CHAPTER VII.

ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND.

Prevailing Checks—Proposed Census of 1753—Brown’s

Estimate—Depopulation of England in Eighteenth Century—Opposing

Arguments—Census of 1801—Interpretation of Returns—Relative Nature

of the Question of Populousness—Scotland to England as Country to

Town—Industrial changes since the Union—Ireland under English rule

in Eighteenth Century and after—The Wall of Brass—Virtue without

Wisdom—The Potato Standard—The Emigration Committee—The New

Departure.

In dealing with the question of population in his own country,[353]

Malthus tries to answer at least three distinct questions:—What were the

checks actually at work in those days? Had the numbers of the people

increased, or not, in the eighteenth century? What conclusions on either

point may be drawn from the English census?

The first question was answered with comparative fulness in the essay of

1798. It is remarked there that in England the middle and upper classes

increase at a slow rate, because they are always anxious to keep their

station, and afraid of the expense of marriage.[354] No man, as a rule,

would like his wife’s social condition to be out of keeping with her

habits and inclinations. Two or three steps of descent will be

considered by most people as a real evil. “If society be held desirable,

it surely must be free, equal, and reciprocal society, where benefits

are conferred as well as received, and not such as the dependant finds

with his patron or the poor with the rich.” So it happens that many men,

of liberal education and limited income, do not give effect to an early

attachment by an early marriage. When their passion is too strong or

their judgment too weak for this restraint, no doubt they have blessings

that counterbalance the obvious evils; “but I fear it must be owned that

the more general consequences of such marriages are rather calculated to

justify than to repress the forebodings of the prudent.”[355] What

Malthus desires, as we infer from the general tenor of his book, is that

all classes without exception should show reluctance to impair their

standard of living; and his hatred of the Poor Laws is due to his

conviction that they hinder this end. The subject will be more fully

discussed by-and-by.[356] In the chapters on England it is little more

than mentioned, the author devoting himself chiefly to the statistical

data of the census and registers.

In this connection it was impossible for him to avoid the question that

had long agitated the minds of politicians. Had the numbers of the

English people been decreasing or increasing since the Revolution of

1688, and especially in the course of the eighteenth century? Economists

of the present day are overloaded with statistics; but, when Adam Smith

wrote the _Wealth of Nations_, he was unaware of the numbers of his own

nation. To estimate population without a census is to study language

without a dictionary; there had been no census since the coming of the

Armada,[357] and it was not till one hundred years after that event that

statistical studies came much into favour. An annual enumeration of the

people was proposed in the House of Commons in 1753, as a means of

knowing the numbers of our poor.[358] But the proposal was resisted as

anti-Scriptural and un-English, exposing our weakness to the foreigner

and spending public money to settle the wagers of the learned. There was

probably a fear[359] that the tax-gatherer would follow on the heels of

the enumerator, as he had done in France. The House of Lords beat off

the bill, and left England in darkness about the numbers of its people

for another half-century, though something like a census of Scotland was

made for Government in 1755.[360] As without the Irish Famine we might

not have had the total Repeal of the Corn Laws, so without the worst of

all possible harvests in 1799 we might have had no census in 1801, for

Parliament, when they passed Mr. Abbot’s Enumeration Bill in 1800,

looked to an enumeration of the people to guide them in opening and

closing the ports to foreign grain. The practical question about the

increase or decline of English numbers was connected, in logic as well

as in time, with the controversy about the comparative populousness of

ancient and modern nations. The same year (1753) which saw the attempt

to settle by census the question of England’s depopulation, saw also the

publication of Dr. Robert Wallace’s reply to Hume’s _Essay on the

Populousness of Ancient Nations_, in his _Dissertations on the Numbers

of Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times_. One of Henry Fox’s objections

to Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (of 1753) was that it would check

population.[361] We are told[362] that the academical discussion roused

attention on the Continent, and a French savant, Deslandes, published an

estimate of the numbers of modern nations, in which England was made

much inferior to France, having only eight millions against twenty. This

was too much for English patriotism. Even in our own day a great war and

a few reverses usually fill England for a year or two with forebodings

of decay. Written in 1757 (at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War),

Dr. John Brown’s _Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times_

was only the most popular of a host of gloomy pamphlets too prejudiced

to be of much use for statistics.[363] Dr. Adam Anderson[364] sides with

the moderns and the optimists. The contributions of Dr. Brackenridge and

Richard Forster to the discussion survive by the mention of them in

Price’s _Observations_ (pp. 182–3) and in George Chalmers’ _Estimate_

(ch. xi. 193), this last giving on the whole perhaps the most lucid

history of the whole depopulation controversy. We know from Goldsmith’s

_Traveller_ (1764) and _Deserted Village_ (1770), with its charming

illogical preface, that even in peace the subject was not out of men’s

thoughts. A similar panic in Switzerland, which owed its beginning to

England,[365] seems afterwards to have reacted on England itself. The

American War of Independence revived the languishing interest in the

controversy. This time it was the English and not the antiquarian topic

that fell into powerful hands. Dr. Richard Price, the Radical dissenter,

the friend of Dr. Franklin, and the inventor of Pitt’s Sinking Fund, did

battle, in his _Observations on Reversionary Payments_ (1769), on behalf

of the pessimistic view; Arthur Young, the agriculturist, the traveller

and the talker, led the opposition to him,[366] and was supported by Sir

Frederick Eden, William Wales, John Howlett, and last but not least by

George Chalmers.[367]

Gregory King[368] and Justice Hale[369] in the seventeenth century, Dr.

Campbell[370] in the eighteenth, had agreed that the numbers of Norman

England must needs have been small, for the government was bad; Dr.

Price, on the contrary, had maintained the paradox that, though the

Revolution of 1688 brought a “happier government,” the numbers of the

people had ever since declined.[371] He reasoned from the decreased

number of dwelling-houses assessed to window tax and house duty, as

compared with those assessed to hearth (or chimney) money before the

Revolution.[372] Opponents denied the accuracy of his data, and thought

his estimate of four and a half or five inhabitants to a house too low.

He pointed to the evil influence of a “devouring metropolis,” a head too

large for the body, and of great cities that were the “graves of

mankind.”[373] Here, too, both the data and the inference were doubtful.

He argued from the decreasing produce of the Excise duties. Opponents

answered that, even if the figures were right, a changed public taste

had lessened the consumption of many taxable articles, and many taxed

ones were supplied free by smuggling.[374] He laid stress on the

difficulty the Government found in raising troops in the middle of the

eighteenth century as compared with the end of the seventeenth, though

he took this as a symptom, not a cause, and complained at the same time

quite consistently that the increase of the army and navy and of

military expenditure in three great wars had been a potent cause of

diminished population. Opponents answered that the first was really a

symptom not of decline but of prosperity; the abundance of other

employments kept men from the need of enlisting in the army; and they

answered too often, that the second (the war expenditure) was good for

trade. They were safer in urging that for the first part of the century

the long peace (1727–40) and the good harvests (1731–50) made the

presumption of increase very strong.[375] Price made much of the

emigrations to America and to the East and West Indies. It was answered

that the known possibility of emigration would give men at home the

greater courage to have a family. Even the engrossing and consolidation

of farms and the enclosure of commons, which he considered to be against

population, would, said his opponents, increase the food, and therefore

the people, though perhaps not the people on the spot;[376] and the

increase of paupers was thought to be a sign of overflowing numbers. He

saw a cause of depopulation in the increased luxury and extravagance of

the people of England. At the beginning of the century gin-drinking was

credited with an evil effect on population.[377] When the opponents of

Price did not meet this with Mandeville’s sophism, luxury benefits

trade, they answered that what had become greater was not the national

vices but the national standard of comfort, the expansion of which

implied an increase of general wealth and presumably of population.[378]

Beyond doubt too (it was argued) the general health was better, and

medical science had won some triumphs.[379] Malthus, however, warns us

against this argument; great unhealthiness is no proof of a small

population nor healthiness of a large.[380] In the ten years after the

American War of Independence (1783–93) the prosperity of the country

seems to have advanced by leaps and bounds, only to make the subsequent

depression the more observable. Dr. Price, who did not live to see the

relapse, seems to have confessed his error. “In allusion to a

diminishing population, on which subject it appears that he has so

widely erred, he says very candidly that perhaps he may have been

insensibly influenced to maintain an opinion once advanced.”[381] Yet

public opinion was not fully convinced till 1801, when “the answers to

the Population Act at length happily rescued the question of the

population of this country from the obscurity in which it had been so

long involved.”[382]

There is no good reason to believe that at the end of last century the

fear of depopulation had given place to a fear of over-population.[383]

Malthus and Arthur Young stood almost alone in their opinion.[384] Alarm

was felt by the agricultural interest, not lest there should be an

excessive population, but lest the population should get its food from

abroad. The population it was feared had grown beyond the English

supplies of food; but of over-population, in the wider sense of an

excess beyond any existing food, the general public and the squires had

learned little or nothing in these years; and we have no reason to

attribute to Malthus any share in the merit of passing the Enumeration

Bill. It was brought forward in an autumn session of Parliament (Nov.

1800) specially convened because of the scarcity. It was moved by Mr.

Abbot,[385] who had made his name more as a financier than as an

economist, and was chiefly remarkable afterwards as a vigorous opponent

of Catholic Emancipation. The motion was seconded by Mr. Wilberforce;

and the combination of finance and philanthropy was irresistible.

Malthus, though he is the true interpreter of the census, neither caused

it in the first instance nor found it of immediate service in spreading

his doctrines.

The first census would hardly have justified him in treating as obsolete

the old quarrel about depopulation; it had decided only the absolute

numbers in the first year of the nineteenth century, not the progress or

relapse during the eighteenth. Besides giving the actual numbers of the

people in 1801, the census no doubt gave “a table of the population of

England and Wales throughout the last century calculated from the

births.” But the births, though a favourite, were an unsafe criterion;

and, for the population at the Revolution of 1688, Malthus would depend

more on “the old calculations from the number of houses.”[386] He finds

no difficulty of principle in admitting with Mr. Rickman, the editor of

the census returns and observations thereon, that the rapid increase of

the English people since 1780 was due to the decrease of deaths rather

than to the increase of births.[387] Such a phenomenon was not only

possible but common, for the rate of births out of relation to the rate

of deaths could give no sure means of judging the numbers. After a

famine[388] or pestilence, for example, the rate of births might be

twice as high as usual, and by the standard of births the numbers of the

people would be at their maximum, when a comparison with the rate of

deaths or an actual enumeration would show them to be at the

minimum,[389] whereas a low rate of births, if lives were prolonged by

great healthiness, might certainly mean an increase, perhaps a high

increase, of numbers. But at the particular time in question the factory

system was coming into being, and manufacturing towns were growing great

at the expense of the country districts. The conditions of life in towns

are at the best inferior to those in the country; new openings for trade

would add not only to the marriages but to the deaths and the

births.[390] The presumption was not all in favour of healthiness; and

the registers at that particular time could not tell the whole

truth;—the drain of recruits for foreign service would keep down the

lists of burials at home, while allowing an increase of births and

marriages.[391] For these and other reasons, Malthus, while he agrees

with Rickman that the general health has improved, trusts little to his

calculations from registers; and concludes that even the census gives us

no clear light on the movement of population in the eighteenth century.

We can be certain that population increased during the last twenty years

of it, and almost certain that the movement was not downwards but

upwards since the Peace of Paris; and we have good ground for believing

that it was rather upwards than downwards even in the earliest years of

the century, during the good harvests and the long peace of

Walpole,[392] and that over the whole country the movement of population

was less fluctuating in England than on the Continent.[393] The author’s

admission, that the proportions of the births, deaths, and marriages

were very different in our country in his time from what they used to

be,[394] seems to put the census of 1801 out of court altogether in the

question of depopulation, especially as there were no previous

enumerations with which to compare it. The figures from the parish

registers for the whole of the century, that were included in the

“returns pursuant to the Population Act,” in addition to the

enumeration, turned out on examination to be unsatisfactory.[395]

Malthus, however, was able to prove some solid conclusions from the

census of 1801. It had shown, for example, as regards marriages, that

the proportion of them to the whole numbers of the people was, in 1801,

as 1 to 123⅕, a smaller proportion than anywhere except in Norway and

Switzerland,[396] and the more likely to be true, because Hardwicke’s

Marriage Act had made registration of marriages more careful than of

burials and baptisms. In the early part of the eighteenth century, the

pessimist, Dr. Short, had estimated the proportion (with much

probability) as 1 to 115; and it would appear, therefore, that at

neither end of the century were the marriages in a high proportion to

the numbers, or had population increased at its highest rate. Again,

Malthus thinks it proved by the census that, since population has as a

matter of fact increased in England in spite of a diminished rate of

marriages, the increase has been at cost of the mortality, the fewer

marriages being partly a cause, partly a consequence, of the fewer

deaths of the later years.[397] Those that married late might have

consoled themselves with the reflection that they were lessening not the

numbers but the mortality of the nation. It was no doubt difficult to

estimate the extent to which such causes operated, or the degree in

which the national health had been improved. In any case the census

guides us better than the registers,[398] for it carries us beyond the

inferred numbers to numbers actually counted out at a given time.

Neither the census nor the registers can be rightly interpreted without

a knowledge of the social condition, government, and history of the

people concerned. In undeveloped countries, like America and Russia, or

in any old countries after special mortality, a large proportion of

births may be a good sign; “but in the average state of a well-peopled

territory there cannot well be a worse sign than a large proportion of

births, nor can there well be a better sign than a small proportion.”

Sir Francis d’Ivernois had very justly observed that, if the various

states of Europe published annually an exact account of their

population, noting carefully in a second column the exact age at which

the children die, this second column would show the comparative goodness

of the governments, and the comparative happiness of their subjects;—a

simple arithmetical statement might then be more conclusive than the

cleverest argument. Malthus assents, but adds that “we should need to

attend less to the column giving the number of children born, than to

the one giving the number which reached manhood, and this number will

almost invariably be the greatest where the proportion of the births to

the whole population is the least.”[399] Tried by this standard, which

is much more truly the central doctrine of Malthus than the ratios, our

own country was even then better than all, save two, European countries.

Tried by it to-day, we have still a good place. Though no great European

countries, except Austro-Hungary and Germany, have had more _marriages_,

in the twenty years from 1861 to 1880, not only these, but Holland,

Spain, and Italy, have had more _births_, and all of them except

Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have had more _deaths_, in proportion to

their numbers.[400]

One great advantage of the census is, that it enables the registrars to

calculate from their own data, with certain sure limits of told-out

numbers behind and before them. “When the registers contain all the

births and deaths, and there are the means [given by the census] of

setting out from a known population, it is obviously the same as an

actual enumeration.”[401] Malthus suggested in 1803 that the experiment

of 1801 should be repeated every ten years, and that registrars’ reports

should be made every year.[402] This has been done; and, if both have

been accurate, then the registers of the intervening years, on the basis

of the decennial enumeration, ought to make us able to calculate the

numbers for any intervening year. Accordingly, the population of England

in 1881, as calculated from the births and deaths, was little more than

one-sixth of a million different from the numbers as actually counted

over on the night of the 4th of April in that year.[403] The growth in

the last decade, 1871 to 1881, was higher than in any since

1831–41;[404] the births were more and the deaths fewer than usual.

Another London has been added to our numbers in ten years.[405]

This gives no sure ground, however, for prediction. To suppose a

country’s rate of increase permanent is hardly less fallacious than to

suppose an invariable order of births and deaths over the world

generally. Even if we are beyond the time when we need to make any

allowance for increasing accuracy and fulness, and if we may assume that

no given census has any units to sweep into its net that through their

fear or an official’s carelessness escaped its predecessor, still we

cannot take the rate of increase from one census to another as a sure

indication of the future. With some qualifications the words of Malthus

apply to us in 1881 quite as accurately as to our fathers in 1811: “This

is a rate of increase which in the nature of things cannot be permanent.

It has been occasioned by the stimulus of a greatly increased demand for

labour, combined with a greatly increased power of production, both in

agriculture and manufactures. These are the two elements which form the

most effective encouragement to a rapid increase of population. What has

taken place is a striking illustration of the principle of population,

and a proof that, in spite of great towns, manufacturing occupations,

and the gradually acquired habits of an opulent and luxuriant people, if

the resources of a country will admit of a rapid increase, and if these

resources are so advantageously distributed as to occasion a constantly

increasing demand for labour, the population will not fail to keep pace

with them.”[406] It was a rate of increase which he saw would double the

population in less than fifty-five years; and this doubling has really

happened. The numbers for England in 1801 were 8,892,536; and in 1851

they were 17,927,609. Malthus had not anticipated any greater changes in

manufacture and trade than those of his own day; and he clearly expected

that the rate of increase would not continue and the numbers would not

be doubled. The one thing certain was the impossibility of safe

prediction on the strength of any existing rate. A writer at the

beginning of this century prophesied the extinction of the Turkish

people in one hundred years; Sir William Petty at the end of the

seventeenth century predicted that in 1800 London would have 5,359,000

inhabitants. But the Turks are not yet extinct; London in 1800 had less

than a million of people, and has taken eighty years more to raise them

to the number in the prophecy.[407]

If prediction was difficult in the case of England, it was not less so

in the case of the other parts of the United Kingdom. The conditions of

society and industry were quite different in the three countries; and to

judge of the actual or probable growth of population in Scotland or

Ireland, we must first, as with England, clearly understand these

conditions. In the early part of this century even more than now,

Scotland[408] stood to England as the country districts of England now

stand to its great towns. Continual migration from country to town may

be said to have been its normal state; and the largest towns were in

England. The change from a militant and feudal to an industrial society

was nowhere so marked as in Scotland after the Union, and especially

after the rebellion of 1745. The hereditary judgeships of highland

chiefs were swept away; the relation between chief and clansmen became

the unromantic relation of landlord and tenant. The displacement of

household work by the factory system, and of hand labour by machinery,

crowded the great towns of Scotland at the expense of the country

districts; and crowded the great towns and manufacturing districts of

England at the expense of Scotland. The flood of North Britons into

England was not of Bute’s making; and it was greatest after and not

before the Peace of Paris, although under that peace and a stable

government the farming, the manufacturing, the banking, and the foreign

trading of Scotland itself had grown great enough (it might have seemed)

to employ the whole population at home. Cotton manufacture, which on the

whole is the typical industry of these latter days, was peculiarly

English.[409] Sheep-farming at home and cotton-spinning in England

combined to depopulate the Scotch highlands and much of the lowlands.

The highlands, with their strongly-marked physical features and strictly

limited industrial possibilities, were somewhat in the position of

Norway. In the highlands proper there were no mineral riches; there were

moorlands, mountains, streams, lochs, heather, bracken, peat, and bog;

the patches of cultivable soil would bear a scanty crop of oats, and

perhaps clover, barley, or potatoes.[410] This description applied to a

large half of entire Scotland; and we must bear it in mind to understand

the saying of Malthus in 1803: “Scotland is certainly over-peopled, but

not so much as it was a century or half a century ago, when it contained

fewer inhabitants.”[411] The highlands are over their whole extent what

the lowlands are as regards their hills, fit only for sheep. Sutherland

has about thirteen inhabitants to the square mile now, and Midlothian

seven hundred and forty-six; but Sutherland and not Midlothian may be

over-peopled. Sutherland as compared with her former self, when she had

thirty or forty to the square mile, may be more or she may be less

over-peopled than she once was; we cannot tell till we know what her

wealth was and how it was distributed.

Under the patriarchal government[412] of early times the wealth of the

country consisted literally in its men. If a chief were asked the rent

of his estate, he would answer that it raised five hundred men; the

tenant paid him in military service. Adam Smith remembers that in the

Jacobite Rebellion, which disturbed his country at the time he was

studying at Oxford, “Mr. Cameron of Lochiel, a gentleman of Lochaber in

[the west highlands of] Scotland, whose rent never exceeded £500

[English] a year, carried, in 1745, eight hundred of his own people into

the rebellion with him.”[413] Subdivision of land meant more retainers

and greater honour; and so the highlands were peopled not to the full

extent of the work to be done, but actually to the full extent of the

bare food got from the soil.[414] On the establishment of a strong

government and the abolition of their hereditary judicial

privileges,[415] the chiefs soon became willing to convert the value in

men into a value in money, exchanging dignity for profit. They no longer

encouraged their tenants to have large families; and yet they made no

efforts to remove the habits, which the tenants had formed, of having

them.[416] It was this change that gave Sir Walter Scott the materials

for his most powerful pictures in _Waverley_ and other novels. But it is

the distress of the chiefs that is tragic to him, rather than the misery

of the clansmen. The clansmen for their part had under feudalism been

brought up to be farmers or cattle-dealers and nothing else; there was

as little variety of occupation in the highlands then as in Ireland now.

Undoubtedly too they had that customary right of long possession, which

law so often construed into a legal title in the case of more

influential men. It was true also that, if the native highlanders would

not cultivate that poor soil, no strangers would, and, if it was

politically desirable that the country should remain peopled, the only

way to secure this was to prevent the native exodus.[417] No such

attempt was made; but, on the contrary, the highland landlords followed

the way that led to the highest rents; they consolidated their farms;

they exchanged agriculture for pasture; they substituted deer for sheep.

Almost every highland district has sooner or later passed through all

these three stages, and with the same result, the employment of fewer

and fewer men.[418] The discarded men had two courses before them,

migration to the lowlands[419] or emigration to the colonies. The farm

labourer would migrate, the farmer emigrate. The landlords incurred and

often deserved odium for the manner of their evictions; but they treated

the evicted better than the average British capitalist treats his

dismissed hands. They usually provided passages and often procured

settlements abroad for them. Lord Selkirk, one of the few writers on

this subject that preserves a judicial calmness, advised his countrymen

to acquiesce in the “depopulation” of the highlands, but to draw the

stream of emigration to our own colonies. He himself drew it, so far as

he could, to the Red River settlement and Prince Edward Island.

From the middle of last century to the beginning of this, emigration

went on except when war made it impossible. The dangerous qualities of

the highlanders made them very valuable in the three great wars that

prevented them from leaving the country with their families. It may be

that this very military consideration induced the English Government to

connive at the clearances at first; and interference at any later stage

was very difficult. As it is, in the end even the Sutherland

evictions[420] seem simply to have shifted the population and not

removed it. In spite of emigration Sutherland had as many inhabitants at

the last census of 1881, as at the first in 1801, namely, above 23,000.

Fishing, an industry new to a great part of the highlands, made this

phenomenon possible. Fishing villages have grown at the expense of

inland farms. But this is not the whole truth. Till the time when free

trade began to distend Glasgow and other great towns of Scotland, the

highland counties taken altogether had actually increased in population,

as compared with what they were in 1801. The subsequent fall is due not

to any great clearances or emigrations, but to another cause that had

been acting though not conspicuously for some time before. This was

migration to the industrial centres of the lowlands. In the days of the

Tudors there were complaints in England of the decay of towns, because a

strong government had at last made the protection of walled towns

superfluous, and industry had spread itself in peace, where it was

wanted. But two centuries later there was decay not of the towns but of

the country districts, because industry was taking forms that made

concentration necessary. At first, both in England and Scotland, there

was a real diminution in the rural population; there had been for the

time a real diminution of the work to be done in the country, and a

transference of it to the towns. The hand-loom weaver had been

supplanted by the power-loom. The little villages, where the workman

lived idyllically, half in his farm and half in his workshop, now either

sent their whole families to the towns, thus stopping their

contributions to the parish registers in the country and swelling those

of the town, or, still keeping the parents, sent three-fourths of the

children there, thus making the country registers a very untrustworthy

reflection of the real state of the population in the country districts.

That country villages in every part of Scotland, but especially near the

large cities, are “breeding grounds” of this latter description[421] is

perfectly well known; and the same is true, in a less degree, of

England. This is one reason why even the purely rural districts of

Scotland have greatly increased in apparent population since 1801, and

most of them are increasing still; the readiness of the Scotch to

emigrate has caused the large families quite as much as the large

families the emigration. Another reason is, that even in the country

districts there is now more work to be done and it is done better.

Orthodox economists may count this an example of the self-healing

effects of an economical change that causes much suffering at first. It

is fair to say that this eventual cure is neither more nor less complete

than the cure of the analogous hardships of the newly-introduced factory

system, and the temporary inconveniences of sudden free trade. What keen

commercial ambition can do it has done, and its success is at least

sufficiently complete to justify us in saying of Scotland to-day what

Malthus said of it eighty years ago: it was most over-populated when it

had fewest inhabitants. Modern improvements, however short of

perfection, have at least both in England and in Scotland absolutely put

an end to periodical famines. Even the scarcities of 1799 and 1800,

though they caused great distress in both countries, were not famines in

either of them; and, since the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, even

such general distress as was caused in Scotland by the potato blight

cannot occur again. That distress itself was as nothing compared with

the terrible dearths from which Scotland used to suffer five or six

times a century, and which England experienced as late as the

seventeenth.[422] The dismal picture[423] which Malthus draws of the

condition of the Scottish peasantry reminds us that it is not much more

than a century since Scotland took her first steps in civilization and

turned her energies from war to commerce. Her population at the ’45 was

about one and a quarter millions, in 1801 about one and a half; but in

1861 more than three, and in 1881 three and three-quarters. Population

therefore has more than doubled within the century. But even now there

are only a hundred and twenty-one inhabitants to the square mile, as

compared with four hundred and forty-five in England. The wealth of the

country has increased immensely faster than the population; it has

multiplied fivefold since the middle of this century, and tenfold since

the beginning of it.[424]

The history of population in Ireland would have furnished Malthus with

still more striking illustrations of his principles, if his life had

lasted a few years longer. He contents himself (till the 6th edition of

the _Essay_[425]) with a single paragraph: “The details of the

population of Ireland are but little known. I shall only observe,

therefore, that the extended use of potatoes has allowed of a very rapid

increase of it during the last century. But the cheapness of this

nourishing root, and the small piece of ground which, under this kind of

cultivation, will in average years produce the food for a family, joined

to the ignorance and depressed state[426] of the people, which have

prompted them to follow their inclinations with no other prospect than

an immediate bare subsistence, have encouraged marriage to such a

degree, that the population is pushed much beyond the industry and

present resources of the country; and the consequence naturally is, that

the lower classes of people are in the most impoverished[427] and

miserable state. The checks to the population are of course chiefly of

the positive kind, and arise from the diseases occasioned by squalid

poverty, by damp and wretched cabins, by bad and insufficient

clothing,[428] and occasional want. To these positive checks have of

late years been added the vice and misery of intestine commotion, of

civil war, and of martial law.”[429]

In his review of Newenham’s _Statistical and Historical Enquiry into the

Population of Ireland_ in 1808,[430] and in his evidence before the

Emigration Committee in 1827, Malthus uses even stronger language. We

may quote from the latter document as the less known of the two. In 1817

he had spent a college vacation in visiting Westmeath and the lakes of

Killarney,[431] and was able to speak from personal knowledge of the

country. He was asked:—

Qu. 3306. “With reference to Ireland, what is your opinion as to the

habits of the people, as tending to promote a rapid increase of

population?”—“Their habits are very unfavourable in regard to their own

condition, because they are inclined to be satisfied with the very

lowest degree of comfort, and to marry with little other prospect than

that of being able to get potatoes for themselves and their

children.”[432]

3307. “What are the circumstances which contribute to introduce such

habits in a country?”—“The degraded condition of the people, oppression,

and ignorance.”

3311. “You have mentioned that oppression contributes to produce those

habits to which you have alluded; in what way do you imagine in Ireland

there is oppression?”—“I think that the government of Ireland has, upon

the whole, been very unfavourable to habits of that kind; it has tended

to degrade the general mass of the people, and consequently to prevent

them from looking forward and acquiring habits of prudence.”

3312. “Is it your opinion that the minds of the people may be so

influenced by the circumstances under which they live, in regard to

civil society, that it may contribute very much to counteract that

particular habit which leads to the rapid increase of population?”—“I

think so.”

3313. “What circumstances in your opinion contribute to produce a taste

for comfort and cleanliness among a people?”—“Civil and political

liberty and education.”[433]

Then the subject of one acre holdings is introduced, and Malthus is

asked:—

3317. “What effect would any change of the moral or religious state of

the government of that country produce upon persons occupying such

possessions?”—“It could not produce any immediate effect if that system

were continued; with that system of occupancy there must always be an

excessive redundancy of people, because, from the nature of tolerably

good land, it will always produce more than can be employed upon it, and

the consequence must be that there will be a great number of people not

employed.”

3318. “Is, therefore, not the first step towards improvement in Ireland

necessarily to be accomplished by an alteration of the present state of

the occupancy of the land?” This was a leading question, but Malthus

would not be led. He replied, “I think that such an alteration is of the

greatest possible importance, but that the other (the change in the

government) should accompany it; it would not have the same force

without.” In his answers to later questions he gave his view at greater

length on the causes of the difference between English and Irish

character.

Answ. to qu. 3411. “At the time of the introduction of the potato into

Ireland the Irish people were in a very low and degraded state, and the

increased quantity of food was only applied to increase the population.

But when our [English] wages of labour in wheat were high in the early

part of the last century, it did not appear that they were employed

merely in the maintenance of more families, but in improving the

condition of the people in their general mode of living.”[434]

3413. “You attribute the difference of the character of the people to

the difference of food?”—“In a great measure.”

3414. “What circumstance determines the difference of food in the two

countries?”—“The circumstances are partly physical and partly

moral.[435] It will depend in a certain degree upon the soil and climate

whether the people live on maize, wheat, oats, potatoes, or meat.”[436]

3415. “Is not the selection in some degree dependent on the general

state of society?”—“Very much on moral causes, on their being in so

respectable a situation that they are in the habit of looking forward,

and exercising a certain degree of prudence; and there is no doubt that

in different countries this kind of prudence is exercised in very

different degrees.”

3416. “Does it depend at all on the government under which they

live?”—“Very much on the government, on the strict and equal

administration of justice, on the perfect security of property, on

civil, religious, and political liberty; for people respect themselves

more under favourable circumstances of this kind, and are less inclined

to marry, with[out] the prospect of more physical sustenance for their

children.”

3417. “On the degree of respect with which they are treated by their

superiors?”—“Yes; one of the greatest faults in Ireland is that the

labouring classes there are not treated with proper respect by their

superiors; they are treated as if they were a degraded people.”

Thereupon he is again asked a leading question of a somewhat cynical

character, but he is again cautious in his answer.

3418. “Does not that treatment mainly arise from their existing in such

redundancy as to be no object to their superiors?”—“In part it does

perhaps; but it appeared to take place before that [redundancy] was the

case, to the same degree.”

The questioner, however, begs the question and asks:

3419. “The number being the cause of their treatment, will not their

treatment tend to the increase of that number?” and the answer is: “Yes,

they act and react on each other.”

Accordingly his opinion in 1827 is, as it was in 1803, that emigration

conjoined with other agencies will be good for Ireland, but by itself

will leave matters no better than they were.

Alongside of his weighty words in the essay and in the evidence it is

worth while to place the words written by Adam Smith half a century

earlier:—

“By the union with England, the middling and inferior ranks of people in

Scotland gained a complete deliverance from the power of an aristocracy

which had always before oppressed them. By a union with Great Britain,

the greater part of the people of all ranks in Ireland would gain an

equally complete deliverance from a much more oppressive aristocracy, an

aristocracy not founded, like that of Scotland, in the natural and

respectable distinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of

all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices;

distinctions which, more than any other, animate both the insolence of

the oppressors and the hatred and indignation of the oppressed, and

which commonly render the inhabitants of the same country more hostile

to one another than those of different countries ever are.”[437]

With such passages before us, we cannot consider the two economists to

have been behind their age in their Irish policy. In regard to accurate

figures, the later economist was little better off than the earlier.

Ireland was not included in the first two censuses of 1801 and 1811. In

1695 its population was estimated by Captain South as little more than

one million;[438] in 1731, by inquiry of Irish House of Lords, at two

millions; in 1792 by Dr. Beaufort at a little above four millions;[439]

in 1805 by Newenham at five and a half millions; in 1812 an imperfect

census gave it as nearly six millions; in the census of 1821 it was

6,800,000. It was clear that the population of Ireland was increasing

even then faster than that of England.[440] But between these dates and

our own times comes an episode striking enough to provide all economical

histories with a _purpureus pannus_.

For about two generations England had perpetrated in Ireland her

crowning feats of commercial jealousy, a jealousy not more foolish or

wicked against Ireland than it was against the American colonies, or,

till 1707, against Scotland, but more easily victorious. Ireland had not

begun to be in any sense an industrial country till the reigns of

Elizabeth and James I.; and the wars of the succeeding reigns hampered

her early efforts. She had fair corn and meadow lands, and perhaps the

best pastures in the world for sheep and cattle. The English farming

interest became impatient of Irish competition, and a law was passed to

forbid the importation of Irish sheep and cattle and dairy produce into

England (1665, 1680). By reason of the later Navigation Acts, Ireland

could not make amends for this by trading with America, for all such

trading must be by way of England and in English ships, nor by trading

with France for the same reason. England in her jealousy would have

surrounded her with a cordon quite as close as Berkeley’s wall of

brass.[441] As soon as a considerable woollen manufacture grew up,

England stopped it by legislation, which (in 1699) forbade the

exportation of Irish woollens not only to England but to any other

country whatever. English interference, if it had done no more, added

immensely to the uncertainties[442] and fluctuations of Irish trade. The

growth of industries like the woollen manufacture had set on foot a

growth of population which did not stop with the arrest of the

industries. As often happens,[443] the effects of an impulse to marriage

lasted far beyond the industrial progress that gave the impulse. But

this means hunger and suffering, if not death. In the case of Ireland,

the ruin of all industries but farming over more than three-fourths of

the land led to an absolute dependence of the people on the harvest of

their own country; and, where it failed them, they were brought face to

face with dearth or famine. It led also to the peopling of the country

districts at the expense of the towns,[444] instead of (as usual) the

towns at the expense of the country. If Goldsmith’s _Deserted Village_

is not English, it is not Irish. By the year 1780, when Lord North from

fear of rebellion granted free trade to Ireland with Great Britain, the

mischief had been made almost incurable. The great increase in the Irish

population, like the great increase in the English, may be said to begin

in a free trade movement. In the worst days of legal persecution it

might have been said of the Irish Catholic population, the more they

were afflicted the more they multiplied and grew. Lavergne[445] thinks

their greater increase was due first to the physiological law, that in

the case of all animals the means of reproduction are multiplied in

proportion to the chances of destruction[?], and second to the

instinctively sound tactics of a people otherwise defenceless. The

probability is, too, that they remained quiet under their multitudinous

industrial, political, and religious disqualifications so long, because

they were reduced to that depth of misery that kills the very power of

resistance; and poverty at its extreme point is a positive but not a

preventive check on population. Where things are so bad, marriage, it is

thought, cannot make them worse, and marriage would go on at the expense

of a high mortality, general pauperism, or continuous emigration. The

pureness of marriage relations in Ireland, though in itself a much

greater good than its consequences were evil, acted as it would have

done in Godwin’s Utopia;[446] apart from wisdom, virtue itself had its

evils. Potatoes by-and-by came into general use; and the bad harvests,

which taught even the Scotch and English poor[447] to make frequent use

of this substitute for corn, converted it in Ireland from a substitute

into a staple. Economists viewed this change with almost unanimous

disapproval. In the view of Malthus it was the cheapness of this food

that made it dangerous for the labourers; his theory of wages led him to

object to cheap corn on the same grounds.[448] On the principle that it

needs difficulties to generate energy, the Irish are made indolent by

their cheap food, and make no use of it except to increase by it. Living

on the cheapest food procurable, they could not in scarcity fall back on

anything else. Every man who wished to marry might obtain a cabin and

potatoes.[449] At the lowest calculation, an acre of land planted with

potatoes will support twice as much as one of the same quality sown with

wheat.[450] There are other objections to a potato diet. It is a simple

(as opposed to a composite) diet, and it involves a low standard of

comfort. The second is not the same as the first, for a people that had

no variety in their food might conceivably have a great variety in their

other comforts. As a matter of fact, however, it was none of these three

supposed disadvantages of the potato that proved the bane of the Irish

population, but a fourth one, its liability to blight.[451]

The figures of the census tell their own tale. In 1821 the Irish people

numbered 6,801,827; in 1831, 7,767,401; in 1841, 8,199,853; but in 1851,

6,514,473. In each previous decade the increase approached a million; in

the last there was not only no increase, but a decrease of more than a

million and a half. There had been a disastrous famine followed by great

emigrations. What happened on Lord Lansdowne’s estate in Kerry is an

example of what took place over Ireland generally.[452] That estate

comprehended about 100,000 acres, on which before the famine there was a

population of 16,000 souls. When the famine came a fourth part of them

perished and another fourth emigrated. In course of time, thanks to

money sent by relatives from America and advances made by Lord

Lansdowne, the emigration continued with such rapidity that only 2000

souls were left on the estate. The famine taught the people how to

emigrate, and gave them some idea of the meaning of over-population. The

rural districts of Ireland are probably over-peopled now; but there

seems reason to believe that a body of tenants, who are little short of

peasant proprietors in security of tenure, and who have been forced into

a knowledge of the world outside Ireland, will not retain the habits of

the old occupiers.[453] Without a change of habits, peasant

proprietorships would have done little for France, and will do little

for Ireland.

This would certainly have been the judgment of Malthus on things as they

are now in Ireland, after Catholic Emancipation, Disestablishment, and

the Land Act. In his own time he was wise enough to see that the first

could not be delayed without injustice and danger. The rapid increase of

the Catholic population would soon, he foresaw in 1808,[454] bring the

question of Emancipation within the range of “practical politics,” and

if the measure had been passed, as he urged, in 1808, instead of twenty

years later, the labour of conciliating Ireland might have proved

easier, and the political change might have helped to produce that

change in the habits of the people which Malthus deemed essential to its

permanent prosperity.

BOOK II. ECONOMICS.

CHAPTER I.

THE LANDLORDS.

Need of an Economical Digression—The Hegemony of Adam Smith’s

School—Cardinal Doctrines of the Malthusian Economy—Scope, Method,

Details—Malthus doing Injustice to his Economics—Human Character of

his Doctrines—Agricultural Situation in 1794—History of Corn

Laws—Malthus on Rent in 1803 and afterwards—_Observations on the

Corn Laws_—_Grounds of an Opinion_—_Nature and Progress of

Rent_—Ricardo’s Criticisms—Agricultural Improvements—Malthusian

Ideal of Commercial Policy—The Wall of Brass—Limits to Commercial

Progress.

The _Essay on Population_ deals with the past, the present, and the

future. We have tried to follow its account of past and present, and

must now consider the author’s view of future prospects and of the

various schemes (including his own) for making the future better than

the present.

To do justice to this half of the essay, we must take further liberties

with its arrangement. For the sake of explaining the historical genesis

of the essay, we have already taken first[455] that criticism of Godwin

and Condorcet which in the later essay comes in the centre of the

work,[456] on the heels of the account of population in the United

Kingdom, the point where we have now arrived; and the chapter on

emigration has been used before its time. There remain, out of the

fourteen chapters of the third book of the essay, eleven still

untouched; and in all but one[457] a knowledge of the general economical

doctrine of Malthus is indispensable to a clear and just understanding

of him. No apology is needed then for a somewhat long digression, in

which the chief economical writings of our author are briefly analyzed.

It is not wholly a digression, as the substance of seven[458] out of ten

chapters will be found incorporated with it, and their logical

connection with the author’s economical theories (so far as it exists)

will be shown.

As a thoroughly practical man, Malthus knew that philanthropy can do

little without sound doctrine; and his economical theories belong to the

substance of his work. They were developed, unlike the _Essay on

Population_, in quiet controversy among friends; Ricardo, James Mill,

and Jean Baptiste Say, who were critics of the _Political Economy_, had

been converts of the _Essay_. These were, however, the very men who came

nearest to identify orthodox economics with rigorous abstraction.

Malthus himself, labouring to build up the neglected pathology of

economic science, was not chargeable with this fault. His first work had

happily fixed into an intellectual principle his natural inclination to

look at speculative questions in their relations to practice, and to

look at “things as they are”[459] rather than as they might be.

Ricardo’s first work, bearing wholly on finance,[460] had unhappily

fixed for him his inclination to treat every social question as a

problem in arithmetic. In both cases the excitement of controversy would

make the impression deeper.

The two economists both start from Adam Smith,[461] as theologians from

the Bible. It was becoming clear that these Scriptures were of doubtful

interpretation. Men were to choose between the Calvinism of Ricardo and

the Arminianism of Malthus; and, when the two writers turned from their

debates with the public to debates with each other, no less a prize was

in question than the hegemony of the school.

This was won by Ricardo, whose _Principles of Political Economy and

Taxation_ (1817) were accepted by James Mill, MacCulloch, Nassau Senior,

to say nothing of others, as the Institutes of their creed. MacCulloch

thought it not worth his while to print what Ricardo had thought it

worth his while to write, in vindication of his positions against

Malthus.[462] The strongest ally of Malthus was Sismondi. It was not

till Ricardo had reigned for thirty years that there was serious sign of

defection, when the son of James Mill broke with his father’s

traditions;[463] and, though in the hands of Thornton, Cliffe Leslie,

Walker, and others, the reaction has been carried to the utmost, the

eclipse of Ricardo has done nothing to rescue Malthus from obscurity.

The very success of the _Essay on Population_ may have deepened the

oblivion of the other writings in virtue of the popular fallacy that a

man cannot be equally great in general theory and in the advocacy of one

particular reform.

The _Political Economy_ of Malthus has its faults; but it contains in

outline the main truths which writers of our own time think they have

established against Ricardo. First and foremost, he maintains with them

that the proper study of the science is not Wealth, but Man, or more

definitely, Wealth in relation to Man. The qualities of man and the

earth he cultivates are according to Malthus so many and variable in

relation to each other that a study of their relations cannot be an

exact science like mathematics; it may contain “great general

principles” to which there are few exceptions, and “prominent landmarks”

that will be safe guides to us in legislation or in life; but “even

these when examined will be found to resemble the most general rules in

morals and politics founded upon the known passions and propensities of

human nature.”[464] Human conduct is characterized by such variation and

aberration that we must always be prepared for exceptions to our

principles, and for qualifications which spoil the charm of uniformity,

but are faithful to facts,[465] like George Eliot’s “analyses in small

and subtle characters,” which stimulate no enthusiasm but alone tell the

whole truth. In the second place, we are told that the nature of the

subject makes a peculiarly cautious Method necessary. Our first business

being to account for things as they are,[466] till we are sure that our

theories do so we cannot act on them.[467] A good economical definition

must conform to the ordinary usage of words. We must take if possible a

meaning which would agree with the ordinary use of words “in the

conversation of educated persons.”[468] If this does not give sufficient

distinctness, we must fall back on the authority of the most celebrated

writers on the science, particularly of the founder or founders of it;

“in this case, whether the term be a new one born with the science, or

an old one used in a new sense, it will not be strange to the generality

of readers, or liable to be misunderstood.”[469] If any word must have a

different meaning from that adopted by either of these authorities, the

new sense must not only be free from the faults of the old, but must

have a clear and recognizable positive usefulness. The new definitions

should be consistent with the old; and the same terms should be used in

the same sense, except where inveterate custom insists on an exception.

When all is done, it is still impossible in a social science like

political economy to find a definition entirely beyond cavil.[470]

“Wealth” must include all the “material objects that are necessary,

useful, or agreeable to mankind;”[471] “productive labour” must be the

labour which realizes itself either in such material objects or the

increased value of them; or else we wander from common language, and our

discussions travel off into indefiniteness. Economical reasoning must be

a deduction from observed facts of nature and of human nature verified

by general experience. Malthus professes to have used this cautious

method throughout, and the theory of population was only the particular

instance where circumstances enabled him to make his verification most

complete. “I should never have had that steady and unshaken confidence

in the theory of population which I have invariably felt, if it had not

appeared to me to be confirmed, in the most remarkable manner, by the

state of society as it actually exists in every country with which we

are acquainted.”[472] On the other hand, Ricardo, legislating for

Saturn, gives us little or no verification by experience. It is true

that he admits qualifications and exceptions to his own statements; and

he would have winced a little at his own biographer’s assertion that

“Mr. Ricardo paid comparatively little attention to the practical

application of general principles; his is not a practical work.”[473]

But he makes no use of the admissions; his illustrations as a rule are

not historical, but imaginary cases and the verification is wanting. In

a letter to Malthus (written on the 24th November, 1820) he says: “Our

differences may in some respects, I think, be ascribed to your

considering my book as more practical than I intended it to be. My

object was to elucidate principles, and to do this I imagined strong

cases, that I might show the operation of these principles.”[474] In

Malthus and Adam Smith, imaginary cases are rare exceptions, actual

examples from life or history are the rule. Malthus goes so far in this

direction that (to use his own phraseology) he is tempted to subordinate

science to “utility.” Even Adam Smith, though he had abundance of

good-will to his kind, did not write to do good but to expound truth. To

Malthus the discovery of truth was less important than the improvement

of society. When an economical truth could not be made the means of

improvement, he seems to have lost interest in it. His pointed warning

to others against this error[475] may be regarded as a confession of his

own liability to it; and, if he obeyed his own warning at all, his

position was at the best like that of the latter-day utilitarians, who

try to reach happiness by making believe not to think of it. If his

science had been less biassed by utility, it might have been more

thorough; and we might not have had in our own time a Ricardian

socialism, appearing like the ghost of the deceased Ricardian orthodoxy

sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. He has the virtue of refusing to

join the economical Pharisees,[476] who would not admit the elasticity

of economical laws, lest they should discredit their science; but he is

to blame for not pushing his quarrel against Ricardo with the same

energy as against Godwin. His forces, in this campaign, were worse

drilled and worse handled. It is justly said by Garnier (_Dict. de

l’Écon. Pol._, art. ‘Malthus’), that in spite of its title, the

_Political Economy_ of Malthus is not the exposition of a system, but

simply a collection of economical papers on various subjects that had

been brought specially under his notice in discussion with his friends,

or (we might add) in his college class. This itself would lead him to

present a much less solid front to the enemy than he did in the _Essay_.

To come, in the third place, to Details, we find the human character of

the _Political Economy_ of Malthus appearing not only in his view of

population, where all is at last made to depend on the personal

responsibility of the individual man, and legislation is good or bad

according as it strengthens or weakens that responsibility,—but in his

view of the Value of goods, as measured by human labour,—in his view of

demand and supply, as sharing the inconstancy of the human desires that

enter into both of them,—in his view of the Rent of land, as determined

by the effects of human industry and skill as well as by the natural

qualities of the soil,—in his view of the Wages of labour, as regulated

not by an unchangeable but by a progressive minimum,—in his view of

luxury, as being equally with parsimony necessary to production, and

preventive of over-production,—and in his view of free trade, as a rule

to which we must make exceptions if we would not cause sufferings.

These doctrines had a distinct relation to current events. Political and

social changes were reacting on political economy. As Godwin and Pitt

provoked the essay of 1798, the scarcity of 1799 and 1800 called forth

the pamphlet on High Prices (1800). As the latter bears directly on the

Poor Law, it will best be considered when the thread of the _Essay on

Population_ is taken up again;[477] and the same applies to the letter

of Malthus to Whitbread (1807). The distresses of a time when wheat went

so high as £6 the quarter instead of its normal 40_s._ or 50_s._, would

naturally make the relief of the poor a question of the day. The high

prices of corn increased the number of enclosures and Enclosure Bills.

More than three millions of acres, or about a twelfth part of the entire

area of England and Wales, are said to have been taken from waste into

cultivation between 1800 and 1820. The average price of wheat, always

the staple food of the people when they could get it, had been 55_s._

11_d._ for the years preceding, viz. from 1790 to 1799 inclusive; it was

82_s._ 2_d._ from 1800 to 1809 inclusive, and 88_s._ 8_d._ from 1810 to

1819 inclusive, after which it fell (for the next decade) to 58_s._

5_d._[478] In 1883–4 it was 35_s._ 8_d._ a quarter, which means a

four-pound loaf (of medium quality) at 4½_d._ or 5_d._; but at its

lowest during the war (in 1803) it was at 57_s._ 1_d._, and the loaf was

at 6¾_d._ or 7_d._

Yet agriculture had not been standing still. Arthur Young, whose

eccentric energy benefited every one but himself, and fell little short

of genius, betted his nineteen volumes of _Annals of Agriculture_

against Sir John Sinclair’s twenty-one volumes of the _Statistical

Account of Scotland_, that the Government of Pitt would not establish a

Board of Agriculture. But Farmer George did establish one, in 1793;[479]

Young paid his bet and became Secretary; Sinclair gained his nineteen

volumes and became President of the new Board; and together they did

much to make farmers and landlords aware of the rotations of crops,

disuse of fallows, new manures, road-makings, that the Secretary had

been preaching in vain for thirty years.[480]

When the great scarcities of 1799–1800 took place, the Board was equal

to the occasion. It urged the Government to get supplies of rice from

India; it preached earnestly the cultivation of waste lands and the

temporary conversion of grass lands into cornfields. The last was done

widely enough when the prices of corn were high. The second, except when

it meant enclosure of commons, was hardly done at all; and there was a

strange impression that the efforts of the Board were at bottom a

political movement against ecclesiastical titles and the Established

Church. The importation of rice would have been of immense immediate

service; but by the time the order had reached India and the rice ships

had come back to England,[481] the famine was over, the people preferred

wheat, and £350,000 of bounty were thrown away.[482] Nothing shows the

insularity of English commercial policy better than the remedies

generally proposed in those days for curing the evils of a bad harvest.

The House of Commons passed self-denying ordinances[483] and brown-bread

bills, and offered a bounty on potatoes.[484]

There was some talk inside the House of enforcing a minimum rate of

wages, and outside of enforcing a maximum price of bread. The people

were told to eat red herrings instead of bread; philanthropic soup shops

were opened; distilleries and starch manufactories were threatened with

prohibition. Relief from the poor rates was, however, the favourite way

of cutting the knot. Better that our people should depend on each other

than on the foreigner. This fear of dependence was the more pardonable

then, as there were times, in the war with Napoleon, when England was

more completely alone against the world than she is ever likely to be

again. It was a much more culpable folly to pretend[485] that the

scarcity was due to “forestalling and regrating,”[486] and that England

could have provided for herself well enough, even in 1799 and 1800, but

for the corn-dealers and the large farms and the enclosures and the

new-fashioned husbandry. The new learning, however, went on its

way.[487] The benefits of it may have gone to farmer[488] or to

landlord,—the question was much debated,—but they did not go to the

labourers. The same is true of the improvements in cattle-breeding

introduced by Bakewell of Leicester and Chaplin of Lincoln, and

encouraged by the Smithfield Club (1798), which has long outlived the

Board of Agriculture. The life of the country labourers was little

changed. They and their wages could not remain entirely unaffected by

the growth of manufacturing towns. But custom still had the chief power

over wages, and had no little influence on rents. From the reports sent

from the Scotch, English, and Welsh counties to the Board of Agriculture

in 1794, it does not appear that wages were at all, or rent very

closely, in correspondence with the amount of the produce.[489] Rents

were far from being rack rents, and wages were far from varying with the

necessary expenses of the labourer. In truth each country district in

the days before railways and steamboats was nearly in the same isolation

with regard to the rest as all England was with regard to foreign

nations. The price of farm produce was indeed tending to be equal over

England, as now over the world. Wages were displaying no such tendency.

Of all goods a man is the most difficult to move,[490] for you must

first persuade him; and human inertia by making men stationary will keep

wages low. So it was in 1794. The exertions of landlord and tenant were

directed therefore rather to keep up corn than to keep down wages. They

were beginning to fear for their monopoly of the corn market. The

English Government had done its best to keep their market for them. A

law of Charles II. passed in 1670 virtually prohibited importation of

foreign wheat till the price of home wheat was over 53_s._ 4_d._ a

quarter, and made it free only when the home price was 80_s._ The

Revolution of 1688 brought a new phase of commercial policy. The new

rulers, to conciliate the agricultural classes and atone for the burdens

which had been transferred to them from the industrial classes, granted

a bounty of 5_s._ a quarter on the exportation of wheat so long as the

home price was not over 48_s._ In this way, after exportation in the

days of the Romans, and alternate exportation and importation according

to the seasons in after times, there was, after the Revolution,

exportation encouraged by a bounty, while importation was still hindered

by duties. The intention was at once to attract capitalists to

agriculture and to reward those already engaged in it. By this means not

only would the farmers be attached to the new dynasty, but England would

provide all her own food.[491]

But the very increase of tillage kept down prices and gave the

landowners little benefit. Whenever a scarcity occurred the laws were

suspended, and the bounty and duties were taken off together.[492]

Exportation, however, was the rule till a little after the middle of the

century, say at the beginning of George III.’s reign, when the tide had

fairly turned. Especially after the Peace of Paris (Nov. 1762), commerce

was extended and population with it. Canals were made, roads improved,

and home trade prospered.[493] We could no longer raise enough corn for

our own wants.[494] In 1766, the year of our author’s birth, there were

scarcities, Corn Riots, and suspensions of the Corn Laws;[495] but the

bounty was kept up in name to the end of the century. In 1795 and 1796

the price of wheat rose to 80_s._ a quarter, in 1797 and 1798 it sank to

54_s._; but, at the end of harvest, 1799, it rose to 92_s._, in 1800 to

128_s._, and before the harvest of 1801 to 177_s._ The quartern loaf

(under 6_d._ in 1885) was once within ½_d._ of 2_s._! Then came a cycle

of comparative plenty. Wheat between 1802 and 1807 was at 75_s._ on an

average, and a new Corn Law in 1804 prohibited importation till the home

price should rise to 63_s._ Between 1808 and 1813 it was 108_s._ on an

average; and it was as high as 140_s._ 9_d._ in the severe winter

(1812–13) of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. But in the spring of 1815

wheat was at 60_s._ If it should rise to 63_s._ the ports would be

opened, and there was not even the Protection of war. The farmers and

landowners were terror-stricken, the political economists divided, and

the bill for raising the importation price to 80_s._ was hurried through

the House. The bounty, relaxed in 1773, had been finally repealed, in

1814.[496] As the sliding scale of duties was not introduced till 1827,

we are to regard Malthus and Ricardo as writing on rent (in 1815 and

1820) under the severe Corn Law of 1815, as well as when the wisdom of

passing that measure was still under debate. All their discussions on

rent bear consciously or unconsciously upon the Corn Laws of their own

time.

Malthus is rightly considered the first clear expounder in England of

the economical doctrine of rent. Dr. James Anderson, a contemporary of

Adam Smith, was no doubt before his age in his view of the subject;[497]

but, perhaps because he was better known as an agriculturist than as an

economist, he does not seem to have made converts. The “simultaneous

rediscovery” of the true doctrine by West and Malthus in 1815 may be

compared with the simultaneous discovery of the Darwinian theory by

Wallace and Darwin in 1859. The times were ripe for it. Malthus gives no

certain sound on the subject in the early editions of the _Essay on

Population_. In the second he even says that “one of the principal

ingredients in the price of British corn is the high rent of land” (p.

460; cf. p. 444). However, needing to lecture on Rent to his pupils at

Haileybury in 1805, he saw the unsoundness of this position, and in

1806, in the third edition of the essay, the passage is dropped, and we

are told, “universally it is price that determines rent, not rent that

determines price” (vol. ii. p. 266). The passage is repeated in the

fourth edition (1807).[498] But when the time came for a fifth edition,

in 1817, the whole of the chapters on Corn Laws and bounties, which are

the only chapters of the essay that deal much with rent, were recast, to

express the clearer views which the author had already expounded

elsewhere. In the spring of 1814, in the excitement of debates on the

abolition of the bounty and on new laws to keep out foreign grain,

Malthus was led for the fourth or fifth time in his life to take the

field as a pamphleteer.[499] This time, however, he came forward, he

said, not to take a side but to act as arbitrator. His “_Observations on

the effects of the Corn Laws_, and of a rise or fall in the price of

corn on the agriculture and general wealth of the country” (1814),[500]

professed to balance the arguments for and against the Corn Laws, and

did it, he said, so judiciously, that his own friends were in doubt to

which opinion he leaned.[501] To later readers the bias is not doubtful.

It appears even in such a passage as the following, which, incidentally,

shows us his view of rent, nearly matured:—“It is a great mistake to

suppose that the effects of a fall in the price of corn on cultivation

may be fully compensated by a diminution of rents. Rich land, which

yields a large nett rent, may be kept up in its actual state,

notwithstanding a fall in the price of its produce, as a diminution of

rent may be made entirely to compensate this fall, and all the

additional expenses that belong to a rich and highly-taxed country. But

in poor land the fund of rent will often be found quite insufficient for

this purpose. There is a good deal of land in this country of such a

quality, that the expenses of its cultivation, together with the

outgoings of poor’s rates, tithes, and taxes, will not allow the farmer

to pay more than a fifth or sixth of the value of the whole produce in

the shape of rent. If we were to suppose the prices of grain to fall

from 75_s._ to 50_s._ the quarter, the whole of such a rent would be

absorbed, even if the price of the whole produce of the farm did not

fall in proportion to the price of grain, and making some allowance for

a fall in the price of labour. The regular cultivation of such land for

grain would of course be given up, and any sort of pasture, however

scanty, would be more beneficial both to the landlord and farmer.”[502]

The drift of the pamphlet may be shortly stated. The writer refused to

go with Adam Smith in identifying corn with food, and attributing to it

in that capacity an unchangeable value, which made any rise of price

futile for the encouragement of tillage. He thought that it was

perfectly possible to encourage tillage by Corn Laws; but was it good

policy? Before he could answer this question, he felt bound to consider

several others.[503] Under free trade would Great Britain grow her own

corn?—if not, ought Government to interfere to secure this?—if so, would

laws to hinder importation be the best kind of interference? The answer

to the first is, that other countries have soils more fertile than

Britain; Poland can ship corn at Dantzig for England at 32_s._ a

quarter;[504] and, if there were free trade over Europe, the rich lands

which are not English would send their plenty to relieve the wants of

their neighbours. If Corn Laws have not made us grow our own corn, free

trade would not. In answer to the second question, no doubt it is sound

economy to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest; and, if

we had regard to nothing but the greatest “wealth, population, and

power,” the rule would be invariable; foreign imports of food are in

every case a good thing for the country, and, if there is evil in the

matter, it is not in them but in the bad season which makes them

necessary; moreover, a free trade in corn secures a steadier as well as

cheaper supply of grain.[505] But, on the other hand, dependence on

other nations for the first necessary of life is a source of political

insecurity to the nation so depending; and, though the dependence is

mutual, identity of commercial interests seldom prevents nations from

going to war with each other; “we have latterly seen the most striking

instances, in all quarters, of Governments acting from passion rather

than interest.”[506] And it might be argued that, if we give up

agriculture for manufacture, we change the character of our people;

manufacturing industry conduces to mental activity, to an expansion of

comforts, to the growth of the middle classes, and to the growth with

them of political moderation; but it is more subject than agriculture to

the fluctuations of fashion, which lead to chronic destitution and

discontent, and the conditions of artizan life are “even in their best

state unfavourable to health and virtue.”[507] Virtue and happiness

after all are the end; wealth, population, and power are but the means.

Malthus himself believes in something like a golden mean, a balance of

the two industries, which legislation might possibly preserve.[508]

There is another and less plausible argument on the same side. Assuming

that wages vary with the price of corn, high money wages, and therefore

high prices of corn, are an advantage to working men, who would have

more money to buy the goods of the foreign countries where prices of

corn were low and goods were cheap. This argument, though our author is

inclined to yield to it, is inconsistent with his own views of wages and

the facts he cites in support of them.[509] More cogent is the plea that

it would be unfair suddenly to withdraw a long-established protection,

though (it might be replied) we are no more bound to be gradual in

abolishing protection than in concluding peace during war. But the real

question is, whether once protected is to mean always protected, and

protected in an always increasing degree, for it was this increased

protection that was proposed in 1814 and 1815. It may be true that if we

protect manufacture we ought to protect agriculture; but, instead of

protecting both, why not set both free? Statesmen had no courage,

however, to be free-traders, in days when the separate articles

protected were as many as the millions in the National Debt, and each

article represented a vested interest. Malthus does not seem to expect

Parliament to give free trade a moment’s consideration. But the friends

of the new Corn Laws, besides using the commonplaces of protectionism,

argued from the change in the value of the English currency. When paper

were paper prices,[510] the importation price of the law of 1804 could

be soon reached, and foreign corn came in much faster than the real or

the bullion prices of it would have allowed. There was also the long

array of standing arguments for Corn Laws that lay stress on the heavy

taxation of the country, and are meant to show that the agricultural

classes bear most of it, and are thus handicapped against the foreigner.

From Malthus himself the old leaven of protectionism was never wholly

purged away. Like Pitt, though in a less degree, he suffered his

politics to corrupt his political economy, and drag him back from the

“simple system of natural liberty” into “the mazes of the old

system.”[511] English people since the Repeal of the Corn Laws will

hardly care to thrash the old straw out again. Perronet Thompson’s

_Catechism of the Corn Laws_ is the best storehouse of the old arguments

and their refutations, set forth with a liveliness to which no other

English economical writing has the slightest claim.[512]

The real opinion of Malthus came out in the second Corn Law pamphlet on

the _Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of restricting the Importation

of Foreign Corn_ (1815). Between the two came the tract on Rent, which

is rather an economical book than a political pamphlet, and will be

noticed immediately. He now declares himself in favour of a temporary

duty on imported corn to countervail the artificially low value of the

currency,—“to get rid of that part of our prices which belongs to great

wealth, combined with a system of restrictions.”[513]

He warns the Government that they should not take such a step to benefit

a particular trade, but only to benefit the public. The motives are

those constantly professed by defenders of the Navigation Act—not

private interests but public policy. Since he wrote his _Observations_

circumstances had changed. The sudden peace had brought the then

unprecedented combination of a bad harvest and low prices; the value of

the currency had fallen fast; and last, and not least, France, the best

corn country in Europe, had begun to prohibit the exportation of

grain[514] in dear years. We must therefore, he says, keep up the high

farming which the war taught us, by keeping up the high prices of the

war. Eighty shillings might not be too high a price, for the limit of

prohibited importation.

It seems extraordinary that, after so clearly recognizing that “wealth

does not consist in the dearness or cheapness of the usual measures of

value, but in the quantity of produce,” and that exports are not so good

a criterion of wealth as the “quantity of produce consumed at

home,”[515] Malthus should recommend the increase of abundance by means

of artificial dearness. It is a poor consolation to us that he was no

worse than Brougham, who voted for the Corn Law in 1815, and for the

support of the Navigation Act in 1849,—and little worse than Ricardo,

who would allow a temporary restriction for the sake of

leaseholders.[516] A better is that he was advocating a policy that was

against his private interests as a holder of a fixed salary and owner of

three per cents.[517] But at the best the atmosphere of these two tracts

is a little depressing.

The tract on Rent is more bracing. It was the first-fruits of the larger

work on _Political Economy_ (1820); and its substance had been delivered

in the professor’s lectures at Haileybury. It expounds the _Nature and

Progress of Rent_ with clearness and intelligibility, if without the

liveliness of 1798. Malthus gives us to understand that, to explain this

or any other economical notion, we must keep as closely as possible to

the usage of ordinary language, the language of clear-thinking ordinary

men.[518]

To them, rent does not mean, as by derivation, simply produce or profit;

nor, as to a Frenchman now and to Bailie Nicol Jarvie in his days,

interest on a debt. It means a certain price paid to a landlord for the

use of his land. But such a definition is too wide. It might include the

proceeds of a monopoly, or an interest on capital, or a Government tax,

or a legal rate, or a toll, or a payment for service rendered. We must

define the term a little more clearly.

There is a certain portion of a landlord’s income and of a peasant

proprietor’s earnings that has an origin and character distinct from the

rest, and demands the economist’s separate attention, whether it alone

receives the name of rent or not;—this is, the excess of the produce of

land beyond the cost of production and the current rate of profits.

Represent these in money; and suppose the current profit five per cent.

Suppose that a tenant lays out £500 on his farm, and gets by the harvest

and farm produce not only £500 plus £25, but £600; the additional £75,

which would if retained by him be over or extra profits as compared with

the rate usual among farmers and men of like business, is the value of

his rent; and the landlord can take that from him without impoverishing

him. Rent is that portion of the produce which remains, after all the

outlay of the cultivator has been repaid him together with the current

profits. From accidental or temporary causes the money rents of land may

be more or less than this; but this is the point to which actual rents

will gravitate.[519]

So far as this account goes, it might seem that Malthus’ description is

too general; it would include the extra profits, for example, of any

monopoly or a royalty for the use of a patent; and Ricardo’s definition,

“the price paid for the indestructible powers of the soil,” might seem

more definite. But Malthus is rather too specific than too general. He

is thinking of agricultural land only, and that mainly as producing food

for man. If his description of the Nature of rent adds little to that of

Adam Smith,[520] his account of its Causes, which he himself was the

first to grasp, is characteristic and peculiar.

First, he says, fertile[521] soils yield a produce that more than feeds

the producer. This may be put more generally than Malthus has put it. If

rent is to be paid, there must be wherewithal to pay it; and there

cannot be so if production does no more than repay cost. There may,

however, be a production beyond mere repayment of cost, not only in

farming but in all trades. The very principle of the division of labour

and the separation of trades implies that devotion to one occupation

makes men so dexterous in production that, besides providing for

themselves, they have an overplus wherewith to supply their other wants

and the wants of others.[522] This overplus, where the facilities for

trading were specially good, might be so much above the overplus of an

ordinary profit that the granter of the facilities, who is usually the

ground landlord, might get the lion’s share of it, and still leave the

user of the facilities as thriving as his neighbours. On the other hand,

if no such overplus can be earned, no such rent can be paid. Rent, in

short, when it is paid by men of business, either in town or in country,

means over-profits, and ground-rents mean advantage of situation.

The second cause of rent, according to Malthus, who is considering, be

it remembered, the cause of the Progress of rents as well as of their

actual volume at any given time,[523] is the peculiarity belonging to

agricultural land, that the demand increases with the supply; in other

cases the demand is external to the supply, but in this case[524] the

supply creates its demand. Where there is food there will be mouths. In

the supply of food no over-production is possible.[525]

It is here that the _Essay on Rent_ is connected with the _Essay on

Population_. By the law of population the tendency is that where food

enough for six is being produced by two, the other four will soon make

their appearance; and so, thinks Malthus, the farmer makes his customers

by simply making his wares. Something like this, we might add, would

happen in a completely developed co-operative society, where the makers

would sell to each other and buy from each other. It is even true, in a

sense, of all manufacturers as things now are, in proportion as their

articles come near to being necessaries;—if they supply that without

which people cannot live, they go far to bring people into being.

Malthus, however, regarded it as much more true of agricultural

production than of any other. He regarded food as the chief necessary,

and thought with Adam Smith, that “when food is provided it is

comparatively easy to find the necessary clothing and lodging.”[526]

Against this we need only remember, how the _Essay on Population_ showed

that it was only in the lower stages of existence that increase of mere

food involved increase of population; and so the tendency of the supply

to create its own demand was, on the author’s own showing, nothing more

than a tendency.[527] His economical reasoning was swayed a little by

his circumstances. The insularity of English life in his days prevented

him from conceiving how a nation could safely derive half its food from

abroad; what Adam Smith had thought too good to be likely,[528] he

thought too dangerous to be desirable. Good or bad, it is our position

now, and the result is, first, that the supply of food does not, in the

same degree or way, produce its own demand as formerly, and, second,

that our other productions are, even more truly than the agricultural,

the supply that creates its own demand, for they give the power of

buying the food that feeds new demanders. The production carried on, on

the surface of the land, has come in this way to be a more potent cause

of the Progress of rents than production from the soil itself. With this

restatement the second of Malthus’ causes of rent becomes perhaps a

little more intelligible.

His third cause is that good land is scarce. Lands differ in fertility,

and there is not, as in a new country, enough of the most fertile to

supply all our wants. When the produce of the inferior begins to be

absolutely necessary, the inferior will be cultivated at a price enough

to repay cost and give ordinary profits to the farmer. But what is

simply enough to do that for him will do much more than that for all the

holders of superior lands, and all that is much more can be taken by a

landlord as rent without placing the tenant at any disadvantage as

compared with his neighbours. As soon as this happens in a country, the

extra profits, which are called by economists rent, will appear in it;

and the growth of population, by leading to an increased demand for food

and to an increased price of it, will cause the cultivation of inferior

lands, or else a more expensive cultivation of the old ones; and again,

since the necessary new supplies cannot be permanently kept up without

one or other of these two resources, the price, and with it the rent,

will, in the absence of inventions, remain permanently higher. In other

words, this third cause is the “law of diminishing returns.”

It is this law of diminishing returns which bulks most largely in the

tract of Sir Edward West, written in the same year as that of Malthus.

West’s theory of rent is simply, “that in the progress of the

improvement of cultivation the raising of rude produce becomes

progressively more expensive, or in other words, the ratio of the net

produce of land to the gross produce is continually diminishing.”[529]

He sees how near Adam Smith came to it when he said, that in the

progress of cultivation the total amount of rent increased, but the

proportion of it to the produce diminished, so that from being _e. g._

half the produce it became one-third.[530] He sees, as even in 1798

Malthus had seen,[531] that but for this law population might increase

indefinitely on a few fertile lands instead of spreading over the globe

(West, p. 13), whereas because of this law inventions in agriculture are

not able to remove “the necessity of having recourse to inferior land,

and of bestowing capital with diminished advantage on land already in

tillage” (p. 50). He pushes the principle so far as to say broadly that

whatever increases agricultural production increases cost, while

whatever increases manufacturing production diminishes cost (p. 48),

inferring that the former must tend abroad and the latter at home to

prevent the displacement of English agriculture by foreign competition.

As he had little or no influence on Malthus, his tract need not be

noticed in detail; it is enough to say that, while West is superior in

style and arrangement, Malthus is the more comprehensive. West is

clearer and simpler because he includes less.

Looking at the three causes together, we see that the first and last

relate to the statics, and the second to the dynamics of the subject. We

need to remember that Malthus is having regard in the first instance not

to the value but to the quantity of the produce. Now, apart from

questions of value, it is possible there might be, in a country, land

yielding to the sower more than he sowed; but it might be an ordinary

excess, secured by all producers in that country, for the land might be

all equally fertile, and production from land might be the most fertile

of industries. In that case, even if the land was a State monopoly and

the producer’s gains could be taken from him by a tax, there would be

nothing corresponding to rent, in the received sense. But, as soon as

there were differences in the fertility, and therefore differences in

the quantity produced at the same cost, the farmer who had the

difference on his side could be said to have a rent. It is this surplus,

conjoined with the institution of private property, that, according to

Malthus, makes leisure and mental progress, and even great material

prosperity, possible.[532] The rent is properly the extra profits, and

not the equivalent paid over for them to a landlord; rent can easily

exist without a landlord. “It may be laid down, therefore, as an

incontrovertible truth, that, as a nation reaches any considerable

degree of wealth, and any considerable fulness of population, which of

course cannot take place without a great fall both in the profits of

stock and the wages of labour, the separation of rents, as a kind of

fixture upon lands of a certain quality, is a law as invariable as the

action of the principle of gravity. And that rents are neither a mere

nominal value, nor a value unnecessarily and injuriously transferred

from one set of people to another, but a most real and essential part of

the whole value of the national property, and placed by the laws of

nature where they are, on the land, by whomsoever possessed, whether the

landlord, the crown, or the actual cultivator.”[533]

It is the second cause that brings the first and third into operation in

such a way as to produce the rents that we actually know in an old

country. The fertility which secures a produce beyond cost makes extra

profits possible; the growing population, which gives the produce a

value, makes them actual; and the gradations in fertility, whereby a

uniform increase in the value of produce creates far from uniform extra

profits to different cultivators, give the extra profits the peculiar

graduated character, which is characteristic of rent in the economical

sense of the word.

Malthus believed himself to have included, in this theory of rent, what

truth there was in the view of the French economists and of Adam Smith,

when they spoke of rent as due to the qualities of the soil and not to

an ordinary monopoly. His contemporaries admitted him to have been the

first clear expounder of the subject. But his most eminent brother

economist found general agreement quite consistent with emphatic

divergence in details,[534] not wonderful in a writer who regarded every

economical question as a particular case of the problem of value rather

than of wealth.

Ricardo admits that his own theory of rent is simply a farther

development of the Malthusian. In an essay on _The Influence of a low

price of Corn on the Profits of Stock, showing the inexpediency of

Restrictions on Importation_ (1815),[535] published in answer to the two

tracts of Malthus above mentioned, he makes this quite clear, and,

unlike his disciples, is warm in praise of his rival’s powers as an

economist.[536] He agrees with the definition (of the _Tract on Rent_)

that rent is “that portion of the value of the whole produce which

remains to the owner after all the outgoings belonging to its

cultivation have been paid,” including an ordinary rate of profits for

the employed.[537]

But, whereas Malthus regards rent as increased by whatever lessens the

outgoings in any shape or form, Ricardo considers that can happen in one

way only, namely, by the increased cost of raising the last part of the

necessary supplies. Arithmetically it was clear that, if you had four

items making up the total expense of cultivation, whatever reduced any

one of the items _pro tanto_ reduced the total.[538] Accordingly,

Malthus said that rent could be increased by such an accumulation of

capital as will lower the profits of stock,—such an increase of

population as will lower the wages of labour,—such agricultural

improvements or such increase of the cultivator’s exertions as will

diminish the number of labourers needed,—or such an increase in the

prices of produce from increased demand as will increase the difference

between the expense of production and the price of produce.[539]

Ricardo, on the other hand, says that profits can never be reduced by

mere accumulation of capital or competition of capitals, but only by the

progressively less fruitful character of the investments to be found for

capital as accumulation goes on. As long as there is fertile land to be

had, yielding a rich return to capital, no one will accept a poor

return. “If in the progress of countries in wealth and population new

portions of fertile land can be added to such countries with every

increase of capital, profits would never fall nor rents rise.”[540] In

things as they are, capital soon accumulates beyond the rich investments

and has to take the poorer. Sooner or later, even in a new colony, a

point is reached where fertile land will not supply food enough for the

growing population except at an increased cost.[541] Now, if the supply

is absolutely required, the most costly portion of it, whether it be got

by an extension of cultivation to poorer lands, or by a more thorough

cultivation of the richer, will determine the price of all the rest, for

there cannot be two prices in the same market; and the profits of the

producer of it will determine the profits of all his fellow-cultivators,

for there cannot be two rates of profit in the same business.

Furthermore, the agricultural profits will determine the rate in other

businesses, for in a full-formed society the rate in the others must

bear a fixed relation to the rate in this business, so that the one

cannot materially vary without the other.[542] Therefore the greater

cost of the last portion of the necessary supply of food will lower

profits generally, will thereby increase the range of extra profits from

the richer soils, and will thereby raise rents.

The difference between the two men is, that what Malthus makes only one

cause, Ricardo makes the only one, the increased cost of

cultivation.[543] Ricardo and his friends have certainly put cause for

effect.[544] It is of course in the first instance the high prices that

lead to the costly cultivation, and not _vice versâ_, for without the

high prices the produce of the costly cultivation would not be

profitable.

Malthus was asked by the Committee on Emigration: “Among other effects

of resorting to a soil inferior to any now in cultivation, which is

involved in the proposition of cultivating waste lands, would not one be

to raise the rents of all the landlords throughout Great Britain and

Ireland?”—He answered: “I think not. The cultivating of poor lands is

not the cause of the rise of rents; the rise of the price of produce

compared with the costs of production, which is the cause of the rise of

rents, takes place first, and then such rise induces the cultivation of

the poorer land. That is the doctrine I originally stated, and I believe

it to be true; it was altered by others afterwards.”[545]

On the other hand, what makes the high prices permanent instead of

temporary, is the fact that the cultivation essential to the

completeness of the supply cannot be other than costly.[546] It is,

therefore, not wrong to consider costly cultivation as one cause of the

permanence of high prices, and therewith of high rents. But Ricardo goes

further, and counts it the only cause.

Through the whole progress of society, he says, profits are regulated by

the difficulty or facility of procuring food; and, “if the smallness of

profits do not check accumulation, there are hardly any limits to the

rise of rent and the fall of profit.” Nothing can increase the general

rate of profit but the cheapening of food;[547] as by improvements in

agriculture, which, by securing the same production with less labour,

for the time increase the profits and lower the rents.[548] The

landlord’s interest is therefore at all times opposed to that of every

other class in the community,[549] for it means dear food, low profits,

and high rents. Still, high rents are not the cause either of the dear

food or the low profits, but are, equally with them, the effect of a

common cause, more costly cultivation. The effect of a costly

cultivation on wages might seem _vi terminorum_ to be a raising of them,

for wages depend on the proportion of the supply of labourers to

capital’s demand[550] for them, and by assumption there was a greater

demand. But since the cause of the rise of price was in the first

instance an increase of population, it follows that the increased cost

of raising the most costly supplies of corn will be incurred not by

higher payment of old labourers, but by employment of new. Wages again

will buy less corn, for corn has risen. “While the price of corn rises

ten per cent., wages will always rise less than ten per cent., but rent

will always rise more; the condition of the labourer will generally

decline, and that of the landlord will always be improved.”[551] In his

statement of the doctrine of wages, Ricardo is perhaps more careful in

1815 than he is in 1817, saying that, “as experience demonstrates that

capital and population alternately take the lead, and wages in

consequence are liberal or scanty, nothing can be positively laid down

respecting profits as far as wages are concerned.”[552] But even in 1817

his exposition is hardly more rigid than that of Malthus himself. So far

is he from recognizing an iron law driving wages down to “the natural

price” or bare necessaries, that he thinks the market rate may be

constantly above the natural for an indefinite period, and he regards

the natural itself as expansive. The whole chapter on wages[553] shows a

just understanding of the _Essay on Population_. Nevertheless, if

Ricardo in one sense made too much of the principle of population in

relation to Rent, in another sense he made too little of it. He does not

see that in a progressive country it counteracts the tendency of

improvements in agriculture to cheapen produce, and thereby reduce

rents;[554] agricultural rents have risen since 1846 largely because of

high farming. He does not grant that high or low wages can affect rent,

because he regards them as purely relative to profits, and making with

profits a total amount, of which only the proportions vary; but it is

difficult to believe that the rise in agricultural wages since 1873 or

so can have failed to play a part in keeping down farmers’ rents since

that date. As, however, our view of the power or powerlessness of

lowered profits or lowered wages to increase rent will be found to

depend on our view of the causes of value, and as the difference of the

two economists on the relation of wages to profits might have the

appearance of a technical subtlety, these two items of the total may be

passed by for the present.

In regard to agricultural improvements the issue seemed plainer, and the

evidence seemed all for Ricardo and against Malthus. In a country

depending chiefly on itself for grain, a general adoption of

improvements would seem to make supplies cheaper because less costly,

and therefore to lower rents because forcing farmers to lower prices.

Even Mr. Mill did not break away from Ricardianism at this point,[555]

though he speaks less unreservedly than Ricardo upon it. Malthus, on the

other hand, who regards rent as depending largely on the ability of the

agricultural supply to create its own demands, regards rent,

accordingly, as at all times keeping pace with the increase of grain

caused by improvements, unless the improvements outrun population. What

cheapness does in other cases is to make an article accessible to a

circle of buyers previously excluded from it. Every one is a buyer of

agricultural produce and no one is excluded; but the temporary cheapness

of grain creates new buyers by making marriage accessible to a wider

circle.

The progress of rents in fact results from the conflict of two

economical tendencies—the tendency of economical expedients to lower

prices, and the tendency of an increasing population to raise them. If

Malthus’ ripest view of population be true, then a cheapening of food

among a civilized people by no means leads to a corresponding increase

of their numbers, and therefore the course of improvement would tend so

far towards a diminution of price, and therewith of rent. If rents

depended on the price of corn alone, economical expedients (including

not only the direct aids to tillage, mechanical and chemical inventions

directly applied to it, but the indirect aids, free trade, railways, and

steamers) must certainly have lowered rents in the last hundred years.

But the reverse is true,[556] chiefly because the produce of a farm is

ceasing to mean wheat, and coming more and more to mean cattle and dairy

produce, which have not fallen but risen in price in one hundred years,

while corn has actually fallen. This variety of productions has proved

financially an equivalent to what Malthus (seventy years ago) considered

the main cause of greater extra profits to the farmer and greater money

rents to the landlord——the increased fertility of the soil in the matter

of grain, and an increased price keeping pace with it.

The commercial policy of England has become what Malthus describes in

the latter part of the _Essay on Population_ as a combination of the

agricultural and the commercial systems. His views on this subject

became modified as he grew older. In the second edition he says:[557]

“Two nations might increase exactly with the same rapidity in the

exchangeable value of the annual produce of their land and labour;

yet ... in that which had applied itself chiefly to agriculture, the

poor would live in greater plenty, and population would rapidly

increase; in that which had applied itself chiefly to commerce, the poor

would be comparatively but little benefited, and consequently population

would either be stationary or increase very slowly.” “In the history of

the world the nations whose wealth has been derived principally from

manufactures and commerce have been perfectly ephemeral beings compared

with those the basis of whose wealth has been agriculture. It is in the

nature of things that a state which subsists upon a revenue furnished by

other countries must be infinitely more exposed to all the accidents of

time and chance than one which produces its own.”[558] It is not, he

thinks, because of her trade, but because of her agriculture that

England is so rich in resources; it is not without danger that our

commercial policy has diverted capital from agriculture into manufacture

and commerce. About the middle of the eighteenth century we were

strictly an agricultural nation, and we were safe, for in a country

whose commerce and manufacture increase from and with the improvement in

agriculture there is no discoverable germ of decay. But all is changed

now; and there is reason to fear that our prosperity is temporary, and

we have only risen by the depression of other nations.[559] When the

nations that now supply us with cheap corn shall have prospered like

ourselves and increased their population till corn is dear among them,

then we shall be ruined. The evils of scarcity are so dreadful that it

is worth our while to give special encouragements to agriculture, and,

in order to be certain to have enough, to have in general too much.[560]

Otherwise “we shall be laid so bare to the shafts of fortune that

nothing but a miracle can save us from being struck.”[561] “If England

continues yearly her importations of corn, she cannot ultimately escape

that decline which seems to be the natural and necessary consequence of

excessive commercial wealth; and the growing prosperity of those

countries which supply her with corn must in the end diminish her

population, her riches, and her power,”—not indeed in the next twenty or

thirty years, but “in the next two hundred or three hundred.”[562] In

1803 Malthus had much in common with the author of _Great Britain

independent of Commerce_, to say nothing of the French economists. He

cannot be said to have entirely lost the bias in favour of Agriculture

in later years. In the _Political Economy_, reviewing the last five

centuries of English work and wages,[563] he tries to explain away the

instances where rising prices of corn and an “influx of bullion” seem to

have injured the condition of the labourer; and there can be little

doubt he was indirectly answering an objection to Corn Laws. When

depreciation of the currency, whether through American discoveries or

suspensions of cash payment, has occurred, the rebound from it (he says)

has made prices fall much more than wages, and so (we are to infer),

when prices are kept high, wages will follow. It may be doubted if he

had weighed the full consequences of such a contention in the light of

his own principles of free trade. Professor Rogers[564] has had the

valuable aid of old College accounts. Malthus had little besides Eden,

Arthur Young, and the Reports to the Board of Agriculture; and it is

doubtful if he fully understood the effects on the labourer of Henry

VII.’s debasement of the currency, or could apply the analogy to the

depreciation in his own day.[565] But on the whole, as years went on, he

became less physiocratic. He came to acknowledge that, if a purely

agricultural country might in some cases, like America, be the best

possible for the labourer, it might in other cases, like Poland or

Ireland, be the worst possible for him. If we hear that the labourer in

one country earns in a year fifteen and in another nine quarters of

wheat, we cannot be sure that the former is the better off till we know

the value of other things in the country in comparison with wheat. If

manufactures were very dear in comparison, then the labourer’s wages

except in food would go very little way, unless in a case like America,

where the quantity is so great that it makes up for the little value of

corn wages. In Poland the value of corn is so low, and there is so

little capital in the country, that the high corn wages mean low real

wages, and the population is either stationary or very slow in its

increase. The prosperity of an agricultural country, then, depends on

other causes than the direction of its attention to the one industry of

agriculture, and without knowing these we could not infer or predict

it.[566]

Malthus in fact reached the point at which he was always glad to arrive,

the medium between two extreme views.[567] He would neither approve of a

purely agricultural nation, whose danger was want of capital, nor of a

purely commercial, whose danger was want of food. In a purely

commercial, everything depends on a superiority in industry, machinery,

and trade, which from the nature of things cannot last. Not only foreign

but domestic competition will bring down profits, and thereby, by

discouraging saving and enterprise, diminish the demand for labour and

bring the population to a standstill. Christendom has seen Venice,

Bruges, Holland lose their trade by their neighbours’ gain.[568] To say

that the nations of the world ought to be allowed to develope their

trade as freely as the provinces of a single empire, is, in his opinion,

to overlook the reality of political obstacles. If England were still

separated into the kingdoms of the Heptarchy, London could not be what

it is. The interest of a province and the interest of an independent

state are never the same.[569] To one who believes political divisions

inevitable, there can be little hope for universal free trade. Malthus

is unable to rise to the cosmopolitan view of Cobden, and he never seems

to see that by ignoring political barriers, free trade may really weaken

them. His ideal is a state which combines agriculture and commerce in

equal proportions.[570] The prosperity of the latter implies the decay

of feudalism and the establishment of secure government; with security

comes the spontaneous extension of enterprise and a steady demand for

labour. Since the two great classes of producers provide a market for

each other, wealth will constantly grow, and without risk of sudden

check by a foreign influence. The prosperity of such a country may (he

thinks) last practically for ever, and we might answer in the

affirmative for our own country the query of Bishop Berkeley about

his.[571] “The countries which unite great landed resources with a

prosperous state of commerce and manufactures, and in which the

commercial part of the population never essentially exceeds the

agricultural part, are eminently secure from sudden reverses. Their

increasing wealth seems to be out of the reach of all common accidents,

and there is no reason to say that they might not go on increasing in

riches and population for hundreds, nay almost thousands of years.”[572]

They would go on in fact till they reached the extreme practical limits

of population, which under the system of private property would mean

such a state of the land as would “enable the last employed labourers to

produce the maintenance of as many probably as four persons,” the man,

his wife, and two children. As soon as the labour ceases to produce more

than this, it ceases to be worth the employer’s while to give the wages

and employ the labour. These practical limits are far from the limits of

the earth’s power to produce food, and a Government which compelled

every member of society to devote himself wholly to the raising of food

and necessaries, would succeed in coming nearer to those farther limits,

though at the expense of everything we mean by civilization.[573] As a

matter of fact, even the practical limit is not approached by way of a

uniform decline of profits and of population. Various causes, acting at

irregular intervals, stave off the event. The decline of general

profits, the introduction of long leases and large farming, would bring

more capital to the land; improvements in agriculture will increase the

produce, inventions in manufacture will lessen the cost of the

agriculturist’s comforts, and make his wages and profits go farther; the

opening of a foreign market may raise home prices; a temporary rise in

the value of agricultural produce may stimulate the investment of

capital in farming. So Malthus concludes, for reasons not unlike Cliffe

Leslie’s,[574] that, though there is a tendency of profits to fall, yet

the tendency is often defeated. Though there is much truth still in many

of his statements, the conclusion he draws from them,[575] that we ought

by a judicious system of corn duties and corn bounties to keep the price

of food steady and secure a large home supply, is quite out of court

now. The variations in price have been under free trade very moderate;

and the supply from one quarter or another has never failed us. Free

trade is no longer among our problems.

It must be added, however, that there is no reason why the “practical

limits” should not exist under a paternal or fraternal socialism as well

as under the present social system. Even if industry were initiated and

directed not by individuals but socialistically by Government, the sole

motive need not be to increase the mere numbers of the people, and

therefore the mere total quantity of food needed for a bare life. The

motive of socialistic government would be to secure a high degree of

comfort, not a bare subsistence, for all; and therefore, at the cost of

a limitation of numbers, society would still remain at a distance from

its greatest possible production of food. Whether such a limitation of

numbers is likely to take place in the reconstituted society is

discussed elsewhere.[576]

CHAPTER II.

THE WORKING MAN.

_Measure of Value_, 1823—In what sense Labour a

Measure—Difficulties—Arguments of the Tract on Value—Measure in the

same Country—Measure in different Countries—Measure at different

Periods in the same—Measure as applied to varying Value of

Currency—The Royal Literary Society—The _Definitions_—Wages—The

Minimum of Social different from the Minimum of Physical

Necessaries—High Wages, how made Permanent—The “Wages Fund,” whose

Invention, and how far a Reality—“The New School of Political

Economy,” its three Tenets—A General Glut in what Sense possible.

As the Rent and Corn pamphlets deal chiefly with Mother Earth, the tract

on the Measure of Value[577] deals chiefly with Father Work. The search

for a common measure of value is not, to Malthus, a purely academical

problem. He considers such a measure desirable because in any inquiry

into the wealth of nations it is important to distinguish between the

rise of one commodity and the fall of another. The former is an

intrinsic alteration of value which will affect every exchange in which

the object is concerned; the latter an extrinsic which affects only the

one exchange, of the object in question with the foreign object that has

been altered. By value of course is to be understood economic value, or

“the power of commanding other objects in exchange,” not value in the

(not uncommon) wider sense, of usefulness in supplying wants.[578] The

economic value of anything, taken in relation to some object which never

changes its value from intrinsic causes, may be called the “natural or

absolute value” of that thing, and the object with which it was compared

may be called the “measure” of absolute or natural value, in other

words, of the value which a thing must fetch if its supply is to be

continued. While not only money but any and every object may be such a

measure of value for a limited place and time, even money itself is not

a good measure for widely different places or for long periods of time;

and corn, which is better for long periods, is worse for short.

Labour is better than either, but Labour is ambiguous. We may measure

the value of anything either by the labour it has cost us in the making

of it, which gives us Ricardo’s sense of natural value, or by the labour

it will purchase after it is made. Adam Smith,[579] who preferred labour

both to money and corn as the measure of value, wavered between these

two meanings of the terms. Malthus declares at once against the first

sense. Labour, he says, in the sense of cost does not altogether

determine value and therefore cannot measure it, even for similar places

and times. In 1820 Malthus had been of opinion that a mean between corn

and labour was a better measure of value than labour itself; but since

1823 he recurred to the view of Adam Smith,[580] and held that the

amount of the unskilled common day labour of the agricultural labourer,

which a thing will purchase or command, is a good measure of the value

of it even at widely different places and times. “Agricultural labour is

taken for the obvious reasons that it is the commonest species of

labour, that it directly produces the food of the labourer, and that it

is the most immediately connected with the gradations of soil and the

necessary variations of profits. It is also assumed with Adam Smith, Mr.

Ricardo, and other political economists, that, on an average, other

kinds of labour continue to bear the same proportions to agricultural

labour.”[581] The bodily exertion of the labourer does not change; it is

the same sweat of the brow, the same sacrifice of physical force. When

corn, for example, will command a less amount of labour than it would

have done a century before, we may be sure it is because of a change not

in the labour but in the corn; and we ought therefore to say not that

labour has risen in value, but that corn has fallen. Malthus’ search for

a permanent element in the changeable has led him to individual human

labour as the economical unit. If the Chinese labourer has lower wages

than the English, it is not because his labour is of lower value, but

because his necessaries are of higher. Wages are higher in the United

States not because labour is of higher value, but because necessaries

are of lower.[582] Of course when skill enters into the labour, the unit

is not the same; but, when we look only at unskilled, we find

confirmation of Malthus’ view in the experience of the elder and the

younger Brassey as employers of labour, that quantity for quantity “the

cost of the labour [the expense of it to the employer] is the same

everywhere” over the world.[583] The measure, however, is by no means

out of court as regards skilled labour; the difference in kind may be

stated in terms of a difference in degree. If the watchmaker’s labour be

paid at the rate of 10_s._ a day, and the common agricultural labourer’s

only at 1_s._ 8_d._, the former may be stated as equivalent to six days’

common labour.[584] Malthus has in his mind a scale of compensation such

as is drawn out by Adam Smith in the tenth chapter of the first book of

the _Wealth of Nations_.[585] Disagreeableness, difficulty, inconstancy,

responsibility, risk of failure, are so many disabilities, for each of

which a compensation must be made to the workman in the scale of his

wages, as adding in effect so many more hours’ labour; and each higher

class of workman must be paid the unit of common labourer’s wages, with

the compensations superadded. In practice this means that men will not

be found in sufficient numbers to do the higher class work unless the

wages are sufficient to make it worth their while to undergo the

disabilities. It is assumed that this scale has been adjusted by custom

and the “higgling of the market” from generation to generation, till in

any given neighbourhood each of the several skilled trades has a

definitely recognized place in the series.[586]

This reasoning seems less convincing when we consider that the

translation of skill into terms of hours would be different in different

localities, and that the common labour, which is the unit, would vary in

the same way. The measure of value would hold only for a given place,

time, and people. To escape from the difficulty, we must consider the

difference between the common labour at one time and place and the

common labour at another as itself measurable, and allow for it; or else

we must consider it as too small to disturb our conclusions, and so

neglect it altogether. To reduce common labour to its theoretically

simplest terms is to reduce it to something below our experience; and to

reduce it to its actually simplest in the given cases is to reduce it to

one thing in England, a second in France, a third in India, a fourth in

America. There are differences of quality which cannot be with any

certainty resolved into differences of quantity; such are the

differences of individuals, the differences of nations, the differences

of races. It will be found, also, that the part played by common as

opposed to skilled labour, and by agricultural as opposed to

manufacturing labour, differs so much between country and country that,

in order to use labour as a measure, we should need other measures in

addition to it. In short, if we had data enough to apply this measure,

we should have data enough to dispense with it.

It was possibly the force of these considerations that led Malthus, as

time went on, to approach somewhat nearer to Ricardo, whose measure, so

far as he had one, was not the labour purchased but the labour that

entered into cost. But he adhered to the substance of his doctrine as

expressed in the tract; and his positions, in detail, were as follows:—

The power of one object to command another in exchange is influenced

either by a change in the object itself, or by a change in the other. If

we found a case where there was never a change in the first object

itself, then we should have, in that first, a measure of natural or

absolute as opposed to nominal or relative value, _i. e._ a measure of

that value of an article which satisfies the “conditions of the supply”

of it, and enables its production to be continued without loss to the

producers. By “conditions of supply” is meant Ricardo’s “cost of

production” with the addition of ordinary profits. No measure of market

or relative values is possible; and to have a measure of natural value

itself we must make two postulates,—that natural value depends on

“labour and profits” (_sic_), on rent little if at all, and that the

“wages” of labour are also the “value” of labour,—what labour is paid is

also what labour will fetch. It is easy to apply the measure where

_only_ labour is concerned, for then the labour that the things _cost_

is a sufficient measure; it would be evident, at any change, that the

things had become cheaper, not the labour dearer. But in present society

value is more complicated; labour is no doubt the chief source of it,

but profits are a very considerable one.[587] The natural conditions of

supply, however, may be stated in terms of labour, just as if labour had

been the sole ingredient. This would give us a measure for the _same_

country at the same place and time. The total quantity of labour that an

article cost, with the addition of ordinary profits stated in terms of

labour, would be the same as that quantity of labour which an article

would purchase in its natural value.

In the case of _different_ countries, at the same time, the difficulties

are not quite the same. Exchange is there determined not by labour but

by money prices; and money is of very different value in the one country

and in the other. But the differences in the value of money in different

countries are in proportion to the different prices of agricultural

labour—1500 days’ labour at 4_d._ a day in India, at 2_s._ in England,

meaning £25 and £150 respectively; and, if fixed capital to the value of

300 days’ labour were advanced to each of them, while profits calculated

in days’ labour were twenty per cent. in the one case, ten in the other,

the result would be an article whose conditions of supply would require

in the one case a money price of £31, in the other of £168. The

difference is no doubt due to the superior efficiency of English

industry and skill which enables England to purchase the precious metals

more cheaply,[588] but the cost of getting the money would not tell us

the true present value of the money in England or in India. It is not

the labour spent on the gold, but the labour purchased by it, that will

help us here. In each country within itself we would measure the natural

value of money as well as of anything else by what labour it will

purchase; know the difference between the value of money in the one and

its value in the other by the difference between the amount of labour it

will purchase in the one case and the amount it will purchase in the

other.[589]

In the case of _different periods in the same country_, though we have

not, as in the case of two different countries, the test of an actual

exchange, we can still use labour as the measure. We must allow for the

higher profits of the earlier period; and on the (Ricardian) principle

that profits and wages vary inversely, though corn wages have risen,

profits have in proportion fallen, and the total value of the produce

measured by its power of purchasing labour must be the same,[590] the

purchased labour then representing the producing labour plus the then

rate of profits. From Ricardo’s dogma it seems (to Malthus) to follow

directly that the value of labour is constant.[591] Taking the labour

they will purchase as the best measure of the value of the precious

metals, as of anything else, we have light on one of the pressing

questions of the day (in 1823), the causes of the changing value of

money. The causes affect not the labour but the money, and they are of

two kinds. The first Malthus describes as a primary or necessary cause,

namely, the variation in profits depending on the (Ricardian) theory of

the interlocking of wages and profits, and the (Malthusian) theory of

the relation of profits to rent. Dear corn due to difficult cultivation

would lower profits, and would alter the value of money, but only in

relation to raw, not in relation to manufactured produce, or at least

(from the effects of Ricardo’s principle of the inverse variation of

wages and profits) not to the same extent. But the second, which is a

“secondary and incidental” class of causes, affects both raw and

manufactured goods, and is often enough to completely dwarf the effects

of the primary cause;[592]—it is the general commercial situation of a

country,—“the fertility and vicinity of the mines, the different

efficiency of labour in different countries, the abundance or scarcity

of exportable commodities, and the state of the demand and supply of

commodities and labour compared with” the precious metals.[593] The

efficiency of labour and a prosperous commerce, with a great consequent

demand for corn and labour, are often more powerful in making bullion

cheap than agricultural productiveness and high profits in making

bullion dear and corn cheap. During the war—say from 1790 to 1814—we had

an instance of this, and since the war—say from 1814 to 1823—we have had

a clear instance, he thinks, of the converse.[594]

Two elaborate papers on the measure of value, written in 1825 and 1827,

show that Malthus was becoming inclined to make less of his differences

with Ricardo.[595] They were intimate friends; their discussions had no

bitterness; and, to use the words of one of them, “both were so anxious

for the truth that sooner or later they would have agreed.”[596] These

papers are a fulfilment of his duty not (as we might guess) as a fellow

of the Royal Society or a member of the Political Economy Club,[597] but

as an associate of the Royal Society of Literature.[598] “That branch of

literature” [_sic_] “on which it shall be his duty to communicate with

the Society once a year at least” is described as “political economy and

statistics.”[599] He does little credit in these papers to his literary

faculty. Their composition is laboured and devoid of ornament. The first

is _On the Measure of the Conditions necessary to the Supply of

Commodities_; and the thesis is, that “the natural and necessary

conditions of the supply of all commodities,” that are not monopolies,

are represented and measured by the labour which they will on an average

command, and by nothing else. The second is _On the Meaning which is

most usually and most correctly attached to the term, Value of

Commodities_; and the thesis is, that, when value is used without a

qualifying adjective or reference to any special equivalent in a

possible exchange,[600] the term refers to the “conditions of supply.”

When we say, for example, anything is sold at a price far above its true

value, we mean far above its cost price, including under “cost” the

average rate of profits that must go to the maker if he is to live by

his trade. The two papers taken together form a sort of indirect proof

of the position taken up in the tract on the _Measure of Value_ (1823),

and the relevant parts of the second edition of the _Political Economy_

(1836), and may be stated briefly thus:—The labour commanded by an

article is generally the measure of that article’s cost;—but that

article’s cost is what people generally mean by its value;—therefore the

labour commanded by an article is the measure of that article’s value in

the ordinary sense of the word.

The second paper was written at the same time as the _Definitions in

Political Economy_, and illustrates the rule laid down there,

prescribing adherence, when possible, to the meaning which economical

terms bear in the mouths of ordinary folk.[601] The _Definitions_, for

example, repeat from (or with) the second paper, “when no second object

is specified, the value of the commodity naturally refers to the causes”

which determine “the estimation in which it is held” “and the object

which measures it.”[602] “The natural value of a commodity at any place

and time” is “the estimation in which it is held when it is in its

natural and ordinary state,” as “determined by the elementary costs of

its production,” or in other words, by “the conditions of its supply.”

And the measure of the natural value of a commodity at any place and

time is “the quantity of labour for which it will exchange at that place

and time when it is in its natural and ordinary state.”[603]

As a literary production the book written for the public is superior

to the papers prepared for the men of letters. Next to the first

_Essay on Population_, the critical parts of the _Definitions_ give

the most pleasant examples of the author’s style. The two papers above

mentioned are chiefly important as showing the importance which

Malthus, unlike Ricardo, attached to the question of a measure of

value.[604] A contemporary writer said very happily that the fault of

Ricardo was to generalize too much, and of Malthus to generalize too

little. Malthus, he added, is a keen observer but poor in analysis; he

is “so occupied with particulars that he neglects that inductive

process which extends individual experience throughout the infinitude

of things,” and converts knowledge into science. “As presented by Mr.

Ricardo, political economy possesses a regularity and simplicity

beyond what exists in nature; as exhibited by Mr. Malthus, it is a

chaos of original but unconnected elements.”[605] On the other hand,

the testimony of a recent German writer is very different. Malthus, he

tells us, resembles Ricardo in his sombre view of human life and frank

statement of unpleasant facts. Their names are often associated, and

no doubt both are children of their times. But their leanings were

really unlike. Ricardo took up certain ideas of his time in their

narrowest, clearest, and harshest form, and applied them wholly in the

interest of capital. Malthus is far less narrow. His influence on

economics has been much smaller than Ricardo’s; but he will be found

“by far the more suggestive and less prejudiced of the two,” and, if

he found more opponents, it is because he was less understood and less

read.[606] The sprightly _Dialogues_[607] of De Quincey contribute

nothing to the discussion on value; but they show how completely

Ricardo had won the ear of the literary world, and how little pains

the opponents of Malthus took to do him justice. Malthus reduced the

problem to many elements; Ricardo to few; and the latter, as certainly

easier to understand, was readily represented as the likelier to be

true. Simplicity in such a case is a treacherous virtue; and the

apparent chaos may have been much nearer the truth than the apparent

cosmos, if there was a hidden flaw in the latter and a latent

principle of union in the former. Sound or unsound, such a principle

may be traced in the most abstract discussions of Malthus. We shall

find this true when we compare his views with Ricardo’s on the nature

and causes of value itself, and the movements of prices. We may

recognize it even in these discussions on the measure of value. The

measurement of all value by individual human labour is of a piece with

the author’s final view of population, where all is made to depend on

individual responsibility.[608] The main weakness of the position is

perhaps that by unskilled labour he means always agricultural, and

does not sufficiently recognize how in manufacturing England it has

perhaps become easier to measure unskilled by skilled than the latter

by the former. The difficulty met Robert Owen, when in his _Labour

Exchanges_[609] he not only tried to reduce all values to a common

measure in labour, but to make labour a means of exchange, for which

it is certainly worse suited than money.

Labour as something to be rewarded by Wages has a more evident

connection with the principles of the _Essay on Population_ than labour

as the measure of all values. In this case unskilled agricultural labour

is again the unit. The first “condition of the supply” of this labour is

the necessaries of life, in such quantities as will enable the labourers

to maintain their numbers or to increase them,[610] as the case may be.

If the former only, the price of labour is not, as Ricardo says, the

“natural,” but really a most unnatural price, for it would mean that the

country giving it had arrived at the final limit of its resources.[611]

Necessaries, however, are not a simple or even a fixed element. We can

of course measure them in corn if we like; but they consist not only of

the prime necessary, the staff of life, but of other absolute

necessaries, of shelter and clothing, and many “conveniences” which have

become necessaries, inasmuch as they are essential to healthy life, such

as soap and shoes and candle-light. It has happily become a truism that

the necessaries of life are not a fixed but an expanding factor. Even if

competition were always to drive wages down to a “minimum of social

necessaries,”[612] social are always beyond animal necessaries; our

basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous; and “the barest

social necessaries” seem likely in process of time to mean a high

standard of comfort. To raise the minimum of social necessaries is the

way to raise wages really, universally, and almost irrevocably.[613]

Malthus himself declares that “it is the diffusion of luxury” in this

sense of the word, “among the mass of the people, and not an excess of

it in a few,” that seems to be advantageous, both for national wealth

and national happiness. Paley’s ideal of national prosperity, “a

laborious frugal people ministering to the demands of an opulent

luxurious nation,” is heartily scouted by him. The luxuries of the few

rich, he says, harass the industry of the poor by varying with the

fashion; but the luxuries of the poor, when embodied in their general

standard of living, are not only the best kind of check to population,

but the steadiest encouragement to general trade.[614] He seems to have

supposed the elevation in the standard of living to have been effected,

like the progress of nations in civilization, by the happy improvement

of an accidental advantage, by the retention of high wages, when once

secured in a time of brisk trade in the ordinary way of competition; the

workmen, in short, succeeded in making permanent and _de jure_ a change

once _de facto_ for the time effected.[615] “When our wages of labour in

wheat were high in the early part of the last century, it did not appear

that they were employed merely in the maintenance of more families, but

in improving the condition of the people in their general mode of

living.”[616] Malthus, without knowing it, was certainly father of the

theory of a Wages Fund. The theory is that the average wages of the

labouring classes at any given time are high or low in proportion to the

great or small amount of circulating capital devoted to the payment of

wages, or, as it is sometimes expressed (more tersely and inexactly),

wages depend on “the ratio of population to capital.” This might mean no

more than the arithmetical truism that we may always find the average

wages by dividing the total sum received by the total number of

recipients; and the quotient would be unalterable only in the sense in

which all other facts might be said to be so, in retrospect. But it is

usually taken to mean that the first total could not at any given time

have been greater or less than it actually was, being fixed unalterably

by circumstances,[617] and so “devoted” or “determined” to the payment

of wages. The simplest test of this theory is the application of it to

the case of a single individual capitalist and his payments in wages.

Suppose he has a capital of £10,000, £5000 fixed and £5000 circulating;

and suppose that the latter means wages only (instead of chiefly), and

is paid to one hundred men;—£50 a year will be the average wages of the

hundred men; and, by the theory, given the rate of ordinary profits and

given the “desire of accumulation” at the time and place, it could not

possibly have been either more or less. But, as the profits are not

unconditional, neither are the wages; the capitalist might conceivably,

to save his business, keep it up in bad times at a loss, and pay wages

at the expense of profits and at the expense of his personal

pleasures.[618] He has often the choice before him to spend more on

fixtures, or more on new hands, or more on further employment of the old

hands. In truth, too, though wages, especially in England, are often in

the first instance advanced out of capital, they are always meant to be

paid out of the gross returns, and in every sound business really are

so. The workman and employer make their contract beforehand, and expect

each other to abide by it, be the profit much or little; the wages

depend, therefore, directly on this contract, and indirectly on that

which is the means of fulfilling the contract on the master’s side, the

price of the article made. The price of the article is the real wages

fund;[619] and therefore the wages fund must be as flexible as market

prices, and the actual wages as changeable as are the powers, habits,

and desires of the two contracting parties.

The theory of a wages fund was formed from the facts of a perfectly

exceptional time, and on the strength of two truths misapplied, the

doctrine of Malthus (on Population) in its most unripe form, and of

Ricardo (on Value) in its most abstract. J. R. MacCulloch seems to have

been the first who put the two together to deduce a rigid law of wages.

“The market rate of wages,” he says, “is exclusively dependent on the

proportion which the capital of the country, or the means of employing

labour, bears to the number of labourers. There is plainly, therefore,

only one way of really improving the condition of the great majority of

the community or of the labouring class, and that is by increasing the

ratio of capital to population,” which the labourers for their part can

only do by diminishing the supply of labour.[620]

Even Mrs. Marcet, a docile Ricardian, had put the case more carefully.

“_Work_ to be performed is the immediate cause of the demand for labour;

but, however great or important is the work which a man may wish to

undertake, the execution of it must always be limited by the extent of

his capital, _i. e._ by the funds he possesses for the maintenance or

payment of his labourers.”[621] She professes to be expounding the

received doctrine of her day. MacCulloch’s exposition is much more

rigid. When he speaks of the “funds devoted to the payment of wages,” he

means “that portion of the capital or wealth of a country which the

employers of labour _intend_ or _are willing_ to lay out in the purchase

of labour.” It “may be larger at one time than at another. But, whatever

be its magnitude, it obviously forms the only source from which any

portion of the wages of labour can be derived. No other fund is in

existence from which the labourers as such can draw a single shilling.

And hence it follows that the average rate of wages or the share of the

national capital appropriated to the employment of labour falling, at an

average, to each labourer, must entirely depend on its amount as

compared with the number of those amongst whom it has to be

divided.”[622] Neither MacCulloch, nor James Mill, nor John Mill in his

early writings, nor apparently any of the expounders of the theory, were

in the habit of describing the fund as “unconditionally” devoted to the

payment of wages, though John Mill, in restating the position after he

abandoned it, gives us so to understand.[623] Something like

unconditional determination, however, is assumed in all the reasonings

of the school. Adam Smith’s frequent use of the words “funds devoted” or

“funds determined” to this or that purpose may easily have been

misunderstood. Certainly in his pages they mean no inflexible

compulsion. He says the demand of those who live by wages can only

increase in proportion to the increase of the “funds” which are

“destined” for the payment of wages, these funds being (he adds) either

the surplus revenue of an idle monied man who will “naturally” use any

addition to them in increasing his staff of domestic servants, or the

increased capital of the capitalist who will just as “naturally” use

them in employing more workmen.[624] The word “destined” is so far, with

him, from implying any iron necessity that it means simply “intended”;

and the intention is one that can be foiled or altered. He speaks of the

“funds destined for the consumption” of the manufacturing class,[625]

and of the townsfolk’s “fund of subsistence,”[626] meaning simply their

food; he even speaks of the funds destined for the repair of the high

roads in France.[627] Even the strong passage in Book I. chap. viii.,

“the demand for those who live by wages necessarily increases with the

increase of the revenue and stock of every country, and cannot possibly

increase without it,” stops considerably short of the doctrine of a

rigid wages fund. It is never suggested by Adam Smith that the wages

fund is inelastic, and that wages could not at any given time have been

greater or less than they actually were. The doctrine is seldom traced

further back than to Malthus; and Malthus cannot be shown to have held

the doctrine. With express reference to the passage last cited from the

_Wealth of Nations_, he says that “it will be found that the funds for

the maintenance of labour do not necessarily increase with the increase

of wealth, and very rarely increase in proportion to it, and that the

condition of the lower classes of society does not depend exclusively

upon the increase of the funds for the maintenance of labour or the

power of supporting a greater number of labourers” (_Essay_, 7th ed.,

III. xiii. 368). The condition of the working classes depended, he

thought, partly on the rate at which the “funds for the maintenance of

labour,”[628] or, as he expressed it at first, “_the resources of the

country_”[629] and the demand for labour are increasing, and partly on

the “habits of the people.” Among their habits we should need to put

their education and their power of union among themselves, and

consequent strength in a struggle with the masters, to obtain or to

raise the market rate of wages. From Ricardo he differed on the subject

of wages very much as on the subject of value. Ricardo looked at cost

price as the natural value of an article, and mere subsistence as the

natural wages of labour. Malthus could do neither.

The issues between the two economists are nowhere so well or so calmly

stated as in a paper written by Malthus (a few months after Ricardo’s

death) in the _Quarterly Review_,[630] where he deals with MacCulloch’s

treatise on _Political Economy_.[631] In that article Malthus professes

to regard the political economy of Ricardo, James Mill, and most of the

economical writers in the _Encyclopædia_, as a new and wrong departure.

It is said to have been regarded by the writer as one of the best

economical papers he ever wrote;[632] and, among other virtues, it has

the merit of perfect courtesy and respect towards the persons

criticized. Their system, he says,[633] is remarkably like that of the

French economists. They “were equally men of the most unquestionable

genius, of the highest honour and integrity, and of the most simple,

modest, and amiable manners. Their systems were equally distinguished

for their discordance with common notions, the apparent closeness of

their reasonings, and the mathematical precision of their calculations

and conclusions founded on their assumed data. These qualities in the

systems and their founders, together with the desire so often felt by

readers of moderate abilities of being thought to understand what is

considered by competent judges as difficult, increased the number of

their devoted followers in such a degree, that in France it included

almost all the able men who were inclined to attend to such subjects,

and in England a very large proportion of them.

“The specific error of the French economists was the having taken so

confined a view of wealth and its sources as not to include the results

of manufacturing and mercantile industry.

“The specific error of the new school in England is the having taken so

confined a view of _value_ as not to include the results of demand and

supply, and of the relative abundance and competition of capital.

“Facts and experience have, in the course of some years, gradually

converted the economists of France from the erroneous and inapplicable

theory of Quesnay to the juster and more practical theory of Adam Smith;

and, as we are fully convinced that an error equally fundamental and

important is involved in the system of the new school in England as in

that of the French economists, we cannot but hope and expect that

similar causes will, in time, produce in our own country similar effects

in the correction of error and the establishment of truth.”

The new school has, according to Malthus, three main principles. The

first is, that what determines value is the quantity of labour that a

thing costs to make,—the second, that supply and demand do not as a rule

affect values,—and the third, that fertility of soil and not competition

regulates the rate of profits. The new school thinks that profits enter

so little into the price of an article that they may be neglected

altogether in the computation of the causes of value. But (says Malthus)

the value of a stone wall would be due, nearly all of it, to labour, and

the value of a cask of old wine kept for twenty or thirty years would be

largely due to profits. £50 worth of stone wall would have much more

labour “worked up in it” than £50 worth of old wine. It is not

sufficient to answer that profits are simply accumulated wages. As well

say that five is another name for four. Ricardo himself introduced many

qualifications into his own statement that value is due to labour. The

principle (he confessed) was modified by the use of machinery and by the

unequal durability of capital.[634]

Malthus admits the truth of Ricardo’s dogma that profits and wages can

only increase at each other’s expense, and he even applies this

principle of Ricardo’s in a new way to the facts of the commercial

depression that had prevailed since the peace.[635] It was universally

allowed there had been a less demand for labour and a great fall in

wages, but, it was also allowed, a much greater fall in profits; so that

wages while lower in gross amount bore a higher proportion to profits

than before. The reason was that, while the competition of labourers was

great, the competition of capitalists with capitalists was still

greater. The result was a universal fall of prices; the wages, though

relatively greater, were absolutely less in amount, and the demand for

labour would have been greater if prices had risen and the capitalist

had got greater returns to his capital. Malthus would not go farther

than this, and the Ricardian doctrine needs to be otherwise applied to

yield the doctrine of a wages fund. It was applied in some such way as

follows:—Competition drives prices down to the cost of production; this

means that at any given time the sum total of profits and wages cannot

be more than they actually are, and both are kept down by competition to

their minimum; the masters could not give higher wages without cutting

down their profits, the men could not get less wages without either

starving or being driven to seek other employments. Malthus does not so

apply his doctrines. To him, what fixes the sum total of wages and

profits is not the cost of production, but the demand for the thing

produced; not the labour spent on a thing, but the labour that others

are willing to give for it; and the cause of value is not cost, but

demand acting with supply. Ricardo, who prefers to confine his theories

to natural value, allows that the state of the demand and supply raises

market value above or depresses it below cost price; and he does not see

how seriously his own qualifications[636] impair the truth of his theory

of value even when the value is “natural.”[637] It is true, on the other

hand, that the supply at any given time is a supply that will not be

kept up unless the cost price be paid back. The cost price would

certainly be the minimum below which prices could not permanently pass.

But to Ricardo the cost in labour is the formal as well as the material

cause of a value; to Malthus it is only the material, and only part of

that, a mere _sine quâ non_, while the efficient is the demand, and the

final is the consumption of the article by its last buyer or user.

The third leading tenet of the new school, says Malthus, is that the

rate of profits in a country depends on the fertility of the soil there,

and not, as Adam Smith thought, on the competition of capital with

capital for employment. Against them Malthus maintains that there is no

necessary (though there is a frequent) connection between the

productiveness of industry and the rate of profits, still less between

the latter and the productiveness of any one single industry, such as

agriculture. Profits depend on the proportion of the whole produce which

“goes to replace the advances of the capitalist”; but this proportion

may remain the same when the productiveness of industry is very various.

In the previous eight or nine years, say from 1815 to 1824, there had

certainly been no costliness in production. Corn had been cheap, and

farmers’ losses had led to the discontinuance of high farming, and

especially of the forced cultivation of the dear years. The production,

therefore, was at the cost of much less labour. But profits, instead of

higher, were much lower. Abundance of produce and competition of

producers had caused a fall in the value of produce, so that it was

possible for the labourer to receive a greater share of what he made,

though his labour had not become more productive. Ricardo does not take

sufficient account of the influence of prices, both on wages and on

profits.

There had in fact been over-production and a general glut. James Mill’s

_Elements of Political Economy_[638] contain a careful demonstration

that general gluts are impossible. It was emphatically a controversial

passage, and in the pages of John Mill it has the look of an

anachronism. All depended on the meaning of “general.” If it meant

universal, the case was impossible. It is incredible that all without

exception should have something to sell and no wish to buy. To offer

anything for sale must of itself imply a desire to buy something else

with it, either directly or by means of money. Even a very near approach

to universality is not easy to understand; and it would mean simply that

a bad organization of the world’s markets had prevented buyers and

sellers from reaching each other, and prevented goods from going where

they are wanted, at the time when they are wanted; it would mean that

not the malady but the scale and degree of it had passed belief.[639]

CHAPTER III.

GENERAL GLUTS.

French War and English Trade—English Currency—Bullion

Committee—Restriction not the only Cause of High Prices—Ricardo on

Currency—Tooke on Prices—Say on Gluts—English Trade from 1824—High

and Low Wages—Some Fallacies of Malthus.

The discussion on General Gluts was simply a phase of the discussions on

Value; and the prominence of such discussions in the political economy

of sixty years ago was largely due to the peculiar effects on trade and

prices of a twenty years’ war with France. The theories of economists

were becoming most abstract precisely at the time when the justest

generalizations were most severely tested by abnormal conditions. Even

if the Industrial Revolution heralded by the _Wealth of Nations_ had

been allowed a free course, the new conditions of manufacture would have

raised new economical questions; and they could not have failed to turn,

to some extent, on the subject of value, which Adam Smith had by no

means exhausted. But there was no free course. War was declared against

England by France in 1793. In the same year Pitt was forced to offer

English merchants a loan of public money, to cure a financial crisis.

Then followed, under the long Tory supremacy, heavy taxes, repressive

laws, and something more nearly approaching a war of classes than

anything known in England before or since.

The effects of the first ten years of the French war (1793 to 1802) were

to all appearance rather good than bad. Britain itself, unlike the other

belligerent countries, was always intact, and the labours of British

manufacturers could go on as if nothing unusual was happening on the

Continent. Our command of the sea, to say nothing of the conquest of new

countries, gave us trade which others lost, and made amends for the

annulment of the French treaty of commerce, and the loss of the Dutch

trade. In 1806 the situation became less pleasant. The Berlin and Milan

decrees excluding us from almost every country in Europe, the

retaliatory Orders in Council and consequent alienation of America did

real damage to English commerce. The very expectations they caused of a

probable scarcity of particular goods sent up prices; and, with the real

scarcity, contributed to an acute disturbance of trade, which lasted

about five years for the Continent and three years more for America

(1807–12, 1807–15). New markets were opened to us in South America; and

the pent-up commercial enterprise of our countrymen vented itself in

that direction, with wild disregard of the needs of consumers in that

quarter.[640] The same happened, with more reason, in 1814 and 1815.

When peace was restored, it was thought that the whole Continent must be

eager to have our goods, after being so long without them; and we sent

them lavishly everywhere without waiting for orders. Unhappily the rest

of Europe was exhausted by the war, which had lessened their production;

and such products as they could offer us in exchange for our

manufactures we seldom took without taxing. The very food that we most

wanted from them we were careful to keep out till the last moment.[641]

Anything more unlike the “simple system of natural liberty” could not be

conceived; and the result certainly seemed to be an over-production on

our part;—it was at any rate a reign of low prices and deep commercial

depression. This was not all. Since 1797 we had had a paper currency of

uncertain value. In that year the Bank of England, whose department of

issue was not then separated from its department of banking, gave

advances to Government, in return for which it was relieved of immediate

obligation to pay gold to the holders of its notes. As long as the

issues were moderate, the notes kept their value; but this was a time

when economical substitutes for the currency, cheques and bills and

County notes, were lessening the proportion of the Bank’s notes to the

total transactions of trade; and the Bank’s power of calculating the

public need without the natural safety-valve of convertibility became

more and more fallible; the circulation soon contained superfluous

paper, which dragged down the whole currency. In these circumstances,

discussions on currency gained an interest they could never have had in

the abstract; and they led to measures of the most practical and

permanent usefulness. Ricardo’s tract _The High Price of Gold Bullion a

Proof of the Depreciation of Bank-Notes_ (1809) prepared the way for the

Bullion Committee of the House of Commons (1810), and through them for

our own Bank Charter Act (1844). Malthus played a more quiet part. His

chief writings on the subject of the currency were two magazine

articles, one in the _Edinburgh Review_ of February 1811,[642] and

another in the _Quarterly Review_ of April 1823.

The first treats of _The Depreciation of Paper Currency_, and is a

review of pamphlets by the leading advocates and assailants of the

principles of the Bullion Committee’s Report. The Committee had inquired

into three subjects: the high price of gold bullion, the state of the

currency, and the state of the foreign Exchanges. As to the first, they

found that, while an ounce of standard gold was converted at the Mint

into £3 17_s._ 10½_d._ (which sum was therefore the Mint price of gold

bullion), the said ounce could not in the years 1806–8 be bought by the

Mint for less than £4 in bank-notes, or in 1809 for less than £4 10_s_.

The market price had risen to that extent above the Mint price, of gold

bullion. As to the second, they found that guineas had gone out of

circulation, and were practically replaced by small notes between £1 and

£5. Finally, as to the third, they found that from the end of 1808 the

Exchanges had become more and more unfavourable to England, till in

1809–10 they were with Hamburg nine, with Amsterdam seven, with Paris

more than fourteen per cent. below par. After examination of witnesses

and consideration of their evidence, the Committee resolved “that there

is at present an excess in the paper circulation of this country, of

which the most unequivocal symptom is the very high price of bullion,

and next to that the low state of the Continental Exchanges; that this

excess is to be ascribed to the want of a sufficient check and control

in the issues of paper from the Bank of England, and originally to the

suspension of cash payments, which removed the natural and true

control.” The effects had been very serious, especially on the wages of

common country labour (_Report_, p. 73); and the Committee recommend a

speedy return to the principle of cash payments, whether the nation be

at peace or war, though caution demands that this take place gradually,

in the space of two years. It took place, not in two years, but in more

than ten, namely on 1st May 1821,[643] Parliament not agreeing to the

change till 1819.[644] Cobbett’s venture (to be broiled on a gridiron

when the Bank paid in gold) seemed a perfectly safe one.

Both Malthus and Ricardo agreed with the Report of the Bullion

Committee. Ricardo indeed is in a sense the father of it. Malthus (in

the _Edin. Review_) speaks strongly of the bad policy and injustice of

continuing the suspension, and he does not spare the Bank of England and

its mischievous monopoly,[645] or the “practical men” and their narrow

views.[646] Yet he finds fault with Ricardo here as elsewhere for making

his statements too absolute. Malthus’ fault is in the contrary

direction; he qualifies too much.[647] He thinks that Ricardo has gone

too far in attributing all the movements of the Exchanges to excessive

or defective currency; a purely commercial excess of imports over

exports might, he thinks, cause the same effects, and even in the high

price of bullion it was the commercial difficulty that began what the

depreciation of currency continued. Ricardo, who replies in a long

appendix,[648] answers, in substance, that in any and every case money

goes from where it is cheaper to where it is dearer, and therefore from

where the currency has lost value to where it has gained it. But this

hardly meets the contention of Malthus, that the efficient cause, though

it affects the currency, is not in all cases the currency itself, and in

the case of an unequal balance of trade, however temporary, the cause of

the exportation of the money is rather the superfluity of the goods in

the foreign country than the deficiency of the money there;—it would be

otherwise when the first cause was in the currency itself. The rest of

the article contains little that is new to readers of the _Political

Economy_, and the reference to a possible over-production is chiefly

valuable as a sign of the authorship, and as showing that the views of

the author were becoming fixed. The personal acquaintance of Malthus

with Ricardo dates probably from the appearance of this article;[649]

and they continued to discuss and correspond, in perfect friendship,

till the death of Ricardo in Sept. 1823.[650]

His friendship with the Edinburgh Reviewers remained unbroken; and, when

he wrote in the _Quarterly Review_, it was the _Review_ not the writer

that had changed. On finance, indeed, the _Quarterly Review_ had been

saved from unsoundness by Canning’s influence,[651] and an article on

Tooke’s _Prices_ need have no politics.

There can be little doubt that Thomas Tooke[652] was right in holding

the difference between the Mint price and the market price of gold

bullion to be the full measure of the effect of this depreciation upon

prices, the rest of the increase being due to great demand with small

supply, being as a rule much exaggerated and in its worst forms purely

local. He pointed out that there was, as a matter of fact, no

coincidence between the Bank’s contraction or extension of its issues

and the fall or rise of prices in the market outside. Prices rose, for

example, in 1795 and 1796, when the Bank’s circulation had been not

extended but contracted to meet the commercial crisis; and in 1798, when

the Bank’s issues were larger, prices actually fell to what they had

been in 1793. Moreover, when some prices went up, others went down. When

the prices of provisions went up in 1799 and 1800, the prices of

colonial wares went down. The ruling cause (Tooke argues) was not the

issue of many or few bank-notes, but scarcity and plenty, especially the

plenty of a good harvest and the scarcity of a bad one. Wages in the

same way fluctuated rather by the harvests than by the currency, but not

by either so much as by the changes in general trade; it would not be

true to say that the high or low prices produced high or low wages, but

what produced the one produced the other. The recoil of the speculation

that followed the Peace brought down both together; there was a glut not

only of goods but of hands; and there were the discarded men of the army

to swell the numbers of the unemployed. The Luddite outbreaks against

machines, as taking work away from the hands, had made a notable

beginning in 1812 during the war; in 1816, the year after the Peace,

they began again with greater violence. The discussions of Say and

Malthus on Over-production, and the reasonings in Ricardo (1817) and

James Mill (1821) on Wages and the Wages Fund, are as truly commentaries

on these events as the Letter of Cobbett to the Luddites[653] or the

volumes of Tooke on Prices.

Malthus has adroitly used the work of Tooke to support his own

economical positions. In a review in the _Quarterly_ for April 1823[654]

(pages 214 _seq._) he tries to show that Mr. Tooke’s conclusions as to

the high and low prices of the past thirty years prove the following

general statements:—First, that values and therefore prices depend on

the supply compared with the demand, and are only affected by the labour

required to produce goods (_i. e._ by what Ricardo counts the main cause

of value) so far as this labour is the main condition of their supply;

second, that the supply and demand are chiefly affected by the seasons,

and, of the other causes, war may limit the supply but can hardly cause

a demand; third, that when demand outruns supply trade is brisk, when

supply outruns demand trade is dull; and that, finally, a long-continued

deficiency or a long-continued excess of this kind brings with it a fall

or a rise in the value of the precious metals.[655] Malthus, however,

goes further than Tooke with the Bullion Committee. Though on the

bullion question the opposing parties, Bosanquet and Ricardo, seemed to

him to be devoted to a preconceived theory,[656] the Report itself was

“more free from this error of preconception than any work that had

appeared on the subject;”[657] and he agreed with it that there had been

a greater rise of prices and of wages at the end of the period of

restriction, than could be explained by the bad seasons, and demand for

men, and the difference between paper and gold. He is old-fashioned

enough to think that even with convertibility there might be over-issue

and depreciation, and speculation on a basis of paper. His reasoning on

this point is hardly sound. It depends on a misapplication of the axiom

that, in the case of necessaries, a very small deficiency in the supply

will cause a very great increase in the price,—_e. g._ that wheat may

rise from 100 to 200 per cent. when the deficiency of the crops is not

more than 15 or 30.[658] The profits of English farmers between 1793 and

1815 must therefore have been enormous; and Malthus, though he loves

agriculture above manufacture, has taken account of these high gains of

individuals in judging the cause of the Agricultural Interest against

the public.[659] But in connection with currency he actually speaks as

if those gains were a public advantage; be does not see they were a mere

transference of public wealth, not an addition to it. The farmer, he

says, is obviously “able to set in motion a much greater quantity of

industry than before,” at least till wages have risen. “The specific

funds destined for the maintenance of labour, though diminished in

quantity, are by this happy provision of nature increased in their

efficiency;” labourers get more employment, and there is “a burst of

prosperity to the producing classes.”[660]

This is a near approach to a worse fallacy than the Wages Fund. The

archaic reasoning is the more unhappy, because the reasoner proceeds to

use it in a good cause. Jean Baptiste Say[661] had taught that all

increased or diminished demand depended on increased or diminished

supply, and argued thence, with James Mill and Ricardo, the

impossibility of general or rather universal gluts. Goods[662] being

always meant to be exchanged with goods, one-half will furnish a market

for the other half; and thus, as production (which gives the means of

buying) is the sole source of demand (so far as demand is effective), an

excess in the supply of one article merely proves a deficiency in the

supply of another, and is improperly called over-production. Indeed,

whereas consumption takes an article away from the market, production

brings one into it, and thereby increases, _pro tanto_, the demand by

increasing the means of buying. James Mill’s neat demonstration of this

doctrine[663] would be quite conclusive if we, first of all, defined

demand and supply so as to include each other, and, second, supposed

general to mean universal. The reply of Malthus himself is that goods

are not always exchanged for goods, but frequently, perhaps most

frequently, for labour. Say rejoins that he for his part used a term

(“products”) which includes both goods and services, and that the latter

are always the real object of an exchange.[664] Malthus makes a better

point when he accuses his opponents of treating goods as if they were

mathematical symbols, instead of objects of human consumption owing

their whole character to human wants.[665] But his case could be made

convincing even on his opponents’ premises. Division of labour, all

admitted, is limited by the extent of the market;[666] allow that the

most satisfactory cure for the limitation is to widen the market, not to

lessen the division of the labour—still, _given_ the limitation of the

market, the extension of the division of the labour will cause an

over-production. All that Malthus maintained was that this might happen

in a great many cases as well as in a few; Say went as near as he dared

to the assertion that it could not happen at all.

The question of a market, again, is not a mere question of numbers but

of wants. A carpet factory, for example, among a people who preferred

bare floors would have no market, whatever the numbers and even the

wealth of the people. Say does not do full justice to Malthus in this

connection. He thinks that the author of the _Essay on Population_

cannot consistently believe in the possibility of a great abundance of

products together with a stationary number of parsimonious consumers.

But Malthus had allowed that in one case, the case of food, there could

be no over-production,[667] the want in that case being constant,

whereas, curiously enough, Ricardo thinks that food is the one object of

which there might be a glut. “If every man were to forego the use of

luxuries and be intent only on accumulation, a quantity of necessaries

might be produced for which there could not be any immediate

consumption. Of commodities so limited in number there might undoubtedly

be a universal glut, and consequently there might neither be demand for

an additional quantity of such commodities nor profits on the employment

of more capital. If men ceased to consume they would cease to produce.

This admission does not impugn the general principle,” for there is no

likelihood of such a contingency as it supposes;—there is a limit to the

desire of food, but there is no limit to the desire of other good

things.[668] The insatiableness of human desires is here assumed by

Ricardo to be always full-grown, instead of what it is, in perhaps

three-fourths of the world, an undeveloped possibility. Till we know

that the possibility has become actual, we cannot take for granted that

all we produce will be wanted. Malthus did not enter with sympathy or

even with full intelligence into the spirit of modern trade. But he sees

that large manufacture, with its complement of speculative trading, must

succeed or fail precisely as it has judged rightly or judged wrongly of

its markets, for it no longer, like the old English small production,

waits for orders—it anticipates, woos, and coaxes them. He believes that

the awakening of man’s insatiable wants will tend to secure us against

both over-population and over-production, by creating a high standard of

living. The taste for luxuries, whatever its positive advantages, from

the educational or artistic point of view, confers at least this

economical benefit.[669]

Malthus gets a similar result by applying to wages his favourite idea of

the golden mean. The “funds destined to pay wages” may, he says, be

increased either by high prices or by great production at low

prices,—increased value without increased quantity, or increased

quantity without increased value. The latter is the more secure way, but

it lies on the road to “glut.” The most desirable plan is the union of

the two. “There is somewhere a happy mean, where, under the actual

resources of a country, both the increase of wealth and the demand for

labour may be a maximum. A taste for conveniences and comforts not only

tends to create a more steady demand for labour than a taste for

personal services, but by cheapening manufactures and the products of

foreign commerce, including many of the necessaries of the labouring

classes, it actually enlarges the limits of the effectual demand for

labour, and renders it for a longer time effective.”[670] If any one had

urged against this, in the words of Mill, that a demand for goods is not

a demand for labour, but simply gives labour a new direction, Malthus

would probably have answered that the new direction was all important,

because the trade begun in it might be a trade in goods more widely

used, and might therefore last longer and more steadily than the old

trade.

We see that in his views of this subject, expounded tediously enough,

and at unnecessary length, Malthus had constant thought of the relations

of production and distribution to consumption as well as to each other,

for the condition of the people was always more important to him than

the state of the articles concerned. But he never yielded to his

feelings so far as to adopt Sismondi’s reactionary ideas on the effects

of machinery on the workmen.[671] He never wrote any description of the

evils of division of labour at all so strong as Adam Smith’s.[672] He

goes little farther than Ricardo, who says in a well-known passage:—“The

same cause which may increase the nett revenue of the country may at the

same time render the population redundant and deteriorate the condition

of the labourer,” for all the increase may possibly be devoted to fixed

and not circulating capital, to machinery and buildings instead of

wages.[673] Ricardo’s admission, that he was wrong in not recognizing

this sooner, makes us wonder (as men were even then doing in Germany

over similar confessions of their philosophers) whether his

demonstrations are more accurate than ordinary reasonings. His brother

economists never claimed infallibility. Adam Smith gave up his defence

of Usury Laws.[674] Malthus amended his first views on population, to

say nothing of the measure of value.[675] Mill gave up the Wages Fund.

It was only the minor economists who proudly remained at the end where

they were at the beginning. James Mill refused to follow Ricardo in

allowing that food could be over-produced, and MacCulloch refused to go

with him in the admission above quoted, that increase of wealth might go

to fixed capital instead of wages.[676] Orthodox economy became most

abstract when on the death of Ricardo in 1823 its doctrines passed into

the hands of the Minor Prophets.

In the last ten years of his life Malthus made no serious change in his

economical views, and approached no nearer to the Ricardians. They were

years when economists and political reformers had not learned to work

together so harmoniously as they were to do after his death. Huskisson’s

changes in commercial policy were preparing the way in high quarters for

free trade. The sliding scale of corn duties introduced in 1826 pointed

on the whole in the same direction. But the agitation of the humbler

classes for political freedom, made solid as it was by an appreciable

progress in popular education,[677] and kept within bounds of law by the

influence of Cobbett,[678] went on in a way apart; and it will be

remembered how Chartism stood aloof from the Anti-Corn-Law League. A man

might be an advanced economist and social reformer and a reactionary in

politics. In 1824, when trades unions were for the first time allowed by

law and the Factory Acts were still too imperfect to give the weak a

fair chance against the strong, the “natural state of things,” free

development of individual and national faculties, did not exist; and

Malthus, who missed them keenly, would have been much amazed to hear

that his doctrines were, like Ricardo’s, a vindication of things as they

are. Not only the notorious fact of his opposition to Ricardo, but his

views on commercial policy are against the notion.[679] At the Peace

there were many fallacies current about wages. The new Corn Law of 1815

had inaugurated the aggressive policy of the agricultural interest, who

frankly endeavoured, by forms of law, to convert an occasional scarcity

into a permanent one, and keep prices at 80_s._ a quarter. Not a few

false friends of the working man recommended him to countenance the law

and let his bread be made dear, for then, said they, his wages would be

made high. Many manufacturers, on the other hand, were declaring the

interest of the country to be low wages, and, unto that end, cheap food

and a great population. Malthus was with neither. His partial approval

of the new Corn Law was no doubt based on erroneous grounds; but he held

no such mistaken views of wages. His opinion, if not sufficiently

obvious from his general views of population, was laid down explicitly

in all his writings. He says, for example: “If a country can only be

rich, by running a successful race for low wages, I should be disposed

to say at once ‘Perish such riches!’”[680] “It is most desirable that

the labouring classes should be well paid, for a much more important

reason than any that can relate to wealth, namely, the happiness of the

great mass of society.”[681] Being asked, “In a national point of view,

even if it were admitted that the low rate of wages was an advantage to

the capitalist, do you think it fitting that labour should be kept

permanently in a state bordering on distress, to avoid the injury that

might accrue to the national wealth from diminishing the rate of

profit?” he answered, “I should say, by no means fitting; I consider the

labouring classes as forming the largest part of the nation, and

therefore that their general condition is the most important of

all.”[682]

He thinks, however, that the change from low to high wages might quite

possibly so reduce profits as to make trade unprofitable. We might need

to sacrifice something of our commercial prosperity. He cannot rise to

the conception of a society in which the entire body of workmen as

consumers would be a sufficient market for the same body as producers.

He cannot rid himself of the idea that a body of unproductive consumers

is a social necessity, to give a stimulus to production by developing

the wants which the manufactures are to satisfy. It seems easy to answer

that those unproductive consumers can only pay for the manufactures by

means of other products, whencesoever obtained, and there seems no

reason why their producers should not obtain them.[683] If the workmen

themselves had the wants and supplied them by their own labour, all the

results that Malthus desires would be obtained without invidious

distinctions of classes, and with distinct improvement in the condition

of the workmen. His aims, at least, were good. The indispensable leisure

would be secured if the hours of labour were shortened, as he desired

them to be. “I have always thought and felt that many among the

labouring classes in this country work too hard for their health,

happiness, and intellectual improvement.”[684] The general wealth

therefore, if need be, must be sacrificed to the general happiness.

Factory Acts that would prevent children from labouring too young or too

long[685] he thoroughly approves; though such Factory Acts as would

interfere with adult labour he considers an injustice to the work-people

themselves, and a hopeless interference with “the principles of

competition, one of the most general principles by which the business of

society is carried on.”[686] The salvation of the labouring classes must

come from themselves, from their own “simultaneous resolution to work

fewer hours in the day.” But trades unions, as we now know them, had not

then come into being; and he talks of a future improvement of the

working classes in knowledge, comfort, and self-restraint,[687] with

much hesitation.