f this kind of spur to industry be
removed, if the idle and the negligent are placed upon the same footing
with regard to their credit, and the future support of their wives and
families, as the active and industrious, can we expect to see men exert
that animated activity in bettering their condition which now forms the
master spring of public prosperity? If an inquisition were to be
established to examine the claims of each individual and to determine
whether he had or had not exerted himself to the utmost, and to grant
or refuse assistance accordingly, this would be little else than a
repetition upon a larger scale of the English poor laws and would be
completely destructive of the true principles of liberty and equality.

But independent of this great objection to these establishments, and
supposing for a moment that they would give no check to productive
industry, by far the greatest difficulty remains yet behind.

Were every man sure of a comfortable provision for his family, almost
every man would have one, and were the rising generation free from the
'killing frost' of misery, population must rapidly increase. Of this Mr
Condorcet seems to be fully aware himself, and after having described
further improvements, he says:

But in this process of industry and happiness, each generation will be
called to more extended enjoyments, and in consequence, by the physical
constitution of the human frame, to an increase in the number of
individuals. Must not there arrive a period then, when these laws,
equally necessary, shall counteract each other? When the increase of
the number of men surpassing their means of subsistence, the necessary
result must be either a continual diminution of happiness and
population, a movement truly retrograde, or, at least, a kind of
oscillation between good and evil? In societies arrived at this term,
will not this oscillation be a constantly subsisting cause of
periodical misery? Will it not mark the limit when all further
amelioration will become impossible, and point out that term to the
perfectibility of the human race which it may reach in the course of
ages, but can never pass?

He then adds,

There is no person who does not see how very distant such a period is
from us, but shall we ever arrive at it? It is equally impossible to
pronounce for or against the future realization of an event which
cannot take place but at an era when the human race will have attained
improvements, of