The mathematical Table, placed at the front of the Essay, therefore leads to a secret suspicion or a bare-faced assumption, that we ought in mere kindness and compassion to give every sort of indirect and under-hand encouragement (to say the least) to the providential checks of vice and misery; as the sooner we arrest this formidable and paramount evil in its course, the less opportunity we leave it of doing incalculable mischief.  Accordingly, whenever there is the least talk of colonizing new countries, of extending the population, or adding to social comforts and improvements, Mr. Malthus conjures up his double ratios, and insists on the alarming results of advancing them a single step forward in the series.  By the same rule, it would be better to return at once to a state of barbarism; and to take the benefit of acorns and scuttle-fish, as a security against the luxuries and wants of civilized life.  But it is not our ingenious author’s wish to hint at or recommend any alterations in existing institutions; and he is therefore silent on that unpalatable part of the subject and natural inference from his principles.

Mr. Malthus’s “gospel is preached to the poor.”  He lectures them on economy, on morality, the regulation of their passions (which, he says, at other times, are amenable to no restraint) and on the ungracious topic, that “the laws of nature, which are the laws of God, have doomed them and their families to starve for want of a right to the smallest portion of food beyond what their labour will supply, or some charitable hand may hold out in compassion.”  This is illiberal, and it is not philosophical.  The laws of nature or of God, to which the author appeals, are no other than a limited fertility and a limited earth.  Within those bounds, the rest is regulated by the laws of man.  The division of the produce of the soil, the price of labour, the relief afforded to the poor, are matters of human arrangement:  while any charitable hand can extend relief, it is a proof that the means of subsistence are not exhausted in themselves, that “the tables are not full!” Mr. Malthus says that the laws of nature, which are the laws of God, have rendered that relief physically impossible; and yet he would abrogate the poor-laws by an act of the legislature, in order to take away that impossible relief, which the laws of God deny, and which the laws of man actually afford.  We cannot think that this view of his subject, which is prominent and dwelt on at great length and with much pertinacity, is dictated either by rigid logic or melting charity!  A labouring man is not allowed to knock down a hare or a partridge that spoils his garden:  a country-squire keeps a pack of hounds:  a lady of quality rides out with a footman behind her, on two sleek, well-fed horses.  We have not a word to say against all this as exemplifying the spirit of the English Constitution, as a part of the law of the land, or as an artful distribution of light and shade in the social picture;