This
is the condition which governs the growth of the population of all
animal species, and, as we have already said, of the savages and
barbarians among the human species. But among civilized men who have
attempted the control of physical nature, and to some extent even the
control of human nature, many other factors enter in to influence both
birth rate and death rate, and so the growth of the population.
Nevertheless, many social thinkers of the past have conceived, as has
already been said, that the growth of population might be reduced to
very simple and definite laws. Among the first who proposed laws
governing population was an English economist, Thomas Robert Malthus,
whose active career coincides with the first quarter of the nineteenth
century. In 1798 Malthus put forth a little book which he entitled _An
Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the future
improvement of society_. This essay went through numerous editions
and revisions, and in it Malthus elaborated his famous economic theory
of the growth of population.
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