Page:Two Lectures on the Checks to Population.pdf/15

9 of a scarcity of the means of subsistence. Many would, perhaps, be startled on being told, that they have any thing to do with it. Yet I think that, on consideration, they would agree with an observation of Mr. Malthus, that the causes of war, in their remote ramifications, are not unconnected with it. The late war, for example, was owing, in a very considerable degree, to the apprehension entertained by the aristocracy of the contagion of the French revolution. But they would have had less ground for apprehension, had the bulk of the people been easy in their condition. Few will deny that an easy command of subsistence is almost a panacea for discontent among the lower classes.

Suppose that the cases, in which prudential restraint arises from the fear of a want of sustenance, were clearly distinguishable, by some manifest token, from those in which it depends on other motives. Suppose also poverty, by which I here mean misery produced by want, to have diseases of its own, wars of its own, and other modes of destruction of its own, all marked by some specific difference, and never to use any tools, or