Population and Capital: Being a Course of Lectures Delivered Before the University of Oxford in 1853-4 |
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abundance actual Adam Smith advance afford agricultural animals Archbishop Whately argument become capital cause Census checks civilisation commodities condition consequence consumed consumption crease creatures cultivation diminishing doctrine doubled duction earth effect employed employment England evil fact famine fecundity illustration improvement increase faster increase of population industry inhabitants instance instinct J. S. Mill labour land laws of nature Lecture less limit Malthus Malthusian mankind manufactures marriage means of existence means of subsistence ment millions misery moral restraint multiply nations necessary numbers observe operation period physical political economy popu poverty powerful instinct present principle of population production progress prolific proportion Providence race rate of increase reference regard result says sistence social social economy society soil species square mile superfecundity supply suppose tendency to increase theory tion tribes true truth viviparous waste wealth wealth of nations Westminster Review whole writers
Popular passages
Page 207 - For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn. Or busy housewife ply her evening care; No children run to lisp their sire's return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
Page 55 - Necessity, that imperious all-pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it.
Page 55 - There is, in short, no bound to the prolific nature of plants or animals, but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each other's means of subsistence. Was the face of the earth vacant of other plants, it might be gradually sowed and overspread with one kind only, as, for instance, with fennel : and were it empty of other inhabitants, it might, in a few ages, be replenished from one nation only, as, for instance, with Englishmen.
Page 54 - The cause to which I allude is the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it.
Page 163 - There are some sorts of industry, even of the lowest kind, which can be carried on nowhere but in a great town. A porter, for example, can find employment and subsistence in no other place. A village is by much too narrow a sphere for him; even an ordinary market town is scarce large enough to afford him constant occupation.
Page 58 - The rate according to which the productions of the earth may be supposed to increase, it will not be so easy to determine. Of this, however, we may be perfectly certain...
Page 56 - The effects of this check on man are more complicated. Impelled to the increase of his species by an equally powerful instinct, reason interrupts his career, and asks him whether he may not bring beings into the world for whom he cannot provide the means of support.
Page 56 - By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence.
Page 180 - The positive checks to population are extremely various, and include every cause, whether arising from vice or misery, which in any degree contributes to shorten the natural duration of human life.
Page 57 - In the northern states of America, where the means of subsistence have been more ample, the manners of the people more pure, and the checks to early marriages fewer, than in any of the modern states of Europe, the population has been found to double itself, for above a century and a half successively, in less than twenty-five years.