The arguments used by Malthus to destroy Godwin often
recoil upon himself. Your moral system, as we both confess, says Malthus, will place human nature in a state extremely favourable to population. Wherefore? Because population is regulated, as Godwin contends, by moral causes. If this unqualified admission destroys Godwin, it must also
destroy a system built upon the contrary idea, that human
population is regulated by food. By your division of property and knowledge, says Malthus, you will remove want
and misery, the cheeks upon population, which must of
course become redundant, because these checks are removed.
But I propose to remove want and misery by a law to prevent procreation: Well, does not the redundant population
as certainly follow, whether want and misery are removed
in the mode of Godwin or of Malthus?
It is true that Malthus, aware of the objection, whilst he allows to man's moral nature a great influence upon population to destroy Godwin, so blends this admission with the entire dependence of population on food, as to support the latter idea throughout his book. And as one system considers mind as the despot of matter, the other considers matter as the despot of mind Whereas the fact is, that with or without civil government, population has never been able to overtake the capacity of the earth to yield subsistence and therefore it is probable, that all the operations of food and population, or of mind and matter, upon each other, are regulated by some unalterable natural law. At both extremities of man's moral state, the urban and the savage, we find its traces. Rather an excess than a want of food, is generally met with in cities; and where a want of food is produced by a savage state, it is never owing to an incapacity of the country to produce it. The checks upon population in both states are therefore moral. Countries, in which a few savages starve for want of food. afford abundance for an hundred fold population. of a different moral character, as has been demonstrated in North America.
