7. Whether this view of the question, which is all in which the Essay differs fundamentally from the received and less startling notions on the subject, is not palpably, and by the author’s subsequent confession, false, sophistical, and unfounded?
8. Whether the additional principle of moral restraint, inserted in the second and following editions of the Essay as one effectual, and as the only desirable means of checking population, does not at once overturn all the paradoxical conclusions of the author respecting the state of man in society, and whether nearly all these conclusions do not still stand in Mr. Malthus’s work as they originally stood, as false in fact as they are inconsistent in reasoning? Whether, indeed, it was likely, that Mr. Malthus would give up the sweeping conclusions of his first Essay, the fruits of his industry and the pledges of his success, without great reluctance; or in such a manner as not to leave the general plan of his work full of contradictions and almost unintelligible?
9. Whether, for example, in treating of the durability of a perfect form of government, Mr. Malthus has not ‘sicklied over the subject with the same pale and jaundiced cast of thought,’ by supposing vice and misery to be the only effectual checks to population; and in his tenacity on this his old and favourite doctrine, whether he has not formally challenged his opponents to point out any other, ‘except indeed’ (he adds, recollecting himself) ‘moral restraint,’ which however he considers as of no effect at all?
10. Whether, consistently with this verbal acknowledgment and virtual rejection of the influence of moral causes, the general tendency of Mr. M.’s system is not to represent the actual state of man in society as nothing better than a blind struggle between vice, misery, and the principle of population, the effects of which are just as mechanical as the ebbing and flowing of the tide, and to bury all other principles, all knowledge, or virtue, or liberty, under a heap of misapplied facts?
11. Whether, instead of accounting for the different degrees of happiness, plenty, populousness, &c. in different countries, or in the same country at different periods, from good or bad government, from the vicissitudes of manners, civilization, and knowledge, according to the common prejudice, Mr. Malthus does not expressly and repeatedly declare that political institutions are but as the dust in the balance compared with the inevitable consequences of the principle of population; and whether he does not treat with the utmost contempt all those, who not being in the secret of ‘the grinding law of necessity,’ had before his time superficially concluded that moral, political, religious, and other positive causes were of considerable weight in determining the happiness or misery of mankind? It were to be wished that the author, instead of tampering with his subject, and alternately holding out concessions, and then recalling them, had made one bold and honest effort to get rid of the bewildering effects of his original system, by affording his readers some clue to determine, both in what manner and to what extent other causes, independent of the principle of population, actually combine with that principle (no longer pretended to be absolute and uncontroulable) to vary the face of nature and society, under the same general law, and had not left this most important desideratum in his work, to be apocryphally supplied by the ingenuity and zeal of his apologists?
12. Whether Mr. Malthus does not uniformly discourage every plan for extending the limits of population, and consequently the sphere of human enjoyment, either by cultivating new tracts of soil, or improving the old ones, by repeating on all occasions the same stale, senseless objection, that, after all, the principle of population will press as much as ever on the means of subsistence; or in other words, that though the means of subsistence and comfort will be increased, there will be a proportionable increase in the number of those who are to partake of it? Or whether Mr. Malthus’s panic fear on this subject has not subsided into an equally unphilosophical indifference?
13. Whether the principle of moral restraint, formerly recognized in Mr. Malthus’s latter writings, and in reality turning all his paradoxes into mere impertinence, does not remain a dead letter, which he never calls into action, except for the single purpose of torturing the poor under pretence of reforming their morals?
14. Whether the avowed basis of the author’s system on the poor-laws, is not the following:—that by the laws of God and nature, the rich have a right to starve the poor whenever they (the poor) cannot maintain themselves; and whether the deliberate sophistry by which this right is attempted to be made out, is not as gross an insult on the understanding as on the feelings of the public? Or whether this reasoning does not consist in a trite truism and a wilful contradiction; the truism being, that whenever the earth cannot maintain all its inhabitants, that then, by the laws of God and nature, or the physical constitution of things, some of them must perish; and the contradiction being, that the right of the rich to withhold a morsel of bread from the poor, while they themselves roll in abundance, is a law of God and nature, founded on the same physical necessity or absolute deficiency in the means of subsistence?
15. Whether the commentators on the Essay have not fallen into the same unwarrantable mode of reasoning, by confounding the real funds for the maintenance of labour, i.e. the actual produce of the soil, with the scanty pittance allowed out of it for the maintenance of the labourer (after the demands of luxury and idleness are satisfied) by the positive, varying laws of every country, or by the caprice of individuals?
16. Whether these two things are not fundamentally distinct in themselves, and ought not to be kept so, in a question of such importance, as the right of the rich to starve the poor by system?