Refuse teach a prophylaxis against these plagues of humanity. polemics of this sort may well be relegated at once to the kitchenmiddens of an obsolete period. It is somewhat trying to find a master of rhetoric like Henry George not unwilling, even at this late day, to garble a whole passage in the first essay of Malthus that he may fling his dynamite bomb full in the face of the English professor, and this, too, a passage which Malthus withdrew and expunged in every edition of his work published after the year 1803. Though Malthus has apologized for the entire form and contents of the first edition as having been written on the impulse of the occasion and from the few materials which were then in his reach," the unreasoning opponents of his theory continue to burrow in this edition for stones of stumbling and rocks of offence. It is as if one should impeach the orthodoxy of Saint Augustine without taking the trouble to read the Retractiones of that great controversialist, or as if one should find the head and front of an author's offending in one or two passages contained in the body of a book without noting that the offending paragraphs had been corrected in the "errata" at its end. Even the literary redundancies of other men have been laid at the door of Malthus; as, for instance, when Wordsworth, in his Thanksgiving Ode after the battle of Waterloo, sang of carnage as "God's daughter," it was supposed that he drew this lurid phrase from the dogmatics of Malthus. So much for the form in which the doctrine of Malthus made its first appearance. Let us now examine its substance in the light of his own revisions and in the light of later scientific criticism. The expansive power with which population, as conceived by Malthus, has a general tendency to increase in every stage of culture within given territorial environments, may be roughly likened to the pressure of an elastic spring coiled within the containing limits of a box constructed with movable sides and so adjusted that the spring acts with a varying radial pressure on the containing sides, while the movable sides themselves sometimes expand and sometimes contract under other influences than those due to the tightening or relaxing coils of the spring. In this rude figure the constant radial pressure of the elastic spring represents the constant tendency which population has to increase beyond the means of subsistence, whether that tendency comes to effect or not. The expanding or contracting sides of the containing box represent the expanding or contracting forces of the food-supply in any given stage of culture and in any given geographical limit; and it is further assumed that these movable sides sometimes expand and sometimes contract under other influences than the tightening or relaxing pressure of the spring, because, as a matter of fact, it is known that the food-sup ply is not always and everywhere a constant function of the numerical population, but varies according to other conditions of time, place, and circumstance. Malthus is very explicit on this latter point. "If hunger alone," he says, "could have prompted the savage tribes of America to change their habits in favor of more plentiful modes of procuring subsistence, there would not have been to-day a single nation of hunters and fishers remaining." "It is evident," he adds, "that some fortunate train of circumstances, in addition to this stimulus, is necessary for the purpose, and it is undoubtedly probable that these arts of obtaining food will be first invented and improved in those spots which are best fitted to them and where the natural fertility of the situation, by allowing a greater number of people to subsist together, would give the fairest chance to the inventive powers of the human mind.” * And if mere want by its sole and single pressure never leads to a change of customs and of social levels in favor of more abundant food-supplies within given limits, it is equally true that mere ease of subsistence, by its sole and single relaxation of the Malthusian pressure, does not necessarily lead to an increase of civilization, but, in the strict causal nexus of that fact alone, may simply lead to an increase of population multiplying on the same grades of culture as before. John Stuart Mill has pointed this moral in the most offensive way when, in his narrow discussion of this topic, he adventured to say that the rapid multiplication of population in these United States, notwithstanding what he is pleased to call "some incipient signs of a better tendency," had simply led to an increase of men given to dollar-hunting and of women given to the breeding of dollar-hunters. Equally express, though much more decorous, is the language of Malthus under this head, when he says that "a certain degree of security [it is social security of which he speaks] is perhaps still more necessary than richness of soil" to encourage the change of a people from a lower stage of culture to a * Malthus: Principle of Population, vol. i, p. 90, edition of 1817. higher. And in his "Principles of Political Economy" he shows how an increase of food command may work either for a simple increase of population or for an improvement in the modes of subsistence, "without a proportionate acceleration in the rate of increase. This latter working he ascribes to civil and political freedom in conjunction with education. † It will be seen, therefore, that in the idea of Malthus the sliding sides of the box, which, figuratively speaking, comprise any given food-supply, do not expand or contract so much under the lessening or increasing pinch of the physical craving for food as under the lessening or increasing force of the radial pressure stored in the "inventive powers of the human mind "-powers which exemplify and embody the "progressional force" of civilization, and which come to the front when that progressional force is placed in effective combination with felicitous surroundings. We should not wonder that the opponents of Malthus have often failed to credit him with a due allowance for this primary principle of causation in social progress (in which cause perpetually becomes effect and again turns effect into cause), because Malthus himself has often failed to take this principle into account in checking the too absolute logic with which he pits the law of population against the law of foodsupply, as if these two great and opposing protagonists filled alone the lists of the world-struggle. Yet this concession is the key of his whole position in what we may call the revised and amended Malthusianism of the later period, and it is to-day the keystone of the whole arch on which the fabric of a sound philosophy of population must rest for its historic support and scientific defense. At the very threshold of his argument Malthus deplores the fact that though the law of population had been powerfully operating since the very commencement of human society, its natural and necessary effects had been almost totally overlooked until he made them an object of special study. They were overlooked because they had been and still are complicated with so many other causes and effects in the social sphere, and it would have been better for Malthus if, in disengaging them from this complication for purposes of special study, he had more clearly recognized their organic connection with the whole social environment. In fact Malthus often fails to * Malthus, Principle of Population, vol. i, book 1, ch. 7, p. 184, ed. 1817. † Malthus, Prin. of Pol. Econ., chapter iv, sec. 2. see the mixed and contingent relations between population and food-supply, because he treats his thesis too abstractly and not with a sufficient perception of its complex relations and bearings in the actual figure of concrete society, with its thousand actions, reactions, and interactions, besides those of population and of food-supply. In every existing stage of culture which the world has yet seen there are, indeed, "checks which have repressed the superior power of population and kept its.effects on a level with the means of subsistence," and it may be that these checks, as actually interposed between the two countervailing tendencies with which Malthus deals, have all been resolvable into "moral restraint," on the one hand, preventing the genesis of a redundant population, and “vice and misery," on the other hand, reducing a redundant population to its necessary level. But the "thundering loom of Time," as Goethe calls it, works with a thousand whirring spindles besides these in weaving for men the garment of a growing civilization. The complex forces of the body politic, though compelled, indeed, to account with the law of Malthus at every stage of culture, are not put in sole subjection to it. In falling against Malthusian law these forces, for the want of a due coördination, may have been often broken, and the law in falling on them may have sometimes ground them to powder, but there is no imperious destiny which remorselessly ordains that this shall always and everywhere be the inevitable result of an inevitable conflict. Both the conflict and the result may, in a measure at least, be avoided by the progress of civilization, for, as a matter of fact, the whole history of the human race may be cited to show, as indeed Malthus is frank to admit, that there are causes from without, in nature, which conspire with causes from within, in the mind of man, to break the cast-iron moulds of a stationary state in which population tends, it is true, to stand at the level of the food supply, because it shares in the lack of that progressional force which, in a growing civilization, is the secret spring of its growth and the index of whose pressure is the measure of that growth. How the growth of civilization is related to the pressure of the law of population and of food supply we may easily see in the pages of that comparative history which reveals the diminishing range of the law with each advance in the evolution of human culture. In savagery the radial pressure of the law is seen in a simple tendency to work for the geographical diffusion of a thin and feeble. population moving on lines of least resistance over the next most accessible parts of the habitable globe. The force is weak and simple because as yet it shares in the fates of a weak and simple stage of culture. The checks on population here come speedily and they come with unrelenting force. When, through the combination of certain inner and outer factors lending themselves to the genesis of a higher social status, the pastoral system of culture came to create a new set of emotions, a new set of social ideas, and a new species of property rights, we shall find the radial pressure of this law expressing itself in a new order of conflicts and a new variety of competitions; to wit, in frequent quarrels about the limits of pasture grounds, in sudden migrations of herdsmen moving with their flocks on lines of least resistance to fresh woods and pastures new, and sometimes in sudden raids made by an impoverished horde on the richer fields of their neighbors. The law of Malthus is indeed at work in helping on these nomadic and predatory incursions, but it works only as part and parcel of the whole social state in which it inheres and is not the sole determining principle which actuates or arrests the general social moveThere has been an advance in the social movement as compared with savagery, and pro tanto with this advance the law of Malthus has fallen into the back-ground, though it comes to the fore again so soon as the limits of the new social evolution are reached by the recurring pressure of population. ment. In favored spots, like those of the Nile Valley and of the Euphrates country, in rich river beds like those of the Yang-tsi-kiang, in comparatively fertile regions like Mexico and Peru, in which latter countries, as Malthus says, the wild Indians were "led to improve and extend their agriculture," we witness a considerable growth in the density of the population as compared with the lower status of savagery, though here again the law of population comes to assert its presence so soon as the limits of the new social evolution have been touched by the expansive force of population over-passing the expansive forces of the human mind. In countries of the highest civilization which has yet been reached, armed with the resources of the best government, purest justice, truest morality, soundest economy, and most fruitful science attained by men, we find the greatest density of population, because the limits of population revolve more and more within the sphere of man's material, mental, and moral freedom, though the law of |