The International Significance of Canadian Resources

the year 1797 Napoleon Buonaparte was successfully engaged in the conquest of Austria, Prussia and Italy. The mad Emperor Paul had just succeeded his equally mad mother Catherine the Great on the Throne of Russia. In England the mad King George III, having succeeded in losing the thirteen Colonies, was enjoying the thirty-seventh year of his reign. It was in this year that an otherwise inoffensive English country clergyman decided to write a book. This was probably the most important event of the year. The clergyman was Robert Malthus; the book, which was published anonymously in 1798, was entitled An on the Principle of Population as it affects the future improvement of Society; with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet and other writers. In his Essay Malthus attacked the prevalent belief in a future age in which humanity would attain the ideal of universal equality, happiness and peace. He asserted that it was a rule of nature that the human population should inevitably increase more rapidly than the means of subsistence, and that, in consequence, perfectibility in the material sense was an idle dream. Unless the growth of population could by some means be checked the future of humanity would be dark indeed. Misery and vice were the only natural checks. In later editions he added that moral restraint might also be developed as an effective means of limitationalthough he never accepted the principle of birth control, which he condemned because of its immorality and because of its tendency to remove a necessary stimulus to industry. He emphasized this argument by the assertion that if it were possible for each married couple to limit by a wish the number of their children, there is certainly reason to fear that the

Political science · Canadian Identity and History · Canadian Policy and Governance · Mining and Resource Management