tion; or, rather, may the nobler principles and better fortunes of our country prevail.

(24) A review of the story of Greece, however transient, and for whatever purpose, cannot fail to awaken in our minds a train of conflicting feelings, which it is as vain an attempt to reconcile as to describe: a land of unrivalled liberty, and courage and genius, as it respects its citizens; but, alas! these were the few; to the rest it was a land of slavery, and suffering, and degradation, equally unexampled. It was to a fundamental error respecting the great principle of population, very similar to the one I am rebutting, that I fearlessly attribute the misfortunes and ruin of the Greeks. Had they been anxious to increase the number of their citizens, rather than of slaves, their prosperity would have been enlarged beyond all conception; while the liberation of the latter would have rendered that prosperity perpetual, by forming a barrier against the tyranny of the few who, whether oligarchs or democrats, were the oppressors and the parricides of Greece. In a word, had they, in a tem poral sense, known, in their day, the things that made for their peace, and consequently chained up the Apollyon of the species, the check we have been considering, Greece might, probably, at this moment, have been the existing example of whatever can elevate the intellect or ennoble the character of man, instead of being the melancholy proof of the mutability of all human distinctions.

(25) In the mean time, that a country in which Nature mourns the desertion and desolation of some of her fairest scenes, amidst devastations which scores of centuries have not repaired and repeopled, should be appealed to, in proof that human beings rapidly

outgrow the prolificness of the mother earth, unless their natural increase be constantly repressed, is indeed surprising, and may serve to shew us the nature of a system which can require or admit such demonstrations. Few, on the other hand, I think, can retire from the contemplation of Greece, without very different impressions; such, indeed, were prompted by some of the very scenes we have been describing, nearly two thousand years ago, then in ruins, and in ruins still. "Ex Asia rediens," writes Sulpicius to Cicero, "cum ab Ægina Megaram versus navigarem, "cœpi regiones circumcirca prospicere. Post me erat Ægina, ante Megara, dextra Piraeus, sinistra Corin"thus: quæ oppida quodam tempore florentissima fue"runt, nunc prostrata et diruta ante oculos jacent.

66

Cœpi egomet mecum sic cogitare: Hem, nos homun“culi indignamur, si quis nostrûm interiit, aut occisus "est, quorum vita brevior esse debet, cum uno loco tot

oppidum cadavera projecta jaceant '!" Little thought the moralizing Roman, that the imperial city itself would have to swell the catalogue of those desolations; that her high places would be covered with a heap of ruins, and all around become a solitary and pestiferous desert; that so vast would be the decrease of his countrymen, that his national name would become totally lost, and the very language he used silent for ever. Let the professors of the modern philosophy, who, while preaching and prophesying against population, and strangely pointing at the ruins of ancient empires and magnificent cities, which have been destroyed, whose names yet live in history, (to say nothing of so many others, "the memorial of which has perished" with them,) tell us, before we submit to their hazardous dogmas, whether "destructions are

Cicero, Epist. ad Famil., tom. i., lib. iv., c. v., pp. 193, 194.

come to a perpetual end?" And if they cannot so assure us, whether, instead of endeavouring to hinder the natural increase of our countrymen, the patriot's fears and endeavours ought not to take another direction, lest, following the same fate, the mightier capital of his own country should, in turn, bow its lofty head, and sink into the dust, and the posterity of Britons also be "minished from among the children of men!"

213

CHAPTER XII.

OF THE WARS AND IRRUPTIONS ON THE ROMAN EMPIRE. THEIR CAUSES IRRECONCILEABLE WITH THE THEORY

OF HUMAN SUPERFECUNDITY.

(1) BUT the grand historical proof of the supposed superfecundity of mankind,-demanding, in ancient times, that great master check to numbers, always deemed redundant, war,-is that series of irruptions from the north of Europe, so formidable in themselves, and so important in their consequences, which are now simply resolved into a necessary and continued struggle for room and food.

(2) As in the work under more particular consideration, together with many others of the same class, the terms "redundant numbers,"-"superfluous population," and other equivalent expressions, are perpetually repeated', it had been well, if those who use them so freely, had, agreeably to the advice of Lord Bacon, first defined them. All population, every number of human beings, even down to a unit, are, without corresponding exertion, (since the golden age, at least,) strictly redundant; as men cannot now, even in the imagination of poets, subsist upon the spontaneous productions of the earth; and the fewer they are, as has been already shewn, the more redundant they become to each other. Is the question, then, as to numbers being redundant, or otherwise, to be determined by mankind in their savage or civilized state? Or, in other words, is "the proper level of food," so much talked

1

1 Malthus, Essay on Population, pp. 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 78, 82, &c. &c.

about, accommodated to habits of inveterate sloth, to indicate the number of human beings which ought to exist; or is that number to be deemed superfluous or otherwise, by the abundance of Nature, as developed by human industry, which, meanwhile, still more elevates the level of character," than that "of food?" I am fully aware, that the barbarian would resist the latter mode of decision, though, in so doing, he would, as certainly, reject the sole means of his civilization; he being, of all mankind, the first to discover, and the most prompt to rectify, the natural superfecundity of his species. In the immeasurable solitudes of prolific nature, the savage sees the principle of population far more clearly than it is now supposed to have been discovered by the sages of Greece', in the crowded porticos of Athens. In opposing that principle, therefore, the farther I go back into antiquity, and the more barbarous the region referred to, the less clear will my argument appear; but it will never become so obscure, as not to shew, most triumphantly, that, in no period or place of the world, has the great check of the species, war, been "a struggle for room or food."

(3) On better consideration, however, I must retract the assertion, as it respects the latter necessary of human life, food; possibly there may have been struggles of that nature, but still under circumstances which further confirm the principle for which I am contending throughout: efforts of sloth to obtain that by violence which the bounty of Nature would have bestowed in infinitely greater abundance, on the sole condition of peaceful industry; these have been, proportionably, the most frequent, as well as fatal, where mankind have been the fewest, and, consequently, distributed over the largest space. Indeed, as so much Malthus, Essay on Population, p. 163.