446 VARIETIES OF MANKIND. 



with the power : climate, soil, situation, may be unfavourable \ 

 one vegetable, one animal, stands in the way of another ; even 

 the impediments to the increase of some, act through them as 

 impediments to others. The incessant tendency of the power 

 of multiplication to exert itself, seizes every opportunity the mo- 

 ment it is presented, and thus, though every living object has 

 a fixed term of existence and may be carried off much earlier 

 by innumerable circumstances, all nature constantly teems with 

 life.* The slow increase of mankind could not interfere with 

 this apparent object of nature ; the deficiency of our race must 

 have invariably been fully compensated by the opportunities 

 which it afforded for the multiplication of other existences : for 

 that man alone was not designed to enjoy the earth, is shown 

 by the vast tracts of land still but thinly peopled. The infinitely 

 rare opportunities afforded for the maturity of the intellectual 

 and moral powers born with every human being, may afford still 

 greater surprise than the extent of country unoccupied by man. 

 After all, the great length of life in the early periods of the 

 world must have contributed so much to man's multiplication 

 that, if food was sufficiently supplied, he might very speedily 

 have covered the earth. 



* From this physiological fact it follows that if a species is not kept down by 

 disease or violence, or, as should be the case with mankind, by good feeling, to such 

 numbers as can find support, the excess must regularly perish. To vegetables 

 this can be no cruelty. As all the brute creation are preyed upon, their numbers 

 may be always sufficiently thinned without starvation. Violent deaths are too 

 insignificant to operate much in restraining the numbers of mankind, and 

 terrible as is the havoc of disease, the rapid increase of nations, who can com- 

 mand any extent of land they require for food, proves it not to be the great 

 restrainer of population. Starvation, however, is not necessary to limit onr 

 numbers, because it is the imperious duty of every man to abstain from getting 

 children unless he has property or work sufficient to feed them when they 

 come into the world. 



These palpable facts have been luminously stated by a celebrated member 

 of my own college at Cambridge, and how any one can deny them or pre- 

 tend there is impiety in Mr. Malthus's Essay on Population, I cannot com- 

 prehend. 



