lier and later a good deal of his _Saturday_
work, discussed a famous passage of Indian History in the _Story of
Nuncomar_ (1885), and wrote not a little criticism--political,
theological, and other--of a somewhat negative but admirably
clear-headed kind--the chief expression of which is _Liberty, Equality,
and Fraternity_ (1873).

Even less room can be given to the Political Economists than to the
"Jurisprudents," partly because the best writers of them, such as J. S.
Mill, have figured or will figure elsewhere; partly because, from
Ricardo to Jevons and Cliffe Leslie, though they have often displayed no
mean literary power, the necessities or supposed necessities of their
subject have usually kept their books further away from _belles lettres_
than the documents of any other department of what is widely called
philosophy. But a paragraph must at least be given to one of the
earliest and one of the most famous of them.

If a prize were offered to the best-abused person in English literature,
few competitors would have much chance with Thomas Robert Malthus,
author of the _Essay on the Principles of Population_ (1798), and of
divers works on Political Economy, of which he was Professor in the East
India College at Haileybury. To judge from the references which for many
years used to be, and to some extent still are, made to Malthus, still
more from the way in which the term "Malthusian" is still often used, he
might be supposed to have been a reprobate anarchist and revolutionary,
who had before his eyes neither the fear of God, nor the love of man,
nor the respect of morality and public opinion. As a matter of fact
Malthus was a most respectable and amiable clergyman, orthodox I believe
in religion, Tory I believe in politics, who incurred odium chiefly by
his inculcation of the most disagreeable lessons of the new and
cheerless science which he professed. Born on 24th February 1766 near
Dorking, of a very respectable family, he went to Cambridge, took
honours, a fellowship at his college (Jesus), and orders, obtained a
benefice, and spent most of the last thirty years of his life in the
Professorship above referred to, dying in 1854. His _Essay_ was one of
the numerous counter-blasts to Godwin's anarchic perfectibilism, and its
general drift was simply to show that the increase of population, unless
counter-acted by individual and moral self-restraint, must reduce
humanity to misery. The special formula that "populat