Mr. Malthus was the first philosopher, after Smith, who laid foundations for the farther progress of knowledge. The earliest distinct views of those laws which govern the revenues of the landed proprietors, and the wages of the laborers in the most advanced stages of civilization', will always be to be traced in his works on population, and on rent: and enough will remain to leave him the character of a powerful and original enquirer after truth, when time and the labors of many other minds have corrected some essential errors, and some hasty extensions of principles,-true in themselves, though of more local or limited application, than amidst the fervor of discovery they appeared to their author to be. But Mr. Malthus has been singularly unfortunate in his successors; under their treatment, his works, instead of being made the foundations of a superstructure of useful truth, have been used to give the semblance of plausibility to a mass of error, ingenious and harmless in some of its parts, but as a whole, most delusive, and unfortunately most mischievous.

On the subject of rent, Mr. Malthus, discarding the errors of the economists, shewed satisfactorily, that where land is cultivated by capitalists

1 As far as rent is concerned, the late Sir Edward West ought to share this praise.

living on the profits of their stock, and able to move it at pleasure to other employments, there the expence of tilling the worst quality of land cultivated determines the average price of raw produce, while the difference of quality on the superior lands measures the rents yielded by them.

This was a step towards understanding the circumstances which affect the progress of a very limited division of rents, and the causes which in one very peculiar state of society determine the average prices of raw produce. Mr. Ricardo, however, overlooking altogether the limited extent of the field to which these principles were really applicable, undertook from them alone to deduce the laws which regulate the nature and amount of the revenue derived from land at all places, and under all circumstances; and not content with this, proceeded from the same narrow and limited data, to construct a general system of the distribution of wealth, and to explain the causes of variations which take place in the rate of profits, or amount of wages over the surface of the globe. Mr. Ricardo was a man of talent, and he produced a system very ingeniously combined, of purely hypothetical truths; which, however, a single comprehensive glance at the world as it actually exists, is sufficient to shew to be utterly inconsistent with the past and present condition of mankind.

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Mr. Malthus' theory of population has been yet more lamentably abused. With the commanding influence of superior talent, he had fixed at once the attention of the world on a physical power possessed by the human race, of multiplying its aggregate numbers; which, if long exerted to its greatest extent, or even to a much less extent, must demonstratively outstrip any possible increase of food; and he had shewn that much of the happiness or misery of a large part of the population of nations, must always depend on the extent to which this power is controlled by themselves, or on the modes by which population is kept down to the level of food by extraneous circumstances. The facts on this subject, which he brought to light, must always hold a prominent place in every enquiry into the causes which determine the social progress and condition of nations and the most prominent place in such branches of those enquiries, as have for their especial object, the explanation of the laws which govern variations in the aggregate numbers of a people, and the amount of subsistence consumed by the great mass of every community; or in other words, its rate of wages. But to create and to perfect such an important department of human knowledge, was hardly likely to be the lot of one man, and the great work of Mr. Malthus contains certainly the elements of many errors, mixed with the portion

of lasting truth which it was his fortune first to demonstrate. Those errors had their origin-partly in a logically defective division of the checks to population which he enumerated and examined,— partly in some obscurity and indecision existing in his own mind, as to the amount of influence on the progress of the numbers of nations, which might in practice be expected to be exercised by moral causes acting in opposition to the physical propensities of mankind.

It is the perilous privilege of really eminent men, that their errors, as well as their wisdom, should be fertile in consequences. Those of Mr. Malthus led at once to forms of argument, and to a phraseology, which cast a gloom over the whole subject, and have had a very disastrous effect on the further progress of knowledge:—more disastrous indeed, than could possibly have been anticipated by any one not gifted with the power of foreseeing the strange combination of credulity and rashness which characterises many of the works in which his speculations have been pushed forwards to their supposed practical conclusions.

Taking together the two subjects of rent, and of population as it affects wages, we shall find that the germs of truth brought to light by Mr. Malthus, have been made to give apparent support to such doctrines as these:-That the revenues of the

proprietors of the soil over the surface of the globe, exist only because the qualities of different soils are different; and can only be increased as the differences in productiveness of the soils cultivated increase :-That this increase is always contemporary with a decrease in the productive powers of agriculture, and in the gains of the productive classes, and comes ever with loss and distress in its train:- And that the interests of the landlords which require such an increase, are, therefore, always and necessarily opposed to the interests of the state, and of every other class of society. The fortunes and position in the ordinary progress of nations, of the owners of stock, the next leading body in communities, are decided on in a spirit scarcely less gloomy. The effects of that diminution in the productive powers of industry, which is supposed to be indicated by increasing rents, reach, it is said, the owners of capital, in the shape of a dwindling rate of profits; and thus their own remuneration, and their capacity to accumulate fresh funds for the employment of labor, are always in a necessary course of gradual diminution, while cultivation is spreading itself to new soils, or multiplying its means and efforts on the old. Of the two richer classes, therefore, the one is threatened that the increase of the people, and the spread of tillage, will bring to it an invidious wealth founded on the