piness shall prevail, and then endeavouring to shew that all these advantages would only hasten their own ruin, and end in famine, confusion, and unexampled wretchedness, in consequence of taking away the only possible checks to population, vice and misery? Whether this objection does not suppose mankind in a state of the most perfect reason, to be utterly blind to the consequences of the unrestrained indulgence of their appetites, and with the most perfect wisdom and virtue regulating all their actions, not to have the slightest command over their animal passions? There is nothing in any of the visionary schemes of human perfection so idle as this objection brought against them, which has no more to do with the reasonings of Godwin, Condorcet, &c. (against which Mr. Malthus's first Essay was directed) than with the prophecies of the Millennium!
5. Whether, in order to give some colour of plausibility to his argument, and to prove that the highest conceivable degree of wisdom and virtue could be of no avail in keeping down the principle of population, Mr. Malthus did not at first set out with representing this principle, to wit, the impulse to propagate the species, as a law of the same order and cogency as that of satisfying the cravings of hunger; so that reason having no power over it, vice and misery must be the necessary consequences, and only possible checks to population?
6. Whether this original view of the subject did not unavoidably lead to the most extravagant conclusions, not only by representing the total removal of all vice and misery as the greatest evil that could happen to the world, but (what is of more consequence than this speculative paradox) by throwing a suspicion and a stigma on all subordinate improvements or plans of reform, as so many clauses or sections of the same general principle? Whether the quantity of vice and misery necessary to keep population down to the level of the means of subsistence, being left quite undetermined by the author, the old barriers between vice and virtue, good and evil, were not broken down, and a perfect latitude of choice allowed between forms of government and modes of so-
