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ART. VII.—The Law of Population: a Treatise in six books, in disproof of the superfecundity of Human Beings, and developing the real principle of their increase. By Michael Thomas Sadler, M.P. 2 vols. 8vo. London: Murray. 1830.

AN Irish barrister, as famous for his volubility as for his devotions to Bacchus, once addressed the court in banco on a motion for a new trial. After a most impressive discourse, and when, having furled his sails, he was gliding into the smooth waters of the peroration; the attorney, who had employed him, ventured tremblingly to whisper in his ear, that he was, all the while, speaking in behalf of the wrong client. With the most undisturbed countenance, the brazen lawyer turned to the bench and said-" My lords, having stated to your lordships, as forcibly as my poor abilities could do it, the case of the opposite party, you will now be pleased to hear the triumphant answer which my client can give to it." Could we count upon the same docility in Mr. Sadler, as the attorney was sure of finding in the lawyer, how readily should we act the prompter to this self-deceived man; for, certainly, never in the annals of controversy did there exist a more striking case of an advocate betraying the cause he was engaged to support, than that which is now before us. Another tome, we hear, is to be published as a continuation of the present volumes. The best wish we can offer Mr. Sadler is, that he may fully avail himself of the intermediate opportunity, the locus pœnitentiæ, and that he may produce in this forthcoming volume, something in the character of a codicil, to repeal all the follies of its predecessors.

In endeavouring to show how strictly justified we are in entertaining the feelings which have dictated this wish, we must premise that it is not our intention to enter into the arithmetical details, by which Mr. Sadler seeks to sustain what he calls his own theory of population; and the reason of our abstinence is, that all those details, simply considered,—abstracted from the mass of sophisms, with which this writer has encumbered them,-most powerfully contribute to confirm the positions-we had better say, the demonstrations of Mr. Malthus. The whole work of two volumes is one colossal error; it is false in statement, false in reasoning, and cruelly iniquitous in accusation. The simplicity of Mr. Sadler's mind can only save him from the guilt of being the author of as mischievous a book as ever degraded the names of a Machiavel, a Hume, a Voltaire, or a Gibbon.

Every body knows what Mr. Malthus's fundamental principle is. He says that, in the human species there is a tendency to re-production in such a ratio as will give a vast number more of consumers of food, than food can be found, according to its inferior power of increase, to supply. That is to say, human fecundity tends to procced in a geometrical ratio, whilst food augments only in an arithmetical ratio. Mr. Sadler has "enunciated" (his favo

rite word, and justly so, for it is exactly characteristic of his pompous emphasis), a series of chapters on this doctrine, which, for absurdity, we should challenge the history of literature to outdo ; for every word of it is founded upon the notion that Mr. Malthus wants to prove that this geometrical progression has absolutely taken place, and is now taking place! Mr. Malthus says the contrary; he says it cannot occur to the full extent, because the want of food will not allow it; but, in consequence of the eternal pressure of more quickly-multiplying population against more slowly-increasing food, a class of human beings always stands at the extreme limit of supply, enduring all the miseries of a condition that admits of only a precarious escape from the effects of famine. Again, Mr. Malthus has said, population does not exist in the multitudes that, in a natural state of circumstances, would be the case,-inasmuch as wars, pestilence, disease, and such casualties, remove, prematurely, a vast proportion of human beings from the earth, preventing, of course, the practical existence of the geometrical produce. Will it be believed that Mr. Sadler is so incapable of apprehending what Mr. Malthus has thus laid down, as that he charges that reverend gentleman with the desire of absolutely encouraging those positive and dreadful checks, in order to keep down the accumulation of human beings? Can any thing be more abominable than this perversion? Before quitting this subject of food and population, we must present the reader with a specimen of Mr. Sadler's puerility.

In every view of the question, and most of all, in that taken by the author whose principle I am opposing, I am, therefore, fully warranted in treating these ratios as an abstract question; and, so regarded, there probably never was an assertion hazarded upon any subject that has engaged the attention of man from the creation to the present hour, so palpably at variance with truth as that which represents the natural rate of increase in human sustenance to be slower than that of the increase of human beings; to say nothing of the astonishingly great, and continually increasing, disparity contended for by the theory so maintained. It seems absolutely necessary to recall the advocates of such notions to the evidence of their own senses. Which of those vegetable or animal substances, whose plain destiny it is to administer to the necessities of man, is it that multiplies in a slower ratio than himself? Or, rather, which is it, on the contrary, that does not increase much faster? many of them, indeed, at a rate which speedily baffles all the powers of calculation to express. In what situation can the human being be placed, whatever may be his habits, who does not see his food multiplying around him with a rapidity truly astonishing, whether he avail himself of the gifts of nature, or, through ignorance or oppression, expire amidst their profusion? Suppose him placed in the lowest condition of life, and existing as an animal of prey; that prey is almost infinitely more prolific than himself. To take but one example of the fact from each of the elements that furnishes it; a single pair of one of the species of wild edible quadrupeds, a celebrated historian of nature observes, would, in four years, multiply into a million and a half: the increase of a flock of wild pigeons, in the same space of time, would be

almost inconceivable. Wilson, the American ornithologist, calculated the numbers of a single flight of them, which he observed, at about two thousand millions; an almost incredible fact, were it not corroborated by similar accounts. In the earlier history of the colonies, they were called the victuallers of the plantations, and were well deserving of the name. As to the finny tribes, who has ever compared human prolificness with theirs, or ventured to suppose that the subsistence they might yield to man is exhaustible? Would not these double in twenty-five years? If the experiments of the great Lewenhoek were true, and I never heard of their being doubted, Bradley has shewn, that, according to a very moderate calculation, a single cod would increase in ten years into about a thousand myriads of myriads, a sum which we may more easily write than apprehend; and that "a herring, if suffered to multiply unmolested and undiminished for twenty years, would shew a progeny greater in bulk than the globe itself."'-pp. 68-70.

Now it is perfectly evident that Mr. Sadler, in the first place, is utterly ignorant of the conditions of increase in the vegetable, as well as the animal, kingdom. When he talks of the fecundity of vegetables, he only opens one eye, as it were, and hence he sees but one side of the question. Let us suppose an acre of wheat produces the seed for sowing six acres next year. Those six acres, the crop being untouched, will yield the seed for sowing thirtysix acres the following year. This is all very plain so far; but there is a trifling draw-back upon this fecundity which merits a little consideration, namely, the extent of the soil you have to sow in. If a man have the seed of a thousand acres of tillage, what good is the possession with reference to fecundity, if he have, at the same time, only ten acres to till? Thus, then, we see how little this elderly child understands, that it is not according to the inherent capability of vegetables to increase, that we are to judge of their possible augmentation; but it is according to the practicability of adding to our stock of cultivable land. This practicability can never go farther than the addition of portion to portion; there is no power of reproduction in land; it has no faculty of regeneration; we cannot add a perch to that amount that is already in existence, and therefore we can contemplate as a natural and probable event, the occupation by crops of the entire quantity. Let us imagine the moment when every foot of the earth, being reduced to cultivation, produces just enough and no more to sustain the number of the population. Food then, at least, is at a stand still; but population, at that very instant, is in process of yielding a fresh batch of consumers equal to a third, if not more, of its own numbers. This is the geometry and the arithmetic which Mr. Sadler has yet to study. But touching the wild animals,' and the 'finny tribes,' and the 'edible quadrupeds,'-after having yielded to the sovereign impulse of laughter for a considerable time, we are at liberty to take a serious view of Mr. Sadler's proposition. We grant the prolificness of the tribes,-quadrupeds and all. We grant

that, notwithstanding any reasonable consumption of these animals, there would still be created plenty of them both in air, on earth, and in sea. But how is it, let us be told, that with all this abundance of food,-this constantly multiplying fund of edible life,' it does happen occasionally that famine strikes her victimsaye, too, in places where this superfluity is most abundant? The sea was never more crowded, since the creation, with animated beings, than was the Atlantic Ocean that beat the shores of Ireland during the dreadful famine of some few years back. We will venture to say, that birds were never more plentiful in that country than during the same season of horrible dearth. We remember well the state of the Lancashire manufacturing population in the summer of 1826, when many certainly died from want of food, and thousands more would have undoubtedly perished but for the charitable assistance of their more fortunate fellow countrymen. It is idle to enter into the causes of this state of things, we can only look at the fact, that men, when they can no longer be supplied with food, the produce of the earth, are taught, by the Sadlers of our day, to expect a resource in the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea. Whoever had the wildness to speak such mockery to either the English or the Irish, during their privation? Not even Mr. Sadler could be capable of such an act of phrenzy; and why? because the proposition of which, in the mist of his confused mind, he does not see the bearing, would then be reduced to a practical exposure of its absurdity. To the poor operative, with his five children, eking out an existence on some few ounces per head of eleemosynary meal a day, it would truly be a consoling scheme that would teach him to add a couple of roast pigeons, or a salmontrout, or haply a brace of partridges, to his scanty fare. But in God's name how is he to get them? To obtain the fish he must build a boat, and manufacture a net; and to get the pigeons or the edible quadrupeds, he must purchase him a gun, and be a good long shot to boot. This is Mr. Sadler's proposition. The unhappy gentleman thinks that the facility of our being fed, depends on the quantity of food, and not on our means of obtaining it. To shew again how extremely absurd in practice this proposition would be, we need only refer to those countries where natural food,--food derived from the soil,-is so scanty as to call on the inhabitants for the exercise of their utmost ingenuity, not to speak of their unwearied diligence, in devising expedients to appease their wants. Wild birds and the 'finny tribes' are surely open to them, and yet they never dream of such, but confine themselves to those substitutes that are most easily to be procured. In Siberia, whose shores and rivers swarm with fish, and where wild 'edible quadrupeds,' and game of the very best quality, are literally in superfluity, the Yakuts feed, during the greater part of the winter, on the inner bark of the yellow pine tree, scraped fine, and mixed with beef or horses' fat. Even supposing it possible that food in abundance

could be obtained ad infinitum, the consequence would be that every man should be a caterer for himself, that his employment should wholly consist in obtaining food; a state of things than which none could be more irreconcileable with the wisdom and goodness of the Almighty.

One of the saddest of the sad blunders into which his ignorance has led Mr. Sadler to grope, is the physiological part of his theory. He begins by saying that the numbers of mankind, and the measure of the means of subsistence, have a very strict and constant relation to each other.' Nothing is more clear: men can exist but a short time without food, so that Mr. Sadler is very safe in making his proposition; population must come down to the level of food,-that there is no denying; but when he lays it down as an universal principle, that population precedes production, we are very solicitous to find out by what reasoning he supports his scheme. It is not Sur purpose, by any direct argument, to exhibit the falsehood of that scheme; it will fully answer all our objects just to exhibit the manner in which Mr. Sadler maintains it, and a word more in its reprobation will scarcely be necessary. We quote the following notable piece of logic :—

But, in arguing on the precedence of production to population, Mr. Malthus descends into a minute examination of the subject, tracing it, as it should seem, to its source, in doing which I shall attempt to imitate him. In replying, in a subsequent edition, to one of his opponents, he says, "In the course of the next twenty-four hours, there will be about eight hundred children born in England and Wales; and I will venture to say that there are not ten out of the whole number that come at the expected time, for whom clothes are not prepared before their birth." We may venture, however, to contradict this. As he seems to have made a minute calculation on the occasion, for what purpose is not very apparent, he ought to have remembered that, in his eight hundred daily births, there would be, according to the calculations of an author he often quotes, founded on actual observations, about twenty-four twins and trigemini. According to other authorities, there would be rather fewer. A large proportion of these births being in the lower classes of society, we may be sure that most of the supernumeraries, at all events, would not have had clothes prepared for them before their birth. But, amidst all this affected precision, it is somewhat astonishing, that it was not perceived that the statement had nothing whatever to do with the matter at issue, which, as applied to the instance adduced, is simply this :-Whether the existence and consequent expectation of these eight hundred unborn children, caused their clothes to be prepared, or their prepared clothes caused the existence of the eight hundred children? If the latter be the fact, which this argument implies, if it imply any thing, then I hope those resolutely self-denying and patriotic old maidens, who are eulogized so highly by the same author, and from whose merits I mean not to detract, will beware how, like so many Dorcases, they continue to make garments for the poor, especially for poor infants, with which employments many of them are atoning for their conduct, and encouraging in others, the fulfilment of the