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.