Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/554

The cases of a rapid population after plagues, are weaker than those of a rapid population, after the expulsion of savages, by all the difference between gaining the possession of an improved and an unimproved country. Both cases are regulated by the different moral impressions of wealth and poverty upon human nature. A colony from London, settling in America on its first discovery, and the remnant of a plague, would both lose and acquire many moral qualities deeply affecting population; and in both cases the moral character which excites the population, flows from a multitude of causes independent of food. If there are human situations which suspend the moral qualities calculated to impede population, and others which awaken them; and if a certain degree of populousness never fails to awaken them; then population being graduated by a natural moral law, there is no need of the artificial laws proposed by Malthus to check it; nor any grounds for an apprehension that Godwin's system could have overturned this natural law. It could only come at it by affecting several imposibilities; but Malthus, alarmed, brings into the field a new impossibility to arrest a foe who can never appear. Godwin proposes to equalise wealth and knowledge among all men; Malthus to equalise food and procreation almost as extensively; and Mr. Adams to equalise wealth and power between three political orders. Thus we see at one view three great authorities, agreeing in principle, at war in fact, and each proposing to effect similar impossibilities. One offers to root out self love and all evil human qualities, and to plant equal and universal knowledge and benevolence where where they grow. Another offers to control the least governable human passion at the most inauspicious epoch; and the third offers to maintain an equality of wealth and power between jealous rival parties. It is as practicable for mankind to change, as to suspend their nature for twenty years. The human qualities proposed by Malthus to be subdued, are undoubtedly as unconquerable, as those proposed by Godwin to be subdued. Indeed, these authors