conclusion of the first century the population would be one
hundred and twelve millions and the means of subsistence only
equal to the support of thirty-five millions, which would leave a
population of seventy-seven millions totally unprovided for.

A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of some
kind or other in the country that is deserted. For few persons
will leave their families, connections, friends, and native land,
to seek a settlement in untried foreign climes, without some
strong subsisting causes of uneasiness where they are, or the
hope of some great advantages in the place to which they are
going.

But to make the argument more general and less interrupted by
the partial views of emigration, let us take the whole earth,
instead of one spot, and suppose that the restraints to
population were universally removed. If the subsistence for man
that the earth affords was to be increased every twenty-five
years by a quantity equal to what the whole world at present
produces, this would allow the power of production in the earth
to be absolutely unlimited, and its ratio of increase much
greater than we can conceive that any possible exertions of
mankind could make it.

Taking the population of the world at any number, a thousand
millions, for instance, the human species would increase in the
ratio of--1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc. and
subsistence as--1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, etc. In two
centuries and a quarter, the population would be to the means of
subsistence as 512 to 10: in three centuries as 4096 to 13, and