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Plato pro

BY DR. JAMES C. WELLING, PRESIDENT OF COLUMBIAN UNIVERSITY. There were Malthusians in the world before Malthus. posed to regulate the conditions of marriage in his ideal republic with a view to the equality of the sexes, the limitation of population. in point of its quality, and the community of property. Aristotle charged Plato with inconsistency in not providing for limitations on the number as well as the quality of the offspring born within the confines of the State, and justly argued that without such restrictions in point of number it would be impossible to maintain an equal distribution of property. The constant pressure of population on the means of subsistence and on the average rates of private maintenance had thus been observed of old time, and measures were devised in real as well as ideal republics for the purpose of meeting it; though in real republics the measures taken under this head, as in most other cases involving a consensus of political opinions, did not proceed from a full consciousness of all the elements involved in the particular problem set for solution. So that while this pressure has been perpetually exerting its power at every stage of human history, and while men have constantly acted under its influence in their concrete masses, it does not follow that the nature, working, and effect of that pressure were clearly perceived or understood in point of law or principle.

Montesquieu caught a passing glimpse of the principle of population in his Esprit des Lois, and the elder Mirabeau, in his "Ami des Hommes ou Traité de la Population," clearly enounced the

* Livre xxiii, Ch. 10.

Tome viii, p. 84.

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