welfare and the desire of contributing to it would banish vice and misery from the world, and in which, the stumbling-blocks of ignorance, of selfishness, and the indulgence of gross appetite being removed, all things would move on by the mere impulse of wisdom and virtue, to still higher and higher degrees of perfection and happiness. Compared with the lamentable and gross deficiencies of existing institutions, such a view of futurity as barely possible could not fail to allure the gaze and tempt the aspiring thoughts of the philanthropist and the philosopher: the hopes and the imaginations of speculative men could not but rush forward into this ideal world as into a vacuum of good; and from "the mighty stream of tendency" (as Mr Wordsworth, in the cant of the day, calls it) there was danger that the proud monuments of time-hallowed institutions, that the strongholds of power and corruption, that "the Corinthian capitals of polished society," with the base and pediments, might be overthrown and swept away as by a hurricane. There were not wanting persons whose ignorance, whose fears, whose pride, or whose prejudices contemplated such an alternative with horror; and who would naturally feel no small obligation to the man who should relieve their apprehensions from the stunning roar of this mighty change of opinion that thundered at a distance, and should be able, by some logical apparatus or unexpected turn of the argument, to prevent the vessel of the State from being hurried forward with the progress of improvement, and dashed in pieces down the tremendous precipice of human perfectibility. Then comes Mr Malthus forward with the geometrical and arithmetical ratios in his hands, and holds them out to his affrighted contemporaries as the only means of salvation. "For" (so argued the author of the essay) "let the principles of Mr Godwin's 'Inquiry' and of other similar works be carried literally and completely into effect; let every corruption and abuse of power be entirely got rid of; let virtue, knowledge, and civilisation be advanced to the greatest height that these visionary reformers would suppose; let the passions and appetites be subjected to the utmost control of reason and influence of public opinion: grant them, in a word, all that they ask, and the more completely their views are realised, the sooner will they be overthrown again, and the more inevitable and fatal will be the catastrophe. For the principle of population will still prevail, and from the comfort, ease, and plenty that will abound, will receive an increasing force and impetus; the number of mouths to be fed will have no limit, but the food that is to supply them cannot keep pace with the demand for it; we must come to a stop somewhere, even though each square yard, by extreme improvements in cultivation, could maintain its man: in this state of things there will be no remedy, the wholesome checks of vice

and misery (which have hitherto kept this principle within bounds) will have been done away; the voice of reason will be unheard; the passions only will bear sway; famine, distress, havoc, and dismay will spread around; hatred, violence, war, and bloodshed will be the infallible consequence, and from the pinnacle of happiness, peace, refinement, and social advantage, we shall be hurled once more into a profounder abyss of misery, want, and barbarism than ever, by the sole operation of the principle of population !"

Such is a brief abstract of the argument of the essay. Can anything be less conclusive, a more complete fallacy and petitio principii? Mr Malthus concedes, he assumes a state of perfectibility, such as his opponents imagined, in which the general good is to obtain the entire mastery of individual interests, and reason of gross appetites and passions; and then he argues that such a perfect structure of society will fall by its own weight, or rather be undermined by the principle of population, because in the highest possible state of the subjugation of the passions to reason, they will be absolutely lawless and unchecked, and because as men become enlightened, quick-sighted, and public-spirited, they will show themselves utterly blind to the consequences of their actions, utterly indifferent to their own well-being and that of all succeeding generations, whose fate is placed in their hands. This we conceive to be the boldest paralogism that ever was offered to the world, or palmed upon willing credulity. Against whatever other scheme of reform this objection might be valid, the one it was brought expressly to overturn was impregnable against it, invulnerable to its slightest graze. Say that the Utopian reasoners are visionaries, unfounded; that the state of virtue and knowledge they suppose, in which reason shall have become all in all, can never take place, that it is inconsistent with the nature of man and with all experience, well and good; but to say that society will have attained this high and "palmy state," that reason will have become the master-key to all our motives, and that when arrived at its greatest power it will cease to act at all, but will fall down dead, inert, and senseless, before the principle of population, is an opinion which one would think few people would choose to advance or assent to, without strong inducements for maintaining or believing it.

The fact, however, is, that Mr Malthus found this argument entire (the principle and the application of it) in an obscure and almost forgotten work published about the middle of the last century, entitled "Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and Providence," by a Scotch gentleman of the name of Wallace. The chapter in this work on the Principle of Population, considered as a bar to all ultimate views of human improvement, was probably written to amuse an idle hour, or read as a paper to exercise

Mr

the wits of some literary society in the northern capital, and no further responsibility or importance annexed to it. Mr Malthus, by adopting and setting his name to it, has given it sufficient currency and effect. It sometimes happens that one writer is the first to discover a certain principle or lay down a given observation, and that another makes an application of, or draws a remote or an immediate inference from it, totally unforeseen by the first, and from which, in all probability, he might have widely dissented. But this is not so in the present instance. Malthus has borrowed (perhaps without consciousness, at any rate without acknowledgment) both the preliminary statement, that the increase in the supply of food "from a limited earth and a limited fertility" must have an end, while the tendency to increase in the principle of population has none, without some external and forcible restraint on it, and the subsequent use made of this statement as an insuperable bar to all schemes of Utopian or progressive improvement --both these he has borrowed (whole) from Wallace, with all their imperfections on their heads, and has added more and greater ones to them out of his own store. In order to produce something of a startling and dramatic effect, he has strained a point or two. In order to quell and frighten away the bugbear of modern philosophy, he was obliged to make a sort of monster of the principle of population, which was brought into the field against it, and which was to swallow it up quick. No half measures, no middle course of reasoning would do. With a view to meet the highest possible power of reason in the new order of things, Mr Malthus saw the necessity of giving the greatest possible physical weight to the antagonist principle, and he accordingly lays it down that its operation is mechanical and irresistible. He premises these two propositions as the basis of all his reasoning-(1.) That food is necessary to man; (2.) that the desire to propagate the species is an equally indispensable law of our existence: thus making it appear that these two wants or impulses are equal and co-ordinate principles of action. If this double statement had been true, the whole scope and structure of his reasoning (as hostile to human hopes and sanguine speculations) would have been irrefragable; but as it is not true, the whole (in that view) falls to the ground. According to Mr Malthus's octavo edition, the sexual passion is as necessary to be gratified as the appetite of hunger, and a man can no more exist without propagating his species than he can live without eating. Were it so, neither of these passions would admit of any excuses, any delay, any restraint from reason or foresight; and the only checks to the principle of population must be vice and misery. The argument would be triumphant and complete. But there is no analogy, no parity in the two cases, such as our author here assumes. No man

can live for any length of time without food; many persons live all their lives without grati fying the other sense. The longer the craving after food is unsatisfied, the more violent, imperious, and uncontrollable the desire becomes; whereas, the longer the gratification of the sexual passion is resisted, the greater force does habit and resolution acquire over it; and, generally speaking, it is a well-known fact, attested by all observation and history, that this latter passion is subject more or less to control from personal feelings and character, from public opinions and the institutions of society, so as to lead either to a lawful and regulated indulgence or to partial or total abstinence, according to the dictates of moral restraint, which latter check to the inordinate excesses and unheard-of consequences of the principle of popu lation, our author, having no longer an extreme case to make out, admits and is willing to patronise in addition to the two former and exclusive ones of vice and misery, in the second and remaining editions of his work. Mr Malthus has shown some awkwardness or even reluctance in softening down the harshness of his first peremptory decision. He sometimes grants his grand exception cordially, proceeds to argue stoutly, and to try conclusions upon it; at other times he seems disposed to cavil about or retract it: "the influence of moral restraint is very inconsiderable, 'or none at all." It is indeed difficult (more particularly for so formal and nice a reasoner as Mr Malthus) to piece such contradictions plausibly or gracefully together. We wonder how he manages it, how any one should attempt it. The whole question, the gist of the argument of his early volume turned upon this, "Whether vice and misery were the only actual or possible checks to the principle of population?" He then said they were, and farewell to building castles in the air; he now says that moral restraint is to be coupled with these, and that its influence depends greatly on the state of laws and manners, and Utopia stands where it did, a great way off indeed, but not turned topsy-turvy by our magician's wand. Should we ever arrive there, that is, attain to a state of perfect moral restraint, we shall not be driven headlong back into Epicurus's sty for want of the only possible checks to population, vice and misery; and in proportion as we advance that way, that is, as the influence of moral restraint is extended, the necessity for vice and misery will be diminished instead of being increased according to the first alarm given by the essay. Again, the advance of civilisation and of population in consequence with the same degree of moral restraint (as there exists in England at this present time, for instance) is a good and not an evil, but this does not appear from the essay. The essay shows that population is not (as had been sometimes taken for granted) an abstract and unqualified good, but it led

to deny both fact and inference-and we put it to Mr Malthus whether we are not, in strictness, justified in doing so.

We have, perhaps, said enough to explain our feeling on the subject of Mr Malthus's merits and defects. We think he had the opportunity and the means in his hands of producing a great work on the principle of population; but we believe he has let it slip from his having an eye to other things besides that broad and unexplored question. He wished not merely to advance to the discovery of certain great and valuable truths, but at the same time to overthrow certain unfashionable paradoxes by exaggerated statements-to curry favour with existing prejudices and interests by garbled representations. He has, in a word, as it appears to us on a candid retrospect and without any feelings of controversial asperity rankling in our minds, sunk the philosopher and the friend of his species (a character to which he might have aspired) in the sophist and party writer. The period at which Mr Malthus came forward teemed with answers to modern philosophy, with antidotes to liberty and humanity, with abusive histories of the Greek and Roman republics, with fulsome panegyrics on the Roman emperors (at the very time when we were reviling Bonaparte for his strides to universal empire), with the slime and offal of desperate servility-and we cannot but consider the essay as one of the poisonous ingredients thrown into the caldron of legitimacy "to make it thick and slab." Our author has, indeed, so far done service to the cause of truth, that he has counteracted many capital errors formerly prevailing as to the universal and indiscriminate encourage. ment of population under all circumstances; but he has countenanced opposite errors, which if adopted in theory and practice would be even more mischievous, and has left it to future philosophers to follow up the principle, that some check must be provided for the unrestrained progress of population, into a set of wiser and more humane consequences. Mr Godwin has lately attempted an answer to the essay (thus giving Mr Malthus a Roland for his Oliver), but we think he has judged ill in endeavouring to invalidate the principle, instead of confining himself to point out the misapplication of it. There is one argument introduced in this reply, which will, perhaps, amuse the reader as a sort of metaphysical puzzle.

"It has sometimes occurred to me whether Mr Malthus did not catch the first hint of his geometrical ratio from a curious passage of Judge Blackstone, on consanguinity, which is as follows:

"The doctrine of lineal consanguinity is sufficiently plain and obvious; but it is at the first view astonishing to consider the number of lineal ancestors which every man has within no very great number of degrees: and so many different

bloods is a man said to contain in his veins, as he hath lineal ancestors. Of these he hath two in the first ascending degree, his own parents; he hath four in the second, the parents of his father and the parents of his mother; he hath eight in the third, the parents of his two grandfathers and two grandmothers; and by the same rule of progression, he hath an hundred and twenty-eight in the seventh; a thousand and twenty-four in the tenth; and at the twentieth degree, or the distance of twenty generations, every man hath above a million of ancestors, as common arithmetic will demonstrate.'

"This will seem surprising to those who are unacquainted with the increasing power of progressive numbers; but is palpably evident from the following table of a geometrical progression, in which the first term is 2, and the denominator also 2; or, to speak more intelligibly, it is evident, for that each of us has two ancestors in the first degree; the number of which is doubled at every remove, because each of our ancestors had also two ancestors of his own.

"This argument, however," proceeds Mr Godwin, "from Judge Blackstone of a geometrical progression would much more naturally apply to Montesquieu's hypothesis of the depopulation of the world, and prove that the human species is hastening fast to extinction, than to the purpose for which Mr Malthus has employed it. An ingenious sophism might be raised upon it, to show that the race of mankind will ultimately terminate in unity. Mr Malthus, indeed, should have reflected, that it is much more certain that every man has had ancestors than that he will have posterity, and that it is still more doubtful, whether he will have posterity to twenty or to an indefinite number of generations."*

Mr Malthus's style is correct and elegant; his tone of controversy mild and gentlemanly; and the care with which he has brought his facts and

• " 'Inquiry Concerning Population," p. 100.

by his attacks on the schemes of "Human Perfectibility" and on the poor-laws, as Mandeville formerly procured enemies by his attacks on human perfections and on charity schools; and among other instances that we might mention, Plug Pulteney, the celebrated miser, of whom Mr Burke said on his having a large estate left him, "that now it was to be hoped he would set up a pocket-handkerchief," was so enamoured with the saving schemes and humane economy of the essay, that he desired a friend to find out the author and offer him a church living! This liberal intention was (by design or accident)

COMRIE is a Scottish village, situated in one of those fine passes which lead up from the Lowlands to the Highlands of Perthshire, and the scenery of which often combines the beauties of the one with the sublimities of the other. Sir Walter Scott, in his "Fair Maid of Perth," has remarked that the noblest landscapes in Scotland-and he might have extended the remark to other regions-are found at those points where the mountains sink down upon the level country, and where the grandeurs of the hills are at once contrasted and harmonised with the beauties of the more cultivated tracts. This is quite the character of the scenery of the district around Comrie. A fine plain, two or three miles in length, and, as Wordsworth says of the Cumberland valleys, "flat as the floor of a temple," has, so to speak, lain down at the feet of rough gigantic mountains, as if to wonder at their bold sublimity, and to repose in their deep shade. Rich woods-partly fir and partly copse-have, with more daring, here and there run half-way up toward the rocky summits, and then, as if in timidity, have paused. Behind the village, from a deep cleft in a wooded hill on which stands a monumental pillar to Henry Dundas, the first Lord Melville-in his day the real King of Scotland, and whose beautiful estate of Dunira lies three miles to the westward-comes down a roaring cataract, storming as it passes with the black crags which in vain seek to confine it, but gradually softening when it ap

"A life which cannot challenge the world's attention; yet which does modestly solicit it, and perhaps, on clear study, will be found to reward it."-Carlyle's Life of Sterling.

proaches the village, the edge of which it at last kisses-like a lion who, having warred with and torn his keeper, comes, and in remorse, kisses the feet of his fair daughter.

Comrie may, indeed, be called the loved of the streams, since on each of its sides there is one to lave it, and murmur in its ear sweet inarticulate names of tenderness and praise, while with more distant and dignified regards the bold dark mountains look down upon it through their ferns and over their woods. The insulated crag, called Dunmore-on which the monument is placed-towers above the cleft and the cataract, and a sea of copsewood between them, and commands a prospect in which luxuriance and naked loftiness, beauty and the barren pomp of solitude, are exquisitely combined. As seen from this eminence the valley lies southward, with the village on its northern side. To the north are two enormous mountains-each three thousand feet in height; but both as lumpish as they are lofty, and separated from the central crag by a wide, green, sparsely-peopled glen, down which you see a river, called Lednick, stealing slowly to the great crisis of the cataract. Immediately below-from a two-sided valley of woods-comes up the eternal cry of the Deil's Caldron, as the waterfall is named, mitigated in the summer solstice; but in winter, when the channel is full, fierce and outrageous as the voice of a demon newly plunged into Tartarus. Further on you see the river, now comprising the three streams-Earn, Lednick, and Ruchil, into the one Earn-turning round and winding about through the plain as if in an agony of reluctance to leave a scene so fair. To the south-west are steep, grim, conical hills,