But in the execution of his great project Condorcet failed.His negative metaphysics prevent his justly appreciating the past,and he indulges,at the close of his work,in vague hypotheses respecting the perfectibility of our race,and in irrationalexpectations of an indefinite extension of the duration of human life.Malthus seems to have little sense of the nobleness ofCondorcet's attitude,and no appreciation of the grandeur of his leading idea.But of his chimerical hopes he is able to makeshort work;his good sense,if somewhat limited and prosaic,is at least effectual in detecting and exposing utopias.
The project of a formal and detailed treatise on population was an after-thought of Malthus.The essay in which he hadstudied a hypothetic future led him to examine the effects of the principle he had put forward on the past and present state ofsociety;and he undertook an historical examination of these effects,and sought to draw such inferences in relation to theactual state of things as experience seemed to warrant.The consequence of this was such a change in the nature andcomposition of the essay as made it,in his own language,"a new work."The book,so altered,appeared in 1803under thetitle,An Essay on the Principle of Population,or a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness;with anEnquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal or mitigation of the evils which it occasions .
In the original form of the essay he had spoken of no checks to population but those which came under the head either ofvice or of misery.He now introduces the new element of the preventive check supplied by what he calls "moral restraint,"and is thus enabled,as he himself said,to "soften some of the harshest conclusions"at which he had before arrived.Thetreatise passed through five editions (37)in his lifetime,and in all of them he introduced various additions and corrections.
That of 1817is the last he fully revised,and presents the text substantially as it has since been reprinted.
Notwithstanding the great development which he gave to his work,and the almost unprecedented amount of discussion towhich it gave rise,it remains a matter of some difficulty to discover what solid contribution he has made to our knowledge,nor is it easy to ascertain precisely what practical precepts,not already familiar,he founded on his theoretic principles.Thistwofold vagueness is well brought out in his celebrated correspondence with Senior,in the course of which it seems to bemade apparent that his doctrine is new not so much in its essence as in the phraseology in which it is couched.He himselftells us that when,after the publication of the original essay,the main argument of which he had deduced from Hume,Wallace,Adam Smith,and Price,he began to inquire more closely into the subject,he found that "much more had beendone"upon it "than he had been aware of."It had "been treated in such a manner by some of the French economists,occasionally by Montesquieu,and,among our own writers,by Dr.Franklin,Sir James Steuart,Mr.Arthur Young,and Mr.
