THE MALTHUSIAD: FANTASIA ECONOMICA 
James Bonar 
Ir the tables have been turned on Adam Smith since his first 
edition in 1776, what of Malthus since 1798? He might seem 
less vulnerable as presenting a smaller surface to attack, a 
single contention instead of a system of doctrines,—more vulner- 
able on the other hand as putting all his eggs into one basket. 
It may prove that what is obsolete in him is just the eggs in 
the other baskets, which he could not refrain from filling, indeed, 
as a professor, was bound to fill according to his faculties. 
Suppose him to appear in a dream to some Young Economist 
of our century, demanding “Am I obsolete or am I not?” 
The other might answer: 
“Mr. Malthus, if we believe your earlier opponents and some 
of your later, you were obsolete from the first, or at least as 
soon as Mr. Godwin found that you were after all worth powder 
and shot, and wrote his Enquiry concerning Population, 1820.” 
The Shade might reply: 
“We there as you here are bound to speak nothing but good of 
those who have left the world, and, though at one time I held 
Godwin an indifferent amateur in statistical study, I allow that 
he gave me a hint from which I profited. It helped me to rid 
myself of early raw exaggerations; and by the time he and 
Booth and Coleridge, to say nothing of Hazlitt, had said their 
say, I had already gone beyond them and escaped their hands.” 
Y. E.: “Is it true that you made population increase faster 
than food?” 
Suape: “Even in my first fine careless rapture I never made 
it work miracles. I said it was always tending to increase beyond 
the food, and trying hard to do it, and it was repressed and 
kept down by vice and misery, or the fear of misery. In my 
second edition (1803) I allowed for a third power, moral restraint, 
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