CHAPTER IV. 



THE POSSIBILITIES OF AGRICULTURE (continued). 



The doctrine of Malthus Progress in wheat-growing East Flanders 

 Jersey Potato crops, past and present Irrigation Major Hallet'i 

 experiments Planted wheat. 



FEW books have exercised so pernicious an influence 

 upon the general development of economic thought as 

 Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population exer- 

 cised for three consecutive generations. It appeared at 

 the right time, like all books which have had any in- 

 fluence at all, and it summed up ideas already current 

 in the minds of the wealth-possessing minority. It was 

 precisely when the ideas of equality and liberty, 

 awakened by the French and American revolutions, 

 were still permeating the minds of the poor, while the 

 richer classes had become tired of their amateur excur- 

 sions into the same domains, that Malthus came to 

 assert, in reply to Godwin, that no equality is possible ; 

 that the poverty of the many is not due to institutions, 

 but is a natural law. Population, he wrote, grows too 

 rapidly and the new-comers find no room at the feast of 

 nature ; and that law cannot be altered by any change 

 of institutions. He thus gave to the rich a kind of 

 scientific argument against the ideas of equality ; and 

 we know that though all dominion is based upon 

 force, force itself begins to totter as soon as it is no 

 longer supported by a firm belief in its own rightf ulness. 



(83) 



