CHAPTER IV

MALTHUS

I. MALTHUS'S STARTING-POINT

The political movement represented the confluence of many different

streams of agitation. Enormous social changes had generated

multifarious discontent. New wants and the new strains and stresses

between the various parts of the political mechanism required new

adaptations. But, if it were inquired what was the precise nature of

the evils, and how the reform of parliament was to operate, the most

various answers might be given. A most important line of division did

not coincide with the line between the recognised parties. One wing of

the Radicals agreed with many Conservatives in attributing the great

evils of the day to the industrial movement and the growth of

competition. The middle-class Whigs and the Utilitarians were, on the

contrary, in thorough sympathy with the industrial movement, and

desired to limit the functions of government, and trust to self-help

and free competition. The Socialistic movement appeared for the

present to be confined to a few dreamers and demagogues. The

Utilitarians might approve the spirit of the Owenites, but held their

schemes to be chimerical. Beneath the political controversies there

was therefore a set of problems to be answered; and the Utilitarian

answer defines their distinction from Radicals of a different and, as

they would have said, unphilosophical school.

What, then, was the view really taken by the Utilitarians of these

underlying problems? They not only had a very definite theory in

regard to them, but in working it out achieved perhaps their most

important contribution to speculation. Beneath a political theory

lies, or ought to lie, what we now call a 'sociology'--a theory of

that structure of society which really determines the character and

the working of political institutions. The Utilitarian theory was

embodied in their political economy. I must try to define as well as I

can what were the essential first principles implied, without going

into the special problems which would be relevant in a history of

political economy.

The two leading names in the literature of political economy during

the first quarter of this century were undoubtedly Malthus and

Ricardo. Thomas Robert Malthus[203] (1766-1834) was not one of the

Utilitarian band. As a clergyman, he could not share their opinion of

the Thirty-nine Articles. Moreover, he was a Whig, not a Radical; and

he was even tainted with some economic heresy. Still, he became one of

the prophets, if not the leading prophet, of the Utilitarians. Belief

in the Malthusian theory of population was the most essential article

of their faith, and marked the line of cleavage between the two wings

of the Radical party.

Malthus was the son of a country gentleman in Surrey. His father was

a man of studious habits, and one of the enthusiastic admirers of

Rousseau. His study of _Emile_ probably led to the rather desultory

education of his son. The boy, after being taught at home, was for a

time a pupil of R. Graves (1715-1804), author of the _Spiritual

Quixote_, a Whig clergyman who was at least orthodox enough to

ridicule Methodism. Malthus was next sent to attend Gilbert

Wakefield's lectures at the Warrington 'Academy,' the Unitarian place

of education, and in 1784 went to Jesus College, Cambridge, of which

Wakefield had been a fellow. For Wakefield, who had become a

Unitarian, and who was afterwards a martyr to political Radicalism, he

appears to have retained a strong respect. At Jesus, again, Malthus

was under Frend, who also was to join the Unitarians. Malthus was thus

brought up under the influences of the modified rationalism which was

represented by the Unitarians outside the establishment and by Paley

within. Coleridge was at Jesus while Malthus was still a fellow, and

there became an ardent admirer of Priestley, Malthus remained within

the borders of the church. Its yoke was light enough, and he was

essentially predisposed to moderate views. He took his degree as ninth

wrangler in 1788, became a fellow of his college in 1793, took orders,

and in 1798 was curate of Albury, near his father's house in Surrey.

Malthus's home was within a walk of Farnham, where Cobbett had been

born and passed his childhood. He had, therefore, before his eyes the

same agricultural labourer whose degradation excited Cobbett to

Radicalism. Very different views were suggested to Malthus. The

revolutionary doctrine was represented in England by the writings of

Godwin, whose _Political Justice_ appeared in 1793 and _Enquirer_ in

1797. These books naturally afforded topics for discussion between

Malthus and his father. The usual relations between senior and junior

were inverted; the elder Malthus, as became a follower of Rousseau,

was an enthusiast; and the younger took the part of suggesting doubts

and difficulties. He resolved to put down his arguments upon paper, in

order to clear his mind; and the result was the _Essay upon

Population_, of which the first edition appeared anonymously in 1798.

The argument upon which Malthus relied was already prepared for him.

The dreams of the revolutionary enthusiasts supposed either a neglect

of the actual conditions of human life or a belief that those

conditions could be radically altered by the proposed political

changes. The cooler reasoner was entitled to remind them that they

were living upon solid earth, not in dreamland. The difficulty of

realising Utopia may be presented in various ways. Malthus took a

point which had been noticed by Godwin. In the conclusion of his

_Political Justice_,[204] while taking a final glance at the coming

millennium, Godwin refers to a difficulty suggested by Robert Wallace.

Wallace had[205] said that all the evils under which mankind suffers

might be removed by a community of property, were it not that such a

state of things would lead to an 'excessive population.' Godwin makes

light of the difficulty. He thinks that there is some 'principle in

human society by means of which everything tends to find its own level

and proceed in the most auspicious way, when least interfered with by

the mode of regulation.' Anyhow, there is plenty of room on the earth,

at present. Population may increase for 'myriads of centuries.' Mind,

as Franklin has said, may become 'omnipotent over matter';[206] life

may be indefinitely prolonged; our remote descendants who have filled

the earth 'will probably cease to propagate';[207] they will not have

the trouble of making a fresh start at every generation; and in those

days there will be 'no war, no crimes, no administration of justice';

and moreover, 'no disease, anguish, melancholy, or resentment.'

Briefly, we shall be like the angels, only without the needless

addition of a supreme ruler. Similar ideas were expressed in

Condorcet's famous _Tableau historique des progres de l'esprit

humain_,[208] written while he was in daily fear of death by the

guillotine, and so giving the most striking instance on record of the

invincibility of an idealist conviction under the hardest pressure of

facts.

The argument of Malthus is a product of the whole previous course of

speculation. The question of population had occupied the French

economists. The profound social evils of France gave the

starting-point of their speculations; and one of the gravest symptoms

had been the decay of population under the last years of Louis XIV.

Their great aim was to meet this evil by encouraging agriculture. It

could not escape the notice of the simplest observer that if you would

have more mouths you must provide more food, unless, as some pious

people assumed, that task might be left to Providence. Quesnay had

laid it down as one of his axioms that the statesman should aim at

providing sustenance before aiming simply at stimulating population.

It follows, according to Gulliver's famous maxim, that the man who

makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before deserves better

of his country than the 'whole race of politicians put together.'

Other writers, in developing this thesis, had dwelt upon the

elasticity of population. The elder Mirabeau, for example, published

his _Ami des hommes ou traite de la population_ in 1756. He observes

that, given the means of subsistence, men will multiply like rats in a

barn.[209] The great axiom, he says,[210] is 'la mesure de la

subsistance est celle de la population.' Cultivate your fields, and

you will raise men. Mirabeau replies to Hume's essay upon the

'Populousness of ancient nations' (1752), of which Wallace's first

treatise was a criticism. The problem discussed by Hume and Wallace

had been comparatively academical; but by Malthus's time the question

had taken a more practical shape. The sentimentalists denounced luxury

as leading to a decay of the population. Their prevailing doctrine is

embodied in Goldsmith's famous passage in the _Deserted Village_

(1770):

'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates and men decay.'

The poetical version only reflected the serious belief of Radical

politicians. Although, as we are now aware, the population was in fact

increasing rapidly, the belief prevailed among political writers that

it was actually declining. Trustworthy statistics did not exist. In

1753 John Potter, son of the archbishop, proposed to the House of

Commons a plan for a census. A violent discussion arose,[211] in the

course of which it was pointed out that the plan would inevitably lead

to the adoption of the 'canvas frock and wooden shoes.' Englishmen

would lose their liberty, become French slaves, and, when counted,

would no doubt be taxed and forcibly enlisted. The bill passed the

House of Commons in spite of such reasoning, but was thrown out by the

House of Lords. Till the first census was taken in 1801--a period at

which the absolute necessity of such knowledge had become obvious--the

most elementary facts remained uncertain. Was population increasing or

decreasing? That surely might be ascertainable.

Richard Price (1723-1791) was not only a distinguished moralist and a

leading politician, but perhaps the best known writer of his time upon

statistical questions. He had the credit of suggesting Pitt's sinking

fund,[212] and spoke with the highest authority upon facts and

figures. Price argued in 1780[213] that the population of England had

diminished by one-fourth since the revolution of 1688. A sharp

controversy followed upon the few ascertainable data. The vagueness of

the results shows curiously how much economists had to argue in the

dark. Malthus observes in his first edition that he had been

convinced by reading Price that population was restrained by 'vice and

misery,' as results, not of political institutions, but of 'our own

creation.'[214] This gives the essential point of difference. Mirabeau

had declared that the population of all Europe was decaying. Hume's

essay, which he criticises, had been in answer to a similar statement

of Montesquieu. Price had learned that other countries were increasing

in number, though England, he held, was still declining. What, then,

was the cause? The cause, replied both Price and Mirabeau, was

'luxury,' to which Price adds the specially English evils of the

'engrossment of farms' and the enclosure of open fields. Price had to

admit that the English towns had increased; but this was an additional

evil. The towns increased simply by draining the country; and in the

towns themselves the deaths exceeded the births. The great cities were

the graves of mankind. This opinion was strongly held, too, by Arthur

Young, who ridiculed the general fear of depopulation, and declared

that if money were provided, you could always get labour, but who

looked upon the towns as destructive cancers in the body politic.

The prevalence of this view explains Malthus's position. To attribute

depopulation to luxury was to say that it was caused by the inequality

of property. The rich man wasted the substance of the country, became

demoralised himself, and both corrupted and plundered his neighbours.

The return to a 'state of nature,' in Rousseau's phrase, meant the

return to a state of things in which this misappropriation should

become impossible. The whole industry of the nation would then be

devoted to supporting millions of honest, simple peasants and

labourers, whereas it now went to increasing the splendour of the

great at the expense of the poor. Price enlarges upon this theme,

which was, in fact, the contemporary version of the later formula that

the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer. The immediate effect

of equalising property, then, would be an increase of population. It

was the natural retort, adopted by Malthus, that such an increase

would soon make everybody poor, instead of making every one

comfortable. Population, the French economists had said, follows

subsistence. Will it not multiply indefinitely? The rapid growth of

population in America was noticed by Price and Godwin; and the theory

had been long before expanded by Franklin, in a paper which Malthus

quotes in his later editions. 'There is no bound,' said Franklin in

1751,[215] 'to the prolific nature of plants and animals but what is

made by their crowding and interfering with each other's means of

subsistence.' The whole earth, he infers, might be overspread with

fennel, for example, or, if empty of men, replenished in a few ages

with Englishmen. There were supposed to be already one million of

Englishmen in North America. If they doubled once in twenty-five

years, they would in a century exceed the number of Englishmen at

home. This is identical with Mirabeau's principle of the multiplying

of rats in a barn. Population treads closely on the heels of

subsistence. Work out your figures and see the results.[216]

Malthus's essay in the first edition was mainly an application of

this retort, and though the logic was effective as against Godwin, he

made no elaborate appeal to facts. Malthus soon came to see that a

more precise application was desirable. It was clearly desirable to

know whether population was or was not actually increasing, and under

what conditions. I have spoken of the contemporary labours of

Sinclair, Young, Sir F. Eden, and others. To collect statistics was

plainly one of the essential conditions of settling the controversy.

Malthus in 1799 travelled on the continent to gather information, and

visited Sweden, Norway, Russia, and Germany. The peace of Amiens

enabled him in 1802 to visit France and Switzerland. He inquired

everywhere into the condition of the people, collected such

statistical knowledge as was then possible, and returned to digest it

into a elaborate treatise. Meanwhile, the condition of England was

giving a fresh significance to the argument. The first edition had

been published at the critical time when the poor-law was being

relaxed, and disastrous results were following war and famine. The old

complaint that the poor-law was causing depopulation was being changed

for the complaint that it was stimulating pauperism. The first edition

already discussed this subject, which was occupying all serious

thinkers; it was now to receive a fuller treatment. The second

edition, greatly altered, appeared in 1803, and made Malthus a man of

authority. His merits were recognised by his appointment in 1805 to

the professorship of history and political economy at the newly

founded East India College at Haileybury. There he remained till the

end of his life, which was placid, uneventful, and happy. He made a

happy marriage in 1804; and his calm temperament enabled him to bear

an amount of abuse which might have broken the health of a more

irritable man. Cobbett's epithet, 'parson Malthus,' strikes the

keynote. He was pictured as a Christian priest denouncing charity, and

proclaiming the necessity of vice and misery. He had the ill luck to

be the centre upon which the antipathies of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin

converged. Cobbett's language was rougher than Southey's; but the

poet-laureate and the author of 'two-penny trash' were equally

vehement in sentiment. Malthus, on the other hand, was accepted by the

political economists, both Whig and Utilitarian. Horner and

Mackintosh, lights of the Whigs, were his warm friends as well as his

disciples. He became intimate with Ricardo, and he was one of the

original members of the Political Economy Club. He took abuse

imperturbably; was never vexed 'after the first fortnight' by the most

unfair attack; and went on developing his theories, lecturing his

students, and improving later editions of his treatise. Malthus died

on 23rd December 1834.

II. THE RATIOS

The doctrine marks a critical point in political economy. Malthus's

opponents, as Mr. Bonar remarks,[217] attacked him alternately for

propounding a truism and for maintaining a paradox. A 'truism' is not

useless so long as its truth is not admitted. It would be the greatest

of achievements to enunciate a law self-evident as soon as formulated,

and yet previously ignored or denied. Was this the case of Malthus? Or

did he really startle the world by clothing a commonplace in paradox,

and then explain away the paradox till nothing but the commonplace was

left?

Malthus laid down in his first edition a proposition which continued

to be worried by all his assailants. Population, he said, when

unchecked, increases in the geometrical ratio; the means of

subsistence increase only in an arithmetical ratio. Geometrical ratios

were just then in fashion.[218] Price had appealed to their wonderful

ways in his arguments about the sinking fund; and had pointed out that

a penny put out to 5 per cent. compound interest at the birth of

Christ would, in the days of Pitt, have been worth some millions of

globes of solid gold, each as big as the earth. Both Price and Malthus

lay down a proposition which can easily be verified by the

multiplication-table. If, as Malthus said, population doubles in

twenty-five years, the number in two centuries would be to the present

number as 256 to 1, and in three as 4096 to 1. If, meanwhile, the

quantity of subsistence increased in 'arithmetical progression,' the

multipliers for it would be only 9 and 13. It follows that, in the

year 2003, two hundred and fifty-six persons will have to live upon

what now supports nine. So far, the case is clear. But how does the

argument apply to facts? For obvious reasons, Price's penny could not

become even one solid planet of gold. Malthus's population is also

clearly impossible. That is just his case. The population of British

North America was actually, when he wrote, multiplying at the assigned

rate. What he pointed out was that such a rate must somehow be

stopped; and his question was, how precisely will it be stopped? The

first proposition, he says[219] (that is, that population increased

geometrically), 'I considered as proved the moment that the American

increase was related; and the second as soon as enunciated.' To say

that a population increases geometrically, in fact, is simply to say

that it increases at a fixed rate. The arithmetical increase

corresponds to a statement which Malthus, at any rate, might regard as

undeniable; namely, that in a country already fully occupied, the

possibility of increasing produce is restricted within much narrower

limits. In a 'new country,' as in the American colonies, the increase

of food might proceed as rapidly as the increase of population.

Improved methods of cultivation, or the virtual addition of vast

tracts of fertile territory by improved means of communication, may of

course add indefinitely to the resources of a population. But Malthus

was contemplating a state of things in which the actual conditions

limited the people to an extraction of greater supplies from a

strictly limited area. Whether Malthus assumed too easily that this

represented the normal case may be questionable. At any rate, it was

not only possible but actual in the England of the time. His problem

was very much to the purpose. His aim was to trace the way in which

the population of a limited region is prevented from increasing

geometrically. If the descendants of Englishmen increase at a certain

rate in America, why do they not increase equally in England? That, it

must be admitted, is a fair scientific problem. Finding that two races

of similar origin, and presumably like qualities, increase at

different rates, we have to investigate the causes of the difference.

Malthus answered the problem in the simplest and most consistent way

in his first edition. What are the checks? The ultimate check would

clearly be starvation. A population might multiply till it had not

food. But before this limit is actually reached, it will suffer in

various ways from scarcity. Briefly, the checks may be distinguished

into the positive, that is, actual distress, and the preventive, or

'foresight.' We shall actually suffer unless we are restrained by the

anticipation of suffering. As a fact, however, he thinks that men are

but little influenced by the prudence which foresees sufferings. They

go on multiplying till the consequences are realised. You may be

confined in a room, to use one of his illustrations,[220] though the

walls do not touch you; but human beings are seldom satisfied till

they have actually knocked their heads against the wall. He sums up

his argument in the first edition in three propositions.[221]

Population is limited by the means of subsistence; that is obvious;

population invariably increases when the means of subsistence are

increased; that is shown by experience to be practically true; and

therefore, finally, the proportion is maintained by 'misery and

vice.' That is the main conclusion which not unnaturally startled the

world. Malthus always adhered in some sense to the main doctrine,

though he stated explicitly some reserves already implicitly involved.

A writer must not be surprised if popular readers remember the

unguarded and dogmatic utterances which give piquancy to a theory, and

overlook the latent qualifications which, when fully expressed, make

it approximate to a commonplace. The political bearing of his

reasoning is significant. The application of Godwin's theories of

equality would necessarily, as he urges, stimulate an excessive

population. To meet the consequent evils, two measures would be

obviously necessary; private property must be instituted in order to

stimulate prudence; and marriage must be instituted to make men

responsible for the increase of the population. These institutions are

necessary, and they make equality impossible. Weak, then, as foresight

may be with most men, the essential social institutions have been

developed by the necessity of enabling foresight to exercise some

influence; and thus indirectly societies have in fact grown in wealth

and numbers through arrangements which have by one and the same action

strengthened prudence and created inequality. Although this is clearly

implied, the main impression produced upon Malthus's readers was that

he held 'vice and misery' to be essential to society; nay, that in

some sense he regarded them as blessings. He was accused, as he tells

us,[222] of objecting to vaccination, because it tended to prevent

deaths from small-pox, and has to protest against some one who had

declared his principles to be favourable to the slave trade.[223] He

was represented, that is, as holding depopulation to be good in

itself. These perversions were grotesque, but partly explain the

horror with which Malthus was constantly regarded; and we must

consider what made them plausible.

I must first notice the maturer form of his doctrine. In the second

edition he turns to account the result of his later reading, his

personal observations, and the statistical results which were

beginning to accumulate. The remodelled book opens with a survey of

the observed action of the checks; and it concludes with a discussion

of the 'moral restraint' which is now added to 'vice and misery.'

Although considerable fragments of the old treatise remained to the

last, the whole book was altered both in style and character. The

style certainly suffers, for Malthus was not a master of the literary

art; he inserts his additions with little care for the general effect.

He tones down some of the more vivid phrases which had given offence,

though he does not retract the substance. A famous passage[224] in the

second edition, in which he speaks of 'nature's mighty feast,' where,

unluckily, the 'table is already full,' and therefore unbidden guests

are left to starve, was suppressed in the later editions. Yet the

principle that no man has a claim to subsistence as of right remains

unaltered. The omission injures the literary effect without altering

the logic; and I think that, where the argument is amended, the new

element is scarcely worked into the old so as to gain thorough

consistency.

Malthus's survey of different countries showed how various are the

'checks' by which population is limited in various countries. We take

a glance at all nations through all epochs of history. In the South

Sea we find a delicious climate and a fertile soil, where population

is mainly limited by vice, infanticide, and war; and where, in spite

of these influences, the population multiplies at intervals till it is

killed off by famine. In China, a vast and fertile territory,

inhabited by an industrious race, in which agriculture has always been

encouraged, marriage stimulated, and property widely diffused, has

facilitated the production of a vast population in the most abject

state of poverty, driven to expose children by want, and liable at

intervals to destructive famines. In modern Europe, the checks appear

in the most various forms; in Switzerland and Norway a frugal

population in small villages sometimes instinctively understands the

principle of population, and exhibits the 'moral restraint,' while in

England the poor-laws are producing a mass of hopeless and inert

pauperism. Consideration of these various cases, and a comparison of

such records as are obtainable of the old savage races, of the

classical states of antiquity, of the Northern barbarians and of the

modern European nations, suggests a natural doubt. Malthus abundantly

proves what can hardly be denied, that population has everywhere been

found to press upon the means of subsistence, and that vice and misery

are painfully abundant. But does he establish or abandon his main

proposition? He now asserts the 'tendency' of population to outrun the

means of subsistence. Yet he holds unequivocally that the increase of

population has been accompanied by an increased comfort; that want has

diminished although population has increased; and that the

'preventive' check is stronger than of old in proportion to the

positive check. Scotland, he says,[225] is 'still overpeopled, but not

so much as when it contained fewer inhabitants.' Many nations, as he

points out in general terms, have been most prosperous when most

populous.[226] They could export food when crowded, and have ceased to

import it when thinned. This, indeed, expresses his permanent views,

though the facts were often alleged by his critics as a disproof of

them. Was not the disproof real? Does not a real evasion lurk under

the phrase 'tendency'? You may say that the earth has a tendency to

fall into the sun, and another 'tendency' to move away from the sun.

But it would be absurd to argue that we were therefore in danger of

being burnt or of being frozen. To explain the law of a vital process,

we may have to analyse it, and therefore to regard it as due to

conflicting forces; but the forces do not really exist separately, and

in considering the whole concrete phenomenon we must take them as

mutually implied. A man has a 'tendency' to grow too fat; and another

'tendency' to grow too thin. That surely means that on the whole he

has a 'tendency' to preserve the desirable mean. The phrase, then, can

only have a distinct meaning when the conflicting forces represent two

independent or really separable forces. To use an illustration given

by Malthus, we might say that a man had a 'tendency' to grow upwards;

but was restrained by a weight on his head. The man has the

'tendency,' because we may regard the weight as a separable accident.

When both forces are of the essence, the separate 'tendencies'

correspond merely to our way of analysing the fact. But if one can be

properly regarded as relatively accidental, the 'tendency' means the

way in which the other will manifest itself in actual cases.

In 1829, Senior put this point to Malthus.[227] What, he asked, do you

understand by a 'tendency' when you admit that the tendency is

normally overbalanced by others? Malthus explains his meaning to be

that every nation suffers from evils 'specifically arising from the

pressure of population against food.' The wages of the labourer in old

countries have never been sufficient to enable him to maintain a large

family at ease. There is overcrowding, we may say, in England now as

there was in England at the Conquest; though food has increased in a

greater proportion than population; and the pressure has therefore

taken a milder form. This, again, is proved by the fact that, whenever

a relaxation of the pressure has occurred, when plagues have

diminished population, or improvements in agriculture increased their

supply of food, the gap has been at once filled up. The people have

not taken advantage of the temporary relaxation of the check to

preserve the new equilibrium, but have taken out the improvement by a

multiplication of numbers. The statement then appears to be that at

any given time the population is in excess. Men would be better off if

they were less numerous. But, on the other hand, the tendency to

multiply does not represent a constant force, an irresistible instinct

which will always bring men down to the same level, but something

which, in fact, may vary materially. Malthus admits, in fact, that

the 'elasticity' is continually changing; and therefore repudiates the

interpretation which seemed to make all improvement hopeless. Why,

then, distinguish the 'check' as something apart from the instinct?

If, in any case, we accept this explanation, does not the theory

become a 'truism,' or at least a commonplace, inoffensive but hardly

instructive? Does it amount to more than the obvious statement that

prudence and foresight are desirable and are unfortunately scarce?

III. MORAL RESTRAINT

The change in the theory of 'checks' raises another important

question. Malthus now introduced a modification upon which his

supporters laid great stress. In the new version the 'checks' which

proportion population to means of subsistence are not simply 'vice and

misery,' but 'moral restraint, vice, and misery.'[228] How, precisely,

does this modify the theory? How are the different 'checks' related?

What especially is meant by 'moral' in this connection? Malthus takes

his ethical philosophy pretty much for granted, but is clearly a

Utilitarian according to the version of Paley.[229] He agrees with

Paley that 'virtue evidently consists in educing from the materials

which the Creator has placed under our guidance the greatest sum of

human happiness.'[230] He adds to this that our 'natural impulses are,

abstractedly considered, good, and only to be distinguished by their

consequences.' Hunger, he says, as Bentham had said, is the same in

itself, whether it leads to stealing a loaf or to eating your own

loaf. He agrees with Godwin that morality means the 'calculation of

consequences,'[231] or, as he says with Paley, implies the discovery

of the will of God by observing the effect of actions upon happiness.

Reason then regulates certain innate and practically unalterable

instincts by enabling us to foretell their consequences. The

reasonable man is influenced not simply by the immediate

gratification, but by a forecast of all the results which it will

entail. In these matters Malthus was entirely at one with the

Utilitarians proper, and seems to regard their doctrine as

self-evident.

He notices briefly one logical difficulty thus introduced. The

'checks' are vice, misery, and moral restraint. But why distinguish

vice from misery? Is not conduct vicious which causes misery,[232] and

precisely because it causes misery? He replies that to omit 'vice'

would confuse our language. Vicious conduct may cause happiness in

particular cases; though its general tendency would be pernicious. The

answer is not very clear; and Malthus, I think, would have been more

logical if he had stuck to his first theory, and regarded vice as

simply one form of imprudence. Misery, that is, or the fear of misery,

and the indulgence in conduct which produces misery are the 'checks'

which limit population; and the whole problem is to make the ultimate

sanction more operative upon the immediate conduct. Man becomes more

virtuous simply as he becomes more prudent, and is therefore governed

in his conduct by recognising the wider and more remote series of

consequences. There is, indeed, the essential difference that the

virtuous man acts (on whatever motives) from a regard to the 'greatest

happiness of the greatest number,' and not simply from self-regard.

Still the ultimate and decisive criterion is the tendency of conduct

to produce misery; and if Malthus had carried this through as

rigorously as Bentham, he would have been more consistent. The 'moral

check' would then have been simply a department of the prudential;

including prudence for others as well as for ourselves. One reason for

the change is obvious. His assumption enables him to avoid coming into

conflict with the accepted morality of the time. On his exposition

'vice' occasionally seems not to be productive of misery but an

alternative to misery; and yet something bad in itself. Is this

consistent with his Utilitarianism? The vices of the South Sea

Islanders, according to him, made famine less necessary; and, if they

gave pleasure at the moment, were they not on the whole beneficial?

Malthus again reckons among vices practices which limit the population

without causing 'misery' directly.[233] Could he logically call them

vicious? He wishes to avoid the imputation of sanctioning such

practices, and therefore condemns them by his moral check; but it

would be hard to prove that he was consistent in condemning them. Or,

again, there is another familiar difficulty. The Catholic church

encourages marriage as a remedy for vice; and thereby stimulates both

population and poverty. How would Malthus solve the problem: is it

better to encourage chastity and a superabundance of people, or to

restrict marriage at the cost of increasing temptation to vice? He

seems to evade the point by saying that he recommends both chastity

and abstinence from marriage. By 'moral restraint,' as he explains, he

means 'restraint from marriage from prudential motives, with a conduct

strictly moral during the period of this restraint.' 'I have never,'

he adds, 'intentionally deviated from this sense.'[234] A man, that

is, should postpone taking a wife, and should not console himself by

taking a mistress. He is to refrain from increasing the illegitimate

as well as from increasing the legitimate population. It is not

surprising that Malthus admits that this check has 'in past ages

operated with inconsiderable force.'[235] In fact Malthus, as a

thoroughly respectable and decent clergyman, manages by talking about

the 'moral restraint' rather to evade than to answer some awkward

problems of conduct; but at the cost of some inconsequence.

But another result of this mode of patching up his argument is more

important. The 'vices of mankind,' he says in an unusually rhetorical

summary of his historical inquiry,[236] 'are active and able ministers

of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of

destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should

they fail in the war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics,

pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their

thousands and ten thousands. Should success still be incomplete,

gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and at one mighty blow

levels the population with the food of the world.' The life of the

race, then, is a struggle with misery; its expansion is constantly

forcing it upon this array of evils; and in proportion to the

elasticity is the severity of the evils which follow. This is not only

a 'gloomy view,' but again seems to suggest that 'vice' is an

alternative to 'misery.' Vices are bad, it would seem, but at least

they obviate the necessity for disease and famine. Malthus probably

suppressed the passage because he thought it liable to this

interpretation. It indicates, however, a real awkwardness, if not

something more, in his exposition. He here speaks as if there was room

for a fixed number of guests at his banquet. Whatever, therefore,

keeps the population to that limit must be so far good. If he had

considered his 'moral check' more thoroughly, he might have seen that

this does not correspond to his real meaning. The 'moral' and the

prudential checks are not really to be contrasted as alternative, but

co-operative. Every population, vicious or virtuous, must of course

proportion its numbers to its means of support. That gives the

prudential check. But the moral check operates by altering the

character of the population itself. From the purely economic point of

view, vice is bad because it lowers efficiency. A lazy, drunken, and

profligate people would starve where an industrious, sober, and honest

people would thrive. The check of vice thus brings the check of misery

into play at an earlier stage. It limits by lowering the vitality and

substituting degeneration for progress. The check, therefore, is

essentially mischievous. Though it does not make the fields barren, it

lowers the power of cultivation. Malthus had recognised this when he

pointed out, as we have seen, that emergence from the savage state

meant the institution of marriage and property and, we may infer, the

correlative virtues of chastity, industry, and honesty. If men can

form large societies, and millions can be supported where once a few

thousands were at starvation point, it is due to the civilisation

which at every stage implies 'moral restraint' in a wider sense than

Malthus used the phrase. An increase of population by such means was,

of course, to be desired. If Malthus emphasises this inadequately, it

is partly, no doubt, because the Utilitarian view of morality tended

to emphasise the external consequences rather than the alteration of

the man himself. Yet the wider and sounder view is logically implied

in his reasoning--so much so that he might have expressed his real aim

more clearly if he had altered the order of his argument. He might

have consistently taken the same line as earlier writers and declared

that he desired, above all things, the increase of population. He

would have had indeed to explain that he desired the increase of a

sound and virtuous population; and that hasty and imprudent increase

led to misery and to a demoralisation which would ultimately limit

numbers in the worst way. We shall see directly how nearly he accepts

this view. Meanwhile, by insisting upon the need of limitation, he was

led to speak often as if limitation by any means was good and the one

thing needful, and the polemic against Godwin in the first edition had

given prominence to this side of the question. Had he put his views in

a different shape, he would perhaps have been so edifying that he

would have been disregarded. He certainly avoided that risk, and had

whatever advantage is gained by stating sound doctrine paradoxically.

We shall, I think, appreciate his real position better by considering

his approximation to the theory which, as we know, was suggested to

Darwin by a perusal of Malthus.[237] There is a closer resemblance

than appears at first. The first edition concludes by two chapters

afterwards omitted, giving the philosophical application of his

theory. He there says that the 'world is a mighty process of God not

for the trial but for the creation and formation of the mind.'[238] It

is not, as Butler thought, a place of 'probation,' but a scene in

which the higher qualities are gradually developed. Godwin had quoted

Franklin's view that 'mind' would become 'omnipotent over matter.'

Malthus holds that, as he puts it, 'God is making matter into mind.'

The difference is that Malthus regards evil in general not as a sort

of accident of which we can get rid by reason; but as the essential

stimulus which becomes the efficient cause of intellectual activity.

The evils from which men suffer raise savage tribes from their

indolence, and by degrees give rise to the growth of civilisation. The

argument, though these chapters were dropped by Malthus, was taken up

by J. B. Sumner, to whom he refers in later editions.[239] It is, in

fact, an imperfect way of stating a theory of evolution. This appears

in his opening chapters upon the 'moral restraint.'[240] He explains

that moral and physical evils are 'instruments employed by the Deity'

to admonish us against such conduct as is destructive of happiness.

Diseases are indications that we have broken a law of nature. The

plague of London was properly interpreted by our ancestors as a hint

to improve the sanitary conditions of the town. Similarly, we have to

consider the consequences of obeying our instincts. The desire of food

and necessaries is the most powerful of these instincts, and next to

it the passion between the sexes. They are both good, for they are

both natural; but they have to be properly correlated. To 'virtuous

love' in particular we owe the 'sunny spots' in our lives, where the

imagination loves to bask. Desire of necessaries gives us the stimulus

of the comfortable fireside; and love adds the wife and children,

without whom the fireside would lose half its charm. Now, as a rule,

the sexual passion is apt to be in excess. The final cause of this

excess is itself obvious. We cannot but conceive that it is an object

of 'the Creator that the earth should be replenished.'[241] To secure

that object, it is necessary that 'there should be a tendency in the

population to increase faster than food.' If the two instincts were

differently balanced, men would be content though the population of a

fertile region were limited to the most trifling numbers. Hence the

instinct has mercifully been made so powerful as to stimulate

population, and thus indirectly and eventually to produce a population

at once larger and more comfortable. On the one hand, it is of the

very utmost importance to the happiness of mankind that they should

not increase too fast,[242] but, on the other hand, if the passion

were weakened, the motives which make a man industrious and capable of

progress would be diminished also. It would, of course, be simpler to

omit the 'teleology'; to say that sanitary regulations are made

necessary by the plague, not that the plague is divinely appointed to

encourage sanitary regulations. Malthus is at the point of view of

Paley which becomes Darwinism when inverted; but the conclusion is

much the same. He reaches elsewhere, in fact, a more precise view of

the value of the 'moral restraint.' In a chapter devoted for once to

an ideal state of things,[243] he shows how a race thoroughly imbued

with that doctrine would reconcile the demands of the two instincts.

Population would in that case increase, but, instead of beginning by

an increase, it would begin by providing the means of supporting. No

man would become a father until he had seen his way to provide for a

family. The instinct which leads to increasing the population would

thus be intrinsically as powerful as it now is; but when regulated by

prudence it would impel mankind to begin at the right end. Food would

be ready before mouths to eat it.

IV. SOCIAL REMEDIES

This final solution appears in Malthus's proposed remedies for the

evils of the time. Malthus[244] declares that 'an increase of

population when it follows in its natural order is both a great

positive good in itself, and absolutely necessary' to an increase of

wealth. This natural order falls in, as he observes, with the view to

which Mirabeau had been converted, that 'revenue was the source of

population,' and not population of revenue.[245] Malthus holds

specifically that, 'in the course of some centuries,' the population

of England might be doubled or trebled, and yet every man be 'much

better fed and clothed than he is at present.'[246] He parts company

with Paley, who had considered the ideal state to be 'that of a

laborious frugal people ministering to the demands of an opulent

luxurious nation.'[247] That, says Malthus, is 'not an inviting

prospect.' Nothing but a conviction of absolute necessity could

reconcile us to the 'thought of ten millions of people condemned to

incessant toil, and to the privation of everything but absolute

necessaries, in order to minister to the excessive luxuries of the

other million.' But he denies that any such necessity exists. He

wishes precisely to see luxury spread among the poorer classes. A

desire for such luxury is the best of all checks to population, and

one of the best means of raising the standard. It would, in fact,

contribute to his 'moral restraint.' So, too, he heartily condemns

the hypocrisy of the rich, who professed a benevolent desire to

better the poor, and yet complained of high wages.[248] If, he says

elsewhere,[249] a country can 'only be rich by running a successful

race for low wages, I should be disposed to say, Perish such riches!'

No one, in fact, could see more distinctly than Malthus the

demoralising influence of poverty, and the surpassing importance of

raising the people from the terrible gulf of pauperism. He refers to

Colquhoun's account of the twenty thousand people who rose every

morning in London without knowing how they were to be supported; and

observes that 'when indigence does not produce overt acts of vice, it

palsies every virtue.'[250] The temptations to which the poor man is

exposed, and the sense of injustice due to an ignorance of the true

cause of misery, tend to 'sour the disposition, to harden the heart,

and deaden the moral sense.' Unfortunately, the means which have been

adopted to lessen the evil have tended to increase it. In the first

place, there was the master-evil of the poor-laws. Malthus points out

the demoralising effects of these laws in chapters full of admirable

common sense, which he was unfortunately able to enforce by fresh

illustrations in successive editions. He attends simply to the

stimulus to population. He thinks that if the laws had never existed,

the poor would now have been much better off.[251] If the laws had

been fully carried out, every labourer might have been certain that

all his children would be supported, or, in other words, every check

to population would have been removed.[252] Happily, the becoming

pride of the English peasantry was not quite extinct; and the poor-law

had to some extent counteracted itself, or taken away with one hand

what it gave with the other, by placing the burthen upon the

parishes.[253] Thus landlords have been more disposed to pull down

than to build cottages, and marriage has been checked. On the whole,

however, Malthus could see in the poor-laws nothing but a vast agency

for demoralising the poor, tempered by a system of petty tyrannical

interference. He proposes, therefore, that the poor-law should be

abolished. Notice should be given that no children born after a

certain day should be entitled to parish help; and, as he quaintly

suggests, the clergyman might explain to every couple, after

publishing the banns, the immorality of reckless marriage, and the

reasons for abolishing a system which had been proved to frustrate the

intentions of the founders.[254] Private charity, he thinks, would

meet the distress which might afterwards arise, though humanity

imperiously requires that it should be 'sparingly administered.' Upon

this duty he writes a sensible chapter.[255] To his negative proposals

Malthus adds a few of the positive kind. He is strongly in favour of a

national system of education, and speaks with contempt of the

'illiberal and feeble' arguments opposed to it. The schools, he

observes, might confer 'an almost incalculable benefit' upon society,

if they taught 'a few of the simplest principles of political

economy.'[256] He had been disheartened by the prejudices of the

ignorant labourer, and felt the incompatibility of a free government

with such ignorance. A real education, such as was given in Scotland,

would make the poor not, as alarmists had suggested, more inflammable,

but better able to detect the sophistry of demagogues.[257] He is, of

course, in favour of savings banks,[258] and approves friendly

societies, though he is strongly opposed to making them compulsory, as

they would then be the poor-law in a new form.[259] The value of every

improvement turns upon its effect in encouraging the 'moral

restraint.' Malthus's ultimate criterion is always, Will the measure

make people averse to premature marriage? He reaches the apparently

inconsistent result that it might be desirable to make an allowance

for every child beyond six.[260] But this is on the hypothesis that

the 'moral restraint' has come to be so habitual that no man marries

until he has a fair prospect of maintaining a family of six. If this

were the practical code, the allowance in cases where the expectation

was disappointed would not act as an encouragement to marriage, but as

a relief under a burthen which could not have been anticipated. Thus

all Malthus's teaching may be said to converge upon this practical

point. Add to the Ten Commandments the new law, 'Thou shalt not marry

until there is a fair prospect of supporting six children.' Then

population will increase, but sufficient means for subsistence will

always be provided beforehand. We shall make sure that there is a

provision for additional numbers before, not after, we add to our

numbers. Food first and population afterwards gives the rule; thus we

achieve the good end without the incidental evils.

Malthus's views of the appropriate remedy for social evils

undoubtedly show an imperfect appreciation of the great problems

involved. Reckless propagation is an evil; but Malthus regards it as

an evil which can be isolated and suppressed by simply adding a new

article to the moral code. He is dealing with a central problem of

human nature and social order. Any modification of the sexual

instincts or of the constitution of the family involves a profound

modification of the whole social order and of the dominant religious

and moral creeds. Malthus tacitly assumes that conduct is determined

by the play of two instincts, unalterable in themselves, but capable

of modification in their results by a more extensive view of

consequences. To change men's ruling motives in regard to the most

important part of their lives is to alter their whole aims and

conceptions of the world, and of happiness in every other relation. It

supposes, therefore, not a mere addition of knowledge, but a

transformation of character and an altered view of all the theories

which have been embodied in religious and ethical philosophy. He

overlooks, too, considerations which would be essential to a complete

statement. A population which is too prudent may suffer itself to be

crowded out by more prolific races in the general struggle for

existence; and cases may be suggested such as that of the American

colonies, in which an increase of numbers might be actually an

advantage by facilitating a more efficient organisation of labour.

The absence of a distinct appreciation of such difficulties gives to

his speculation that one-sided character which alienated his more

sentimental contemporaries. It was natural enough in a man who was

constantly confronted by the terrible development of pauperism in

England, and was too much tempted to assume that the tendency to

reckless propagation was not only a very grave evil, but the ultimate

source of every evil. The doctrine taken up in this unqualified

fashion by some of his disciples, and preached by them with the utmost

fervour as the one secret of prosperity, shocked both the conservative

and orthodox whose prejudices were trampled upon, and such Radicals as

inherited Godwin's or Condorcet's theory of perfectibility. Harsh and

one-sided as it might be, however, we may still hold that it was of

value, not only in regard to the most pressing difficulty of the day,

but also as calling attention to a vitally important condition of

social welfare. The question, however, recurs whether, when the

doctrine is so qualified as to be admissible, it does not also become

a mere truism.

An answer to this question should begin by recognising one specific

resemblance between his speculations and Darwin's. Facts, which appear

from an older point of view to be proofs of a miraculous

interposition, become with Malthus, as with Darwin, the normal results

of admitted conditions. Godwin had admitted that there was some

'principle which kept population on a level with subsistence.' 'The

sole question is,' says Malthus,[261] 'what is this principle? Is it

some obscure and occult cause? a mysterious interference of heaven,'

inflicting barrenness at certain periods? or 'a cause open to our

researches and within our view?' Other writers had had recourse to the

miraculous. One of Malthus's early authorities was Suessmilch, who had

published his _Goettliche Ordnung_ in 1761, to show how Providence had

taken care that the trees should not grow into the sky. The

antediluvians had been made long-lived in order that they might have

large families and people an empty earth, while life was divinely

shortened as the world filled up. Suessmilch, however, regarded

population as still in need of stimulus. Kings might help Providence.

A new Trajan would deserve to be called the father of his people, if

he increased the marriage-rate. Malthus replies that the statistics

which the worthy man himself produced showed conclusively that the

marriages depended upon the deaths. The births fill up the vacancies,

and the prince who increased the population before vacancies arose

would simply increase the rate of mortality.[262] If you want to

increase your birth-rate without absolutely producing famine, as he

remarks afterwards,[263] make your towns unhealthy, and encourage

settlement by marshes. You might thus double the mortality, and we

might all marry prematurely without being absolutely starved. His own

aim is not to secure the greatest number of births, but to be sure

that the greatest number of those born may be supported.[264] The

ingenious M. Muret, again, had found a Swiss parish in which the mean

life was the highest and the fecundity smallest known. He piously

conjectures that it may be a law of God that 'the force of life in

each country should be in the inverse ratio of its fecundity.' He

needs not betake himself to a miracle, says Malthus.[265] The case is

simply that in a small and healthy village, where people had become

aware of the importance of the 'preventive check,' the young people

put off marriage till there was room for them, and consequently both

lowered the birth-rate and raised the average duration of life.

Nothing, says Malthus very forcibly, has caused more errors than the

confusion between 'relative and positive, and between cause and

effect.'[266] He is here answering the argument that because the poor

who had cows were the most industrious, the way to make them

industrious was to give them cows. Malthus thinks it more probable

that industry got the cow than that the cow produced industry. This is

a trifling instance of a very general truth. People had been content

to notice the deaths caused by war and disease, and to infer at once

that what caused death must diminish population. Malthus shows the

necessity of observing other collateral results. The gap may be made

so great as to diminish population; but it may be compensated by a

more rapid reproduction; or, the rapidity of reproduction may itself

be the cause of the disease; so that to remove one kind of mortality

may be on some occasion to introduce others. The stream is dammed on

one breach to flow more strongly through other outlets.[267]

This is, I conceive, to say simply that Malthus was introducing a

really scientific method. The facts taken in the true order became at

once intelligible instead of suggesting mysterious and irregular

interferences. Earlier writers had been content to single out one

particular set of phenomena without attending to its place in the more

general and complex processes, of which they formed an integral part.

Infanticide, as Hume had pointed out, might tend to increase

population.[268] In prospect, it might encourage people to have

babies; and when babies came, natural affection might prevent the

actual carrying out of the intention. To judge of the actual effect,

we have to consider the whole of the concrete case. It may be carried

out, as apparently in the South Sea Islands, so generally as to limit

population; or it may be, as in China, an indication that the pressure

is so great that a number of infants become superfluous. Its

suppression might, in the one case, lead to an increase of the

population; in the other, to the increase of other forms of mortality.

Malthus's investigations illustrate the necessity of referring every

particular process to its place in the whole system, of noting how any

given change might set up a set of actions and reactions in virtue of

the general elasticity of population, and thus of constantly referring

at every step to the general conditions of human life. He succeeded in

making many points clear, and of showing how hastily many inferences

had been drawn. He explained, for example, why the revolutionary wars

had not diminished the population of France, in spite of the great

number of deaths,[269] and thus gave an example of a sound method of

inquiry which has exercised a great influence upon later observers.

Malthus was constantly misunderstood and misrepresented, and his

opponents often allege as fatal objections to his doctrine the very

facts by which it was really supported. But we may, I think, say, that

since his writing no serious economical writer has adopted the old

hasty guesses, or has ventured to propose a theory without regard to

the principles of which he first brought out the full significance.

V. POLITICAL APPLICATION

This I take to indicate one real and permanent value of Malthus's

writings. He introduced a new method of approaching the great social

problems. The value of the method may remain, however inaccurate may

be the assumptions of facts. The 'tendency,' if interpreted to mean

that people are always multiplying too rapidly, may be a figment. If

it is taken as calling attention to one essential factor in the case,

it is a most important guide to investigation. This brings out another

vital point. The bearing of the doctrine upon the political as well as

upon the economical views of the Utilitarians is of conspicuous

importance. Malthus's starting-point, as we have seen, was the

opposition to the doctrine of 'perfectibility.' Hard facts, which

Godwin and Condorcet had neglected, were fatal to their dreams. You

have, urged Malthus, neglected certain undeniable truths as to the

unalterable qualities of human nature, and, therefore, your theories

will not work. The revolutionists had opposed an ideal 'state of

nature' to the actual arrangements of society. They imagined that the

'state of nature' represented the desirable consummation, and that the

constitution of the 'natural' order could be determined from certain

abstract principles. The equality of man, and the absolute rights

which could be inferred by a kind of mathematical process, supplied

the necessary dogmatic basis. The antithesis to the state of nature

was the artificial state, marked by inequality, and manifesting its

spirit by luxury. Kings, priests, and nobles had somehow established

this unnatural order; and to sweep them away summarily was the way of

bringing the natural order into full activity. The ideal system was

already potentially in existence, and would become actual when men's

minds were once cleared from superstition, and the political made to

correspond to the natural rights of man. To this Malthus had replied,

as we have seen, that social inequality was not a mere arbitrary

product of fraud and force, but an expedient necessary to restrain the

primitive instincts of mankind. He thus coincides with Bentham's

preference of 'security' to 'equality,' and illustrates the real

significance of that doctrine. Property and marriage, though they

involve inequality, were institutions of essential importance. Godwin

had pushed his theories to absolute anarchy; to the destruction of all

law, for law in general represented coercion or an interference with

the state of nature. Malthus virtually asserted that the metaphysical

doctrine was inapplicable because, men being what they are, these

conclusions were incompatible with even the first stages of social

progress. This means, again, that for the metaphysical method Malthus

is substituting a scientific method. Instead of regarding all

government as a kind of mysterious intervention from without, which

has somehow introduced a fatal discord into the natural order, he

inquires what are the facts; how law has been evolved; and for what

reason. His answer is, in brief, that law, order, and inequality have

been absolutely necessary in order to limit tendencies which would

otherwise keep men in a state of hopeless poverty and depression.

This gives the 'differentia' of the Utilitarian considered as one

species of the genus 'Radical.' Malthus's criticism of Paine is

significant.[270] He agrees with Paine that the cause of popular

risings is 'want of happiness.' But Paine, he remarks, was 'in many

important points totally ignorant of the structure of society'; and

has fallen into the error of attributing all want of happiness to

government. Consequently, Paine advocates a plan for distributing

taxes among the poorest classes, which would aggravate the evils a

hundredfold. He fully admits with Paine that man has rights. The true

line of answer would be to show what those rights are. To give this

answer is not Malthus's present business; but there is one right, at

any rate, which a man does not and cannot possess: namely, the 'right

to subsistence when his labour will not fairly purchase it.' He does

not possess it because he cannot possess it; to try to secure it is to

try to 'reverse the laws of nature,' and therefore to produce cruel

suffering by practising an 'inhuman deceit.' The Abbe Raynal had said

that a man had a right to subsist 'before all social laws.' Man had

the same right, replied Malthus, as he had to live a hundred or a

thousand years. He may live, _if he can_ without interfering with

others. Social laws have, in fact, enlarged the power of subsistence;

but neither before nor after their institution could an unlimited

number subsist. Briefly, the question of fact comes before the

question of right, and the fault of the revolutionary theorists was to

settle the right without reference to the possibility of making the

right correspond to the fact.

Hence Malthus draws his most emphatic political moral. The admission

that all evil is due to government is the way to tyranny. Make men

believe that government is the one cause of misery, and they will

inevitably throw the whole responsibility upon their rulers; seek for

redress by cures which aggravate the disease; and strengthen the hands

of those who prefer even despotism to anarchy. This, he intimates, is

the explanation of the repressive measures in which the

country-gentlemen had supported Pitt. The people had fancied that by

destroying government they would make bread cheap; government was

forced to be tyrannical in order to resist revolution; while its

supporters were led to 'give up some of the most valuable privileges

of Englishmen.'[271] It is then of vital importance to settle what is

and what is not to be set down to government. Malthus, in fact, holds

that the real evils are due to underlying causes which cannot be

directly removed, though they may be diminished or increased, by

legislators. Government can do something by giving security to

property, and by making laws which will raise the self-respect of the

lower classes. But the effect of such laws must be slow and gradual;

and the error which has most contributed to that delay in the progress

of freedom, which is 'so disheartening to every liberal mind,'[272] is

the confusion as to the true causes of misery. Thus, as he has already

urged, professed economists could still believe, so long after the

publication of Adam Smith's work, that it was 'in the power of the

justices of the peace or even of the omnipotence of parliament to

alter by a _fiat_ the whole circumstances of the country.'[273] Yet

men who saw the absurdity of trying to fix the price of provisions

were ready to propose to fix the rate of wages. They did not see that

one term of the proportion implied the other. Malthus's whole

criticism of the poor-law, already noticed, is a commentary upon this

text. It is connected with a general theory of human nature. The

author of nature, he says, has wisely made 'the passion of self-love

beyond expression stronger than the passion of benevolence.'[274] He

means, as he explains, that every man has to pursue his own welfare

and that of his family as his primary object. Benevolence, of course,

is the 'source of our purest and most refined pleasures,' and so

forth; but it should come in as a supplement to self-love. Therefore

we must never admit that men have a strict right to relief. That is to

injure the very essential social force. 'Hard as it may seem in

individual instances, dependent poverty ought to be held

disgraceful.'[275] The spirit of independence or self-help is the one

thing necessary. 'The desire of bettering our condition and the fear

of making it worse, like the _vis medicatrix_ in physics, is the _vis

medicatrix naturae_ in politics, and is continually counteracting the

disorders arising from narrow human institutions.'[276] It is only

because the poor-laws have not quite destroyed it, that they have not

quite ruined the country. The pith of Malthus's teaching is fairly

expressed in his last letter to Senior.[277] He holds that the

improvement in the condition of the great mass of the labouring

classes should be considered as the main interest of society. To

improve their condition, it is essential to impress them with the

conviction that they can do much more for themselves than others can

do for them, and that the _only_ source of permanent improvement is

the improvement of their moral and religious habits. What government

can do, therefore, is to maintain such institutions as may strengthen

the _vis medicatrix_, or 'desire to better our condition,' which

poor-laws had directly tended to weaken. He maintains in his letter to

Senior, that this desire is 'perfectly feeble' compared with the

tendency of the population to increase, and operates in a very slight

degree upon the great mass of the labouring class.[278] Still, he

holds that on the whole the 'preventive checks' have become stronger

relatively to the positive,[279] and, at any rate, all proposals must

be judged by their tendency to strengthen the preventive.

Malthus was not a thoroughgoing supporter of the 'do-nothing'

doctrine. He approved of a national system of education, and of the

early factory acts, though only as applied to infant labour. So, as we

shall see, did all the Utilitarians. The 'individualism,' however, is

not less decided; and leads him to speak as though the elasticity of

population were not merely an essential factor in the social problem,

but the sole principle from which all solutions must be deduced. He is

thus led, as I have tried to show, to a narrow interpretation of his

'moral check.' He is apt to take 'vice' simply as a product of

excessive pressure, and, in his general phrases at least, to overlook

its reciprocal tendency to cause pressure. The 'moral check' is only

preventive or negative, not a positive cause of superior vigour. A

similar defect appears in his theory of the _vis medicatrix_. He was,

I hold, perfectly right in emphasising the importance of individual

responsibility. No reform can be permanent which does not raise the

morality of the individual. His insistence upon this truth was of the

highest importance, and it is to be wished that its importance might

be more fully recognised to-day. The one-sidedness appears in his

proposal to abolish the poor-law simply. That became the most

conspicuous and widely accepted doctrine. All men of 'sense,' said

Sydney Smith--certainly a qualified representative of the class--in

1820, agree, first, that the poor-law must be abolished; and secondly,

that it must be abolished very gradually.[280] That is really to

assume that by refusing to help people at all, you will force them to

help themselves. There is another alternative, namely, that they may,

as Malthus himself often recognises, become demoralised by excessive

poverty. To do simply nothing may lead to degeneration instead of

increased energy. The possibility of an improved law, which might act

as a moral discipline instead of a simply corrupting agency, is simply

left out of account; and the tendency to stimulate reckless population

is regarded not only as one probable consequence, but as the very

essence of all poor-laws. Upon Malthus's assumptions, the statement

that sound political and social theories must be based upon systematic

inquiry into facts, meant that the individual was the ultimate

unalterable unit, whose interest in his own welfare gave the one

fulcrum for all possible changes. The ideal 'state of nature' was a

fiction. The true basis of our inquiries is the actual man known to us

by observation. The main fault of this being was the excess of the

instinct of multiplication, and the way to improve him was to show how

it might conflict with the instinct of self-preservation. In this

shape the doctrine expressed the most characteristic tendency of the

Utilitarians, and divided them from the Socialists or believers in

abstract rights of man.

VI. RENT

Here, then, we are at a central point of the Utilitarian creed. The

expansive force of population is, in a sense, the great motive power

which moulds the whole social structure; or, rather, it forces

together the independent units, and welds them into an aggregate. The

influence of this doctrine upon other economical speculations is of

the highest importance. One critical stage in the process is marked by

the enunciation of the theory of rent, which was to become another

essential article of the true faith. The introduction of this doctrine

is characteristic, and marks the point at which Ricardo superseded

Malthus as chief expositor of the doctrine.

Malthus's views were first fully given in his _Inquiry into Rent_, the

second of three pamphlets which he published during the corn-law

controversy of 1814-15.[281] The opinions now stated had, he says,

been formed in the course of his lecturing at Haileybury; and he made

them public on account of their bearing upon the most absorbing

questions of the time. The connection of the theory with Malthus's

speculations and with the contemporary difficulties is indeed obvious.

The landlord had clearly one of the reserved seats at the banquet of

nature. He was the most obvious embodiment of 'security' as opposed to

equality. Malthus, again, had been influenced by the French economists

and their theory of the 'surplus fund,' provided by agriculture.

According to them, as he says,[282] this fund or rent constitutes the

whole national wealth. In his first edition he had defended the

economists against some of Adam Smith's criticisms; and though he

altered his views and thought that they had been led into preposterous

errors, he retained a certain sympathy for them. Agriculture has still

a certain 'pre-eminence.' God has bestowed upon the soil the

'inestimable quality of being able to maintain more persons than are

necessary to work it.'[283] It has the special virtue that the supply

of necessaries generates the demand. Make more luxuries and the price

may fall; but grow more food and there will be more people to eat it.

This, however, seems to be only another way of stating an unpleasant

fact. The blessing of 'fertility' counteracts itself. As he argues in

the essay,[284] an equal division of land might produce such an

increase of population as would exhaust any conceivable increase of

food. These views--not, I think, very clear or consistently worked

out--lead apparently to the conclusion that the fertility is indeed a

blessing, but on condition of being confined to a few. The result, in

any case, is the orthodox theory of rent. The labourer gets less than

he would if the products of the soil were equally distributed. Both

wages and profits must fall as more is left to rent, and that this

actually happens, he says, with unusual positiveness, is an

'incontrovertible truth.'[285] The fall enables the less fertile land

to be cultivated, and gives an excess of produce on the more fertile.

'This excess is rent.'[286] He proceeds to expound his doctrine by

comparing land to a set of machines for making corn.[287] If, in

manufacture, a new machine is introduced every one adopts it. In

agriculture the worst machines have still to be used; and those who

have the best and sell at the same price, can appropriate the surplus

advantage. This, he declares, is a law 'as invariable as the action of

the principle of gravity.'[288] Yet Smith and others have overlooked a

'principle of the highest importance'[289] and have failed to see that

the price of corn, as of other things, must conform to the cost of

production. The same doctrine was expounded in the same year by Sir

Edward West;[290] and, as it seems to me, more clearly and simply.

West, like Malthus, says that he has to announce a principle

overlooked by Adam Smith. This is briefly that 'each equal additional

quantity of work bestowed on agriculture yields an actually diminished

return.' He holds that profits fall as wealth increases, but he denies

Adam Smith's view that this is a simple result of increased

competition.[291] Competition would equalise, but would not lower

profits, for 'the productive powers of manufactures are constantly

increasing.' In agriculture the law is the opposite one of diminishing

returns. Hence the admitted fall of profits shows that the necessity

of taking inferior soils into cultivation is the true cause of the

fall.

Such coincidences as that between Malthus and West are common enough,

for very obvious reasons. In this case, I think, there is less room

for surprise than usual. The writer generally credited with the

discovery of the rent doctrine is James Anderson, who had stated it

as early as 1777.[292] The statement, however, did not attract

attention until at the time of West and Malthus it was forced upon

observers by the most conspicuous facts of the day. Adam Smith and

other economists had, as Malthus notices, observed what is obvious

enough, that rent in some way represented a 'net produce'--a something

which remained after paying the costs of production. So much was

obvious to any common-sense observer. In a curious paper of December

1804,[293] Cobbett points out that the landlords will always keep the

profits of farmers down to the average rate of equally agreeable

businesses. This granted, it is a short though important step to the

theory of rent. The English system had, in fact, spontaneously

analysed the problem. The landlord, farmer, and labourer represented

the three interests which might elsewhere be combined. Prices raised

by war and famine had led to the enclosure of wastes and the breaking

up of pastures. The 'margin of cultivation' was thus illustrated by

facts. Farmers were complaining that they could not make a profit if

prices were lowered. The landed classes were profiting by a rise of

price raised, according to a familiar law, in greater proportion than

the deficiency of the harvest. Facts of this kind were, one must

suppose, familiar to every land-agent; and to discover the law of

rent, it was only necessary for Malthus and West to put them in their

natural order. The egg had only to be put on its end, though that, as

we know, is often a difficult task. When the feat was accomplished

consequences followed which were fully developed by Ricardo.

FOOTNOTES:

[203] Mr. James Bonar's _Malthus and his Work_ (1885) gives an

admirable account of Malthus. The chief original authorities are a

life by Bishop Otter, prefixed to a second edition of the _Political

Economy_ (1831), and an article by Empson, Malthus's colleague, in the

_Edinburgh Review_ for January 1837.

[204] _Political Justice_ (3rd edition, 1798), ii. bk. viii. chap.

ix., p. 514.

[205] Wallace wrote in answer to Hume, _A Dissertation on the Numbers

of Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times_ (1753), and _Various Prospects

of Mankind_, and _Nature and Providence_ (1761). Godwin refers to the

last.

[206] _Political Justice_, ii. 520.

[207] _Ibid._ ii. 528.

[208] First published in 1795, after the first edition, as Godwin

remarks, of the _Political Justice_.

[209] _Ami des hommes_ (reprint of 1883), p. 15.

[210] _Ami des hommes_, p. 26.

[211] See the curious debate in _Parl. Hist._ xiv. 1318-1365.

[212] The seventh edition of Price's _Observations on Reversionary

Payments_, etc. (1812), contains a correspondence with Pitt (i. 216,

etc.). The editor, W. Morgan, accuses Pitt of adopting Price's plans

without due acknowledgment and afterwards spoiling them.

[213] _Essay on Population_, p. 18. In _Observations_, ii. 141, he

estimates the diminution at a million and a half. Other books

referring to the same controversy are Howlett's _Examination of Dr.

Price's Essay_ (1781); _Letter to Lord Carlisle_, by William Eden

(1744-1814), first Lord Auckland; William Wales's _Enquiry into

Present State of Population_, etc. (1781); and Geo. Chalmers's

_Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great Britain_ (1782 and

several later editions).

[214] _Essay_ (first edition), p. 339.

[215] _Memoirs_, etc. (1819), ii. 10.

[216] So Sir James Stewart, whose light was extinguished by Adam

Smith, begins his _Enquiry into the Principles of Political Economy_

(1767) by discussing the question of population, and compares the

'generative faculty' to a spring loaded with a weight, and exerting

itself in proportion to the diminution of resistance (_Works_, 1805,

i. 22). He compares population to 'rabbits in a warren.' Joseph

Townsend, in his _Journey Through Spain_ (1792), to whom Malthus

refers, had discussed the supposed decay of the Spanish population,

and illustrates his principles by a geometric progression: see ii.

213-56, 386-91. Eden, in his book on the poor (i. 214), quotes a tract

attributed to Sir Matthew Hale for the statement that the poor

increase on 'geometrical progression.'

[217] _Malthus and his Work_, p. 85.

[218] Voltaire says in the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_ (art.

'Population'): 'On ne propage point en Progression Geometrique. Tous

les calculs qu'on a faits sur cette pretendue multiplication sont des

chimeres absurdes.' They had been used to reconcile the story of the

deluge with the admitted population of the world soon afterwards.

[219] _Essay_ (1826), ii 453 _n._ I cite from this, the last edition

published in Malthus's lifetime, unless otherwise stated.

[220] _Essay_, ii. 251 (bk. iii. ch. xiv.).

[221] _Ibid._ (1798), p. 141.

[222] _Essay_, ii. 449 (Appendix).

[223] _Essay_, ii. 473 (Appendix).

[224] _Ibid._ (Second Edition), p. 400. The passage is given in full

in _Malthus and his Work_, p. 307.

[225] _Essay_, i. 469 (bk. ii. ch. x.). Eden had made the same remark.

[226] _Ibid._ ii. 229 (bk. iii. ch. xiv.).

[227] Correspondence in Senior's _Three Essays on Population_ (1829).

[228] _Essay_, i. 234 (bk. i. ch. ii.).

[229] Mr. Bonar thinks (_Malthus and his Work_, p. 324) that Malthus

followed Paley's predecessor, Abraham Tucker, rather than Paley. The

difference is not for my purpose important. In any case, Malthus's

references are to Paley.

[230] _Essay_, ii. 266 (bk. iv. ch. i.).

[231] _Essay_ (first edition), p. 212.

[232] _Ibid._ i. 16 _n._ (bk. i. ch. ii.).

[233] See _e.g._ his remarks upon Condorcet in _Essay_, ii. 8 (bk.

iii. ch. i.); and Owen in _Ibid._ ii. 48 (bk. iii ch. ii.).

[234] _Essay_, i. 15 _n._ (bk. i. ch. ii.); and see _Ibid._ (edit. of

1807) ii. 128.

[235] _Ibid._ (1807) ii. 128.

[236] _Ibid._ (1807) ii. 3 (bk. ii. ch. ii.). (Omitted in later

editions.)

[237] Mr. A. R. Wallace, Darwin's fellow-discoverer of the doctrine,

also learned it from Malthus. See Clodd's _Pioneers of Evolution_.

Malthus uses the phrase 'struggle for existence' in relation to a

fight between two savage tribes in the first edition of his _Essay_,

p. 48. In replying to Condorcet, Malthus speaks (_Essay_, ii. 12, bk.

iii. ch. i.) of the possible improvement of living organisms. He

argues that, though a plant may be improved, it cannot be indefinitely

improved by cultivation. A carnation could not be made as large as a

tulip. It has been said that this implies a condemnation by

anticipation of theories of the development of species. This is hardly

correct. Malthus simply urges against Condorcet that our inability to

fix limits precisely does not imply that there are no limits. This, it

would seem, must be admitted on all hands. Evolution implies definite

though not precisely definable limits. Life may be lengthened, but not

made immortal.

[238] _Essay_ (first edition), 353.

[239] _Ibid._ 42 _n._ (bk. iii. ch. iii.)

[240] _Essay_, ii. 301-36 (bk. iv. ch. i. and ii.). Sumner's _Treatise

on the Records of the Creation, and on the Moral Attributes of the

Creator: with Particular Reference to the Jewish History and the

Consistency of the Principle of Population with the Wisdom and

Goodness of the Creator_ (1815), had gained the second Burnett prize.

It went through many editions; and shows how Cuvier confirms Genesis,

and Malthus proves that the world was intended to involve a

competition favourable to the industrious and sober. Sumner's view of

Malthus is given in Part ii., chaps, v. and vi. In previous chapters

he has supported Malthus's attack on Godwin and Condorcet.

[241] _Essay_, ii. 266 (bk. iv. ch. i.).

[242] _Essay_, ii 268 (bk. iv. ch. i.).

[243] _Ibid._ (bk. iv. ch. ii.).

[244] _Essay_, 241 (bk. iii. ch. iv.).

[245] _Ibid._ ii. 241 (bk. iii. ch. xiv.).

[246] _Ibid._ ii. 293 (bk. iv. ch. iv.).

[247] _Ibid._ ii. 425 (bk. iv. ch. xiii.). Malthus expresses a hope

that Paley had modified his views upon population, and refers to a

passage in the _Natural Theology_.

[248] _Essay_, ii. 292 (bk. iv. ch. iv.).

[249] _Political Economy_ (1836), p. 214.

[250] _Essay_, ii. 298 (bk. iv. ch. iv.).

[251] _Ibid._ ii. 86 (bk. iii. ch. vi.).

[252] _Ibid._ ii. 87 (bk. iii. ch. vi.).

[253] _Essay_, ii. 90 (bk. iii. ch. vi.).

[254] _Ibid._ ii. 338 (bk. iv. ch. viii.).

[255] _Ibid._ ii. (bk. iv. ch. x.).

[256] _Ibid._ ii. 353 (bk. iv. ch. ix.).

[257] _Essay_, ii. 356 (bk. iv. ch. ix.).

[258] _Ibid._ ii. 407 (bk. iv. ch. xii.).

[259] _Ibid._ ii. 375 (bk. iv. ch. xi.).

[260] _Ibid._ ii. 429 (bk. iv. ch. xiii.).

[261] _Essay of 1807_ (bk. iii. ch. ii., and vol. ii. p. 111). The

phrases quoted are toned down in later editions.

[262] _Essay_, i. 330 (bk. ii. ch. iv.).

[263] _Ibid._ ii. 300 (bk. iv. ch. v.).

[264] _Ibid._ ii. 405 (bk. iv. ch. xiii.).

[265] _Ibid._ i. 343 (bk. ii. ch. v.).

[266] _Essay_, ii. 424 (bk. iv. ch. xiii.).

[267] _Ibid._ ii. 304 (bk. iv. ch. v.).

[268] _Essay_, i. 75 (bk. i. ch. v.).

[269] _Ibid._ (bk. ii. ch. vi.).

[270] _Essay_, ii. 318 (bk. iv. ch. vi.).

[271] _Essay_, ii. 315 (bk. iv. ch. v.).

[272] _Ibid._ ii. 326 (bk. iv. ch. vi.).

[273] _Ibid._ ii. 78 (bk. iii. ch. v.).

[274] _Essay_, ii. 454 (Appendix).

[275] _Ibid._ ii. 82 (bk. iii. ch. vi.).

[276] _Ibid._ ii. 90 (bk. iii. ch. vi.).

[277] Senior's _Three Lectures_, p. 86.

[278] Senior's _Three Lectures_, p. 60.

[279] _Essay_, i. 534 (bk. ii. ch. xiii.).

[280] Smith's _Works_ (1859), i. 295.

[281] _Observations on the Effects of the Corn-laws, 1814; Inquiry

into the Nature and Progress of Rent, 1815_; and _The Grounds of an

Opinion on the Policy of restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn_,

intended as an appendix to the _Observations on the Corn-laws_, 1815.

[282] _Inquiry into Rent_, p. 1.

[283] _Ibid._ p. 16.

[284] _Essay_, ii. 35 (bk. iii. ch. ii.).

[285] _Inquiry into Rent_, p. 20.

[286] _Ibid._ p. 18.

[287] _Ibid._ p. 38.

[288] _Inquiry into Rent_, p. 20.

[289] _Ibid._ p. 37.

[290] _Essay on the Application of Capital to Land, by a Fellow of

University College, Oxford, 1815._

[291] _Essay_, p. 19.

[292] _In An Inquiry into the Nature of the Corn-laws_, and again

(1801) in _Observations on Agriculture_, etc., vol. v. 401-51.

[293] _Political Works_, i. 485, etc. In this paper, I may add,

Cobbett, not yet a Radical, accepts Malthus's view of the tendency of

the human species to multiply more quickly than its support. He does

not mention Malthus, but speaks of the belief as universally admitted,

and afterwards illustrates it amusingly by saying that, in his

ploughboy days, he used to wonder that there was always just enough

hay for the horses and enough horses for the hay.