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Garrett Hardin's famous essay on the tragedy of the commons is widely reproduced online, but here's a treat you won't be able to find anywhere else: the original text of William Forster Lloyd's "Two Lectures on the Checks to Population".
[edit] Lecture 1
I proposed to consider, in this and in the following Lecture, the checks to population. We have seen that the increase of food cannot keep pace with the theoretical rate of increase of population. Since, therefore, food is essential to the existence of man, it is obvious, that, with reference to the increase of numbers actually possible, the theoretical power of multiplication can be of little moment, and that, whatever be its extent, the actual excess of the births above the deaths must be determined according to the inferior progression of the supply of food.
In considering therefore the condition of any country in respect of its population, we have two rates of increase to which to direct our attention; viz. first, the theoretical rate, or, in other words, as I explained in a former Lecture, that amount of the annual excess of the births above the deaths, which would be possible, and might be expected to have a real existence, were the supply of food abundant, and were no part of the people cramped in their circumstances: and secondly, the actual rate of increase, or the annual excess of the births above the deaths really occurring.
It is necessary, I say, to attend to these two rates of increase, because the difference between them is the measure of the amount of existences repressed, and it is in the mode by which the repression is effected, that the happiness or misery of every people is essentially involved. The superabundant tendency to increase must of necessity be repressed by some one mode of repression or another [note: The consideration of the resource of emigration is at present waived]. So far is absolutely unavoidable. But there are material differences in the possible modes of repression, and it is of importance to ascertain the circumstances, which favour them respectively, and tend to give the predominance to any one of them in particular.
The modes of repression are the same as what have been called the checks to population. It is obvious that the theoretical rate of increase, (I didn't finish this, and it kinda looks bad....