Note 91 — CANTO III. MANIFESTO.

They may have rest, we—elbow room.

If your worships have not read Mr Malthus’s Essay on the Principles of Population, I advise you to buy the book immediately, and set yourselves about something like an effort to comprehend its contents. You will there find, I cannot now recollect the page, that population has a tendency to increase in a geometrical ratio, but that subsistence must be limited to an arithmetical ratio. That the world would soon swarm with inhabitants in such a manner that in years of the greatest plenty we should be under the disagreeable necessity of turning anthropophagi, and, like the famous Pantagruel, eat pilgrims with our salad, were not the principle of population restrained by two very useful predominant principles, viz. “VICE and MISERY;” the former of which is happily exemplified in the extravagance and luxury of your worships, and the latter correctly expressed in the poverty of your worships’ petitioner. You will likewise find in the same volume, passim, that after war, pestilence, and famine have laid waste a country, there is an immediate increase of births, in consequence of the principle of population being let loose to take its natural operation in replenishing the earth; or, in other words, because there is more elbow room for the survivors. Now, this being correct reasoning, it must be wonderfully wrong to try to keep alive poor folks, who are a dead weight on population, destroy the means of subsistence, prevent early marriages, and, by keeping themselves above ground, stand in the way of their betters.