Page:Principlesofpoli00malt.djvu/52

xlvi to interpret the positions of a work not only in connection with other parts of it, but also with a special reference to the circumstances of the times, and the opinions which prevailed in them, or preceded them. These circumstances and opinions do, in point of fact, constitute a portion of the positions themselves, or rather they are the conditions on which their truth depends, and if the former are changed, the latter must change with them, or be no longer true. Why then should we deny to Mr. Malthus, a writer upon a new and difficult subject, that indulgence which is so freely granted to the moralist and the divine? Let it be remembered that at the time when the Essay on Population was published, now more than thirty years ago, there were two great dangers threatening the peace of society, with which he had to deal; on the one hand, Mr. Godwin and his followers were striking at the reverence for all social institutions, by holding out delusive visions of perfectibility which could never be realized, and on the other a real and practical pauperism was diffusing itself widely and rapidly over the land, and undermining more surely the basis both of property and law, by an ignorant and indolent reliance upon their omnipotence—that foresight and frugality, the special virtues of their station, were fast losing ground in the estimation of the poor, and that they were recklessly sinking into a state of entire dependence on the parish rate; while the conduct and opinions of those above them, so far from repressing their error, rather tended to encourage it. With these facts before him, and the consequences strongly impressed on his mind, we cannot wonder that Mr. Malthus, having laid down and demonstrated the great law of nature respecting population, should have thought it necessary in the first instance to point out, in all their naked deformity, the dangers it would always involve, and the sin and misery