450 APPENDIX. 



checks which already prevail.* These remarks are cor- 

 rectly true, and are truisms exactly of the same kind as the 

 assertion that man cannot live without food. For, undoubt- 

 edly as long as this continues to be a law of his nature, what 

 are here called the natural checks cannot possibly fail of 

 being etl'ectual. Besides the curious truism that these as- 

 sertions involve, they proceed upon the very strange sup- 

 position, that the nUinuite object of my work is to check 

 population ; as if any thing coul'd be more desirable than 

 the most rapid increase of population, unaccompanied by 

 vice and misery. But of course my ultimate object is to 

 diminish vice and misery, and any checks to population, 

 w hich may have been suggested, are solely as means to ac- 

 complish this end. To a rational being, the prudential 

 check to population ought to be considered as equally na- 

 tural with the check from poverty and premature mortality 

 which these gentlemen seem to think so entirely sufficient 

 and satisfactory ; and it wiH readily occur to the intelligent 

 reader, that one class of checks may be substituted for an- 

 other, not only without essentially diminishing the popula- 

 tion of a country, but even under a constantly progressive 

 increase of it.t 



On the possibility of increasing very considerably the ef- 

 fective population of this country, I have expressed myself 

 in some parts of my work more sanguinely, perhaps, than 

 experience would warrant. 1 have said, that in the course 

 of some centuries it might contain two or three times as 

 many inhabitants as at present, and yet every person be both 

 better fed and better clothed.J And in the comparison of 

 the increase of population and food at the beginning of the 

 Essay, that the argument might not seem to depend upon a 

 difference of opinion respecting facts, 1 have allowed the 

 produce of the earth to be unlimited, which is certainly 

 going too far. It is not a little curious therefore, that it 

 should still continue to be urged against me as an argument, 



* I should like nnii;h to know what description of facts this gentleman had 

 in view, when he made this observation. If I could have found one of the kind, 

 which seems here to be alluded to, it would indeed have been trul^' original. 



+ Both Norway and Switzerland, where the preventive check prevails the 

 most, are increasing with some rapidity in their population ; and in proportion 

 to their means of subsistence, they can produce more males of a military age 

 than any other country of Europe. 



% Page 512, 4to. edit. p. '293, vol. ii. of this edit. 



