He suggested that to remove the poverty of the lower classes all parish-laws should be abolished, the wages of the agricultural labourers should be increased to the level of wages of labourers in trade and manufacturing, and country work-houses must be established for the cases of extreme distress where a person can do a day's work at market price.

In the views of Malthus, societies by their very nature are divided into unequal classes: upper classes and the labourers. Between them the misery and vice caused by rapid population growth are observed mainly by the labourers.

…that a society constituted according to the most beautiful form that imagination can conceive, with benevolence for its moving, principle, instead of self-love, and with every evil disposition in all its members corrected by reason and not force, would, from the inevitable laws of nature, and not from any original depravity of man, in a very short period, degenerate into a society, constructed upon a plan not essentially different from that which prevails in every known state at present; I mean, a society divided into a class of proprietors and a class of labourers, and with self-love for the main-spring of the great machine.

EVALUATION OF MALTHUSIAN THEORY

Malthus was heavily criticised for his pessimistic ideas. He revised his essay six times and by the time of last revision he had become more flexible and optimistic: he had accepted that growth of education and awareness among the masses may lead to population control. The main charges against Malthus are as follows:

• There is no empirical basis of his laws of population and subsistence.

• His theory became popular simply because after the French revolution it attempted to divert people's attention towards population growth while the social institutions and unequal access to resources were the major reasons behind poverty and unemployment. Thus it helped to legitimize the capitalist system.