Before I left England, I had read the book of which
you speak. [1] I must confess that it appeared to me exceedingly
illogical. Godwin's and Condorcet's extravagancies were not worth
confuting; and yet I thought that the Essay on "Population" had not
confuted them. Professor Wallace, Derham, and a number of German
statistic and physico-theological writers had taken the same ground,
namely, that population increases in a geometrical, but the accessional
nutriment only in arithmetical ratio--and that vice and misery, the
natural consequences of this order of things, were intended by
providence as the counterpoise. I have here no means of procuring so
obscure a book, as Rudgard's; but to the best of my recollection, at the
time that the Fifth Monarchy enthusiasts created so great a sensation in
England, under the Protectorate, and the beginning of Charles the
Second's reign, Rudgard, or Rutgard (I am not positive even of the name)
wrote an Essay to the same purpose, in which he asserted, that if war,
pestilence, vice, and poverty, were wholly removed, the world could not
exist two hundred years, etc. Seiffmilts, [2] in his great work
concerning the divine order and regularity in the destiny of the human
race, has a chapter entitled a confutation of this idea; I read it with
great eagerness, and found therein that this idea militated against the
glory and goodness of God, and must therefore be false,--but further
confutation found I none!--This book of Seiffmilts has a prodigious
character throughout Germany; and never methinks did a work less deserve
it.
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