when arrived at its greatest power it
will cease to act at all, but will fall down dead, inert, and senseless
before the principle of population, is an opinion which one would
think few people would choose to advance or assent to, without strong
inducements for maintaining or believing it.

The fact, however, is, that Mr. Malthus found this argument entire (the
principle and the application of it) in an obscure and almost forgotten
work published about the middle of the last century, entitled _Various
Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and Providence_, by a Scotch gentleman
of the name of Wallace. The chapter in this work on the Principle
of Population, considered as a bar to all ultimate views of human
improvement, was probably written to amuse an idle hour, or read as a
paper to exercise the wits of some literary society in the Northern
capital, and no farther responsibility or importance annexed to it. Mr.
Malthus, by adopting and setting his name to it, has given it sufficient
currency and effect. It sometimes happens that one writer is the first
to discover a certain principle or lay down a given observation, and
that another makes an application of, or draws a remote or an immediate
inference from it, totally unforeseen by the first, and from which, in
all probability, he might have widely dissented. But this is not so
in the present instance. Mr. Malthus has bo