nequal powers must be kept equal.

This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from
the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and
must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.

Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the
seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. She has
been comparatively sparing in the room and the nourishment necessary to
rear them. The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with
ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds
in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious all
pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds.
The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great
restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason,
escape from it. Among plants and animals its effects are waste of seed,
sickness, and premature death. Among mankind, misery and vice. The
former, misery, is an absolutely necessary consequence of it. Vice is a
highly probable consequence, and we therefore see it abundantly
prevail, but it ought not, perhaps, to be called an absolutely
necessary consequence. The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation
to evil.

This natural inequality of the two powers of population and of
production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must
constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to
me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society.
All other arguments are of slight and subordinate consideration in
comparison of this. I see no way by which man can escape from the
weight of this law which pervades all animated nature. No fancied
equality, no agrarian regulations in their utmost extent, could remove
the pressure of it even for a single century. And it appears,
therefore, to be decisive against the possible existence of a society,
all the members of which should live in ease, happiness, and
comparative leisure; and feel no anxiety about providing the means of
subsistence for themselves and families.

Consequently, if the premises are just, the argument is conclusive
against the perfectibility of the mass of mankind.

I have thus sketched the general outline of the argument, but I will
examine it more particularly, and I think it will be found that
experience, the true source and foundation of all knowledge, in