SECOND THOUGHTS, 1803.
Exaggerations of the First Essay—Its two Postulates not
co-ordinate—Distinctive feature of the Second Essay—Its moderate
Optimism—Rough Classification of Checks—Moral Restraint and Mixed
Motives—Freedom as understood by Godwin and by Malthus—The two men
contrasted.
While Malthus was making such converts as Pitt, Paley, and Parr, and
when even Godwin acknowledged the “writer of the essay” to have made a
“valuable addition to political economy,”[85] the essay was not beyond
criticism. There were some familiar facts of which the writer had taken
too little account, and they were impressed on him by his critics from
all sides. To use the language of philosophy, he had not been
sufficiently concrete; he had gone far to commit Godwin’s fault, and
consider one feature of human nature apart by itself, instead of seeing
it in its place with the rest. The position and prospects of civilized
society in our own day depend on a combination of political,
intellectual, physical, and moral causes, of which the growth or
decrease of population may be only an effect. If we are part man, part
lion, and part hog, it is not fair to assume the predominance of the hog
any more than the predominance of the man. In a herd of animals, as
distinguished from a society of men, the units are simply the fittest
who have survived in the struggle for existence. The principle of
population is in the foreground there; there is no check to it but
famine, disease, and death. We can therefore understand how the study of
the _Essay on Population_ led Charles Darwin to explain the origin of
species by a generalization which Malthus had known and named, though he
did not pursue it beyond man.[86] The “general struggle” among animals
“for room and food” means among civilized men something very like free
trade, the old orthodox economical panacea for economic evils; and the
essayist agrees with Adam Smith in a general resistance to legislative
interference. Bad as are the effects of the irremovable causes of
poverty, interference makes them still worse. But at least, when we come
to man, the struggle is not so cruel. “Plague take the hindmost” is not
the only or the supreme rule. If the fear of starvation, the most
earthly and least intellectual of all motives, is needed to force us to
work at first, it need not therefore be necessary ever afterwards. The
baser considerations are by their definition the lowest layers of our
pile; we rise by means of them, but we tread them down, and the higher
the pile the less their importance. Within civilized countries, in
proportion to their civilization, the struggle in the lowest stages is
abolished; the weakest are often saved, and the lowest raised, in spite
of unfitness.[87] View man not as an animal, but as a citizen; view the
principle of population as checked not only by vice, misery, and the
fear of them, but by all the mixed motives of human society, and we
recognize that Malthus, with the best intentions, had treated the matter
too abstractly. Godwin had over-rated the power of reason, Malthus the
power of passion. “It is probable,” he wrote at a later time, “that,
having found the bow bent too much one way, I was induced to bend it too
much the other, in order to make it straight.”[88] The abstract
principle of increase getting more, and concrete humanity less, than
justice, the next step was, naturally, to deny the possibility of
permanent improvement in this world, and to regard every partial
improvement as a labour of Sisyphus.[89]
It could hardly be otherwise, if we began, like Malthus, by setting down
the desire of food and the desire of marriage as two co-ordinate
principles.[90] They are not really co-ordinate. It is true not merely
of most men, but of all men without a single exception, that they cannot
live without food. Even if a man survive an abstinence from solid food
for forty days, he cannot deny himself water, and he is for all useful
purposes dead to the world during his fast. The second postulate of the
first essay is, on the contrary, true only of most men, and even then
under qualifications. It is not true of any till manhood, and it is not
true of all men equally. Some are beyond its scope by an accident of
birth, and a still larger number, whether priests or laymen, put
themselves beyond its scope for moral reasons.[91] Coleridge puts the
case pertinently enough: “The whole case is this: Are they both alike
passions of physical necessity, and the one equally with the other
independent of the reason and the will? Shame upon our race that there
lives the individual who dares even ask the question.”[92]
Malthus saw that he had been hasty, and he did not republish the essay
till he had given it five years of revision, and added to it the results
of foreign travel and wider reading. In 1799 he went abroad with some
college friends, Otter, Clarke the antiquarian and naturalist, and
Clarke’s pupil Cripps,[93] and visited Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland,
and part of Russia, these being the only countries at that time open to
English travellers. After his return he published his tract on the _High
Price of Provisions_ (1800),[94] and at the conclusion of it he promised
a new edition of the _Essay on Population_. Some people, he says, have
thought the essay “a specious argument inapplicable to the present state
of society,” because it contradicts preconceived opinions; but two years
of reflection have strengthened his conviction that he has discovered
“the real cause of the continued depression and poverty of the lower
classes;” and he will not recant his essay: “I have deferred giving
another edition of it in the hope of being able to make it more worthy
of the public attention, by applying the principle directly and
exclusively to the existing state of society, and endeavouring to
illustrate the power and universality of its operation from the best
authenticated accounts that we have of the state of other countries.”
But he was not satisfied with the accounts of other people. When the
Peace of Amiens let loose thousands of pleasure-seekers on the
Continent, Malthus went to France and Switzerland on no errand of mere
pleasure; and he was luckily at home again, and passing his proof-sheets
through the press, before Napoleon’s unpleasant interference with
English travellers.
It was a happy coincidence that in the dark fighting days of 1798,
Malthus should write only of vice and misery, while in the short gleam
of peace in 1802 and 1803, when the tramp of armed men had ceased for
the moment, he should recollect himself, and write of a less ghastly
restraint on population, a restraint which might perhaps, like the truce
of Amiens, hold out some faint hope for the future. For the sake of the
world let us hope that the parallel goes no further. The wonder is not
that he forgot there was such a thing as civilization, but that amidst
wars and rumours of wars he should ever have remembered it.
In the preface to the new edition (June 1803), he says he has “so far
differed in principle” from the old edition “as to suppose the action of
another check to population which does not come under the head either of
vice or misery,” and he has “tried to soften some of the harshest
conclusions of the first essay.” There was really more change than this.
The first essay contained much of the imperfection of the sudden
magazine-article; and if the writer had lived half a century later he
would probably, instead of writing a small book, have contributed a long
article to a monthly or quarterly magazine, giving a review of Godwin’s
political writings, with incidental remarks on the Poor Bill of Mr.
Pitt. This was evidently the light in which he himself regarded his
first work, or he would not have handled it so freely in republication.
The new edition had new facts, new arrangement, and new emphasis. He had
not written a book once for all, leaving the world to fight over it
after his death. He took the public into partnership with him, and made
every discussion a means of improving his book. This gives the _Essay on
Population_ a unique character among economical writings. It leads the
author to interpret his thoughts to us from many various points of view,
leaving us, unhappily, often in doubt whether an alteration of language
is or is not an alteration of thought. Malthus adds to the difficulty by
omitting and inserting instead of rewriting in full. His chapters cease
to be old without becoming new.
The very face of the book revealed a change. In 1798 it was _An Essay on
the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of
Society_; in 1803, _An Essay on the Principle of Population, or a View
of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness_. The dreams of the
future are now in the background, and the facts of the present in the
foreground. In 1798 Malthus had given Godwin the lie:—
“Colouring he, dilating, magniloquent, glorying in picture,
He to a matter of fact still softening, paring, abating,
He to the great might-have-been upsoaring, sublime and ideal,
He to the merest it—was restricting, diminishing, dwarfing.”
He must do more now, or his political economy is a dismal science. He
must show how we can cling to the matter of fact without losing our
ideal. It is not enough to refer us to the other world. How far may we
have hope in this world? Let Malthus answer.
The second essay is his answer; and if second thoughts are the best,
then we may rejoice over the second essay, for it lifts the cloud from
the first. It tells us that on the whole the power of civilization is
greater than the power of population; the pressure of the people on the
food is therefore less in modern than it was in ancient times or the
middle ages; there are now less disorder, more knowledge, and more
temperance.[95] The merely physical checks are falling into a
subordinate position. There are two kinds of checks on population. A
check is (_a_) positive, when it cuts down an existing population, (_b_)
preventive, when it keeps a new population from growing up. Among
animals the check is only misery, among savage men vice as well as
misery, and, in civilized society, moral restraint as well as, till now,
both vice and misery. Even in civilized society there are strata which
moral restraint hardly reaches, for there are strata which are not
civilized. On the whole, however, it is true that among animals there is
no sign of any other check than the positive, while among men the
positive is gradually subordinated to the preventive. Among men misery
may act both positively and preventively. In the form of war or disease
it may slay its tens of thousands, and cut down an existing population.
By the fear of its own coming it may prevent many a marriage, and keep a
new population from growing up. Vice may also act in both ways:
positively as in child-murder, preventively as in the scheme of
Condorcet. But in civilized society the forces of both order and
progress are arrayed against their two common enemies; and, if we
recognized no third check, surely the argument that was used against
Godwin’s society holds against all society; its very purification will
ruin it, by forbidding vice and misery to check the growth of
population, and by thereby permitting the people to increase to excess.
There is, however, a third check, which Malthus knows under the title of
moral restraint.
Moral restraint is a distinct form of preventive check. It is not to be
confused with an impure celibacy, which falls under the head of vice;
and yet the adjective “moral” does not imply that the motives are the
highest possible.[96] The adjective is applied not so much to the motive
of the action as to the action itself, from whatever motives proceeding;
and in the mouth of a Utilitarian this language is not unphilosophical.
Moral restraint, in the pages of Malthus, means simply continence; it is
an abstinence from marriage followed by no irregularities.[97] He speaks
of the “moral stimulus” of the bounty on corn, meaning the expectations
it produced in the minds of men, as distinguished from the variations it
produced in the prices of grain;[98] and the word “moral” is often, like
“morale,” used in military matters to denote mental disposition, as
distinguished from material resources. The vagueness of the word is
perhaps not accidental, for nothing is vaguer than the mixed motives
which it denotes; but continence, which is unambiguous, would seem the
better word.
With the enunciation of the third check the theory of Malthus entered
definitively on a new phase; and in sketching the outlines of his work
we shall no longer need to treat it as paradoxical and overstrained, but
as a sober argument from the ground of accepted facts. The author’s
analysis of human nature has been brought into harmony with common
sense. He confesses that it had hitherto been too abstract, and had
separated the inseparable.
The mind of man cannot be sawed into quantities; and, even if it is
possible to distinguish the mixed motives that guide human action, the
fact remains that they only operate when together. It is probable that
no good man’s motives were ever absolutely noble, and no bad man’s ever
absolutely bestial. Even the good man is strongest when he can make his
very circumstances war against his power to do evil. Mixed from the
first of time, human motives will, in this world, remain mixed unto the
last, whether in saint, sage, or savage. But civilization, involving, as
it does, a progressive change in the dominant ideas of society, will
alter the character of the mixture and the proportion of the elements.
The laws of Malthus will be obeyed, though the name of Malthus be not
mentioned, and the checks, physical or moral, be never brought to mind.
Society, moving all together, if it move at all, cannot cure its evils
by one single heroic remedy; but as little can it be content with
self-denying ordinances, prohibitions, or refutations. It needs a
positive truth, and an ideal, that is to say, a religion, to give new
life to the bodily members by giving new hope to the heart. “The fear of
the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but the end of wisdom is the love
of the Lord and the admiration of moral good.”[99] It follows that an
economist, if he knows nothing but his economy, does not know even that.
No economists are more reproached with their want of idealism than
Malthus and his brethren. As the French Revolutionists were said to
believe that the death of their old rulers would of itself bring
happiness and good government, so these writers were said to teach that
the mere removal of hindrances would lead to the best possible
production and distribution of the good things of this life. The ideal
state then, as far as wealth was concerned, would be anarchy _plus_ the
police constable. Godwin would have dispensed with the constable. “Give
a state liberty enough,” he says, “and vice cannot exist in it.”[100]
But neither he nor the economists desired a merely negative change or
removal of hindrances. Their political reformation was to be, like the
Protestant, only successful as it went beyond image-breaking. Malthus,
it will be seen,[101] is far from being an unqualified advocate of
_laissez faire_; and, in all cases where he did desire it, he wished to
make the state small only to make public opinion great. Godwin was not
far away from him here. If he was wrong in attributing too much evil to
institutions, and too little to human nature, he has furnished his own
correction. The _Political Justice_ disclaimed all sympathy with
violence; it taught that a political reform was worthless unless
effected peacefully by reason; and Malthus[102] has the same cure for
social evils—argument and instruction. The difference between them is,
that Malthus takes more into account the unreasonableness as well as the
reasonableness of men. In essentials they are agreed. The thorough
enlightenment of the people, which includes their moral purification as
well as their intellectual instruction, is to complete the work of
mending all, in which men are to be fellow-workers with God—so runs the
teaching of Malthus and all the greatest economists of the last hundred
years. Whether the evils of competition are many or few, serious or
trifling, depends largely on the character of the competitors; and the
more free we make the competition, the more thoroughly we must educate
the competitors. Adam Smith was well aware of this; he recommended
school-boards a hundred years before the Acts of 1870 and 1872;[103] and
Malthus was not behind him.[104] They are aware that the more completely
we exclude the interference of Government, the more actively we must
employ every other moral and social agency. Whether Malthus was prepared
to exclude the interference of Government entirely, even under this
condition, we shall see by-and-by.
The characters of the two men, Malthus and Godwin, are a striking
contrast. Malthus was the student, of quiet settled life, sharing his
little wealth with his friends in unobtrusive hospitality, and
constantly using his pen for the good, as he believed, of the English
poor, that in these wretched times they might have domestic happiness
like his own. There never was a more singular delusion than the common
belief in the hard-heartedness of Malthus. Besides the unanimous voice
of private friends, he has left testimony enough in his own books to
absolve him. While Adam Smith and others owe their errors to
intellectual fallibility, Malthus owes many of his to his tender heart.
His motive for studying political economy was no doubt a mixed motive;
it was partly the interest of an intelligent man in abstract questions;
but it was chiefly the desire to advance the greatest happiness of the
greatest number. In his eyes the elevation of human life was much more
important than the solution of a scientific problem. Even when in 1820
he wrote a book on the “_Principles of Political Economy_,” he took care
to add on the title-page, “_considered with a view to their practical
application_,” refusing to consider in abstractness what always exists
in the concrete. His keen sympathy for the sufferings of displaced
workmen led him to fight a losing battle with Say and Ricardo in favour
of something like an embargo on inventions, and in protest against a
fancied over-production.[105] His private life showed the power of
gentleness; Miss Martineau could hear his mild, sonorous vowels without
her eartrumpet, and his few sentences were as welcome at her
dinner-table as the endless babble of cleverer tongues. He felt the pain
of a thousand slanders “only just at first,” and never let them trouble
his dreams after the first fortnight, saying, with a higher than stoical
calmness, that they passed by him like the idle wind which he respected
not.[106] He outlived obloquy, and saw the fruit of his labours in a
wiser legislation and improved public feeling.
With Godwin all was otherwise. There were fightings within and fears
without. With an immovable devotion to ideas he combined a fickleness of
affection towards human beings. He heeded emotion too little in his
books and too much in his own life, yielding to the fancy of the moment,
quarrelling with his best friends twice a week, and quickly knitting up
the broken ties again. He loved his wife well, but hardly allowed her to
share the same house with him, lest they should weary of one
another.[107] He was the sworn enemy of superstition, and himself the
arch-dreamer of dreams.
Yet when we contrast the haphazard literary life of the one, ending his
days ingloriously[108] in a Government sinecure, unsuccessful and almost
forgotten, with the academical ease of the other, centred in the sphere
of common duties, and passing from the world with a fair consciousness
of success, we feel a sympathy for Godwin that is of a better sort than
the mere liking for a loser. It is a sympathy not sad enough for pity.
It is not wholly sad to find Godwin in his old age a lonely man, his
friends dropping off one by one into the darkness and leaving him
solitary in a world that does not know him. The world that had begun to
realize the ideas of Malthus had begun to realize the ideas of Godwin
also. It was a world far more in harmony with political justice than
that into which Godwin had sent his book forty years before. It was good
that Malthus had lived to see the new Poor Law, but still better that
both had lived to see the Reform of ’32.
They passed away within two years of each other, Malthus in the winter
of 1834, Godwin in the spring of 1836, the year of the first league of
the people against the Corn Laws. In their death they were still
divided, but, “si quis piorum manibus locus,” they are divided no
longer, and they think no hard thoughts of each other any more.