 Population growth, providing more hands as well as the demand for more corn and cloth, was viewed as the primary source of economic prosperity for about two centuries, until the alarm bell sounded by Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Whereas for Hobbes, might made right, Locke grounded property rights in consent and the virtue of industriousness; those who enclosed and cultivated the land created a right to its yield that did no harm to one’s neighbors (see Sreenivasan 1995). Because children are one’s property, this also legitimated the transfer of accumulated wealth via inheritance. Over time, inequality became salient, as some owned land while others, less fortunate, were compelled to enter into a wage contract to earn their bread and ale. Locke, however, underscored the volitional nature of these arrangements, forged on equal terms and by “tacit consent”.