326 Mr. William Pitt on the Production and 



CHAPTER X. 



A full Community^ how far desirable ; Instruction for the louder Classes proposed. 



But as every earthly effort and production has its limit, a period must at length, 

 arrive when the produce and, consequently, the population of a particular district, 

 or country, can, as depending upon itself, go no further, and of course the numbers 

 that the whole earth is capable of supporting, has its bounds. Dr. Darwin, in 

 Zoonomia, Part II. page 670, has expressed an idea, that " by the future im- 

 provements of human reason, such governments may possibly hereafter be estab- 

 lished, as may an hundredfold increase the numbers of mankind, and a thousand 

 times their happiness." This idea is, I fear, visionary, and a part of the mistaken- 

 system of human perfectability, inconsistent with the condition of human society, 

 and the world it is placed in. 



A great population is only desirable so far as the energies and industry of its 

 particular and individual members may be wanted, or can be employed for the 

 general good, and to promote the general happiness. Mr. Malthus says, "national 

 prosperity and an improved agriculture are the causes, and not the effects, of an 

 increased population ; and as the population of a country may be doubled in less 

 time than is required to double its produce of human food, the population of a 

 country has always a strong tendency to outrun its means of subsistence, which it 

 will inevitably do if not powerfully restrained by moral or physical causes, in which 

 •case it must unavoidably meet those dreadful physical checks God and nature have 

 appointed — famine and its consequences. All that government or industry can do 

 is, to make the necessary checks to population operate more equably, and so as to 

 produce the least evil; to remove them, is in the nature of things impossible." 



And farther, " the checks to population are moral restraint, vice, and misery. 

 No act of government, emigration, benevolence, or industry, can prevent tlie action 

 of these checks, in some form or other ; they must be submitted to as the inevitable 

 Jaw of nature : the only enquiry that remains is, how they may operate with the least 

 possible prejudice to the virtue and happiness of society. And if from the laws of 

 nature we can go but a certain length in proportioning the food to the population, 

 we mu.st then try to proportion the population to the food; and with this view the 

 necessary duty of moral restraint must be impressed on mankind." 



