Читать книгу A Visit to the Philippine Islands - Bowring John - Страница 7

In the last generation a wonderful sensation was produced by the propagation of the great Malthusian discovery – the irresistible, indisputable, inexorable truth – that the productive powers of the soil were less and less able to compete with the consuming demands of the human race; that while population was increasing with the rapidity of a swift geometrical progression, the means of providing food lagged with the feebleness of a slow arithmetical advance more and more behind; that the seats at nature’s table – rich and abundant though it was – were being abundantly filled, and that there was no room for superfluous and uninvited guests; in a word, to use the adopted formula, that population was pressing more and more upon subsistence, and that the results must be increasing want, augmenting misery, and a train of calamities boundless as the catalogue of the infinite forms of mortal wretchedness.