cording to the
first alarm given by the Essay. Again, the advance of civilization and
of population in consequence with the same degree of moral restraint (as
there exists in England at this present time, for instance) is a good,
and not an evil--but this does not appear from the Essay. The Essay
shews that population is not (as had been sometimes taken for granted)
an abstract and unqualified good; but it led many persons to suppose
that it was an abstract and unqualified evil, to be checked only by vice
and misery, and producing, according to its encouragement a greater
quantity of vice and misery; and this error the author has not been
at sufficient pains to do away. Another thing, in which Mr. Malthus
attempted to _clench_ Wallace's argument, was in giving to the
disproportionate power of increase in the principle of population
and the supply of food a mathematical form, or reducing it to the
arithmetical and geometrical ratios, in which we believe Mr. Malthus is
now generally admitted, even by his friends and admirers, to have been
wrong. There is evidently no inherent difference in the principle of
increase in food or population; since a grain of corn, for example, will
propagate and multiply itself much faster even than the human species.
A bushel of wheat will sow a field; that field will furnish seed for
twenty others. So that the limit to the means of subsistence is only the
want of room to raise it in, or, as Wallace expresses it, "a limited
fertility and a limited earth." Up to the point where the earth or any
given country is fully occupied or cultivated, the means of subsistence
naturally increase in a geometrical ratio, and will more than keep pace
with the natural and unrestrained progress of population; and beyond
that point, they do not go on increasing even in Mr. Malthus's
arithmetical ratio, but are stationary or nearly so. So far, then, is
this proportion from being universally and mathematically true, that
in no part of the world or state of society does it hold good. But our
theorist, by laying down this double ratio as a law of nature, gains
this advantage, that at all times it seems as if, whether in new or
old-peopled countries, in fertile or barren soils, the population was
pressing hard on the means of subsistence; and again, it seems as if the
evil increased with the progress of improvement and civilization; for if
you cast your eye at the scale which is supposed to be calculated upon
true a