ABSTRACT
Malthus takes a survey of human progress, if not from brute to savage, at least from savage to citizen. He shows how the rude and simple positive checks become complicated with the preventive; and he leads up from barbarism to civilization till one find his/herself in a society where the citizens think less of check than of chief end, and less of self-sacrifice than of self-devotion, to some cause or person, and even the inferior members act, at worst, from mixed motives, containing good as well as evil. As savages are entirely innocent of sanitary science, the dirt of their persons and their houses deprives them of the advantage which attends a thinly-peopled country, comparative exemption from pestilence. The slaughter of German barbarians by Marius, Caesar, Drusus, Tiberius, Germanicus did not prevent the reappearance of hordes of invaders a generation later. Under Diocletian the barbarians, finding the conquest of Rome too much for them, slaughtered one another in frontier wars.
