CHAPTER IV. 



THE POSSIBILITIES OF AGRICULTURE (continued). 



The doctrine of Malthus Progress in wheat-growing East 

 Flanders Channel Islands Potato crops, past and present 

 Irrigation Major Hallet's 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 exercised for three 

 consecutive generations. It appeared at the 

 right time, like all books which have had any 

 influence 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 perme- 

 ating the minds of the poor, while the richer 

 classes had become tired of their amateur ex- 

 cursions 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 



