would be little listened to except for their tendency to pessimism. There is a sense in which meditative souls 66 'love darkness rather than the light." The moon, that is said to disorder the minds of men, makes the earth fairer with her silver than the sun with his gold. So the mysteriously potent evil gives us firm outlines and suggestive shadows possessed of almost irresistible fascination. But it is when we are tired of the day that we love the night. An era of intellectual illumination has closed for us; under the few stars left to us we ponder the work done.

It has just been said that about the beginning of the present century the Renaissance wave spent its force. It was a mighty wave, yet perhaps it had died away before then. Goethe, at any rate, combined in himself the whole philosophy of the Renaissance; Byron plucked from it the individualism it produced; Shelley etherealised it; Godwin added to it the ethics of government. For these, what have we now? The English poem is "In Memoriam;" the continental poet is Alfred de Musset; European philosophy is the cold system of Mill, the fierce despair of Schopenhauer, or the dregs of Hume's nonchalant scepticism-too nonchalant to take any name; and in economics the Malthusian theoryverily a " dismal science"-is either accepted as proved, or accepted as unrefuted, like Berkeley's theory of perception. It would have been strange if the result to economics had not been the same as that to literature and philosophy. A critical age is never a joyful age.

After the Revolution had compressed the lesson of human history into the deeds of a few months; after poets like Southey and Coleridge, and philosophers like Robert Owen and Fourier and St. Simon had seen their visions of earthly

paradise dispelled; after Godwin's "Political Justice" had thrilled the world with an enthusiasm comparable for intensity and brief duration only to electricity;-after this, men were prepared to listen to what such a man as Malthus had to say to them, with some patience, and even encouragement. The perfectibility, either of the poetical state of nature or of the highest civilisation, was declared to be an idea utterly chimerical. We were said to be hastening, not to social harmony, and wealth, and ease, but to over-population, and starvation, and misery. Blind, indeed, had we been, priding ourselves on productive powers, forgetting that only some produce, and that the possibility of production has bounds, while every being that draws the breath of life is of necessity a consumer. Certain commodities we have been rather proud of producing-children-we were to produce no longer ad libitum; we were rather to check the begetting of them. Since the days of Plato how much invention had been wasted in contriving the hatching of every egg that looked goodly! Undeterred by the failure of all such inventions, Plato's especially, Malthus proposed an artificial-or, at least, a hitherto neglected mode of regulating marriage and the whole relation of the sexes. He showed us, for a picture of society, the board spread by Nature for her favourites by a kind of predestination; but to this board some came hungry, and were turned away to die. The Mirza Bridge rocked with the load of human beings trampling across it. At the entrance sat Death, and snatched innocent babes from brothers and sisters, or gave them load of disease they sank under ere they had travelled far. The crowd could only proceed by launching the old and infirm from the other end into the yawning

river. These were the pictures men were led to form for themselves. Or they looked still further forward. The old-world traditions had framed many a legend of the last man left to die monarch of the universe. How different the truth! Mankind grows hungrier and poorer; cities swallow up the fields; the whole earth becomes one gigantic city, a cosmopole city of death. What imagination can picture or describe the writhing, swarming, groaning blaspheming mortals turned to beasts of prey, with only garbage to prey upon, gasping, gaping in the agonies of hunger and death, and falling, millions together, to blacken and rot- -a hecatomb to the sun! The words of Goncourt echo in the heart of him who is forced to believe this the deliverance of Fate: "Nature is for me an enemy; the country seems to me funereal. This green earth suggests a cemetery awaiting its dead. That grass feeds on man. Those trees grow upon and blossom from what has died. This sun which shines so brightly, imperturbable and peaceful, is but the great force which putrifies. Trees, sky, water, all appear to me merely as a lifegrant of land, where the gardener sets out a few new flowers every spring around a small basin of gold fish.'

But surely there is something in each of us that condemns this morbid plaint, and human feeling is difficult to subdue by the rules of Logic.

A picture would be nothing without shadow; life would be weary but for the presence of death. The curious thing is the fertility of Death's invention; for he has killed his man a minute for some thousands of years, yet each in a different way. Death used to be a strong arguer for socialism. He whipped off a duke as easily as a beggar; so it was thought. But

no, says Malthus. Death has no credit by his adroitness; it is you who put yourselves to pains that he may have victims. You may educate and morally purify the masses, but you are in this only making Death's morsel the daintier. It is your nature to produce children too fast; your very constitution and instincts are leading the world to ruin.

This was bold of Malthus. A pious bishop once thought to make men believe in God by causing them to throw overboard what they had understood to be common sense, and agree that there was no such thing as matter. The few who did convincedly accept his theory were by no means thereby disposed to adore God. Quite the contrary. They founded modern philosophical scepticism.

So Mr. Malthus, perhaps as truly pious a man as lived, by destroying our faith in the instincts of nature would have us led to rely the more upon Providence. I have never heard that any man has declared the reading of Malthus's books to have strengthened his belief in the mercy of God. Unless Adam and Eve were intended by the Creator to be unique patterns of a species, and unless the sexual instinct be from beginning to end identified with original sin, it is impossible to doubt that instincts. are the commands of God. Malthusian doctrine seems capable of producing nothing but scepticism. How strange to find two men so different as Godwin and Malthus coming to conclusions regarding the same problem quite opposite to those we might expect from them. Both inquired into existing evils and their cure. the sceptical Godwin found goodness everywhere in man's original nature, and proclaimed that he might yet attain perfection were he rightly to govern circumstances

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under his own control. The Rev. Mr. Malthus proclaimed that man by his nature was drifting to misery, and could only save himself by mutilating that nature. Not only the hunger of the senses, but the hunger of the heart must be denied gratification. If this were so, how much oftener should we hear the still too frequent question, Is life worth living? world has lived till now with shackles enough; it could scarcely endure more. All the innocent poetry of life must now be looked upon with caution. There is no joy born without its invisible twin brother sorrow. And gaiety of heart has only lied when it sang, "C'est l'amour qui fait la ronde et le monde." That one heart the more should be broken for this theory would be strong argument against it.

The theory, then, with which we have to deal is that population increases in geometrical proportion, subsistence in arithmetical. The survey of facts must have been very exact to produce so exact a formula. Further, we are told that but three checks upon this tendency to over-population exist. -vice, misery, and moral restraint. It would seem, this doctrine, to say that one comfort is only to be obtained by loss of another, since the subsistence necessary for all is only to be gained by the death of countless innocent babes, dearer to parents than bread by the premature decay of the flower of man -or by foregoing habitually for a season- -and that the season when it acts most powerfully-and often foregoing altogether, the strongest instinct of our nature-that, as Montaigne declares, which is to the others as sun to planets.

How should this teaching, if true, change the face of society! The peopling of the world was formerly furthered as eagerly as

the sowing of seed in the field i The smallness of population was deplored. Montesquieu, in his "Lettres Persanes," calculated that in Julius Cæsar's time there existed fifty times more people than in his time. Those were found who maintained that riches increased as population increased.

And what becomes of all the dreams of civilisation and educa- f tion and the spiritual elevation of man? To produce men in order to educate them must be wrong, to some extent at least: we must be educated not to produce men. Our glory has been that, rising above the wants of the body, we are gaining time for the wants of the soul. But, if this theory be true, future generations must bestow less and less attention on the soul, and more and more on provision for the body. We may therefore conclude that humanity has reached its highest level of prosperity.

I. The actual fecundity of the human race has never approached its possible fecundity.

The possible rate of increase in the human species is said, upon good and almost undisputed authority, to be a doubling in every ten years. Nothing like this, at any rate upon any considerable scale, has occurred. Humboldt judged, according to the rate of births and deaths, that in some parts of Mexico population might double itself in nineteen years. This is the highest instance of fecundity. In the States, and in Canada, population is supposed to double in twenty-five years. This is the next highest instance.

Again, the possible number of children to a marriage, since it has been sometimes attained, may be moderately put at twenty-five. But how much smaller the average number? In England, for in

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stance, Mr. Malthus himself calculates the average family at 4.5. In Switzerland the average is said to be 55; but it is not so. The calculation was made for mothers. Now, every married woman is not a mother. Without entering into statistics any further, we may affirm without fear of contradiction that in the case of no nation, however crowded, or however scattered, has actual fecundity approached possible fecundity. possible fecundity. What is the reason of this? Has the check been vice, misery, or moral restraint? The last it has never been, nor has it been in great part either of the others. In the healthiest countries, where food was to be had in abundance, where the parents were in the enjoyment of the full vigour of life, where every encouragement was given to fecundity by opportunity for marriage, the population fell far short of the possible number. Health, then morals, favourable situation, wealth-all combined have not produced anything like what this theory might lead us to expect. We may therefore conclude that the possible is not probable, and that reproduction of the species will never proportionately increase. But what does this limitation of actual fecundity point to in no way related, it would appear, to the ratio of vice cr misery? It points to some hidden check far more powerful than any moral; one that exists, and has existed, in all places and at all times, in the beginning of the world as now, when the great ambition of nations and families and mothers was to beget sons, when there was neither vice nor misery nor moral restraint to curb fecundity.

II. The natural rate of increase of man's food is out of all proportion greater than man's own rate of increase.

One potato produces twenty in the course of a single year. We all know the story of the woman who was presented with a potato, and promised land for so many years wherein to cultivate its produce. She quickly gained a small estate. Godwin calculated, perhaps extravagantly, that if every individual in a community devoted half an hour in the day to cultivation of the earth, that community would be supplied with an abundance of food. There can be no doubt, at any rate, that a comparatively small portion of the day would be spent for mankind in work if each individual were to continue producing, whether for direct consumption or for exchange. A man is at present easily able to produce food to sustain himself and all dependent on him, and also food to exchange for other necessaries, and even luxuries. This, of course, when those disabled by disease or age are excluded from consideration. "Some seed brought forth an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold." Malthus himself admits that "the rate at which food could be made to increase would far exceed what was necessary to keep pace with the most rapid increase of population which the laws of nature in relation to human kind permit."

In considering nature, we cannot fail to find cause for wonder in the prodigious power of increase in plants. What is used in cultivation is often less than what is wasted. In the growth of wheat, for example, a vast amount of seed is lost. When it is dibbled, instead of being sown in the common way, two pecks of seed wheat yield as large a crop as two bushels; and thus they quadruple the proportion of the return to the quantity of seed put into the ground. There is on record an experiment in which,

by the separation of roots obtained from a single grain of wheat and their transference to a favourable soil, a return was obtained of over 500,000 grains. Humboldt entered into such questions with laborious minuteness, and made it appear that in France, the north of Germany, Poland, and Sweden, one grain produces from five to six grains; the most fertile parts of France, indeed, produce fifteen for one; Picardy produces nine for one; Hungary, Croatia, and Sclavonia yield from eight to ten grains for one; in La Plata twelve are produced for one; near Buenos Ayres, sixteen for one; in the northern parts of Mexico, seventeen; in the equinoctial regions of Mexico, twenty-four.

These facts show, first, that in the majority of countries, at any rate, the production of food does not nearly approach its possible rate of production; and, secondly, that, even in countries below the average, wheat increases in at least a geometric ratio. It has been calculated that if the rate of production in one single acre were six grains for one, and if soil of the same kind could be prepared fast enough, the whole earthy portion of the globe would be covered in fourteen years. Even after food necessary for the present population of the globe is deducted from this, there remains by far the greater portion.

That such a quantity is not produced is owing to one of these two facts-either that mankind are not willing to exert themselves to the necessary cultivation, or that the ground cannot be prepared fast enough. That the first is the cause, and not the second, is shown by the number of idle labourers in every town. "Look at the listless loiterers about an Irish town," writes Sir Arthur Helps; "you would 'you would naturally say to yourself, Surely this people have done all that there can be for them to do.' You walk

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out of the town, and find the adjacent fields as listless-looking and neglected as the men themselves. Think what a want there must be of masters of labour, that those hands and these weeds are not in closer contact!"

If, then, the reproduction of man be by nature in geometric ratio, his food, by nature, increases in a geometric ratio still more rapid.

It may be said that all of the earthy portion of the globe could never be brought under cultivation, on account of unsuitability in various ways. It may be said that the best soils are first laid under contribution, afterwards the inferior. It may be said that the Malthusian theory points incessantly to the truth that, however fertile man's brain be, the earth has a limit to its fertility.

As to the first statement, we need only allow that, in present circumstances, much of the entire surface of the globe is not practicable for cultivation; but we have no absolute proof that any single spot will for ever remain devoid of utility to the farmer.

The second statement admits of no contradiction, so far as it points. to the principle that guides man in selecting soils; but there is this to be borne in mind, that perhaps the richest soils have not yet been discovered; and, at any rate, many rich soils are yet uncultivated.

The third statement, we allow, must always be kept in view as absolutely true. But the scientific achievements of civilisation have year by year lightened the toil of man that is, have made the earth yield more per unit of labour; and to what invention still may do towards the fertilisation of the soil, we have no right to prescribe limits. The great result of science is insight into the thrift of Nature. As we grow more scientific we learn to copy nature, wast