THESES.
Position stated in the Essay—Tendency of Life to increase beyond
Food—Problem not the same for Humanity as for the lower forms of
Life—Man’s Dilemma—Tendency to increase not predicable of Food in
same sense as of Life—The Geometrical and Arithmetical
Ratios—Position stated in _Encyclopædia Britannica_—Milne’s
Confirmation of the Geometrical Ratio—Arithmetical Ratio proved
differently—Private Property a condition of great Production—Fallacy
of confusing possible with actual Production—Laws of Man as well as
of Nature responsible for necessity of Checks—Position stated in
“Summary View”—The Checks on Population classified (_a_) objectively
and (_b_) subjectively—Relation to previous Classification—Cycle in
the movement of Population.
The second essay applies the theory of the first to new facts and with a
new purpose. The author, having gained his case against Godwin, ceases
to be the critic and becomes the social reformer. Despairing to master
all the forms of evil, he confines his study to one of them in
particular, the tendency of living beings to increase beyond their means
of nourishment. This phenomenon is important both from its cause and
from its effects. Its cause is not the action of Governments, but the
constitution of man; and its effects are not of to-day or yesterday, but
constant and perpetual;[109] it frequently hinders the moral goodness
and general happiness of a nation as well as the equal distribution of
its wealth.
This is the general position, which the several chapters of the essay
are to expound in detail. It is not by itself quite simple. “The
constant tendency in all animated life [_sic_][110] to increase beyond
the nourishment prepared for it” is in one sense common to humanity with
plants and animals, but in another sense is not common to any two of the
three. It is certainly true of all of them that the seeds of their life,
whencesoever at first derived, are now infinitely numerous on our
planet, while the means of rearing them are strictly limited. In the
case of plants and animals the strong instinct of reproduction is
“interrupted by no reasoning or doubts about providing for
offspring,”[111] and they crowd fresh lives into the world only to have
them at once shorn away by starvation. With the exception of certain
plants which ape their superiors, like the drosera, and certain men who
ape their inferiors, like the cannibals, the lines of difference between
the three classes of living things are tolerably distinct. The first
class, in the struggle for room and food, can only forestall each other
and leave each other to die; the second deliberately prey on the first
and on each other; while the third prey on both the rest. But with man
this “tendency to increase beyond the food” differs from the same
instinct in the other two cases by more than the fact that man has
larger resources and is longer in reaching his limit. The instinct is
equally strong in him, but he does not unquestioningly follow it.
“Reason interrupts his career,” and asks him whether he may not be
bringing into the world beings for whom he cannot provide the means of
support.[112] If he brushes reason aside, then he shares the fate of
plants and animals; he tends to multiply his numbers beyond the room and
food accessible to them, and the result is that his numbers are cut down
to these limits by suffering and starvation. There is nothing in this
either more or less contrary to the notion of a benevolent Providence
than in the general power given to man of acting rationally or
irrationally according to his own choice in any other instance. On the
other hand, if he listens to reason, he can no doubt defeat the
tendency, but too often he does it at the expense of moral purity. The
dilemma makes the desire for marriage almost an “origin of evil.” If man
obeys his instincts he falls into misery, and, if he resists them, into
vice. Though the dilemma is not perfect, its plausibility demands that
we should test it by details, and to this test Malthus may be said to
have given his whole life. His other economical works are subordinate to
the essay, and may be said to grow out of it. Though we cannot omit them
if we would fully understand and illustrate the central work, still the
latter must come first; and its matured form requires more than the
brief summary which has been given in the two preceding chapters.
The body of the book consists of historical details, and particular
examples showing the checks to population in uncivilized and in
civilized places, in present and in past times. The writer means to
bring his conclusions home to his readers by the “longer way” of
induction. As this, however, was not the way in which he himself reached
them, or even stated them at first, he will ask us first of all to look
at the terms of the dilemma in the light of his two original
postulates[113]—(_a_) food is necessary, (_b_) the desire of marriage is
permanent. What is the quickest possible increase of numbers in
obedience to the second, and of food in obedience to the first? In the
most crucial of the known instances, the actual rapidity of the increase
of population seems to be in direct proportion to the easy possession of
food; and we can infer that the ideally rapid increase would take place
where all obstacles (whether material or moral) to the getting of food
and rearing of a family were removed, so that nature never needed to
remonstrate with instinct. “In no state that we have yet known has the
power of population been left to exert itself with perfect
freedom.”[114] We can guess what it would be from the animal and
vegetable world, where reason does not as a matter of fact interfere
with instinct in any circumstances, so far as we can judge. Benjamin
Franklin, in a passage quoted by Malthus in this connection,[115]
supposes that if the earth were bared of other plants it might be
replenished in a few years with fennel alone. Even as things are now,
fennel would fill the whole earth if the other plants would only allow
it; and the same is true of each of the others. Townsend’s goats and
greyhounds on Juan Fernandez are a better instance, because not
hypothetical.[116] Juan Fernando, the first discoverer, had covered the
island with goats from one pair.[117] The Spaniards resolved to clear it
of goats, in order to make it useless to the English for provisioning.
They put on shore a couple of greyhounds, whose offspring soon caused
the goats to disappear. But without some few goats to eat all the dogs
must have died; and the few were saved to them by their inaccessible
refuges in the rocks, from which they descended at risk of their lives.
In this way only the strongest and fleetest dogs and the hardiest and
fleetest goats survived; and a balance was kept up between goat food and
hound population. Townsend thereupon remarks that human populations are
kept down by want of food precisely in the same way.
There is nothing to prevent the increase of human numbers if we suppose
reason to have no need (as in the lower creatures it has no opportunity)
to interfere. To understand the situation, however, it is best not to
assume the truth of this parallelism, but to take the actually recorded
instances of human increase under the nearest known approaches to
absolute plenty combined with moral goodness, that is to say, with a
state of society in which vice is at a minimum. “In the northern states
of America, where the means of subsistence have been more ample, the
manners of the people more pure, and the checks to early marriages fewer
than in any of the modern states of Europe, the population was found to
double itself for some successive periods every twenty-five years.”[118]
From this near approach to an unchecked increase, we infer that the
unchecked would mean a doubling in less than twenty-five years (say
twenty, or perhaps fifteen), and that all population, in proportion as
it is unchecked, tends towards that rate of increase.
If it is difficult to find an unchecked increase of population, it is
still harder to find an unchecked increase of food; for what is meant is
not that a people should find their food in one fertile country with as
much ease as in another, but that, for a new people, new supplies should
always be found with the same ease as the old ones. Now it is not
necessary to suppose that the most fertile land is always used
first;[119] very often it might only be used late after the rest,
through political insecurity, imperfect agriculture, incomplete
explorations, or the want of capital; but, when it is once occupied, the
question is, will it supply new food to new-comers without any limit at
all? This would be an ideally fertile land corresponding to the ideally
expanding population. And on some such inexhaustible increase of food an
unchecked increase of population would depend, unless men became able to
live without food altogether.
Malthus afterwards pointed out, in the course of controversy,[120] that
there is strictly speaking no question here of the comparison of two
tendencies, for we cannot speak of a tendency to increase food in the
same sense as a tendency to increase population. Population is increased
by itself; food is increased not by food itself, but by an agency
external to it, the human beings that want it; and, while the former
increase is due to an instinct, the latter is (in a sense) acquired.
Eating is instinctive, but not the getting of the food. We have,
therefore, to compare an increase due to an instinctive desire with an
increase due to labour, and “a slight comparison will show the immensity
of the first power over the second.” Malthus allows that it is difficult
to determine this relation with exactness;[121] but, with the natural
liking of a Cambridge man for a mathematical simile,[122] he says that
the one is to the other as an arithmetical to a geometrical ratio,—that
is to say, in any given time (say a century) the one will have increased
by multiplication, the other only by addition. If we represent both the
population and the food at the beginning of that century by ten, then
the population will double itself in twenty-five years; the ten will
become twenty in the first twenty-five years, forty in the second,
eighty in the third, one hundred and sixty in the last, while the food
will only become twenty in the first, thirty in the second, forty in the
third, fifty in the fourth. If this is true, it shows the tendency of
population to outrun subsistence. But of course it needs to be shown
from experience that, while the strength of the desire remains the same
in the later stages of the growth of population as in the earlier, the
laboriousness of the labour is greater in the later stages of the
increase of food than in the earlier. It is the plain truth, says
Malthus, that nature is niggardly in her gifts to man, and by no means
keeps pace with his desires. If men would satisfy their desire of food
at the old rate of speed, they must exert their mind or their body much
more than at first.[123] An obvious objection presents itself. Since
man’s food consists after all of the lower forms of life, animal and
vegetable, and since these admittedly tend to increase, unchecked by
themselves, in a geometrical ratio, it might be thought that the
increase of human population and the increase of its food could proceed
together, with equal ease. But the answer is that this unchecked
geometrical increase of the first could go on only so long as there was
room for it. It could only be true, for example, of wheat in the
corn-field at the time when the seed of it was sown, and the field was
all before it. The equality of the two ratios would only be true of the
first crop.[124] At first there might be five or sixfold the seed; but
in after years, though the geometrical increase from the seed would tend
to be the same, there could be no geometrical increase of the total crop
by unassisted nature. The earth has no tendency to increase its surface.
There is a tendency of animals and vegetables to increase geometrically,
in their quality of living things, but not in their quality of being
food for man. The same amount of produce might no doubt be gained on a
fresh field, from the seed yielded by the first, and at the same
geometrical rate; but this assumes that there is a fresh field, and we
should not then be at the proper stage to contrast the two ratios. The
contrast begins to show itself as soon as the given quantity of land has
grown its crop, and its animal and human population have used all its
food. The question is then how any increase of the said population, if
they are confined to their own supplies, is at all to be made possible;
the answer is, only by greater ingenuity and greater labour in the
getting of food; and, however possible this may be, it can hardly be so
easy as the increase of living beings by their own act.
The degree of disparity between the two will of course depend on the
degree of rapidity with which an unchecked population is supposed to
double itself. Sir William Petty,[125] with few trustworthy statistics,
had supposed ten years; Euler, with somewhat better, twelve and
four-fifths; but Malthus prefers to go by the safe figures of the
American colonies, which he always regarded as a crucial proof that the
period was not more than twenty-five. He admits the risk of his own
mathematical simile when he grants that it is more easy to determine the
rate of the natural increase of population than the rate of the increase
of food which is in a much less degree natural (or spontaneous); and he
argues from what had been done in England in his own time that the
increase would not even be in an arithmetical ratio, though agricultural
improvement (thanks to Arthur Young and the Board of Agriculture, and
the long reign of high prices) was raising the average produce very
sensibly. If the Napoleonic times were the times of a forced population
in England, they were also the times of a forced agricultural
production. Yet we ourselves, long after this stimulus, and after much
high farming unknown to our fathers, have reached only an average
produce of twenty-eight bushels per acre of arable land as compared with
twenty-three in 1770,[126] while the population has risen from about six
millions to thirty-five. It may be said that applies only to wheat. But
until lately wheat-growing was the chief object of all our scientific
agriculture; and this is the result of a century’s improvements. It is
far from an arithmetical increase; and, even had the produce been
multiplied sevenfold, along with the population, this would not
overthrow the contention of Malthus, for he is not speaking of any and
every increase of food, but of such an increase made by the same methods
and by the same kind of labour as raised the old supplies.[127] Once it
is acknowledged that to raise new food requires greater labour and new
inventions, while to bring new men into the world requires nothing more
than in all times past, the disparity of the two is already admitted.
The fact that the two processes are both dependent on the action of man,
and both practically illimitable, does not prevent them from being
essentially unlike.[128] Objectors often suppose that the tendency of
population to outrun subsistence is contradicted by the existence of
unpeopled or thinly-peopled countries, just as if the tendency of bodies
to attract each other were contradicted by the incompressibility of
matter. The important point to notice is that the one power is greater
than the other. The one is to the other as the hare is to the tortoise
in the fable. To make the slow tortoise win the race, we must send the
hare to sleep.[129]
Carey (_Social Science_, vol. i. ch. iii. § 5) represents the view of
Malthus by the following propositions:—1. “Matter tends to take upon
itself higher forms,” passing from inorganic to vegetable and animal
life, and from these to man. 2. Matter tends to take on itself the
vegetable and animal forms in an arithmetic ratio only. 3. It tends to
take its highest form, man, in a geometrical ratio, so that the highest
outstrips the lowest. In short he believes that Malthus holds the
geometrical increase to be true of man alone, and only the arithmetical
to be true of animals and vegetables. But Malthus really attributed the
tendency to geometrical increase to all life whatsoever, and
arithmetical to all food, as such.
In Macvey Napier’s Supplement to the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ (1824)
Malthus has left his mature statement of his cardinal principles, and,
at the risk of repetition, that account may be added here. The main
difference from the essay is in arrangement of the leading ideas; and we
may learn at least what he conceived to be their relative importance
towards the end of his life.
He begins by observing (1) that _all living things_, of whatever kind,
when furnished with their proper nourishment tend to increase in a
geometrical ratio, whether (as wheat) by multiplying sixfold in one
year, or (as sheep) by doubling their numbers in two years, tending to
fill the earth, the one in fourteen, the other in seventy-six years. But
(2) as a matter of fact they do not so increase, and the reason is
either man’s want of will or man’s want of power to provide them their
proper soil or pasture. The actual rate of increase is extremely slow,
while the power of increase is prodigious. (3) Physically man is as the
rest; and if we ask what is the factor of his geometrical increase, we
can only tell it, as in the case of wheat and sheep, by experience. (4)
In the case of other living beings, where there are most room and food
there is greatest increase. These conditions are best fulfilled for man
in the United States, where the distribution of wealth is better than in
other equally fertile places, and the greater number share the
advantages. The American census shows for the three decades between 1790
and 1820 a rate of increase that would double the numbers in 22⅓, 22½,
and 23⁷⁄₁₂ years respectively, after we deduct as immigrants ten
thousand on an average every year.
A striking indirect confirmation of this view of the American increase
was supplied to Malthus[130] by Joshua Milne, the author of the
_Treatise on Annuities_. His calculations were founded on the new
Swedish table of mortality. This table had been drawn up from the
registers of the first five years of the century, years of unusual
healthiness; and might therefore be presumed to represent the normal
condition of a new and healthy country like the United States better
than the old table drawn up from the years before sanitary reform and
vaccination. Milne took the Swedish table as his guide, and one million
of people as his unit of measurement; he calculated in what proportions
the component individuals of the million must belong to childhood,
youth, mature life, and old age, in order that by the principles of the
Swedish table the million might double itself by natural increase in
twenty-five years; and he arrived at a distribution so like that given
by the American census, that he was bound to conclude the American rate
of increase to be at the least very like one that doubles a population
in twenty-five years. But the Swedish law of mortality could not be
exactly true of the United States, which are healthier as a whole than
Sweden even in Sweden’s best years.[131] The United States themselves
are not the very healthiest and wealthiest and happiest country
conceivable; and their increase is therefore not the fastest
conceivable. If the observed fact of increase is the best proof of the
capacity for increase, the observed presence of checks leads to an _a
fortiori_ reasoning, whereby we infer the capacity for a greater
increase than any actually observed. To sum up the whole of this first
branch of the argument,—“taking into consideration the actual rate of
increase which appears from the best documents to have taken place over
a very large extent of country in the United States of America, very
variously circumstanced as to healthiness and rapidity of
progress,—considering further the rate of increase which has taken place
in New Spain and also in many countries of Europe, where the means of
supporting a family, and other circumstances favourable to increase,
bear no comparison with those of the United States,—and adverting
particularly to the actual increase of population which has taken place
in this country during the last twenty years[132] under the formidable
obstacles which must press themselves upon the attention of the most
careless observer, it must appear that the assumption of a rate of
increase such as would double the population in twenty-five years, as
representing the natural progress of population when not checked by the
difficulty of procuring the means of subsistence or other peculiar
causes of premature mortality, must be decidedly within the truth. It
may be safely asserted, therefore, that population when unchecked
increases in a geometrical ratio of such a nature as to double itself
every twenty-five years.”[133]
The problem is only half stated; it is still to be shown what is the
rate of the increase of Food. The case does not admit the same kind of
proof. We can suppose an unchecked increase of men going on without any
change in human nature; we have only to suppose for the future the same
encouragement to marriage and the same habits of life, together with the
same law of mortality. But with the increase of food the causes do not
remain the same. If good land could be got in abundance, the increase of
food from it would be in a geometrical ratio far greater than that of
the men; that of wheat, for example, would be sixfold, as we have seen.
But good lands are comparatively few; they will in the nature of things
soon be occupied; and then the increase of the food will be a laborious
process at a rate rather resembling a decreasing than an increasing
geometrical ratio. “The yearly increment of food, at least, would have a
constant tendency to diminish;” and the amount of the increase in each
successive ten years would probably be less and less. In practice, the
inequalities of distribution may check the increase of food with
precisely the same efficacy as an actual arrival at the physical limits
to the getting of the food. “A man who is locked up in a room may fairly
be said to be confined by the walls of it, though he may never touch
them.”[134] But the main point is, that, inequalities or no
inequalities, there is a tendency to diminished productiveness. Under
either condition the quantity yielded this year will not be doubled or
trebled for an indefinite period with the same ease as it was yielded
this year. In a tolerably well-peopled country such as England or
Germany the utmost might be an increase every twenty-five years equal to
the present produce. But the continuance of this would mean that in the
next two hundred years every farm should produce eight times what it
does now, or, in five hundred years, twenty times as much; and even this
is incredible, though it would be only an arithmetical progression. No
doubt almost all parts of the earth are now more thinly peopled than
their capacities might allow; but the difficulty is to use the
capacities. That this view of Malthus need not imply any ignorance or
any disregard of the resources of high farming may be judged from the
fact that our highest agricultural authority, who recognizes the power
of English farming to provide on emergency even for our entire annual
wants, admits at the same time that, “where full employment and the
means of subsistence are abundant, population increases in geometrical
progression, and therefore in a far more rapid proportion than the
increased productiveness of the soil, which after a certain point is
stationary.”[135] “It follows necessarily” (sums up Malthus) “that the
average rate of the actual increase of population over the greatest part
of the globe, obeying the same law as the increase of food, must be
totally of a different character from the rate at which it would
increase if unchecked.” On no single farm could the produce be so
increased as to keep pace with the geometrical increase of population;
and what is true of a single farm is true in this case of the whole
earth. Machinery and invention can do less in agriculture than in
manufacture, and they can never do so much as to make preventive checks
unnecessary.[136]
This is the argument of the _Encyclopædia_ so far as it relates to the
theses of the essay. Malthus follows it up by a remark on the
institution of property. The alternatives to his mind are always private
property as we now have it, and common property as desired by Godwin. He
upholds the first because, “according to all past experience and the
best observation which can be made on the motives which operate upon the
human mind,” the largest produce from the soil is got by that system,
and because (what is socially much more important), by making a man feel
his responsibility and his dependence on his own efforts, it tends to
cause prudence in marriage as well as industry in work. Common property
has not been successful, historically; and the widest extension of
popular education would not make men the fitter for it. There is indeed
a sense in which common property might tend to carry production farther
than private property; cultivation, not being for profit but for mere
living, would not, like the present, stop at the point where production
ceased to be a good investment. But this would mean[137] that the whole
energies of the society were directed to the mere getting of food;
neither the whole society nor any part of it would have leisure, for
intellectual labour or enjoyment. Whereas private property not only
secures the leisure, but, by stopping at the point of profitableness, it
keeps an unused reserve, on which society may fall back in case of need.
Malthus therefore would stand by private property, though he thinks that
private proprietors may damage the national wealth by game-preserving,
and injure the poorer classes by not spending enough on what they
make.[138]
The actual increase of population (he goes on) and the necessity of
checks to it depend on the difficulty of getting food, from whatever
cause, whether the exhaustion of the earth or the bad structure of
society; and the difficulty is not for the remote future but for the
present.
It is chiefly the contrast between the actual and the possible supplies
that makes men incredulous about the necessity of checks; and we may
grant that under an ideal government, a perfect people, and faultless
social system the produce would at first be so great that the necessity
for checks on population would be very much reduced; but, as the earth’s
productiveness does not expand with population, it would be a very short
time before the pressure of the checks would reassert itself—this time
from no fault of man, but from the mere nature of the soil.[139] The bad
government of our ancestors left much produce unused, and in consequence
we have for the present a large margin to draw on. But, “if merely since
the time of William the Conqueror all the nations of the earth had been
well governed, and if the distribution of property and the habits both
of the rich and the poor had been the most favourable to the demand for
produce and labour, though the amount of food and population would have
been prodigiously greater than at present, the means of diminishing the
checks to population would unquestionably be less.”
But, though the laws of nature are responsible for the necessity of
checks to population,[140] “a vast mass of responsibility remains
behind, on man and the institutions of society.” To them in the first
place is due the scantiness of the present population of the earth,
there being few parts of it that would not with better government and
better morals support twice, ten times, or even one hundred times as
many inhabitants as now. In the second place, though man cannot remove
the necessity of checks, or even make them press much more lightly in
any given place,[141] he is responsible for their precise character and
particular mode of operation. A good government and good institutions
can so direct them that they shall be least hurtful to the general
virtue and happiness, vice and misery disappearing before moral
restraint, though after all the influence of government and institutions
is indirect, and everything depends on the conduct of the individual
citizens.
The rest of the article contains little that is not in the _Essay on
Population_ (5th ed., 1817) and the treatise on _Political Economy_ (1st
ed., 1820). It gives the historical sketches of the former, some small
part of the economical discussions (_e. g._ on wages) of the latter, and
a short answer to current objections, together with some tables of
mortality and other figures, of more special interest to the
professional actuary than to the general reader. The article is an
authoritative summary of the author’s doctrines in their final form. It
was not his last work. From the fact that he undertook the paper in
Sept. 1821,[142] we may perhaps infer that he placed it in Macvey
Napier’s hands in the year 1822.[143] But it was his last attempt to
restate the subject of the essay in an independent form with anything
approaching to fulness of detail, and it shows he had made no change in
his position. The _Summary View of the Principle of Population_ (1830)
was avowedly an abridgment of the article in the _Encyclopædia_, and is
in fact that article with a few paragraphs omitted and a few pronouns
altered.
The clear statement of the two tendencies was, in his own eyes, the
least original part of his work. It had been often perceived distinctly
by other writers that population must always be kept down to the level
of the means of subsistence. “Yet few inquiries have been made into the
various modes by which this level is effected, and the principle has
never been sufficiently pursued to its consequences, nor those practical
inferences drawn from it which a strict examination of its effects on
society appears to suggest.”[144] What some people would count the more
interesting question remained to be considered——the question that
touches individuals and familiar circumstances more nearly, and is not
to be answered by a generality, from which we easily in thought except
our own individual selves. Since, at any given time, in any given place,
among any given people, there is (1) a tendency of population to outrun
subsistence, and there is (2) no such excess as a matter of fact, in
what way or ways is the tendency prevented from carrying itself out? As
was said above,[145] this is effected in two kinds of ways—(1) by the
way of a positive, (2) by the way of a preventive check, the former
cutting down an actual population to the level of its food, the second
forbidding a population to need to be cut down, and being, so far as it
is voluntary, peculiar to man among living creatures. Of the positive,
all those that come from the laws of nature may be called misery pure
and simple; and all those that men bring on themselves by wars,
excesses, and avoidable troubles of all kinds are of a mixed character,
their causes being vice and their consequences misery. Of the
preventive, that restraint from marriage which is not accompanied by any
immoral conduct on the part of the person restraining himself or herself
is called moral restraint. Any restraint which is prudential and
preventive, but immoral, comes under the head of vice, for every action
may be so called which has “a general tendency to produce misery,”
however innocuous its immediate effects.[146] We find, therefore, that
the positive and the preventive checks are all resolvable into vice,
misery, and moral restraint, or sin, pain, and self-control, a threefold
division that makes the second essay “differ in principle” from the
first.[147]
We have here a twofold alongside of a threefold division of the checks
to population. The one is made from an objective, the other from a
subjective point of view. The division of checks (1) into positive and
preventive has regard simply to the outward facts; a population is in
those two ways kept down to the food. The division of them (2) into
vice, misery, and moral restraint has regard to the human agent and his
inward condition, the state of his feelings and of his will. For
example, the positive check viewed subjectively, or from the human
being’s point of view, is the feeling of pain; the will is not directly
concerned with it. The preventive, from the same point of view, is of a
less simple character. First of all, moral restraint involves a
temporary misery or pain in the thwarting of a desire; “considered as a
restraint upon an inclination otherwise innocent and always natural, it
must be allowed to produce a certain degree of temporary unhappiness,
but evidently slight compared with the evils which result from any of
the other checks to population,”[148] and “merely[149] of the same
nature as many other sacrifices of temporary to permanent gratification
which it is the business of a moral agent continually to make.” The
reverse is true of vicious excesses and passions; in their immediate
gratification they are pleasant, but their permanent effects are misery.
From the point of view of the will the case is clear, for the state of
the will would be described by Malthus, if he ever used such terms, as
in the one case good, and in the other case evil, pure and simple. Of
course in treating the matter historically we may neglect the subjective
point of view, not because it is not necessary for proper knowledge of
the facts, but because it leads to a psychological inquiry, the results
of which are independent of dates.
Malthus goes on to say that, in all cases where there is the need for
checks at all, it is the sum total of all the preventive and positive
checks that forms the check to population in any given country at any
given time,[150] and his endeavour will be to show in what relative
proportions and in what degree they prevail in various countries known
to us. He assumes further that the preventive and the positive checks
will “vary inversely as each other.” In countries where the mortality is
great the influence of the preventive check will be small; and, where
the preventive check prevails much, the positive check, or in brief the
mortality, will be small.[151]
In society, as it was in the first years of the nineteenth century,
Malthus thinks he can trace out even by his own observation an
“oscillation,” or what it is the fashion to call a “cycle,” in the
movement of population. History does not show it well, simply because
“the histories of mankind which we possess are in general only of the
higher classes,”[152] and it is the labouring classes to which the
observation applies. Their painful experience of the ruder checks has
not prevented a “constant effort” in the labouring population to have
larger families than they can well support. The consequence is that
their numbers are increased; they must divide amongst eleven and a half
millions the food that was formerly divided among eleven millions; they
must have lower wages and dearer provisions. But this state of distress
will so check population that in process of time the numbers will be
almost at a standstill, while at the same time, since the demand for
food has been greater and labour has been cheaper, the application of
capital to agriculture will have increased the available food. The
result will be the same tolerable degree of comfort as at the beginning
of the cycle, and the same relapse from it as at the second stage. He
conceives the two stages to follow each other as naturally as sunshine
rain and rain sunshine. The existence of such a cycle may remain
concealed from the ordinary historian, if he looks merely to the money
wages of the labourer, for it frequently happens that the labourer gets
the same sums of money for his wages during a long series of years when
the real value of the sums has not remained the same,—the price of bread
in what we have called the second stage of the cycle being much dearer
than it was in the first, and than it will be in the third.[153] Though
Malthus expressly qualifies his statements by showing that civilization
tends to counteract these fluctuations, it certainly seemed to be his
belief in 1803 that on the whole the working classes of Europe, and
especially of England, were powerless to escape from them. How far this
view is justified will be seen presently.