MALTHUS AND HIS WORK
[Illustration]
MALTHUS AND HIS WORK
BY
JAMES BONAR, M.A.
BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
=London=
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1885
_The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved_
LONDON:
RICHARD CLAY AND SONS,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C.
TO
=Professor Edward Caird=
THIS BOOK,
WHICH OWES MUCH TO HIM,
IS DEDICATED.
INTRODUCTION.
Of the three English writers whose work has become a portion of all
Political Economy, Malthus is the second in time and in honour. His
services to general theory are at least equal to Ricardo’s; and his full
illustration of one particular detail will rank with the best work of
Adam Smith.
In the following pages the detail will be the main subject, and general
theory the episode. The _Political Economy_ and minor writings of
Malthus (which are not few) will be noticed only in relation to the
_Essay on Population_.
Accordingly, the First of these Five Books will deal with the genesis,
history, and contents of the Essay, plunging the reader _in medias res_
and keeping him there, till the facts force him, in the Second Book, to
recur with the author to Economical theory. The Third will show the mind
of Malthus more clearly by adding to his economics his Ethics and
Political Philosophy; and the Fourth, with the case now fully stated,
will criticize the Critics of the Essay, and try to determine how much
of its doctrine remains still valuable. The Fifth Book, with its
Biography, may help the reader to associate the living personality of
the man with his writings.
_London, June 1885._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
BOOK I. THE ESSAY.
CHAP. I. FIRST THOUGHTS, 1798 1
„ II. SECOND THOUGHTS, 1803 45
„ III. THESES 60
„ IV. THE SAVAGE, BARBARIAN, AND ORIENTAL 85
„ V. NORTH AND MID EUROPE 119
„ VI. FRANCE 153
„ VII. ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND 170
BOOK II. ECONOMICS.
CHAP. I. THE LANDLORDS 207
„ II. THE WORKING MAN 254
„ III. GENERAL GLUTS 282
„ IV. THE BEGGAR 303
BOOK III. MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 319
„ IV. THE CRITICS 355
„ V. BIOGRAPHY 399
INDEX 428
MALTHUS AND HIS WORK
BOOK I. THE ESSAY.
CHAPTER I.
FIRST THOUGHTS, 1798.
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.
If 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 book, 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 “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 were 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 for 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
defending 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 argument; 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 talked 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. Thanks 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, have 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 criticism 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,
long 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 speculation 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 not 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. To 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 postulates, 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 people, 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 algebraic 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.
From 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 them, 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. Like 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 to 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 in 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 are 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; in 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 remedy 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 presented 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 liberty
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 larger. “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 mouths
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
century. 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 cases 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, has 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 turn.[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 awakeners 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 themselves 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
Being 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 be 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 passages, 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, it 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.
The 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
the 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 one 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.