and virtual rejection of the influence of moral causes, the general tendency of Mr. M.'s system is not to represent the actual state of man in society as nothing better than a blind struggle between vice, misery, and the principle of population, the effects of which are just as mechanical as the ebbing and flowing of the tide, and to bury all other principles, all knowledge, or virtue, or liberty, under a heap of misapplied facts?
11. Whether, instead of accounting for the different degrees of happiness, plenty, populousness, &c. in different countries, or in the same country at different periods, from good or bad government, from the vicissitudes of manners, civilization, and knowledge, according to the common prejudice, Mr. Malthus does not expressly and repeatedly declare that political institutions are but as the dust in the balance compared with the inevitable consequences of the principle of population; and whether he does not treat with the utmost contempt all those, who not being in the secret of "the grinding law of necessity," had before his time superficially concluded that moral, political, religious, and other positive causes were of considerable weight in determining the happiness or misery of mankind? It were to be wished that the author, instead of tampering with his subject, and alternately holding out concessions, and then recalling them, had made one bold and honest effort to get rid of the bewildering effects of his original system, by affording his readers some clue to determine, both in what manner and to what extent other causes, independent of the principle of population, actually combine with that principle (no longer pretended to be absolute and uncontroulable) to vary the face of nature and society, under the same general law, and had not left this most important desideratum in his work, to be apocryphally supplied by the ingenuity and zeal of his apologists?
12. Whether Mr. Malthus does not uniformly discourage every plan for extending the limits of population, and consequently the sphere of human enjoyment, either by cultivating new tracts of soil, or improving the old ones, by repeating on all occasions
