to shew that it has been warmly proposed in this country ages ago, and with a fairness in regard to its application, now wholly lost sight of, and which entitles the fanatic author so far to our respect, I shall again quote Cock; and I do so for a still higher purpose than that of prolonging this part of the inquiry; and if the facts disclosed meet the eye of who any have influence in the kingdom, may they sink into their hearts! They prove not only that the pressure of population was felt more heavily when the inhabitants of the country were comparatively few, and had recently been thinned by the consequences of the grand rebellion, which Sir William Petty computes had swept off a fortieth part of the whole people'; but that emigration (a mania for which has been recently attempted to be revived) was even then strongly recommended as a necessary remedy for the sufferings and surcharge in the numbers of the people. "The nation,” says this writer, "hath lost its politick "rule," alluding to the restraint upon marriage having been removed, "and is overspread with multitudes of men, nay multitudes of poor, so that to take care for "the education of all these, you say, is wholly imprac"ticable. To this I say, that no nation, if not plagued "with war or diseases, but naturally it will grow 66 over numerous. Now the magistrate supreme ought truly to know the contents of his territory, "and be able to lay out the possible subsistence of "his subjects; as the wise grazier, to know how many "beasts will be depastured in such a ground, or how "much seed will sow an acre. These are the myste"ries of wise regiments, which few princes or magis"trates, now-a-days, if at any time, will study, but 66 1 Political Arithmetic, Tracts, p. 106. "it is their duty: but from not well considering these things, nations which might in ordinary course live "quiet, being grown over populous, whereby the due "care of inferior magistrates is obstructed, they grow "loose and lazy, then swarve into crimes, then complain of neglect of duty of magistrates, which is "evident; then interest gains head, these make par"ties, and then the state is utterly embroiled or "altered. Therefore, if the princes will, in the use "of the wisdom God hath given them to rule by, rule "well and safely, they must, once every seven years, "number their people; if the accidents (I must so "call them) of plague, war, famine, &c. have not "done it; and either by opening a fit way, publickly "known, of easing their country's burthen,. by settling "them in another county; or if all counties are full, by transporting them into another country, avoid "this danger." The former alternative, however, is now conceived to be unworthy attention by the political economists of the present day: nor were these the only expedients to avoid the recurrence of the evil, in the discovery of which he was as clear-sighted as any of them; he therefore thus expresses himself. "Now the Christian magistrate, therefore, upon the "whole, may and ought to bridle this beast in man,' (alluding to the natural passion between the sexes,) "by a discreet moderate law, to restrain the lusts of "proud, rich, lazy, idle, and so lustful young ones; "and take off the itch of mean ones by work and "labour of body, with slender diet; and holy exer"cises, divine and spiritual breathings after God in "the sense of our own weakness, will as well restrain "exorbitant affections in Christians, as the love of "philosophy or the fear of the gods, so called, could "heathens: let us not therefore eat to lust, and live "in idleness, and then we must marry or we burn 1." Such are the opinions this author published in the middle of the seventeenth century; and it is therefore perfectly clear, that the old fanatic understood what our modern philosophers call "the true principle of population" as clearly as the best of them, anticipating all their remedies for the evils it is supposed to occasion, which it fully appears were felt far more severely then than at present; but with a fairness, of which not an individual amongst them has shewn himself capable of imitating, proposing to administer those remedies, as it respected the rich as well as the poor, impartially and universally. (18) Respecting the terms now made use of in the system under consideration, which, as applied to this theory, have acquired a most unnatural importance, they have as little claim to originality as the things they are meant to express. The idea of mankind multiplying in a "geometric ratio," that is, doubling their numbers in regularly recurring intervals of equal duration, is sufficiently old, so is the expression itself3. But the geometrical progression of human increase has been generally applied to the antediluvian period of human history, or to that immediately succeeding the flood, when human life was tenfold its present duration. This longevity was always attended to in these calculations; and its diminution, after having accomplished a manifest purpose of the Deity, was taken into account as occasioning the gradual extension of the term of human duplication: considerations which must not even be recollected in the modern system of population. As to the "arithmetical ratio," as far as it means to imply, that food naturally increases slower than the multiplication of human life, if the term has not been used, which I think it has, at all events the idea is as ancient as the former one, as has been sufficiently shewn already. Nor has the circumstance of the two ratios being brought together, most unfortunately, as I think, for the argument, been without an example1. But as I suspect, it is upon these ratios that the supposed demonstration of that theory is built, which Mr. Malthus says is established in his first five pages, I shall further consider them separately, and then in connexion with each other; when I think it will be seen the whole rests on a very insecure foundation. (19) I have, in the meantime, adduced these proofs, that the principle shortly explained in this chapter, has no claims to originality, from, I repeat, a very different motive to that of settling a dispute about authorship. One of the principal excellencies in a justly celebrated work, in answer to the infidel publication of Mr. Paine, consisted in shewing that writer, that his confident. hopes of subverting the Christian religion, by having advanced something, as he supposed, essentially new on the occasion, were utterly fallacious, and that the sacred truths he opposed, had, through a succession of ages, sustained precisely similar attacks uninjured. In like manner the laws of Providence, in regard to human increase, have, long before our days, been impugned on the same grounds, by the same arguments and in the same terms, as those we are about to consider, but without any permanent 1 Philip Cantillon, Essay on Food and Population, &c. pp. 119, 120. 2 Bp. Watson, Apology for the Bible, passim. |