increase in an arithmetical series in China, or even in England: it increases in a geometrical series, or as fast as the population, in America. The rates at which one or the other increase naturally, or can be made to increase, have no relation to an arithmetical and geometrical series. They are co-ordinate till the earth, or any given portion of it, is occupied and cultivated, and, after that, they are quite disproportionate: or rather, both stop practically at the same instant; the means of subsistence with the limits of the soil, and the population with the limits of the means of subsistence. All that is true of Mr. Malthus's doctrine, then, is this, that the tendency of population to increase remains after the power of the earth to produce more food is gone; that the one is limited, the other unlimited. This is enough for the morality of the question: his mathematics are altogether spurious. Entirely groundless as they are, they have still been of the greatest use to Mr. Malthus, in alarming the imaginations and confounding the understandings of his readers. For, if the case had been represented as it stands, the increase of population would have seemed, till the limits of the earth were full, a great moral good; and after they were passed, a physical impossibility, the state of society remaining the same. But, by means of the arithmetical and geometrical series, ever present to the mental eye, and overlaying the whole question, whether applicable to it or not, it seems, first, as if this inordinate and unequal pressure of population on the means of subsistence was, at all times, and in all circumstances, equally to be dreaded, and equally inevitable; and again, as if, the more that population advanced, the greater the evil became, the actual excess as well as the tendency to excess. For it appears by looking at the scale, at the "stop-watch" of the new system of morals and legislation, as if, when the population is at 4, the means of subsistence is at 3; so that there is here only a deficit of 1 in the latter, and a small corresponding quantity of vice and misery; but that when it gets on to 32, the means of subsistence being only 6, here is a necessary deficiency of food, and all the comforts of life, to 26 persons
