nor income but to withdraw from life by suicide, unless he
prefers to be driven from it by starvation: such is, on the one
hand, the law of our existence; such is, on the other, the
consequence of property; and M. Rossi has taken altogether too
much trouble to justify the good sense of Malthus on this point.
I suspect, indeed, that M. Rossi, in making so lengthy and loving
an apology for Malthus, intended to recommend political economy
in the same way that his fellow-countryman Machiavel, in his book
entitled "The Prince," recommended despotism to the
admiration of the world. In pointing out misery as the necessary
condition of industrial and commercial absolutism, M. Rossi seems
to say to us: There is your law, your justice, your political
economy; there is property.

But Gallic simplicity does not understand artifice; and it would
have been better to have said to France, in her immaculate
tongue: The error of Malthus, the radical vice of political
economy, consists, in general terms, in affirming as a definitive
state a transitory condition,-- namely, the division of society
into patricians and proletaires; and, particularly, in saying
that in an organized, and consequently solidaire, society, there
may be some who possess, labor, and consume, while others have
neither possession, nor labor, nor bread. Finally Malthus, or
political economy, reasons erroneously when seeing in the faculty
of indefinite reproduction--which the human race enjoys in
neither greater nor less degree than all animal and vegetable
species--a permanent danger of famine; whereas it is only
necessary to show the necessity, and consequently the existence,
of a law of equilibrium between population and production.