During the next period of doubling, where will the food be found to satisfy the importunate demands of the increasing numbers?  Where is the fresh land to turn up?  Where is the dressing necessary to improve that which is already in cultivation?  There is no person with the smallest knowledge of land but would say that it was impossible that the average produce of the country could be increased during the second twenty-five years by a quantity equal to what it at present yields.  Yet we will suppose this increase, however improbable, to take place.  The exuberant strength of the argument allows of almost any concession.  Even with this concession, however, there would be seven millions at the expiration of the second term unprovided for.  A quantity of food equal to the frugal support of twenty-one millions, would be to be divided among twenty-eight millions.

Alas! what becomes of the picture where men lived in the midst of plenty, where no man was obliged to provide with anxiety and pain for his restless wants, where the narrow principle of selfishness did not exist, where Mind was delivered from her perpetual anxiety about corporal support and free to expatiate in the field of thought which is congenial to her.  This beautiful fabric of imagination vanishes at the severe touch of truth.  The spirit of benevolence, cherished and invigorated by plenty, is repressed by the chilling breath of want.  The hateful passions that had vanished reappear.  The mighty law of self-preservation expels all the softer and more exalted emotions of the soul.  The temptations to evil are too strong for human nature to resist.  The corn is plucked before it is ripe, or secreted in unfair proportions, and the whole black train of vices that belong to falsehood are immediately generated.  Provisions no longer flow in for the support of the mother with a large family.  The children are sickly from insufficient food.  The rosy flush of health gives place to the pallid cheek and hollow eye of misery.  Benevolence, yet lingering in a few bosoms, makes some faint expiring struggles, till at length self-love resumes his wonted empire and lords it triumphant over the world.

No human institutions here existed, to the perverseness of which Mr Godwin ascribes the original sin of the worst men. (Bk VIII, ch. 3; in the third edition, Vol.  II, p. 462) No opposition had been produced by them between public and private good.  No monopoly had been created of those advantages which reason directs to be left in common.  No man had been goaded to the breach of order by unjust laws.  Benevolence had established her reign in all hearts:  and yet in so short a period as within fifty years, violence, oppression, falsehood, misery, every hateful vice, and every form of distress, which degrade and sadden the present state of society, seem to have been generated by the most imperious circumstances, by laws inherent in the nature of man, and absolutely independent of it human regulations.