st and most refined pleasures,' and so
forth; but it should come in as a supplement to self-love. Therefore
we must never admit that men have a strict right to relief. That is to
injure the very essential social force. 'Hard as it may seem in
individual instances, dependent poverty ought to be held
disgraceful.'[275] The spirit of independence or self-help is the one
thing necessary. 'The desire of bettering our condition and the fear
of making it worse, like the _vis medicatrix_ in physics, is the _vis
medicatrix naturae_ in politics, and is continually counteracting the
disorders arising from narrow human institutions.'[276] It is only
because the poor-laws have not quite destroyed it, that they have not
quite ruined the country. The pith of Malthus's teaching is fairly
expressed in his last letter to Senior.[277] He holds that the
improvement in the condition of the great mass of the labouring
classes should be considered as the main interest of society. To
improve their condition, it is essential to impress them with the
conviction that they can do much more for themselves than others can
do for them, and that the _only_ source of permanent improvement is
the improvement of their moral and religious habits. What government
can do, therefore, is to maintain such institutions as may strengthen
the _vis medicatrix_, or 'desire to better our condition,' which
poor-laws had directly tended to weaken. He maintains in his letter to
Senior, that this desire is 'perfectly feeble' compared with the
tendency of the population to increase, and operates in a very slight
degree upon the great mass of the labouring class.[278] Still, he
holds that on the whole the 'preventive checks' have become stronger
relatively to the positive,[279] and, at any rate, all proposals must
be judged by their tendency to strengthen the preventive.

Malthus was not a thoroughgoing supporter of the 'do-nothing'
doctrine. He approved of a national system of education, and of the
early factory acts, though only as applied to infant labour. So, as we
shall see, did all the Utilitarians. The 'individualism,' however, is
not less decided; and leads him to speak as though the elasticity of
population were not merely an essential factor in the social problem,
but the sole principle from which all solutions must be deduced. He is
thus led, as I have tried to show, to a narrow interpretation of his
'moral check.' He is apt to take 'vice' simply as a product o