ciety, according to the temper of the times, or the taste of individuals; only that vice and misery being always the safe side, the presumption would naturally be in favour of the most barbarous, ignorant, enslaved, and profligate? Whether the stumbling-block thus thrown in the way of those who aimed at any amendment in social institutions, does not obviously account for the alarm and opposition which Mr. Malthus's work excited on the one hand, and for the cordiality and triumph with which it was hailed on the other?
7. Whether this view of the question, which is all in which the Essay differs fundamentally from the received and less startling notions on the subject, is not palpably, and by the author's subsequent confession, false, sophistical, and unfounded?
8. Whether the additional principle of moral restraint, inserted in the second and following editions of the Essay as one effectual, and as the only desirable means of checking population, does not at once overturn all the paradoxical conclusions of the author respecting the state of man in society, and whether nearly all these conclusions do not still stand in Mr. Malthus's work as they originally stood, as false in fact as they are inconsistent in reasoning? Whether, indeed, it was likely, that Mr. Malthus would give up the sweeping conclusions of his first Essay, the fruits of his industry and the pledges of his success, without great reluctance; or in such a manner as not to leave the general plan of his work full of contradictions and almost unintelligible?
9. Whether, for example, in treating of the durability of a perfect form of government, Mr. Malthus has not "sicklied over the subject with the same pale and jaundiced cast of thought," by supposing vice and misery to be the only effectual checks to population; and in his tenacity on this his old and favourite doctrine, whether he has not formally challenged his opponents to point out any other, "except indeed" (he adds, recollecting himself) "moral restraint," which however he considers as of no effect at all?
10. Whether, consistently with this verbal acknowledgement
