Appendix to the Census of the Commonwealth, have an interest in this connection.  I quote from an article in the Times of August 5, 1918:  “An eminent geographer, the late Mr. E. G. Ravenstein, some years ago, when the population of the earth was estimated at 1400 million, foretold that about the middle of this century population would have reached a limit beyond which increase would be disastrous.  Mr. Knibbs is not so pessimistic and is much more precise; though he defers the disastrous culmination, he has no doubt as to its inevitability.  The limits of human expansion, he assures us, are much nearer than popular opinion imagines; the difficulty of food supplies will soon be most grave; the exhaustion of sources of energy necessary for any notable increase of population, or advance in the standards of living, or both combined, is perilously near.  The present rate of increase in the world’s population cannot continue for four centuries.”]

6.

The Essay of Malthus afterwards became one of the sacred books of the Utilitarian sect, and it is interesting to notice what Bentham himself thought of perfectibility.  Referring to the optimistic views of Chastellux and Priestley on progressive amelioration he observed that “these glorious expectations remind us of the golden age of poetry.”  For perfect happiness “belongs to the imaginary region of philosophy and must be classed with the universal elixir and the philosopher’s stone.”  There will always be jealousies through the unequal gifts of nature and of fortune; interests will never cease to clash and hatred to ensue; “painful labour, daily subjection, a condition nearly allied to indigence, will always be the lot of numbers”; in art and poetry the sources of novelty will probably be exhausted.  But Bentham was far from being a pessimist.  Though he believes that “we shall never make this world the abode of happiness,” he asserts that it may be made a most delightful garden “compared with the savage forest in which men so long have wandered.” [Footnote:  Works, vol. i. p. 193 seq.]

7.

The book of Malthus was welcomed at the moment by all those who had been thoroughly frightened by the French Revolution and saw in the “modern philosophy,” as it was called, a serious danger to society. [Footnote:  Both Hazlitt and Shelley thought that Malthus was playing to the boxes, by sophisms “calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph” (Revolt of Islam, Preface).  Bentham refers in his Book of Fallacies (Works, ii. p. 462) to the unpopularity of the views of Priestley, Godwin, and Condorcet:  “to aim at perfection has been pronounced to be utter folly or wickedness.”] Vice and misery and the inexorable laws of population were a godsend to rescue the state from “the precipice of perfectibility.”  We can understand the alarm occasioned to believers in the established constitution of things, for Godwin’s work—­now virtually forgotten, while Malthus is still appealed