If these lines are not Mr. Sadler’s, we heartily beg {216}his pardon
for our suspicion--a suspicion which, we acknowledge, ought not to be
lightly entertained of any human being. We can only say that we never
met with them before, and that we do not much care how long it may be
before we meet with them, or with any others like them, again.
The spirit of this work is as bad as its style. We never met with a book
which so strongly indicated that the writer was in a good humour with
himself, and in a bad humour with everybody else; which contained so
much of that kind of reproach which is vulgarly said to be no slander,
and of that kind of praise which is vulgarly said to be no commendation.
Mr. Malthus is attacked in language which it would be scarcely decent to
employ respecting Titus Oates. “Atrocious,” “execrable,” “blasphemous,”
and other epithets of the same kind, are poured forth against that able,
excellent, and honourable man, with a profusion which in the early part
of the work excites indignation, but, after the first hundred pages,
produces mere weariness and nausea. In the preface, Mr. Sadler excuses
himself on the plea of haste. Two-thirds of his book, he tells us, were
written in a few months. If any terms have escaped him which can be
construed into personal disrespect, he shall deeply regret that he had
not more time to revise them. We must inform him that the tone of his
book required a very different apology; and that a quarter of a year,
though it is a short time for a man to be engaged in writing a book, is
a very long time for a man to be in a passion.
The imputation of being in a passion Mr. Sadler will not disclaim. His
is a theme, he tells us, on which “it were impious to be calm;” and he
boasts that, “instead of conforming to the candour of the present age,
he has {217}imitated the honesty of preceding ones, in expressing
himself with the utmost plainness and freedom throughout.” If Mr. Sadler
really wishes that the controversy about his new principle of population
should be carried on with all the license of the seventeenth century, we
can have no personal objections. We are quite as little afraid of a
contest in which quarter shall be neither given nor taken as he can be.
But we would advise him seriously to consider, before he publishes the
promised continuation of his work, whether he be not one of that class
of writers who stand peculiarly in need of the candour which he insults,
and who would have most to fear from that unsparing severity which he
practises and recommends.
There is only one excuse for the extreme acrimony with which this book
is written; and that excuse is but a bad one. Mr. Sadler imagines that
the theory of Mr. Malthus is inconsistent with Christianity, and even
with the purer forms of Deism. Now, even had this been the case, a
greater degree of mildness and self-command than Mr. Sadler has shown
would have been becoming in a writer who had undertaken to defend the
religion of charity. But, in fact, the imputation which has been thrown
on Mr. Malthus and his followers is so absurd as scarcely to deserve
an answer. As it appears, however, in almost every page of Mr. Sadler’s
book, we will say a few words respecting it.