"The Law of Population; a Treatise in Six Books, in Disproof
of the Superfecundity of Human Beings, and developing the
real Principle of their Increase". By Michael Thomas
Sadler, M.P. 2 volumes 8vo. London: 1830.
We did not expect a good book from Mr Sadler: and it is well that we did
not; for he has given us a very bad one. The matter of his treatise is
extraordinary; the manner more extraordinary still. His arrangement is
confused, his repetitions endless, his style everything which it ought
not to be. Instead of saying what he has to say with the perspicuity,
the precision, and the simplicity in which consists the eloquence proper
to scientific writing, he indulges without measure in vague, bombastic
declamation, made up of those fine things which boys of fifteen admire,
and which everybody, who is not destined to be a boy all his life, weeds
vigorously out of his compositions after five-and-twenty. That portion
of his two thick volumes which is not made up of statistical tables,
consists principally of ejaculations, apostrophes, metaphors,
similes,--all the worst of their respective kinds. His thoughts are
dressed up in this shabby finery with so much profusion and so little
discrimination, that they remind us of a company of wretched strolling
players, who have huddled on suits of ragged and faded tinsel, taken
from a common wardrobe, and fitting neither their persons nor their
parts; and who then exhibit themselves to the laughing and pitying
spectators, in a state of strutting, ranting, painted, gilded beggary.
"Oh, rare Daniels!" "Political economist, go and do thou likewise!"
"Hear, ye political economists and anti-populationists!" "Population, if
not proscribed and worried down by the Cerberean dogs of this wretched
and cruel system, really does press against the level of the means of
subsistence, and still elevating that level, it continues thus to
urge society through advancing stages, till at length the strong
and resistless hand of necessity presses the secret spring of human
prosperity, and the portals of Providence fly open, and disclose to the
enraptured gaze the promised land of contented and rewarded labour."
These are specimens, taken at random, of Mr Sadler's eloquence. We could
easily multiply them; but our readers, we fear, are already inclined to
cry for mercy.
Much blank verse and much rhyme is also scattered through these volumes,
sometimes rightly quoted, sometimes wrongly,--sometimes good, sometimes
insufferable,--sometimes taken from Shakspeare, and sometimes, for aught
we know, Mr Sadler's own. "Let man," cries the philosopher, "take heed
how he rashly violates his trust;" and thereupon he breaks forth into
singing as follows:
"What myriads wait in destiny's dark womb,
Doubtful of life or an eternal tomb!
'Tis his to blot them from the book of fate,
Or, like a second Deity, create;
To dry the stream of being in its source,
Or bid it, widening, win its restless course;
While, earth and heaven replenishing, the flood
Rolls to its Ocean fount, and rests in God."
If these lines are not Mr Sadler's, we heartily beg 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 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.