“If the great truths on these subjects were more generally circulated, and the lower classes could be convinced that by the laws of nature, independently of any particular institution, except the great one of property, which is absolutely necessary in order to attain any considerable produce, no person has any claim or _right_ on society for subsistence, if his labor will not purchase it, the greatest part of the mischievous declamation on the unjust institutions of society would fall powerless to the ground. If the real causes of their misery were shown to the poor, and they were taught to know how small a part of their present distress was attributable to government, discontent would be far less common.
“Again—Remove all fear from the tyranny or folly of the people, and the tyranny of government could not stand a moment. It would then appear in its proper deformity, without palliation, without pretext, without protection.
“Good governments are chiefly useful to the poorer classes, by giving them a clearer view of the necessity of some preventive check to population. And in despotic governments it is usually found that the checks to population arise more from the sickness and mortality consequent on poverty, than from any such preventive check.”
Mr. Malthus contends that “the most successful supporters of tyranny are without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the poor, and almost all the evils to which society is subject, to human institutions and the iniquity of governments. The falsity of these accusations, and the dreadful consequences that would result from their being generally admitted and acted upon, make it absolutely necessary that they should at all events be resisted: not only on account of the immediate revolutionary horrors to be expected from a movement of the people acting under such impressions, a consideration which must at all times have very great weight, but on account of the extreme probability that such a revolution would soon terminate in a much worse despotism than that which it had destroyed. Whatever may be, therefore, the intention of those indiscriminate accusations against governments, their real effect undoubtedly is to add a weight of talents and principles to the prevailing power which it would never have received otherwise.”