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Malthus expressed the opinion that only in such a land of unlimited means of living could population.
Moreover, modern economists, while accepting in the main the general tenor of Malthus's theory of population, would not agree with his statement of it.
In fact, the way in which abundance, increase of numbers, want, increase of deaths, succeed each other in the natural economy, when reason does not intervene, had been fully explained by Joseph Townsend in his Dissertation on the Poor Laws (1786) which was known to Malthus.
It would seem, then, that what has been ambitiously called Malthus's theory of population, instead of being a great discovery as some have represented it, or a poisonous novelty, as others have considered it, is no more than a formal enunciation of obvious, though sometimes neglected, facts.
An English version of the Lettres a Malthus appears in vol.