Rereading the original paper I can't find anything objectionable. It's still insightful, applicable, and worthy of being a classic piece of scholarship. Maybe t

Rereading the original paper I can't find anything objectionable. It's still insightful, applicable, and worthy of being a classic piece of scholarship. Maybe the man was racist but there's nothing overtly racist about the article itself unless one willfully infers intent based on words like "breeding". Problem being, nothing in the paper suggests that he didn't mean it to also apply to whites or to his own nation; rather, the obvious reading is that it applies universally, subject only to the institution of his recommended mitigations--education, property rights, legal and administrative prohibitions, etc. What the paper gets wrong, if anything, is that populations can and do stabilize--even begin to shrink--much earlier than ever anticipated. More importantly, this occurs not in the face of disease or hardship but seemingly paradoxically because of wealth and selfishness. But that was never self-evident judging by how universally unchecked population explosion was assumed back then and how difficult the reality remains for people to appreciate even today. We only understood this after it had already come to pass in nations like Japan, and in general scholarship only relatively recently has it become presumed as a possible and natural outcome in the due course of industrialization. This also wouldn't be the first time that a scholar put forth a remarkably simple and accurate statement of natural dynamics and then subsequently failed to apply their own argument with sufficient rigor and restraint, resulting in suspect secondary conclusions.