the success of their misrepresentations and calumnies; and, while they are accusing others of revolutionary designs, let them beware how they themselves set on foot that which no human power may be able to arrest or to controul. SWEDEN. KING AND BERNADOTTE.—. This unfortunate personage, of whom history will have hereafter to speak, having got on board of the Tartarus, from the port of Riga, sometime ago, and having on the 15th instant landed at Yarmouth, under the title of Count Gortone, the same under which he travelled on the 'continent, arrived on the 22nd instant in London, of which arrival the following account was given, in the news-papers of the 23rd. "On Wednesday evening the King "of Sweden arrived at the Clarendon "Hotel. The Marquis Wellesley being "out of town at Windsor, Mr. Culling "Smith (Under Secretary of State) im mediately waited on his Majesty, with "whom he remained for some time. His "Swedish Majesty looks extremely well. "He is of a dark complexion, with a "Roman nose, and is about five feet six the purchasers of amusement; the former are driven from the scene; and the wretched showman, thus left unsupported, offers his commodity for sale at the Old Prices.It does not require any supernatural powers to foresee what all this must lead to, unless great wisdom be brought to hear upon the accumulating difficulties of the times.-The truth is, that all the pains imaginable have been taken; that all possible means have been used, by those, who, with unblushing impudence, still call themselves the exclusive friends of order and of law; all means that can be named have been used by this description of persons to prevent the people from believing that Bank notes have depreciated. This is a fact, for having openly and explicitly acknowledged which, even a Committee of the House of Commons have been much more violently attacked than the House was attacked by Sir Francis Burdett. This is a fact, which, if frankly declared to the people, would, at once, make them clearly perceive the reasonableness of a rise in the price of all things; and, it would, of course, reconcile them to that rise, and prevent all the heart-burnings and contests and violences" inches in height."What is intended to be finally apprehended from their not seeing the real cause of what they complain of--But, this fact will, I suppose, be disguised from the people at large as long as possible. How long that may be I do not pretend to say. It is the immediate interest of a great many persons to disguise it; to deny the fact; to confuse the question; and, if nothing better can be done, to misrepresent the views, to abuse, to calumniate, all those who evince a desire to make the truth known. Hence all the vile and venal attacks, in the Morning Post, upon the Builion Committee, who, I have no scruple to say, and am prepared to prove it, have done more serve the country, than all the other Committees and Commissions, whose inquiries} ever came under my examination. Yet, should I not at all wonder, to see the Members of this Committee held forth to the uninformed and unreflecting part of the community, as the advocates for high prices, as the co-adjutors of the bakers and the meal-while, contrary to all the predictions of men; and, of course, as meriting the same fate. Let those who correspond with, who write for, who abet and buy and read the Morning Post and other prints of the sort, reflect, however, upon the consequences before it be too late. Let them reflect upon the probable consequences of to be done by our government, in this case, we shall, probably, soon hear; but, I cannot refrain from expressing my hope, that there will be no grant of money made to this personage out of the taxes, at a time when our resources are so much wanted for our own defence. Besides, such a measure might increase the obstacles in the way of negociation for peace. I have not heard, that any such grant was in contemplation; but, I could not let pass this opportunity of expressing my opinion upon the subject. We are still, I believe, at peace with Sweden. I have never heard any thing to the contrary and, unless we mean to make war for the recovery of this sovereign's throne, it will, in my opinion, be very inconsistent, to support him out of the public revenues; because, if he has such support it must be given him as an ally, and of course as a king: for, in no other character can we consider him as an ally.In the mean our venal writers, who never listen to rea son, who never consult any thing but their wishes; contrary to all their bold foretel lings; and, as it were for the express purpose of throwing ridicule upon their wheedling of the Swedes to reject BERNADOTTE, and upon their fulminations against " them if they did not reject him, he has ar- Printer and Publisher of this paper, who rived in Sweden, and has been received in are now in this prison. But, I shall not the most flattering manner, according to the fail to take the matter up another time, accounts from Stockholm, under the date and to point out the curious circumstances of the 5th and 6th instant." Friday that mark this publication, especially as "November 2, which was fixed upon for relating to the proprietorship of it. There "the solemn entry of his Royal Highness were Companies enough at the time of the "the Crown Prince into this town, he South Sea Bubble; but, in the whole list, "proceeded from Dreininghoim to the I do not find any Company for publishing royal country seat, New Haga, whence a news-paper, and, by means of the numer "he was attended to this capital by Baron ousness of the proprietors, screening the "Hamilton, Lord High Chamberlain, and whole from that responsibility, towards indi"arrived here at two o'clock in the after-viduals, towards the public, and towards noon. On his reaching the Custom-the state, that the proprietors of all other "house, he was received by the Governor General, the Magistrates, and the "five Eiders of the City; and a grand entry was made. After which he was "introduced to the King, and dined in public. On the 9th of October his "Royal Highness the Crown Prince of "Sweden solemnly professed the tenets and principles of the pare Lutheran religion, and answered in the affirmative "several questions which were put to "him for that purpose by the Arch" bishop Doctor Lindelon. Stockholm, "Nov, 6. The day before yesterday his "Majesty adopted his Royal Highness "the Crown Prince, in the Session-hall of "the States of the Realm, for his son, "under the name of Charles John, which "name his Royal Highness is henceforth The to bear.". It may be very mortifying to us to behold this; but, to rail at the Swedes is perfectly useless. thing is done. Another fleet is, in effect, added to the navy of France. This is another consequence proceeding from the Anti-Jacobin war. Our statesmen from 1793 to 1800, could not think of a peace with any thing but a regular government in France. We have now got a regular government there to our hearts' comment; and, by a strange revolution in human affairs, the only friends and allies (except the King of Sicily) that we now have, present in their dominions, at least, are the people of Spain and Portugal, the former of whom have declared, that a Representative Assembly shall be styled His Majesty, and that the Executive Government shall be considered as their inferiors. This is not amiss at the end of 17 years of war against Jacobins and Levellers.. THE DAY NEWSPAPER.Want of room prevents me from making some remarks upon a State Prosecution against the public prints are liable. It would be curious to see how many of the bitterest enemies of the liberty of the press, and of public liberty of all sorts, have thought it worth their while to partake in the profits (if any) of this paper; and, it would be equally curious to know, who it was that went to the Siamp Office and swore themselves to be the proprietors of this paper. KING'S ILLNESS. From the official reports, which shall appear in my next, it would seem, that little alteration has taken place in the state of this unhappy malady. WM. COBBETT. State Prison, Newgate, Friday, November 23, 1810. MR. MALTHUS AND THE EDINBURGH REVIEWERS. SIR,-The title page of a pamphlet which I published some time ago, and part of which appeared in the Political Register in answer to the Essay on Population, having been lately prefixed to an article in the Edinburgh Review as a pretence for making a formal eulogy on that work, I take the liberty to request your insertion of a few queries, which may perhaps bring the dispute between Mr. Malthus's admirers and his opponents, to some sort of issue. It will, however, first of all be proper to say something of the article in the Review. The writer of the article accuses the "anonymous" writer of the reply to the Essay, of misrepresenting and misunderstanding his author, and undertakes to give a statement of the real principles of Mr. Malthus's work. He at the same time informs us for whom this statement is intended, namely, for those who are not likely ever to read the work itself, and who take their opinions on all sub losophy, proves absolutely nothing with jects moral, political, and religious, from the periodical reports of the Edinburgh Review. For my own part, what I have to say will be addressed to those who have read Mr. Malthus's work, and who may be disposed to form some opinion of their own on the subject.-The inost remarkable circumstance in the Review is, that it is a complete confession of the force of the arguments which have been brought against the Essay. The defence here set up of it may indeed be regarded as the euthanasia of that performance. For in what docs this defence consist but in an adoption, point by point, of the principal objections and limitation, which have been offered to Mr. Malthus's system; and which being thus ingeniously applied to gloss its defects, the Reviewer charges those who had pointed them out with mis-habits, the state of civilization, commerce, representing and vilifying the author? or agriculture, the improvements in art or In fact, the advocates of this celebrated science, and a variety of other causes quite work do not at present defend its doc- distinct from the sole mechanical princi trines, but deny them. The only resource ple of population. And, this Sir, is what left them is that of screening its fallacies the Reviewer imposes on his unsuspecting from the notice of the public by raising a readers as the sum and substance, the true cry of misrepresentation against those scope and effect of Mr. Malthus's reasonwho attempt to expose them, and by holding. It is in truth an almost literal recapi ing a mask of flimsy affectation over the real and distinguishing features of the work. Scarcely a glimpse remains of the striking peculiarities of Mr. Malthus's reasoning, his bold paradoxes dwindle by refined gradations into mere harmless commonplaces, and what is still more extraordinary, an almost entire coincidence of sentiment is found to subsist between the author of the essay and his most zealous opponents, if the ignorance and prejudices of the latter would but allow them to see it. Indeed the Edinburgh Reviewer gives pretty broad hints that neither friends nor foes have ever understood much of the matter, and kindly presents his readers for the first time, with the true key to this much admired production. He accordingly proceeds with considerable self-complacency to translate the language of the essay into the dialect of the Scotch school of economy, to put quite on one side the author's geometrical and arithmetical ratias, which had wrought such wonders, to state that Mr. Malthus never pretended to make any new discovery, and to quote a passage from Adam Smith, which suggested the plan of his work; to shew that this far-fanied work which has been so idly magnified, and so unjustly decried as overturning all the commonly received axioms of political phi tulation of the chief topics insisted on in the Reply to the Essay, which the Reviewer seems silently to regard as a kind of necessary supplement to that work-In this account it is evident, both that Mr. Malthus's pretensions as an original dis coverer are given up by the Reviewer, and that his obnoxious and extravagant conclusions are carefully suppressed. Now with regard to the general principle of the disproportion between the power of increase in population, and in the means of subsistence, and the necessity of provid ing some checks, moral or physical, to the former, in order to keep it on a level with the means of subsistence, I have never in any instance called in question either of these important and radical facts," which it is the business of Mr. M.'s work to illustrate. All that I undertook in the Reply to the Essay was to disprove Mr. Malthus's claim to the discovery of these facts, and to shew that he had drawn some very false and sophistical conclusions from them, which do not appear in the article in the Review. As far therefore as relates to the Edinburgh Reviewers, and their readers, I might consider my aim as accomplished, and leave Mr. Malthus's system and pretensions in the hands of these friendly critics, who will hardly set the seal of their authority on either one or " the other, till they have reduced both to something like their own ordinary standard. But against this I have several reasons. First, as I never looked upon Mr. Malthus as a man of no mark or likeli"hood," I should be sorry to see him dandled into insignificance, and made a mere puppet in the hands of the Reviewers. Secondly, I in some measure owe it to myself to prove that the objections I have brought against his system are not the phantoms of my own imagination. Thirdly, Mr. Matthus's work cannot be considered as enitely superseded by the account of it in the Review, as there are, no doubt, many persons who will still take their opimen of Mr. Malthus's doctrines from his own writings, and abide by what they find imehe text as good authority and sound argument, though not sanctioned in the commentary.I will therefore proceed to put the questions I at first proposed as the best means I can devise for determining, both what the contents of Mr. Malthus's work really are, and to what degree of credit they are entitled, or how far they are true or false, original or borrowed Query 1. Whether the real source of Mr. Malthus's Essay is not to be found in the long extract from Wallace's " Various Prospects of Mankind," &c. quoted in the second letter of the Reply to the Essay? Or whether Wallace has not both stated the principle of the disproportion between the unlimited power of increase in population, and the limited power of increase in the means of subsistence, which is the corner-stone of the Essay, and whether he has not drawn the very same inference from it that Mr. Malthuз has done, viz. that vice and misery are necessary to keep population down to the level of the means of subsistence?-2. Whether the chapter in Wallace, written expressly to prove these two points (or, in other words, to shew that the principle of population is necessarily incompatible with any great degree of improvement in government or morals) does not throw considerably more light on the history of Mr. Malthus's work, the first edition of which was written expressly to prove the same 'points, than the passage from Adam Smith, which the Reviewer says he has heard first gave rise to the Essay, but which Mr. M. might have read a hundred times over, without once dreaming either of his principle or his conclusion?-3. Whether it is probable that the Reviewer himself would have made so light of Mr. Malthus's pre " tensions to originality on the mere strength of these vague, hearsay obligations to Adam Smith, if he had not been apprised of his real obligations to others, which he perhaps keeps in reserve, in case any indiscreet admirer of the Essay should resent the petulance with which the Reviewer has disclaimed "all pretensions to discovery" on the part of the author?— 4. Whether the idea of an arithmetical and geometrical series, by which Mr. Malthus has been thought to have furnished the precise rule or calculus of the dis proportion between food and population, is not, strictly speaking, inapplicable to the subject; inasmuch as in new and unoccupied countries the quantity of food may be made to increase nearly in the same proportion as population, and in all old and well cultivated countries must be stationary or nearly so? Whether therefore this mode of viewing the subject has not tended as much to confound as to illustrate the question, and to divert the mind from the real source of the only necessary distinction between food and population, viz. the want of sufficient room for the former to grow in, a grain of corn as long as it has room to increase and multiply, in fact propagating its species much faster even than a man?-5. Whether the argument borrowed from Wallace, and constituting the chief scope and tenour of the first edition of the Essay, which professed to overturn all schemes of human perfectibility and Utopian forms of government from the sole principle of population, does not involve a plain contradiction ;-both these authors, first of all, supposing or taking for granted a state of society in which the most perfect order, wisdom, virtue, and happiness shall prevail, and then endeavouring to shew that all these advantages would only hasten their own ruin, and end in famine, confusion, and unexampled wretchedness, in consequence of taking away the only checks to excessive population, vice, and misery? Whether this objection does not suppose mankind in a state of the most perfect reason to be utterly blind to the consequences of the unrestrained indulgence of their appetites, and with the most perfect wisdom and virtue to regulate all their actions, not to have the slightest command over their animal passions? There is nothing, I believe, in any of the visionary schemes of human perfection so idle as this objec tion brought against them, which has no more connection with "the reasonings of considers as in effect none at all?-10. Whether, consistently with this formal acknowledgment, and virtual rejection of the influence of moral causes, the general tendency of Mr. M.'s system is not to represent the actual state of man in society, as nothing better than a blind struggle between vice and misery, and the principle of population, the effects of which are just as mechanical as the ebbing and flowing of the tide, and to bury all other motives, ali virtue, wisdom, and l berty, under a heap of misapplied facts? «Godwin, Condorcet," &c. than with the not stand as they originally stood, as false Millennium.-6. Whether, in order to give in fact as they are idle and contradictory some colour of plausibility to his argu- in reasoning? Whether, indeed, it was ment, and to prove that the highest de. likely that Mr. Malthus would give up the gree of wisdom and virtue could be of no sweeping conclusions of his first Essay, avail in keeping down the principle of the fruits of his industry, and pledges of population, Mr. Malthus did not set out his success, without much reluctance; or with assuming this principle, or the im- in such a manner as not to leave the genepulse to propagate the species as a law of ral plan of his work full of inconsistencies, nature of the same order and cogency as and almost unintelligible ?➡9. Whether, that of satisfying the cravings of hunger, for example, in treating of the durability so that reason having no power over of a perfect form of government, or state it, vice and misery must be the ne- of society, Mr. Malthus has "not sicklied cessary consequences, and only possible" over the subject with the same pale and checks to population?-7. Whether this "jaundiced cast of thought," by suppos original view of the subject did not una ing vice and misery to be the only effec voidably lead to the most extravagant tual checks to population, and in his te conclusions, not only by representing the nacity on this his old and favourite subtotal removal of all vice and misery as the ject, has not formally challenged his opgreatest evil that could happen to the ponents to point out any other, "except world, but (what is of more consequence" indeed" (he adds, recollecting himself) than this speculative paradox) by throw-"moral restraint," which, however, he ing a stigma on all subordinate improvements or plans of reform, as so many clauses or sections of the same general principle? Whether the quantity of vice and misery necessary to keep population down to the level of the means of subsistence, being left quite undetermined by the author, the old barriers between vice and virtue, good and evil, were not broken down, and a perfect latitude of choice allowed between forms of government or modes of society, according to the temper of the times, or the taste of individuals, only that vice and misery being always-11. Whether, instead of accounting for the safe side, the presumption would be in favour of the most barbarous, ignorant, enslaved, and profligate? Whether the stumbling-block thus thrown in the way of those who aimed at any improvement in social institutions, does not sufficiently account for the alarm and opposition which Mr. Malthus's work excited on the one hand, and for the cordiality and triumph with which it was received on the other? And, lastly, whether this view of the question, which is all in which the Es-ple of population, and whether he does say differs from the most common place not treat with the utmost contempt all disquisition on the subject, is not palpably, those, who, like the Edinburgh Reviewer, and by the author's own confession, false, not being in the secret of "the grinding sophistical, and unfounded?-8. Whether "law of necessity," had superficially con the additional principle of moral restraint, cluded that political, moral, and artificial admitted in the second and following edi- causes were of any considerable weight in tions of the Essay as one effectual, and as determining the welfare of mankind? the only desirable means of checking po- were to be wished that the author, instead pulation, does not at once overturn all the of tampering with his subject, and alterparadoxical conclusions of the author re-nately holding out concessions and then specting the state of man in society, and whether nearly all these conclusions do the different degrees of happiness, plenty, populousness, &c. in different countries, or in the same country at different periods, from good or bad government, from the vicissitudes of manners, civilization, and knowledge, according to the statement in the Edinburgh Review, Mr. Malthus does not expressly and repeatedly declare, that political institutions are but as the dust in the balance compared with the inevitable consequences of the princi recalling them, had made one bold and honest effort to get rid of the bewildering |