1831.] Mr. Sadler and the Political Economists. 529 



The latter doctrine is the more creditable of the two. It is foolish 

 and ridiculous enough, but it shews a clinging to kind, and a love of 

 the earth on which God has placed his creatures, and a zest in the 

 enjoyments of its cheerful and busy surface, and a reverential anxiety 

 about life that indicated love and gratitude. The more fictitious 

 and complicated relations into which society formed itself, however, 

 required a doctrine that would give a missionary appearance to the 

 masters of the soil, and keep off the unholy approaches of the lower 

 orders. The good of the few was to be consulted, and the desires and 

 spreading hopes of the many were to be curtailed. In our times there 

 was no want of zeal in the pursuit of some feasible apology for depre- 

 ciating the increase of the poor ; and that apology found its expounder 

 in the person of a clergyman. With considerable shew of skill, an 

 exhibition of painful research, and the air of one who had discovered 

 the philosopher's stone, Mr. Malthus revived the exploded and hardly 

 formed folly of a primitive age, announced it as his own, and became 

 the father of a new sect of philosophers. 



The substance of his theory is briefly stated. He maintains that 

 mankind has a constant tendency to increase beyond the means of 

 existence : that population increases in a geometrical ratio, doubling 

 itself every twenty-five years, while food, with all the advantages of accu- 

 mulating labour, and application of enlarged and enlarging information, 

 could not increase more rapidly than in the arithmetical ratio. As it is 

 desirable that this fundamental principle may not be mistaken, here is 

 the example of the relative proportions put into figures : 



Population 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256, &c. 

 Food 12345 67 8 9, &c. 



Thus it appears that the natural and ordained progress of mankind is 

 to starvation ; for if at the end of two centuries the proportion between 

 the number of created beings, and the amount of food that could be 

 produced for their sustentation, would be as thirty-two to one, it is 

 pretty clear that thirty-one out of the thirty-two must famish. Indeed, 

 had we not the fear of Old JBlue-and- Yellow before our eyes, we might 

 say this theory refutes itself, since if human beings were to be decimated 

 after so wholesale a fashion by the inscrutable decrees of Providence, 

 there never could arise any danger of that super- fecundity which the 

 theory propounds, seeing that the people who were to have propagated 

 at so fierce a rate must have died for want of food. But it does not ap- 

 pear that mankind has run into any such excess, for every man contrives 

 to get enough to eat either by honesty or theft, and many men get much 

 more than their share, which would be things impossible if it were true 

 that the quantity of food in the world was inadequate to the demand. 



But Mr. Malthus asserts that such would be the case, were it not that 

 Providence provides checks against the increase of our race under the 

 forms of moral restraint, and vice and misery. t( Only for something 

 the sky would fall." Grant Mr. Malthus these premises, and away he 

 goes, whistling like a man who had just sold a spavined colt for sound 

 wind and limb, and had got the money in his pocket. 



It requires very little penetration to perceive that these checks, which 

 Mr. Malthus assigns to the Creator of life, and the Giver of the means of 

 living, are as direct impeachments of the goodness and mercy of GOD as 

 they are insults to the dignity of our own nature. To add that they 

 are also an unequalled specimen of bad logic would be an anti-climax 



M.M. New Series. VOL. XI. No. 64. 3 Y 



