ABSTRACT
Arnold accepts Malthus’s ideas as completely factual, and over a number of pages he sets out to prove that the high birth rate amongst Lancashire’s workers illustrated Malthus’s point that the poor should not be encouraged to have children. Arnold couples the usual religious rectitude with the need to be aware of the complexity of society, a hint that though this writer is always concerned about the propertied classes and how they were taxed, he is developing a modern understanding of the complexity of and need for the welfare state. The doctrines of Malthus were received, as the laws of political economy have generally been received by the multitude.
