or rapid it may be, must operate in the way of a geometrical ratio. The same causes which double a population of one thousand will double a population of one thousand millions. For example: a given rate of increase between 1790 and 1800 added only 1,200,000 to the white population of this country; between 1830 and 1840 the same rate of increase added 3,600,000. Our population was more than doubled between 1790 and 1820; it was again more than doubled between 1820 and 1850. But the former doubling added less than five millions to our numbers, while the latter one added over ten millions; and the next doubling, in 1880, will have added considerably more than twenty millions. Inevitably then, if the population increase at all, it must increase in the way of a geometrical progression-that is, as the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.

But the means of subsistence, at best, cannot possibly be made to increase faster than in an arithmetical ratio—that is, as the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. The surface of the earth affords only a limited extent of ground, and this is of various degrees of fertility, large portions of it being hardly cultivable at all. By put ting more ground in cultivation and improving the modes of agriculture, it is conceivable that, within twenty-five years, the quantity of food should be doubled. But it is not conceivable that more than this should be accomplished; that is, that the second twenty-five years should make a larger addition to the existing stock than was obtained during the former period. Hence, under the most favorable supposition that can be made, beginning with an annual product equal to one million bushels of wheat, at the end of the first quarter of a century this might be raised to two millions, at the end of the second quarter to three millions, and at the close of the third period to four millions.-Pp. 448, 449.

ADOPTION OF THE DOCTRINE AND ITS RESULTS.

The inferences from this theory were logically of the most inhumane character. If the increase of life was the great dan ger, all humanitarianism was essentially criminal. Charity was a folly. Vaccination was the enemy, and small-pox the benefactor. Marriage and fecundity were crimes against the public welfare. These conclusions were, of course, welcome to the English aristocracy, both as refuting the revolutionary doctrines and as relieving them of all responsibility for the miseries of the lower classes. Political economy was, down to a late period, based on Malthusianism. "These opinions led to the enactment, in 1834, of the New Poor Law, the avowed purpose of which was to prevent what is called 'outdoor relief,' and to collect the destitute and starving in union work-houses, where, as in jails, the separation of the sexes, the lowness of the diet,

and the general severity of the regimen, should be a terror to the evil-doers who had presumed to burden society with their superfluous progeny. If the crime was not literally theirs, it was at any rate their parents' fault, and the sins of the fathers must be visited upon the children in order to deter others from like offenses. Go to the work-house, or starve,' was henceforth to be the answer to all applicants for parochial relief; and the reader of Dickens need not be reminded that many of them preferred the latter alternative."-P. 450.

ITS PRACTICAL REFUTATION.

As Malthusianism is a signal instance showing how a dogma may demoralize a people, so its refutation, brought about by its effects, shows how a fact may demolish a dogma.

But the triumph of Malthusianism lasted only for about half a century, and its decline and fall have been even more rapid than its rise. The tide turned about the time of the famine in Ireland in 1846-47, and the consequent fearful exodus from that unhappy island, which, in less than ten years, deprived it of full one fourth of its population. In 1845 the number of persons in that country was estimated at 8,295,000, and they were increasing with considerable rapidity. In 1851 the population was only 6,574,278; and in 1871 it was less than five and one half millions, being a diminution of nearly thirty-five per cent. The Malthusians themselves were appalled at such a result. For the evil did not stop with the immediate diminution of numbers; as usual, in such cases, it was chiefly those who were in the flower of life, the healthy and the strong, who emigrated, leaving behind them the aged, the feeble, and the diseased. Hence the people at home deteriorated in vitality and working power even in a higher ra tio than their decrease in numbers. At the same period there was also a great emigration, though by no means to an equivalent extent, from England, and especially from Scotland, where the great land-owners had acted on Malthusian principles by depopulating their vast estates, unroofing the cottages over their tenants' heads, and thus compelling them to ship themselves beyond sea. Then came the great trials of the Crimean war and the Indian mutiny, with the attendant difficulty of recruiting the army, so that the country awoke to a knowledge of the sad truth that, in banishing their people, they were drying up the sources of their productive power and their military strength.-Pp. 451, 452.

TRUE LAWS OF FECUNDITY.

The discussion brings out some interesting conclusions in regard to the true principles of population. The first prominent

and

fact of observation is that the lower classes of life, the poor ignorant, are very prolific, while the higher classes, the rich, intellectual, and aristocratic, tend to sterility. As men rise in culture and in varied means of enjoyment, they resort less to animal gratifications. The very poor have scarce any other.

On examining the facts in the case more closely, it will always be found that it is not the excess of population which causes the misery, but the misery which causes the excess of population. Hopeless poverty makes men imprudent and reckless, and leads them to burden themselves with a family because they cannot be worse off, and there is no possibility of improving their condition. In Switzerland, where the land is parceled out among small proprietors, the peasantry obtain a comfortable livelihood, and, therefore, increase so slowly that the population will not double itself in less than two hundred and twenty-seven years. In France, where also the land is cut up into very small estates, and the peasantry are vastly better off than in England, the rate of increase for the population for ten years is only five per cent. In England, for the same period, it was fifteen per cent.; and in Connaught, the sink of Irish misery and degradation, between 1821 and 1831 it was as high as twenty-two per cent. In Galway and Mayo, notoriously two of the most destitute counties, during the same period, there was an increase in the one case of twentyseven and in the other of twenty-five per cent.-nearly as great as in the United States. Thus the two extremes of general misery and general well-being produce very nearly the same effect on the movement of the population.-P. 454.

In England it is a matter of common observation that the families of the nobility and landed gentry constantly tend to die out, and, if they were not recruited by promotions from the middle classes, the upper orders of society would gradually disappear. Of the barons who sat in the English House of Lords in 1854, the peerage of considerably more than one half does not date back beyond 1800; and not more than thirty of them can boast that their ancestors were ennobled before 1711. The continued and increasing opulence of the landed gentry of England is chiefly attributable to this cause; since the diminution of their numbers tends, of course, to the concentration of their estates. Celibate or childless lives are common among the younger sons of the nobility and gentry, while they are very infrequent in the classes of artisans and laborers. Even here, in the eastern part of the United States, the sons in educated and wealthy families marry later in life, and have fewer children, than those in the classes who live by handiwork; while the Irish laborers are the most prolific of all. No further back than the beginning of this century families containing from ten to fifteen children each were not infrequent here in New England; now, one that has more than six is seldom found except among the very poor.-P. 455.

DARWINISM IS ANIMAL MALTHUSIANISM.

Darwinism is based on the same assumption of the overwhelming fecundity of animal life and the beneficence of destruction. In this battle of destruction it is the animal endowed with the best advantages for the struggle that survives and propagates his like, and so arise species. And so, too, result the rising of species into higher grades, for it is the best that survives. And as the slight variations of the new-born animals are properly accidental, that is, guided by no intention, so an air of what allow us to call accidentality is flung over the whole process, quite acceptable to Atheism. But here, alas, as Professor Bowen shows, comes in the true principle of fecundity that upsets this theory. In both the animal and vegetable worlds the law prevails that low life is prolific and high life is chary of over-propagation. Insects and fishes propagate by billions and trillions, but mammals by half dozens. It is by this secret principle of superior fecundity in animal life that species survive, and not by any slight individual accidental advantage, which is sure to be obliterated in a generation or two, that species prevail. "Natural selection," therefore, is a fallacy. And when art steps in and arbitrarily selects, art can improve, can vary wonderfully sometimes, and fantastically even, but the new forms tend to reversion, to sterility, and are rarely permanent.

Between low life and high life there arises this remarkable conservative balance, that the former is protected by its numbers and the latter by its strength. And if a battle between the two can be imagined, the low would be most likely to conquer, and the unfittest to survive. The Professor piquantly says:

66

If a battle of this sort were possible, victory in it would not depend on superiority of organization. The existence not of the lower races, but of the higher ones, would be imperiled. We can foresee this result in our own case, whether we compare the different classes of human society with each other, or man himself, the order primates, with the inferior animals. In the grand struggles" which will occur about the time of the Greek Kalends, the primitive stocks, such as Irish bog-trotters and Welsh peasants, would certainly "survive" the nobility and gentry, though the latter profit by the accumulated advantages of high breeding transmitted by direct inheritance through a pedigree extending back to William the Conqueror. And, in the final FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXII.—11

stage of the conflict even these original poor representatives of humanity must die out long before some of the animals far below them. Those pests of our summer, the insect tribes, would sing the requiem of man, and feast on his remains. Accordingly, the only original and distinctive feature of Darwinism-its attempt to explain away the argument from design for the being of a God by showing that the supposed adaptations of means to ends, and the admirably complex arrangements by which every portion of a living organism is fitted to do its proper work, may all be accounted for by the blind and unconscious action of mechanical principles and physical laws, without calling in anywhere a Divine purpose or a contriving Mind-must be regarded as a baseless hypothesis. A careful study of the successive development of the higher forms of life upon the earth does not invalidate, but fully confirms, the doctrine which has been held by every great thinker, from Socrates down to the present day, that no organism could have been produced without an organizing mind. -P. 462.

PESSIMISM.

Seen under the desperation of Malthus and the accidentalism of Darwin, deprived of all the lights and colorings of a higher faith, the universe is a dismal presentation, and daguerreotypes itself on the predisposed mind as Pessimism. Life is worthless. Man is a lump of matter crowded into a certain shape by a concurrence of blind forces, stimulated by a force called life, with certain molecular motions in his upper end called thought. Shatter the lump, and the molecular motion stops; and what of it? Just as well as if it kept a-going. My life is worthless; your life is worthless. All moralities are dissolved, and crime is just as good as innocence. And the more sincere these views, the worse they are, and the more dangerous the men who hold them. "Educated men, who have come to regard their own lives as only a burden to them, though they have been driven to despair, not by the privations and miseries which afflict the hopelessly poor, but by an insensate theory which teaches them to consider the existence of the human race itself as an intolerable evil, that can be abated most effectually by reducing society to anarchy and ruin, and who have prepared themselves for the admission of this theory by getting rid of all the restraints of morality and religion-these are foes truly formidable, against whom all the precautions and means of defense which governments can institute seem to be of little avail. This is the real ground of the terror recently inspired by the