Men would offer to work for a bare subsistence, and the rearing of families would be checked by sickness and misery.

On the contrary, when this fund was increasing fast, when it was great in proportion to the number of claimants, it would be divided in much larger shares.

No man would exchange his labour without receiving an ample quantity of food in return.

Labourers would live in ease and comfort, and would consequently be able to rear a numerous and vigorous offspring.
On the state of this fund, the happiness, or the degree of misery, prevailing among the lower classes of people in every known state at present chiefly depends.

And on this happiness, or degree of misery, depends the increase, stationariness, or decrease of population.
And thus it appears, 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 the main-spring of the great machine.
In the supposition I have made, I have undoubtedly taken the increase of population smaller, and the increase of produce greater, than they really would be.