BOOK I. THE ESSAY. — CHAPTER I. FIRST THOUGHTS, 1798. — CHAPTER II. SECOND THOUGHTS, 1803. — CHAPTER III. THESES. — CHAPTER IV. THE SAVAGE, BARBARIAN, AND ORIENTAL. — CHAPTER V. NORTH AND MID EUROPE. — CHAPTER VI. FRANCE. — CHAPTER VII. ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND.
1
The Common Caricature—The Essay an Inquiry into the Poverty of
Nations—Godwin’s Political Justice and Enquirer—The Two Postulates
and Conclusions from them—Condorcet’s Sketch of the
Progress of the Human Mind—Organic Perfectibility of Man and its
Obstacles—Historical Context of the Essay—The Crisis—Pitt’s Poor
Bill—Malthus and his Teachers—Success explained—Theology
and Metaphysics—Faults of the Essay—Immediate aim secured.
He was the “best-abused man of the age.” Bonaparte
himself was not a greater enemy of his species. Here
was a man who defended small-pox, slavery, and
child-murder; who denounced soup-kitchens, early
marriage, and parish allowances; who “had the
impudence to marry after preaching against the evils
of a family;” who thought the world so badly
governed that the best actions do the most harm;
who, in short, took all romance out of life and
preached a dull sermon on the threadbare text—“Vanity
of vanities, all is vanity.” Such was the
character of Malthus as described by his opponents.
2If an angry man is probably in the wrong, an
abusive man is certainly so; and, when not one or
two, but one or two thousand are engaged in the
abuse, the certainty amounts to a demonstration.
We may measure the soundness of the victim’s logic
by the violence of the personal attacks made upon
him. For most worldly purposes, to be ignored and
to be refuted are the same thing.
Malthus from the first was not ignored. For thirty
years it rained refutations. The question, as he
stated it, was thoroughly threshed out. The Essay
on Population passed in the author’s lifetime through
six editions (1798, 1803, 1806, 1807, 1817, and
1826); even between the first edition, in 1798, and
the second, in 1803, there were more than a score
of ‘Replies’; and the discussion was carried on in
private correspondence, as well as in public journals
and parliamentary speeches. The case was fully
argued; and no one who fairly considers the extent
of the discussion, and the ability of the disputants,
can fail to believe that we have, in the records of this
controversy, ample materials for forming our own
judgment on the whole question in dispute.
Such a privilege is seldom used. The world
has no time to consult authorities, though it likes
them to be within reach of consultation. When an
author becomes an authority, he too often ceases
to be read, and his doctrines, like current coin,
are worn by use till they lose the clear image
and superscription of the issuer. In this way an
author’s name may come to suggest, not his own
3book, but the current version of his doctrines.
Malthus becomes Malthusianism,—Darwin, Darwinism;
and if Adam Smith’s name were more
flexible he too would become an epithet.[1] As it is,
Adam Smith has left a book which “every one
praises and nobody reads,” Malthus a book which
no one reads and all abuse. The abuse is, fortunately,
not quite unanimous; but it is certain that
Malthus for a long time had an experience worse
than Cassandra’s, for his warnings were disbelieved
without being heard or understood. Miss Martineau,
in her girlhood, heard him denounced “very
eloquently and forcibly by persons who never saw
so much as the outside”[2] of his book. This was in
1816; and when at a later time she inquired about
him for herself, she could never find any one who
had read his book, but scores who could “make
great argument about it and about,” or write sentimental
pamphlets on supposed Malthusian subjects.
This carelessness was not confined to the general
public; it infected the savants. Nothing more
clearly shows how political economy, or at least
one question of it, had descended into the streets
and become a common recreation. Even Nassau
William Senior, perhaps the most distinguished
professor of political economy in his day, confessed
with penitence that he had trusted more to his ears
than to his eyes for a knowledge of Malthusian
doctrine, and had written a learned criticism, not
of the opinion of Mr. Malthus, but of that which
4“the multitudes who have followed and the few who
have endeavoured to oppose” Mr. Malthus, have
assumed to be his opinion.[3]
The “opinion” so imagined by Senior and the
multitude is still the current Malthusianism. A
Malthusian is supposed to forbid all marriage. Mr.
Malthus was supposed to believe that “the desire of
marriage, which tends to increase population, is a
stronger principle than the desire of bettering our
condition, which tends to increase subsistence.”[4] This
meant, as Southey said, that “God makes men and
women faster than He can feed them.” The old
adage was wrong then: Providence does not send
meat where He sends mouths; on the contrary, He
sends mouths wherever He sends meat, so that the
poor can never cease out of the land, for, however
abundant the food, marriage will soon make the
people equally abundant. It is a question of simple
division. A fortune that is wealth for one will not
give comfort to ten, or bare life to twenty. The
moral is, for all about to marry, “Don’t,” and for
all statesmen, “Don’t encourage them.”
This caricature had enough truth in it to save it
from instant detection, and its vitality is due to the
superior ease in understanding, and therefore greater
pleasure in hearing, a blank denial or a blank affirmation
as compared with the necessary qualifications of
a scientific statement. The truth must be told, however,
that Malthus and the rest of the learned world
5were by no means at utter discord. He always
treated a hostile economist as a possible ally. He
was carrying on the work of their common Founder.
In the Essay on Population he was inquiring into the
nature and causes of poverty, as Adam Smith had
inquired into the nature and causes of wealth. But
Malthus himself did not intend the one to be a mere
supplement to the other. He did not approach the
subject from a purely scientific side. He had not
devoted long years of travel and reflection to the preparation
of an economical treatise. Adam Smith had
written his Moral Sentiments seventeen years before
his greater work. When he wrote the latter he had
behind him an academical and literary reputation;
and he satisfied the just expectations of the public
by giving them, in the two quarto volumes of the
Wealth of Nations, his full-formed and completely
digested conclusions and reasonings definitively expressed
(1776). Malthus, on the contrary, gained
his reputation by a bold and sudden stroke, well followed
up. His Essay was an anonymous pamphlet
in a political controversy, and was meant to turn
the light of political economy upon the political
philosophy of the day. Whatever the essay contained
over and above politics, and however far
afield the author eventually travelled in the later
editions, there is no doubt about the first origin of
the essay itself. It was not, as we are sometimes told,
that, being a kind-hearted clergyman, he set himself
to work to inquire whether after all it was right to
increase the numbers of the population without caring
6for the quality of it. In 1798 Malthus was no doubt
in holy orders and held a curacy at Albury; but he
seems never to have been more than a curate. The
Whigs offered him a living in his later years, but he
passed it to his son;[5] and we should be far astray if
we supposed his book no more than the “recreations
of a country parson.” “Parson” was in his case a
title without a rôle and Cobbett’s immortal nickname
is very unhappy.[6] He had hardly more of the parson
than Condillac of the abbé. In 1798 Pitt’s Bill
for extending relief to large families, and thereby
encouraging population, was no doubt before the
country; but we owe the essay not to William Pitt,
but to William Godwin. The changed aspect of the
book in its later editions need not blind us to the
efficient cause of its first appearance.
Thomas Robert Malthus had graduated at Cambridge
as ninth wrangler in the year 1788, in the
twenty-second year of his age. In 1797, after gaining
a fellowship at Jesus College, he happened to spend
some time at his father’s house at Albury in Surrey.
Father and son discussed the questions of the day,
the younger man attacking Jacobinism, the elder
7defending it. Daniel Malthus had been a friend
and executor of Rousseau, and was an ardent believer
in human progress. Robert had written a Whig
tract, which he called The Crisis, in the year of
Pitt’s new loan and Napoleon’s Italian campaign
(1796); but he did not publish it, and his views
were yet in solution. We may be sure the two
men did not spare each other in debate. In the
words of the elder Malthus, Robert then, if at no
other time, “threw little stones” into his garden. An
old man must have the patience of Job if he can look
with calmness on a young man breaking his ideals.
But in this case he at least recognized the strength
of the slinger, and he bore him no grudge, though he
did not live to be won by the concessions of the second
essay (1803). That Robert, on his part, was not wanting
in respect, is shown by an indignant letter, written
in February, 1800, on his father’s death, in reply to
the supposed slight of a newspaper paragraph.[7]
The fireside debates had in that year (1797)
received new matter. William Godwin, quondam
parson, journalist, politician, and novelist, whose
Political Justice was avowedly a “child of the
Revolution,”[8] had written a new book, the Enquirer,
in which many of his old positions were set in a
new light. The father made it a point of honour
to defend the Enquirer; the son played devil’s advocate,
partly from conviction, partly for the sake of
8argument; and, as often happens in such a case,
Robert found his case stronger than he had thought.
Hard pressed by an able opponent, he was led, on
the spur of the moment, to use arguments which had
not occurred to him before, and of which The Crisis
knows nothing. In calmer moments he followed
them up to their conclusions. “The discussion,” he
tells us,[9] “started the general question of the future
improvement of society, and the author at first sat
down with an intention of merely stating his thoughts
to his friend upon paper in a clearer manner than
he thought he could do in conversation.” But the
subject opened upon him, and he determined to
publish. This is the plain story of the publication of
the Essay on Population, reduced to its simplest terms.
At the very time when the best men in both worlds
were talking only of progress, Malthus saw rocks
ahead. French and English reformers were looking
forward to a golden age of perfect equality and
happiness; Malthus saw an irremovable difficulty
in the way, and he refused to put the telescope
to his blind eye.
There had been Cassandras before Malthus, and
even in the same century. Dr. John Bruckner of
Norwich had written in the same strain in his Théorie
du Système Animal, in 1767;[10] and a few years earlier
(in 1761) Dr. Robert Wallace, writing of the Various
Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and Providence, had
9talked of community of goods as a cure for the ills
of humanity, and then had found, very reluctantly,
one fatal objection—the excessive population that
would ensue. Men are always inclined to marry
and multiply their numbers till the food is barely
enough to support them all. This objection had
since Wallace’s time become a stock objection, to
be answered by every maker of Utopias. It was left
for Malthus to show the near approach which this
difficulty makes to absolute hopelessness, and to
throw the burden of proof on the other side. As
the Wealth of Nations altered the standing presumption
in favour of interference to one in favour
of liberty in matters of trade, so the Essay on
Population altered the presumption in favour of the
advocates of progress to a presumption against them.
This may not describe the final result of the essay,
but it is a true account of its immediate effect.
People had heard of the objection before; it was only
now that they began to look on it as conclusive.
How had Godwin tried to meet it, when it was
still in the hands of weaker men, and therefore not
at all conclusive? He could not ignore it. In his
Political Justice (1793) he had given the outlines of
a “simple form of society, without government,” on
the principle of Tom Paine, which was also a received
Jacobin motto, “Society is produced by our wants,
government by our wickedness.”[11] He says, with the
ruling philosophy, that man is born a blank, and his
outward circumstances make him good or evil.
10Thanks to human institutions, especially lawyers,
sovereigns, and statesmen, the outward circumstances,
he says, are as bad as they can be. Everywhere
there is inequality. There is great poverty alongside
of great riches, and great tyranny with great slavery.
In the same way the best of his novels, Caleb Williams
(1794), tells us how “things as they are” enable the
rich sinner to persecute the poor righteous man. But
he is no pessimist. The Political Justice does not
end with a statement of evils. It goes on to show
that in the end truth will conquer; men will listen
to reason, they will abandon their present laws, and
they will form a society without law or government
or any kind of force; no such things will be needed
when every man listens to reason, and contents
himself with plain living and high thinking. There
will be no king in Israel; every man will do that
which is right in his own eyes. In our present
society, says Godwin, it is distribution and not
production that is at fault. There is more than
enough of wealth for all, but it is not shared amongst
all. One man has too much, another little or nothing.
In the new society reason will change all that.
Reason tells us that, if we make an equal division,
not only of the good things of this life, but of the
labour of making them, then we shall secure a production
quite sufficient for the needs of plain livers,
at the cost of perhaps half-an-hour’s labour in a day
from each of them.[12] Each of them will, therefore,
11have leisure, which is the true riches, and he will
use the time for his own moral and intellectual
improvement. In this way, by the omnipotence of
truth and the power of persuasion, not by any
violence or power of the sword, perfection and
happiness will in time be established on the earth.
Godwin made no essential change in these views
in the later editions of the Political Justice (1796
and 1798), or in the Enquirer (1797). “Among the
faithless, faithful only he,” when the excesses of the
Terror made even Sir James Mackintosh (not to say
Bishop Watson, Southey, and Wordsworth) a lukewarm
reformer. Nothing in Godwin’s life is more
admirable than the perfect confidence with which
he holds fast to his old faith in democratic principles
and the perfectibility of man. If it is obstinacy,
it is very like devotion; and perhaps the only
author who shows an equal constancy is Condorcet,
the Girondist, marked out for death, and writing
in his hiding-place, almost under the eyes of the
Convention, his eager book on the Progress of the
Species. Nothing but intense sincerity and sheer
depth of conviction could have enabled these men
to continue the defence of a dishonoured cause.
They had not the martyr’s greatest trial, the
doubt whether he is right. The great impression
made by their works was a sign that, as they felt
strongly, they wrote powerfully. Malthus, who
refuted both of them, apologized for giving serious
12criticism to Condorcet’s palpable extravagances by
saying that Condorcet has many followers who will
hold him unanswerable unless he is specially answered.[13]
Of Godwin, Mr. Sumner, writing in 1816, says that
though his book (the Political Justice) was becoming
out of date, it was still “the ablest and best known
statement” of the doctrines of equality that had ever
appeared in England.[14] It has been justly called the
“first text-book of the philosophical radicals.” The
actual effect of it cannot be measured by the number
of copies sold on its first appearance. Godwin had
placed it far beyond the reach of ordinary democrats
by fixing the price at three guineas. In 1793 many
who would have been his keenest readers could not
have paid three shillings for it. But the event
proved him wise in his generation. The Privy
Council decided they might safely tolerate so dear
a book; and a small audience even of the rich was
better to Godwin than prosecution, which might
mean exile and no audience at all.[15] Few writers
of our own day have so good an excuse for making
themselves inaccessible to the poor. Godwin, however,
like Ruskin, reached the poor in spite of his
arrangements for avoiding them. He filtered down
among the masses; and his writings became a
political as well as a literary power in England,
13long before he had a poetic son-in-law to give him
reflected glory. If a species is to be judged by its
best individual, then Godwin represents better than
Paine the class of political writers to which they both
belong; and many fell down with Godwin when he
fell down before Malthus.
The Enquirer was less popular than the Political
Justice. Part of the charm of the latter undoubtedly
lay in the elaborate completeness and systematic
order of the whole discussion. The foundations were
laid in the psychology of Locke; and then the building
was raised, stone by stone, until the whole was
finished. But in the Enquirer Godwin’s dislike of
law had extended even to the form of composition.
He had been wrong, he said, in trying to write a
systematic treatise on society, and he would now
confine himself to detached essays, wholly experimental,
and not necessarily in harmony with one
another. “He (the author) has carried this principle
so far that he has not been severely anxious relative
to inconsistency that may be discovered between the
speculations of one essay and the speculations of
another.”[16] The contrast between these two styles is
the contrast between a whole oratorio and a miscellaneous
concert, or between a complete poem and a
volume of extracts.
The thoughts were the same, though they had lost
their attractive expression. The essay on Avarice
and Profusion[17] tells us, among other things, that “a
state of cultivated equality is that state which, in
14speculation and theory, appears most consonant to
the nature of man, and most conducive to the extensive
diffusion of felicity.” This was the essay which
led Malthus and his father into their fruitful argument.
The essay on Riches and Poverty, and the one
on Beggars,[18] contain other applications of the same
idea, with many moralizing digressions. Godwin has
not lost his sweet Utopian vision; he has not yielded
to the objections that baffled Dr. Robert Wallace; he
thinks he has removed all objections.
He meets them[19] by saying first of all: “There is a
principle in the nature of human society by means of
which everything seems to tend to its level,” when not
interfered with; and the population of a country when
left to itself does not seem to increase beyond the food.
But in the second place, supposing things not to find
their level in this way, the earth is wide and the evil
day is far off. It may take myriads of centuries to
till the untilled acres and to replenish the empty
earth with people, and much may happen before then.
In fact, he views the subject as many of us view the
question of our coal supply. Before it is exhausted
we may be beyond the need of it.[20] The earth itself
may have collapsed with all its inhabitants. Don’t
let us refuse a present blessing from fear of a remote
future danger. Besides, it is not very hard to
imagine a safeguard. Franklin says that “mind
will one day become omnipotent over matter;”[21] why
15not over the matter of our own bodies? Does not
the bodily health depend largely on the mind?
“A merry heart goes all the day;
Your sad tires in a mile, O!”
The time may come when we shall be so full of
liveliness that we shall not sleep, and so full of life
that we shall not die. The need for marriage will
be superseded by earthly immortality, and the desire
for it by the development of intellect. On the
renewed earth of the future there will be neither
marrying nor giving in marriage, but we shall be
as the angels. “The whole will be a people of men,
and not of children. Generation will not succeed
generation, nor truth have, in a certain degree, to
recommence her career every thirty years. Other
improvements may be expected to keep pace with
those of health and longevity. There will be no
war, no crimes, no administration of justice as it is
called, and no government. Besides this, there will
be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment.
Every man will seek with ineffable ardour
the good of all.”[22]
This sweet strain had been enchanting the public
for four or five years, when Malthus ventured to
interrupt it with his modest anonymous Essay on
the Principle of Population as it affects the Future
Improvement of Society. The writer claims to be
as hearty a philanthropist as Mr. Godwin, but he
cannot allow the wish to be father to the thought,
and believe in future perfection against evidence.
16To prove a theory true, he says, it is not enough
to show that you cannot prove its contradiction,
or that you can prove its usefulness. It would be
very useful to have eyes in both sides of our head;
but that does not prove that we are going to have
them. If you told me that man was becoming a
winged creature like the ostrich, I should not doubt
that he would find wings very useful, but I could
hardly believe your prophecy without some kind of
proof beyond the mere praises of flying. I should
ask you to show palpable signs in his body and
habits that such a change was going on, that his
neck has been lengthening, his lips hardening, and
his hair becoming feathery. In the same way, when
you tell me that man is becoming a purely intellectual
being, content with plain living and high
thinking, I see there might be advantage in the
change, but I ask for signs that it is in progress.
I see none; but, on the contrary, I see strong reasons
for believing in its impossibility. Grant me two
postulates, and I disprove your millennium. The
first is, that food is necessary; the second, that the
instinct for marriage is permanent. No one denies
the first, and Godwin’s denial of the second is purely
dogmatic. He has given us no proofs. Men have
no doubt made progress in other respects; they
have passed from barbarism to civilization. But in
respect of the second postulate they are the same
now as they were 4000 years ago. Individual
exceptions are individual exceptions still. I am
bound, therefore, to believe in the truth of my
17postulates, and I infer from them the impossibility of
your millennium.
You speak of a society, he continues, where the
members are all equally comfortable and at leisure.
Suppose it established, it could not last; it would
go to pieces through the principle of population
alone. The seven years of plenty would be at
once devoured by seven years of want. The proof of
this is short and decisive:—Population, when unchecked,
increases in a geometrical ratio; subsistence
only in an arithmetical. “A slight acquaintance
with numbers will show the immensity of the first
power in comparison with the second.”[23] “The race
of plants and animals shrinks under this great
restrictive law, and the race of man cannot by any
efforts of reason escape from it. Among plants and
animals its effects are waste of seed, sickness, and
premature death, among men misery and vice,” the
former necessary, the latter probable. Now, in the
old countries of Europe, population never is unchecked.
It is checked by want of room and food.
Vice and misery, and the fear of them, are always
“equalizing” the numbers of the people with the
food of the people. In the New World, “the
cynosure of neighbouring eyes,” there are fewer
hindrances to early marriage; there is more room and
there is more food; hard work is the only condition
of a happy life. But, even there, population is not
entirely unchecked; the hard work will at least
interfere with the rearing of children; and the
18people, however comfortable, are not at the very
highest pitch of comfort, or at the highest pitch of
purity and simplicity of life; whereas, by assumption,
Godwin’s imaginary society is all these. If,
therefore, the people of old Europe double their
numbers once a century, and the people of new
America (at least in the United States) once in
twenty-five years, we may be sure that in the
millennial society of Godwin,
“Where all are proper and well-behaved,
And all are free from sorrow and pain,”
the increase would be much faster. The “leisure”
he talks of would soon disappear, and the old scramble
for bread, the old inequality of rank and property,
would again become the order of the day. We should
have our own kind of society back again, with its
masters and servants, landlords and tenants, rich and
poor.[24]
Therefore (argues the writer of the essay) if
Godwin’s society were once made it could not last.
But we grant too much in supposing it could ever
be made. We cannot believe this and believe in the
second postulate at the same time; and the second
postulate is so certain that we can predict by it.
The same causes, then, that would have destroyed
Godwin’s newly-formed society will prevent it from
ever being formed at all. “The passion between
the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly
the same that it may always be considered, in
19algebraic language, as a given quantity.”[25] In spite
of the whimpering of old men and roués, “the
pleasures of pure love will bear the contemplation
of the most improved reason and the most exalted
virtue.”[26] Godwin views the matter in a dry, intellectual
light, and asks us to abstract from all accessories
before we form an estimate of the passion in
question. One man or one woman will then be as
good as another. But he might as well tell us to
strip off all the leaves before we estimate our liking
for trees. We do not admire the bare pole, but the
whole tree, the tree with all the “attendant circumstances”
of branches and foliage. As well deprive
a magnet of its chief powers of attraction, and then
ask us to confess it as weak as other minerals.[27] The
fact is, that man’s large discourse, which marks him
out from the brutes, makes him hide the marriage
instinct under a mass of “attendant circumstances”
before he lets himself be drawn by it. He will not
obey the instinct simply more feræ, or in animal
fashion, because he feels it. But it is not destroyed,
only disguised. The love is not purely intellectual.
Reason, with its calculation of consequences, can
save a man from the abuse of a passion, but cannot
destroy the passion itself;[28] and (he might have
added) its “looking before and after” includes fancy
as well as thought. Take this passion then as it
is, an adoration it may be of an assemblage of accessories;
it can never die out of the world.
20From this cheerful premise, what conclusion
follows? One not altogether cheerful: Wherever
Providence sends meat He will send mouths.
Wherever the people have room and food, they will
marry and multiply their numbers, till they press
against the limits of both, and begin a fierce struggle
for existence, in which death is the punishment of
defeat. Godwin and the whole French school are
sadly wrong in attributing all inequality to human
institutions; human nature is to blame, and, without
any artificial aid, this one passion of human nature
will be the standing cause of inequality, the most
serious obstacle to the removal of it.[29] Dr. Robert
Wallace had more wisdom than he wot of.
Examine the meaning of this argument and its
conclusion. It involves an answer to Godwin’s first
defence against Wallace. Here is something very
like a law of nature, a truth past, present, and future,
or, in other words, a truth which, being scientific,
ought not to be stated in terms of time at all:
“Where goods increase, they are increased that eat
them.” The “struggle for existence” (Malthus uses
the very phrase) is a present fact, as it has been a
past fact, and will be a future. No good is gained
by rhetorical references to the wideness of the world
and the possibilities of the ages.[30] In our own day
and land we see people multiplying up to the limit of
the food, and a “great restrictive law” preventing
21them, as it prevents all other animals, from multiplying
beyond that limit.[31] In our own day and country,
men marry when they cannot support a family; the
children whom they cannot support die of hunger or
sickness, if the charity of the public does not interfere;—or
else the fear of misery makes men avoid a marriage
for which they have not the means, and their
celibacy, whether pure or impure, keeps the numbers
of the people on a level with the food.[32] Godwin
himself had written in so many words: “There is a
principle in human society by which population is
perpetually kept down to the level of the means of
subsistence.”[33] Why did he not take one step more,
and discover what that principle is?[34]
The fact is that Godwin was at once intellectually
sanguine and emotionally cold. His ideal would
have been a man “of large brain and no affections;”
and when he wrote the Political Justice he was not
aware of his own defect. At a later time he was not
only aware of it, but anxious to remove it. In his
Memoir of his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft (1798), and
in the story of St. Leon (1799), the man who found
the philosopher’s stone, and became, to his own
sorrow, immortal on earth, he confesses that he has
hitherto taken too little thought of feeling as an
element in human action. If Mary had been too
much of a Werther, her husband had been too little.
22Like Condorcet (and like Buckle), he had believed
civilization to be a purely intellectual movement.
He had dogmatized on the omnipotence of truth
and reason, and inferred the growth of a perfect
society. He had dogmatized on the development of
intellect, and inferred an earthly immortality. Moreover,
in the Memoir, and in St. Leon, if he had
added a little to his doctrines, he had recanted little
or nothing, even in regard to immortality.
St. Leon is miserable only because his gift is
peculiar to himself; an immortality that is common
to all would be acceptable to all. A Methuselah
would not be melancholy among antediluvians. Such
was probably Godwin’s position. The mere belief
in the possibility of earthly immortality was not
uncommon; Godwin is careful to number Bacon
among its supporters.[35] Malthus was probably right
in tracing it to the unconscious influence of Christianity,[36]
though the progress in Godwin’s days of the
new science of chemistry had perhaps more to do
with it, and Godwin’s religion was never more than
a bare Theism.[37] It was held by Holcroft, one of
Godwin’s most intimate friends,[38] and it was an
important part of Condorcet’s Sketch of the Progress
of the Human Spirit.
In the days of the Terror (1794) Condorcet, from
his hiding-place in the Rue Servandoni, had written
of the “organic perfectibility of man.” He looked
23to medicine, and to the arts and sciences in general,
to banish disease and prolong human life “indefinitely.”[39]
Godwin trusted to the inward development
of the mind, not to outward appliances.[40] But by
different ways they arrive at the same terminus, and
receive from their great critic very much the same
reception there. Malthus points out to Godwin that
there is no sign that the body is becoming subjugated
to the mind. Even philosophers, said he (and he
wrote feelingly, as he had the malady at the time of
writing), cannot endure the toothache patiently,[41] and
even a merry heart will not enable a weak man to
walk as fast and as far as a strong man. There
is no change in the human body, and little or no
change in the relation of the mind to it. To Condorcet
he simply points out that, while the arts have
made the lengthening of life “indefinite,” that does
not mean “infinite.” Gardeners can grow carnations
“indefinitely” large; no man can ever say that he
has seen the largest carnation that will ever be
grown; but this he can say, that a carnation will
never be as large as a cabbage. The limit is there,
though it is undefined, and there is a limit also to
the lengthening of human life, though no one can
fix it to a year. Condorcet therefore has proved an
earthly immortality only by a misuse of the word
“indefinite.” He has shown no organic change in
man which would prove the possibility of perfection
24in this world. Neither has Condorcet repelled the
objection which troubled Dr. Wallace. It is true
that, like Godwin, he faces the difficulty and admits
the importance of it.[42] The growth of population
will always, he says, cause inequality; there will
always be a rich leisured class and a poor industrial
class; and to lighten the hardships of the latter
there ought to be a State Insurance fund, which
will make all the poorest citizens sure of support.
But one cannot help thinking, if all are sure of
support, all will marry, and if all marry, will not
the difficulty be increased?[43] Yes, Condorcet grants
this; the numbers will soon be too great, and so
throughout the ages there will be an “oscillation”
between the blessings of progress and the evils of
overcrowding, now the one predominating, now the
other. In despair he clutches at the old fallacy,
“the day is distant,” but he feels it fail him, and
must needs add a new and startling solution of his
own which Malthus freely denounces.[44] This is not
the place to discuss the questions associated in our
own times with Neo-Malthusianism.[45] But it is
beyond all doubt that the Neo-Malthusians are the
children not of Robert Malthus, but of Robert Owen.
Malthus was not Malthus because he said, “The
people are too many; thin them down”—any more
than Darwin was Darwin because he said, “Species
25are not made, but grow.” If Darwinians are to be
judged by Darwin, Malthusians must be judged by
Malthus; and the originality of neither Malthus nor
Darwin can be explained by a single phrase. We
cannot understand the meaning of an author’s words,
far less of his work, till we know the context in which
they are set. Once know the context and we understand
the text. The devil, citing Scripture for his
purpose, only succeeds because he never quotes in full.
It follows that, to understand the full meaning
of the essay, we must go beyond its efficient cause,
and take a view of its material cause, or the whole
circumstances in which it was written. If the text
of the sermon was Godwin and Condorcet, the
application was to the poor of England and the
philanthropists who were trying to relieve them.
The early life of Malthus, coinciding, as it largely
does, with the latter half of the eighteenth century,
coincides with England’s greatest industrial revolution.
Malthus was born in 1766, three years after the Peace
of Paris. There was an end, for the time, to foreign
wars, and trade was making a brave start. The
discoveries of coal and iron in Northern England,
going hand in hand with the inventions of cotton-spinning
and weaving, were beginning to convert the
poorest counties into the richest, upsetting the
political balance. The new science of chemistry had
begun to prove its usefulness. Wedgwood was perfecting
his earthenware, Brindley cutting his canals,
Telford laying out his roads, Watt building his steam-engines.
England in Roman days had been a granary;
26in later ages she had been a pasture-ground; she was
now becoming the land of machinery and manufacture,
as well as the centre of foreign trade. In other words,
she had begun an industrial change, which was the
greatest till then in her history, and rich in the most
magical improvements. But in the early stages of
the change, the evils of it were nearly as much felt
as the blessings. The sufferings of displaced workmen,
and the anarchy of the new factory system, supplanting
home labour, and making the word “manufacturer”
forget its etymology,[46] were real evils,
however transient. Combined with the general
democratic influence of an expansive manufacturing
industry, they might easily have caused a social
convulsion in these days of no extraordinary virtue;
and the country owed its escape in some degree to
the evangelical movement under Whitefield and the
Wesleys, which was fatal at once to religious torpor
and to political excitement.[47] The annoyances of a
meddlesome tariff and the futile attempts to exclude
foreign food were to vanish away before a hundred
years had passed; but in the boyhood of Malthus
the voice of Adam Smith raised against them in the
Wealth of Nations (1776) was a cry in the wilderness.
There was a general agreement that, whether the high
prices prevailing after the Peace of Paris were caused
by the growth of the population, or by the lessened
value of silver, or by the troubles in Poland, the
27remedy was not to lie in a free corn trade. The poor
were not to have cheap corn, they were to have large
allowances. Legislation had gone backwards in this
matter. In 1723 a new law had introduced a wise
workhouse test of destitution, which might have prevented
wilful poverty by reducing outdoor relief; but
the clause was repealed by Gilbert’s Act in 1782; the
poor were to be “set on work” at their own houses;
and the new stringency gave place to the old laxity,
with the usual results. The close of the century saw
the troubles of a European war added to the list, and
the tide of political reform ebbed for forty years
(1792–1832). Because the French reform had gone
too far, the English reform was not allowed to take
its first steps.
It is a commonplace with historians that the French
Revolution would have been very different without
Voltaire and Rousseau to prepare the way for it.
Hunger and new ideas are two advocates of change
which always plead best in each other’s company;
hunger makes men willing to act, and the new ideas
give them matter for enactment. In France, when
the crisis came in 1789, the new ideas were not far
to seek. Writers of Utopias, from Plato to More,
and from Rousseau to Ruskin, have always adopted
one simple plan: they have struck out the salient
enormities of their own time and inserted the
opposite, as when men imagine heaven they think
of their dear native country with its discomforts left
out. Inequality at home had made Frenchmen ready
to dote on a vision of equality when Rousseau
28presented it to them, and the state of Nature was
the state of France reversed. Philosophically, the
theorists of the Revolution traced their descent to
Locke, and their ideas were not long in recrossing the
Channel to visit their birthplace.
Even if Englishmen had not had in America a
visible Utopia, or, at least, Arcadia, there was hunger
enough in England to recommend the new ideas to
every rank in society. This is the reason why, in
1793, Godwin’s book was so successful. It was not
only a good English statement of the French doctrines
of equality, and therefore a book for the times, but
it had a vigour of its own, and was no mere translation.
Rousseau and Raynal had thought it necessary
to sacrifice universal improvement to universal
equality; they saw (or thought they saw) that the
two could not go together, and they counted equality
so desirable that they were willing to purchase it at
the expense of barbarism. Now, they were perhaps
more logical than Godwin; equality may mean barbarism.
But Godwin’s ideal was at least higher than
theirs; he thought of civilization and equality as
quite compatible, for he thought that when all men
were truly civilized they would of their own accord
restore equality. As he left everything to reason and
nothing to force, his book was in theory quite harmless;
but the tendency of it seemed dangerous, for it
criticized the British constitution in a free way to
which the British nation was not accustomed. In
England, moreover, the people have always confounded
ideas with persons. They were not in love with
29liberty when it took the form of an American “War
of Independence” against England, and, even if
equality had pleased them in 1789, they would have
nothing of it after the Terror. They forsook Fox for
Burke, and went to war for a sentiment. At the
time when Malthus wrote, the bulk of the English
people had lost their enthusiasm for the new ideas.
It needed some fortitude to call oneself a Reformer,
or even a Whig, when Napoleon had overrun Italy
and was facing us in Egypt. Pitt held all persons
seditious who did not believe in the wisdom of the war.
But even Pitt, though he now ignored the need of
reform, could not overlook the existence of distress.
In 1795 there had been a serious scarcity; war prices
had become famine prices. It was the year when
“the lower orders” were held down by special coercion
acts;[48] it was the year when the king’s carriage
was stopped by a mob crying “Bread, bread!” Mr.
Whitbread and the rest thought Parliament ought to
“do something”; and Pitt proposed (1796) to meet
the difficulty by amending the Poor Laws. His
bill proposed “to restore the original purity of the
Poor Laws” by modifying the law of settlement in
the direction of greater freedom, and by assisting the
working man in other ways. One of these other
ways was an attempt of a harmless kind to found
schools of industry, another to attach every labourer
to a friendly society. But another less innocently
proposed to encourage the growth of population by
making the poor relief greater where the family was
30larger. “Let us make relief,” in such cases, “a
matter of right and honour, instead of a ground for
opprobrium and contempt. This will make a large
family a blessing and not a curse; and this will
draw a proper line of distinction between those who
are to provide for themselves by their labour, and
those who, after enriching their country with a
number of children, have a claim upon its assistance
for their support.”[49]
Malthus in 1796 did not doubt the infallibility of
Pitt in such a matter; The Crisis gives no hint of
objection. But in 1798, with his new light, he could
no longer take the recruiting officer’s view of population.
If he had had a good case against Godwin and
Condorcet, who had simply failed to show how population
could be kept from growing too fast, he had
still a better case against Pitt, who proposed to make
it grow faster. Besides, their schemes were merely
on paper; they had no chance of realizing them,
whereas Pitt’s majority would carry any measure on
which he had set his heart. The danger from this
third quarter was therefore the most imminent. But
Malthus needed no new argument for it; he needed
simply to shift round his old argument, and point the
muzzle of it at his new enemy. There is no need, he
said, to encourage marriage; there is no need for
Government to make population grow faster. Wherever
Providence has sent meat, He will soon send
31mouths to eat it; and, if by your artificial encouragements
you increase the mouths without increasing the
meat, you will only bring the people one step nearer
starvation, you will only multiply the nation without
increasing the joy. If stalwart numbers are strength,
starving numbers are weakness.[50]
These commonplaces were then a paradox. Even
at the end of the eighteenth century there was no
party in the English House of Commons identified
with enlightened views on the position of the British
workman. Whitbread had always some measure on
hand for helping the labourer out of the rates, or by
some other State interference; it was in opposing
one of Whitbread’s bills that the Prime Minister
promised to introduce his own memorable measure.
Fox was free to follow either, not professing to understand
the new economical doctrines. Pitt, who
admired Adam Smith,—Fox, Condorcet, and Godwin,
who owed Smith no allegiance,[51]—all were equally
purblind in this matter. All Pitt’s study of the
fourth book of the Wealth of Nations, chapter fifth,
had not shown him the fallacy of a bounty on
children. Yet Malthus had got his light from no
obscure sources, but from “Hume, Wallace, Adam
Smith, and Dr. Price,”[52] who were all well-known and
widely-read authors of the day. “The populousness
of ancient nations” had been a happy hunting-ground
for learned antiquarian essay writers over half a
32century. Montesquieu, Wallace, and Price[53] claimed
the advantage for the ancients. David Hume, with
his usual acute divination, decides for the moderns,
though with his usual irony he professes to adopt a
sceptical conclusion, and makes several concessions
to Wallace.[54] This controversy itself might have been
expected to bring men nearer to the truth on the
subject of population than it actually did. It was
left to Malthus to convert Hume’s probability into
a certainty from a higher vantage-ground; but the
sifting of the arguments by the various writers
before him must have simplified his task.[55] Other
aids and anticipations were not wanting. As early
as 1786, Joseph Townsend, the Wiltshire rector,
had written a Dissertation on the Poor Laws, which
gives an admirable statement of those wise views of
charity and poor relief that are only in these latter
days becoming current among us. Malthus records
his opinion of Townsend’s work in the best of all
possible ways. From his careful inquiry (in the
second edition of the Essay) into the population of
European countries, he omits Spain on the ground
that Mr. Townsend’s Travels in Spain has already
done the work for him.[56]
The Essay on Population was therefore not original
in the sense of being a creation out of nothing, but
in the same way as the Wealth of Nations. In both
33cases the author got most of his phrases, and even
many of his thoughts, from his predecessors; but
he treated them as his predecessors were unable to
do; he saw them in their connection, perspective,
and wide bearings. We must not assume anticipation
where there is mere identity of language or
partial identity of thought; the words of an earlier
writer are not unfrequently quoted by a later away
from their logical context, and therefore not as part
of an argument of which the writer sees the consecutive
premises. This is true of Adam Smith when he
is compared with Sir Dudley North, Abraham Tucker,
or the other prophets of free trade[57] catalogued
by MacCulloch or Blanqui. They talked free trade
almost as Mons. Jourdain talked prose, without knowing
it. Precisely the same is true of Adam Smith
himself in relation to Malthus. Of his own generalizations
he is complete master. Having reasoned up
to them, he can reason down from them. But, when
he says, “Every species of animals naturally multiplies
in proportion to the means of their subsistence,”
“The demand for men necessarily regulates the production
of men,”[58] he has not anticipated Malthus.
His phrases are touching a principle of which he does
not see the most important bearings; and not having
reasoned up to it, he makes hardly any attempt to
reason down from it. Malthus, on the other hand,
34has taken fast hold of a general principle, and is able
to solve a number of dependent questions in the way
of simple corollaries. Others may have given right
answers to the special questions about the Poor Law
and the populousness of ancient nations. Malthus is
the first to show one comprehensive reason why all
these answers must be right.
This was the secret of his success. As Godwin’s
Political Justice was successful because systematic,
the Essay on Population was successful because it
seemed to put chaos in order. The very sadness of
his conclusion had a charm for some minds; but the
bulk of his readers did not love him for taking their
hopes away, they loved him for giving them new
light. Pestilence and famine begin to lose their
vague terrors when we know whence they come and
what they do for the world. Even if the desire of
marriage is itself an evil, it is well to know the truth
about it. Ignorance can only be blissful where it is
total; and wilful ignorance, being of necessity partial,
is a perpetual unrest, not even a fool’s paradise.[59]
The truth in this case was not all sadness. In the
last portion of the essay of 1798 Malthus expounds
an argument which he afterwards reproduced in
later editions with a more terrestrial application.
He uses the style of Paley and the Apologists, and
he tries to discover the final cause of the principle
of population, on metaphysical lines that
were followed by Mr. Sumner nearly twenty years
afterwards, when the discussion had taken a new
35turn.[60] The question is how to reconcile the suffering
produced by the principle of population with the
goodness of God. Malthus answers that the difficulty
is only one part of the general problem of evil, the
difference between this part and the rest being that
in this case we see farther into the causes; and it is
therefore the easier for us to justify the ways of God
to man. “Evil exists not to create despair but
activity.”[61] We ought not to reason from God to
nature, but from nature to God; to know how God
works, let us observe how nature works. We shall then
find that nature sends all sentient creatures through
a long and painful process, by which they gain new
qualities and powers, presumably fitting them for
a better place than they have in this world. This
world and this life are therefore in all probability
“the mighty process of God,” not indeed for the mere
“probation” of man (for that would imply that his
Maker was suspicious of him, or ignorant of what was
in him), but for the “creation and formation” of
the human mind out of the torpor and corruption of
dead matter,[62] “to sublimate the dust of the earth
into soul, to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of
clay.” The varied influences of life are the forming
hand of the Creator, and they are infinitely diverse,
for (in spite of Solomon) there is nothing old under
the sun.[63] Difficulties generate talents.[64] “The first
36awakeners of the mind are the wants of the body;”
it is these that rouse the intellect of the infant and
sharpen the wits of the savage. Not leisure but
necessity is the mother of invention:
ἁ πενία, Διόφαντε, μόνα τὰς τέχνας ἐγείρες.
Locke was right; the desire to avoid pain is even
stronger than the desire to find pleasure. In this
way evil leads to good; for pain, which is a kind of
evil, creates effort, and effort creates mind. This is
the general rule. A particular example of it is, that
want of food, which is one of the most serious of
evils, leads to good. By contriving that the earth
shall produce food only in small quantities, and in
reward of labour, God has provided a perpetual spur
to human progress. This is the key to the puzzle
of population. By nature man is a lotos-eater till
hunger makes him a Ulysses. Why should he toil,
the roof and crown of things? Mainly because, if he
does not toil, neither can he live; the lotos country
will soon be over-peopled, and he must push off his
bark again. “The first awakeners of the mind are
the wants of the body,” though, once awakened, the
mind soon finds out wants beyond the body, and the
development of intellect and civilization goes on
indefinitely.[65] The people “tend to increase” more
quickly than their food, not in order that men may
suffer, but in order that they may be roused to save
37themselves from suffering. The partial ill of all
such general laws is swallowed up in the general
good; and the general good is secured in two ways:
humanity is developed; the resources of the world
are developed. In the first place, the intellect of
individual men is developed, for the constancy of
nature is the foundation of reasoning, and human
reason would never be drawn out unless men were
absolutely unable to depend on miracles, and were
obliged as well as able to make calculations on the
basis of a constant law. To this constancy of nature
we owe the immortal mind of a Newton. In the second
place, the world must be peopled. If savages could
have got all their food from one central spot of fertile
ground, the earth at large would have remained
a wilderness; but, as it is, no one settlement can
support an indefinite increase of numbers; the
numbers must spread out over the earth till they
find room and food. If there were no law of increase,
a few such careers as Alexander’s or Tamerlain’s
might unpeople the whole world; but the law
exists, and the gaps made by any conqueror, or by any
pestilence, are soon filled to overflowing, while the
overflowing flood passes on to reclaim new countries.[66]
This is the cosmology of Malthus. “Life is,
generally speaking, a blessing independent of a future
state.”[67] “The impressions and excitements of this
world are the instruments with which the Supreme
38Being forms matter into mind.” The necessity of constant
exertion, to avoid evil and pursue good, is the
principal spring of these impressions, and is therefore
a sufficient reason for the existence of natural and
moral evil, including the difficulties which arise from
the principle of population. All these are present
difficulties, but they are not beyond remedy. They
do not serve their purpose unless human exertion
succeeds in diminishing them. Absolute removal
Malthus does not promise; but, while believing in
science and reason as strongly as Condorcet or
Godwin, declines to regard an earthly immortality as
a reasonable hope, and points us instead to a future life
and to another world for perfection and happiness.[68]
Perhaps the great economist went beyond his province
in attacking the problem of evil. In the
controversy that followed the essay there are few
references to this part of it, and after the appearance
of the second edition, where this part is omitted
altogether, people forgot the existence of the first
edition. From the way in which Sumner speaks of
the difference between his point of view and that
of Malthus, it might fairly be suspected that he
knew nothing of the first edition; and yet the
second of his two learned volumes is simply an
expansion of its ideas.[69] The metaphysic itself might
39be deep or shallow; it would be impossible to tell
till we heard the sense in which the metaphysical
phrases were used, and that we have hardly any
means of doing. They point at least to the
“monistic” view, that there is no gulf between mind
and matter. We might believe them idealistic in a
German sense; but we cannot forget how closely the
ethical views of Malthus are connected with those of
the English moralists of his century. He cannot be
said to have a place in the history of philosophy;
and it is mainly of a curious personal interest to
discover that, although he is nominally a utilitarian,
he separates himself from Paley by refusing to
allow moral value to action done from either fear of
punishment or hope of reward.[70] There is no indication
that he was a metaphysical genius. His
researches in the heavier German literature did not
perhaps extend much farther than to the quaint
optimist Johann Peter Süssmilch,[71] from whose
Göttliche Ordnung he freely drew his statistics.
Malthus at one time intended to expound his
metaphysical views at greater length.[72] In other
words, he meant to write a book in the manner of
Price’s essays, half economical and half literary. We
need not deeply regret the “particular business,”
whatever it was, that nipped this intention in the
bud, besides delaying the publication of the essay as
we now have it.[73] The metaphysical and theological
40passages, as they stand, have the look of an episode,
though the thought of them is logically enough connected
with the tenor of the book. The views of
the author on the other world, the punishment of
the wicked, and the use of miracles, have, like the
philosophy, mainly a personal interest. Adam Smith,
in the later edition of his Moral Sentiments, had
omitted at least one very marked expression of theological
opinion (on the Atonement) that had appeared
in the first edition,[74] and perhaps his disciple did
well to follow suit. At the same time, omission is
not recantation, and we get light on an author’s
mind and character by discovering any views in which
he once professed to believe. A writer who reached
absolute truth at a very early stage of study, has
patronized Adam Smith[75] by editing his chief work,
and honoured the other economists by tabulating
their conclusions in an historical introduction. He
extends this favour to Malthus. The reasonings of
Malthus he finds, though valuable, are not free from
error; he has “all but entirely overlooked” the
beneficial effects of the principle of population as a
stimulus to invention and progress.[76] This charge is
refuted by the essay even in its later form; but,
placed alongside of the cosmology of the first edition,
41it seems merely grotesque. Malthus is accused of
ignoring the very phenomena which Malthus glorifies
as the “final cause” of the principle of population.
He thought he had explained not only one of the
chief causes of poverty, but one of the chief effects;
if Adam Smith had shown the power of labour as
a cause of wealth, Malthus thought he had shown the
power of poverty as a cause of labour. No doubt
the mistake was a common one; and (to say nothing
of the encyclopædias and biographical dictionaries)
there are few economical text-books which do justice
to Malthus in this matter.[77] But one who speaks
with authority should not be content with a borrowed
knowledge. The same authority tells us that “the
work of Mr. Malthus is valuable rather for having
awakened public attention to the subject than for
its giving anything like a complete view of the department
of the science of which it treats.”[78] Malthus
for his part lays no claim to infallibility; like most
pioneers, he is sure of little beyond his leading
principles, and he is never ashamed to change his
views.[79] But, if his Essay on Population, gradually
amended and expanded as it was, to keep pace with
the searching criticisms of thirty years, has not
reached the heart of the matter, surely there is no
profit in discussion.
42The fact is, that though the anonymous small 8vo
of 1798 was a mere draught of the completed work
of later years, its main fault was not incompleteness,
but wrongness of emphasis. When a man is writing
a controversial pamphlet, he does not try to bring
all truths into the front equally; he sets the neglected
ones in the foreground, and allows the familiar
to fall behind, not as denied or ignored, but simply
as not emphasized. It is always possible, in such
cases, that the neglected truths, though unworthy
of the old neglect, did not deserve the new pre-eminence,
and must not be allowed to retain it. Science,
seeking answers to its own questions, and not to
questions of the eighteenth century, has no toleration
for the false emphasis of passing controversy. It
puts the real beginning first, the middle next, and
the end last, not the end in the middle, or the
last first. Accordingly it takes up the first essay
of Malthus on population, and requires the author
to amend it. He must be less critical and more
creative, if he is to give a satisfactory answer to the
general problem which he has chosen to take in hand.
The times and the subject, both, demand a change of
attitude,——the times, because political theories have
now become less important than social difficulties,
and the subject, because he has hitherto, while clearly
explaining the difficulties, done little more than hint
at the expedients for overcoming them. True, no
critic or iconoclast can ever fully vanquish an opponent
except by a truth of his own which goes beyond
the opponent’s falsity; and it is to this he owes
43the enthusiasm of his followers. But he does not
always expound the truth so fully as the error; and
so, beyond the point of negation, his friends often
follow him rather by faith than by sight. This,
then, was what Malthus had yet to do; to state
what were the trustworthy as well as the delusive
methods of raising modern society, and what were
the right as well as the wrong ways of relieving
the poor.
The success of the essay, so far, had been very
remarkable. It had provoked replies by the dozen,
and an unwilling witness tells us it had converted
friends of progress by the hundred.[80] We find
Godwin writing to the author in August 1798,[81] and
we may conclude that the veil of anonymousness was
not very thick, though Malthus used it again in 1800
in the tract on High Prices. In a debate in the
House of Commons on the 11th February, 1800,
Pitt took occasion to say that, though he still believed
his new Poor Bill a good one, he had dropped it in
deference to the objections of “those whose opinions
he was bound to respect.”[82] He meant Bentham and
Malthus. We cannot tell which had the greater share
of the credit, but we know that Malthus regarded
Pitt and Paley as his most brilliant converts.[83] Pitt’s
declaration that he still believed his bill to be a good
44one could only mean that he still wished to believe
it so. It must have been peculiarly galling to a
statesman who affected the political economist to
find that not only the solemn criticisms of Malthus,
but the jocose “Observations” of Bentham,[84] which
threshed the chaff out of the bill clause by clause,
had turned his favourite science against himself.
45
Exaggerations of the First Essay—Its two Postulates not co-ordinate—Distinctive
feature of the Second Essay—Its moderate Optimism—Rough
Classification of Checks—Moral Restraint and Mixed Motives—Freedom
as understood by Godwin and by Malthus—The two
men contrasted.
While Malthus was making such converts as Pitt,
Paley, and Parr, and when even Godwin acknowledged
the “writer of the essay” to have made a
“valuable addition to political economy,”[85] the essay
was not beyond criticism. There were some familiar
facts of which the writer had taken too little account,
and they were impressed on him by his critics from
all sides. To use the language of philosophy, he had
not been sufficiently concrete; he had gone far to
commit Godwin’s fault, and consider one feature of
human nature apart by itself, instead of seeing it in
its place with the rest. The position and prospects
of civilized society in our own day depend on a
combination of political, intellectual, physical, and
moral causes, of which the growth or decrease of
population may be only an effect. If we are part
46man, part lion, and part hog, it is not fair to assume
the predominance of the hog any more than the
predominance of the man. In a herd of animals, as
distinguished from a society of men, the units are
simply the fittest who have survived in the struggle
for existence. The principle of population is in the
foreground there; there is no check to it but famine,
disease, and death. We can therefore understand
how the study of the Essay on Population led Charles
Darwin to explain the origin of species by a generalization
which Malthus had known and named, though
he did not pursue it beyond man.[86] The “general
struggle” among animals “for room and food” means
among civilized men something very like free trade,
the old orthodox economical panacea for economic
evils; and the essayist agrees with Adam Smith in
a general resistance to legislative interference. Bad
as are the effects of the irremovable causes of poverty,
interference makes them still worse. But at least,
when we come to man, the struggle is not so cruel.
“Plague take the hindmost” is not the only or the
supreme rule. If the fear of starvation, the most
earthly and least intellectual of all motives, is needed
to force us to work at first, it need not therefore be
necessary ever afterwards. The baser considerations
are by their definition the lowest layers of our pile;
we rise by means of them, but we tread them down,
and the higher the pile the less their importance.
Within civilized countries, in proportion to their
47civilization, the struggle in the lowest stages is
abolished; the weakest are often saved, and the
lowest raised, in spite of unfitness.[87] View man not
as an animal, but as a citizen; view the principle
of population as checked not only by vice, misery,
and the fear of them, but by all the mixed motives
of human society, and we recognize that Malthus,
with the best intentions, had treated the matter too
abstractly. Godwin had over-rated the power of
reason, Malthus the power of passion. “It is probable,”
he wrote at a later time, “that, having found
the bow bent too much one way, I was induced to
bend it too much the other, in order to make it
straight.”[88] The abstract principle of increase getting
more, and concrete humanity less, than justice, the
next step was, naturally, to deny the possibility of
permanent improvement in this world, and to regard
every partial improvement as a labour of Sisyphus.[89]
It could hardly be otherwise, if we began, like
Malthus, by setting down the desire of food and the
desire of marriage as two co-ordinate principles.[90]
They are not really co-ordinate. It is true not merely
48of most men, but of all men without a single exception,
that they cannot live without food. Even if a man
survive an abstinence from solid food for forty days,
he cannot deny himself water, and he is for all useful
purposes dead to the world during his fast. The
second postulate of the first essay is, on the contrary,
true only of most men, and even then under qualifications.
It is not true of any till manhood, and it
is not true of all men equally. Some are beyond its
scope by an accident of birth, and a still larger
number, whether priests or laymen, put themselves
beyond its scope for moral reasons.[91] Coleridge puts
the case pertinently enough: “The whole case is this:
Are they both alike passions of physical necessity,
and the one equally with the other independent
of the reason and the will? Shame upon our race
that there lives the individual who dares even ask
the question.”[92]
Malthus saw that he had been hasty, and he did
not republish the essay till he had given it five
years of revision, and added to it the results of foreign
travel and wider reading. In 1799 he went abroad
with some college friends, Otter, Clarke the antiquarian
and naturalist, and Clarke’s pupil Cripps,[93] and visited
Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and part of
Russia, these being the only countries at that time
open to English travellers. After his return he
49published his tract on the High Price of Provisions
(1800),[94] and at the conclusion of it he promised
a new edition of the Essay on Population. Some
people, he says, have thought the essay “a specious
argument inapplicable to the present state of society,”
because it contradicts preconceived opinions; but
two years of reflection have strengthened his conviction
that he has discovered “the real cause of
the continued depression and poverty of the lower
classes;” and he will not recant his essay: “I have
deferred giving another edition of it in the hope of
being able to make it more worthy of the public
attention, by applying the principle directly and
exclusively to the existing state of society, and
endeavouring to illustrate the power and universality
of its operation from the best authenticated accounts
that we have of the state of other countries.” But
he was not satisfied with the accounts of other people.
When the Peace of Amiens let loose thousands of
pleasure-seekers on the Continent, Malthus went to
France and Switzerland on no errand of mere pleasure;
and he was luckily at home again, and passing
his proof-sheets through the press, before Napoleon’s
unpleasant interference with English travellers.
It was a happy coincidence that in the dark
fighting days of 1798, Malthus should write only of
vice and misery, while in the short gleam of peace
in 1802 and 1803, when the tramp of armed men
had ceased for the moment, he should recollect
himself, and write of a less ghastly restraint on
50population, a restraint which might perhaps, like
the truce of Amiens, hold out some faint hope for
the future. For the sake of the world let us hope
that the parallel goes no further. The wonder is not
that he forgot there was such a thing as civilization,
but that amidst wars and rumours of wars he should
ever have remembered it.
In the preface to the new edition (June 1803),
he says he has “so far differed in principle” from
the old edition “as to suppose the action of another
check to population which does not come under the
head either of vice or misery,” and he has “tried
to soften some of the harshest conclusions of the
first essay.” There was really more change than
this. The first essay contained much of the imperfection
of the sudden magazine-article; and if the
writer had lived half a century later he would
probably, instead of writing a small book, have contributed
a long article to a monthly or quarterly
magazine, giving a review of Godwin’s political
writings, with incidental remarks on the Poor Bill
of Mr. Pitt. This was evidently the light in which
he himself regarded his first work, or he would not
have handled it so freely in republication. The new
edition had new facts, new arrangement, and new
emphasis. He had not written a book once for all,
leaving the world to fight over it after his death.
He took the public into partnership with him, and
made every discussion a means of improving his
book. This gives the Essay on Population a unique
character among economical writings. It leads the
51author to interpret his thoughts to us from many
various points of view, leaving us, unhappily, often
in doubt whether an alteration of language is or is
not an alteration of thought. Malthus adds to the
difficulty by omitting and inserting instead of rewriting
in full. His chapters cease to be old without
becoming new.
The very face of the book revealed a change. In
1798 it was An Essay on the Principle of Population
as it affects the Future Improvement of Society; in
1803, An Essay on the Principle of Population, or
a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human
Happiness. The dreams of the future are now in
the background, and the facts of the present in the
foreground. In 1798 Malthus had given Godwin
the lie:—
“Colouring he, dilating, magniloquent, glorying in picture,
He to a matter of fact still softening, paring, abating,
He to the great might-have-been upsoaring, sublime and ideal,
He to the merest it—was restricting, diminishing, dwarfing.”
He must do more now, or his political economy is
a dismal science. He must show how we can cling
to the matter of fact without losing our ideal. It is
not enough to refer us to the other world. How far
may we have hope in this world? Let Malthus
answer.
The second essay is his answer; and if second
thoughts are the best, then we may rejoice over the
second essay, for it lifts the cloud from the first. It
tells us that on the whole the power of civilization is
greater than the power of population; the pressure of
52the people on the food is therefore less in modern than
it was in ancient times or the middle ages; there
are now less disorder, more knowledge, and more
temperance.[95] The merely physical checks are falling
into a subordinate position. There are two kinds
of checks on population. A check is (a) positive,
when it cuts down an existing population, (b) preventive,
when it keeps a new population from growing
up. Among animals the check is only misery,
among savage men vice as well as misery, and, in
civilized society, moral restraint as well as, till now,
both vice and misery. Even in civilized society there
are strata which moral restraint hardly reaches, for
there are strata which are not civilized. On the
whole, however, it is true that among animals there
is no sign of any other check than the positive, while
among men the positive is gradually subordinated to
the preventive. Among men misery may act both
positively and preventively. In the form of war or
disease it may slay its tens of thousands, and cut
down an existing population. By the fear of its own
coming it may prevent many a marriage, and keep a
new population from growing up. Vice may also act
in both ways: positively as in child-murder, preventively
as in the scheme of Condorcet. But in civilized
society the forces of both order and progress are
arrayed against their two common enemies; and, if
we recognized no third check, surely the argument
that was used against Godwin’s society holds against
all society; its very purification will ruin it, by
53forbidding vice and misery to check the growth of
population, and by thereby permitting the people to
increase to excess. There is, however, a third check,
which Malthus knows under the title of moral restraint.
Moral restraint is a distinct form of preventive
check. It is not to be confused with an impure
celibacy, which falls under the head of vice; and yet
the adjective “moral” does not imply that the
motives are the highest possible.[96] The adjective is
applied not so much to the motive of the action as to
the action itself, from whatever motives proceeding;
and in the mouth of a Utilitarian this language is
not unphilosophical. Moral restraint, in the pages
of Malthus, means simply continence; it is an abstinence
from marriage followed by no irregularities.[97]
He speaks of the “moral stimulus” of the bounty on
corn, meaning the expectations it produced in the
minds of men, as distinguished from the variations it
produced in the prices of grain;[98] and the word
“moral” is often, like “morale,” used in military
matters to denote mental disposition, as distinguished
from material resources. The vagueness of the word
is perhaps not accidental, for nothing is vaguer
than the mixed motives which it denotes; but
continence, which is unambiguous, would seem the
better word.
54With the enunciation of the third check the theory
of Malthus entered definitively on a new phase; and
in sketching the outlines of his work we shall no
longer need to treat it as paradoxical and overstrained,
but as a sober argument from the ground of accepted
facts. The author’s analysis of human nature has
been brought into harmony with common sense. He
confesses that it had hitherto been too abstract, and
had separated the inseparable.
The mind of man cannot be sawed into quantities;
and, even if it is possible to distinguish the
mixed motives that guide human action, the fact
remains that they only operate when together. It
is probable that no good man’s motives were ever
absolutely noble, and no bad man’s ever absolutely
bestial. Even the good man is strongest when he
can make his very circumstances war against his
power to do evil. Mixed from the first of time,
human motives will, in this world, remain mixed unto
the last, whether in saint, sage, or savage. But
civilization, involving, as it does, a progressive change
in the dominant ideas of society, will alter the character
of the mixture and the proportion of the
elements. The laws of Malthus will be obeyed,
though the name of Malthus be not mentioned, and
the checks, physical or moral, be never brought to
mind. Society, moving all together, if it move at all,
cannot cure its evils by one single heroic remedy;
but as little can it be content with self-denying ordinances,
prohibitions, or refutations. It needs a positive
truth, and an ideal, that is to say, a religion, to give
55new life to the bodily members by giving new hope
to the heart. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom, but the end of wisdom is the love of the
Lord and the admiration of moral good.”[99] It follows
that an economist, if he knows nothing but his
economy, does not know even that.
No economists are more reproached with their
want of idealism than Malthus and his brethren.
As the French Revolutionists were said to believe
that the death of their old rulers would of itself bring
happiness and good government, so these writers were
said to teach that the mere removal of hindrances
would lead to the best possible production and distribution
of the good things of this life. The ideal
state then, as far as wealth was concerned, would be
anarchy plus the police constable. Godwin would
have dispensed with the constable. “Give a state
liberty enough,” he says, “and vice cannot exist in
it.”[100] But neither he nor the economists desired a
merely negative change or removal of hindrances.
Their political reformation was to be, like the Protestant,
only successful as it went beyond image-breaking.
Malthus, it will be seen,[101] is far from
being an unqualified advocate of laissez faire; and,
in all cases where he did desire it, he wished to
make the state small only to make public opinion
great. Godwin was not far away from him here.
If he was wrong in attributing too much evil to
56institutions, and too little to human nature, he has
furnished his own correction. The Political Justice
disclaimed all sympathy with violence; it taught
that a political reform was worthless unless effected
peacefully by reason; and Malthus[102] has the same
cure for social evils—argument and instruction. The
difference between them is, that Malthus takes more
into account the unreasonableness as well as the
reasonableness of men. In essentials they are agreed.
The thorough enlightenment of the people, which
includes their moral purification as well as their
intellectual instruction, is to complete the work of
mending all, in which men are to be fellow-workers
with God—so runs the teaching of Malthus and all
the greatest economists of the last hundred years.
Whether the evils of competition are many or few,
serious or trifling, depends largely on the character
of the competitors; and the more free we make the
competition, the more thoroughly we must educate the
competitors. Adam Smith was well aware of this;
he recommended school-boards a hundred years before
the Acts of 1870 and 1872;[103] and Malthus was not
behind him.[104] They are aware that the more completely
we exclude the interference of Government,
the more actively we must employ every other moral
and social agency. Whether Malthus was prepared
to exclude the interference of Government entirely,
even under this condition, we shall see by-and-by.
57The characters of the two men, Malthus and Godwin,
are a striking contrast. Malthus was the student,
of quiet settled life, sharing his little wealth with his
friends in unobtrusive hospitality, and constantly
using his pen for the good, as he believed, of the
English poor, that in these wretched times they might
have domestic happiness like his own. There never
was a more singular delusion than the common
belief in the hard-heartedness of Malthus. Besides
the unanimous voice of private friends, he has left
testimony enough in his own books to absolve him.
While Adam Smith and others owe their errors to
intellectual fallibility, Malthus owes many of his to
his tender heart. His motive for studying political
economy was no doubt a mixed motive; it was partly
the interest of an intelligent man in abstract questions;
but it was chiefly the desire to advance the
greatest happiness of the greatest number. In his
eyes the elevation of human life was much more
important than the solution of a scientific problem.
Even when in 1820 he wrote a book on the “Principles
of Political Economy,” he took care to add on the
title-page, “considered with a view to their practical
application,” refusing to consider in abstractness what
always exists in the concrete. His keen sympathy
for the sufferings of displaced workmen led him to
fight a losing battle with Say and Ricardo in favour
of something like an embargo on inventions, and in
protest against a fancied over-production.[105] His private
58life showed the power of gentleness; Miss Martineau
could hear his mild, sonorous vowels without her eartrumpet,
and his few sentences were as welcome at
her dinner-table as the endless babble of cleverer
tongues. He felt the pain of a thousand slanders
“only just at first,” and never let them trouble his
dreams after the first fortnight, saying, with a higher
than stoical calmness, that they passed by him like
the idle wind which he respected not.[106] He outlived
obloquy, and saw the fruit of his labours in a wiser
legislation and improved public feeling.
With Godwin all was otherwise. There were fightings
within and fears without. With an immovable
devotion to ideas he combined a fickleness of affection
towards human beings. He heeded emotion too little
in his books and too much in his own life, yielding
to the fancy of the moment, quarrelling with his best
friends twice a week, and quickly knitting up the
broken ties again. He loved his wife well, but hardly
allowed her to share the same house with him, lest
they should weary of one another.[107] He was the
sworn enemy of superstition, and himself the arch-dreamer
of dreams.
Yet when we contrast the haphazard literary life
of the one, ending his days ingloriously[108] in a Government
sinecure, unsuccessful and almost forgotten,
with the academical ease of the other, centred in
59the sphere of common duties, and passing from the
world with a fair consciousness of success, we feel
a sympathy for Godwin that is of a better sort than
the mere liking for a loser. It is a sympathy not sad
enough for pity. It is not wholly sad to find Godwin
in his old age a lonely man, his friends dropping off
one by one into the darkness and leaving him solitary
in a world that does not know him. The world that
had begun to realize the ideas of Malthus had begun
to realize the ideas of Godwin also. It was a world
far more in harmony with political justice than that
into which Godwin had sent his book forty years
before. It was good that Malthus had lived to see
the new Poor Law, but still better that both had lived
to see the Reform of ’32.
They passed away within two years of each other,
Malthus in the winter of 1834, Godwin in the spring
of 1836, the year of the first league of the people
against the Corn Laws. In their death they were
still divided, but, “si quis piorum manibus locus,”
they are divided no longer, and they think no hard
thoughts of each other any more.
60
Position stated in the Essay—Tendency of Life to increase beyond
Food—Problem not the same for Humanity as for the lower forms
of Life—Man’s Dilemma—Tendency to increase not predicable of
Food in same sense as of Life—The Geometrical and Arithmetical
Ratios—Position stated in Encyclopædia Britannica—Milne’s Confirmation
of the Geometrical Ratio—Arithmetical Ratio proved
differently—Private Property a condition of great Production—Fallacy
of confusing possible with actual Production—Laws of Man
as well as of Nature responsible for necessity of Checks—Position
stated in “Summary View”—The Checks on Population classified
(a) objectively and (b) subjectively—Relation to previous Classification—Cycle
in the movement of Population.
The second essay applies the theory of the first to new
facts and with a new purpose. The author, having
gained his case against Godwin, ceases to be the critic
and becomes the social reformer. Despairing to
master all the forms of evil, he confines his study to
one of them in particular, the tendency of living
beings to increase beyond their means of nourishment.
This phenomenon is important both from its cause
and from its effects. Its cause is not the action of
Governments, but the constitution of man; and its
effects are not of to-day or yesterday, but constant
and perpetual;[109] it frequently hinders the moral
61goodness and general happiness of a nation as well as
the equal distribution of its wealth.
This is the general position, which the several
chapters of the essay are to expound in detail. It
is not by itself quite simple. “The constant tendency
in all animated life [sic][110] to increase beyond the
nourishment prepared for it” is in one sense common
to humanity with plants and animals, but in another
sense is not common to any two of the three. It is
certainly true of all of them that the seeds of their
life, whencesoever at first derived, are now infinitely
numerous on our planet, while the means of rearing
them are strictly limited. In the case of plants and
animals the strong instinct of reproduction is “interrupted
by no reasoning or doubts about providing for
offspring,”[111] and they crowd fresh lives into the world
only to have them at once shorn away by starvation.
With the exception of certain plants which ape their
superiors, like the drosera, and certain men who ape
their inferiors, like the cannibals, the lines of difference
between the three classes of living things are
tolerably distinct. The first class, in the struggle
for room and food, can only forestall each other and
leave each other to die; the second deliberately prey
on the first and on each other; while the third prey
on both the rest. But with man this “tendency to
increase beyond the food” differs from the same
instinct in the other two cases by more than the fact
that man has larger resources and is longer in reaching
his limit. The instinct is equally strong in him, but
62he does not unquestioningly follow it. “Reason
interrupts his career,” and asks him whether he may
not be bringing into the world beings for whom he
cannot provide the means of support.[112] If he brushes
reason aside, then he shares the fate of plants and
animals; he tends to multiply his numbers beyond
the room and food accessible to them, and the result
is that his numbers are cut down to these limits by
suffering and starvation. There is nothing in this
either more or less contrary to the notion of a
benevolent Providence than in the general power
given to man of acting rationally or irrationally
according to his own choice in any other instance.
On the other hand, if he listens to reason, he can no
doubt defeat the tendency, but too often he does it at
the expense of moral purity. The dilemma makes
the desire for marriage almost an “origin of evil.”
If man obeys his instincts he falls into misery, and,
if he resists them, into vice. Though the dilemma
is not perfect, its plausibility demands that we should
test it by details, and to this test Malthus may be
said to have given his whole life. His other economical
works are subordinate to the essay, and may be
said to grow out of it. Though we cannot omit them
if we would fully understand and illustrate the central
work, still the latter must come first; and its matured
form requires more than the brief summary which
has been given in the two preceding chapters.
The body of the book consists of historical details,
and particular examples showing the checks to population
63in uncivilized and in civilized places, in present
and in past times. The writer means to bring his
conclusions home to his readers by the “longer way”
of induction. As this, however, was not the way in
which he himself reached them, or even stated them
at first, he will ask us first of all to look at the terms
of the dilemma in the light of his two original
postulates[113]—(a) food is necessary, (b) the desire of
marriage is permanent. What is the quickest possible
increase of numbers in obedience to the second, and
of food in obedience to the first? In the most crucial
of the known instances, the actual rapidity of the
increase of population seems to be in direct proportion
to the easy possession of food; and we can infer that
the ideally rapid increase would take place where all
obstacles (whether material or moral) to the getting
of food and rearing of a family were removed, so
that nature never needed to remonstrate with instinct.
“In no state that we have yet known has
the power of population been left to exert itself with
perfect freedom.”[114] We can guess what it would be
from the animal and vegetable world, where reason
does not as a matter of fact interfere with instinct in
any circumstances, so far as we can judge. Benjamin
Franklin, in a passage quoted by Malthus in this
connection,[115] supposes that if the earth were bared of
other plants it might be replenished in a few years
64with fennel alone. Even as things are now, fennel
would fill the whole earth if the other plants
would only allow it; and the same is true of each of
the others. Townsend’s goats and greyhounds on
Juan Fernandez are a better instance, because not
hypothetical.[116] Juan Fernando, the first discoverer, had
covered the island with goats from one pair.[117] The
Spaniards resolved to clear it of goats, in order to make
it useless to the English for provisioning. They put
on shore a couple of greyhounds, whose offspring soon
caused the goats to disappear. But without some
few goats to eat all the dogs must have died; and the
few were saved to them by their inaccessible refuges
in the rocks, from which they descended at risk of
their lives. In this way only the strongest and
fleetest dogs and the hardiest and fleetest goats
survived; and a balance was kept up between goat
food and hound population. Townsend thereupon
remarks that human populations are kept down by
want of food precisely in the same way.
There is nothing to prevent the increase of human
numbers if we suppose reason to have no need (as
in the lower creatures it has no opportunity) to interfere.
To understand the situation, however, it is
best not to assume the truth of this parallelism, but
to take the actually recorded instances of human
increase under the nearest known approaches to absolute
plenty combined with moral goodness, that is to
65say, with a state of society in which vice is at a
minimum. “In the northern states of America, where
the means of subsistence have been more ample, the
manners of the people more pure, and the checks to
early marriages fewer than in any of the modern states
of Europe, the population was found to double itself
for some successive periods every twenty-five years.”[118]
From this near approach to an unchecked increase,
we infer that the unchecked would mean a doubling
in less than twenty-five years (say twenty, or perhaps
fifteen), and that all population, in proportion as it
is unchecked, tends towards that rate of increase.
If it is difficult to find an unchecked increase of
population, it is still harder to find an unchecked
increase of food; for what is meant is not that a
people should find their food in one fertile country
with as much ease as in another, but that, for a new
people, new supplies should always be found with the
same ease as the old ones. Now it is not necessary
to suppose that the most fertile land is always used
first;[119] very often it might only be used late after
the rest, through political insecurity, imperfect agriculture,
incomplete explorations, or the want of
capital; but, when it is once occupied, the question
is, will it supply new food to new-comers without
any limit at all? This would be an ideally fertile
land corresponding to the ideally expanding population.
And on some such inexhaustible increase
66of food an unchecked increase of population would
depend, unless men became able to live without
food altogether.
Malthus afterwards pointed out, in the course of
controversy,[120] that there is strictly speaking no
question here of the comparison of two tendencies,
for we cannot speak of a tendency to increase food
in the same sense as a tendency to increase population.
Population is increased by itself; food is increased
not by food itself, but by an agency external
to it, the human beings that want it; and, while the
former increase is due to an instinct, the latter is (in
a sense) acquired. Eating is instinctive, but not the
getting of the food. We have, therefore, to compare an
increase due to an instinctive desire with an increase
due to labour, and “a slight comparison will show
the immensity of the first power over the second.”
Malthus allows that it is difficult to determine this
relation with exactness;[121] but, with the natural liking
of a Cambridge man for a mathematical simile,[122] he
says that the one is to the other as an arithmetical
to a geometrical ratio,—that is to say, in any given
time (say a century) the one will have increased by
multiplication, the other only by addition. If we
represent both the population and the food at the
beginning of that century by ten, then the population
67will double itself in twenty-five years; the ten will
become twenty in the first twenty-five years, forty in
the second, eighty in the third, one hundred and sixty
in the last, while the food will only become twenty
in the first, thirty in the second, forty in the third,
fifty in the fourth. If this is true, it shows the
tendency of population to outrun subsistence. But
of course it needs to be shown from experience that,
while the strength of the desire remains the same in
the later stages of the growth of population as in the
earlier, the laboriousness of the labour is greater in
the later stages of the increase of food than in the
earlier. It is the plain truth, says Malthus, that
nature is niggardly in her gifts to man, and by no
means keeps pace with his desires. If men would
satisfy their desire of food at the old rate of speed,
they must exert their mind or their body much more
than at first.[123] An obvious objection presents itself.
Since man’s food consists after all of the lower forms of
life, animal and vegetable, and since these admittedly
tend to increase, unchecked by themselves, in a geometrical
ratio, it might be thought that the increase
of human population and the increase of its food
could proceed together, with equal ease. But the
answer is that this unchecked geometrical increase of
the first could go on only so long as there was room
for it. It could only be true, for example, of wheat
in the corn-field at the time when the seed of it was
sown, and the field was all before it. The equality
of the two ratios would only be true of the first
68crop.[124] At first there might be five or sixfold the
seed; but in after years, though the geometrical
increase from the seed would tend to be the same,
there could be no geometrical increase of the total
crop by unassisted nature. The earth has no tendency
to increase its surface. There is a tendency of animals
and vegetables to increase geometrically, in their
quality of living things, but not in their quality of
being food for man. The same amount of produce
might no doubt be gained on a fresh field, from the
seed yielded by the first, and at the same geometrical
rate; but this assumes that there is a fresh field,
and we should not then be at the proper stage to
contrast the two ratios. The contrast begins to show
itself as soon as the given quantity of land has grown
its crop, and its animal and human population have
used all its food. The question is then how any
increase of the said population, if they are confined
to their own supplies, is at all to be made possible;
the answer is, only by greater ingenuity and greater
labour in the getting of food; and, however possible
this may be, it can hardly be so easy as the increase
of living beings by their own act.
The degree of disparity between the two will of
course depend on the degree of rapidity with which
an unchecked population is supposed to double itself.
Sir William Petty,[125] with few trustworthy statistics,
69had supposed ten years; Euler, with somewhat better,
twelve and four-fifths; but Malthus prefers to go by
the safe figures of the American colonies, which he
always regarded as a crucial proof that the period was
not more than twenty-five. He admits the risk of his
own mathematical simile when he grants that it is
more easy to determine the rate of the natural increase
of population than the rate of the increase of food
which is in a much less degree natural (or spontaneous);
and he argues from what had been done in
England in his own time that the increase would
not even be in an arithmetical ratio, though agricultural
improvement (thanks to Arthur Young and the
Board of Agriculture, and the long reign of high
prices) was raising the average produce very sensibly.
If the Napoleonic times were the times of a forced
population in England, they were also the times of
a forced agricultural production. Yet we ourselves,
long after this stimulus, and after much high farming
unknown to our fathers, have reached only an
average produce of twenty-eight bushels per acre of
arable land as compared with twenty-three in 1770,[126]
while the population has risen from about six millions
to thirty-five. It may be said that applies only to
wheat. But until lately wheat-growing was the chief
object of all our scientific agriculture; and this is
the result of a century’s improvements. It is far
from an arithmetical increase; and, even had the
produce been multiplied sevenfold, along with the
population, this would not overthrow the contention
70of Malthus, for he is not speaking of any and every
increase of food, but of such an increase made by
the same methods and by the same kind of labour
as raised the old supplies.[127] Once it is acknowledged
that to raise new food requires greater labour and
new inventions, while to bring new men into the
world requires nothing more than in all times past,
the disparity of the two is already admitted. The
fact that the two processes are both dependent on the
action of man, and both practically illimitable, does not
prevent them from being essentially unlike.[128] Objectors
often suppose that the tendency of population to
outrun subsistence is contradicted by the existence of
unpeopled or thinly-peopled countries, just as if the
tendency of bodies to attract each other were contradicted
by the incompressibility of matter. The
important point to notice is that the one power is
greater than the other. The one is to the other as
the hare is to the tortoise in the fable. To make the
slow tortoise win the race, we must send the hare to
sleep.[129]
Carey (Social Science, vol. i. ch. iii. § 5) represents
the view of Malthus by the following propositions:—1.
“Matter tends to take upon itself higher forms,”
passing from inorganic to vegetable and animal life,
and from these to man. 2. Matter tends to take on
itself the vegetable and animal forms in an arithmetic
ratio only. 3. It tends to take its highest form, man,
in a geometrical ratio, so that the highest outstrips
71the lowest. In short he believes that Malthus holds
the geometrical increase to be true of man alone, and
only the arithmetical to be true of animals and
vegetables. But Malthus really attributed the
tendency to geometrical increase to all life whatsoever,
and arithmetical to all food, as such.
In Macvey Napier’s Supplement to the Encyclopædia
Britannica (1824) Malthus has left his mature statement
of his cardinal principles, and, at the risk of
repetition, that account may be added here. The
main difference from the essay is in arrangement of
the leading ideas; and we may learn at least what
he conceived to be their relative importance towards
the end of his life.
He begins by observing (1) that all living things,
of whatever kind, when furnished with their proper
nourishment tend to increase in a geometrical ratio,
whether (as wheat) by multiplying sixfold in one year,
or (as sheep) by doubling their numbers in two years,
tending to fill the earth, the one in fourteen, the other
in seventy-six years. But (2) as a matter of fact they
do not so increase, and the reason is either man’s
want of will or man’s want of power to provide them
their proper soil or pasture. The actual rate of
increase is extremely slow, while the power of increase
is prodigious. (3) Physically man is as the rest;
and if we ask what is the factor of his geometrical
increase, we can only tell it, as in the case of wheat
and sheep, by experience. (4) In the case of other
living beings, where there are most room and food
there is greatest increase. These conditions are best
72fulfilled for man in the United States, where the
distribution of wealth is better than in other equally
fertile places, and the greater number share the
advantages. The American census shows for the
three decades between 1790 and 1820 a rate of
increase that would double the numbers in 22⅓,
22½, and 23⁷⁄₁₂ years respectively, after we deduct as
immigrants ten thousand on an average every year.
A striking indirect confirmation of this view of
the American increase was supplied to Malthus[130] by
Joshua Milne, the author of the Treatise on Annuities.
His calculations were founded on the new Swedish
table of mortality. This table had been drawn up
from the registers of the first five years of the century,
years of unusual healthiness; and might therefore be
presumed to represent the normal condition of a new
and healthy country like the United States better
than the old table drawn up from the years before
sanitary reform and vaccination. Milne took the
Swedish table as his guide, and one million of people
as his unit of measurement; he calculated in what
proportions the component individuals of the million
must belong to childhood, youth, mature life, and old
age, in order that by the principles of the Swedish
table the million might double itself by natural
increase in twenty-five years; and he arrived at a
distribution so like that given by the American
census, that he was bound to conclude the American
rate of increase to be at the least very like one that
doubles a population in twenty-five years. But the
73Swedish law of mortality could not be exactly true
of the United States, which are healthier as a whole
than Sweden even in Sweden’s best years.[131] The
United States themselves are not the very healthiest
and wealthiest and happiest country conceivable;
and their increase is therefore not the fastest conceivable.
If the observed fact of increase is the best
proof of the capacity for increase, the observed
presence of checks leads to an a fortiori reasoning,
whereby we infer the capacity for a greater increase
than any actually observed. To sum up the whole of
this first branch of the argument,—“taking into
consideration the actual rate of increase which appears
from the best documents to have taken place over a
very large extent of country in the United States of
America, very variously circumstanced as to healthiness
and rapidity of progress,—considering further
the rate of increase which has taken place in New
Spain and also in many countries of Europe, where
the means of supporting a family, and other circumstances
favourable to increase, bear no comparison
with those of the United States,—and adverting
particularly to the actual increase of population which
has taken place in this country during the last twenty
years[132] under the formidable obstacles which must
press themselves upon the attention of the most
74careless observer, it must appear that the assumption
of a rate of increase such as would double the population
in twenty-five years, as representing the natural
progress of population when not checked by the
difficulty of procuring the means of subsistence or
other peculiar causes of premature mortality, must
be decidedly within the truth. It may be safely
asserted, therefore, that population when unchecked
increases in a geometrical ratio of such a nature as to
double itself every twenty-five years.”[133]
The problem is only half stated; it is still to be
shown what is the rate of the increase of Food. The
case does not admit the same kind of proof. We
can suppose an unchecked increase of men going
on without any change in human nature; we have
only to suppose for the future the same encouragement
to marriage and the same habits of life, together
with the same law of mortality. But with
the increase of food the causes do not remain the
same. If good land could be got in abundance, the
increase of food from it would be in a geometrical
ratio far greater than that of the men; that of wheat,
for example, would be sixfold, as we have seen. But
good lands are comparatively few; they will in the
nature of things soon be occupied; and then the
increase of the food will be a laborious process at a
rate rather resembling a decreasing than an increasing
geometrical ratio. “The yearly increment of food, at
least, would have a constant tendency to diminish;”
and the amount of the increase in each successive ten
75years would probably be less and less. In practice,
the inequalities of distribution may check the increase
of food with precisely the same efficacy as an
actual arrival at the physical limits to the getting
of the food. “A man who is locked up in a room
may fairly be said to be confined by the walls of it,
though he may never touch them.”[134] But the main
point is, that, inequalities or no inequalities, there is
a tendency to diminished productiveness. Under
either condition the quantity yielded this year will
not be doubled or trebled for an indefinite period with
the same ease as it was yielded this year. In a
tolerably well-peopled country such as England or
Germany the utmost might be an increase every
twenty-five years equal to the present produce. But
the continuance of this would mean that in the next
two hundred years every farm should produce eight
times what it does now, or, in five hundred years,
twenty times as much; and even this is incredible,
though it would be only an arithmetical progression.
No doubt almost all parts of the earth are now more
thinly peopled than their capacities might allow; but
the difficulty is to use the capacities. That this view of
Malthus need not imply any ignorance or any disregard
of the resources of high farming may be judged
from the fact that our highest agricultural authority,
who recognizes the power of English farming to provide
on emergency even for our entire annual wants,
admits at the same time that, “where full employment
and the means of subsistence are abundant,
76population increases in geometrical progression, and
therefore in a far more rapid proportion than the
increased productiveness of the soil, which after a
certain point is stationary.”[135] “It follows necessarily”
(sums up Malthus) “that the average rate of the actual
increase of population over the greatest part of the
globe, obeying the same law as the increase of food,
must be totally of a different character from the rate
at which it would increase if unchecked.” On no
single farm could the produce be so increased as to
keep pace with the geometrical increase of population;
and what is true of a single farm is true in this case
of the whole earth. Machinery and invention can do
less in agriculture than in manufacture, and they can
never do so much as to make preventive checks
unnecessary.[136]
This is the argument of the Encyclopædia so far as
it relates to the theses of the essay. Malthus follows
it up by a remark on the institution of property.
The alternatives to his mind are always private
property as we now have it, and common property as
desired by Godwin. He upholds the first because,
“according to all past experience and the best observation
which can be made on the motives which operate
upon the human mind,” the largest produce from the
soil is got by that system, and because (what is
socially much more important), by making a man feel
his responsibility and his dependence on his own
efforts, it tends to cause prudence in marriage as well
as industry in work. Common property has not
77been successful, historically; and the widest extension
of popular education would not make men the fitter
for it. There is indeed a sense in which common
property might tend to carry production farther than
private property; cultivation, not being for profit but
for mere living, would not, like the present, stop at the
point where production ceased to be a good investment.
But this would mean[137] that the whole energies
of the society were directed to the mere getting of
food; neither the whole society nor any part of it
would have leisure, for intellectual labour or enjoyment.
Whereas private property not only secures
the leisure, but, by stopping at the point of profitableness,
it keeps an unused reserve, on which society
may fall back in case of need. Malthus therefore
would stand by private property, though he thinks
that private proprietors may damage the national
wealth by game-preserving, and injure the poorer
classes by not spending enough on what they make.[138]
The actual increase of population (he goes on) and
the necessity of checks to it depend on the difficulty
of getting food, from whatever cause, whether the
exhaustion of the earth or the bad structure of
society; and the difficulty is not for the remote
future but for the present.
It is chiefly the contrast between the actual and
the possible supplies that makes men incredulous
about the necessity of checks; and we may grant that
78under an ideal government, a perfect people, and
faultless social system the produce would at first be
so great that the necessity for checks on population
would be very much reduced; but, as the earth’s
productiveness does not expand with population, it
would be a very short time before the pressure of the
checks would reassert itself—this time from no fault
of man, but from the mere nature of the soil.[139] The
bad government of our ancestors left much produce
unused, and in consequence we have for the present
a large margin to draw on. But, “if merely since the
time of William the Conqueror all the nations of the
earth had been well governed, and if the distribution
of property and the habits both of the rich and the
poor had been the most favourable to the demand for
produce and labour, though the amount of food and
population would have been prodigiously greater than
at present, the means of diminishing the checks to
population would unquestionably be less.”
But, though the laws of nature are responsible for
the necessity of checks to population,[140] “a vast mass of
responsibility remains behind, on man and the institutions
of society.” To them in the first place is due
the scantiness of the present population of the earth,
there being few parts of it that would not with better
government and better morals support twice, ten
times, or even one hundred times as many inhabitants
as now. In the second place, though man cannot
79remove the necessity of checks, or even make them
press much more lightly in any given place,[141] he is
responsible for their precise character and particular
mode of operation. A good government and good
institutions can so direct them that they shall be
least hurtful to the general virtue and happiness, vice
and misery disappearing before moral restraint, though
after all the influence of government and institutions
is indirect, and everything depends on the conduct of
the individual citizens.
The rest of the article contains little that is not
in the Essay on Population (5th ed., 1817) and the
treatise on Political Economy (1st ed., 1820). It
gives the historical sketches of the former, some small
part of the economical discussions (e. g. on wages) of
the latter, and a short answer to current objections,
together with some tables of mortality and other
figures, of more special interest to the professional
actuary than to the general reader. The article is
an authoritative summary of the author’s doctrines in
their final form. It was not his last work. From
the fact that he undertook the paper in Sept. 1821,[142]
we may perhaps infer that he placed it in Macvey
Napier’s hands in the year 1822.[143] But it was his
last attempt to restate the subject of the essay in
an independent form with anything approaching to
fulness of detail, and it shows he had made no change
80in his position. The Summary View of the Principle
of Population (1830) was avowedly an abridgment
of the article in the Encyclopædia, and is in fact
that article with a few paragraphs omitted and a
few pronouns altered.
The clear statement of the two tendencies was, in
his own eyes, the least original part of his work. It
had been often perceived distinctly by other writers
that population must always be kept down to the
level of the means of subsistence. “Yet few inquiries
have been made into the various modes by which this
level is effected, and the principle has never been
sufficiently pursued to its consequences, nor those
practical inferences drawn from it which a strict
examination of its effects on society appears to
suggest.”[144] What some people would count the more
interesting question remained to be considered——the
question that touches individuals and familiar circumstances
more nearly, and is not to be answered by a
generality, from which we easily in thought except
our own individual selves. Since, at any given time,
in any given place, among any given people, there is
(1) a tendency of population to outrun subsistence,
and there is (2) no such excess as a matter of fact,
in what way or ways is the tendency prevented from
carrying itself out? As was said above,[145] this is
effected in two kinds of ways—(1) by the way of
a positive, (2) by the way of a preventive check, the
former cutting down an actual population to the level
of its food, the second forbidding a population to
81need to be cut down, and being, so far as it is voluntary,
peculiar to man among living creatures. Of
the positive, all those that come from the laws of
nature may be called misery pure and simple; and
all those that men bring on themselves by wars,
excesses, and avoidable troubles of all kinds are of a
mixed character, their causes being vice and their
consequences misery. Of the preventive, that restraint
from marriage which is not accompanied by any
immoral conduct on the part of the person restraining
himself or herself is called moral restraint. Any
restraint which is prudential and preventive, but
immoral, comes under the head of vice, for every
action may be so called which has “a general tendency
to produce misery,” however innocuous its immediate
effects.[146] We find, therefore, that the positive and the
preventive checks are all resolvable into vice, misery,
and moral restraint, or sin, pain, and self-control,
a threefold division that makes the second essay
“differ in principle” from the first.[147]
We have here a twofold alongside of a threefold
division of the checks to population. The one is
made from an objective, the other from a subjective
point of view. The division of checks (1) into positive
and preventive has regard simply to the outward
facts; a population is in those two ways kept down
to the food. The division of them (2) into vice,
misery, and moral restraint has regard to the human
agent and his inward condition, the state of his
feelings and of his will. For example, the positive
82check viewed subjectively, or from the human being’s
point of view, is the feeling of pain; the will is not
directly concerned with it. The preventive, from the
same point of view, is of a less simple character. First
of all, moral restraint involves a temporary misery or
pain in the thwarting of a desire; “considered as a
restraint upon an inclination otherwise innocent and
always natural, it must be allowed to produce a certain
degree of temporary unhappiness, but evidently slight
compared with the evils which result from any of
the other checks to population,”[148] and “merely[149] of the
same nature as many other sacrifices of temporary
to permanent gratification which it is the business
of a moral agent continually to make.” The reverse
is true of vicious excesses and passions; in their
immediate gratification they are pleasant, but their
permanent effects are misery. From the point of
view of the will the case is clear, for the state of the
will would be described by Malthus, if he ever used
such terms, as in the one case good, and in the other
case evil, pure and simple. Of course in treating the
matter historically we may neglect the subjective
point of view, not because it is not necessary for
proper knowledge of the facts, but because it leads
to a psychological inquiry, the results of which are
independent of dates.
Malthus goes on to say that, in all cases where
there is the need for checks at all, it is the sum total
of all the preventive and positive checks that forms
the check to population in any given country at any
83given time,[150] and his endeavour will be to show in
what relative proportions and in what degree they
prevail in various countries known to us. He assumes
further that the preventive and the positive checks
will “vary inversely as each other.” In countries
where the mortality is great the influence of the
preventive check will be small; and, where the preventive
check prevails much, the positive check, or in
brief the mortality, will be small.[151]
In society, as it was in the first years of the nineteenth
century, Malthus thinks he can trace out even
by his own observation an “oscillation,” or what it
is the fashion to call a “cycle,” in the movement of
population. History does not show it well, simply
because “the histories of mankind which we possess
are in general only of the higher classes,”[152] and it is
the labouring classes to which the observation applies.
Their painful experience of the ruder checks has not
prevented a “constant effort” in the labouring population
to have larger families than they can well
support. The consequence is that their numbers are
increased; they must divide amongst eleven and a
half millions the food that was formerly divided
among eleven millions; they must have lower wages
and dearer provisions. But this state of distress
will so check population that in process of time the
numbers will be almost at a standstill, while at the
same time, since the demand for food has been greater
84and labour has been cheaper, the application of capital
to agriculture will have increased the available food.
The result will be the same tolerable degree of comfort
as at the beginning of the cycle, and the same relapse
from it as at the second stage. He conceives the two
stages to follow each other as naturally as sunshine
rain and rain sunshine. The existence of such a
cycle may remain concealed from the ordinary historian,
if he looks merely to the money wages of the
labourer, for it frequently happens that the labourer
gets the same sums of money for his wages during
a long series of years when the real value of the sums
has not remained the same,—the price of bread in
what we have called the second stage of the cycle
being much dearer than it was in the first, and than
it will be in the third.[153] Though Malthus expressly
qualifies his statements by showing that civilization
tends to counteract these fluctuations, it certainly
seemed to be his belief in 1803 that on the whole
the working classes of Europe, and especially of
England, were powerless to escape from them. How
far this view is justified will be seen presently.
85
Simile supplanted by Fact—Savage Life—Population dependent not on
possible but on actual Food—Indirect Action of Positive Checks—Hunger
not a Principle of Progress—Otaheite a Crux for Common
Sense—Cycle in the Movement of Population—Pitcairn Island—Barbarian
and Oriental—Nomad Shepherds—Abram and Lot—Cimbri
and Teutones—Gibbon versus Montesquieu—“At bay on the
limits of the Universe”—Misgovernment an indirect Check on Population—Ancient
Europe less populous than Modern—Civilization
the gradual Victory of the third Check.
The main position of the essay was so incontrovertible,
that when the critics despaired to convict
Malthus of a paradox, they charged him with a
truism. To the friendly Hallam[154] the mathematical
basis of the argument appeared as certain as the
multiplication table, and the unfriendly Hazlitt “did
not see what there was to discover after reading the
tables of Noah’s descendants, and knowing that the
world is round.”[155] If the essayist had done nothing
more than put half-truths together into a whole, he
would have “entrenched himself in an impregnable
fortress” and given his work a great “air of mastery.”[156]
But he would have convinced the understanding
86without convincing the imagination. Adam Smith
himself would have done no more than half his work,
if he had been content to prove the reasonableness of
free trade without showing, in detail, the effect of it
and its opposites. Even the most competent reader
has seldom all the relevant facts marshalled in his
memory, ready to command; and he will always be
thankful for illustrations. The Essay on Population
in its second form certainly excelled all economical
works, save one, in its pertinent examples from life
and history.
Imagination in the narrower sense of the word is
to be out of court. Malthus, like Adam Smith, not
only leaves little to his reader’s fancy, but makes
little use of his own. His own had misled his readers
in the first essay, though it had certainly given that
little book much of its piquancy; and he resolves for
the sake of truth to chain it up, as Coleridge chained
up his understanding. The self-denying ordinance
is only too fully executed. The style of his essay
is truly described by himself[157] as having gradually
“lost all pretensions to merit.” Edition follows
edition, each with its footnotes, supplements, rearrangements,
and corrections, till the reader feels that
this writer “would be clearer if he were not so clear.”
But the title-page supplies a guiding thread. From
the second edition onwards to the last, “Past” and
“Present” appear in large letters, “Future” in small.
The entire work may therefore be divided according to
the three tenses, with the emphasis on the two former.
87The first book is devoted to the past, the second to
the present, and the third and fourth to the future.
The First deals with the less civilized parts of the
world as it now is, and the uncivilized past times;
the Second with the different states of modern
Europe; the Third criticizes popular schemes of future
improvement; while the Fourth gives the author’s
own views of the possible progress of humanity.
After explaining his principles, Malthus takes a
survey of human progress, if not from brute to savage,
at least from savage to citizen. He shows us how
the rude and simple positive checks become complicated
with the preventive; and he leads us up from
barbarism to civilization till we find ourselves in a
society where the citizens think less of check than of
chief end, and less of self-sacrifice than of self-devotion,
to some cause or person, and even the inferior
members act, at worst, from mixed motives, containing
good as well as evil. These are the two extreme ends
of his line. It would be useless to deny that he
lingers longest over the less pleasing, and gives Godwin
some excuse for questioning his logical right to believe
in the more pleasing at all.[158] At the same time it
would have been (even logically) impossible for him
to have attacked Godwin for taking abstract views
of human nature, and then to have persisted in an
abstraction of his own, after all his own European
travel and historical studies. His fault had lain in
defective premises, not in false reasoning; and he
remedies the fault.
88Let us take his account in his own order. Beginning
with present savagery, which with some
qualifications is a picture of our own past, he sifts
out the descriptions of Cook, Vancouver, and other
travellers, to see what checks to population operate
in different grades of savage humanity. At the very
bottom of the scale comes Tierra del Fuego, by
general consent the abode of pure misery, and therefore
naturally the home of a sparse population. Next
come the natives of the Andaman Islands and of
Van Diemen’s Land. “Their whole time is spent in
search of food,” which consists of the raw products of
the soil and sea; the whole time of every individual
is devoted to this one labour, and there is neither
room nor inducement for any other industries. Vice
is hardly needed; misery in the shape of perpetual
scarcity and famine keeps down the people to the food.
Third in the scale of human beings are the New
Hollanders, the original inhabitants of North-West
Australia, among whom can be traced not only the
check of misery, but the check of vice. The women
are so cruelly treated at all times, and the children
have so harsh an upbringing, that there is no difficulty
in understanding how population does not even reach
the full limit of the scanty food. War and pestilence
make the assurance doubly sure. As savages are
entirely innocent of sanitary science, the dirt of their
persons and their houses deprives them of “the
advantage which usually attends a thinly-peopled
country,” comparative exemption from pestilence.[159]
89Even the North American Indians, who are one step
higher than the New Hollanders, come under the
same condemnation for overcrowding, and for much
else besides. The account which Malthus gives of
them may be compared with that of De Tocqueville
half a century later. Romance has clung to them
only because they were the nearest and best known
savages of their kind, and their necessary labours
were in Europe rich men’s pleasures. But hunting
and river-fishing cannot yield much food unless pursued
over a wide area. A hunter is so far like the
beast of prey which he pursues, that he must go long
distances for his food, and must either fly from or
overcome every rival. The North American Indian
must therefore either go West after his old food, or
else he must stay where he is, to beat off the
Europeans, or to adopt their food and their habits.
“The Indians have only two ways of saving themselves,
war and civilization. They must either
destroy the Europeans or become their equals.”[160] As
the civilization of a nation of hunters is almost
impossible, their extinction seems inevitable. The
question remains, How is this population cut down
to the level of its food?
In Malthus’ answer to the question occur three
remarks of great general importance. First, what
limits the numbers of a people is not the possible
but the actual food.[161] Second, want destroys a
90population less often directly by starvation than
indirectly through the medium of manners and
customs.[162] Third, the mere pressure of impending
starvation does not lead to progress.[163]
Malthus is never tired of insisting on the first of these
remarks; and a proper understanding of it is essential
to a fair judgment on his doctrine. He never says
that it is the tendency of a population to increase up
to the limits of the greatest possible amount of food
that can be produced in a given country. The valley
of the Mississippi when highly cultivated may possibly
support a hundred millions; but the question is not
what it would do when highly cultivated, but what
it can do when cultivated as it now is and as men
now are. “In a general view of the American
continent as described by historians, the population
seems to have been spread over the surface very
nearly in proportion to the quantity of food which
the inhabitants of the different parts in the actual
state of their industry and improvements could as a
matter of fact obtain; and that with few exceptions
it pressed hard against this limit, rather than fell short
of it, appears from the frequent recurrence of distress
for want of food in all parts of America.”[164] What is
said here of the Indians a hundred years ago applies
to the Colonists now. “The actual state of industry”
is of course a much more improved one; but the
population the land will bear is still in proportion
to it, and the amount could not have been
91increased till the actual state of the industry had first
been bettered. One cause of the decay of the numbers
of the Indians was that their method of industry, so
far from becoming better, became worse by their contact
with Europeans, and therefore the limit of population
was actually contracted instead of being extended.[165]
This explains how it is that their diminishing numbers
do not bring them greater comfort. Whether the
numbers in any given case are too great or too small
depends always on the quantity of the food that is
divided among them; and, where the food decreases
faster than the population, a population that has
become smaller numerically becomes actually larger
in proportion to the food. The statement that
England or any other country could bear millions
more than it does now is a mere reference to unexplored
possibilities, landing us in the infinite. It
may be answered in the same way as the Eleatic
puzzles about motion; land infinitely improvable
does not mean land infinitely improved, as matter
infinitely divisible does not mean matter infinitely
divided. The position of Malthus is therefore as
follows: given a people’s skill, and given its standard
of living at any time, its numbers are always
tending to be the utmost that can be furnished by
that skill with a living up to that standard,—that is
to say, with what, according to that standard, are the
necessaries of human life. Either a diminution of
that skill or an increase in that standard would cause
over-population. The question is always a relative one.
92The human as distinguished from the animal
character of the problem appears not only in that
relativity (which affects mainly the preventive checks),
but in the indirect way in which the positive checks,
if we may say so, prefer to act. It is as if they
were always desirous of resolving themselves as far
as might be into preventive. The ultimate check,
Malthus says, is starvation; but, he adds, it is seldom
the immediate one. The higher up we go in the
scale, the more it is hidden away out of sight. Starvation
is interpreted, by all grades of society above
the lowest, to mean the loss of what they conceive to
be the necessaries not of a bare living but of endurable
life; and even the lowest, instead of apprehending
some pain, apprehend some bringer of it. They do
not allow famine to kill them; they create manners
and customs that do the work for it, keeping the
famine itself afar off. “Both theory and experience
uniformly instruct us that a less abundant supply of
food operates with a gradually increasing pressure for
a very long time before its progress is stopped. It is
difficult indeed to conceive a more tremendous shock
to society than the event of its coming at once to the
limits of the means of subsistence, with all the habits
of abundance and early marriages, which accompany a
largely increasing population. But, happily for mankind,
this never is nor ever can be the case. The
event is provided for by the concurrent interests and
feelings of individuals long before it arrives; and the
gradual diminution of the real wages of the labouring
classes of society slowly and almost insensibly generates
93the habits necessary for an order of things in which
the funds for the maintenance of labour are stationary....
The causes [of the retardation of population]
will be generally felt and [will] generate a change of
habits long before the period arrives.”[166] “An insufficient
supply of food to any people does not show
itself merely in the shape of famine, but in other
more permanent forms of distress, and in generating
certain customs which operate sometimes with greater
force in the prevention of a rising population” than in
the destruction of the risen.[167] Robertson the historian
truly says, that whether civilization has improved
the lot of men may be doubtful, but it has certainly
improved the condition of women. Among the Indians
and almost all savages, “servitude is a name too mild
to describe their wretched state.” The hard life of
the men kills their instinctive fondness for the women;
the latter are therefore less likely to become mothers,
while, if they do, their own hardships and heavy tasks
are a great hindrance to nursing. It is not surprising
that the surviving children are of good physique;
none but the exceptionally strong could weather the
cruel discipline of childhood.[168] In South America
the difficulty of upbringing actually led to an enforced
monogamy, as well as to late marriages and
their not unfrequent accompaniment, irregularities
before marriage. Such customs diminish numbers.
But even the adult savages do not find life easy.
They are not the men to think of providing for a
94rainy day; in the short moments of plenty they do
not think of the long days of want. Intemperate
living as well as the rigour and the accidents of a
hunting life cut off numbers in their prime. They
are subject to diseases and invent no remedies. Their
acquiescence in dirt leads to pestilences, but they invent
no sanitary reforms; and their thinly-peopled
country loses its natural exemption from epidemics.
Their wars are internecine, for they are largely
prompted by sheer self-preservation, and the thought
that if the one combatant lives the other cannot.
Cannibalism itself was at first due to extreme want,
though what occasional hunger had begun, hate perpetuated
in a custom. This and the low cunning
and mean strategy, due to a resolve to survive at
all costs, are the prime inventions of the struggle for
existence on these low levels.
Such are the causes by which the numbers of the
North American Indians are kept down to a very low
figure; but, low as it is, the figure is high enough for
the food. Apart from a difference in the standard of
living, the proportion of population to food is similar
over the inhabited world; and in the same neighbourhood
or among cognate races it will be almost
identical. A diminution in one Indian tribe, not
being voluntary, will not be the cause of plenty to
the survivors; it has been the effect of want, and it
will simply weaken the collective force of the tribe
in the struggle against others.[169]
The supremacy of want as the ultimate check on
95population is illustrated by the instant expansion of
population which is produced in these grades of
humanity by an accession of plenty. When a tribe
falls upon fertile land, its numbers swell, and its collective
might, depending on numbers, becomes greater.
The increase of food, however, seems in this case to
lead to nothing else than increase of numbers. There
is a melancholy equality of suffering between tribe and
tribe, as well as between members of the same tribe.
There is no distinction of rank, but only of sex and
bodily strength, as regards endurance of hardships.
It is in this connection that Malthus throws some
light on the question how progress could ever take
place at all. His answer is not unlike Adam Smith’s
remark about the connection of high wages with good
work. He says, that beyond a certain limit, hard
fare and great want depress men below the very
capacity of improvement; comfort must reach a
certain height before the desires of civilized life can
come into being at all. If the American tribes, he
says, have remained hunters, it is not simply because
they have not increased in numbers sufficiently to
render the pastoral or agricultural state necessary to
them. Reasons which Malthus does not pretend to
particularize,[170] and which he allows to be unconnected
with mere increase or decrease of numbers, have prevented
these tribes from ever trying to raise cattle
or grow corn at all. “If hunger alone could have
prompted the savage tribes of America to such a
96change in their habits, I do not conceive that there
would have been a single nation of hunters and fishers
remaining; but it is evident that some fortunate
train of circumstances, in addition to this stimulus,
is necessary for this purpose; and it is undoubtedly
probable that these arts of obtaining food will be first
invented and improved in those spots which are best
suited to them, and where the natural fertility of the
situation, by allowing a greater number of people to
subsist together, would give the fairest chance to the
inventive powers of the human mind.” “A certain
degree of [political] security is perhaps still more
necessary than richness of soil to encourage the change
from the pastoral to the agricultural state.”[171] These
passages are remarkable because they seem to contradict
the general tenor of the author’s writings.
We were told with great emphasis in the first edition
of the essay that difficulties generate talents,[172] and
even the second and later are full of approving commentaries
on the proverb, “Necessity is the mother
of invention.”[173] The contradiction is soon solved.
Malthus has no faith in the civilizing power of competition
when it means a struggle among starved
men for bare life, but much faith in it when it means
the struggle for greater comfort among those who
already have the animal necessaries.[174] The significance
97of his admissions will be noticed later. Meanwhile
it must be observed that the passage just
quoted is not perfectly precise. The larger the
society, the greater might be the division of labour
and consequent stimulus to invention; but a tribe
might be large and yet have little in it of a society,
and still less of a division of labour. Without
such favouring circumstances as Malthus mentions
the progress cannot take place; but even with them
it need not; they are therefore not the real motive
power.
The account of the state of population among the
South Sea Islanders,[175] which comes next in order to
the chapter on the American Indians, is an illustration
of these remarks. These savages live in a fertile
country and yet they make no progress. As this
is not the only point illustrated, it is worth while
to look at the chapter in detail.
Malthus begins by observing that population must
not be thought more subject to checks on an island
than on a continent. The Abbé Raynal, in his book
on the Indies, had tried to explain a number of
modern customs that retarded population[176] by referring
them to an insular origin. He thought that
they were caused at first by the over-population
of Britain and other islands, and were imported
therefrom into the continents, to the perplexity of
later ages. But as a matter of fact population on
the mainlands is subject to the same laws as on
the islands, though the limits are not so obvious to
98common observation, and the case is not put so neatly
in a nutshell. A nation on the continent may be as
completely surrounded by its enemies or its rivals,
savage or civilized, as any islanders by the sea; and
emigration may be as difficult in the one case as in the
other. Both continent and island are peopled up to
their actual produce. “There is probably no island
yet known, the produce of which could not be further
increased. This is all that can be said of the whole
earth. Both are peopled up to their actual produce.
And the whole earth is in this respect like an island.”[177]
The earth is indeed more isolated than any island of
the sea, for no emigration from it is possible. The
question, therefore, to be asked about the whole earth
as about any part of it, is, “By what means the
inhabitants are reduced to such numbers as it can
support?”
This was the question which forced itself on Captain
Cook when he visited the islands of the Pacific and
Indian Oceans. Some of his experiences there, especially
in New Zealand, show that the native population
was kept down in nearly the same way as the
American. Their chief peculiarity is the extreme
violence of their local feuds. The people of every
village he visited petitioned him to destroy the
people of the next, and “if I had listened to them
I should have extirpated the whole race.” A sense
of human kinship is impossible at so low a level
of being; and the internecine wars of the New
Zealanders were the chief check to their numbers,
99which, from the distressing effects of occasional
scarcities, would seem always at the best to have
been close to the limits of the food.
The first impression of common sense is that distress
is natural where food is scanty, and unnatural
where it is plentiful. But “if we turn our eyes from
the thinly-scattered inhabitants of New Zealand to the
crowded shores of Otaheite and the Society Islands”
we find no such phenomenon. “All apprehension
of death seems at first sight to be banished from a
country that is described to be fruitful as the garden
of the Hesperides.” But reflection tells us that
happiness and plenty are the most powerful causes
of increase. We might, therefore, expect a large
population in Otaheite; at its first start it might
double itself not in twenty-five but in fifteen years.
Captain Cook estimated it (on his second voyage in
1773) as 204,000. How could a country about one
hundred and twenty miles in circuit support an
increase that doubled these numbers in twenty-five
years? Emigration is impossible, for the other
islands are in the same situation. Further cultivation
is inadequate, for scientific invention is quite
wanting. The answer is that the increase does not
take place, and yet there is no miracle. Licentiousness
among the higher classes, and infanticide
amongst all classes, are freely practised. The free
permission of infanticide no doubt, as Hume remarks,[178]
tends as a rule rather to increase than to diminish
100population, for “by removing the terrors of too
numerous a family it would engage many people in
marriage,” and such is the force of natural affection,
that comparatively few parents would carry out their
first intentions. But in Otaheite in its old state
custom had made infanticide easy, and it was a real
check. War against other islands was a third check,
frequently destroying the food as well as the people,
thus striking down two generations at once. All
these checks notwithstanding, the population was up
to the level of the food, and there was as much
scarcity and keen distress as on any barren island.
Such at least was the state of things discovered by
Captain Cook in his three voyages (the last in 1778)
and Captain Vancouver (in 1791). On the other hand,
the author of A Missionary Voyage to the South Pacific
Ocean in 1796–8 (London, 1799) found a people very
scanty as compared with the food. The accuracy of
both accounts is borne out by the description of the
habits of the people at these two periods. Captain
Cook says they were careful to save up every scrap of
food, and yet suffered often from famine. The missionaries
observe the frequency of famine in the Friendly
Islands and the Marquesas, but say of the Otaheitans
that they are extremely wasteful, and yet never seem
to be in want. Even in the intervals between one
of Cook’s voyages and another the state of the island
had altered. Malthus sees here an illustration of two
facts. The one is that, apart from changes in the
standard of living, population fluctuates between
great excess and great defect, great numbers with
101great mortality, and great comfort with rapid multiplication
of numbers. The other, which explains the
first, is that any cause affecting population, either
towards increase or towards decrease, continues to
act for some time after the disappearance of the
circumstances that first occasioned it. For example,
over-populousness would lead to wars,[179] and the
enmities of these wars would long survive their first
occasion. Again, over-populousness would lead to
greater infanticide and vice, which would become
habitual. New circumstances would, no doubt, after
a time bring new habits, and, to use the author’s
words, would “restore the population, which could not
long be kept below its natural level without the most
extreme violence. How far European contact may
operate in Otaheite with this extreme violence and
prevent it from recovering its former population is a
point which experience only can determine. But,
should this be the case, I have no doubt that on
tracing the causes of it, we should find them to be
aggravated vice and misery.”[180] As a matter of fact
either European contact has caused a diminution, or
exacter inquiry has made a lower estimate of the
population of all Polynesia. The people of the whole
Society Islands is reckoned at between 15,000 and
18,000,[181] which is a long way from Cook’s estimate
of 204,000 for Otaheite alone. We can hardly
believe, however, that the vice and misery of Otaheite
are more than ten times as great as they were in
1021773; and perhaps we may suppose Malthus to mean
that, if the European influences were of the same
character at the end as they were at the beginning,
and were as pernicious to the Polynesian as to the
Red Indian, the language of pessimism would be
justified. The passage at least shows how unfair it
is to suppose Malthus to desire at all costs a small
population; he is careful to say that, while vice in
Otaheite by reducing the numbers caused a transient
plenty among the survivors, still “a cause which may
prevent any particular evil may be beyond comparison
worse than the evil itself.”[182] Life itself may be
bought too dear.
No good is done, however, by denying that excessive
numbers are an evil, or by optimistic assertion
that if men are only good they will be happy.
There is at least one Polynesian island whose past
history gives a picturesque proof of the contrary.
Pitcairn, “the lonely isle of the Mutineers,” was a
moral contrast to Otaheite. The inhabitants owed
nothing good to their parents, who were the mutineers
of H.M.S. ‘Bounty,’ and the women of Otaheite
that came with them in 1790, when they first took
refuge in Pitcairn Island. They owed all to the
religious teaching of John Adams, which made them
so good, that there were few like them on the
earth.[183] But in latitudes just touching the tropics,
with a single square mile of poor soil, surrounded
by wide ocean, they had no outlet for trade and
103modern arts. Like the inhabitants of Godwin’s
Utopia,[184] they soon peopled the little country to the
full extent of the food that could be got by the old
methods, and, unlike the Utopians, they had not
skill to invent new. If they had not drawn the
line for themselves, misery would have done it for
them. Their little colony at its first founding consisted
of fifteen men and twelve women. Fourteen
men and many women died off in the course of the
ten years which passed before the time of moral
regeneration. But they left many children; and,
when the patriarch John Adams was visited by a
passing ship in 1814, he was surrounded by a happy
circle of devout families. Rapidly outgrowing the
resources of the place, these simple folk removed in
1831 to Tahiti, eighty-seven strong. Some remained
there; others had no pleasure in their new abode,
and came back to suffer affliction with the people
of God, believing with Malthus that “a cause which
may prevent any particular evil may be beyond all
comparison worse than the evil itself.” The evil was
real, however, and, in default of celibacy or new ways
of bread winning, their only cure seemed emigration.
So in 1855, Tahiti seeming ineligible, they journeyed
further west to Norfolk Island. Though there are
more than four hundred and forty to the square
mile in England and Wales, two hundred people of
this primitive sort had been certainly too many for
the single square mile of Pitcairn Island; and they
did not leave a moment too soon. Home sickness
104brought back two entire families (of seventeen
persons) in 1859. One or two stray travellers joined
them five years afterwards; but, with allowance for
these, we find that the increase of population on Pitcairn
Island reaches the highest estimate of Malthus.
When the English Admiral D’Horsey visited the
place in 1878, the quarter of a hundred had grown in
nineteen years, at the moderate cost of twelve deaths,
to a population of ninety[185] persons. The primeval
virtues will avail little without the modern arts.
Returning to Malthus, we find him following an
order of his own, in rough conformity with the
orthodox progress from deer to sheep, and from
sheep to corn. He takes us from Polynesian savages
to the nomad pastoral nations of ancient Europe.[186]
The vast migrations and their momentous historical
effects he ascribes to the “constant tendency in the
human race to increase” beyond its food, and thinks
that when history has been rewritten it will contain
more of this.[187] “The misfortune of history is, that
while the particular motives of a few princes and
leaders are sometimes detailed with accuracy, the
general causes which crowd their standards with
willing followers are totally overlooked.”[188] At first
sight the phenomenon of civilized agricultural
nations unable to repel the invasion of shepherds
seems incredible; a country in pasture cannot
possibly support so many inhabitants as a country
105in tillage. A shepherd, it is true, is nearer to the
skilled labourer than a hunter; he does not simply
take what nature gives him, where nature puts it;
he keeps the desired objects of consumption under
his own control, and his life is stronger because more
social. Early African colonization, as Adam Smith
pointed out, was less successful than early American,
because the natives, being shepherds and even farmers
rather than fishermen, were stronger in their resources
and more united than the American aborigines, so
that the European intruders were not able to displace
them.[189] We should have expected the Scythian,
Cimbrian, and Gothic invaders of ancient times to
have had a similar rebuff. “But what renders
nations of shepherds so formidable is the power
which they possess of moving altogether, and the
necessity they frequently feel of exerting this power
in search of fresh pasture for their herds.”[190] They
have always in their breeding stock a reserve of food
for an emergency. The mere consciousness that their
mode of life does not bind them to one place gives
them less anxiety about providing for a family.
Therefore, when they exhaust one region and begin
to feel the pinch of want, they make an armed
emigration on the scale of whole tribes at once, for
the occupation of more fruitful regions, and, as a rule,
the conquest of them by force. The law of their life
is a series of periodical “struggles for existence”[191]
between one nation and another, in which the fittest
106survive at the cost of a prodigious waste of human
life.
The milder initial stage of this process is illustrated
by the separation of Abram and Lot in the book of
Genesis.[192] Abram “was very rich in cattle.” “Lot also
had flocks and herds and tents. And the land was
not able to bear them that they might dwell together,
for their substance was great, so that they could not
dwell together. And there was a strife between the
herdmen of Abram’s cattle and the herdmen of Lot’s
cattle.” They agreed, therefore, to separate, Lot choosing
the fertile valley of the Jordan, Abram going to
the left into the land of Canaan. Migrations of the
same sort, more or less peaceable, are described by
modern writers as extending the Russian people from
time to time farther and farther to the south and
east.[193] In the instances best known to history the
migrations were far from peaceable, and the puzzle
has been to account for their recurrence. The
slaughter of the German barbarians by Marius,
Cæsar, Drusus, Tiberius, Germanicus did not prevent
the reappearance of similar hordes of invaders a
generation later. Claudius destroyed a quarter of a
million of Goths; Aurelian and Probus had the same
work to do again. Under Diocletian the barbarians,
finding the conquest of Rome too much for them,
slaughtered one another in frontier wars. No losses
seemed to exhaust the permanent possibilities of
population in those quarters. At last in the fourth
107century “clouds of barbarians seemed to collect from
all parts of the northern hemisphere. Gathering
fresh darkness and terror as they rolled on, the
congregated bodies at length obscured the sun of
Italy and sunk the Western world in night.”[194]
Why were the resources of the North so inexhaustible?
Simply because the power of increase is
inexhaustible. The North was not, it is true, more
densely peopled then than now. “The climate of
ancient Germany has been mollified and the soil
fertilized by the labour of ten centuries from the
time of Charlemagne. The same extent of ground
which at present maintains in ease and plenty a
million of husbandmen and artificers, was unable to
supply a hundred thousand lazy warriors with the
simple necessaries of life. The Germans abandoned
their immense forests to the exercise of hunting,
employed in pasturage the most considerable part
of their lands, bestowed on the small remainder a
rude and careless cultivation, and then accused the
scantiness and sterility of a country that refused to
maintain the multitude of its inhabitants. When
the return of famine severely admonished them of
the importance of the arts, the national distress
was sometimes alleviated by the emigration of a
third, perhaps, or a fourth part of their youth.”[195] In
short, the countries were more than fully peopled
up to their actual produce; and, though by agriculture
the actual produce would have been made
greater, yet agriculture was not extended. The
108passion of the Germans for wine did not lead them
to plant vineyards by the Rhine and Danube, but
to rob the vintage of Italy. “Pigrum quin immo
et iners videtur sudore acquirere quod possis sanguine
parare.”[196] Malthus supposes that even the Mark
system of land-holding, with its absence of cities
and its periodical redistributions of land, may have
sprung from a political motive, the fear of accustoming
the people to a settled agricultural life, and the
desire to make emigration less irksome to them.[197] So
long as there were weaker peoples to be plundered, the
northern nations might freely double their numbers
every twenty-five years, or oftener, and descend again
on Italy and the South. Only when the whole was
occupied by their own people who were not likely to
be less stout for defence than for conquest, were the
hordes forced back. Not perhaps till gunpowder was
invented was Europe finally safe against them. Long
after their last inland invasions, the Norsemen found
their way by sea to the shores of England and France.
Gibbon’s account of the matter is, according to
Malthus, substantially true. The only flaw is that
he thinks it necessary, in denying the greater populousness
of North Europe in ancient times, to deny
the possibility of a rapid increase of population.[198] The
German people were on the whole virtuous and
healthy in their manners of living, and, the checks
to increase being mainly the positive ones of war
and famine, the increase itself was prodigious. But
109Gibbon is greatly in advance of Montesquieu, who
believes with Sir William Temple, Mariana, and
Machiavelli, that the northern countries were, as a
matter of fact, more densely peopled then than they
are now, and that, further, when the Romans repelled
them, a huge multitude was driven far north and
remained there biding its time. The same (says
Montesquieu) happened under Charlemagne, and
would happen again if a modern prince were to
make the same ravages in Europe; “the nations
repulsed to the north, backed against the limits of
the universe, would there make a firm stand, till the
moment when they would inundate and conquer
Europe a third time.”[199] We are to suppose these
immense multitudes living “at the limits of the
universe” on ice and air for some hundreds of years.
If this is to answer to the question-begging question,
why the North is less fully peopled than it once
was, it involves a miracle. But nothing more supernatural
than ordinary laws is really needed to explain
the movements of pastoral nations a thousand years
ago. They are the same that govern the Tartars and
Bedouins now.[200]
In the modern nomads,[201] it is true, the comparative
simplicity of the circumstances and the comparative
thoroughness of our knowledge about them,
enable us to see plainly that the local distribution
of the people is in strict accordance with the local
distribution of the food, in other words, with
110“the quantity of food the people can obtain in the
actual state of their industry and habits.” We
should see the same thing of the rest of the world’s
inhabitants, if the complicated commerce of civilized
nations did not make it less gross and palpable. The
power of the earth to support life may be compared
with the power of a horse to carry burdens. He is
strong in proportion to the strength of his weakest
part, as a chain to the strength of its weakest link;
and the earth’s powers of nourishment are great in
proportion to their greatness in the worst seasons of
the year.[202] Again, owing to imperfect facilities for
distribution, one part of a society may suffer want
when another is in plenty.[203] Among the Tartars and
the Arabs this is plainly seen; and it is clear, too,
how the waste of life from war not only acts as a
direct check on population, but checks it indirectly
by repressing productive industry. Its fruits would
have no chance of preservation. “Even the construction
of a well requires some funds or labour in
advance, and war may destroy in one day the work
of many months and the resources of a whole year.”[204]
When once warlike habits have become fixed, the two
evils, war and scarcity, reproduce and perpetuate one
another. The encouragements held out to large
families by the Mohammedan religion have a like
effect. “The promise of Paradise to every man who
had ten children would but little increase their
numbers, though it might greatly increase their
111misery.”[205] It could only increase their numbers if
it increased their food, and it could not increase their
food without changing their warlike habits into habits
of industry. Failing this, it simply creates a constant
uneasiness (through want and poverty) that multiplies
occasions of war. Fortunately for himself, the
Arab often proportions his religious obedience to the
extent of his resources,[206] and in hard times, “when
there is a pig at hand and no Koran,” he thinks best
to eat what God has given him.
Nothing but increase of food will permanently
increase population, and where there is food the increase
will reach up to it. In those parts of Africa
that have furnished the Western slave supplies, there
has been no discernible gap from the “hundred years’
exportation of negroes which has blackened half
America.”[207] Even in Egypt, where there is a striking
contrast between natural fertility and human lethargy,
the cause is not any deficiency in the principle of
increase. It is that property is insecure, the government
being despotic and its exactions indefinite. It
is not the want of population that has checked
industry, but the want of industry that has checked
population; and it is bad government that has occasioned
the want of industry. “Ignorance and despotism
seem to have no tendency to destroy the passion
which prompts to increase, but they effectually destroy
the checks to it from reason and forethought....
112Industry cannot exist without foresight and security;
the indolence of the savage is well known, and the
poor Egyptian or Abyssinian farmer without capital,
who rents land which is let out yearly to the highest
bidder, and who is constantly subject to the demands
of his tyrannical masters, to the casual plunder of an
enemy, and not unfrequently to the violation of his
miserable contract, can have no heart to be industrious,
and, if he had, could not exercise that industry
with success. Even poverty itself, which appears to
be the great spur to industry, when it has once passed
certain limits almost ceases to operate. The indigence
which is hopeless destroys all vigorous exertion, and
confines the efforts to what is sufficient for bare
existence.[208] It is the hope of bettering our condition,
and the fear of want rather than want itself, that is
the best stimulus to industry; and its most constant
and best directed efforts will almost invariably be
found among a class of people above the class of the
wretchedly poor.”[209] This passage repeats an idea
expressed in every book of the essay.[210] Government
can retard the increase of population both directly
and indirectly, but can only advance it indirectly,
namely, by encouraging industry, more especially
agriculture. For example, industrious agriculture
has made China capable of bearing a great population,
though other causes of a more equivocal character
have made it exceed its great capacities, and its
excessive numbers are cut down by famine and child
113murder.[211] The Roman emperors found it impossible
by legislation to promote the increase of the old
Roman stock, because they found it impossible to
restore the old Roman habits of industry, though
believers in the superior populousness of ancient
nations used to mistake their intentions for accomplished
facts.
In the eighteenth-century dispute about the populousness
of ancient nations (one particular skirmish
in the general battle of the books) we have seen that
Malthus declares for the moderns. He gives his
opinion in detached passages; but, putting together
the different parts wherever we can find them, we
discover his proof to depend on two principles, which
are corollaries of the primary doctrine of the essay.
The first is, that without the extension of agriculture
or the better distribution of its fruits there can be
no increase of population;[212] the second is, that whatever
is unfavourable to industry is to that extent
unfavourable to population.[213]
Now in the early days of Greece and Rome[214] the
population ought on these principles to have been
a large one, for not only was agriculture actively
prosecuted, but property and wealth were more
equally divided among the people than in later
times. On the other hand, the numbers were always
up to the level of the resources; and the smallness of
the political divisions made law-givers like Solon, and
114theorists like Plato and Aristotle, conscious of the
risk of over-population and full of plans to provide
against it. It is one of Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s
Republic that Plato has not sufficiently met this
difficulty, or realized that a community of goods or an
equal distribution of property is impossible without a
limitation of families. If every one may have as
many children as he pleases, the result will soon be
poverty and sedition. Of the preventive checks
actually recommended by the highest wisdom of the
Greek world, the mildest is late marriages; the rest
include exposure and abortion. Colonization was
rather adopted in practice than recommended in
theory. Frequent wars and occasional plagues were
the chief positive checks.
In Rome even more evidently than in Greece[215] the
causes that produced inequality of property led also
to thinness of population. In our own days the
absorption of small proprietors by large would have
this effect in a less degree, because the large would
need to employ the labour of the small. In Rome
the labour was done by slaves; and the wonder was not
that the number of free citizens should decrease, but
that any should exist at all, except the proprietors.[216]
Yet the legislation of Augustus in favour of
marriage, and the universal lamentation of the later
Roman writers over the extinction of the old Roman
stock, are no more than a presumption that the
population was decreasing, not a proof of its actual
115smallness, while the prevalence of war and infanticide,
so often used to prove the same point, tend really
to do the opposite. They are for the time positive
encouragements to marriage, for people will not
hesitate to bring children into the world, if they are
either free to kill off the superfluous or certain to
find sad vacancies ready for them.[217] In the former
case, as we noticed, parental feeling will often interfere
with the infanticide, and save rather too many
than too few.[218] Wars, on the other hand, may injure
the quality of the population by removing the most
stalwart and even the most intelligent men; but there
is as much food as before, there is more room, and
there are therefore more marriages, till all the gaps
are filled, even to overflowing.[219] Livy need not have
wondered that in the Volscian wars the more were
killed the more seemed to come on. The like is true
of plague and famine; epidemics, like the small-pox,
have never permanently lessened the population,
though they have increased the mortality of the infected
countries.[220] To take only one instance (from
Süssmilch)—a third of the people in Prussia and
Lithuania were destroyed by the plague in 1710,
and in 1711 the number of marriages was very nearly
double the average.[221] Emigration in like manner may
drain off the best blood of a nation, but cannot reduce
its numbers for any length of time, unless the nation
116is learning a new standard of comfort. Greece and
Rome were not less populous because they were great
colonizers.[222] The known existence of a number of very
active checks to population, instead of proving that
the population was absolutely small, might more
naturally, other things being equal, prove it to have
been absolutely large. It might be argued that, if
the population had not been great, fewer and less
potent checks would have done the work.[223]
But other things were not equal. We know that
the gratuitous distribution of foreign corn had ruined
Roman husbandry.[224] We know that even the labour
of the slaves who had supplanted the free labourers
of Italy had not been sufficiently (or sufficiently
well) directed to agriculture. Moreover, the increase
by marriage in the number of slaves did not even
balance the decrease in the number of the free men;
else why should the Romans need to import fresh cargoes
of slaves every year from all parts of the world?[225]
In short, the Roman habits had become “unfavourable
to industry, and therefore to population.” The
very necessity for such a law as the Papia Poppæa
would indicate a moral depravity inconsistent with
habits of industry. This strong argument had
escaped even Hume, who thought that the people
would increase very fast under the Peace of Trajan
and the Antonines, forgetting that the people could
117not unlearn their habits in so short a time; unlearning
is harder than learning, especially for a whole
people; and, “if wars do not depopulate much when
industry is in vigour, peace does not increase population
much when industry is languishing.”[226] Contrariwise,
it might be argued that the prevention of
child-murder in India will not cause over-population,
when it is part of a general policy accustoming the
people to European habits.
Allow, then, that general viciousness is inconsistent
with general industry, and it follows that those
ancient nations in which the first prevailed were less
populous than the modern. This seems to be the
argument of Malthus brought to a focus. From the
absence of censuses,[227] it is strictly deductive; there
could not have been so many people as now, and
therefore there were not.[228]
Expressed in more technical language, the meaning
is, that where there is nothing present but the positive
check and the lower kind of preventive, the
habits of the people are necessarily such as to hinder
an increase of food and thereby of population. When
Europe was less civilized, it was not more, but less
thickly peopled.[229]
118This argument seems to be weakened by one
consideration—that the poor in our day put more
into their idea of necessaries; they have a higher
standard of living than the poor 2000 years ago. It
might therefore be said with justice that over-population
(a peopling beyond the food) begins much sooner
with us than with them, for it begins at a point
much farther removed from starvation, and that
therefore with the ancients a given amount of food
would go farther and feed more. But, if we look
only to the poor in each case, the difference between
the ancient standard of comfort and the modern
is unhappily much smaller than the difference
between their meagre industrial resources and our
ample ones, for our powers of production have grown
far more rapidly than the comfort of our labouring
population. Such difference as there is in the
standards is only made possible by moral restraint,
which has a closer affinity with modern civilization
than with ancient or mediæval.[230] The history of
modern civilization is largely the history of the gradual
victory of the third check over the two others; and,
as one of the chief allies of the third has been commercial
ambition, the victory of moral restraint, by
causing a larger industry, has caused in the end not
a smaller, but a larger population.[231] The increase by
being deferred has been made only the more certain
and permanent.
119
Different Effects of Commercial Ambition in different Countries—No
single safe Criterion of National Prosperity—Süssmilch’s “Divine
Plan”—Malthus in the Region of Statistics—His Northern Tour—In
Norway the truth brought home by the very nature of Place
and Industries—In Sweden less obvious—In Russia quite ignored—Foundling
Hospitals indefensible—Tendency of People to multiply
beyond, up to, or simply with the Food—Author tripping—Facts
the Interpreters and the Interpreted—Holland—The best pater
patriæ—Emigration in various Aspects—Evidence of the Author
before Emigration Committee—Switzerland, St. Cergues and Leysin—The
pons asinorum of the subject.
The broad difference between a savage and a civilized
population is, that the positive checks prevail in
the one, the preventive in the other,—and between
ancient and modern civilizations, that vice and misery
prevail in the one, moral restraint in the other.[232] Yet
every civilized nation in modern times has not only
passed through these three stages in the course of
its past history, but contains them all within it now
as a matter of observation. Its early history was
an endeavour after independence or bare life, its
later history an endeavour after full development;
but there are strata in it to which civilization
has not descended, and in which the struggle for
bare existence prevails, alongside of strata in which
120the struggle is towards ideals of commercial ambition
and social perfection.
The view which Malthus takes of commercial ambition
is substantially that of Adam Smith. As
soon as commerce is separated from slavery, as soon
as wealth is a man’s own acquisition, got by the
sweat of his own brow, then the desire of wealth
has a new social aspect. It becomes what Adam
Smith calls “the natural desire of every man to better
his own condition;” and as such it creates modern
commercial society, as opposed both to the ancient
society built upon slavery, and to the feudal built
upon war.
This vis mediatrix reipublicæ, the desire of rising
in the world, so glorified in the Wealth of Nations[233]
and in the Essay on Population,[234] is really not easy
to define. It is a very composite motive; and
the same differences of race (whatever their origin),
which lead to differences of intellect and language
also affect a nation’s standard of comfort, as soon as
it can be said to have one. By the influence of good
climate and much intercourse with foreigners, along
with advantages of upbringing, and perhaps of race,
a nation of Southern Europe comes to put into its
notion of happiness a great many more elements than
a northern nation, which has to hew its model out of
much poorer materials. The Norwegian standard will
be simpler than the Parisian. But there is more
behind. The question is not simply one of like and
121unlike elements, or of many and few elements, but
of the treatment of them by the human subject.
The English notion of comfort differs from the French
in its elements, which are probably more in number
as well as other in quality, and have a third peculiarity
quite distinct from the other two, their effect
on the habits of the persons concerned.
French writers have noticed that the English
farmer works hard for such an income as will give
him the innumerable little luxuries of toilet, dinner-table,
and drawing-room, that make up the English
idea of comfort, while the French farmer works hard
that he may be able to buy another farm.[235] The one
lives up to his income; and in his efforts to preserve
it he is enterprising and persevering; he is always
striving to rise to the class above him. The other,
on the contrary, is more content with his position in
society; and simply wishes to make it stronger, by
gaining more property. His willing privations in
time of plenty are rewarded by his secure provision
in time of want; he has always his land to sell.
Both are moved by the civilizing “desire to better
one’s own condition”; but it leads in the one case
to simple saving, the old stocking, the piece of land,
or the rentes, in the other to active using, the steam-plough
first, that the piano and pony-carriage may
follow afterwards. There is some truth in M. Taine’s
paradox, “The Englishman provides for the future
not by his savings but by his expenses.”[236] If capitalizing
means using as well as saving, there is a sense
122in which the French and English divide the two
functions between them.
This is what prevents the economist from making
any exact predictions about the effect of the vis mediatrix
reipublicæ. He may, like Adam Smith, find it
doing good work in the undermining of feudalism,[237]
and he may point out that at any rate it would
make a better guide to the world than military glory,
which means unhappiness to one-half the world, and
a very mingled happiness to the other half. But he
cannot predict its effect on men whose characters are
unknown to him. He cannot even tell whether a
man is wealthy or not, till he knows what his wants
are, for wealth exists to satisfy wants, wants change
with human progress, the notion of wealth expands
with civilization, and the luxuries of one age and
one man are the necessaries of another. It is impossible
to treat this relative question as if its
conditions were absolute, and to deal with men as
we would with figures on a slate. Two and two
do not always make four in such a case, but sometimes
five, and frequently only three. A new vista
of comfort spread before different men may stimulate
one, spoil another, and leave a third unmoved.
It is not surprising then that the question, “By
what various modes is population kept to the level of
the food in the states of modern Europe?” is not a
simple one. On some grounds it would seem comparatively
easy to get the answer. There are figures
to be had, and in many cases a census; there is a
123general similarity of circumstances which produces a
general similarity of habits, and, therewith, of the movements
of population. But there is no invariable order
of mortality and generation. The rates of births and
deaths are not the same for all nations; they depend
on the conduct of human beings, and may differ not
only in different countries, but in different parts of the
same country. In the same way, we have no single
statistical criterion of the healthy state of a population,
just as it might be said we have no single criterion
of the commercial prosperity of a country, still less of
its happiness. The two former stand to the last as
the parts to the whole. A healthy population and a
prosperous trade are parts of the happiness of a nation,
though they do not constitute the whole of it. To
ascertain whether a nation is happy or not, we have to
take into account these two parts of happiness along
with many others. The parts in their turn consist of
many parts. We measure the state of trade not only
by imports and exports, railway, banking and Clearing
House returns, and the gains of the public revenue,
but by subscriptions to churches, charities, and schools,
by savings banks and benefit societies, sales of books,
pictures, and luxuries of all kinds, by the state of
workmen’s wages, by the poor-law returns, by the
number of marriages, emigrants, and recruits for the
army; and we could make little use of most of these
figures without the census returns and the reports of
the Registrar General. In the same way, to measure
the healthiness of a population and ascertain whether
it is safely under the level of its food, tending to pass
124beyond it, or simply rising up to it, and to ascertain
by what ways and means the process is going on, we
need instead of one single general criterion a whole
array of particular tests. It is in the infancy of
statistical science that men yield to appearances and
“suppose a greater uniformity in things than is
actually found there.”[238]
This was, for example, the failing of Johann Peter
Süssmilch, one of the earliest inquirers into the
movements of population. A book like Süssmilch’s
had the same relation to the Essay on Population
as astrology to astronomy, or alchemy to chemistry;
it prepared the way for the more accurate study.
Süssmilch first published his researches in 1761,
while the Seven Years’ War was still in progress.
He dedicated it to Frederick the Great, as became a
patriot and Church dignitary; and entitled it, The
Divine Plan in the Changes through which the Human
Race passes in Birth, Death, and Marriage. The Divine
plan is the one set forth in the exhortation to Noah
in Genesis—the peopling of the earth;[239] and the book
tries to show the particular arrangements by which
the plan is carried out. One condition is, he says,
that fertility be greater than mortality; the births
must exceed the deaths. On an average at present
each marriage produces four children; and “the
present law of death” is on an average, taking town
and country together, 1 in 36; out of 36 men now
living, 1 must die every year. In the country it is
from 1 in 40 to 1 in 45; in the town, from 1 in 38
125to 1 in 32. There is a yearly excess of births represented
by 1 in 10 and 5 in 10. The increase must
have been faster at first than it is now; and the
means God took to effect His end in each case was
the lengthening and shortening of human life. In the
times of Methuselah there must have been a very
different law of mortality, perhaps one death in a
hundred; the length of life was greater; and probably
the power of parentage lasted longer. The
average number of children might be about twenty
in a family instead of four; and the doubling of
population would take place in ten or twenty years,
instead of as now in seventy or eighty. Antediluvians
were long-lived because their long lives were
needed for the replenishment of the earth; and the
extreme length was shortened so soon as the time
came when the same end could be reached in other
ways. When we observe the remarkable adaptiveness
of man which enables him alone among the
creatures[240] to live in any latitude, and when we
observe how he has been preserved while many
animals have become extinct, we need have no
doubt that the replenishment of the earth was really
the Divine purpose. It is remarkable too that,
though more sons are born than daughters, death
equalizes their numbers before mature life. The
“system” which prevails in the increase of man is
like the march of a military regiment, in which all
the men have their places, actions, and accoutrements
determined for them. The proportion of sons to
126daughters, and deaths to births, Süssmilch regards
as a tolerably fixed one; the discovery of unexpected
uniformities overjoys him greatly, and he regards
the man who first used the London bill of mortality
to detect these uniformities as a sort of statistical
Columbus. In short, his book is an economical
Théodicée, a long piece of pious deductive reasoning;
and it is curious to find Germany producing two such
optimistic books at a time when it was even further
from the millennium than its neighbours.
The facts of Süssmilch, ill-sifted as they were, gave
Malthus a much firmer ground of reasoning than
the scanty patches of evidence about the population
of ancient and barbarous nations. He is at last in
the region of statistics as opposed to conjecture,
and in the region of the personal observation and
travel of men who were at least asking his own
questions. But the fate of the bills of mortality
and other records, in the hands of Price and
Wallace, to say nothing of Petty and Süssmilch,
shows how important was Malthus’ work as an
interpreter of statistics. Statistics were a novelty
in his day. As Adam Smith wrote on the Wealth
of Nations without any full statistics of the wealth,
and none at all of the population, of his own country,
Malthus wrote his first essay when there was no
census; and, for some time afterwards, so comparatively
isolated were the nations of Europe, that
to be at all certain of his facts, an author needed
to verify and collect them by journeying in person,
and seeing the scenes with his own eyes. This
127essential work of an investigator Malthus did not
leave undone; and his chapters on the state of
population in modern European nations are to a
large extent a record of his own observations. He
went for a summer trip in 1799 with three college
friends, Dr. Edward Clarke, Mr. Cripps, and Mr.
Otter, afterwards Bishop of Chichester. They went
by Hamburg to Sweden, and there the party broke
up into two, Clarke and his pupil Cripps going
farther north, Otter and Malthus going on through
Norway to visit Finland and St. Petersburg.[241] These
were the only European countries where English
travellers could easily make their way in those
years.[242] In 1802 he saw France and Switzerland,[243]
but seems not to have left the kingdom again till
1825, when the journey was taken for the sake of his
wife’s health, on the death of one of his children,
and he was little in the mood for investigations.
The tours of 1799 and 1802 are the only ones
that have left substantial traces on his economical
work.[244]
In all his travels he found the foreigner as ignorant
as the Englishman on the subject of population.
Only twice did he hear the truth expounded to
him; in Norway during his first tour, and in
Switzerland during his second. In the latter case
128the enlightenment was confined to one individual;
but in the former the whole nation was wise.
While the Swedish Government was continually
crying for more people, and trying to “encourage
population,” the Norwegian Government and people
seemed to have understood that the first question
must be, “Are there means to feed more people?”
If not, then we multiply the nation without increasing
the joy. Of course there are cases where we
might thin down the nation and still less increase
the joy. Mere scantiness of numbers is no advantage
to a nation, any more than fewness of wants
to an individual; it may mean a low state of civilization,
in both cases. It is not by any means so
good for a country to be wasted by a pestilence as
to be opened up by a new trade. The denser the
population, the better;—so says Malthus himself;—but,
he adds, let it be a population of strong,
comfortable citizens, or let us stand by the small
numbers and the slow increase.
Look now at Norway.[245] If we were dealing with
uncivilized times under the reign of positive checks,
we should expect an overflowing population, a large
body of poor, and in times of scarcity a great deal
of distress. There had been no wars for half a
century, the cold climate kept away epidemics, and
what else was left but famine to keep down the
population to the limits of the food? Vice was not
taken into the service, and emigration was seldom
practised then in these regions. But Malthus visited
129the country in one of the hardest years ever known
in Europe, 1799, and found the Norwegians “wearing
a face of plenty and content, while their neighbours
the Swedes appeared to be starving.”[246] He
found the death-rate lower in Norway than in any
country in Europe.[247] The population, however, was
hardly increasing at all; and the proportion of marriages
to the whole numbers of the people was smaller
than in any country except Switzerland.[248] The positive
check was largely superseded by the preventive.
The virtue of foresight, he says, is elsewhere forced
upon the upper classes by the smallness of their circle
and the fewness of openings in business or professions;
in Norway it is forced upon all classes alike by the
evident smallness of the country’s resources, and by
the peculiarities of the national industry. There is
almost no variety of occupation or division of labour.
The humbler classes are almost all “housemen”
(husmänd), labourers, who receive from a farmer in
quasi-feudal fashion a small house and a little piece
of land in return for occasional labour on his fields.
In other countries men may easily fall into the fallacy
of crediting the whole of the land with a greater
power of supporting people than the power possessed
by the sum of its parts. In the great towns of Central
Europe a man has perhaps some excuse for trusting
to the chapter of accidents; in the great variety of
occupations he may have some excuse for thinking
130there will surely be a vacancy for him, and he may
“e’en take Peggie.” Norway, however, is to manufacturing
countries what the country districts elsewhere
are to the towns elsewhere. In the country
districts an excess of population cannot be hidden,
and the superfluities must go to the towns. Those
who marry, therefore, when there is no vacancy for
them, do so with the alternatives of poverty or
migration clearly before their eyes. In Norway
every peasant, not to say every farmer, knows quite
certainly whether there is an opening for him or not,
and, if there is not, he cannot marry.[249]
The conditions of the problem were in this way
simplified, and the problem itself was satisfactorily
answered. The only districts where Malthus saw
signs of poverty were on the coast, where the people
live by fishing; the openings for a fisherman are not
so distinctly limited in their numbers as the openings
for a farmer.
Time has united Norway and Sweden under one
king (1814), and Sweden now presents no unfavourable
contrast with Norway. Even in 1825 Malthus
wrote[250] that the progress of agriculture and industry,
and the practice of vaccination, had caused a steady
and healthful increase of population since 1805.
He would be pleased to find too by the census that
the population of Norway had increased very greatly
in proportion to its poor. The improvement continues.
The paupers were about one per cent. of
131the population in 1869 (when they were nearly five
per cent. in England), which seems to have meant a
decrease from previous years;[251] but between 1865 and
1875 the population had increased fourteen per cent.
in spite of considerable emigration.[252] Malthus would
have recognized with satisfaction that the nation had
been “either increasing the quantity or facilitating
the distribution” of its food,[253] that is to say, improving
either its agriculture or its manufactures. It has
really done both. Though the growth of the population
has been greater in the centres of manufacture,
there has been progress also in the country districts.
Many of the old customs and laws that hampered
agriculture have ceased to exist.[254] Malthus himself
says that, if Government would remove hindrances
to agriculture, and spread sound knowledge about it,
it would do more for the population of the country
than by establishing five hundred foundling hospitals.[255]
He need not have confined his recommendation to agriculture;
and elsewhere he states the truth in broader
terms: “The true encouragement to marriage is the
high price of labour, and an increase of employments
which require to be supplied with proper hands.”[256]
Remove hindrances to trade and spread sound knowledge
of it—that (in his view) is the way to increase
the quantity and facilitate the distribution of the
products of agriculture; and, to judge by results,
the Norwegian Government has followed it.
132Sweden,[257] as it then was, furnished a striking contrast
to Norway. Malthus had the advantage there
of the earliest and most regular of European censuses,
beginning with the year 1748, and continued at
intervals first of three and then of five years. He
found that there was a large mortality, though the
conditions of life were superficially the same as in
Norway. The only explanation he could see was
that the size and shape of the country, as well as its
mode of government, did not so forcibly bring home
to the people the need of restraint as in Norway, while
at the same time the hindrances to good farming
were even more serious than in the smaller country.
From the very contiguity and general similarity of
the two countries, they proved Malthus’ point, by
the Method of Difference, almost as well as a deliberate
experiment could have done. It was not that
Norway had an absolutely small and Sweden an
absolutely large population; considerations of absolute
greatness or smallness never enter into this, if into
any, economical question. But Norway had a moderately
large population in proportion to her food,
while Sweden had in the same regard an excessive
population, a population which was sparely fed even
in average years, and decimated by famine and
disease in years below the average.
Russia,[258] which was the third scene of Malthus’
travels, had this in common with Norway and Sweden,
that the movement of its population was unlike that
of Central Europe, and that the eccentricity was due
133to a clearly definable cause. In Norway the shape
and climate of the country and the fewness of the
available occupations forced the Government and the
people to restrain rather than to encourage the
increase of numbers; in Sweden, under conditions
less simple, the habits of the people conspired with a
false policy of the Government to produce an excessive
increase. In both cases we have something
different from the typical modern society of Central
Europe, with its full division of labour, its system
of large factories, and its extensive substitution of
machinery for hand labour. Russia was as old-fashioned
as Norway and Sweden in this respect;
and her physical vastness made her a difficult country
to know, in these days of slow communication. It
is not surprising that the statistics available in the
days of Malthus were open to grave suspicion. The
death-rate was given as 1 in 60, while in Norway
itself it had not been lower than 1 in 48, and it
is about 1 in 53 in England now, yet the number
of marriages and of births and the size of families
were no smaller than elsewhere.[259] These facts by
themselves would simply suggest a great rate of
increase going on in the country concerned; and
Malthus allows that there is great scope for such in
Russia. But there was one other fact that strengthened
his doubts about the vital statistics of that
country; contrary to the experience of all other
countries, it was said that in Russia more women
were born than men. In others, more men are born
134than women, and the numbers are only equalized
gradually, by the greater risks of masculine life, as the
years go on. In Sweden, with a climate not milder
than Russia, this had long been observed.[260] It turned
out on inquiry that the Russian method of registration
allowed loopholes for more omissions in the deaths than
in the births. Public institutions, including hospitals
and prisons, had been left out of account; and the
deaths in the foundling hospitals were alone quite
sufficient to alter the average very significantly for the
worse. Malthus’ hatred of Foundling hospitals is only
equalled by his dislike of Poor laws. The idea of
such institutions was, like that of Pitt’s Poor Bill,
purely philanthropic. They were “to enrich the
country from year to year with an increasing number
of healthy, active, and industrious burghers,”[261] that
would otherwise be doomed to death soon after
birth. It used to be said of the bounty, granted by
the Government of India, on slaughtered snakes, that
it really kept up the supply, for the natives bred them
to catch the bounty. The foundling hospitals had
an opposite effect. They were meant to multiply and
they tended to destroy. They encouraged a mother
to desert her child at the precise time it needed the
minute and careful attention that only a mother can
give. “It is not to be doubted that, if the children
received into these hospitals had been left to the
management of their parents, taking the chance of all
the difficulties in which they might be involved, a
135much greater proportion of them would have reached
the age of manhood and have become useful members
of the state.”[262] But, besides increasing the mortality
of children, they injure the very “mainspring of population”[263]
by discouraging marriage and encouraging
irregularities. In his talks with his father, Malthus
had no doubt discussed the propriety of Rousseau’s
conduct in sending his children to the Paris Foundling
Hospital. He would certainly have declared against
Rousseau. To those who argue that the foundling
basket may prevent child-murder, he answers that an
occasional murder from “false [?] shame” is saved at
a very dear price by the violation of “the best and
most useful feelings of the human heart,” which the
existence of such an institution teaches to the poor.
To relieve parents of the care of their children is
bad for the parents,[264] because it takes away from
them a responsibility essential to full citizenship and
civilizing in its effects on human character;—and it is
unjust to their fellow-citizens, because, like the Poor
Laws, it relieves one portion of society (in this case
rather the worst than the poorest) at the expense of
all the rest, and finds a career for pauper apprentices
to the prejudice of independent workmen and
their children.[265] In the third place, like the Poor
Laws, it promises an impossibility—to relieve all that
come. If children are to be received without limit,
the resources for maintaining them should be without
136limit; otherwise an excessive mortality is quite
unavoidable.[266] The second reason is no doubt an
economical commonplace; it is the first and third
that are most characteristic of Malthus. He never
forgets that human wants and human wills are an
element in every economical phenomenon, and therefore
considers that the effects of character on actions
and of actions on character are of great economical
importance. He will not allow that it can be right,
even for a Government, to make promises that cannot
be performed. These two plain principles give the
tone to the later chapters, where he interprets for
us the comparatively full statistics of Central Europe
and our own England.[267]
The law of population may be described (though
not in the exact words of Malthus) as among
savage peoples the tendency to increase beyond the
food, and among civilized to increase up to it. So
Professor Rogers founds his estimate of the numbers
of the English people in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries on the principle that “there were
generally as many people existing in this country
as there have been, on an average, quarters of wheat
to feed them with.”[268]
In the case of highly progressive modern nations
such statements would be beyond the truth; and
we must either say that they tend to increase not
beyond but along with the food, or else we must
137define food itself very widely. In the first case
“tendency” will mean the abstract possibility depending
on the one physiological condition; in the
others it is the concrete nett possibility depending
on all the various conditions together. In a general
preface to his chapters on Central Europe, Malthus
quite recognizes these distinctions and warns us
against exact statements. “It seldom happens,” he
says, “that the increase of food and of population
is uniform; and when the circumstances of a country
are varying either from this cause or from any change
in the national habits with respect to prudence and
cleanliness, it is evident that a proportion which is
true at one period will not be at another. Nothing
is more difficult than to lay down rules on this
subject that do not admit of exceptions.”[269]
After this it is hard to believe what he tells us
elsewhere, that “the only criterion of a real and
permanent increase in the population of any country
is the increase of the means of subsistence.”[270] It
would be at best a negative criterion and sine quâ
non,—there can be no increase of numbers without
increase of food,—though even then it is not true of
a “forced population,” living down to a lower food.[271]
But there clearly may be an increase of food without
an increase of numbers, unless the character of the
people is such that they do nothing with the food
except increase by it. Therefore, though, within
certain wide limits fixed for us by invariable qualities
138of human nature, predictions are justifiable on the
ground of the law of population[272] or any other
economical laws, none that specify a particular course
of action as a result of a particular event are trustworthy,
till we know the character of the people
concerned.[273] Malthus always tries to bear this in
mind; and, when he tells us that the lists of
births, marriages, and deaths in Mid Europe give
more information about its internal economy than
the observations of the wisest travellers,[274] he is
at once interpreting those figures in the light of
a principle, and interpreting the principle by means
of the figures. This appears when we look at
the four chief conclusions of the general chapter
in question. The first is the proposition that in
the present state of our industrial civilization the
marriages depend very closely on the deaths, and the
births on the marriages.[275] Montesquieu says that
wherever there is room for two persons to live
comfortably a marriage will certainly take place.[276]
In old countries experience is usually against any
sure expectation of the means of supporting a
family; the place for a new marriage is only made
by the dissolution of an old. As a rule therefore
the number of annual marriages is regulated by the
139number of annual deaths. “Death is the most
powerful of all the encouragements to marriage,”[277]
while on the other hand the marriages are a frequent
cause of the deaths. In almost every country there
is too great a frequency of marriages, which causes
as it were a forced mortality. Which of these two
mutual influences is the more powerful depends on
circumstances. In last century the proportion of
annual marriages to inhabitants was in Holland
generally as 1 in 107 or 108. But in twenty-two
Dutch villages it was as 1 in 64. Süssmilch explained
this anomaly by the number of new trades
in Holland and the new openings for workmen.
Malthus would not have denied this possibility, his
startling paradox about death being only a particular
case of the general principle that “the high price of
labour is the real encouragement to marriage.”[278] But
in this case the explanation ought to have applied
to all Holland if to any part of it. The real
reason came out when Malthus observed that the
mortality, which was as 1 in 36 in Holland generally,
was as 1 in 22 in those villages. The additional
marriages did not really increase the population.
They were caused by the high number of deaths
which provided openings for the living; and the high
number of deaths was caused by the unhealthiness
of the region and of its prevailing industries, which
were manufacturing rather than agricultural. The
choice in every large population is between having
140many lives which end soon, and few which last long.
Greater healthiness in the conditions of life will result
in the latter. We find as a matter of fact that, where
there has been the sanitary improvement as well as
simply the “replenishment” of an old country, the
marriage rate goes down at the expense of the death-rate,
and there is an economy of human life and
suffering.
Putting the parts of his exposition together, we
get something like a deductive scheme of the growth
of population in old countries under an industrial
revolution like that of the eighteenth century. The
first effect of the discovery of new minerals, and
even (with some qualifications) of the invention of
new machines, is to provide new employment for
working men, and many new opportunities for marriage;
the proportion of marriages therefore becomes
at once greater without any alteration (from this
cause at least) in the death-rate. But, when the
first burst of progress has passed, and the succeeding
improvement is not by leaps and bounds, but at a
uniform rate, then the proportion of marriages will
decrease, as the new situations are filled up and
there is no more room for an increasing population.
Once the country is really “old” in the sense of
fully peopled and unprovided with new sources of
employment, then the marriages will be regulated
principally by the deaths, and (the habits of the
people remaining the same) will bear much the
same proportion to each other at one time as at
another. It is not, however, exactly the same proportion
141for all old countries, simply because the
habits and standards of living are different, to say
nothing of healthiness or unhealthiness of climate
and occupation. For similar reasons it is not the
same for towns as for country districts.[279] “A general
measure of mortality for all countries taken together”
would be useless if procurable; but it cannot be
procured.[280]
Habits, however, are sufficiently fixed to make us
certain that “any direct encouragements to marriage
must be accompanied by an increased mortality.”[281]
They spur a willing horse. Montesquieu and Süssmilch,
although they both enlarge on the evils of
over-population, still think it a statesman’s duty
to be, like Augustus and Trajan, the father of his
people by encouraging their marriages. But, if many
marriages mean many deaths, the princes or statesmen
who should really succeed in this patriotic policy
might more justly be called the destroyers than the
fathers of their people.[282]
If Malthus had been asked how a prince could
best become a real pater patriæ, he would have
named two or three ways. The prince might direct
his mind to the improvement of industry, especially
of agriculture.[283] He might circulate news and knowledge
on these subjects;[284] or, as we should say now,
he might institute agricultural exhibitions, and regular
agricultural statistics of home and foreign production.
142He would in this way increase the population by
helping to increase the food.
In the second place, he might benefit trade everywhere
by giving it the security of good government
and impartial justice, a peaceful foreign policy and
light taxation.
In the third place, he might, together with all
these, encourage Emigration. Malthus devotes a
special chapter of the essay to this subject; and,
though the chapter is in a later part of his work
(Bk. III. ch. iv.[285]), this seems the best place to touch
on the subject. Emigration, he says, is, apart from
political distinctions, the same thing as migration;
and, if it is economically good for a man to go from
a poor land at his door to a rich in the next county,
it cannot be economically bad for him to go from a
poor district of his own country to a rich across the
sea. The mere length of the journey or the difference
of latitude does not affect the economical nature of
the change.
Economical motives, however, have come very late
in all the great European emigrations. It was not
the desire of finding room for the over-crowded
families at home, but desire of the metal gold, or
else it was the simple love of adventure, or ambition
of conquest, that first sent the Spanish, Portuguese,
English, and Dutch to the far East and far West.[286]
“These passions enabled the first adventurers to
triumph” over obstacles that would have deterred
143quiet industrial emigrants, “but in many instances
in a way to make humanity shudder, and to defeat
the very end of emigration. Whatever may be the
character of the Spanish inhabitants of Mexico and
Peru at the present moment, we cannot read the
accounts of the first conquests of these countries
without feeling strongly that the race destroyed was,
in moral worth as well as numbers, superior to the
race of their destroyers.” The settlers that followed
on the heels of these pioneers, though they were
more like real emigrants, went unskilfully to work.
They seemed to expect that “the moral and mechanical
habits” which suited the old country would suit
the new,[287] and everything would go on as it did at
home. At first therefore there would be a redundant
population[288] in the new country rather than in the
old, for, however great the possible produce of the
colony, the actual produce would be less than the
wants of the new-comers on their first arrival. To
all this must be added the fact that, though economically
a far and a near place are alike, they are very
different to the sentiments of men. Patriotism is
no fault, and the breaking of home ties is a real evil
to the individuals, however beneficial the emigration
may be to the nation. Men are slow to move, not
only from the uncertain prospects of success, but from
that vis inertiæ in man which is always counteracting
the vis mediatriæ of commercial ambition. In addition,
therefore, to the mere uneasiness of poverty and the
desire of getting a living, there is need of some spirit
144of enterprise, to make men willing and successful
emigrants.[289] Those who felt distress most would often
have been the most helpless in a new country;
they needed leaders who were “urged by the spirit
of avarice or enterprise, or of religious or political
discontent, or were furnished with means and support
by Government;” otherwise, “whatever degree of
misery they might suffer in their own country from
the scarcity of subsistence, they would be absolutely
unable to take possession of any of those uncultivated
regions of which there is such an extent on the earth.”
Emigration then (according to Malthus) is not likely
to happen unless political discontent and extreme
poverty have brought the emigrants to such a plight
that it is better for their country as well as for themselves
that they should go. “There are no fears so
totally ill-grounded as the fears of depopulation from
emigration.”[290] Emigration is not even a cure for an
over-population; and is much recommended only
because little adopted. Gaps made in the population
of old countries are soon filled up; room found in the
new is soon occupied. If emigration is proposed as a
means of securing an absolutely unrestricted increase
of population by placing old countries in the position
of new colonies, the hope will be soon and for ever
cut off.[291]
Towards the end of his life, Malthus had an opportunity
of explaining his views on this subject to an
audience of statesmen. He appeared as a witness
145before the Select Committee[292] of the House of Commons
“to inquire into the expediency of encouraging emigration
from the United Kingdom,” and his influence
is traceable in their Reports. They reported[293] that
there had been in the United Kingdom a “redundant
population,” in Ireland agricultural, in Scotland and
England manufacturing; that one cause of it had
been the unavoidable displacement of hand labour by
machinery;[294] that meanwhile the British colonies in
America, Africa, and Australia had few men and
plenty of land, and that it would benefit the whole
empire if parishes could convert their probable or
actual paupers into emigrants, always provided that
the remaining population could be induced not to
grow so fast as to fill the whole gap thus created.[295]
“The testimony” (said the Committee in their third
Report[296]) “which was uniformly given by the practical
witnesses has been confirmed in the most absolute
manner by that of Mr. Malthus, and your Committee
cannot but express their satisfaction at finding that
the experience of facts is thus strengthened throughout
by general reasoning and scientific principles.”
They were more disposed than their witness himself
to a priori reasoning, and in many of their leading
146questions he declined to follow them.[297] But he agreed
with their main conclusions, allowing that under
certain conditions it would be even a financial advantage
to remove unemployed workmen to the colonies
rather than suffer them to become paupers at home,
and adding, that, if he was against the admission of
any legal claim to relief in ordinary cases of pauperism,
still more would he be against it when the
pauper had before him the alternative of assisted
emigration.[298] His own view of emigration had not
changed since he wrote in 1803. It was to him a
partial remedy; and it is more useful when spontaneously
adopted by the people[299] than when pressed
on them by their Government. Under the torture
of the question he conceded no more.[300]
As a temporary expedient, the essay tells us,[301]
“with a view to the more general cultivation of the
earth and the wider extension of civilization, it seems
to be both useful and proper,” and is to be encouraged,
or at least not prevented, by Governments. All
depends on the rate of wages. If wages were high
enough to enable people to live with what they
counted reasonable comfort at home, we may be sure
their domestic and patriotic ties would be strong
enough to keep them there. The complaint that
emigration raises wages is most unreasonable. At
the utmost it prevents wages from falling too low,
147and helps to heal the mischief caused by fluctuations
in trade.
We shall find at a later stage that Malthus is
keenly aware of the unhappiness caused in modern
industrial societies by changes in the demand for
goods, occurring even in the natural (or uninterrupted)
course of trade. A movement in favour of
emigration in 1806 and 1807 led him to insert a
paragraph in the fourth edition of his essay which
explains the relation of emigration to these changes.
He accepts the statement of Adam Smith, that “the
demand for men, like that for any other commodity,
necessarily regulates the production of men;”[302] but
he adds (as Cairnes added later) that it takes some
little time to bring more labour into the market when
there is demand for it, and some little time to check
the supply when once it has begun to flow.[303] A
family may be reared to catch high wages, and the
high wages may have gone before the family has
arrived at maturity. Malthus distinguishes between
a normal or slight “oscillation” of this kind, and an
excessive redundancy caused by an unusual stimulus
to production—the stimulus, for example, of the
foreign wars and the foreign trade of the years before
Waterloo. In the normal case we must submit to
the inevitable; in the exceptional we may find an
outlet in emigration. No doubt, even if there be no
emigration, in the long run the labour market will
148right itself; but the process will be a very painful
one to the workmen concerned. Emigration is the
humane and politic remedy.
In some cases, such as Norway and the uplands of
Switzerland,[304] there would seem to be no need for
Government to teach the people to emigrate. Circumstances
should do it for them; but human beings
are influenced by habit and “chance” as much as
by any deliberate motive, commercial or otherwise.
In the Swiss uplands, as Malthus knew them, “a
habit of emigration depended not only on situation
but often on accident.” Three or four successful
emigrations “have frequently given a spirit of enterprise
to a whole village, and three or four unsuccessful
ones a contrary spirit.”[305] This is illustrated by the
contrast of two parishes, both in the Canton de Vaud,
St. Cergues in the Jura, and Leysin[306] in the Bernese
Alps near Aigle. The movements of population in
Leysin puzzled M. Muret, the Swiss economist, who
drew up a paper on the depopulation of Switzerland
for the Economical Society of Berne in the year 1766.
He found that in this parish of four hundred people
there were born every year on an average only eight
children, whereas, elsewhere in Canton de Vaud, to
the same number of people eleven (in Lyonnais
sixteen) children were a common proportion. The
difference, he observed, disappeared by the age of
twenty, when, if we may say so, the difference died
off, the eight in Leysin being healthier than the
149eleven (or sixteen) elsewhere. Muret infers from
this, that “in order to maintain in all places the
proper equilibrium of population, God has wisely
ordered things in such a manner as that the force of life
in each country should be in the inverse ratio of its
fecundity.”[307] There is, however, no need to suppose
a miracle. The fact was simply that the place and
the employments were healthy, that the people had
not formed habits of emigration, that their resources
were stationary, that, therefore, they married late, had
few children, and were long-lived.[308] The subsisting
marriages were to the annual births as 12 to 1; the
births were to the living population as 1 to 49; and
the number of persons above sixteen were to those
below as 3 to 1.[309] This would show that mere number
of births is no criterion of the size of a population,
for it took only about half of the ordinary number
of births to keep up a population of four hundred in
the parish of Leysin. In St. Cergues the subsisting
marriages were to the annual births as 4 to 1 (instead
of 12 to 1 as at Leysin), the births were to the living
population as 1 to 26, and the number of persons
above and below sixteen just equal. That is to say,
St. Cergues had nearly twice as many births a year
in proportion to the population, and more than twice
as many marriages; but, instead of three-fourths of
its living population being above sixteen (as at Leysin),
those above and those below were equal in number,
and St. Cergues had a smaller proportion of adults
150than Leysin. On the other hand, the death-rate was
nearly the same; the healthiness was nearly as great.
How came it then that the population of St. Cergues
was only one hundred and seventy-one, as against the
four hundred and five of Leysin? What became of
the children born? Seeing that they did not die,
and did not appear on the registers of the living,
we infer that they left their native village; that
is all. The situation of the parish of St. Cergues,
on the high road from Paris to Geneva, suggested
emigration; and, as a matter of fact, the place had
become, like most highland hamlets, a breeding-place
for the lowlands and the manufacturing towns. The
annual drain of adults made room for the favoured
remnant to marry and have large families. Even
Leysin, though it lay on no high road, might conceivably
(says Malthus) have exchanged its stay-at-home
character for a habit of emigration, and might then
have doubled its birth-rate without raising the death-rate.
It is one of the fallacies of old statisticians to
infer a large population from a high birth-rate; in
an old country, if the rate of births is high in comparison
with the number of living inhabitants, it
means either many deaths or much emigration.
The people of an old country, if they cannot or
will not emigrate, must, according to Malthus, either
look for a high death-rate or accustom themselves
to late marriages. M. Muret’s figures showed that
many cantons of Switzerland had adopted this last
course in the eighteenth century. In the Canton de
Vaud, for example, the proportion of marriages to
151living inhabitants (1 to 140) was lower than in Norway
itself. In a pastoral country the limits of human
resources are so obvious that the people cannot fail to
be impressed with the need of limiting their numbers.
Pastoral industry, again, feeds more than it employs,[310]
and the unemployed must look for employment elsewhere.
This was one reason why there were so
many Swiss in foreign service. “When a father
has more than one son, those who are not wanted
on the farm are powerfully tempted to enrol themselves
as soldiers, or emigrate in some other way, as
the only chance to enable them to marry.”[311] Malthus
was a little disappointed with the condition of the
Swiss peasantry when he saw them in 1803. Perhaps,
he says, they were still suffering from the wars
in which the “Helvetic Republic” had been involved
by its French allies; but more probably they were
suffering from the unwise attempts of their Government
in the previous century to “encourage” what
they then thought was a declining population.[312] The
peasant who guided Malthus to the sources of the
Orbe[313] talked freely to him on the poverty of the
district, which he ascribed to early and imprudent
marriages, “le vice du pays”; he would have a law
passed to prevent a man marrying till he was forty,
and a woman till she was elderly. He said that at
one time the introduction of stone polishing had given
the people high wages and led them to expect constant
152employment; changes of fashion[314] had helped to drive
the industry away, but the habits taught by it had
remained so fast rooted in the people that emigration
itself brought no relief to their overflowing numbers.
But this self-taught Malthusian had not learned his
lesson perfectly. He fancied that the fertile lands
of the low countries, with their abundance of corn
and employments, could never experience the evil
of over-population. This was true only in the
unhappy sense that they had greater unhealthiness
and a greater mortality, providing room for early
marriages and many births.
It is easy to see that Malthus over-valued his
prize. The pons asinorum of the subject is the
doctrine that over-population is not a question of
absolute numbers or absolute quantity of food and
fertility of soil, but of the numbers in relation to
the food, in whatever place or time; and the young
peasant had not crossed it.
153
French Numbers a Problem to Europe in 1802, because Law of Increase
not understood—Effects of War—Lament for the unborn millions
eighty years ago—More fitting now—Good Distribution and Production
sometimes inseparable—The Stationary State—Malthus and
the French Revolution.
In the order of his writing Malthus follows the
order of his travels, and takes France[315] after Switzerland.
France presents us with facts of an almost
unique kind. But before the Revolution it had no
trustworthy parish registers to show to the English
inquirer; and Malthus would not have lingered over
it, if in 1802 the public mind had not been perplexed
by a riddle, about French population and its increase
during war, of which he had the key.[316]
The essay is not meant for a mere history, and its
author is not careful to be full in his historical details
if he has a body of facts sufficient for his purpose.
He even says, about some conjectures of his own
based on French figures, that he had only adopted
the figures for the sake of illustration, and had not
supposed them to be strictly true. “It will be but
154of little consequence if any of the facts or calculations
which have been assumed in the course of this chapter
should turn out to be false. The reader will see that
the reasonings are of a general nature, and may be
true though the facts taken to illustrate them may be
inapplicable.”[317] This is not a wary admission. Nevertheless,
the chapter on France is one of the most
telling in the essay. The substance of it may be
stated very shortly.
“It has been seen,” he says, “in many of the
preceding chapters, that the proportions of births,
deaths, and marriages are extremely different in
different countries, and there is the strongest reason
for believing that they are very different in the same
country at different periods and under different circumstances.”[318]
The truth of this remark is borne
out not only by the contrast between the France and
the Switzerland of that time, but, as we shall find,
by the contrast between the France of 1803 and the
France of to-day. It is not singular that Malthus
should (wrongly) expect the Swiss to become his
pupils more easily than the French, for in his day
both the mortality and the number of marriages
were greater in France than in Switzerland.[319]
He spends most pains in illustrating the contrast
between the France before the Revolution and the
155France at the Peace of Amiens. In many ways it
was fortunate that he confined himself to the Republican
period. It was the time when the moral position
of France was highest, and she was warring not for
conquest but for defence. Switzerland had exemplified
the fact that Emigration does not permanently
check population, but, on the whole, encourages it.
France, at the time chosen, exemplified the fact that
even the most destructive Wars have a similar effect
on the growth of numbers. What Malthus had
proved more or less deductively in regard to ancient
nations he was able to show more inductively by
statistics in regard to modern. Great surprise was
expressed in the early days of this century that, in
spite of her enormous losses, France had not diminished
in population. Malthus says she had rather
increased than diminished. According to the estimate
of the Constituent Assembly, which was confirmed
by the calculations of Necker, the population in 1792,
before the war, was 26,000,000. In 1801 it seems,
from the returns of the Prefects, to have been about
28,000,000.[320] In ten years the increase had been
2,000,000, or 200,000 a year. Yet at a medium calculation
France, in addition to the ordinary deaths, had
lost by the war about 1,000,000 of men up to that
time,[321] or 100,000 a year. How, on the principles
of Malthus, were the two facts to be reconciled?
To reconcile them he shows, first, how, according
to the figures given by Frenchmen themselves, the
numbers of the unmarried survivors at home were
156more than enough to have kept up in case of necessity
the old number of marriages and the old rate of
increase; second, how from general principles there
was a presumption in favour of a rapid increase at
such a time; and third, how the social and industrial
conditions of the French people since the Revolution
were favourable to an increase of population. First,
then, he shows that the entire body of unmarried
persons was large enough in spite of the war to fill
the vacancies and keep up the old rate of increase.
The body of the unmarried is formed by the “accumulation”
year by year of the numbers of persons,
rising to marriageable age, who are not married (or
say briefly of the marriageable unmarried, including
widows and widowers). This accumulation will only
stop when the yearly accessions thereto are no more
than equal to the yearly mortality therein. The size
of this body will therefore vary with the character of
the particular nation considered. In the Canton de
Vaud it was equal to the whole number of the
married; but in France both the mortality and the
marriage rate were higher than in Switzerland, and
the unmarried were therefore a smaller fraction of
the total numbers. Assuming from the French
authorities[322] a certain birth and death-rate, and assuming
from the same authorities that the unmarried
men for the period before the Revolution were one
and a half millions out of five millions that were
marriageable, it would appear that every year there
were 600,000 persons arriving at the marriageable
157age, of whom (since about 220,000 is the annual
number of marriages) 440,000 marry. The surplus
of unmarried is therefore 160,000 persons, or about
80,000 men. It follows that for war purposes (if
mere numbers be considered) the reserve fund of men
would be nearly one and a half millions, and every
new annual surplus of 80,000 youths above eighteen
might be taken for military service without any
diminution in the number of marriages.[323] As a
matter of fact, it is putting the case somewhat
strongly to suppose as many as 600,000 to be taken
for service in the first instance, and 150,000 additional
troops to keep up the supply every year. But this
would still leave in the first instance nearly 900,000
for the reserve fund, which with the annual 80,000
could bear a drain on it of 150,000 for ten years, and
leave a balance of 200,000 altogether, or 20,000 a
year. In other words, there would be room for an
increase in the number of marriages of nearly 20,000.
It would not be miraculous then if the French population
should continue to increase in the face of great
losses in war, for the increase before the war had been
very much less than the greatest possible.
In the second place, the circumstances of the
civilian population made an increase very likely.
Many out of the reserve fund of unmarried men will
in the course of ten years be past the military age,
but not past the age of marriage. The 150,000
recruits would probably be taken from the 300,000
158who every year rose to marriageable age, and the
marriages would be kept up from the older unmarried
men, in the scarcity of younger husbands. It may
be remembered, too, that in the early years of the
war so many youths married prematurely to avoid
service,[324] that the Directory were obliged (in 1798) to
extend the conscription to the married men. But
even when the husbands were removed to the war
the marriages were not necessarily childless, and
would thus, at the least, be a means of adding to the
people’s numbers that did not exist before the Revolution.
The facility of divorce, too, though bad both
in morals and in politics, would at least, in the
existing scarcity of men, act somewhat like polygamy,
and make the number of children greater in proportion
to the number of husbands. It is said, too, that
there were more natural children born in France after
the Revolution than before it; and, since the peasants
were better off after it than before it, there was a
better chance that more of the children than formerly
should survive.
In the third place, there is no doubt, says Malthus,
that the division of the domain lands and the creation
(or at least the multiplication) of peasant properties
have had a great influence both on wealth and on
population. They add to population more than to
wealth, for they increase the gross produce of food
at the expense of the nett surplus. “If all the
land of England were divided into farms of £20 a
year, we should probably be more populous than
159we are at present, but as a nation we should be
extremely poor. We should be almost without disposable
revenue, and should be under a total inability
of maintaining the same number of manufactures or
collecting the same taxes as at present.”[325] But the
division of lands was at least in favour of the gross
produce, and even the passing traveller was inclined
to think, from the appearance of the fields and the
style of the field labour, that, however severely the
manufacturing industry of France might have suffered
during the war, her agriculture had rather gained
than lost.[326] The absence of so many strong men with
the armies would not only raise wages at home and
make the labourers better off, but by pro tanto
lessening the demand for food and taking from those
at home the burden of supporting so many men,
would not raise the price of food with the wages,
but would allow real wages to rise. This would
co-operate with political causes in making the people
desert the towns for the country, and thereby it
would reduce the death-rate, which is always higher
in towns than in the country. It is attested by
Arthur Young (no friend to the Essay on Population)
that the high mortality of France before the Revolution
(according to Necker 1 in 30) was caused by an
over-population which the changes at the Revolution
tended to remove. The probability is, therefore, that
160the births increased and the deaths decreased during
the ten years after the Revolution; and there could
be no difficulty in understanding the increase of
population in spite of the war. In the later editions
of the essay[327] Malthus confesses that his French
figures need revision; the returns of the Prefects
for 1801–2 and other Government papers had given
a smaller proportion of births than he had thought
probable, for the period before the Revolution. But
(he remarks) the Prefects’ returns do not embrace
the earlier years of the Revolution, precisely the
time when the encouragement to marriage would be
greatest and the proportion of births highest. In
any case they show that the population of France
is not less but greater since the Revolution. If in
the latter part of this period the increase was affected
by the decrease of deaths rather than by increase of
births, they not only leave his position untouched,
but give him a result that would highly please him.
Certainly in England and in Switzerland, and probably
in every European country, the rate of mortality
has decreased in the last two hundred years, through
the greater healthiness of the conditions of life; and
it is not at all surprising that a population should
be kept up or even made to increase with a smaller
proportion of births, deaths, and marriages than before.[328]
The French labouring classes at the beginning of
the Revolution were seventy-six per cent. worse fed,
clothed, and supported than their fellows in England.[329]
161Their wages were 10d. a day (as compared with
1s. 5d.), while the price of corn was about the same;
but their condition and their remuneration had been
decidedly improved by the Revolution and the
division of the national domains. Wages in money
(since Young wrote) had risen to 1s. 3d. a day; and,
according to some authorities, the real wages had
become even higher than in England.[330] The new
distribution of wealth had been followed by an
immense increase in the production of it, shared by
the producers themselves, and making France immensely
stronger as a nation either for offence or
defence.[331] Such an improvement in the condition of
the people would naturally be followed by diminution
in the deaths; and a diminution in the deaths must
lead either to an increase of population or to a
decrease in the marriages and births. The latter
(which is presumably an increase of moral restraint)
has followed. In the ten years after the Peace of
Amiens the population seems to have increased only
at a very slow rate. “There is perhaps no proposition
more incontrovertible than this, that in two
countries, in which the rate of increase, the natural
healthiness of climate, and the state of towns and
manufactures are supposed to be nearly the same, the
one in which the pressure of poverty is the greatest
will have the greatest proportion of births, deaths,
and marriages,” and vice versâ.[332]
Malthus’ survey of population in France applies
162only to his own lifetime, and indeed only to the
earlier part of that. To do him full justice we must
place his picture of the real losses of war alongside
of his description of the compensations.
The constant tendency of population to increase
up to the limits of the food may be interpreted (in
the case of war) as the tendency of the births in a
country to supply the vacancies made by death.
The breaches are not permanent; they are among the
reparable as distinguished from the irreparable mischiefs
of war. But this does not, from a moral or
political aspect, afford the slightest excuse for the
misery caused thereby to the existing inhabitants.
“Can you by filling cradles empty graves?”
There is an exchange of mature beings in the “full
vigour of their enjoyments”[333] for an equal number
of helpless infants. Not only is this a waste of the
men who died, but it is a deterioration, for the time
being, of the quality of the whole people; they will
consist of more than the normal proportion of women
and children; and the married will be men and
women who in ordinary times would have remained
single. When the drain of men for military service
begins to exhaust the reserve of unmarried persons,
and the annual demands are in excess of the number
annually rising to marriageable age, then of course
war will actually diminish population.[334] Till that
point is reached, war may alter the units and spoil
the quality of the population, but will not lessen its
163total volume. Sir Francis Ivernois, from whom
Malthus took some of his figures, went too far in
the other direction when he told us we must not look
so much at the deaths in battle or in hospital, when
we are counting up the destructive effects of war
or revolution, as at the remoter results; “the number
of men war has killed is of much less importance
than the number of children whom it has prevented
and will still prevent from coming into the world.”
He supposes one million of men to have been lost in
the Revolution itself, and one and a half millions in its
wars; and he says that, if only two millions of these
had been married, they would have needed to have had
six children each in order that a number of children
equal to the number of their parents (i. e. four millions)
should be alive thirty-nine years afterwards. We
ought, he thinks, to mourn not only for the two and a
half millions of men killed, but for the twelve millions
whom their death prevented from being born. To
which Malthus wisely answers that the slain, being
full-grown men, reared at no little cost to themselves
and their country, may be fitly mourned, but not the
unborn twelve millions, whose appearance in the
world would only have sent or kept a corresponding
number out of it,—and “if in the best-governed
country in Europe we were to mourn the posterity
which is prevented from coming into being, we should
always wear the habit of grief.”[335]
If Sir Francis Ivernois could have foreseen the
history of French population for seventy years after
164the time when he wrote, he would have had more
reason to utter his curious lament.
“The effect of the Revolution,” wrote Malthus in
1817, “has been to make every person depend more
upon himself and less upon others. The labouring
classes have therefore become more industrious, more
saving, and more prudent in marriage than formerly;
and it is quite certain that without these effects the
Revolution would have done nothing for them.”[336] The
country districts which took the least active part in
the Revolution have been the most resolute in conserving
the results of it. Over-population in France
is known only in the towns. At the beginning of the
eighteenth century—say one hundred and fifty years
ago (1732)—under Louis XV. the population of France
was estimated at twenty millions of people.[337] There
is good reason to believe that the habits of the people
were entirely different from what they are now; they
were even said to be famous for their large families.[338]
In 1776 their numbers were about twenty-four millions,[339]
165at the Revolution of 1789 about twenty-six
millions,[340] in 1831 thirty-two and a half, and in 1866
thirty-eight. At the present time, from loss of territory
and from decrease of numbers in certain parts
of the country, they are little more than thirty-seven
and a half millions—not much more than the population
of Great Britain, a country neither so large nor
so fertile. Even in 1815 Malthus spoke of France
as having a more stationary and less crowded population
than Britain, though it was richer in corn.[341]
The population of 1881 showed an increase of 766,260
over that of 1876, and was in all 37,672,048.[342] It
increases not by augmentation in the number of
births, for that has been actually lessening, but by
diminution in the deaths. The population of Britain
has trebled itself within the present century; that of
France has not even doubled itself in a century and a
half, with every allowance for a varying frontier. The
fears which Malthus expressed,[343] that the law of inheritance
and compulsory division of property would lead
to an excessive and impoverished country population,
have not been realized. The industrial progress of
the country has been very great. Fifty years ago the
production of wheat was only the half of what it is
166to-day, of meat less than the half. In almost every
crop and every kind of food France is richer now
than then in the proportion of more than 2 to 1.
In all the conveniences of life (if food be the necessaries)
the increased supply is as 4 to 1, while foreign
trade has become as 6 to 1. Since property is more
widely distributed in France than elsewhere, an
increase of production is much more certain to mean
a benefit to the whole people. But there are certain
classes of goods, chiefly necessaries, of which (even
in a land like England, where the great wealth is in
a few hands) it is impossible profitably to extend the
production without pari passu extending the distribution.
When articles of food are imported in vast
quantities, they cannot, from the nature of things,
go entirely to the rich; the rich can easily eat and
drink beyond the normal value, but not much (without
Gargantua’s mouth) beyond the normal quantity;
and, at least in the case of our own country, very little
is exported again. Generally speaking, it is a true saying
that, the more the food, the more are fed. But
what is true of necessaries in England is true even of
other goods in France.[344] The “average wealth of each
person” is not there, as often elsewhere, a mere arithmetical
entity, but a very near approach to the ordinary
state of the great majority of the people; and
this average wealth is thought by good authorities[345]
to have more than doubled since the beginning of the
167century. The population, on the other hand, has
only increased by one-half; and the average duration
of life has lengthened from twenty-eight to thirty-seven
years. In a paper of Chateauneuf’s (1826)
quoted by MacCulloch,[346] it was said that the French
people were improving their condition by diminishing
their marriages. The statistician Levasseur, on the
contrary, with the facts of another half-century before
him, tells us that married people in France are the
majority of the population,[347] the average age of marriage
being twenty-six for the women, and rather more than
thirty for the men. The birth-rate, however, is the
lowest in Europe,[348] being 1 in 37, as opposed to 1 in
27 for England. It is by refusing to fill the cradles
that they leave the graves empty. Yet France is
less healthy than England. Its death-rate in 1882
was 22.2 per thousand, while in England it was 19.6.[349]
There are other features which make the case
unique. There are few foreigners in France; the
numbers of the French people are neither swelled by
immigration nor reduced by emigration. Since the
expulsion of the Huguenots and the colonization of
Canada, few nations have been so rooted in their
own country; even Algerian and Tunisian conquests
are due to no popular passion for colonizing. The
peasant properties have made the people averse to
movement.
At present most Frenchmen remain during life in
168the same Department in which they were born;[350]
and recent observers tell us[351] that a military career
is becoming distasteful to all classes. Taking the
absence of immigration as balanced by the absence
of emigration, we are brought to the conclusion that
the population of France is stationary by its own
deliberate act.
How far this is in accordance with the views of
Malthus it is impossible to say in one word. It is
at least the result of the prudence which he was
always preaching. But his prudence lay in the deferring
of marriage; and this is not the form which
prevails in France. Moreover, he thought with Adam
Smith that the progressive state and not the stationary
was the normal one for humanity; if the whole world
became contented with what it had got, there would,
in his opinion, be no progress, and the resources and
capacities of human beings and of the world would
not be developed. In fact, he retained the aspirations
of the Revolution, which the country-folk in France
seem in danger of losing; he wished men to have
hopes for the future as well as a comfortable life in
the present; he saw no virtue in mere smallness any
more than in mere bigness of numbers; he desired as
great as possible a population of stalwart, well-instructed,
wise, and enterprising men; he thought
that, without competition, ambition, and emulation,
and without the element of difficulty and hardship,
human beings would never fully exert their best
powers, though he also thought that a time might
169come when the lower classes would be as the middle
classes, or, in his own words, when the lower would
be diminished and the middle increased, and when,
mainly through the action of the labourers themselves,
inventions would become a real benefit, because
accompanied by lighter labour and shorter hours for
the labourers.[352] As for that love of humanity, that
was so much present in the words and thoughts if
not in the deeds of the men of the Revolution, he had
a full share of it. He desired a longer life for the
living, and fewer births for the sake of fewer deaths.
His work was like that of the lighthouse, to give
light and to save life.
170
Prevailing Checks—Proposed Census of 1753—Brown’s Estimate—Depopulation
of England in Eighteenth Century—Opposing Arguments—Census
of 1801—Interpretation of Returns—Relative
Nature of the Question of Populousness—Scotland to England as
Country to Town—Industrial changes since the Union—Ireland
under English rule in Eighteenth Century and after—The Wall
of Brass—Virtue without Wisdom—The Potato Standard—The
Emigration Committee—The New Departure.
In dealing with the question of population in his
own country,[353] Malthus tries to answer at least three
distinct questions:—What were the checks actually
at work in those days? Had the numbers of the
people increased, or not, in the eighteenth century?
What conclusions on either point may be drawn from
the English census?
The first question was answered with comparative
fulness in the essay of 1798. It is remarked there
that in England the middle and upper classes increase
at a slow rate, because they are always anxious to
keep their station, and afraid of the expense of
marriage.[354] No man, as a rule, would like his wife’s
171social condition to be out of keeping with her habits
and inclinations. Two or three steps of descent will
be considered by most people as a real evil. “If
society be held desirable, it surely must be free,
equal, and reciprocal society, where benefits are conferred
as well as received, and not such as the
dependant finds with his patron or the poor with
the rich.” So it happens that many men, of liberal
education and limited income, do not give effect to
an early attachment by an early marriage. When
their passion is too strong or their judgment too
weak for this restraint, no doubt they have blessings
that counterbalance the obvious evils; “but I fear
it must be owned that the more general consequences
of such marriages are rather calculated to justify
than to repress the forebodings of the prudent.”[355]
What Malthus desires, as we infer from the general
tenor of his book, is that all classes without exception
should show reluctance to impair their standard of
living; and his hatred of the Poor Laws is due to
his conviction that they hinder this end. The subject
will be more fully discussed by-and-by.[356] In the
chapters on England it is little more than mentioned,
the author devoting himself chiefly to the statistical
data of the census and registers.
In this connection it was impossible for him to
avoid the question that had long agitated the minds
of politicians. Had the numbers of the English
people been decreasing or increasing since the
172Revolution of 1688, and especially in the course of
the eighteenth century? Economists of the present
day are overloaded with statistics; but, when Adam
Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations, he was unaware
of the numbers of his own nation. To estimate
population without a census is to study language
without a dictionary; there had been no census since
the coming of the Armada,[357] and it was not till one
hundred years after that event that statistical studies
came much into favour. An annual enumeration of
the people was proposed in the House of Commons in
1753, as a means of knowing the numbers of our
poor.[358] But the proposal was resisted as anti-Scriptural
and un-English, exposing our weakness to the
foreigner and spending public money to settle the
wagers of the learned. There was probably a fear[359]
that the tax-gatherer would follow on the heels of the
enumerator, as he had done in France. The House
of Lords beat off the bill, and left England in
darkness about the numbers of its people for another
half-century, though something like a census of
Scotland was made for Government in 1755.[360] As
without the Irish Famine we might not have had
the total Repeal of the Corn Laws, so without the
worst of all possible harvests in 1799 we might
have had no census in 1801, for Parliament, when
173they passed Mr. Abbot’s Enumeration Bill in 1800,
looked to an enumeration of the people to guide
them in opening and closing the ports to foreign
grain. The practical question about the increase or
decline of English numbers was connected, in logic
as well as in time, with the controversy about the
comparative populousness of ancient and modern
nations. The same year (1753) which saw the
attempt to settle by census the question of England’s
depopulation, saw also the publication of Dr. Robert
Wallace’s reply to Hume’s Essay on the Populousness
of Ancient Nations, in his Dissertations on the Numbers
of Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times. One of
Henry Fox’s objections to Hardwicke’s Marriage Act
(of 1753) was that it would check population.[361] We
are told[362] that the academical discussion roused
attention on the Continent, and a French savant,
Deslandes, published an estimate of the numbers of
modern nations, in which England was made much
inferior to France, having only eight millions against
twenty. This was too much for English patriotism.
Even in our own day a great war and a few reverses
usually fill England for a year or two with forebodings
of decay. Written in 1757 (at the beginning of the
Seven Years’ War), Dr. John Brown’s Estimate of the
Manners and Principles of the Times was only the
most popular of a host of gloomy pamphlets too
174prejudiced to be of much use for statistics.[363] Dr.
Adam Anderson[364] sides with the moderns and the
optimists. The contributions of Dr. Brackenridge
and Richard Forster to the discussion survive by
the mention of them in Price’s Observations (pp.
182–3) and in George Chalmers’ Estimate (ch. xi. 193),
this last giving on the whole perhaps the most lucid
history of the whole depopulation controversy. We
know from Goldsmith’s Traveller (1764) and Deserted
Village (1770), with its charming illogical preface,
that even in peace the subject was not out of men’s
thoughts. A similar panic in Switzerland, which
owed its beginning to England,[365] seems afterwards to
have reacted on England itself. The American War
of Independence revived the languishing interest in
the controversy. This time it was the English and
not the antiquarian topic that fell into powerful
hands. Dr. Richard Price, the Radical dissenter, the
friend of Dr. Franklin, and the inventor of Pitt’s
Sinking Fund, did battle, in his Observations on
Reversionary Payments (1769), on behalf of the
pessimistic view; Arthur Young, the agriculturist,
the traveller and the talker, led the opposition to
him,[366] and was supported by Sir Frederick Eden,
William Wales, John Howlett, and last but not least
by George Chalmers.[367]
175Gregory King[368] and Justice Hale[369] in the seventeenth
century, Dr. Campbell[370] in the eighteenth, had
agreed that the numbers of Norman England must
needs have been small, for the government was bad;
Dr. Price, on the contrary, had maintained the paradox
that, though the Revolution of 1688 brought a “happier
government,” the numbers of the people had
ever since declined.[371] He reasoned from the decreased
number of dwelling-houses assessed to window tax
and house duty, as compared with those assessed to
hearth (or chimney) money before the Revolution.[372]
Opponents denied the accuracy of his data, and
thought his estimate of four and a half or five inhabitants
to a house too low. He pointed to the evil
influence of a “devouring metropolis,” a head too
large for the body, and of great cities that were the
“graves of mankind.”[373] Here, too, both the data and
the inference were doubtful. He argued from the
decreasing produce of the Excise duties. Opponents
answered that, even if the figures were right, a
changed public taste had lessened the consumption
of many taxable articles, and many taxed ones were
supplied free by smuggling.[374] He laid stress on the
176difficulty the Government found in raising troops in
the middle of the eighteenth century as compared
with the end of the seventeenth, though he took this
as a symptom, not a cause, and complained at the
same time quite consistently that the increase of the
army and navy and of military expenditure in three
great wars had been a potent cause of diminished
population. Opponents answered that the first was
really a symptom not of decline but of prosperity;
the abundance of other employments kept men from
the need of enlisting in the army; and they answered
too often, that the second (the war expenditure) was
good for trade. They were safer in urging that for
the first part of the century the long peace (1727–40)
and the good harvests (1731–50) made the presumption
of increase very strong.[375] Price made much of
the emigrations to America and to the East and West
Indies. It was answered that the known possibility
of emigration would give men at home the greater
courage to have a family. Even the engrossing and
consolidation of farms and the enclosure of commons,
which he considered to be against population, would,
said his opponents, increase the food, and therefore
the people, though perhaps not the people on the
spot;[376] and the increase of paupers was thought to be
a sign of overflowing numbers. He saw a cause of
177depopulation in the increased luxury and extravagance
of the people of England. At the beginning of the
century gin-drinking was credited with an evil effect
on population.[377] When the opponents of Price did not
meet this with Mandeville’s sophism, luxury benefits
trade, they answered that what had become greater
was not the national vices but the national standard
of comfort, the expansion of which implied an increase
of general wealth and presumably of population.[378]
Beyond doubt too (it was argued) the general
health was better, and medical science had won some
triumphs.[379] Malthus, however, warns us against this
argument; great unhealthiness is no proof of a small
population nor healthiness of a large.[380] In the ten
years after the American War of Independence
(1783–93) the prosperity of the country seems to
have advanced by leaps and bounds, only to make
the subsequent depression the more observable. Dr.
Price, who did not live to see the relapse, seems to
have confessed his error. “In allusion to a diminishing
population, on which subject it appears that
he has so widely erred, he says very candidly that
perhaps he may have been insensibly influenced to
maintain an opinion once advanced.”[381] Yet public
178opinion was not fully convinced till 1801, when
“the answers to the Population Act at length happily
rescued the question of the population of this country
from the obscurity in which it had been so long
involved.”[382]
There is no good reason to believe that at the end
of last century the fear of depopulation had given
place to a fear of over-population.[383] Malthus and
Arthur Young stood almost alone in their opinion.[384]
Alarm was felt by the agricultural interest, not lest
there should be an excessive population, but lest the
population should get its food from abroad. The
population it was feared had grown beyond the
English supplies of food; but of over-population, in
the wider sense of an excess beyond any existing food,
the general public and the squires had learned little
or nothing in these years; and we have no reason to
attribute to Malthus any share in the merit of passing
the Enumeration Bill. It was brought forward in an
autumn session of Parliament (Nov. 1800) specially
convened because of the scarcity. It was moved
by Mr. Abbot,[385] who had made his name more as
a financier than as an economist, and was chiefly
remarkable afterwards as a vigorous opponent of
179Catholic Emancipation. The motion was seconded
by Mr. Wilberforce; and the combination of finance
and philanthropy was irresistible. Malthus, though
he is the true interpreter of the census, neither caused
it in the first instance nor found it of immediate
service in spreading his doctrines.
The first census would hardly have justified him
in treating as obsolete the old quarrel about depopulation;
it had decided only the absolute numbers
in the first year of the nineteenth century, not the
progress or relapse during the eighteenth. Besides
giving the actual numbers of the people in 1801,
the census no doubt gave “a table of the population
of England and Wales throughout the last century
calculated from the births.” But the births, though
a favourite, were an unsafe criterion; and, for the
population at the Revolution of 1688, Malthus would
depend more on “the old calculations from the number
of houses.”[386] He finds no difficulty of principle in
admitting with Mr. Rickman, the editor of the census
returns and observations thereon, that the rapid increase
of the English people since 1780 was due to
the decrease of deaths rather than to the increase of
births.[387] Such a phenomenon was not only possible
but common, for the rate of births out of relation to
the rate of deaths could give no sure means of
judging the numbers. After a famine[388] or pestilence,
180for example, the rate of births might be twice as high
as usual, and by the standard of births the numbers
of the people would be at their maximum, when a
comparison with the rate of deaths or an actual
enumeration would show them to be at the minimum,[389]
whereas a low rate of births, if lives were
prolonged by great healthiness, might certainly mean
an increase, perhaps a high increase, of numbers.
But at the particular time in question the factory
system was coming into being, and manufacturing
towns were growing great at the expense of the
country districts. The conditions of life in towns are
at the best inferior to those in the country; new
openings for trade would add not only to the marriages
but to the deaths and the births.[390] The presumption
was not all in favour of healthiness; and the
registers at that particular time could not tell the
whole truth;—the drain of recruits for foreign service
would keep down the lists of burials at home, while
allowing an increase of births and marriages.[391] For
these and other reasons, Malthus, while he agrees
with Rickman that the general health has improved,
trusts little to his calculations from registers; and
concludes that even the census gives us no clear
light on the movement of population in the eighteenth
century. We can be certain that population
increased during the last twenty years of it, and
181almost certain that the movement was not downwards
but upwards since the Peace of Paris; and we
have good ground for believing that it was rather
upwards than downwards even in the earliest years
of the century, during the good harvests and the long
peace of Walpole,[392] and that over the whole country
the movement of population was less fluctuating in
England than on the Continent.[393] The author’s admission,
that the proportions of the births, deaths, and
marriages were very different in our country in his
time from what they used to be,[394] seems to put the
census of 1801 out of court altogether in the question
of depopulation, especially as there were no previous
enumerations with which to compare it. The figures
from the parish registers for the whole of the century,
that were included in the “returns pursuant to
the Population Act,” in addition to the enumeration,
turned out on examination to be unsatisfactory.[395]
Malthus, however, was able to prove some solid
conclusions from the census of 1801. It had shown,
for example, as regards marriages, that the proportion
of them to the whole numbers of the people was, in
1801, as 1 to 123⅕, a smaller proportion than anywhere
except in Norway and Switzerland,[396] and the
more likely to be true, because Hardwicke’s Marriage
Act had made registration of marriages more careful
182than of burials and baptisms. In the early part of
the eighteenth century, the pessimist, Dr. Short, had
estimated the proportion (with much probability) as
1 to 115; and it would appear, therefore, that at
neither end of the century were the marriages in a
high proportion to the numbers, or had population
increased at its highest rate. Again, Malthus thinks
it proved by the census that, since population has
as a matter of fact increased in England in spite of a
diminished rate of marriages, the increase has been
at cost of the mortality, the fewer marriages being
partly a cause, partly a consequence, of the fewer
deaths of the later years.[397] Those that married late
might have consoled themselves with the reflection
that they were lessening not the numbers but the
mortality of the nation. It was no doubt difficult to
estimate the extent to which such causes operated,
or the degree in which the national health had been
improved. In any case the census guides us better
than the registers,[398] for it carries us beyond the
inferred numbers to numbers actually counted out
at a given time. Neither the census nor the registers
can be rightly interpreted without a knowledge of
the social condition, government, and history of the
people concerned. In undeveloped countries, like
America and Russia, or in any old countries after
special mortality, a large proportion of births may be
a good sign; “but in the average state of a well-peopled
territory there cannot well be a worse sign
than a large proportion of births, nor can there well
183be a better sign than a small proportion.” Sir
Francis d’Ivernois had very justly observed that, if
the various states of Europe published annually an
exact account of their population, noting carefully in
a second column the exact age at which the children
die, this second column would show the comparative
goodness of the governments, and the comparative
happiness of their subjects;—a simple arithmetical
statement might then be more conclusive than the
cleverest argument. Malthus assents, but adds that
“we should need to attend less to the column giving
the number of children born, than to the one giving
the number which reached manhood, and this number
will almost invariably be the greatest where the proportion
of the births to the whole population is the
least.”[399] Tried by this standard, which is much more
truly the central doctrine of Malthus than the ratios,
our own country was even then better than all, save
two, European countries. Tried by it to-day, we
have still a good place. Though no great European
countries, except Austro-Hungary and Germany, have
had more marriages, in the twenty years from 1861
to 1880, not only these, but Holland, Spain, and
Italy, have had more births, and all of them except
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have had more deaths,
in proportion to their numbers.[400]
One great advantage of the census is, that it enables
the registrars to calculate from their own data, with
certain sure limits of told-out numbers behind and
184before them. “When the registers contain all the
births and deaths, and there are the means [given by
the census] of setting out from a known population,
it is obviously the same as an actual enumeration.”[401]
Malthus suggested in 1803 that the experiment of
1801 should be repeated every ten years, and that
registrars’ reports should be made every year.[402] This
has been done; and, if both have been accurate, then
the registers of the intervening years, on the basis of
the decennial enumeration, ought to make us able
to calculate the numbers for any intervening year.
Accordingly, the population of England in 1881, as
calculated from the births and deaths, was little more
than one-sixth of a million different from the numbers
as actually counted over on the night of the 4th of
April in that year.[403] The growth in the last decade,
1871 to 1881, was higher than in any since 1831–41;[404]
the births were more and the deaths fewer than
usual. Another London has been added to our
numbers in ten years.[405]
This gives no sure ground, however, for prediction.
To suppose a country’s rate of increase permanent
is hardly less fallacious than to suppose an invariable
order of births and deaths over the world generally.
Even if we are beyond the time when we need to
make any allowance for increasing accuracy and fulness,
and if we may assume that no given census has any
185units to sweep into its net that through their fear or
an official’s carelessness escaped its predecessor, still
we cannot take the rate of increase from one census
to another as a sure indication of the future. With
some qualifications the words of Malthus apply to us
in 1881 quite as accurately as to our fathers in 1811:
“This is a rate of increase which in the nature of
things cannot be permanent. It has been occasioned
by the stimulus of a greatly increased demand for
labour, combined with a greatly increased power of
production, both in agriculture and manufactures.
These are the two elements which form the most
effective encouragement to a rapid increase of population.
What has taken place is a striking illustration
of the principle of population, and a proof that, in
spite of great towns, manufacturing occupations, and
the gradually acquired habits of an opulent and
luxuriant people, if the resources of a country will
admit of a rapid increase, and if these resources
are so advantageously distributed as to occasion a
constantly increasing demand for labour, the population
will not fail to keep pace with them.”[406] It was
a rate of increase which he saw would double the
population in less than fifty-five years; and this
doubling has really happened. The numbers for
England in 1801 were 8,892,536; and in 1851 they
were 17,927,609. Malthus had not anticipated any
greater changes in manufacture and trade than those
of his own day; and he clearly expected that the
rate of increase would not continue and the numbers
186would not be doubled. The one thing certain was the
impossibility of safe prediction on the strength of
any existing rate. A writer at the beginning of this
century prophesied the extinction of the Turkish
people in one hundred years; Sir William Petty at
the end of the seventeenth century predicted that in
1800 London would have 5,359,000 inhabitants. But
the Turks are not yet extinct; London in 1800 had
less than a million of people, and has taken eighty years
more to raise them to the number in the prophecy.[407]
If prediction was difficult in the case of England,
it was not less so in the case of the other parts of
the United Kingdom. The conditions of society and
industry were quite different in the three countries;
and to judge of the actual or probable growth of
population in Scotland or Ireland, we must first, as
with England, clearly understand these conditions.
In the early part of this century even more than
now, Scotland[408] stood to England as the country
districts of England now stand to its great towns.
Continual migration from country to town may be
said to have been its normal state; and the largest
towns were in England. The change from a militant
and feudal to an industrial society was nowhere so
marked as in Scotland after the Union, and especially
after the rebellion of 1745. The hereditary judgeships
of highland chiefs were swept away; the relation
187between chief and clansmen became the unromantic
relation of landlord and tenant. The displacement
of household work by the factory system, and of hand
labour by machinery, crowded the great towns of
Scotland at the expense of the country districts; and
crowded the great towns and manufacturing districts
of England at the expense of Scotland. The flood
of North Britons into England was not of Bute’s
making; and it was greatest after and not before the
Peace of Paris, although under that peace and a
stable government the farming, the manufacturing,
the banking, and the foreign trading of Scotland itself
had grown great enough (it might have seemed)
to employ the whole population at home. Cotton
manufacture, which on the whole is the typical
industry of these latter days, was peculiarly English.[409]
Sheep-farming at home and cotton-spinning in
England combined to depopulate the Scotch highlands
and much of the lowlands. The highlands,
with their strongly-marked physical features and
strictly limited industrial possibilities, were somewhat
in the position of Norway. In the highlands
proper there were no mineral riches; there were moorlands,
mountains, streams, lochs, heather, bracken,
peat, and bog; the patches of cultivable soil would
bear a scanty crop of oats, and perhaps clover, barley,
or potatoes.[410] This description applied to a large half
188of entire Scotland; and we must bear it in mind to
understand the saying of Malthus in 1803: “Scotland
is certainly over-peopled, but not so much as it was a
century or half a century ago, when it contained fewer
inhabitants.”[411] The highlands are over their whole
extent what the lowlands are as regards their hills, fit
only for sheep. Sutherland has about thirteen inhabitants
to the square mile now, and Midlothian
seven hundred and forty-six; but Sutherland and not
Midlothian may be over-peopled. Sutherland as compared
with her former self, when she had thirty or forty
to the square mile, may be more or she may be less
over-peopled than she once was; we cannot tell till we
know what her wealth was and how it was distributed.
Under the patriarchal government[412] of early times
the wealth of the country consisted literally in its men.
If a chief were asked the rent of his estate, he would
answer that it raised five hundred men; the tenant
paid him in military service. Adam Smith remembers
that in the Jacobite Rebellion, which disturbed his
country at the time he was studying at Oxford, “Mr.
Cameron of Lochiel, a gentleman of Lochaber in [the
west highlands of] Scotland, whose rent never exceeded
£500 [English] a year, carried, in 1745, eight hundred
of his own people into the rebellion with him.”[413]
Subdivision of land meant more retainers and greater
honour; and so the highlands were peopled not to
the full extent of the work to be done, but actually to
189the full extent of the bare food got from the soil.[414]
On the establishment of a strong government and
the abolition of their hereditary judicial privileges,[415]
the chiefs soon became willing to convert the value
in men into a value in money, exchanging dignity for
profit. They no longer encouraged their tenants to
have large families; and yet they made no efforts to
remove the habits, which the tenants had formed, of
having them.[416] It was this change that gave Sir
Walter Scott the materials for his most powerful
pictures in Waverley and other novels. But it is the
distress of the chiefs that is tragic to him, rather than
the misery of the clansmen. The clansmen for their
part had under feudalism been brought up to be
farmers or cattle-dealers and nothing else; there was
as little variety of occupation in the highlands then
as in Ireland now. Undoubtedly too they had that
customary right of long possession, which law so often
construed into a legal title in the case of more
influential men. It was true also that, if the native
highlanders would not cultivate that poor soil, no
strangers would, and, if it was politically desirable
that the country should remain peopled, the
only way to secure this was to prevent the native
exodus.[417] No such attempt was made; but, on the
contrary, the highland landlords followed the way
that led to the highest rents; they consolidated their
190farms; they exchanged agriculture for pasture; they
substituted deer for sheep. Almost every highland
district has sooner or later passed through all these
three stages, and with the same result, the employment
of fewer and fewer men.[418] The discarded
men had two courses before them, migration to the
lowlands[419] or emigration to the colonies. The farm
labourer would migrate, the farmer emigrate. The
landlords incurred and often deserved odium for the
manner of their evictions; but they treated the
evicted better than the average British capitalist
treats his dismissed hands. They usually provided
passages and often procured settlements abroad for
them. Lord Selkirk, one of the few writers on this
subject that preserves a judicial calmness, advised his
countrymen to acquiesce in the “depopulation” of the
highlands, but to draw the stream of emigration to
our own colonies. He himself drew it, so far as
he could, to the Red River settlement and Prince
Edward Island.
From the middle of last century to the beginning
of this, emigration went on except when war made
it impossible. The dangerous qualities of the highlanders
made them very valuable in the three great
wars that prevented them from leaving the country
191with their families. It may be that this very military
consideration induced the English Government to
connive at the clearances at first; and interference
at any later stage was very difficult. As it is, in
the end even the Sutherland evictions[420] seem simply
to have shifted the population and not removed it.
In spite of emigration Sutherland had as many inhabitants
at the last census of 1881, as at the first
in 1801, namely, above 23,000. Fishing, an industry
new to a great part of the highlands, made this
phenomenon possible. Fishing villages have grown
at the expense of inland farms. But this is not the
whole truth. Till the time when free trade began
to distend Glasgow and other great towns of Scotland,
the highland counties taken altogether had
actually increased in population, as compared with
what they were in 1801. The subsequent fall is
due not to any great clearances or emigrations, but
to another cause that had been acting though not
conspicuously for some time before. This was migration
to the industrial centres of the lowlands. In
the days of the Tudors there were complaints in
England of the decay of towns, because a strong
government had at last made the protection of walled
towns superfluous, and industry had spread itself in
peace, where it was wanted. But two centuries later
there was decay not of the towns but of the country
districts, because industry was taking forms that
made concentration necessary. At first, both in
192England and Scotland, there was a real diminution
in the rural population; there had been for the time
a real diminution of the work to be done in the
country, and a transference of it to the towns. The
hand-loom weaver had been supplanted by the power-loom.
The little villages, where the workman lived
idyllically, half in his farm and half in his workshop,
now either sent their whole families to the towns,
thus stopping their contributions to the parish registers
in the country and swelling those of the town,
or, still keeping the parents, sent three-fourths of
the children there, thus making the country registers
a very untrustworthy reflection of the real state of
the population in the country districts. That country
villages in every part of Scotland, but especially near
the large cities, are “breeding grounds” of this latter
description[421] is perfectly well known; and the same is
true, in a less degree, of England. This is one reason
why even the purely rural districts of Scotland have
greatly increased in apparent population since 1801,
and most of them are increasing still; the readiness
of the Scotch to emigrate has caused the large
families quite as much as the large families the
emigration. Another reason is, that even in the
country districts there is now more work to be done
and it is done better. Orthodox economists may
count this an example of the self-healing effects of
an economical change that causes much suffering at
first. It is fair to say that this eventual cure is
193neither more nor less complete than the cure of the
analogous hardships of the newly-introduced factory system,
and the temporary inconveniences of sudden
free trade. What keen commercial ambition can do
it has done, and its success is at least sufficiently
complete to justify us in saying of Scotland to-day
what Malthus said of it eighty years ago: it was
most over-populated when it had fewest inhabitants.
Modern improvements, however short of perfection,
have at least both in England and in Scotland absolutely
put an end to periodical famines. Even the
scarcities of 1799 and 1800, though they caused great
distress in both countries, were not famines in either of
them; and, since the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846,
even such general distress as was caused in Scotland
by the potato blight cannot occur again. That distress
itself was as nothing compared with the terrible
dearths from which Scotland used to suffer five or six
times a century, and which England experienced as
late as the seventeenth.[422] The dismal picture[423] which
Malthus draws of the condition of the Scottish
peasantry reminds us that it is not much more than
a century since Scotland took her first steps in
civilization and turned her energies from war to
commerce. Her population at the ’45 was about
one and a quarter millions, in 1801 about one
and a half; but in 1861 more than three, and in
1881 three and three-quarters. Population therefore
194has more than doubled within the century. But
even now there are only a hundred and twenty-one
inhabitants to the square mile, as compared with four
hundred and forty-five in England. The wealth of
the country has increased immensely faster than the
population; it has multiplied fivefold since the middle
of this century, and tenfold since the beginning of it.[424]
The history of population in Ireland would have furnished
Malthus with still more striking illustrations of
his principles, if his life had lasted a few years longer.
He contents himself (till the 6th edition of the Essay[425])
with a single paragraph: “The details of the population
of Ireland are but little known. I shall only
observe, therefore, that the extended use of potatoes
has allowed of a very rapid increase of it during the
last century. But the cheapness of this nourishing
root, and the small piece of ground which, under this
kind of cultivation, will in average years produce
the food for a family, joined to the ignorance and
depressed state[426] of the people, which have prompted
them to follow their inclinations with no other
prospect than an immediate bare subsistence, have
encouraged marriage to such a degree, that the
population is pushed much beyond the industry and
present resources of the country; and the consequence
naturally is, that the lower classes of people are in
the most impoverished[427] and miserable state. The
checks to the population are of course chiefly of the
195positive kind, and arise from the diseases occasioned
by squalid poverty, by damp and wretched cabins,
by bad and insufficient clothing,[428] and occasional
want. To these positive checks have of late years
been added the vice and misery of intestine commotion,
of civil war, and of martial law.”[429]
In his review of Newenham’s Statistical and Historical
Enquiry into the Population of Ireland in 1808,[430]
and in his evidence before the Emigration Committee
in 1827, Malthus uses even stronger language. We
may quote from the latter document as the less known
of the two. In 1817 he had spent a college vacation
in visiting Westmeath and the lakes of Killarney,[431]
and was able to speak from personal knowledge of the
country. He was asked:—
Qu. 3306. “With reference to Ireland, what is
your opinion as to the habits of the people, as tending
to promote a rapid increase of population?”—“Their
habits are very unfavourable in regard to their own
condition, because they are inclined to be satisfied
with the very lowest degree of comfort, and to marry
with little other prospect than that of being able to
get potatoes for themselves and their children.”[432]
1963307. “What are the circumstances which contribute
to introduce such habits in a country?”—“The
degraded condition of the people, oppression,
and ignorance.”
3311. “You have mentioned that oppression contributes
to produce those habits to which you have
alluded; in what way do you imagine in Ireland there
is oppression?”—“I think that the government of
Ireland has, upon the whole, been very unfavourable
to habits of that kind; it has tended to degrade the
general mass of the people, and consequently to
prevent them from looking forward and acquiring
habits of prudence.”
3312. “Is it your opinion that the minds of the
people may be so influenced by the circumstances
under which they live, in regard to civil society,
that it may contribute very much to counteract that
particular habit which leads to the rapid increase of
population?”—“I think so.”
3313. “What circumstances in your opinion contribute
to produce a taste for comfort and cleanliness
among a people?”—“Civil and political liberty and
education.”[433]
Then the subject of one acre holdings is introduced,
and Malthus is asked:—
3317. “What effect would any change of the
moral or religious state of the government of that
country produce upon persons occupying such possessions?”—“It
could not produce any immediate effect
if that system were continued; with that system of
197occupancy there must always be an excessive redundancy
of people, because, from the nature of tolerably
good land, it will always produce more than can
be employed upon it, and the consequence must be
that there will be a great number of people not
employed.”
3318. “Is, therefore, not the first step towards improvement
in Ireland necessarily to be accomplished by
an alteration of the present state of the occupancy of
the land?” This was a leading question, but Malthus
would not be led. He replied, “I think that such
an alteration is of the greatest possible importance,
but that the other (the change in the government)
should accompany it; it would not have the same
force without.” In his answers to later questions he
gave his view at greater length on the causes of the
difference between English and Irish character.
Answ. to qu. 3411. “At the time of the introduction
of the potato into Ireland the Irish people
were in a very low and degraded state, and the
increased quantity of food was only applied to increase
the population. But when our [English] wages
of labour in wheat were high in the early part of
the last century, it did not appear that they were
employed merely in the maintenance of more families,
but in improving the condition of the people in their
general mode of living.”[434]
3413. “You attribute the difference of the character
of the people to the difference of food?”—“In a great
measure.”
1983414. “What circumstance determines the difference
of food in the two countries?”—“The circumstances
are partly physical and partly moral.[435] It will
depend in a certain degree upon the soil and climate
whether the people live on maize, wheat, oats, potatoes,
or meat.”[436]
3415. “Is not the selection in some degree dependent
on the general state of society?”—“Very
much on moral causes, on their being in so respectable
a situation that they are in the habit of looking
forward, and exercising a certain degree of prudence;
and there is no doubt that in different countries
this kind of prudence is exercised in very different
degrees.”
3416. “Does it depend at all on the government
under which they live?”—“Very much on the
government, on the strict and equal administration of
justice, on the perfect security of property, on civil,
religious, and political liberty; for people respect themselves
more under favourable circumstances of this
kind, and are less inclined to marry, with[out] the prospect
of more physical sustenance for their children.”
3417. “On the degree of respect with which they
are treated by their superiors?”—“Yes; one of the
greatest faults in Ireland is that the labouring classes
there are not treated with proper respect by their
199superiors; they are treated as if they were a degraded
people.”
Thereupon he is again asked a leading question of
a somewhat cynical character, but he is again cautious
in his answer.
3418. “Does not that treatment mainly arise
from their existing in such redundancy as to be no
object to their superiors?”—“In part it does perhaps;
but it appeared to take place before that [redundancy]
was the case, to the same degree.”
The questioner, however, begs the question and
asks:
3419. “The number being the cause of their treatment,
will not their treatment tend to the increase
of that number?” and the answer is: “Yes, they
act and react on each other.”
Accordingly his opinion in 1827 is, as it was in
1803, that emigration conjoined with other agencies
will be good for Ireland, but by itself will leave
matters no better than they were.
Alongside of his weighty words in the essay
and in the evidence it is worth while to place
the words written by Adam Smith half a century
earlier:—
“By the union with England, the middling and
inferior ranks of people in Scotland gained a complete
deliverance from the power of an aristocracy which
had always before oppressed them. By a union with
Great Britain, the greater part of the people of all
ranks in Ireland would gain an equally complete
deliverance from a much more oppressive aristocracy,
200an aristocracy not founded, like that of Scotland, in
the natural and respectable distinctions of birth and
fortune, but in the most odious of all distinctions,
those of religious and political prejudices; distinctions
which, more than any other, animate both the
insolence of the oppressors and the hatred and indignation
of the oppressed, and which commonly render
the inhabitants of the same country more hostile to
one another than those of different countries ever
are.”[437]
With such passages before us, we cannot consider
the two economists to have been behind their age in
their Irish policy. In regard to accurate figures, the
later economist was little better off than the earlier.
Ireland was not included in the first two censuses of
1801 and 1811. In 1695 its population was estimated
by Captain South as little more than one million;[438]
in 1731, by inquiry of Irish House of Lords, at two
millions; in 1792 by Dr. Beaufort at a little above
four millions;[439] in 1805 by Newenham at five and a
half millions; in 1812 an imperfect census gave it
as nearly six millions; in the census of 1821 it was
6,800,000. It was clear that the population of
Ireland was increasing even then faster than that of
England.[440] But between these dates and our own
201times comes an episode striking enough to provide
all economical histories with a purpureus pannus.
For about two generations England had perpetrated
in Ireland her crowning feats of commercial jealousy,
a jealousy not more foolish or wicked against Ireland
than it was against the American colonies, or, till
1707, against Scotland, but more easily victorious.
Ireland had not begun to be in any sense an industrial
country till the reigns of Elizabeth and James I.;
and the wars of the succeeding reigns hampered her
early efforts. She had fair corn and meadow lands,
and perhaps the best pastures in the world for sheep
and cattle. The English farming interest became
impatient of Irish competition, and a law was passed
to forbid the importation of Irish sheep and cattle
and dairy produce into England (1665, 1680). By
reason of the later Navigation Acts, Ireland could not
make amends for this by trading with America, for
all such trading must be by way of England and in
English ships, nor by trading with France for the
same reason. England in her jealousy would have
surrounded her with a cordon quite as close as
Berkeley’s wall of brass.[441] As soon as a considerable
woollen manufacture grew up, England stopped it
by legislation, which (in 1699) forbade the exportation
of Irish woollens not only to England but to
any other country whatever. English interference,
202if it had done no more, added immensely to the
uncertainties[442] and fluctuations of Irish trade. The
growth of industries like the woollen manufacture
had set on foot a growth of population which did
not stop with the arrest of the industries. As often
happens,[443] the effects of an impulse to marriage lasted
far beyond the industrial progress that gave the
impulse. But this means hunger and suffering, if
not death. In the case of Ireland, the ruin of all
industries but farming over more than three-fourths
of the land led to an absolute dependence of the
people on the harvest of their own country; and,
where it failed them, they were brought face to face
with dearth or famine. It led also to the peopling
of the country districts at the expense of the towns,[444]
instead of (as usual) the towns at the expense of
the country. If Goldsmith’s Deserted Village is not
English, it is not Irish. By the year 1780, when
Lord North from fear of rebellion granted free trade
to Ireland with Great Britain, the mischief had been
made almost incurable. The great increase in the
Irish population, like the great increase in the English,
may be said to begin in a free trade movement. In
the worst days of legal persecution it might have
been said of the Irish Catholic population, the more
they were afflicted the more they multiplied and
grew. Lavergne[445] thinks their greater increase was
203due first to the physiological law, that in the case of
all animals the means of reproduction are multiplied
in proportion to the chances of destruction[?], and
second to the instinctively sound tactics of a people
otherwise defenceless. The probability is, too, that
they remained quiet under their multitudinous industrial,
political, and religious disqualifications so long,
because they were reduced to that depth of misery
that kills the very power of resistance; and poverty
at its extreme point is a positive but not a preventive
check on population. Where things are so bad,
marriage, it is thought, cannot make them worse, and
marriage would go on at the expense of a high
mortality, general pauperism, or continuous emigration.
The pureness of marriage relations in Ireland,
though in itself a much greater good than its consequences
were evil, acted as it would have done in
Godwin’s Utopia;[446] apart from wisdom, virtue itself
had its evils. Potatoes by-and-by came into general
use; and the bad harvests, which taught even the
Scotch and English poor[447] to make frequent use of
this substitute for corn, converted it in Ireland from
a substitute into a staple. Economists viewed this
change with almost unanimous disapproval. In the
view of Malthus it was the cheapness of this food
that made it dangerous for the labourers; his theory
of wages led him to object to cheap corn on the same
grounds.[448] On the principle that it needs difficulties
204to generate energy, the Irish are made indolent by
their cheap food, and make no use of it except to
increase by it. Living on the cheapest food procurable,
they could not in scarcity fall back on anything
else. Every man who wished to marry might obtain
a cabin and potatoes.[449] At the lowest calculation, an
acre of land planted with potatoes will support twice
as much as one of the same quality sown with
wheat.[450] There are other objections to a potato diet.
It is a simple (as opposed to a composite) diet, and
it involves a low standard of comfort. The second
is not the same as the first, for a people that had no
variety in their food might conceivably have a great
variety in their other comforts. As a matter of fact,
however, it was none of these three supposed disadvantages
of the potato that proved the bane of the Irish
population, but a fourth one, its liability to blight.[451]
The figures of the census tell their own tale. In
1821 the Irish people numbered 6,801,827; in 1831,
7,767,401; in 1841, 8,199,853; but in 1851, 6,514,473.
In each previous decade the increase approached a
million; in the last there was not only no increase,
but a decrease of more than a million and a half.
There had been a disastrous famine followed by great
emigrations. What happened on Lord Lansdowne’s
estate in Kerry is an example of what took place
over Ireland generally.[452] That estate comprehended
205about 100,000 acres, on which before the famine there
was a population of 16,000 souls. When the famine
came a fourth part of them perished and another
fourth emigrated. In course of time, thanks to
money sent by relatives from America and advances
made by Lord Lansdowne, the emigration continued
with such rapidity that only 2000 souls were left on
the estate. The famine taught the people how to
emigrate, and gave them some idea of the meaning
of over-population. The rural districts of Ireland
are probably over-peopled now; but there seems
reason to believe that a body of tenants, who are
little short of peasant proprietors in security of
tenure, and who have been forced into a knowledge
of the world outside Ireland, will not retain the
habits of the old occupiers.[453] Without a change of
habits, peasant proprietorships would have done little
for France, and will do little for Ireland.
This would certainly have been the judgment of
Malthus on things as they are now in Ireland,
after Catholic Emancipation, Disestablishment, and
the Land Act. In his own time he was wise enough
to see that the first could not be delayed without
injustice and danger. The rapid increase of the
Catholic population would soon, he foresaw in 1808,[454]
bring the question of Emancipation within the range
of “practical politics,” and if the measure had been
206passed, as he urged, in 1808, instead of twenty years
later, the labour of conciliating Ireland might have
proved easier, and the political change might have
helped to produce that change in the habits of the
people which Malthus deemed essential to its permanent
prosperity.
