THE MALTHUSIAD: FANTASIA ECONOMICA 23 
which saves the situation, and, whatever my critics may say, 
saves it without vice or misery.” 
Y. E.: “Mr. Malthus, if you had said all this ut first, would 
your book have made such a noise in the world? You get the 
credit of having roused civilized humanity from its visions of 
an Earthly Paradise by showing the existence of something in 
human nature fatal to all paradises. Writers before you had 
the idea of it in their brain, but you got it into other people’s 
bones.® You would hardly have done so, sir, if you had made 
all your corrections in the proofs of your first essay; you wisely 
kept them for the second.” 
SHADE: “My exaggeration was not intentional. I honestly did 
not see in 1798 what I saw in 1803. You speak of corrections. 
The introduction of moral restraint was the one important cor- 
rection. Corrections and additions are bound to be legion in 
every scientific inquiry. We get more and more of the truth 
as we go on, but all grows from the same root; there is no 
recantation of first principles. I am prepared to hear from you 
that the process had gone on in your day as in mine.” 
Y. E.: “I shall try to follow your well-known example, sir, 
and be polite even in telling of things disagreeable. The process 
as you describe it assuredly went on within your own book in 
the successive editions of it; and I take for granted that you 
know all about your critics till the 29th of December, 1834, when 
you left us. If you had been Professor at Cambridge instead of 
Haileybury for thirty years, lecturing not to cadets of the East 
India Company but to future professors, you might have founded 
something like a school. As it was, you reached the highly trained 
and learned and scientific men only through your books and 
their letters and occasional visits to you. Other economists, like 
Ricardo, got fruitful hints from you on Rent and less lucky ones 
on Wages and Value. You lived to see the Philosophical Radi- 
cals put you into their creed and calendar. You lived to see 
your maxims embodied for good or ill in a New Poor Law, 1834. 
You helped statisticians to draw together (in that same year) 
into a Statistical Society, and you will be glad to know that the 
sald Society still exists and occasionally studies Births, Mar- 
riages and Deaths just as you would have desired. You had 
* Stokes quoted by A. Schuster, Nature, Feb., 1925, p. 305, on the dis- 
covery of the Rontgen rays.