THE SAVAGE, BARBARIAN, AND ORIENTAL.
Simile supplanted by Fact—Savage Life—Population dependent not on
possible but on actual Food—Indirect Action of Positive
Checks—Hunger not a Principle of Progress—Otaheite a Crux for Common
Sense—Cycle in the Movement of Population—Pitcairn Island—Barbarian
and Oriental—Nomad Shepherds—Abram and Lot—Cimbri and
Teutones—Gibbon _versus_ Montesquieu—“At bay on the limits of the
Universe”—Misgovernment an indirect Check on Population—Ancient
Europe less populous than Modern—Civilization the gradual Victory of
the third Check.
The main position of the essay was so incontrovertible, that when the
critics despaired to convict Malthus of a paradox, they charged him with
a truism. To the friendly Hallam[154] the mathematical basis of the
argument appeared as certain as the multiplication table, and the
unfriendly Hazlitt “did not see what there was to discover after reading
the tables of Noah’s descendants, and knowing that the world is
round.”[155] If the essayist had done nothing more than put half-truths
together into a whole, he would have “entrenched himself in an
impregnable fortress” and given his work a great “air of mastery.”[156]
But he would have convinced the understanding without convincing the
imagination. Adam Smith himself would have done no more than half his
work, if he had been content to prove the reasonableness of free trade
without showing, in detail, the effect of it and its opposites. Even the
most competent reader has seldom all the relevant facts marshalled in
his memory, ready to command; and he will always be thankful for
illustrations. The _Essay on Population_ in its second form certainly
excelled all economical works, save one, in its pertinent examples from
life and history.
Imagination in the narrower sense of the word is to be out of court.
Malthus, like Adam Smith, not only leaves little to his reader’s fancy,
but makes little use of his own. His own had misled his readers in the
first essay, though it had certainly given that little book much of its
piquancy; and he resolves for the sake of truth to chain it up, as
Coleridge chained up his understanding. The self-denying ordinance is
only too fully executed. The style of his essay is truly described by
himself[157] as having gradually “lost all pretensions to merit.”
Edition follows edition, each with its footnotes, supplements,
rearrangements, and corrections, till the reader feels that this writer
“would be clearer if he were not so clear.”
But the title-page supplies a guiding thread. From the second edition
onwards to the last, “Past” and “Present” appear in large letters,
“Future” in small. The entire work may therefore be divided according to
the three tenses, with the emphasis on the two former. The first book is
devoted to the past, the second to the present, and the third and fourth
to the future.
The First deals with the less civilized parts of the world as it now is,
and the uncivilized past times; the Second with the different states of
modern Europe; the Third criticizes popular schemes of future
improvement; while the Fourth gives the author’s own views of the
possible progress of humanity.
After explaining his principles, Malthus takes a survey of human
progress, if not from brute to savage, at least from savage to citizen.
He shows us how the rude and simple positive checks become complicated
with the preventive; and he leads us up from barbarism to civilization
till we find ourselves in a society where the citizens think less of
check than of chief end, and less of self-sacrifice than of
self-devotion, to some cause or person, and even the inferior members
act, at worst, from mixed motives, containing good as well as evil.
These are the two extreme ends of his line. It would be useless to deny
that he lingers longest over the less pleasing, and gives Godwin some
excuse for questioning his logical right to believe in the more pleasing
at all.[158] At the same time it would have been (even logically)
impossible for him to have attacked Godwin for taking abstract views of
human nature, and then to have persisted in an abstraction of his own,
after all his own European travel and historical studies. His fault had
lain in defective premises, not in false reasoning; and he remedies the
fault.
Let us take his account in his own order. Beginning with present
savagery, which with some qualifications is a picture of our own past,
he sifts out the descriptions of Cook, Vancouver, and other travellers,
to see what checks to population operate in different grades of savage
humanity. At the very bottom of the scale comes Tierra del Fuego, by
general consent the abode of pure misery, and therefore naturally the
home of a sparse population. Next come the natives of the Andaman
Islands and of Van Diemen’s Land. “Their whole time is spent in search
of food,” which consists of the raw products of the soil and sea; the
whole time of every individual is devoted to this one labour, and there
is neither room nor inducement for any other industries. Vice is hardly
needed; misery in the shape of perpetual scarcity and famine keeps down
the people to the food. Third in the scale of human beings are the New
Hollanders, the original inhabitants of North-West Australia, among whom
can be traced not only the check of misery, but the check of vice. The
women are so cruelly treated at all times, and the children have so
harsh an upbringing, that there is no difficulty in understanding how
population does not even reach the full limit of the scanty food. War
and pestilence make the assurance doubly sure. As savages are entirely
innocent of sanitary science, the dirt of their persons and their houses
deprives them of “the advantage which usually attends a thinly-peopled
country,” comparative exemption from pestilence.[159] Even the North
American Indians, who are one step higher than the New Hollanders, come
under the same condemnation for overcrowding, and for much else besides.
The account which Malthus gives of them may be compared with that of De
Tocqueville half a century later. Romance has clung to them only because
they were the nearest and best known savages of their kind, and their
necessary labours were in Europe rich men’s pleasures. But hunting and
river-fishing cannot yield much food unless pursued over a wide area. A
hunter is so far like the beast of prey which he pursues, that he must
go long distances for his food, and must either fly from or overcome
every rival. The North American Indian must therefore either go West
after his old food, or else he must stay where he is, to beat off the
Europeans, or to adopt their food and their habits. “The Indians have
only two ways of saving themselves, war and civilization. They must
either destroy the Europeans or become their equals.”[160] As the
civilization of a nation of hunters is almost impossible, their
extinction seems inevitable. The question remains, How is this
population cut down to the level of its food?
In Malthus’ answer to the question occur three remarks of great general
importance. First, what limits the numbers of a people is not the
possible but the actual food.[161] Second, want destroys a population
less often directly by starvation than indirectly through the medium of
manners and customs.[162] Third, the mere pressure of impending
starvation does not lead to progress.[163]
Malthus is never tired of insisting on the first of these remarks; and a
proper understanding of it is essential to a fair judgment on his
doctrine. He never says that it is the tendency of a population to
increase up to the limits of the greatest possible amount of food that
can be produced in a given country. The valley of the Mississippi when
highly cultivated may possibly support a hundred millions; but the
question is not what it would do when highly cultivated, but what it can
do when cultivated as it now is and as men now are. “In a general view
of the American continent as described by historians, the population
seems to have been spread over the surface very nearly in proportion to
the quantity of food which the inhabitants of the different parts in the
actual state of their industry and improvements could as a matter of
fact obtain; and that with few exceptions it pressed hard against this
limit, rather than fell short of it, appears from the frequent
recurrence of distress for want of food in all parts of America.”[164]
What is said here of the Indians a hundred years ago applies to the
Colonists now. “The actual state of industry” is of course a much more
improved one; but the population the land will bear is still in
proportion to it, and the amount could not have been increased till the
actual state of the industry had first been bettered. One cause of the
decay of the numbers of the Indians was that their method of industry,
so far from becoming better, became worse by their contact with
Europeans, and therefore the limit of population was actually contracted
instead of being extended.[165] This explains how it is that their
diminishing numbers do not bring them greater comfort. Whether the
numbers in any given case are too great or too small depends always on
the quantity of the food that is divided among them; and, where the food
decreases faster than the population, a population that has become
smaller numerically becomes actually larger in proportion to the food.
The statement that England or any other country could bear millions more
than it does now is a mere reference to unexplored possibilities,
landing us in the infinite. It may be answered in the same way as the
Eleatic puzzles about motion; land infinitely improvable does not mean
land infinitely improved, as matter infinitely divisible does not mean
matter infinitely divided. The position of Malthus is therefore as
follows: given a people’s skill, and given its standard of living at any
time, its numbers are always tending to be the utmost that can be
furnished by that skill with a living up to that standard,—that is to
say, with what, according to that standard, are the necessaries of human
life. Either a diminution of that skill or an increase in that standard
would cause over-population. The question is always a relative one.
The human as distinguished from the animal character of the problem
appears not only in that relativity (which affects mainly the preventive
checks), but in the indirect way in which the positive checks, if we may
say so, prefer to act. It is as if they were always desirous of
resolving themselves as far as might be into preventive. The ultimate
check, Malthus says, is starvation; but, he adds, it is seldom the
immediate one. The higher up we go in the scale, the more it is hidden
away out of sight. Starvation is interpreted, by all grades of society
above the lowest, to mean the loss of what they conceive to be the
necessaries not of a bare living but of endurable life; and even the
lowest, instead of apprehending some pain, apprehend some bringer of it.
They do not allow famine to kill them; they create manners and customs
that do the work for it, keeping the famine itself afar off. “Both
theory and experience uniformly instruct us that a less abundant supply
of food operates with a gradually increasing pressure for a very long
time before its progress is stopped. It is difficult indeed to conceive
a more tremendous shock to society than the event of its coming at once
to the limits of the means of subsistence, with all the habits of
abundance and early marriages, which accompany a largely increasing
population. But, happily for mankind, this never is nor ever can be the
case. The event is provided for by the concurrent interests and feelings
of individuals long before it arrives; and the gradual diminution of the
real wages of the labouring classes of society slowly and almost
insensibly generates the habits necessary for an order of things in
which the funds for the maintenance of labour are stationary.... The
causes [of the retardation of population] will be generally felt and
[will] generate a change of habits long before the period arrives.”[166]
“An insufficient supply of food to any people does not show itself
merely in the shape of famine, but in other more permanent forms of
distress, and in generating certain customs which operate sometimes with
greater force in the prevention of a rising population” than in the
destruction of the risen.[167] Robertson the historian truly says, that
whether civilization has improved the lot of men may be doubtful, but it
has certainly improved the condition of women. Among the Indians and
almost all savages, “servitude is a name too mild to describe their
wretched state.” The hard life of the men kills their instinctive
fondness for the women; the latter are therefore less likely to become
mothers, while, if they do, their own hardships and heavy tasks are a
great hindrance to nursing. It is not surprising that the surviving
children are of good physique; none but the exceptionally strong could
weather the cruel discipline of childhood.[168] In South America the
difficulty of upbringing actually led to an enforced monogamy, as well
as to late marriages and their not unfrequent accompaniment,
irregularities before marriage. Such customs diminish numbers. But even
the adult savages do not find life easy. They are not the men to think
of providing for a rainy day; in the short moments of plenty they do not
think of the long days of want. Intemperate living as well as the rigour
and the accidents of a hunting life cut off numbers in their prime. They
are subject to diseases and invent no remedies. Their acquiescence in
dirt leads to pestilences, but they invent no sanitary reforms; and
their thinly-peopled country loses its natural exemption from epidemics.
Their wars are internecine, for they are largely prompted by sheer
self-preservation, and the thought that if the one combatant lives the
other cannot. Cannibalism itself was at first due to extreme want,
though what occasional hunger had begun, hate perpetuated in a custom.
This and the low cunning and mean strategy, due to a resolve to survive
at all costs, are the prime inventions of the struggle for existence on
these low levels.
Such are the causes by which the numbers of the North American Indians
are kept down to a very low figure; but, low as it is, the figure is
high enough for the food. Apart from a difference in the standard of
living, the proportion of population to food is similar over the
inhabited world; and in the same neighbourhood or among cognate races it
will be almost identical. A diminution in one Indian tribe, not being
voluntary, will not be the cause of plenty to the survivors; it has been
the effect of want, and it will simply weaken the collective force of
the tribe in the struggle against others.[169]
The supremacy of want as the ultimate check on population is illustrated
by the instant expansion of population which is produced in these grades
of humanity by an accession of plenty. When a tribe falls upon fertile
land, its numbers swell, and its collective might, depending on numbers,
becomes greater. The increase of food, however, seems in this case to
lead to nothing else than increase of numbers. There is a melancholy
equality of suffering between tribe and tribe, as well as between
members of the same tribe. There is no distinction of rank, but only of
sex and bodily strength, as regards endurance of hardships.
It is in this connection that Malthus throws some light on the question
how progress could ever take place at all. His answer is not unlike Adam
Smith’s remark about the connection of high wages with good work. He
says, that beyond a certain limit, hard fare and great want depress men
below the very capacity of improvement; comfort must reach a certain
height before the desires of civilized life can come into being at all.
If the American tribes, he says, have remained hunters, it is not simply
because they have not increased in numbers sufficiently to render the
pastoral or agricultural state necessary to them. Reasons which Malthus
does not pretend to particularize,[170] and which he allows to be
unconnected with mere increase or decrease of numbers, have prevented
these tribes from ever trying to raise cattle or grow corn at all. “If
hunger alone could have prompted the savage tribes of America to such a
change in their habits, I do not conceive that there would have been a
single nation of hunters and fishers remaining; but it is evident that
some fortunate train of circumstances, in addition to this stimulus, is
necessary for this purpose; and it is undoubtedly probable that these
arts of obtaining food will be first invented and improved in those
spots which are best suited to them, and where the natural fertility of
the situation, by allowing a greater number of people to subsist
together, would give the fairest chance to the inventive powers of the
human mind.” “A certain degree of [political] security is perhaps still
more necessary than richness of soil to encourage the change from the
pastoral to the agricultural state.”[171] These passages are remarkable
because they seem to contradict the general tenor of the author’s
writings. We were told with great emphasis in the first edition of the
essay that difficulties generate talents,[172] and even the second and
later are full of approving commentaries on the proverb, “Necessity is
the mother of invention.”[173] The contradiction is soon solved. Malthus
has no faith in the civilizing power of competition when it means a
struggle among starved men for bare life, but much faith in it when it
means the struggle for greater comfort among those who already have the
animal necessaries.[174] The significance of his admissions will be
noticed later. Meanwhile it must be observed that the passage just
quoted is not perfectly precise. The larger the society, the greater
might be the division of labour and consequent stimulus to invention;
but a tribe might be large and yet have little in it of a society, and
still less of a division of labour. Without such favouring circumstances
as Malthus mentions the progress cannot take place; but even with them
it need not; they are therefore not the real motive power.
The account of the state of population among the South Sea
Islanders,[175] which comes next in order to the chapter on the American
Indians, is an illustration of these remarks. These savages live in a
fertile country and yet they make no progress. As this is not the only
point illustrated, it is worth while to look at the chapter in detail.
Malthus begins by observing that population must not be thought more
subject to checks on an island than on a continent. The Abbé Raynal, in
his book on the Indies, had tried to explain a number of modern customs
that retarded population[176] by referring them to an insular origin. He
thought that they were caused at first by the over-population of Britain
and other islands, and were imported therefrom into the continents, to
the perplexity of later ages. But as a matter of fact population on the
mainlands is subject to the same laws as on the islands, though the
limits are not so obvious to common observation, and the case is not put
so neatly in a nutshell. A nation on the continent may be as completely
surrounded by its enemies or its rivals, savage or civilized, as any
islanders by the sea; and emigration may be as difficult in the one case
as in the other. Both continent and island are peopled up to their
actual produce. “There is probably no island yet known, the produce of
which could not be further increased. This is all that can be said of
the whole earth. Both are peopled up to their actual produce. And the
whole earth is in this respect like an island.”[177] The earth is indeed
more isolated than any island of the sea, for no emigration from it is
possible. The question, therefore, to be asked about the whole earth as
about any part of it, is, “By what means the inhabitants are reduced to
such numbers as it can support?”
This was the question which forced itself on Captain Cook when he
visited the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Some of his
experiences there, especially in New Zealand, show that the native
population was kept down in nearly the same way as the American. Their
chief peculiarity is the extreme violence of their local feuds. The
people of every village he visited petitioned him to destroy the people
of the next, and “if I had listened to them I should have extirpated the
whole race.” A sense of human kinship is impossible at so low a level of
being; and the internecine wars of the New Zealanders were the chief
check to their numbers, which, from the distressing effects of
occasional scarcities, would seem always at the best to have been close
to the limits of the food.
The first impression of common sense is that distress is natural where
food is scanty, and unnatural where it is plentiful. But “if we turn our
eyes from the thinly-scattered inhabitants of New Zealand to the crowded
shores of Otaheite and the Society Islands” we find no such phenomenon.
“All apprehension of death seems at first sight to be banished from a
country that is described to be fruitful as the garden of the
Hesperides.” But reflection tells us that happiness and plenty are the
most powerful causes of increase. We might, therefore, expect a large
population in Otaheite; at its first start it might double itself not in
twenty-five but in fifteen years. Captain Cook estimated it (on his
second voyage in 1773) as 204,000. How could a country about one hundred
and twenty miles in circuit support an increase that doubled these
numbers in twenty-five years? Emigration is impossible, for the other
islands are in the same situation. Further cultivation is inadequate,
for scientific invention is quite wanting. The answer is that the
increase does not take place, and yet there is no miracle.
Licentiousness among the higher classes, and infanticide amongst all
classes, are freely practised. The free permission of infanticide no
doubt, as Hume remarks,[178] tends as a rule rather to increase than to
diminish population, for “by removing the terrors of too numerous a
family it would engage many people in marriage,” and such is the force
of natural affection, that comparatively few parents would carry out
their first intentions. But in Otaheite in its old state custom had made
infanticide easy, and it was a real check. War against other islands was
a third check, frequently destroying the food as well as the people,
thus striking down two generations at once. All these checks
notwithstanding, the population was up to the level of the food, and
there was as much scarcity and keen distress as on any barren island.
Such at least was the state of things discovered by Captain Cook in his
three voyages (the last in 1778) and Captain Vancouver (in 1791). On the
other hand, the author of _A Missionary Voyage to the South Pacific
Ocean in 1796–8_ (London, 1799) found a people very scanty as compared
with the food. The accuracy of both accounts is borne out by the
description of the habits of the people at these two periods. Captain
Cook says they were careful to save up every scrap of food, and yet
suffered often from famine. The missionaries observe the frequency of
famine in the Friendly Islands and the Marquesas, but say of the
Otaheitans that they are extremely wasteful, and yet never seem to be in
want. Even in the intervals between one of Cook’s voyages and another
the state of the island had altered. Malthus sees here an illustration
of two facts. The one is that, apart from changes in the standard of
living, population fluctuates between great excess and great defect,
great numbers with great mortality, and great comfort with rapid
multiplication of numbers. The other, which explains the first, is that
any cause affecting population, either towards increase or towards
decrease, continues to act for some time after the disappearance of the
circumstances that first occasioned it. For example, over-populousness
would lead to wars,[179] and the enmities of these wars would long
survive their first occasion. Again, over-populousness would lead to
greater infanticide and vice, which would become habitual. New
circumstances would, no doubt, after a time bring new habits, and, to
use the author’s words, would “restore the population, which could not
long be kept below its natural level without the most extreme violence.
How far European contact may operate in Otaheite with this extreme
violence and prevent it from recovering its former population is a point
which experience only can determine. But, should this be the case, I
have no doubt that on tracing the causes of it, we should find them to
be aggravated vice and misery.”[180] As a matter of fact either European
contact has caused a diminution, or exacter inquiry has made a lower
estimate of the population of all Polynesia. The people of the whole
Society Islands is reckoned at between 15,000 and 18,000,[181] which is
a long way from Cook’s estimate of 204,000 for Otaheite alone. We can
hardly believe, however, that the vice and misery of Otaheite are more
than ten times as great as they were in 1773; and perhaps we may suppose
Malthus to mean that, if the European influences were of the same
character at the end as they were at the beginning, and were as
pernicious to the Polynesian as to the Red Indian, the language of
pessimism would be justified. The passage at least shows how unfair it
is to suppose Malthus to desire at all costs a small population; he is
careful to say that, while vice in Otaheite by reducing the numbers
caused a transient plenty among the survivors, still “a cause which may
prevent any particular evil may be beyond comparison worse than the evil
itself.”[182] Life itself may be bought too dear.
No good is done, however, by denying that excessive numbers are an evil,
or by optimistic assertion that if men are only good they will be happy.
There is at least one Polynesian island whose past history gives a
picturesque proof of the contrary. Pitcairn, “the lonely isle of the
Mutineers,” was a moral contrast to Otaheite. The inhabitants owed
nothing good to their parents, who were the mutineers of H.M.S.
‘Bounty,’ and the women of Otaheite that came with them in 1790, when
they first took refuge in Pitcairn Island. They owed all to the
religious teaching of John Adams, which made them so good, that there
were few like them on the earth.[183] But in latitudes just touching the
tropics, with a single square mile of poor soil, surrounded by wide
ocean, they had no outlet for trade and modern arts. Like the
inhabitants of Godwin’s Utopia,[184] they soon peopled the little
country to the full extent of the food that could be got by the old
methods, and, unlike the Utopians, they had not skill to invent new. If
they had not drawn the line for themselves, misery would have done it
for them. Their little colony at its first founding consisted of fifteen
men and twelve women. Fourteen men and many women died off in the course
of the ten years which passed before the time of moral regeneration. But
they left many children; and, when the patriarch John Adams was visited
by a passing ship in 1814, he was surrounded by a happy circle of devout
families. Rapidly outgrowing the resources of the place, these simple
folk removed in 1831 to Tahiti, eighty-seven strong. Some remained
there; others had no pleasure in their new abode, and came back to
suffer affliction with the people of God, believing with Malthus that “a
cause which may prevent any particular evil may be beyond all comparison
worse than the evil itself.” The evil was real, however, and, in default
of celibacy or new ways of bread winning, their only cure seemed
emigration. So in 1855, Tahiti seeming ineligible, they journeyed
further west to Norfolk Island. Though there are more than four hundred
and forty to the square mile in England and Wales, two hundred people of
this primitive sort had been certainly too many for the single square
mile of Pitcairn Island; and they did not leave a moment too soon. Home
sickness brought back two entire families (of seventeen persons) in
1859. One or two stray travellers joined them five years afterwards;
but, with allowance for these, we find that the increase of population
on Pitcairn Island reaches the highest estimate of Malthus. When the
English Admiral D’Horsey visited the place in 1878, the quarter of a
hundred had grown in nineteen years, at the moderate cost of twelve
deaths, to a population of ninety[185] persons. The primeval virtues
will avail little without the modern arts.
Returning to Malthus, we find him following an order of his own, in
rough conformity with the orthodox progress from deer to sheep, and from
sheep to corn. He takes us from Polynesian savages to the nomad pastoral
nations of ancient Europe.[186] The vast migrations and their momentous
historical effects he ascribes to the “constant tendency in the human
race to increase” beyond its food, and thinks that when history has been
rewritten it will contain more of this.[187] “The misfortune of history
is, that while the particular motives of a few princes and leaders are
sometimes detailed with accuracy, the general causes which crowd their
standards with willing followers are totally overlooked.”[188] At first
sight the phenomenon of civilized agricultural nations unable to repel
the invasion of shepherds seems incredible; a country in pasture cannot
possibly support so many inhabitants as a country in tillage. A
shepherd, it is true, is nearer to the skilled labourer than a hunter;
he does not simply take what nature gives him, where nature puts it; he
keeps the desired objects of consumption under his own control, and his
life is stronger because more social. Early African colonization, as
Adam Smith pointed out, was less successful than early American, because
the natives, being shepherds and even farmers rather than fishermen,
were stronger in their resources and more united than the American
aborigines, so that the European intruders were not able to displace
them.[189] We should have expected the Scythian, Cimbrian, and Gothic
invaders of ancient times to have had a similar rebuff. “But what
renders nations of shepherds so formidable is the power which they
possess of moving altogether, and the necessity they frequently feel of
exerting this power in search of fresh pasture for their herds.”[190]
They have always in their breeding stock a reserve of food for an
emergency. The mere consciousness that their mode of life does not bind
them to one place gives them less anxiety about providing for a family.
Therefore, when they exhaust one region and begin to feel the pinch of
want, they make an armed emigration on the scale of whole tribes at
once, for the occupation of more fruitful regions, and, as a rule, the
conquest of them by force. The law of their life is a series of
periodical “struggles for existence”[191] between one nation and
another, in which the fittest survive at the cost of a prodigious waste
of human life.
The milder initial stage of this process is illustrated by the
separation of Abram and Lot in the book of Genesis.[192] Abram “was very
rich in cattle.” “Lot also had flocks and herds and tents. And the land
was not able to bear them that they might dwell together, for their
substance was great, so that they could not dwell together. And there
was a strife between the herdmen of Abram’s cattle and the herdmen of
Lot’s cattle.” They agreed, therefore, to separate, Lot choosing the
fertile valley of the Jordan, Abram going to the left into the land of
Canaan. Migrations of the same sort, more or less peaceable, are
described by modern writers as extending the Russian people from time to
time farther and farther to the south and east.[193] In the instances
best known to history the migrations were far from peaceable, and the
puzzle has been to account for their recurrence. The slaughter of the
German barbarians by Marius, Cæsar, Drusus, Tiberius, Germanicus did not
prevent the reappearance of similar hordes of invaders a generation
later. Claudius destroyed a quarter of a million of Goths; Aurelian and
Probus had the same work to do again. Under Diocletian the barbarians,
finding the conquest of Rome too much for them, slaughtered one another
in frontier wars. No losses seemed to exhaust the permanent
possibilities of population in those quarters. At last in the fourth
century “clouds of barbarians seemed to collect from all parts of the
northern hemisphere. Gathering fresh darkness and terror as they rolled
on, the congregated bodies at length obscured the sun of Italy and sunk
the Western world in night.”[194]
Why were the resources of the North so inexhaustible? Simply because the
power of increase is inexhaustible. The North was not, it is true, more
densely peopled then than now. “The climate of ancient Germany has been
mollified and the soil fertilized by the labour of ten centuries from
the time of Charlemagne. The same extent of ground which at present
maintains in ease and plenty a million of husbandmen and artificers, was
unable to supply a hundred thousand lazy warriors with the simple
necessaries of life. The Germans abandoned their immense forests to the
exercise of hunting, employed in pasturage the most considerable part of
their lands, bestowed on the small remainder a rude and careless
cultivation, and then accused the scantiness and sterility of a country
that refused to maintain the multitude of its inhabitants. When the
return of famine severely admonished them of the importance of the arts,
the national distress was sometimes alleviated by the emigration of a
third, perhaps, or a fourth part of their youth.”[195] In short, the
countries were more than fully peopled up to their actual produce; and,
though by agriculture the actual produce would have been made greater,
yet agriculture was not extended. The passion of the Germans for wine
did not lead them to plant vineyards by the Rhine and Danube, but to rob
the vintage of Italy. “Pigrum quin immo et iners videtur sudore
acquirere quod possis sanguine parare.”[196] Malthus supposes that even
the Mark system of land-holding, with its absence of cities and its
periodical redistributions of land, may have sprung from a political
motive, the fear of accustoming the people to a settled agricultural
life, and the desire to make emigration less irksome to them.[197] So
long as there were weaker peoples to be plundered, the northern nations
might freely double their numbers every twenty-five years, or oftener,
and descend again on Italy and the South. Only when the whole was
occupied by their own people who were not likely to be less stout for
defence than for conquest, were the hordes forced back. Not perhaps till
gunpowder was invented was Europe finally safe against them. Long after
their last inland invasions, the Norsemen found their way by sea to the
shores of England and France.
Gibbon’s account of the matter is, according to Malthus, substantially
true. The only flaw is that he thinks it necessary, in denying the
greater populousness of North Europe in ancient times, to deny the
possibility of a rapid increase of population.[198] The German people
were on the whole virtuous and healthy in their manners of living, and,
the checks to increase being mainly the positive ones of war and famine,
the increase itself was prodigious. But Gibbon is greatly in advance of
Montesquieu, who believes with Sir William Temple, Mariana, and
Machiavelli, that the northern countries were, as a matter of fact, more
densely peopled then than they are now, and that, further, when the
Romans repelled them, a huge multitude was driven far north and remained
there biding its time. The same (says Montesquieu) happened under
Charlemagne, and would happen again if a modern prince were to make the
same ravages in Europe; “the nations repulsed to the north, backed
against the limits of the universe, would there make a firm stand, till
the moment when they would inundate and conquer Europe a third
time.”[199] We are to suppose these immense multitudes living “at the
limits of the universe” on ice and air for some hundreds of years. If
this is to answer to the question-begging question, why the North is
less fully peopled than it once was, it involves a miracle. But nothing
more supernatural than ordinary laws is really needed to explain the
movements of pastoral nations a thousand years ago. They are the same
that govern the Tartars and Bedouins now.[200]
In the modern nomads,[201] it is true, the comparative simplicity of the
circumstances and the comparative thoroughness of our knowledge about
them, enable us to see plainly that the local distribution of the people
is in strict accordance with the local distribution of the food, in
other words, with “the quantity of food the people can obtain in the
actual state of their industry and habits.” We should see the same thing
of the rest of the world’s inhabitants, if the complicated commerce of
civilized nations did not make it less gross and palpable. The power of
the earth to support life may be compared with the power of a horse to
carry burdens. He is strong in proportion to the strength of his weakest
part, as a chain to the strength of its weakest link; and the earth’s
powers of nourishment are great in proportion to their greatness in the
worst seasons of the year.[202] Again, owing to imperfect facilities for
distribution, one part of a society may suffer want when another is in
plenty.[203] Among the Tartars and the Arabs this is plainly seen; and
it is clear, too, how the waste of life from war not only acts as a
direct check on population, but checks it indirectly by repressing
productive industry. Its fruits would have no chance of preservation.
“Even the construction of a well requires some funds or labour in
advance, and war may destroy in one day the work of many months and the
resources of a whole year.”[204] When once warlike habits have become
fixed, the two evils, war and scarcity, reproduce and perpetuate one
another. The encouragements held out to large families by the Mohammedan
religion have a like effect. “The promise of Paradise to every man who
had ten children would but little increase their numbers, though it
might greatly increase their misery.”[205] It could only increase their
numbers if it increased their food, and it could not increase their food
without changing their warlike habits into habits of industry. Failing
this, it simply creates a constant uneasiness (through want and poverty)
that multiplies occasions of war. Fortunately for himself, the Arab
often proportions his religious obedience to the extent of his
resources,[206] and in hard times, “when there is a pig at hand and no
Koran,” he thinks best to eat what God has given him.
Nothing but increase of food will permanently increase population, and
where there is food the increase will reach up to it. In those parts of
Africa that have furnished the Western slave supplies, there has been no
discernible gap from the “hundred years’ exportation of negroes which
has blackened half America.”[207] Even in Egypt, where there is a
striking contrast between natural fertility and human lethargy, the
cause is not any deficiency in the principle of increase. It is that
property is insecure, the government being despotic and its exactions
indefinite. It is not the want of population that has checked industry,
but the want of industry that has checked population; and it is bad
government that has occasioned the want of industry. “Ignorance and
despotism seem to have no tendency to destroy the passion which prompts
to increase, but they effectually destroy the checks to it from reason
and forethought.... Industry cannot exist without foresight and
security; the indolence of the savage is well known, and the poor
Egyptian or Abyssinian farmer without capital, who rents land which is
let out yearly to the highest bidder, and who is constantly subject to
the demands of his tyrannical masters, to the casual plunder of an
enemy, and not unfrequently to the violation of his miserable contract,
can have no heart to be industrious, and, if he had, could not exercise
that industry with success. Even poverty itself, which appears to be the
great spur to industry, when it has once passed certain limits almost
ceases to operate. The indigence which is hopeless destroys all vigorous
exertion, and confines the efforts to what is sufficient for bare
existence.[208] It is the hope of bettering our condition, and the fear
of want rather than want itself, that is the best stimulus to industry;
and its most constant and best directed efforts will almost invariably
be found among a class of people above the class of the wretchedly
poor.”[209] This passage repeats an idea expressed in every book of the
essay.[210] Government can retard the increase of population both
directly and indirectly, but can only advance it indirectly, namely, by
encouraging industry, more especially agriculture. For example,
industrious agriculture has made China capable of bearing a great
population, though other causes of a more equivocal character have made
it exceed its great capacities, and its excessive numbers are cut down
by famine and child murder.[211] The Roman emperors found it impossible
by legislation to promote the increase of the old Roman stock, because
they found it impossible to restore the old Roman habits of industry,
though believers in the superior populousness of ancient nations used to
mistake their intentions for accomplished facts.
In the eighteenth-century dispute about the populousness of ancient
nations (one particular skirmish in the general battle of the books) we
have seen that Malthus declares for the moderns. He gives his opinion in
detached passages; but, putting together the different parts wherever we
can find them, we discover his proof to depend on two principles, which
are corollaries of the primary doctrine of the essay. The first is, that
without the extension of agriculture or the better distribution of its
fruits there can be no increase of population;[212] the second is, that
whatever is unfavourable to industry is to that extent unfavourable to
population.[213]
Now in the early days of Greece and Rome[214] the population ought on
these principles to have been a large one, for not only was agriculture
actively prosecuted, but property and wealth were more equally divided
among the people than in later times. On the other hand, the numbers
were always up to the level of the resources; and the smallness of the
political divisions made law-givers like Solon, and theorists like Plato
and Aristotle, conscious of the risk of over-population and full of
plans to provide against it. It is one of Aristotle’s criticisms of
Plato’s Republic that Plato has not sufficiently met this difficulty, or
realized that a community of goods or an equal distribution of property
is impossible without a limitation of families. If every one may have as
many children as he pleases, the result will soon be poverty and
sedition. Of the preventive checks actually recommended by the highest
wisdom of the Greek world, the mildest is late marriages; the rest
include exposure and abortion. Colonization was rather adopted in
practice than recommended in theory. Frequent wars and occasional
plagues were the chief positive checks.
In Rome even more evidently than in Greece[215] the causes that produced
inequality of property led also to thinness of population. In our own
days the absorption of small proprietors by large would have this effect
in a less degree, because the large would need to employ the labour of
the small. In Rome the labour was done by slaves; and the wonder was not
that the number of free citizens should decrease, but that any should
exist at all, except the proprietors.[216]
Yet the legislation of Augustus in favour of marriage, and the universal
lamentation of the later Roman writers over the extinction of the old
Roman stock, are no more than a presumption that the population was
decreasing, not a proof of its actual smallness, while the prevalence of
war and infanticide, so often used to prove the same point, tend really
to do the opposite. They are for the time positive encouragements to
marriage, for people will not hesitate to bring children into the world,
if they are either free to kill off the superfluous or certain to find
sad vacancies ready for them.[217] In the former case, as we noticed,
parental feeling will often interfere with the infanticide, and save
rather too many than too few.[218] Wars, on the other hand, may injure
the quality of the population by removing the most stalwart and even the
most intelligent men; but there is as much food as before, there is more
room, and there are therefore more marriages, till all the gaps are
filled, even to overflowing.[219] Livy need not have wondered that in
the Volscian wars the more were killed the more seemed to come on. The
like is true of plague and famine; epidemics, like the small-pox, have
never permanently lessened the population, though they have increased
the mortality of the infected countries.[220] To take only one instance
(from Süssmilch)—a third of the people in Prussia and Lithuania were
destroyed by the plague in 1710, and in 1711 the number of marriages was
very nearly double the average.[221] Emigration in like manner may drain
off the best blood of a nation, but cannot reduce its numbers for any
length of time, unless the nation is learning a new standard of comfort.
Greece and Rome were not less populous because they were great
colonizers.[222] The known existence of a number of very active checks
to population, instead of proving that the population was absolutely
small, might more naturally, other things being equal, prove it to have
been absolutely large. It might be argued that, if the population had
not been great, fewer and less potent checks would have done the
work.[223]
But other things were not equal. We know that the gratuitous
distribution of foreign corn had ruined Roman husbandry.[224] We know
that even the labour of the slaves who had supplanted the free labourers
of Italy had not been sufficiently (or sufficiently well) directed to
agriculture. Moreover, the increase by marriage in the number of slaves
did not even balance the decrease in the number of the free men; else
why should the Romans need to import fresh cargoes of slaves every year
from all parts of the world?[225]
In short, the Roman habits had become “unfavourable to industry, and
therefore to population.” The very necessity for such a law as the Papia
Poppæa would indicate a moral depravity inconsistent with habits of
industry. This strong argument had escaped even Hume, who thought that
the people would increase very fast under the Peace of Trajan and the
Antonines, forgetting that the people could not unlearn their habits in
so short a time; unlearning is harder than learning, especially for a
whole people; and, “if wars do not depopulate much when industry is in
vigour, peace does not increase population much when industry is
languishing.”[226] Contrariwise, it might be argued that the prevention
of child-murder in India will not cause over-population, when it is part
of a general policy accustoming the people to European habits.
Allow, then, that general viciousness is inconsistent with general
industry, and it follows that those ancient nations in which the first
prevailed were less populous than the modern. This seems to be the
argument of Malthus brought to a focus. From the absence of
censuses,[227] it is strictly deductive; there _could_ not have been so
many people as now, and therefore there _were_ not.[228]
Expressed in more technical language, the meaning is, that where there
is nothing present but the positive check and the lower kind of
preventive, the habits of the people are necessarily such as to hinder
an increase of food and thereby of population. When Europe was less
civilized, it was not more, but less thickly peopled.[229]
This argument seems to be weakened by one consideration—that the poor in
our day put more into their idea of necessaries; they have a higher
standard of living than the poor 2000 years ago. It might therefore be
said with justice that over-population (a peopling beyond the food)
begins much sooner with us than with them, for it begins at a point much
farther removed from starvation, and that therefore with the ancients a
given amount of food would go farther and feed more. But, if we look
only to the poor in each case, the difference between the ancient
standard of comfort and the modern is unhappily much smaller than the
difference between their meagre industrial resources and our ample ones,
for our powers of production have grown far more rapidly than the
comfort of our labouring population. Such difference as there is in the
standards is only made possible by moral restraint, which has a closer
affinity with modern civilization than with ancient or mediæval.[230]
The history of modern civilization is largely the history of the gradual
victory of the third check over the two others; and, as one of the chief
allies of the third has been commercial ambition, the victory of moral
restraint, by causing a larger industry, has caused in the end not a
smaller, but a larger population.[231] The increase by being deferred
has been made only the more certain and permanent.