530 The Population Question. [MAY, 



from which we will spare the Political Economists. They pre-suppose 

 that GOD had miscalculated the power and operation of the machinery 

 constructed out of His own bidding, since they assume that He has 

 found it necessary to repress its springs and retard its motions ; that He 

 made a world which so fructified in its own vile luxuriance, as to outgrow 

 the Original Design, deform the pure symmetry of its plan, and render im- 

 perative some mighty scourges to cure those excrescences, to the evils of 

 which it was exposed from its formation. In this, either the wisdom 

 or the goodness of the Omnipotent is staked. The Malthusians cannot 

 escape from the force of this impiety. They have committed it, and they 

 continue to commit it in their professors' chairs, in their dark lectures in 

 Old Blue-and- Yellow, and in every hole and corner where they can 

 thrust their sallow, lank faces, and unpronounceable heads. 



The preventive check that proposes to turn the natural passions into 

 other and nameless channels that would extinguish marriage amongst 

 the poorer classes (the wretches, to whom, of all this world, the sweets 

 of home are sweetest, and its least enjoyments boundless !) and that 

 would stop the current of nature in its onward flow, by means diaboli- 

 cal, pestilential, and unholy forms that feature in the system, which, 

 although but subsequently introduced by its founder, has occupied more 

 than any other the attention of the public, and the wonder and horror of 

 all men whose sympathies are not blunted by the vices of the imagina- 

 tion, or the practice of cruelties to their fellow creature. 



This system, then, with its many charms for people in high places 

 for with all its absurdities, blasphemies, and inconsistencies, it permitted 

 the rich to propagate ad libitum, and it is even said that Mr. Malthus 

 himself is the father of seventeen children, Heaven prosper them to him 

 in the solitude of his latter days ! this system became fashionable. In 

 the wake of its father the father of the seventeen children followed 

 all such men as Mill, McCullogh, Senior, and fifty fellows who wrote 

 pamphlets that they could not understand, and that nobody else would 

 read. But as indescribable pamphlets, with the name of a floating theory 

 inscribed on their title-pages, help to spread the reputation of such 

 theory, whether said pamphlets be worth half-a- crown or not worth a 

 rush ; it happened, of course, that the pamphlets, and Old Blue-and- 

 Yellow to boot, stamped the name of Malthus upon the minds of the 

 million. And he might have remained there until now, had it not 

 been for a work in two volumes entitled the " Law of Population/' 

 written by Mr. Sadler, which made its appearance some time in the 

 course of last year. 



The gigantic grasp, profound reasoning, diversified research, and, 

 above all, the humane philosophy it inculcated, were one and all 

 wondrous. Each separate part was a perfect treatise upon a Malthu- 

 sian fallacy, an incentive to implicit reliance upon the bounties of 

 Providence, and a chapter in the sublimities of creation. The style was 

 glowing and enthusiastic ; the proofs, figures that could not be con- 

 troverted ; the deductions as clear as sparkling water in the sunbow. 

 The appearance of this work was naturally met with jealousy, and pur- 

 sued with virulence. Wherever the club-foot had pressed the black soil 

 of a vindictive heart, there were the simple yet laborious doctrines of the 

 Law of Population received with dismay and hate. But its enemies 

 were in the condition of men who fight in a bad cause, and who feel it, 

 and whose conscience, before the struggle is over, forces them to quail 



