Collation: [2], V [1], IX [1], 396. Title page a cancel (see front cover illustration). Although there was perhaps no entirely original idea in Malthus's first Essay, it carried immeasurable significance as a reasoned response to the egalitarianism of Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Jusstice (1793) and the Marquis de Condorcet's Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progrès de l'Espirit Humain (1795), forming a dramatically pessimistic contribution to the debate on 'the future improvement of society'. The two principles that population cannot increase without the means of subsistence, and that population will increase when the means of subsistence are available, were treated by Malthus as truths already evident from the writing of David Hume, Adam Smith and Robert Wallace. But from these principles he derived the more personal and heterodox synthesis that population was kept within manageable proportions by a series of natural checks which entailed a life of vice and misery for the poor. These checks were a necessary mechanism since the geometrical power of population to grow succeeded the arithmetic power of improvements in agriculture to increase provisions. It was a matter not of reactionary triumph, but genuine sadness to Malthus that for this reason no society could guarantee equality to all its members.