We have seen that the economics of Malthus, whether in relation to the

landlords, the employers, or the workmen, are by no means identical with

the economics of Ricardo and his school, which have been the ruling and

orthodox doctrine for the first half of the nineteenth century.

It would be neither complimentary nor true to ascribe the difference to

the logic of sentiment; but it is true that the acute sensitiveness of

Malthus to the evils of poverty kept constantly before him large classes

of facts which Ricardo seemed willing to forget, and the path that he

took, though long ago obscured and forgotten, led him in some important

points away from _laissez faire_ to doctrines of our own day, in which

society acting through its Government is allowed an originative and not

merely a regulative action in the matter of industry and wealth.

Resuming the thread of the essay, we shall find that the relation of

society to its destitute poor is not to Malthus, as to Ricardo, a

question of taxation and finance, but a problem of morals and politics,

which could only be solved by a clear view of the relation of the

citizen to the commonwealth.

CHAPTER IV.

THE BEGGAR.

Arrangement of the Essay—Nature’s Mighty Feast—Tract on _High Price of

Provisions_—I cannot, therefore I ought not—Poor Laws

condemned—Frederick the Great’s Army—Mitigation of Bad Effects of

Poor Law—Step towards Abolition—New Poor Law.

In the foregoing brief review of the economical doctrines of Malthus,

the chapters on commercial policy and the Corn Laws,[688] in the third

book of the _Essay on Population_, have been already noticed. As the

First and Second books of the essay were supposed to deal with the state

of population in past and in present times, the Third is supposed to

deal with the “different systems of expedients which have been proposed

or have prevailed in society” for curing the evils arising from the

principle of population, while the Fourth relates to the future

prospects of society, and the possibility of removing the evils in

question. This division of the subject could not be maintained very

strictly. The “systems proposed” no doubt were in most cases mere

theories and could be considered by themselves; but the “systems that

prevailed” included such laws as the Corn Laws and Poor Laws, which

directly affected the present habits and wealth of the people, and might

fairly have been considered in the second book. The fourth book might

quite logically have been part of the third, for it simply adds to the

“systems proposed” the proposal of Malthus himself. The arrangement is

not in itself so perfect or so closely respected by its author that we

need have any remorse for disregarding it. The earliest chapters of the

third book (i. and ii.) are substantially the refutation of Godwin,

Wallace, Condorcet, as it appeared in 1798, with a postscript (ch. iii.)

on Owen and Spence, which will be best considered in another place.[689]

In point of style they are probably the best in the book.

After a chapter (iv.) on Emigration[690] come three chapters on the Poor

Laws, to be viewed with ch. viii. of the fourth book, which deals with

Plans for their Abolition. Of all the applications of the doctrines of

Malthus, their application to pauperism was probably, at the time, of

the greatest public interest. Even the first essay had distinct bearing

on Pitt’s Poor Bill; the next writing of the author was on a question of

parish relief; and these three chapters in the later _Essay on

Population_ have influenced public opinion and legislation about the

destitute poor almost as powerfully as the _Wealth of Nations_ has

influenced commercial policy. Malthus is the father not only of the new

Poor Law, but of all our latter-day societies for the organization of

charity.

The subject is best introduced in the words of a celebrated parable,

which Malthus having used once was never afterwards allowed to

forget:[691]—“A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he

cannot get subsistence from his parents, on whom he has a just demand,

and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of _right_ to

the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where

he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She

tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he do

not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. If these guests get

up and make room for him, other intruders immediately appear demanding

the same favour. The report of a provision for all that come, fills the

hall with numerous claimants. The order and harmony of the feast is

disturbed, the plenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and

the happiness of the guests is destroyed by the spectacle of misery and

dependence in every part of the hall, and by the clamorous importunity

of those, who are justly enraged at not finding the provision which they

had been taught to expect. The guests learn too late their error, in

counteracting those strict orders to all intruders, issued by the great

mistress of the feast, who, wishing that all her guests should have

plenty, and knowing that she could not provide for unlimited numbers,

humanely refused to admit fresh comers when her table was already

full.”[692]

Our neighbours’ misfortunes have seldom been made so picturesque. The

figure itself was no new one. Lucretius had written:—

“Cur non, ut plenus vitæ conviva, recedis?”[693]

and Fenton, in Pope’s[694] familiar lines:—

“From Nature’s temperate feast rose satisfied,

Thanked heaven that he had lived and that he died.”

But the new application took hold on the public fancy. Sir William

Pulteney and Windham are said to have been, beyond others, delighted

with its conservative moral.[695] Malthus may have got the hint of it

from a passage in Paley’s _Moral and Political Philosophy_. Paley was

criticizing a justification of private property, which founded it on

every man’s right to take what he wants of the things God made for the

use of all, just as, when an entertainment is given to the freeholders

(as the free and independent electors?) of a county, we see them coming

in and eating and drinking each what he chooses, without asking the

consent of the other guests. The simile, says Paley, is not perfect, for

in a freeholder’s feast nobody is allowed to fill his pockets or to

throw anything away, “especially if by so doing he pinched the guests at

the lower end of the table.”[696]

Even the friends of Malthus thought the passage too gloomy; and, as

every one noticed,[697] it was not retained after 1803. It contains,

however, at least two positions that were never retracted:—that the poor

cannot claim relief as a right, but only as a favour, and that poor

relief can only raise one man by depressing another. The latter position

may be illustrated from the tract written in 1800 on the _High Price of

Provisions_. The main aim of the tract was to show that the price was

too extravagantly high to be due to the deficiency, which was admittedly

only one-fourth. But the author throws light on his own general

doctrines.[698] He argues, in substance, that to give relief in money is

to enable the relieved persons to retain their ordinary rate of

consumption at the expense of the rest. To this the reply is

obvious:—the sufficiency of the stock is not so finely calculated,

neither is the amount of it so fixed that it cannot be increased from

home or foreign stores,—and to withdraw money from the rich for the

poor, and increase the country’s total expenditure on necessaries, might

be simply to divert the stream of importation into the channel of

necessaries, and lead to a larger use of food other than bread. Under

the conditions of the time, however, the author’s views were not

unnatural. On his return from Sweden in 1800 he found scarcity

prevailing in England as elsewhere, but with prices much higher than in

other countries. These were the days when Chief Justice Kenyon and a

jury enforced the antiquated laws against forestalling and

regrating.[699] Malthus had not read his Adam Smith to so little purpose

that he could approve such proceedings; much of his pamphlet was simply

an application, to one particular case, of the principles of the _Wealth

of Nations_ (Book IV. chap. v.).[700] Neither could he agree with the

notion that the paper currency had done it all.[701] Settling down to

his parish work in Surrey, he watched the course of events. What

happened, he said, there and presumably elsewhere was as follows:—In

progress of the scarcity the poor complained to the justices that their

wages were too low to buy bread at present prices; the justices

thereupon inquired at what, as the lowest wages, they would have been

able to buy it, and then “very humanely, and I am far from saying

improperly,” gave parish relief accordingly.[702] But, like the water

from the mouth of Tantalus, the corn slipped from the grasp of the poor;

prices rose a step further, and the relief had to follow the prices.

The rates accordingly rose in many places from four to fourteen

shillings in the pound. By the double burden of dear food and high

rates, perhaps five or six millions of the richer classes were certainly

made to feel the pinch of the scarcity, which would otherwise have been

borne, say by two millions of the poorest, who would have died under

it.[703] In this instance the Poor Laws did the country a distinct

service. But it was done by taking from the first guests to give to the

importunate intruders, and could not justify a general eulogy of the

Poor Laws. The whole drift of the _Essay on Population_ had gone against

such institutions; and “two years’ reflection,” says the writer of the

_Essay_, “have served strongly to convince me of the truth of the

principle there advanced, and of its being the real cause of the

continued depression and poverty of the lower classes of society, of the

total inadequacy of all the present establishments in their favour to

relieve them, and of the [certainty of] periodical returns of such

seasons of distress as we have of late experienced.”[704] In the first

essay he had spoken strongly not only against Pitt’s new Poor Bill, but

against all legal relief, and amongst other reasons precisely on the

ground that it caused food to rise in price beyond the point to which

scarcity would have raised it apart from interference.[705]

The second was a stronger reason;—in the language of Kant, the claim

allowed (with little qualification[706]) by the English Poor Laws was a

claim that could not be made universal without contradiction. If every

one exercised the supposed right of demanding relief, no community could

fulfil the supposed duty of granting it.[707] If it could have been

fulfilled, Malthus thinks, the obligation would have held; and, instead

of declaring “I cannot, therefore I ought not,” he would have confessed,

“I can, therefore I ought.”[708] As the case stands, he agrees with Sir

Frederick Eden in thinking the giving of legal relief impracticable, and

therefore no duty, and also that, “upon the whole, the sum of good to be

expected from a compulsory maintenance of the poor will be far

outbalanced by the sum of evil which it will inevitably create.”[709] It

relieved individual suffering at the cost of making the suffering

general. It created the poor which it maintained, for it led men to

marry with the certainty of parish assistance. It thereby increased the

population without increasing the food of the country, and it has to a

large extent broken down the ancient spirit of independence. “Hard as it

may appear in individual instances, dependent poverty ought to be held

disgraceful.”[710] High wages and independence and moral restraint are

better than low wages with a parish supplement and a pauper family. “I

feel persuaded that if the Poor Laws had never existed in this country,

though there might have been a few more instances of very severe

distress, the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would

have been much greater than it is at present.”[711] This was his belief

to the end.[712]

An allegory of these things may be found in Dr. John Moore’s description

of the army of Frederick the Great. Dr. Moore saw a man caned for being

a few seconds late in replacing his ramrod; and the officers told him

that, since they could not distinguish wilful blunders from accidental,

they punished all alike, and the result, they said, was excellent; all

the men were on the alert, and fewer blunders were committed on the

whole. It used to be common on field-days for dragoons to have their

hats blown off and to be thrown from their horses. At last a general

gave orders to punish every man to whom either of these accidents

happened; since then hardly anybody lost his hat or fell from his horse.

Dr. Moore heard of a poor hussar who had fallen from his horse at last

review, and was to be punished for it as soon as he could leave the

hospital. This seemed hard, but the King of Prussia thought he could

only hope to make his army superior to others by improving its

discipline, training its officers by honour and disgrace, and its

privates by physical punishment; he considered that the occasional

suffering of an innocent individual does less harm to an army than the

toleration of negligence, which makes the negligence greater.[713] So

far as legal relief goes, Malthus would recommend the same martial

severity, and try to put men on their guard against poverty by making

them bear the discipline of its consequences. There are other points in

which the allegory applies to the “simple system of natural liberty;”

the discipline of industrial competition is certainly in some respects

as severe as the discipline of an army. On the other hand, society does

not consist of picked strong men, but includes the weak also, and its

privates are supposed not to take their orders from a commander, but to

“fend for themselves.” Society under socialism may resemble an army, but

not society under individualism. Malthus, therefore, would have

repudiated the analogy. He does not reach his conclusions by a

preconceived theory of the state, but by observing the ill results of

the common preconceived theory that every citizen when destitute has a

right to be supported by the state. He finds that, as a matter of fact,

where material relief has been given as a duty, and claimed as a right,

the effect on the recipient has been clearly bad; the Poor Law stands

condemned by experience.

Yet he admits that the badness of the law has been largely counteracted

by the remissness of its execution. The attempt to secure a fixed rate

of wages to the labourer in all states of trade has not really been made

in England as the Elizabethan Poor Law enjoined. The scantiness of the

relief actually given, together with the insolence of the officials

concerned in the giving of it, has disturbed the sense of complete

security, which in the view of Malthus would in such a case have been

fatal. “The desire of bettering our condition and the fear of making it

worse, like the _vis mediatrix naturæ_ in physics, is the _vis mediatrix

reipublicæ_ in politics, and is continually counteracting the disorders

arising from narrow human institutions.” The Poor Law has been so

imperfectly carried out that it has left some room still for prudential

motives among the labourers; they cannot count on complete provision for

their families if they marry recklessly, and some few of them still

think caution needful. Moreover, from fear of the Poor Law the rich will

often refuse to build cottages, lest their occupants become

paupers.[714] In the third place, pauper children, like foundlings, do

not live long.[715]

In his _Letter to Samuel Whitbread, M.P., on his proposed Bill for the

amendment of the Poor Laws_ (1807), Malthus allows that abolition must

not come till public opinion is ripe for it; but he recommends

legislation in the direction of abolition, to prepare the minds of all

classes for the final steps, and to expose to the working classes the

delusiveness of the present boon. Poor Laws, he says, are peculiar to

England, and their absence in other countries does not seem to have the

effects expected from their abolition here. In reply to Malthus, it

might be urged that the Poor Laws are not entirely peculiar to England,

but occur in Denmark and elsewhere.[716] In the second place, as

MacCulloch argues in a letter, aimed at Malthus, to Macvey Napier,[717]

Britain is peculiarly subject to fluctuations in trade, due, for

example, to the changes in foreign tariffs, and therefore there are more

cases of sudden and unavoidable distress, that need such a provision as

the Poor Law’s. In the third place, too, it is difficult to see how we

can make begging unlawful if we make legal relief inaccessible,[718] any

more than we can logically make education compulsory while we insist on

the payment of fees. In the fourth place, an indiscriminate private

charity is probably more mischievous than a discriminating public

relief. Malthus, however, was not against all relief, but only against

it when claimed as a right; and he was fully aware that the risks of the

English working man were greater than those of his Continental brethren.

All he desired was to give the workman scope for that sense of personal

responsibility out of which the Poor Law was beguiling him. He knew

quite well that no good end would be served by the removal of the Poor

Law, unless the public had been educated out of the evil ways of it. He

proposed therefore to make a gradual change, the essence of which was to

be the disclaimer of any right on the part of a poor man to be supported

at the public expense; children have a right to be supported by their

parents, but not by the public.[719] Let a law be passed, he said,

declaring that no legitimate child born from any marriage taking place a

year after the law’s enactment, and no illegitimate born two years

thereafter, shall ever be entitled to parish relief. “And to give a more

general knowledge of this law, and to enforce it more strongly on the

minds of the lower classes of people, the clergyman of each parish

should, previously to the solemnization of a marriage, read a short

address to the parties, stating the strong obligation on every man to

support his own children; the impropriety, and even immorality, of

marrying without a fair prospect of being able to do this; the evils

which had resulted to the poor themselves, from the attempt which had

been made to assist, by public institutions, in a duty which ought to be

exclusively appropriated to parents, and the absolute necessity which

had at length appeared, of abandoning all such institutions, on account

of their producing effects totally opposite to those which were

intended. This would operate as a fair, distinct, and precise notice

which no man could well mistake, and without pressing hard upon any

particular individuals, would at once throw off the rising generation

from their miserable and helpless dependence upon the Government and the

rich.”[720] Both their irritation against the upper classes and their

helplessness in devising expedients in time of want, arise from “the

wretched system of governing too much. When the poor were once taught,

by the abolition of the Poor Laws, and a proper knowledge of their real

situation, to depend more upon themselves, we might rest secure that

they would be fruitful enough in resources, and that the evils which

were absolutely irremediable they would bear with the fortitude of men

and the resignation of Christians.”[721] However comical may be the

picture of a clergyman following up the very un-Malthusian marriage

service by such a moral lecture as is here recommended, the principle of

the recommendation is sober sense, and has largely influenced the

benevolence of later philanthropists. Dr. Chalmers applied it in his

Parochial System, which would have been an admirable substitute for the

Poor Law on the (unfortunately untrue) hypothesis of an absence of

sects. The Mendicity Society (dating from 1815) and the Charity

Organisation (from 1869) build on the same foundation.

The new Poor Law of 1834 differed from Malthus in that it did not deny

the right to relieve, and still kept up the fiction that the law of

Elizabeth was good, and we had degenerated from it.[722] But it allowed

the right only to the indigent,[723] refusing all relief in aid of wages

to the merely poor and the able-bodied; and it carried out the principle

that dependent poverty (in the words of Malthus) should be held

disgraceful and made disagreeable. “Every penny bestowed that tends to

render the condition of a pauper more eligible than that of the

independent labourer is a bounty on indolence and vice.” “In proportion

as the condition of any pauper class is elevated above the condition of

independent labourers, the condition of the independent class is

depressed.”[724] If this meant that poor relief should run a race with

the average wages of labour, keeping always one stage behind them, it

might be argued that in good times a pauper would get too much comfort

and in bad times too little food. But the disgrace of dependence and the

discomfort of constraint are the deterrents which Malthus himself has

most in mind.

Without the discussions raised by the _Essay on Population_ it is very

doubtful if public opinion would have been so far advanced in 1834 as to

make a bill, drawn on such lines, at all likely to pass into law. The

abolition of outdoor relief to the able-bodied was nothing short of a

revolution. It had needed a lifetime of economical doctrine, reproof,

and correction to convince our public men, and to some extent the

nation, that the way of rigour was at once the way of justice, of mercy,

and of self-interest. The history of the English Poor Law is ample proof

that men do not instinctively follow their own interest. It was the

ratepayer’s interest,[725] unless he was an employer, that relief should

be sparely given; and it was given lavishly. It was the poor man’s

interest to be thrifty and sober; and as a rule he was neither. There

was no hope of reform till both rich and poor learned a deeper sense of

their personal responsibility for the remoter effects of their own acts,

whether unwisely benevolent or heedlessly selfish. The clear

consciousness of personal responsibility seems to Malthus to be the soul

and centre of every healthy reform. In this sense, at least, he would

say that virtue is knowledge.

His thoughts on society are connected at this point with his thoughts on

man’s place and duty in the world. His psychology and ethics, slightly

as they are sketched, throw light on his sociology and economics, and

must be considered before we can estimate his position in social

philosophy. This will lead us over the greater portion of the fourth

book of the essay, leaving the critical chapters till we come to deal

with the Critics as a body.

BOOK III.

MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.

Cardinal Doctrines of the Malthusian Ethics—Application to Desire of

Marriage—Place of Man on the Earth—Criticism of Moral

Philosophy—Teleology and Utility—Benevolence and Self-love—Malthus

and Paley—Greatest Happiness—Earthly Paradise—Malthus and the French

Revolution—Malthus not a Political Reactionary—Not committed to

_laissez faire_—His Modifications of that Doctrine—Utilitarianism

_plus_ Nationality—Experience as much the Riddle as the

Interpretation—The State an Organism—Political Ideals before and

after 1846.

The moral philosophy of Malthus, like that of Aristotle, starts from a

teleology.

Nature makes nothing in vain. Every desire has its proper place and

proper gratification, if we can find them. The passions are the

materials out of which happiness is made; and they are therefore to be

regulated and harmonized; they are not to be extinguished, or even

diminished in intensity.[726] There is a way of so gratifying the

desires that they produce a general balance of consequences in favour of

happiness; and there is an opposite way with opposite effects. The

former is evidently the way of nature, for utility is the only guide of

conduct we have apart from Scripture.[727] We must not eradicate any

impulses; but we must follow none so far “as to trench upon some other

law [_sic_] which equally demands our attention.” What is the golden

mean, and what is too much or too little, we can only know by our own

and others’ experience of the consequences of actions.[728] Nature shows

us the wrongness of an act by bringing from it a train of painful

consequences. Diseases, instead of being the “inevitable inflictions of

Providence,” are “indications that we have offended against some of the

laws of nature. The plague at Constantinople and in other towns of the

East is a constant admonition of this kind to the inhabitants. The human

constitution cannot support such a state of filth and torpor; and as

dirt, squalid poverty, and indolence are in the highest degree

unfavourable to happiness and virtue,[729] it seems a benevolent

dispensation that such a state should by the laws of nature produce

disease and death, as a beacon to others to avoid splitting on the same

rock.”[730] As epidemics indicate bad food, unwholesome houses, or bad

drainage, and as indigestion follows over-eating, so the misery that

follows on too great an increase of numbers is simply the law of nature

recoiling on the law-breaker.[731] In this case it has taken a longer

experience to teach men the conduct most favourable to happiness, and

therefore the conduct right for them. But even the best food, best

clothing, and best housing have not been taught all at once; and the

principle of the lesson is clearly the same in all the cases.

To say, therefore, that the desire of marriage is to be restrained and

regulated is not to treat it exceptionally or to deny its naturalness.

There is a lawful and there is an irregular gratification even of hunger

and thirst; and the irregular is punished both by nature and, when it

takes, for example, the form of theft, by human laws. Society could give

such punishment only on the ground that the action punished tended to

injure the general happiness. The act of the hungry man who steals a

loaf is only distinguishable from the act of the hungry man who takes a

loaf of his own, by means of its consequences. If all were to steal

loaves there would in the end be fewer loaves for everybody.[732] We

must apply the same criterion to the irregular gratification of all

other desires.

After the desire for food, the desire of marriage is the most powerful

and general of our desires. “When we contemplate the constant and severe

toil of the greatest part of mankind, it is impossible not to be

forcibly impressed with the reflection that the sources of human

happiness would be most cruelly diminished if the prospect of a good

meal, a warm house, and a comfortable fireside in the evening were not

incitements sufficiently vivid to give interest and cheerfulness to the

labours and privations of the day.”[733] This desire gives strength of

character to a man in proportion as the animal element in it is hidden

away out of sight, and in proportion as the gratification of it is won

by exertion and, it may be, by waiting. To do as Jacob did for Rachel, a

man must have some strength of character. Most of us, in the opinion of

Malthus, owe whatever of definite plan there is in our lives to the

existence of such a central object of affection.[734] Malthus himself,

it will appear, did not marry till on the eve of becoming a professor at

the East India College, nearly a year after these passages were written.

Even in 1798 he wrote: “Perhaps there is scarcely a man who has once

experienced the genuine delights of virtuous love, however great his

intellectual pleasures may have been, that does not look back to the

period as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves

to bask, which he recollects and contemplates with the fondest regrets,

and which he would most wish to live over again.”[735] Such a passage,

though it disappeared, with other flowers of language, in the later

editions of the essay, show us that Malthus, though wiser, was not

colder than his fellow-men, and drew his facts from experience as well

as observation, of the matters concerned.[736]

If we assume the intention of the Creator to replenish the earth, we can

see a reason in cosmical polity for the strength of this desire of

marriage. If the fertility of fertile soils had been as great as the

power of population to increase, there would have been no inducement to

men to cultivate the poorer soils or frequent the less attractive parts

of the earth’s surface; human industry and ingenuity would have wanted

their first stimulus.[737] As it is, the disparity of the two powers

leads to an over-spreading of the world; men are led to avoid

overcrowding from fear of the evils that spring from it. Man’s duties

vary with his situations; and, as these are not uniform, but infinitely

various, all his powers are kept in play. This language might make us

doubt whether the final cause is the development of man, or simply the

replenishment of the earth. If the first essay be allowed in evidence,

it is clear that man (with whatever justice) is made the chief end of

the earth, though his own chief end is not supposed to be realized

there.[738]

The natural theology of Malthus and Paley is the foundation of their

ethics. It was the English ethics of last century, not only before Kant,

but before Bentham. There are signs that Malthus, in his views of

metaphysics and of the “moral sentiments,”[739] preferred where he could

to draw rather from Tucker than from Paley. Abraham Tucker[740] (the

“Edward Search” who began the _Light of Nature_ in 1756, and finished

it, blind, in 1774) lived for nearly fifty years[741] at Betchworth

Castle near Dorking. It is possible in these days, when near neighbours

knew each other better than they care to do now, that Daniel Malthus,

though the younger man, may have known Tucker. They were both of them

Oxford men, small proprietors, eccentric, literary, and fond of

philosophizing. Whether through his father at home or through Paley at

college, it is certain that Malthus at an early date studied the _Light

of Nature_ and adopted much of its teaching. Before he appeared in

public as an author, he had formed some settled philosophical

convictions, which (whatever their value) at least left his mind free

for its other work, and kept it at peace with itself as regards the

problems of philosophy.

The substantial agreement of his views with the doctrines of the _Moral

and Political Philosophy_ no doubt helped to bring Malthus under the

common prejudice against “Pigeon Paley,”[742] the defender of things as

they are and preacher of contentment to starving labourers. When Paley

became an open convert to the _Essay on Population_, the public would no

doubt believe their suspicions confirmed. But Malthus and Paley agree

not as disciple and master, but at most as disciples of the same master.

Malthus tries to work out his own philosophy for himself.[743]

It is open to many criticisms. In his ethics he seems to have made no

distinct analysis or classification of the passions. He takes for

granted that the Passions are on one side and Reason on the other, and

there is no middle term between the two except the Design of God, which

is worked out by the passions of men as by external nature, and which is

(we are left to infer) in some way akin to human reason, for human

reason can find it out. The impulse of benevolence, for example, is said

to be, like all our natural passions, “general” (by which he seems to

mean vague), “and in some degree indiscriminate and blind;” and, like

the impulses of love, anger, ambition, the desire of eating and

drinking, or any other of our “natural propensities,” it must be

regulated by experience and frequently brought to the test of utility,

or it will defeat its own purpose.[744] In other words, Malthus treats

all human impulses as if they were appetites, co-ordinate with each

other, primary and irresolvable. All desires are equally natural, and

abstractedly considered equally virtuous,[745] though not equally

strong, and therefore not equally fit at first sight to carry out their

Creator’s purpose.

The Reason of Man, therefore, must assist the Reason of his Maker in

carrying out the teleology of his passions, as well as the teleology of

nature itself.[746] The “apparent object” (or evident final cause), for

example, of the desire of marriage is the continuance of the race and

the care of the weak, and not merely the happiness of the two persona

most concerned.[747] To take another example, the object of the impulse

of benevolence is to increase the sum of human happiness by binding the

human race together.[748] Self-love is made a stronger motive than

benevolence for a wise and perfectly ascertainable purpose. The

ascertainment of the purpose, however, presents a difficulty.

Acknowledging that we ought to do the will of God, how are we to

discover it?

We are told in answer to this question, that the intention of the

Creator to procure the good of His creatures is evident partly from

Scripture and partly from experience; and it is that intention, so

manifested, which we are bound to promote. What on God’s side is

teleology, on man’s is utility; utility is the ruling principle of

morals. Not being a passion it cannot itself lead to action; but it

regulates passion, and that, so powerfully, that all our most important

laws and customs, such as the institution of property and the

institution of marriage, are simply disguised forms of it.[749] As

animals, we follow the dictates of nature, which would mean unhindered

passion; but as reasonable beings we are under the strongest obligations

to attend to the consequences of our acts, and, if they be evil to

ourselves or others, we may justly infer that such a mode of indulging

those passions is “not suited to our state or conformable to the will of

God.” As moral agents, therefore, it is clearly our duty to restrain the

indulgence of our passions in those particular directions, that by thus

carefully examining their consequences, and by frequently bringing them

to the test of utility, we may gradually acquire a habit of gratifying

them only in the way which, being unattended with evil, will clearly

“add to the sum of human happiness, and fulfil the apparent purpose of

the Creator.”[750] All the moral codes which have laid down the

subjection of the passions to reason have been really (thinks Malthus)

built on this foundation, whether their promulgators were aware of it or

not. “It is the test alone by which we can know independently of the

revealed will of God whether a passion ought or ought not to be

indulged, and is therefore the surest criterion of modern rules which

can be collected from the light of nature.” In other words, our

theological postulates lead us to control our passions so as to secure

not merely our own individual happiness, but “the greatest sum of human

happiness.” And the tendency of an action to promote or diminish the

general happiness is our only criterion of its morality.[751]

From this it directly follows that, because the free and indiscriminate

indulgence of benevolence leads to the reverse of general happiness, we

ought to practise a discriminating charity which blesses him that gives

and him that takes. There is what Bastiat would call a harmony between

the two.[752]

In this case, indeed, nature reinforces utility by making the passion of

self-love stronger in men than the passion of benevolence. Every man

pursues his own happiness first as his primary object, and it is best

that he should do so. It is best that every man should, in the first

instance, work out his own salvation, and have a sense of his own

responsibility. Not only charity but moral reformation must begin at

home. Benevolence apart from wisdom is even more mischievous than mere

self-love, which is not to be identified with the “odious vice of

selfishness,” but simply with personal ambition, the person to whom it

is personal including as a rule children and parents, and in fact a

whole world besides the single atom or “dividual self.”[753] If the

desire of giving to others had been as ardent as the desire of giving to

ourselves, the human race would not have been equal to the task of

providing for all its possible members. But because it is impossible for

it to provide for all, there is a tendency in all to provide for

themselves first; and, though we consider that the selfish element in

this feeling ought to grow less in a man in proportion as he becomes

richer and less embarrassed by his own wants, we must recognize that its

existence has been due to a wise provision for the general

happiness.[754] Malthus does not deny at the same time that benevolence

is always the weaker motive, and needs continually to be strengthened by

doctrine, reproof, and correction. It ought always to be thought a

“great moral duty” to assist our fellow-creatures in distress.[755]

With these ethical views, it was easy for Malthus to meet the objection

that the general adoption of the moral restraint recommended in his

_Essay on Population_ would diminish the numbers of the people too far.

He (or his spokesman) answers[756] that we might as well fear to teach

benevolence lest we should make men too careless of their private

interests. “There is in such a case a mean point of perfection, which it

is our duty to be constantly aiming at; and the circumstance of this

point being surrounded on all sides with dangers is only according to

the analogy of all ethical experience.” There is as much danger of

making men too generous or too compassionate, as there is of

“depopulating the world by making them too much the creatures of reason,

and giving prudence too great a mastery over the natural passions and

affections. The prevailing error in the game of life is, not that we

miss the prizes through excess of timidity, but that we overlook the

true state of the chances in our eager and sanguine expectations of

winning them.[757] Of all the objections that were ever made to a

moralist who offered to arm men against the passions that are everywhere

seducing them into misery, the most flattering, but undoubtedly the most

chimerical, is that his reasons are so strong that, if he were allowed

to diffuse them, passion would be extinguished altogether, and the

activity as well as the enjoyments of man annihilated along with his

vices.”[758]

In his view of the passions and of the moral sentiments, Malthus is

clearly a man of the eighteenth century, and on the whole is more nearly

at one with Paley than with any moralist after Tucker. There are points

of divergence. He could not, in view of his cosmology, have fully

approved Paley’s definition of virtue, “doing good to mankind in

obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting

happiness.”[759] He may have seen how it followed that a solitary man

had no duties, that a pagan had no power to do right, that the moral

imperative was hypothetical, and that it had no force for any who

abjured their future bliss. At least he contents himself with agreeing

that “the will of God is plainly general happiness, as we discover both

by Scripture and the light of nature;”[760] and, “provided we discover

it, it matters nothing by what means;”—there are clear marks of design

in the world showing that its Maker willed the happiness of His

creatures; and what He willed they should will.

In other words, the ethical system of both is a utilitarianism which is

narrow and personal in its motive (the private happiness of the

individual in another world), but broad and catholic in its end (the

general happiness of human beings in the present world). It is as if God

induced us to promote other people’s happiness now, by telling us that

He would in return promote our own by-and-by. There are signs that

Malthus took a larger view, and thought rather of the development of the

human faculties[761] than of mere satisfaction of desires, both in this

world and in the next; but he nowhere distinctly breaks with Paley, and

his division of passions into self-love (or prudence) and benevolence is

taken straight from that theologian.[762]

By the vagueness of their phraseology when they spoke of the general sum

of happiness, the older utilitarians avoided some of the difficulties

that encounter their successors. Apart from the hardness of defining

happiness and a sum of happiness,[763] there is a difficulty in fixing

the precise extent of the generality. The tendency of utilitarianism in

the hands of Bentham was towards equality and the removal of privilege;

every one to count as one, no one as more than one. But both with him

and with the older members it may be doubted whether the doctrine did

not tend to benefit the majority at the expense of the minority.

We find Malthus thinking[764] that, had the Poor Laws never existed,

there “might have been a few more instances of very severe distress,”

but “the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would have

been much greater than it is at present.” In other words, what he wanted

was the “greatest amount of happiness” on the whole, whatever an

“amount” of happiness may mean. Malthus would probably have refused to

use the formula of Bentham, “the greatest happiness of the greatest

number”; he would have counted the first item, the happiness, out of all

proportion more important than the second.[765] He had refused something

like it at the hands of Paley. “I cannot agree with Archdeacon Paley,

who says that the quantity of happiness in any country is best measured

by the number of its people. Increasing population is the most certain

possible sign of the happiness and prosperity of a state; but the actual

population may be only a sign of the happiness that is past.”[766]

Malthus would not, for example, have wished to see the highlands of

Scotland brought back to their ancient condition, in which they had

greater numbers than now living in rude comfort, but also greater

numbers exposed to precarious indigence.[767]

On the other hand, it is certain (in spite of a common prejudice) that

Malthus desired the great numbers as well as the great happiness, and

was indeed quite naturally led by his theological views to prefer a

little happiness for each of many individuals to a great deal for each

of a few. He “desires a great actual population and a state of society

in which abject poverty and dependence are comparatively but little

known,”[768]—two perfectly compatible requirements, which if realized

together would lead to what may be called Malthus’ secondary or earthly

paradise, which is not above mundane criticism.

This earthly paradise is, even in our author’s opinion, the end most

visibly concerned in our schemes of reform. His idea of it as a society

where moral restraint is perfect, invites the remark that the chief end

of society cannot be the mere removal of evil; it must be the

establishment of some good, the former being at the utmost an essential

condition _sine quâ non_ of the latter. Moreover, moral restraint is not

the removal of every but only of one evil; and it kills only one cause

of poverty. A complete reformation must not only remove all the evils,

but must positively amend and transform all the three branches of social

economy,—the making, the sharing, and the using of wealth,—not one or

even two of them alone. Every Utopian scheme should be tested by the

question: Does it reform all three, or only one, or two, of the three?

Neglect of the third might spoil all. A scheme which affects all three,

however, must have something like a Religion in it. With these

reservations Malthus’ picture of the good time coming has much value and

interest.[769]

Unlike Godwin, he relies on the ordinary motives of men, which he

regards as forms of an enlightened self-love. Self-love is the

mainspring of the social machine;[770] but self-love, when the self is

so expanded as to include other selves, is not a low motive. Commercial

ambition, encouraged by political liberty, and unhampered by Poor Laws,

leads naturally to prosperity.[771] The happiness of the whole is to

result from the happiness of individuals, and to begin first with them.

He “sees in all forms of thought and work the life and death struggles

of separate human beings.”[772] “No co-operation is required. Every step

tells. He who performs his duty faithfully will reap the full fruits of

it, whatever may be the number of others who fail. This duty is

intelligible to the humblest capacity. It is merely that he is not to

bring beings into the world for whom he cannot find the means of

support. When once this subject is cleared from the obscurity thrown

over it by parochial laws and private benevolence, every man must feel

the strongest conviction of such an obligation. If he cannot support his

children, they must starve; and, if he marry in the face of a fair

probability that he will not be able to support his children, he is

guilty of all the evils which he thus brings upon himself, his wife, and

his offspring. It is clearly his interest, and will tend greatly to

promote his happiness, to deter marrying till by industry and economy he

is in a capacity to support the children that he may reasonably expect

from his marriage; and, as he cannot in the mean time gratify his

passions without violating an express command of God, and running a

great risk of injuring himself or some of his fellow-creatures,

considerations of his own interest and happiness will dictate to him the

strong obligation to a moral conduct while he remains unmarried.”[773]

Supposing passion to be thus controlled, we should see a very different

scene from the present. “The period of delayed gratification would be

passed in saving the earnings which were above the wants of a single

man.” Savings Banks and Friendly Societies would have their perfect

work; and “in a natural state of society such institutions, with the aid

of private charity well directed, would probably be all the means

necessary to produce the best practicable effects.”[774] The people’s

numbers would be constantly within the limits of the food, though

constantly following its increase; the real value of wages would be

raised, in the most permanent way possible; “all abject poverty would be

removed from society, or would at least be confined to a very few who

had fallen into misfortunes against which no prudence or foresight could

provide.”[775] It must be brought home to the poor that “they are

themselves the cause of their own poverty.”[776] While Malthus insists

against Godwin that it is not institutions and laws but ourselves that

are to blame, he still shares, with Godwin, the desire to lessen the

number of institutions; and, as a first reform, would repeal at least

one obnoxious law.

The relation of Malthus to the French Revolution and its English

partisans is indeed not to be expressed in a sentence. It has been said

that he cannot be justly described as being a reactionary;[777] and, in

truth, besides being a critic of Godwin and of Condorcet, he is

influenced to some extent by the same ideas that influenced them. The

_Essay on Population_ is coloured throughout by a tacit or open

reference to the Rights of Man, a watchword borrowed from France by the

American Republic, to be restored again at the Revolution. Paine’s book

on the _Rights of Man_, in reply to Burke’s _Reflections on the French

Revolution_, had been widely read before it was suppressed by the

English Government; and Godwin and Mackintosh[778] were not silenced.

Malthus himself, as a Whig, does not disparage the rights of man when

they meant political freedom and equality, but only when they included

the right to be supported by one’s neighbour, as had been asserted by

the Abbé Raynal and some other writers of the Revolution.[779] As the

same assertion was practically made by the English Poor Law, which had

venerable conservative prejudice on its side, our author’s opposition to

it was no proof that his politics were reactionary. His economical

antecedents and his political views bound him to the French Revolution.

In his range of ideas and his habitual categories he could not depart

far from the French Economists, who had helped to prepare the way for

the Jacobins. Adam Smith himself had felt their influence. Though he had

criticized the noble savage and the state of nature,[780] he had himself

a lingering preference for agriculture over manufacture; and he himself

spoke of a “natural” price, a “natural” progress of opulence, a

“natural” rate of wages, and “natural liberty.” To him as to the French

writers, Nature[781] meant what would grow of itself if men did not

interfere,—the difficulty being that the interference seems also to grow

of itself, and it is impossible to separate the necessary protection

from the mischievous interference. Malthus retains the phraseology with

an even nearer approach to personification. Nature points out to us

certain courses of conduct.[782] If we break Nature’s laws, she will

punish us. At Nature’s mighty feast there is no cover laid for the

superfluous new-comer. The Poor Laws offend against Nature; they

interfere with human action in a case where it would spontaneously right

itself by ordinary motives of self-interest; if men knew they could not

count on parish relief, they would probably help themselves. Be the

argument worth much or little, its strength is not the greater because

of this figure; and his use of it shows that Malthus had not risen above

the metaphysical superstitions of his age. But the charge sometimes made

against him is that he was not merely not before his age but positively

behind it; and this is certainly false.

In politics he was as little of a reactionary as his opponent, who if

“in principle a Republican was in practice a Whig.”[783] He followed Fox

rather than Burke, and lost neither his head nor his temper over the

Revolution. “Malthus will prove a peace-monger,” wrote Southey in

1808.[784] He was a steady friend of Catholic Emancipation. He saw the

folly of attributing with Godwin and Paine all evil to the Government,

and with Cobbett all evil to taxation and the funds;[785] but he is one

with them all in dislike of standing armies, and is more alarmed at the

overbearing measures of the Government against sedition than at the

alleged sedition itself. One of the most remarkable chapters in the

second edition of the essay[786] is on “the effects of the knowledge of

the principal cause of poverty on civil liberty.” Its main argument is,

that, where there is much distress and destitution, there will be much

discontent and sedition, and, where there is much of the two last, there

will be much coercion and despotism. A knowledge of the chief cause of

poverty by taking away the distress would leave Government at least no

excuse for tyranny. “The pressure of distress on the lower classes of

people, together with the habit of attributing this distress to their

rulers, appears to me to be the rock of defence, the castle, the

guardian spirit of despotism. It affords to the tyrant the fatal and

unanswerable plea of necessity. It is the reason why every free

Government tends constantly to destruction, and that its appointed

guardians become daily less jealous of the encroachments of power.”[787]

The French people had been told that their unhappiness was due to their

rulers; they overthrew their rulers, and, finding their distress not

removed, they sacrificed the new rulers; and this process would have

continued indefinitely if despotism had not been found preferable to

anarchy. In England “the Government of the last twenty years[788] has

shown no great love of peace or liberty,” and the country gentlemen have

apparently surrendered themselves to Government on condition of being

protected from the mob.[789] A few more scarcities like 1800 might cause

such convulsions and lead to such sternness of repression that the

British constitution would end as Hume foretold,[790] in “absolute

monarchy, the easiest death, the true _euthanasia_ of the British

constitution.” The “tendency of mobs to produce tyranny” can only be

counteracted by the subversion, not of the tyrants, but of the mobs. The

result would be a lean and wiry people, weak for offence, but strong for

defence; there would be freedom at home and peace abroad.[791]

Of course the “knowledge of the principal cause of poverty” is not

conceived by Malthus as the only lesson worth learning. He shares the

growing enthusiasm of all friends of the people for popular

education,[792] and thinks the Tory arguments against instructing the

poorer classes “not only illiberal, but to the last degree feeble, if

not really disingenuous.”[793] “An instructed and well-informed people

would be much less likely to be led away by inflammatory writings, and

much better able to detect the false declamation of interested and

ambitious demagogues than an ignorant people.”[794] These words were

written in 1803, four years before Whitbread made his motion on Schools

and Savings Banks, and thirteen years before Brougham’s Committee on

Education.[795] Malthus in fact was in politics an advanced Whig, ahead

of his party in ideas of social reform. This may be seen from the

following passage, which is only one out of many, that show his large

view of his subject. He says that in most countries among the poor there

seems to be something like “a standard of wretchedness, a point below

which they will not continue to marry.” “This standard is different in

different countries, and is formed by various concurring circumstances

of soil, climate, government, degree of knowledge, civilization, &c.” It

is raised by liberty, security of property, the diffusion of knowledge,

and a taste for the conveniences and the comforts of life. It is lowered

by despotism and ignorance. “In an attempt to better the condition of

the labouring classes of society, our object should be to raise this

standard as high as possible by cultivating a spirit of independence, a

decent pride, and a taste for cleanliness and comfort. The effect of a

good Government in increasing the prudential habits and personal

respectability of the lower classes of society has already been insisted

on; but certainly this effect will always be incomplete without a good

system of education, and indeed it may be said that no Government can

approach to perfection that does not provide for the instruction of the

people. The benefits derived from education are among those which may be

enjoyed without restriction of numbers; and, as it is in the power of

Governments to confer these benefits, it is undoubtedly their duty to do

it.”[796]

Our author’s historical sense saved him from Ricardian presumptions in

favour of _laissez faire_. Writers go too far, however, in declaring

unlimited competition to be against the spirit of his work, and

asserting that he undervalued the influence of institutions, only that

he might save his country’s institutions from hasty reform.[797] He knew

that society did not grow up on economical principles; instead of

beginning with non-interference, and extending interference by degrees

where it was found imperative, it began with interference everywhere,

and relaxed the interference by degrees where it was found possible and

thought desirable. We have begun with status and paternal government,

and have made our way towards contract and _laissez faire_; but we have

never reached them, because, as men now are, we cannot go on without

damage to the common weal. But it seemed to Malthus that experience had

shown the need as clearly as the dangers of natural liberty;—history,

for example, had clearly proved that the material relief of the poor,

which had never been abandoned by the Government, might best have been

left to private action. The extreme view would have been that it was not

every one’s duty in general, but every one’s in particular, a

responsibility of which no one could divest himself. But, though Malthus

often speaks as if the burden ought to lie specially on a man’s

relatives and private friends, he does not share Adam Smith’s antipathy

to associations, and would probably have recognized division of labour

to be as necessary in charity as in industry. Still, even as

administered by an organization of men specially fitted for the work by

nature and choice, the distribution of material relief never seems to

him a case where society can help the poor without in some degree

injuring their independence and their strength of character. In the

matter of charity he is clearly on the side of natural liberty and

individualism.

But, in other directions, he has made admissions which seriously modify

the unlimited competition of natural liberty. He admits, first of all,

that the struggle for existence when it is the struggle for bare life

does not lead to progress;[798] and he admits, therefore, in the second

place, that the state should interfere with the “system of natural

liberty,” positively, to educate the citizens,[799] and to grant medical

aid to the poor,[800] to assist emigration,[801] and even to give direct

relief in money to men that have a family of more than six

children,[802]—as well as negatively, to restrict foreign trade when it

causes more harm to the public than good to the traders,[803] and to

restrict the home trade where children’s labour is concerned.[804]

A critic might ask on what principle he justifies these admissions; or

might hint that he makes them on no conscious principle at all, but in

the spirit of a judge, who is administering a law that he knows to be

bad, but prefers to make continual exceptions rather than suggest a new

law;—otherwise could any rule stand the test of so many exceptions?

It might be replied that Malthus nowhere writes a treatise on political

philosophy, and his views must be inferred from scattered hints, but it

does not follow that he was not, consciously or unconsciously, possessed

of a guiding principle. His several admissions have a certain logical

connection. It is more doubtful whether their connecting principle will

seem adequate to a modern reader whose questions in political philosophy

have been stated for him by Comte and the latter-day socialists.

The first of the admissions is the more significant, as Malthus, while

making it, refuses to approve of the means then actually adopted (by the

Poor Law) for raising the level of the weakest citizens, and so fitting

them for their struggle. If the absence of provision was an evil, the

existing provision was hardly a less one. It was bad for society to give

help by giving bread and butter, for that was a gift to full-grown men

and women, not really weak, but quite ready to be indolent. A gift of

education, on the other hand, is given, he considers, to those who are

really incapable of helping themselves and really ignorant of their

powers.[805] It makes the weak strong, and tends to remove indolence,

not create it.[806] In the same way Factory Acts assist the weak and not

the indolent, while the (rare) interference with free trade, the

granting of medical relief, the special aid in case of large families,

and the aid to Irish peasants, are all of them special remedies in cases

where the sufferers could not be expected to foresee and provide against

the distress, and were therefore sufferers from circumstances rather

than from indolence. Malthus continually takes the view that security is

a greater blessing than wealth itself, and insecurity a worse evil than

poverty. The circumstances that cause insecurity were therefore in his

view the most distressing; they baffled individual effort.

His critics might have answered: “In all the cases mentioned by you as

justifying interference, a perfectly enlightened self-interest would

have provided against the mishap; and relief of any kind would be in the

end equivalent to relief in bread and butter, for, as far as it goes, it

allows the more to be left over either to the man or his parents for

bread and butter, and thereby it is a relief that fosters indolence.” He

could rejoin, however, that (even if we grant the practical possibility

of such a perfect enlightenment) direct relief appeals far more to

indolence than indirect,[807] and the good of the indirect can often,

the good of the direct very seldom, outweigh the evil. He would have

added that even the direct relief in bread and butter was not opposed by

him on any theory, but on the ground of its known tendency to evil,—and,

if it had been possible from the nature of men and things to keep the

promises of the Poor Law, he would have given his voice for it. He was

committed to free trade itself only because and only so far as

experience was in its favour. His only axiom in political philosophy was

that the end of politics is the greatest happiness of the great body of

the people; and his only rule for securing that end was the observation

of what, as a matter of experience, actually did secure it.

On the other hand, nothing is clearer from his own writings than that

the language of experience owes much of its meaning to its interpreter;

and we ask “What were his principles of interpretation?”

The answer is, that, in spite of the affinity between utilitarianism in

morals and individualism in politics, he tried to retain the first

without the second. He understood moral goodness to consist in the

tendency of actions to produce a balance of pleasures over pains; but

his utility when examined turned out, as we have seen, to be much nearer

the notion of self-development than simply a sum of pleasures

irrespective of their quality. At this point the strong grasp which

family life held on his fancy lifted him above the notion that the chief

end could be the individual happiness of isolated units, and showed him

that the real unit was a group. The state to Malthus, as to Aristotle,

is an aggregate of families, though he recognizes very clearly that,

besides the connection of householder with householder by the common

subjection to the laws, there is the common bond of nationality, a

community of feeling, a partnership of past traditions, present

privileges, and future hopes.[808] It is one of the plainest facts of

experience that men are often led by their attachment to their country

and countrymen to run counter to their worldly interests.[809]

The nation is a little world within the great world, and on the analogy

of the great world it is the scene where difficulties generate talents

and bring out the character.[810] From this point of view it is not far

from the truth to parody a well-known description of modern Judaism, and

describe the political philosophy of Malthus as Utilitarianism _plus_ a

Nationality. The individualism of Malthus is limited by the particular

institutions and particular interests of the English nation.[811] In his

intellectual history a strong emphasis on the state preceded the

emphasis on the individual; and even in his mature view the state is

limited in its interference with the citizens only by its powers of

doing good to them. But he holds with Adam Smith and the other

economists that its powers of doing good to them are very much narrower

than on the old conception of the state, as a kind of family. The duties

of a state to the citizens are narrower than those of a father to his

children, because what the father can and must do for his children the

state cannot do for its citizens with equal safety to their

independence. It remains, however, true that the relation of state to

citizen is not the commercial relation of one contracting party with

another; it is a relation prior to the commercial, and gives to all

contracts whatever validity they have.

If Malthus himself had been asked to reconcile his departure from the

general principle of natural liberty with his general adherence to it,

he would have made some such answer as the following: “From the first,

when I wrote in 1798, it appeared to me that the action of Government

could neither have so uniformly bad an effect as Godwin supposed, nor so

uniformly good as Pitt’s Bill implied. If, as Godwin desires, there were

no Government, but only a chastened _laissez faire_, unsophisticated

human nature would be quite enough to bring back misery and sin.[812]

But the chastening of the _laissez faire_ could not in my opinion take

place without the Government, for it is one of the most proper functions

of Government, not adequately dischargeable by individuals, to provide

for the people the education that is supposed to chasten. Even when that

provision has been made, the education will not do its perfect work if

it has not included the particular doctrines which it has fallen to me

more than any man to bring home to the public mind. With such an

education there will be hope for better things. Things as they are and

the struggle for existence as it now is among the helpless classes can

please me as little as Godwin. It is a struggle which leads to no

progress. But, unlike Godwin, I do not regard Government as necessarily

creating the distress; and I certainly regard it as the necessary engine

for removing the distress by education in the end, and toning down its

effects by restrictions for the present. If only as an engine of

education, paternal government must be a permanent factor of society.

Where a public necessity has been well supplied by individual action, I

should leave it in the hands of individuals; but not otherwise. I did

not object to the Poor Law on the broad ground that it took the place of

private action, but because its own action was mischievous. I should try

every case on its merits, and be guided to interfere or not interfere by

the known results of the existing policies.”

In so speaking, Malthus would no doubt have justified his own

consistency. But the modern reader might justly reply to Malthus, that

we have often to judge tendencies as well as results, and experience

becomes then an uncertain guide; he might complain that Malthus himself

is sometimes led to judge both of them by a half-acknowledged

supplementary principle of the balance of classes and safety of the

mean, which can be applied in a way very unfavourable to popular rights.

He might urge that the apparent success of an institution might have

been due to a concurrent cause that cancelled its defects, and we cannot

always pronounce on its merits from experience of it. How can experience

help us unless we have the key to its interpretation? Without such a key

nothing would be so false as facts except figures. In human politics

mere survival is seldom the test of fitness.

If we compare the state to an organism and convert our simile into a

rule of judgment, we may say that, when each part has its function and

contributes to the efficiency of the whole, the body politic is well;

when any part does not, there is need of the doctor or surgeon. This

figure seems to give us a key for the interpretation of social

experience; but unhappily the figure itself needs an interpreter.[813]

If we interpret organism as the ideal union of members in one body, it

ceases to be a simile, for the body politic is not merely like this

union,—it is the best example of it. For in the body politic the general

life is the source of all individual energy, and at the same time the

individual members are continually paying back the debt, by an active

sympathy and conscious union with the commonwealth, to which the

commonwealth in its turn owes all its collective energy; the citizen is

nothing without his state, or the state without its citizens. This is to

make the figure useful, by making it change places with the thing

prefigured. So long as the same idea is grasped in both, their relation

in rhetoric need not affect us.

Such an idea of the state would lead us beyond the admissions of Malthus

to some such demands as the following:—For his every possession, the

citizen must be able to show some service rendered to his countrymen,

and must be taught and expected to hold his property in trust for the

common good, that so the body politic may have no useless member. In

proportion as private possession involves monopoly, its use should be

jealously restricted in the public interest, which in the extreme cases

would lead to the withdrawing of it, with as little friction as might

be, from the private owner to the state. Education acts, sanitary laws,

and factory acts should be strictly and universally enforced, not for

the sake of the parents, guardians, and employers, or even altogether

for the sake of the sufferers themselves, but for the sake of the

community, in order that in the struggle for existence every competitor

should start fair as an efficient citizen, with full possession of his

powers of mind and body. For the rest, security and order should be the

watchword of the state, free course being allowed to commercial and

industrial enterprise, scientific inquiry, and speculative discussion,

in order that progress may be made in the surest of all ways, by the

moral and intellectual development of the individual citizens, which

will soon express itself in their institutions. With these postulates,

half from the old economists and half from the new reformers, on the way

to be realized, and with industrial co-operation in prospect, we need

not despair of the future of man on our part of the earth.

Tried by such a standard Malthus certainly fails to give us a perfect

political philosophy, and seems little farther advanced than his master

Adam Smith, who taught that the state was profitable only for defence,

for justice, and for such public works as could not be so well done by

individuals. With all his regard for the nation, Malthus looks at social

problems too much from the individual’s point of view. He speaks much,

for example, of the good effect, on the individual man, of the domestic

ideal, and of the ideals of personal prosperity in the world, both built

on security of property and liberty of action. He speaks little of the

duty of the citizen to the community, and of the return he owes it for

his security and liberty. The citizen in his picture of him seems to

have nothing but duties to his family and nothing but claims on the

state. The citizen is lost in the householder. He is content to be let

alone, and does not positively and actively recognize his identity with

the legislative power, and his obligation to repay service with service.

Later political philosophy would press the counter-claims of the

community on the citizen. It would demand, for example, that he shall

neither leave his lands waste nor preserve his game, if either practice

is contrary to the public good. It would keep in mind that the holders

of large fortunes owe more to the public for protection of them than the

holders of small, and should bear a heavier burden of taxes. It would

not leave men to do as they willed with their own.[814]

In regard to the lowest classes that are hardly to be called citizens,

for they are struggling in hopeless weakness for mere bread, Malthus

never seems to see that his own acknowledgment of their powerlessness to

rise must justify much more than the mere establishment of compulsory

education for their children or even mechanics’ institutes for

themselves. It would justify the adoption of such measures as will make

their surroundings likely to give and preserve to them a higher standard

of living. It would sanction measures of “local option” to keep away

from them the infection of dangerous moral diseases; and it would

enforce the obligation on the owners of houses to make them habitable

and healthy. It would give town and country tenants secure tenure by

law, where an insecure tenure of custom had induced them to spend labour

on their holdings.

The older economists had the just idea that security in possession was

the first condition of industrial progress; but they did not see that

this very principle would justify very large restrictions on the use of

property, and that the restrictions would increase in largeness as the

property approached the nature of a monopoly; they did not see that for

the public interest it may be as necessary to prohibit deer forests as

to pull down unsanitary dwellings or enforce vaccination.

The reason was that for a long time in England it was a hard enough task

for reformers to secure the negative freedom of being let alone, the

freedom of trade and of the press and of local government, with the

abolition of privileges. Cobden’s attempt to resolve Politics into

Economics was well-timed and fruitful in its generation; and the

Manchester school has still a part to play in our own time. But the

special work of political reform in the future is to achieve the

positive freedom, “the maximum of power, for all members of human

society alike, to make the best of themselves.”[815] Of this programme

neither Malthus nor any writer of his day had any clear conception. He

himself had no claim to a seer’s vision; and the horizon of his

opponents was never wider than his own.

It is time to go back to the _Essay_ and confront its opponents. We have

now a sufficient knowledge of the economics and philosophy of Malthus to

be able to sympathize with him under misconception, or at least to

understand what appearance an objection would wear to his mind. Not that

we have a complete picture of the man, or even a view of his entire

mental furniture, which is more than this _curta supellex_; but we see

enough to judge the cause of the _Essay_ on its merits, not prejudiced,

favourably or unfavourably, by the life and character of the author.

BOOK IV.

THE CRITICS.

Three Questions for the Critics—Parr and _Thoughts on Parr_—Pulpit

Philosophy—Godwin’s Blessing in 1801—The Cursing in

1820—Theology—The Command to Noah—The Ratios—Population “fitful”—S.

T. Coleridge among the Economists—James Grahame—Empson’s

Classification of Critics—Weyland and Arthur Young—“Cannot,

therefore ought not”—Spence’s _Plan_ and Owen’s—_Progress and

Poverty_—_Das Kapital_—Herbert Spencer—Classification of

Critics—Ethics of the Hearth and of the World—End and Means of

Malthus.

The critics of Malthus had three questions before them: Do the

conclusions of Malthus follow from his premises? Does he himself draw

them? Are they true as a matter of fact? The answers will be best given

by a short survey of the principal critics with whom Malthus contended

in his lifetime, and those who have most formidably contended with his

followers since his death.

There is a sense in which the _Essay on Population_ begins and ends with

Godwin, for it begins and ends with the question of human

perfectibility. The relations of Malthus and Godwin are as it were the

tale on which the play is founded.

Godwin’s _Political Justice_ was written in 1793, his _Enquirer_ in

1797, and Malthus’ _Essay_ in 1798. Others kept the ball a-rolling. On

the Easter Tuesday of 1800 Dr. Samuel Parr preached an anniversary

sermon in Christ’s Hospital before the Corporation of London. He chose

his text from Galatians vi. 10: “As we have therefore opportunity, let

us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household

of faith.” Like Butler’s sermons in the Rolls Chapel, the discourse was

really a treatise on moral philosophy. It began by contrasting the

selfish and the benevolent system of ethics, pronouncing both of them

faulty. If the one has done less harm, the other has done less good than

might have been expected, for it has been connected with the new

doctrine of universal philanthropy. The new doctrine is false because

local neighbourhood of all men is impossible, _vi terminorum_, and a

widening out of the feelings that usually prevail between local

neighbours would only make those feelings thin and watery.[816] Man’s

obligations cannot be stretched beyond his powers; he has no powers, and

therefore no obligation to do good unto all men.[817] Love of the

universe, in the intense sense of the word love, can only belong to the

omnipotent Being who has the care of the universe upon Him. We, being

men, must only see to it that our benevolence is of His quality,

extending, like His, to the unthankful and to the evil. But a universal

philanthropist exaggerates and pampers this one particular form of the

duty of benevolence at the expense of the rest, and forgets duties that

lie near to him, towards kindred and friends and neighbours; he neglects

common duties of life in favour of the uncommon and fanciful. Very

different is “the calm desire of general happiness,” which draws those

that are near still nearer, and makes us value and assist the benevolent

institutions, like Christ’s Hospital, which are at our own doors.

The hearers of the sermon could have no doubt at whom it was aimed; and

the footnotes of the published version of it contained large quotations

from the _Essay on Population_ and large direct commendations of its

author, which made the sermon’s oblique censure of Godwin the more

stinging.

Pulpit philosophizing was not rare in those times; it had been practised

since Butler’s days by Dr. Ezra Styles[818] in 1761; and Dr. Richard

Price had used a dissenter’s pulpit to utter his enthusiastic views on

the future improvement of mankind (1787) and the love of our country

(1789).[819] Burke had denounced him for this in his _Reflections_;[820]

but, if Parr could do the same thing on the other side a few years

afterwards, it cannot have been any great singularity. Parr’s sermon was

the subject of Sydney Smith’s first paper in the _Edinburgh Review_ (Oct

1802); but its economical interest is due to its effect on Godwin.

Godwin had been assailed shortly before by Sir James Mackintosh, a

former friend and political ally, in his _Discourse on the Law of Nature

and Nations_, delivered in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, 1799; but Dr. Parr’s

censures were more severe. Parr may have been alienated by an offensive

description in the _Enquirer_[821] of the clergy, as characterized by “a

perennial stationariness of understanding, abortive learning, artificial

manners, infantine prejudices, and arrogant infallibility.” As all the

other professions were equally well abused, the censure need not have

been taken to heart. The letter of Malthus to Godwin, written after the

publication of the _Enquirer_, is full of courtesy. At that time, and

indeed for a few years afterwards, there was nothing but good-will

between the two writers. When Godwin in 1801 made his letters to his

three critics into a book,[822] under the title, _Thoughts on Dr. Parr’s

Spital Sermon_, with remarks on Mackintosh and the writer of the _Essay

on Population_, he was bitter only against the two former. He was

surprised at the “overbearing scornfulness” of Mackintosh, and at the

“venom” of Dr. Parr. If he had changed some of his views it was not in

deference to their criticism. Of the _Essay on Population_, “and the

spirit in which it is written,” he “can never speak but with unfeigned

respect;” contending only that it is meant to attack his conclusions and

not his premises.[823] Parr had hailed it as a complete demonstration

that Godwin’s scheme of equality would not work, and many better men had

felt their mouths shut, and had begged Godwin to speak for them. Godwin

consents in these _Thoughts_. If he was sincere in saying, “I confess I

could not see that the essay had any very practical bearing on my own

hopes” (p. 55), he must have been in the state which the _Enquirer_

ascribes to the clergyman: “He lives in the midst of evidence and is

insensible to it. He is in daily contemplation of contradictions and

finds them consistent. He listens to arguments that would impress

conviction upon every impartial hearer and is astonished at their

futility. He never dares trust himself to one unprejudiced

contemplation. He starts with impatience and terror from its possible

result.” Malthus, on the other hand, though in orders, has behaved very

unlike the clergyman of the _Enquirer_, for we are told by Godwin

himself, “he has neither laboured to excite hatred nor contempt against

me and my tenets; he has argued the questions between us just as if they

had never been made a theme for political party and the intrigues of

faction; he has argued just as if he had no end in view but the

investigation of evidence and the development of truth” (p. 55 ft.).

Moreover, he has “made as unquestionable an addition to the theory of

political economy as any writer for a century past. The grand

propositions and outlines of his work will, I believe, be found not less

conclusive and certain than they are new. For myself, I cannot refuse to

take some pride in so far as by my writings I gave the occasion and

furnished an incentive to the producing so valuable a treatise” (p. 56).

Surely concession could no further go. Godwin even admits the

arithmetical and geometrical ratios.[824] His criticisms are all on the

checks, which (be it remembered) were only the checks of the first

essay, vice, misery, and the fear of them. Are Governments henceforward

to prevent the evils of an excessive population by encouraging these

unsightly counter-agents? and is every scheme for the amelioration of

man’s lot foredoomed? No, the “author of the essay” has too small an

idea of the resources of the human mind; it is no conclusive argument

against a scheme to say that when it is realized it will probably not

last.[825] He does not attach sufficient weight to the fact that in

England, for example, “prudence and pride” prevent early marriages, and

from late ones come smaller families. In a state of universal

improvement there would be not less but more of these feelings, and a

similar effect would follow in a greater degree.[826]

That there was force in this reasoning appears from the way in which

Malthus received it when stated to him by letter a few months after the

publication of the essay. He replied that the “prudence” in question, if

existing in Godwin’s new society, would mean an eye to the main chance;

it would mean that one man is strengthening his position and getting to

himself more than the minimum of necessaries; if you prevent this, what

becomes of your freedom? if you do not, what becomes of your equality

and wealth? Secondly, the effect of the prudence would be that the

population would not be the greatest possible, but considerably within

the limits of the food; and yet you object to present society, that its

arrangements prevent the “greatest practicable population.” In all our

political theories, if we would trace to particular institutions the

evil that is really due to them, we must deduct the evil that is known

to be due to other causes. “The very admission of the necessity of

prudence to prevent the misery from an overcharged population, removes

the blame from public institutions to the conduct of individuals. And

certain it is, that almost under the worst form of government, where

there was any tolerable freedom of competition, the race of labourers,

by not marrying, and consequently decreasing their numbers, might

immediately better their condition, and under the very best form of

government, by marrying and greatly increasing their numbers they would

immediately make their condition worse.”[827]

This was no doubt a point against Godwin, but it was also a point

against Malthus himself. The essay in its first form had not made

sufficient allowance for “prudence”; and the introduction of moral

restraint in the second edition might very plausibly have been ascribed

by Godwin’s friends to Godwin himself, in spite of the elaborate reply

to the _Thoughts_ in a chapter afterwards dropped.[828] Godwin said to

him afterwards that he had no right to introduce a new element into his

solution of the problem, and pretend that it was the same solution as

before;[829] if he altered his premises he ought to alter his

conclusion. To which Malthus might have answered, that, though his

conclusion is altered, it retains its value as an argument against

Godwin. At first the tendency of numbers to increase up to the food was

described as an obstacle fatal to progress; now it is indeed an obstacle

which must be faced and overcome, but it is fatal not to progress, but

only to equality. Godwin himself had at first considered it an entirely

imaginary obstacle which might be ignored for the present by reformers;

and his very doctrine of prudence amounts to an admission that his view

of it had changed.

Godwin himself was not conscious of his change of front; as the seventh

of thirteen children he may have thought the matter personal; and

whatever concessions he had made in 1801 he withdrew in 1820. In that

year, with David Booth, the patient author of the _English Analytical

Dictionary_, to arrange his statistics and vouch for his calculations,

he published an elaborate reply to the _Essay on Population_. The

politicians, the political economists, the bulk of the press, and the

public had accepted the Malthusian doctrines, though the conversion of

the public was no deeper than it was on Free Trade, and the statesmen

with a few exceptions were not sorry to make capital out of the

“odiousness” of the doctrines whenever the “acknowledged truth” of them

would not serve their turn. Still it seemed true that time had declared

for Malthus, and Godwin had fallen out of notice. Sydney Smith’s

assertion,[830] “Malthus took the trouble of refuting him, and we hear

no more of Mr. Godwin,” is not very far from the truth. Malthus had

survived his refutation, and Godwin his reputation. Pitt, Paley, and

Copleston were with Malthus; he had gained over Hallam among historians,

James Mill, Senior, and Ricardo among economists, Brougham, Mackintosh,

and even Whitbread among politicians. Southey, Hazlitt, and Cobbett were

not a sufficient make-weight. Hazlitt in his _Reply_ to the _Essay on

Population_ (in letters of which some appeared in Cobbett’s _Pol.

Register_, 1807) acknowledges the popularity, though he predicts its

decay.[831] It seems clear that in educated circles at least the view of

Malthus was as early as 1820 what it was in 1829, “the popular

view,”[832] which is quite compatible, as Darwin long experienced, with

great unpopularity in particular quarters. No better evidence could be

given of this popularity than the unwilling testimony given by Godwin

himself in his new book.[833] At the end of 1819 Brougham had referred

in the House of Commons to the principle of Malthus as “one of the

soundest principles of political economy,” and said it was melancholy to

observe how the press scouted it and abused its defenders.[834] The

press, however, was divided. The _Edinburgh Review_ from the first had

sided with Malthus. The _Quarterly_ had begun by strong hostility (Dec.

1812, pp. 320 _seq._); had softened its tone as time went on (Dec. 1813,

pp. 157 _seq._, and Oct. 1814, pp. 154–5); had spoken with hesitation

and doubtfulness (Oct. 1816, pp. 50 _seq._); and had at last completely

surrendered (July 1817, pp. 369 _seq._), confessing it to be “much

easier to disbelieve Mr. Malthus than to refute him” (p. 396),

thereafter utilizing his doctrine for the support of things as they are,

only regretting that Malthus himself would not do the same a little more

stoutly (pp. 402–3). Finally, as we have seen, Malthus, after having

contributed to the _Edinburgh_, became a contributor to the _Quarterly_.

The change of public opinion, illustrated by the conversion of the

_Quarterly_, gave greater bitterness to the attacks of the enemies that

remained unconverted. But it gave them no new arguments.

In Godwin’s _Enquiry concerning Population_ (when we neglect mere

epigrams such as “a man is surer that he has ancestors than that he will

have posterity”) there are substantially four arguments:—Malthus has

changed his position; the world is not peopled; the ratios are not as he

represents; and experience is against him. We have already discussed the

first. The use of the second implies a misunderstanding of the

Malthusian position, for it ignores distinction between actual and

possible supplies of food, and does not allow that a man is “confined”

by four walls unless he touches them.[835] Godwin does not mend the

argument by comparing it to the objection brought against

Christianity—“the world is not yet Christianized”; still less by

appealing to Christianity itself, and taunting Malthus with the texts,

“Increase and multiply,” “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of

them,” “made a little lower than the angels,” “forty sons and thirty

grandsons, which rode on threescore and ten ass colts,” “In the last

days some shall depart from the faith, forbidding to marry.”[836]

Malthus had been attacked in 1807 by a Puritan or Covenanting pamphlet

entitled, ‘A summons of Wakening, or the evil tendency and danger of

Speculative Philosophy, exemplified in Mr. [Sir John] Leslie’s _Enquiry

into the Nature of Heat_, and Mr. Malthus’ _Essay on Population_, and in

that speculative system of common law which is at present administered

in these kingdoms.’[837] The body of this book had been even more

remarkable than its title, for it had proved Malthus guilty not merely

of heterodoxy, but of atheism. “It is evident to any one who attentively

reads the _Essay on Population_ that its author does not believe in the

existence of God, but substitutes for Him sometimes the principle of

Population, sometimes that of Necessity.” Sadler many years later

declared in the same spirit that “the insults the theory of Malthus

levels at God, and the injuries it meditates inflicting upon man, will

be endured by neither.”[838]

Once for all, let Parson Malthus explain his consistency with the

religious text-book of his Church. Prior to the injunction given to men

to increase and multiply, come, says Malthus, all the moral and physical

laws without which they cannot increase or multiply. Suppose the command

had been to increase and multiply not men but vegetables; this could not

mean, “Sow the seed broadcast, in the air, over the sea, on stony

ground,” but, “Take all the means made necessary, by pre-existing laws,

to secure the best growth of vegetables.” That man would best obey the

command, who should prepare the soil, and provide for the watering and

tilling of it, where those things were wanting before. So he will best

obey the command to increase and multiply Men, who prepares food for men

where there was none before, and not he who brings them recklessly into

the world without any such provision. “I believe it is the intention of

the Creator that the earth should be replenished, but certainly with a

healthy, virtuous, and happy population, not an unhealthy, vicious, and

miserable one. And, if, in endeavouring to obey the command to increase

and multiply, we people it only with beings of the latter description

and suffer accordingly, we have no right to impeach the justice of the

command, but our irrational mode of executing it.”[839] He might have

added, that to give any other interpretation of the passage in Genesis

is to forget the circumstances in which the words were spoken. The

Deluge had just swept away all the earth’s inhabitants except one

family, expressly on the score of wickedness; and, if a wicked

replenishing were not desirable, an unhappy or a poor one would be at

the best only one degree less so. Regarding the question then purely

from the outside, we cannot find anything in the writings of Parson

Malthus inconsistent with his ecclesiastical orthodoxy; and we can

hardly believe that free-thinking Godwin was very serious in the

objection.

Malthus himself replies to it as a charge commonly brought against him

by others, with no reference to Godwin in particular. For the most part

he ignores Godwin’s book on Population, as mere rhetoric and

scurrility.[840] Godwin, however, had given more than two years of hard

labour to the writing of it;[841] and his biographer regards it as the

last work of his best days. He employed his son William and his friend

Henry Blanch Rosser to help him, in addition to Booth. His whole mind

was occupied with Booth’s calculations and his own deductions from them.

He himself “could not pursue a calculation for an hour without being

sick to the lowest ebb.”[842] If Booth lagged behind him he was

miserable. He rose in early morning to note down an idea and was ill for

the rest of the day after it. He is satisfied, however, with the result

of his labours. He thinks his chapter on the Geometrical Ratio will

delight his friends and astonish his foes. In any case his comfort is

that “truth” will prevail, and, whether through him or another, “the

system of Malthus can never rise again, and the world is delivered from

this accursed apology in favour of vice and misery and hard-heartedness

and oppression,”[843] and the world will see that there is “no need of

any remedies,” for the numbers of mankind never did and never can

increase in the ways described by Malthus.[844] A few of his younger

friends[845] believed him successful; and the book was mentioned in the

House of Commons as a conclusive refutation of Malthus, especially in

regard to the ratios.[846] But the fact remains not only that poor

Godwin made no bread and butter by it,[847] but that he converted no one

whose opinion in such a matter was of any weight. Mackintosh, though at

peace again with his old friend, when he writes to him in September

1821,[848] cannot praise his work; even thinks its tone intolerant; and

will only say that he sees nothing in the Malthusian doctrines

inconsistent with perfectibility. He takes pains at the same time to

disclaim the authorship of the notice in the _Edinburgh Review_ for July

1821, which was lacking in the courtesy due to Godwin, though it did not

reproduce the scurrility of the earliest review of him.[849] The

inconclusiveness of the book, even in the view of Malthus’ opponents,

appears from the stream of new refutations, which made no pause.

Even the question of the ratios was not settled. Godwin had counted his

discussion of them the most important part of his book. It gives us his

third substantial argument against Malthus. Godwin takes up,[850] what

seems to have been a common charge, that the essayist had written a

quarto volume to prove that population increases in a geometrical and

food in an arithmetical ratio. The essayist had answered, as long ago as

1806,[851] that the first proposition was proved as soon as the facts

about America were authenticated, and the second was self-evident; his

book was meant less to prove the ratios than to trace their effects. His

authorities, as he told Godwin afterwards,[852] were Dr. Price, Styles,

Benjamin Franklin, Euler, and Sir William Petty, supplemented, for

figures, by Short and Süssmilch and the censuses of the United States

and England, and, for principles, by Adam Smith and Hume. We have

already seen[853] how far the simile of geometrical and arithmetical

ratios was meant to be pressed. Godwin thinks he exposes it by arguing

that the increase of population can never be quite exactly

geometrical[854] (which Malthus would admit),—that America was an

exception[855] (in face of the maxim that the exception tests the

rule),—that, in order to suppose population doubling itself in the

United States, we must suppose it, as regards births, doing the same in

the Old World (in other words, fact is the same as tendency),—that the

normal increase is not that of America but that of Sweden,[856] in which

case (Malthus would answer) the normal increase must be one that takes

place in face of very severe restrictions. To the charge of damaging the

borrowed kettle the old Irishwoman had three answers:—It was cracked

when I got it; it was whole when I returned it; I never had it. So

Godwin’s views of the American colonies vacillated between three

inconsistent propositions: the great increase of the numbers is natural

(or spontaneous), but that of the food is greater still;[857] the great

increase is not natural, but due to immigration;[858] there has been no

great increase at all.[859] The reader has three alternative arguments

presented to him, and it matters little whereby he is convinced, if only

in the end he is persuaded to believe with Godwin, that population

requires no checks at all,[860] and is a fitful principle.[861] In

history, says Godwin, it seems to operate by fits and starts; and such

irregular effects cannot have a uniform cause. It might be replied that

in the same sense gravitation is fitful, for we seem to break it by

walking upstairs as well as down, by using a siphon as well as a

water-jug, or by drying up a drop of ink with blotting-paper instead of

letting it sink down into the paper. Yet in these cases the fitfulness

is never imputed to the absence of a cause, but to the presence of more

causes than one. To believe, as Godwin seems to do, in occult laws which

vary with the circumstances is to believe in no laws at all. The only

constancy would be the constant probability of miracles.[862]

Freethinkers had not as yet identified themselves with the party of

order in physics; and perhaps Godwin was simply carrying out his dislike

of law one step farther. Having applied it to politics (1793) and to

style (1797), he now applied it to nature (1820). He deliberately placed

a whole army of facts out of the range of science. It was fortunate for

himself that he appeared no more in the character of an economist, but

left Booth the task of replying to the Edinburgh reviewer.[863]

If economical criticism was weak with Godwin, the political philosopher,

it was still weaker with Coleridge, the philosophizing poet. The main

criticisms of Coleridge[864] are contained in manuscript marginal

comments with pen and pencil written on his copy of the second (quarto)

edition of the Essay (1803), now in the British Museum. When Malthus

writes (in Preface, p. vi) that if he had confined himself to general

views, his main principle was so incontrovertible that he could have

entrenched himself in an impregnable fortress, Coleridge breaks in: “If

by the main principle the author means both the _Fact_[865] (i. e. that

population unrestrained should infinitely outrun food) and the deduction

from the fact, _i. e._ that the human race is _therefore_ not

indefinitely improvable, a pop-gun would batter down the impregnable

Fortress. If only the Fact be meant, the assertion is quite nugatory, in

the former case vapouring, in the latter a vapour.” (And on p. vii:)

“Are we now to have a quarto to teach us that great misery and great

vice arise from poverty, and that there must be poverty in its worst

shape wherever there are more mouths than loaves and more Heads than

Brains?”

This may be taken as simply the argument of Hazlitt, who “did not see

what there was to be proved;”—the principle of Malthus is a truism. Even

when commenting on the statement of the Ratios (on p. 8), after some

denunciation of the “verbiage and senseless repetition” of the essay,

Coleridge goes on to agree with it. He would restate the whole so as to

substitute “a proportion which no one in his senses would consider as

other than axiomatic, viz.: Suppose that the human race amount to a

thousand millions. Divide the square acres of food-producing surface by

500,000,000, that is to say, so much to each married couple. Estimate

this quotum as high as you like, and, if you will, even at a thousand or

even at ten thousand acres to each family. Suppose population without

check, and take the average increase from two families at five (which is

irrationally small, supposing the human race healthy, and each man

married at twenty-one to a woman of eighteen), and in twelve generations

the increase would be 48,828,125. Now as to any conceivable increase in

the production or improvement in the productiveness of the thousand or

ten thousand acres, it is ridiculous even to think of production at all,

inasmuch as it is demonstrable that either already in this twelfth

generation, or _certainly_ in a few generations more (I leave the exact

statement to schoolboys, not having Cocker’s Arithmetic by me, and

having forgotten the number of square feet in an acre), the quotum of

land would not furnish standing room to the descendants of the first

agrarian proprietors. Best do the sum at once. Find out the number of

square acres on the globe (of land), and divide the number by 500,000. I

have myself been uselessly prolix, and in grappling with the man have

caught his itch of verbiage.” He goes on to say that if every man were

to marry and have a family, and each of his children were to do the

same, their posterity would soon want standing room, and, if _all_

checks were removed, this would of course happen much faster. “Any

schoolboy who has learned arithmetic as far as compound interest may

astonish his younger sister both by the fact and by the exact number of

years in which it would take place. On the other hand, let the

productiveness of the earth be increased beyond the hopes of the most

visionary agriculturist, still the productions take up room. If the

present crop of turnips occupy one-fifth of the space of the turnip

field, the increase can never be more than quintupled, and, if you

suppose two planted for one, the increase still cannot exceed ten; so

that, supposing a little island of a single acre, and its productions

occupying one-fifth of its absolute space, and sufficient to maintain

two men and two women, four generations would outrun its _possible_

power of furnishing them with food; and we may boldly affirm that a

truth so self-evident as this was never overlooked or even by

implication contradicted. What proof has Mr. Malthus brought? What proof

can he bring that any writer or theorist has overlooked this fact, which

would not apply (with reverence be it spoken) to the Almighty Himself

when He pronounced the awful command, ‘Increase and multiply’?”

From some of the phrases dropped in the course of these comments, we

should infer they were the preparation for a formal review of the book

by Coleridge himself. It is therefore extremely puzzling to find the

whole comments printed almost word for word and letter for letter in a

review[866] hitherto considered by every one (Southey included) to be

Southey’s. This applies to the subsequent MS. notes, which are happily

briefer. Coleridge finds fault with Malthus (p. 11) for using the words

virtue and vice without defining them, apparently overlooking the

footnote under his very eyes (p. 11 n.) which says, “The general

consequence of vice is misery, and this consequence is the precise

reason why an action is termed vicious.”[867] Coleridge says, in

relation to the list of irregularities given in the last paragraph but

one of the page (11): “That these and all these are vices in the present

state of society, who doubt? So was Celibacy in the patriarchal ages.

Vice and Virtue subsist in the agreement of the habits of a man with his

reason and conscience, and these can have but one moral guide, Utility,

or the Virtue[868] and Happiness of Rational beings. We mention this not

under the miserable notion that any state of society will render those

actions capable of being performed with conscience and virtue, but to

expose the utter unguardedness of this speculation.” Then after some

remarks on New Malthusians (as they would be now called) he goes on:

“All that follows to the three hundred and fifty-fifth page[869] may be

an entertaining farrago of quotations from books of travels, &c., but

surely very impertinent in a philosophical work. Bless me, three hundred

and forty pages—for what purpose! A philosophical work can have no

legitimate purpose but proof and illustration, and three hundred and

fifty pages to prove an axiom! to illustrate a self-evident truth! It is

neither more nor less than bookmaking!” He thinks, however, that what

Malthus wrote of Condorcet applies to himself;—though his paradox is

very absurd, it must be refuted, or he will think the toleration of his

contemporaries due to their mental inferiority and his own sublimity of

intellect.[870] The remaining marginal notes are chiefly of an

interjectional character,[871] many of them not very refined. Malthus

himself never falls into coarseness; but his opponents seldom avoid it,

and Coleridge (or Southey) is no exception to the rule.[872] Except for

the interest attaching even to the foolish words of a great man, it

would not have been worth while to revive his _obiter scripta_ on a

matter beyond his ken.

A few words are necessary in regard to Grahame and Weyland, who form the

chief subject of the long second appendix of later editions of the

essay. Grahame’s charges were such as owed all their force to the

general ignorance of the actual writings of Malthus himself.[873] Mr.

Malthus regards famine as nature’s benevolent remedy for want of food;

Mr. Malthus believes that nature teaches men to invent (p. 100) diseases

in order to prevent over-population; Mr. Malthus, regarding vice and

misery generally as benevolent remedies for over-population, thinks that

they are rather to be encouraged than otherwise (p. 100). Malthus, for

his part, deploring the fact that this last charge has been current “in

various quarters for fourteen years” (or since his quarto essay of

1803), thinks he may well pass it by. “Vice and Misery, and these alone,

are the evils which it has been my great object to contend against. I

have expressly proposed moral restraint as their rational and proper

remedy,” a sufficient proof that he regarded them as the disease.[874]

Grahame himself does not deny the tendency to increase beyond food (p.

102), but thinks emigration a sufficient remedy (p. 104).

Empson,[875] playfully classifying the opponents of Malthus, says there

are some who will not comprehend “out of sheer stupidity, like Mr.

Grahame,” or out of sentimental horror, like Southey,[876] Coleridge,

and Bishop Huntingford;[877] or because, like Sadler[878] and Godwin,

who followed Price and Muret,[879] they imagine the law of population to

vary with the circumstances; or else because they invent laws of their

own, like Anderson, Owen, and Poulett Scrope;[880] or because, like

Weyland,[881] they deny the premises of Malthus as well as the

conclusion. Weyland, like Grahame, has the honour of a special

refutation from Malthus. He allows that Malthus in his essay has raised

his subject from the level of desultory academical discussion to that of

scientific inquiry, and his book is the point from which every later

investigation must start. He allows that his order is lucid and his

reasoning fair, and that he enables an opponent at once to discuss the

question on its merits. Granting his premises, says Weyland, we cannot

deny his conclusion; but that premise of his is false which assumes that

the highest known rate of increase in a particular state of society is

the natural or spontaneous rate in all;[882] we cannot take the height

of Chang or of the Hale Child as the natural standard of the height of

all. To this Malthus answers, that, if we had observed in any country

that all the people who were short carried weights upon their heads, and

the people who were tall did not, we should infer that the weights had

something to do with the height,—and so, when we find that the increase

of a people is fast or slow in proportion as the pressure of certain

checks on increase is heavy or light, we cannot but believe that the

rate would be at its fastest if there were no checks at all. To say with

Weyland, in the terms of his first cardinal proposition,[883] that

“population has a natural tendency to keep within the powers of the soil

to afford it subsistence in every gradation through which society

passes,” is to say “that every man has a natural tendency to remain in

prison who is necessarily confined to it by four strong walls.” One

might as well infer that the pine of the crowded Norwegian forest has no

tendency to have lateral branches, because as a matter of fact there is

no room for it to have any.[884]

Weyland thinks that, without any moral restraint, population will keep

within limits of the food, in proportion as it reaches a high state of

morality, religion, and political liberty.[885] Malthus, on the

contrary, would say that, without moral restraint, even morality,

religion, and political liberty will not save a people from

wretchedness;[886] and, for his part, the design always uppermost in his

mind when writing has been “to improve the condition and increase the

happiness of the lower classes of society.”[887]

One argument of Weyland’s[888] has some weight in it. With a rich soil,

high farming, and abundant food, the bulk of the people of a country

might by the natural division of labour be employed in manufacture, and

their unhealthy manner of life in towns might so check population that

it might be far from keeping up to the level of the food. Malthus

replies that this case is rare, for our town populations have increased

rapidly,—but, such as it is, he has allowed for it in the second clause

of his second proposition: “Population invariably increases where the

means of subsistence increase, _unless prevented by some very powerful

and obvious checks_.”[889]

There are two other critics to whom Malthus replies in some detail, one

the visionary Owen, who is embraced in Empson’s classification, the

other the practical man Arthur Young, who cannot so easily be

classified. “I mean,” says the latter, “to deal in facts alone, happy

when I can discover them pure and unalloyed with prejudice.”[890] As

this was his practice as well as his profession, it may easily be

believed that in his voluminous records of fifty years’ travelling and

experimenting[891] he has spun rope enough to hang himself. It ought to

be added that, like Godwin, he claims the privilege of being

inconsistent. Nothing could be more clear than his recognition in his

_Travels in France_ of the evils of over-population.[892] Yet in 1800,

in his _Question of Scarcity plainly stated and Remedies considered_, he

recommends as his remedy that each country labourer who has three

children be provided with a cow and half an acre of potato ground.[893]

In other words, he would reduce the English standard of living to the

common Irish one, milk and potatoes. Malthus replies by giving reasons

why people should “live dear,” and by reminding Arthur Young of his own

comments on the proceedings of the National Assembly. Recognizing their

duty to grant relief, but wishing to avoid an English Poor Law, the

National Assembly set aside fifty millions of francs a year for support

of the poor. If it had been really a duty, wrote Arthur Young (in his

_Travels_), necessity might have occasioned them to extend the relief to

one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred millions, and so on, “in the

same miserable progression that has taken place in England.”[894]

Malthus hardly needed to go back to the _Travels_, as Young himself

confessed in his later writings that his plan did not apply to large

cities, and though he still held by the claim of right, he confessed

that his faith must be without works; in other words, he claimed the

right to be inconsistent. But he continued to question Malthus’ axiom

that what cannot be ought not to be; and he thinks that, if a man

marries without the means to keep a family, he may justly blame society

for not providing him with the means. He argues, too, that Malthus for

the success of his scheme assumes perfect chastity in the unmarried.

Malthus really assumed only that the evils, which on an average in a

civilized country attend the prudential check, are less than the evils

of premature mortality and other miseries entailed by the opposite

course; he declares himself not against but in favour of schemes that

improve the condition of the poor even on a limited scale; and he only

asks that every such scheme be tested not by its first success, for

hardly any scheme of the kind is unsuccessful at first, but by its

effect on a new generation.[895]

This test might be applied to schemes like Owen’s and later ones on the

same model. Malthus perhaps deals too peremptorily with them. Speaking

of Owen’s system of the community of labour and goods, and of Spence’s

_Plan for Parochial Partnerships in the Land_[896] (“the only remedy for

the distresses and oppressions of the people,” the land to be “the

people’s farm”), he answers that there are two “decisive arguments

against systems of equality”: first, the inability of a state of

equality to furnish adequate motives for exertion, the goad of necessity

being absent,—and, second, the tendency of population to increase faster

than subsistence. In reply it must be said that there might be socialism

without communism; there might even be communism without an absolute

equality, such as would put idle and industrious on the same footing;

there might be an approximation of the social extremes, bringing poor

and rich nearer, and giving the former not weaker but stronger motives

to exertion; finally, it is not at all inconceivable that at least

one-half of this result might come, as Godwin wished, by the act of the

rich themselves, which means also as Malthus wished, for it would come

from a strong sense of personal obligation. It cannot be denied that

Malthus, in using the argument in question, seems to forget his own

admission, that the goad of necessity does not act with effect either on

the lowest or on the highest classes.[897] Moreover, he allows, there

have been cases, _e. g._ among the Moravian communities, where industry

and community of goods have existed side by side. “It may be said that,

allowing the stimulus of inequality of conditions to have been necessary

in order to raise man from the indolence and apathy of the savage to the

activity and intelligence of civilized life, it does not follow that the

continuance of the same stimulus should be necessary when this activity

and energy of mind has been once gained.”[898]

The second of his arguments against Owen is of course his more cogent

and characteristic one. As we have seen, it is not deprived of its point

by the inclusion of moral restraint among the checks to population. It

was argued against him that his own ideal of a society where moral

restraint universally prevailed would involve precisely what is

necessary to make such systems as Godwin’s and Owen’s permanently

possible.[899] There is an air of conclusiveness in the remark that, in

proportion as moral restraint prevails in the world, Malthus

approximates to Godwin. But Malthus believes that equality and community

would destroy the motive for moral restraint. The passions would still

be present, and no man would be in a position where there seemed any

need to restrain them; the restraint would be the interest of the whole

society, but not of the individual himself, for the effects were to be

borne not by himself, but by the whole society. No doubt the good of the

whole society ought to be a sufficient reason; but it would be so in a

very few men now; and, unless it were in all men then, the result would

be an expansion of population, with the results Malthus described. Owen

is aware of this, and suggests artificial checks, allowing men to

gratify desire without the usual consequences, and dispensing with any

effort of will. Malthus, on the other hand, would throw all the

responsibility and burden on the individual, which he thinks it

impossible to do without allowing the individual his private

property.[900] No further justification of things as they are is to be

found in Malthus; and, so far from being reactionary, his principles

(with all their qualifications) were probably the most advanced

individualism that was ever preached in these days. They are adopted in

full view of the facts that have been again vividly brought before the

public mind in our day by writers who are to our generation what Godwin,

Spence, and Owen were to theirs.

Malthus seems to believe, with Dugald Stewart, that Utopian schemes are

like the tunes of a barrel-organ, recurring at melancholy intervals from

age to age with damnable iteration.[901] But, unless society itself has

moved in a circle, the Utopias will resemble each other no more and no

less than do the states of society which they would replace. Our own

socialists, therefore, can hardly be dismissed by the stroke of the pen,

that classifies them with people so curiously unlike them and each other

as Plato, Ball, More, the Fifth Monarchy men, the Levellers, Godwin and

Spence and Owen. Malthus does not, in fact, so dismiss them. Besides

bringing forward his own argument, he examines Owen’s attempt to deal

with it.[902]

Since Malthus, every complete reform has needed to face in some way or

other the question which he treated; but he left little for others to

do. Of the two most prominent schemes of our own day for the

reconstruction of society, one, that of Mr. Henry George, involves an

unconscious recourse to the old weapons of Godwin, Sadler, and other

opponents of Malthus; _Progress and Poverty_ does not contain any

argument not to be found in these writers. The conjecture about a “fixed

quantity of human life on the earth” (ed. 1881, p. 97) is hardly an

argument. It may be compared with what is stated by St. G. Mivart[903]

to be the basis of Darwinism. “Every individual has to endure a very

severe struggle for existence owing to the tendency to geometrical

increase of all kinds of animals and plants, while the total animal and

vegetable population (man and his agency excepted) remains almost

stationary.” Mr. Mivart’s reason for excepting man seems to be Mr.

George’s reason for including him. The latter’s more direct arguments

against Malthus are as follows:—first, the difficulty is in the future

(p. 85);—second, Malthus shifts the responsibility from man to the

Creator (p. 87);—third, Malthus justifies the _status quo_ and parries

the demand for reform (p. 88);—fourth, Malthus ascribes excessive

increase of numbers to a general tendency of human nature, while it is

really due to the badness of our institutions in old countries, as in

India and Ireland (pp. 101–114), or the very thinness of population in

new (p. 92);—fifth, Malthus does not distinguish between tendency to

increase and actual increase, and is therefore refuted by the fact that

the world is not yet peopled (p. 94). In the sixth place, we are told,

if there had been such a law as the Malthusian, it would have been

sooner and more widely recognized (p. 98);—that families often become

extinct (p. 99), and it is more certain that we have ancestors than that

we shall have descendants;[904]—that better industry would keep a larger

population (p. 107);—Malthus says that vice and misery are necessary (p.

109);—Malthus does not see that vegetables and animals increase faster

than population (p. 115),—or that the increase of man involves the

increase of his food (p. 116), for a division of labour makes man

produce more than he consumes (p. 126), and so the most populous

countries are always the most wealthy (p. 128);—Malthus forgets that the

world is wide (p. 119),—and that the tendency to increase is checked by

development of intellect,[905]—and by the elevation of the standard of

comfort (pp. 121, 123);—he forgets that “the power of population to

produce the necessaries of life is not to be measured by the necessaries

of life” it actually produces, but by its powers to produce wealth in

all forms (p. 127);—Malthus will not see that twenty men where nature is

niggardly (_e. g._ on a bare rock?) will produce more than twenty times

what one man will where nature is bountiful (p. 134);—and the Malthusian

theory “attributes want to the decrease of productive power” (p.

134);—finally Malthus does not know “the real law of population,” which

is that “the tendency to increase, instead of being always uniform, is

strong where a greater population would give increased comfort, and

where the perpetuity of the race is threatened by the mortality induced

by adverse conditions, but weakens just as the higher development of the

individual becomes possible, and the perpetuity of the race is assured”

(p. 123). What is right in this view of the real law of population is

common to Mr. George with Mr. Herbert Spencer;[906] what is wrong is

common to him with Godwin.[907]

The view of Karl Marx,[908] the prophet of the International and of

modern economic Socialism, is built on much more solid foundations. It

is a corollary of his view of capital. The general law of the

accumulation of capital, in these days of large manufactories and

machinery, involves not only a progressive addition to the quantity of

capital, which is all that Adam Smith contemplated, but a qualitative

change in the proportion between fixed capital, such as machinery, and

the circulating which is paid in wages. To use the author’s words, the

progress of accumulation brings with it a relative decrease of the

variable component of capital and a relative increase of its constant

component. New machinery is constantly supplanting labour without any

real compensation in increased demand, either at once or in the long

run. The constant element increases at the cost of the variable; and

this can only result in the progressive production of a population

which, in relation to capital, is a surplus or superfluity, an

over-population;—the cause which increases the net revenue of the

country at the same time renders the population redundant and

deteriorates the condition of the labourer.[909] So far from deploring

the existence of this redundant class, the capitalists depend on

it,[910] as the reserve of their army. They trust to its cheap labour to

save them from the depression which in our days (though never before)

appears with unfailing regularity after brisk trade and a crisis. If the

hands were not always there for them to employ, they would not at once

be able to seize the happy moment of a reviving demand for their goods.

“Malthus with his narrow views understands the surplus population to be

superfluous absolutely in itself, and not merely in relation to capital;

but even he recognizes that over-population is a necessity of modern

industry.”[911] In proof of these statements he quotes the words of

Malthus (_Pol. Econ._, ed. 1836, pp. 215,[912] 319, 320):—“Prudential

habits with regard to marriage carried to a considerable extent among

the labouring classes, of a country mainly depending upon manufactures

and commerce, might injure it.”... “From the nature of a population, an

increase of labourers cannot be brought into [the] market, in

consequence of a particular demand, till after the lapse of sixteen or

eighteen years; and the conversion of revenue into capital, by saving,

may take place much more rapidly; a country is always liable to an

increase in the quantity of the funds for the maintenance of labour

faster than the increase of population.”

To these charges the answer is, first, that Malthus always recognized

that over-population was relative, relative to the actual food;[913]

second, that he did _not_ recognize the over-population as necessary; it

took place as a matter of fact, but he believed that, if working men did

as he wished them, it would disappear;[914]—and in the third place, the

first sentence quoted by Marx, from the _Political Economy_ is explained

by the second, which he does not quote: “In a country of fertile land

such habits would be the greatest of all conceivable blessings.” Malthus

is comparing Commercial with Agricultural countries, not pronouncing on

the general question of wages; and other passages in his writings[915]

show that he regarded the high wages, resulting from prudential habits,

as a public gain, more than compensating the capitalists’ loss of

profits. Even Marx himself grudgingly allows that Malthus was more

humane than Ricardo in regard to the hours of labour desirable for the

workmen.[916] In the fourth place, the latter half of the quotation

(beginning with the words, “From the nature of a population”) first

states an obvious fact which a child could have pointed out, and then a

disputable proposition which predicts not an over-population but the

reverse of it.

Marx is seeking to demonstrate the hopelessness of the labourer’s

position; and he is too acute not to know that his demonstration would

be seriously weakened if he admitted the truth of the Malthusian

doctrine and the bare possibility of the adoption of prudential habits

by the labourers. This is the real reason of his bitter attacks on the

Essay. He says of it:[917] “When I say Eden’s work on the Poor was the

only important writing by a disciple of Adam Smith in the eighteenth

century, I may be reminded of the essay of Malthus. But this book in its

first form (and the later editions did nothing but add and adapt

borrowed materials) is nothing but a plagiarism from Sir James Steuart,

Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, full of schoolboy superficiality and

clerical declamation, and not containing a single original sentence. By

the way, although Malthus was a clergyman of the Church of England, he

had taken the monastic oath of celibacy[!], for this is one of the

conditions of a fellowship at the Protestant University of Cambridge.

‘Socios collegiorum maritos esse non permittimus, sed statim postquam

quis uxorem duxerit, socius collegii desinat esse’ (_Reports of

Cambridge University Commission_, p. 172). By this circumstance Malthus

is favourably distinguished from the other Protestant clergy, who have

cast off the Catholic rule of celibacy....[918] With exception of

Ortes[919] the Venetian monk, an original and clever writer, most of the

writers on Population are Protestant clergymen,” a contrast, he goes on,

to the days when political economists were all philosophers. Marx

adopts[920] the common view that Malthus being a clergyman was the

bond-slave of Toryism and the ruling classes, and therefore ready to

adopt a principle that attributed over-population to the eternal laws of

nature rather than to the historical laws (also natural) of the

capitalists’ production. Marx does not see that the “eternal laws” in

question do not lead to over-population except when the precepts of

Malthus are neglected; and never shows how, apart from these precepts,

over-population will be prevented in the renovated society itself, which

has nationalized not only the land but all the instruments of

production. Would the habits of men be so changed by this stroke of

nationalization that the want of ordinary commercial motives would not

be felt?[921] Would not the millennium of the Socialist, like that of

the Christian, postulate a religious conversion on the largest scale for

its first introduction, to say nothing of its continuance? Productive

Co-operation, depending on the spontaneous action of the labourers for

its creation, and on their intelligence and prudence for its success,

would nationalize capital more surely; and it would not make the

impossible postulate of Socialism, that a passionless unselfishness,

which not one in a hundred thousand in our day exhibits at any time,

shall at once become the invariable daily rule of all without exception.

But Co-operation, if it neglects Malthus, will find its work no sooner

done than undone.

It may be thought that there are causes at work which will remove

over-population among the working classes even under the present system

of separated capital and labour. It is a doctrine of the “finer wits,”

founded on striking biological analogies, that the general development

of intellect in the race will weaken the passion for marriage and

supersede the necessity for any checks on it;[922]—the exercise of the

energies of concentration or “individuation” developes these energies at

the expense of those of diffusion or “genesis;”—the individual is made

strong in himself, at the expense of his power of creating new

individuals. Quite apart from the disagreeable fact that this principle

would lessen the pressure most in those classes where lessening is at

present least needed, and least where it is most needed, Malthus would

probably have pointed out, first, that unless the appetite is absolutely

killed, no physiological check can supersede some control of the will

over the passion,—and, second, that intellectual development will more

certainly check population by making men alive to their responsibilities

and strengthening their power of restraint than by weakening the passion

to be restrained. The expounder of the theory is of all people the least

likely to teach men that they may become civilized by the progress of

their race without the trouble of civilizing themselves individually.

But his theory admits the misapplication; and, if it be said by the

misappliers that we ought to tell the truth without fear of

consequences, we must answer that in this case the consequences are part

of the truth. On the other hand, to theorists like W. R. Greg, who

suggest unknown physiological laws that may act as a spontaneous check,

Malthus would have replied as to Condorcet:[923]

“What can we reason but from what we know?”

This brief survey of typical critics and commentators may be completed

by a classification of the former, which, among other advantages, will

give a bird’s-eye view of the chief points in discussion. Empson

classified the opponents of Malthus by their motives,[924] a proceeding

hardly fair either to them or to the essay itself. It is not fair to

them, for as a rule the critics appeal to argument, and must be judged

by what they adduce, not by their good or ill will, wisdom or folly, in

adducing it; and not fair to the essay, because few books have owed so

much to their reviewers.

The positions of the critics may be classified as follows:—

I. Some say the doctrine of the essay is a truism.[925]

II. Others admit that it is unanswerable, but retain a philosophical

faith in the future discovery of some contrary principle.[926]

III. Others find fault with the details of the doctrine, either (_a_) in

regard to the ratios of increase, asserting that no tendency to a

geometrical increase of population has been proved, but something much

less rapid, even (a few say) a decreasing ratio,[927]—and that no mere

arithmetical increase of food has been proved, but something much more

rapid,[928]—or (_b_) in regard to the checks on population, asserting

that no checks are necessary,[929]—that vice and misery sometimes add to

population instead of checking it,[930]—that to include moral restraint

is to stultify the original doctrine,[931]—that moral restraint

sometimes involves as great evil as excessive numbers, both from the

personal practice of it and from the preaching of it to

others,[932]—that important checks have been omitted, the chief being

misgovernment,[933] bad laws,[934] high feeding,[935] intellectual

development,[936] and those of Owen.[937]

There is, besides, an _a priori_ criticism, which is either (I.)

ecclesiastical,[938] alleging that Malthus contradicts the Bible or some

other authority,—(II.) theological,[939] that he denies Providence,—or

(III.) doctrinaire,[940] that he denies natural rights and the

pre-established harmony of moral and economical laws, and the instinct

of equality,—or (IV.) ethical and popular,[941] that he runs counter to

the moral sense and the natural benevolence of men and cosmopolitan

morality. These arguments have been already considered. The fourth of

them has, in its last branch, an appearance of truth, because Malthus

has certainly pled less for the cosmopolitan than for the domestic and

civic virtues. He wishes to lay the foundations solidly and leave the

building to others. Cosmopolitan morality can rarely be the foundation.

In the Empire, Christianity may have raised the people, and Stoicism the

philosophers, to the wider morality without the training of the

narrower, so that the converts were made better members of their own

small communities by becoming members of the commonwealth of the saints

and citizens of the great world. But it seems to Malthus that, in the

world of to-day, the many conditions of a steady moral progress are best

secured if the domestic and civic virtues precede the cosmopolitan. We

must not legislate for a world of heroes, but for men as we know them to

be; and a comfortable domestic life (βίος τέλειος) must be the common

highway to goodness in a society of ordinary men. If poverty were no

evil, churlishness would be no vice. But extreme poverty[942] is a real

hindrance to goodness. In the apparent exceptions, as in the voluntary

poverty of St. Francis, the greatest evil is absent, for there is no

struggle for bare life. To abolish that struggle, and help men to

comfort, is in some degree to help men to goodness; and it was the end

for which Malthus laboured. The most sure and solid way of reaching it

lay, as he thought, in impressing every man with a strong sense of his

responsibility for his acts and of his power over his own destiny. To

reform a nation, we must reform the members of it, who, if they are good

at first in spite of their institutions, will at last conform their

institutions to the model of their own goodness. To hold men the

creatures of society, and make society responsible for their character,

was, he thought, to mistake the order of nature. Society can feel its

responsibility only in its individual members; and no member of it can

free his own soul by the purity of a collective or representative

conscience.

The doctrine of Malthus is, therefore, a strong appeal to personal

responsibility. He would make men strong in will, to subdue their animal

wants to their notion of personal good and personal goodness, which, he

believed, could never fail to develope into the common good and goodness

of all. Believers in the omnipotence of outward circumstances and the

powerlessness of the human will, to alter them or the human character,

may put Malthus beyond the pale of sympathy. But all can enter into the

mind of Malthus and understand his work, who know the hardness of the

struggle between the flesh and the spirit, and yet believe in the power

of ideas to change the lives of men, and have faith not only in the

rigour of natural laws, but in man’s power to conquer nature by obeying

her.

BOOK V.

BIOGRAPHY.

Parentage—Early Education—Graves and Wakefield—Course at

Cambridge—Correspondence with his Father—Change in Studies—The

_Crisis_ and the Curacy—Effect of the Essay on its Author—Early and

Late Styles—Life from 1799 to 1834—_Ingrata Patria?_—East India

College—Professor’s Lectures—_Hic Jacet_.

The few facts that are known of the life of Malthus bring us nearer to

him than we can come in his writings, and show us how well, on the

whole, his antecedents and surroundings fitted him for his work. Our

chief authorities are Bishop Otter’s biographical preface to the second

edition of our author’s _Political Economy_, which was posthumously

published in 1836, and Professor Empson’s notice of the book in the

_Edinburgh Review_ for January 1837.[943] Otter was the college

companion and life-long friend of Malthus; Empson was his colleague at

Haileybury. The information they give us, though meagre, is trustworthy;

and happily it can be supplemented by hints from other quarters.

His father, Daniel Malthus, was born in 1730, and went to Queen’s

College, Oxford, in 1747,[944] the year when Adam Smith went home from

Balliol to Scotland. He left without a degree, not because of the

Articles, for he subscribed them at matriculation,[945] or from Dr.

Johnson’s reason of poverty, for he was a gentleman commoner, but

probably from a contempt for the distinction itself.[946] His mind was

active and open, and he seems to have formed literary friendships that

stood his son in good stead afterwards. He liked to stay up in Oxford in

vacation, working hard at his own studies in his own ways, and seeing

none but chosen friends. He wrote to his son in later years, “I used to

think Oxford none the less pleasant and certainly not the less useful

for being disburdened of some of its society; I imagine you will say the

same of Cambridge.”[947] On leaving the university he married and went

to live in Surrey at a quiet country house on the way from Dorking to

Guildford, still known by its old name of the Rookery. Of his eldest

son, who took his grandfather’s name of Sydenham,[948] we know little

except that in due time he married, and had two sons, Sydenham and

Charles, and a daughter Mary. Mary died single in 1881 in her

eighty-second year, Charles in 1821 in his fifteenth, their father in

1821 in his sixty-eighth. Sydenham, our author’s nephew, who died in

1869, was proprietor of Dalton Hill, Albury, where members of his family

were, till recently, still living; his son, Lieut.-Col. Sydenham

Malthus, C.B., of the 94th Regiment, served with distinction in the Zulu

war a few years ago.

Daniel’s second son, Thomas Robert, familiarly known as Robert, was born

at the Rookery on 14th February, 1766, the year when Rousseau came to

England. His mother seems to have died before her husband; she is not

mentioned in our meagre biographies.[949] His father, full of the

teaching of the Émile, and by no means prejudiced by his Oxford

experience in favour of the ordinary conventional training of the

English youth, seems to have sent his sons to no public school of any

kind, and in all probability brought them up at home under his own eye

for the first eight or nine years of their life. We may think of Robert,

therefore, as passing his childhood without privation, if without

luxury, in the home of an English country gentleman of moderate fortune,

who was devoted to books and botany, fireside and hillside

philosophizing,[950] and the improvement of his house and grounds,—a man

full of life and originality, gifted with vigorous health, and joining

in his boys’ walks and games.[951] In his quiet little valley it was

easy for Daniel Malthus to picture to himself a Millennial Hall of the

future in store for every one else, on the type of his own Rookery, with

no worse interruption than the rooks that cawed there nightly on the

hill above him. From his son’s description[952] and his own letters, we

gather that he was one of the best sort of the Enlightened followers of

Nature. He knew Rousseau personally, and became his executor;[953] but

they were liker in views than in character; Daniel Malthus had a deeper

vein of reverence and a stronger inclination to put theory into

practice.[954] The neighbours thought him an amiable and clever man who

was an ornament to his parish, but decidedly eccentric, for he made few

friends and was fondest of his own and his children’s company.[955] He

was versed beyond his compeers in French and German literature, or he

would hardly have been credited with having translated _Paul et

Virginie_, D’Ermenonville’s _Essay on Landscape_, and the _Sorrows of

Werther_. We have Robert’s authority for saying that, although he wrote

no translations, he wrote many pieces that were very successful, but

always anonymous.[956] With much of his son’s talent, he had no power,

like his son’s, of sustained intellectual effort.

He saw the boy’s promise early, and gave him an education which is

condemned by Robert’s chief biographer as irregular and desultory, but

had a method in it. He believed that sons are always what their fathers

were at their age, with the same kind of faults and virtues; and the men

whose influence would have been best for himself would, he thought, be

the best teachers for Robert. At the same time he believed with the

“Émile” that a sort of _laissez faire_ was the best policy in the

education of children; they should be left to grow, and use their own

eyes and hands and heads for themselves. At the age of nine or ten, say

in the year 1776, Robert was accordingly delivered over to Mr. Richard

Graves, Rector of Claverton, near Bath, to be taught little but Latin

and good behaviour, along with a few other boys, most of them older than

himself. Graves, who was Daniel’s senior by some years, had been

intimate with the poet Shenstone at Pembroke College, Oxford, “a society

which for half a century” (on Johnson’s partial testimony) “was eminent

for English poetry and elegant literature.” From his novel, _The

Spiritual Quixote, or the Summer’s Ramble of Mr. Geoffry

Wildgoose_,[957] we should not fancy him the best guide for ingenuous

youth. The book is a coarse and offensive satire on Whitfield and

Wesley;[958] and shows Graves as a clergyman to be liker Laurence Sterne

than Dr. Primrose. “Don Roberto,” however, as the tutor nicknamed his

pupil, was fonder of fun and fighting than of his books, and at the ripe

age of ten is not likely to have been troubled about the universe or

about clerical consistency. From Graves he passed[959] into the hands of

a much better man, Gilbert Wakefield, a clergyman who had rebelled

against the Articles, turned dissenter, and become classical master of

an academy at Warrington, founded in 1779 “to provide a course of

liberal education for the sons of dissenters, and particularly for

dissenting ministers.”[960] About one-third of the boys at the

Warrington Academy were sons of members of the Church of England, who

were, like Daniel Malthus, liberal in their opinions, and wished their

sons to be likewise. Wakefield held decided views on education; and they

were in close accordance with Daniel and the Émile. “The greatest

service of tuition,” he said, “to any youth, is to teach him the

exercise of his own powers, to conduct him to the hill of knowledge by

that gradual process in which he sees and secures his own way, and

rejoices in a consciousness of his own faculties and his own

proficiency. Puppies and sciolists alone can be expected to be formed by

any other process.”[961] The tutor’s best service is to point the pupil

to the best authors and give him advice (not lectures) when he wants it.

There was self-denial as well as wisdom in Wakefield’s view, for in one

case at least the pupil showed his proficiency by departing from the

opinions of his tutor.

Wakefield, himself a Fellow of Jesus,[962] procured Malthus an entrance

to that college, and directed his studies till he matriculated there as

a pensioner (or ordinary commoner) on 17th December, 1784, beginning

residence in 1785.[963] Robert esteemed him highly. He described him

twenty years afterwards[964] as a man “of the strictest and most

inflexible integrity,” who gave up not only prospects of preferment, but

even opportunities of usefulness, rather than deny the truth and offend

his conscience,—a man hot and intemperate in public controversy,[965]

but modest and genial in society, never advancing his opinions till

challenged, nor trying to make converts to them, but urging others to an

independent study of the facts,—finally, a genius cramped by its own

learning and good memory, never taking time and pains to do itself

justice in its writings. Though a foe to the thirty-nine Articles,

Wakefield was a stout believer in Christianity, and attacked Paine’s

_Age of Reason_ in a rough style that contrasts strongly with the sober

remarks of Malthus on Paine’s _Rights of Man_.

Up to 1785, therefore, his father and Wakefield had the largest share in

the education of Malthus; and their influence was shown in the very fact

that the opinions of Malthus were not fixed by them. His opinions were

to be of his own forming; and, having never learned the schoolboy’s

ambition of prize-taking,[966] he found time at college not only for

what would give him the best degree, but for every study that interested

him, especially history and poetry and modern languages, as in his later

years for Italian literature. Frend, author of a political tract, _Peace

and Union_, which brought him the honour of prosecution,[967] was his

college tutor, and spoke highly of him.[968] It says much for his

mathematical powers that in spite of his wide general reading he took

the ninth place among the wranglers of his year, 1788. If he had been

confining himself, as his father supposed, to the beaten track, he

might, like Paley, have reached the senior wranglership.[969] After the

Tripos he proposed to study at Cambridge and at home on a plan of his

own. His father, on the false analogy of his own experience, had warned

him against the abstract studying of scientific and mathematical

principles apart from their applications; he must not “work curious

stitches on a piece of rag”; he must become a practical surveyor,

mechanic, and navigator. The son had answered that there would be ample

time after the Tripos to make the applications, and there was little

enough time in three years to study the principles. But thereafter, “if

you will give me leave to proceed in my own plans of reading for the

next two years (I speak with submission to your judgment), I promise you

at the expiration of that time to be a decent natural philosopher, and

not only to know a few principles, but to be able to apply these

principles in a variety of useful problems.”[970] In reality, so far

from having his father’s tendency to abstract speculation, he was (as he

says himself) rather “remarked in college for talking of what actually

exists in nature or may be put to real practical use.”[971]

Though the son had the best of this personal controversy, he would have

done well to have responded to his father’s letters in the spirit in

which they were written; in one instance at least, his father complains

that Robert “drove him back into himself.” But this was rare. His father

describes him as an admirable companion, sympathetic and generous, and

making everybody easy and amused about him.[972] He was a favourite at

home. When the family was removing from the Rookery at Dorking to the

Cottage[973] at Albury in 1787, he was told: “You must find your way to

us over bricks and tiles and meet with five in a bed and some of us

under hedges, but everybody says they will make room for Robert.” It was

Robert’s own warm heart that led him to give those years of leisure

after the Tripos to studies very different from those of his first plan.

Social problems were competing for his attention with scientific.

In 1797 he took his Master’s degree. In the same year he got a

fellowship at his college; wrote but, on his father’s advice, did not

print the _Crisis_;[974] and took a curacy near Albury. If the _Crisis_

did nothing more, it showed how the attention of the man was fixing

itself on the subjects that engrossed him during life, and how his

character was changing from gay to grave. It is difficult for a reader

of the later _Essay_ or the _Political Economy_ to conceive that the

writer could ever have been very merry in heart or light in touch; and

there is a still wider distance between the pugnacious Don Roberto,

never long without a black eye, and the grave gentle host of Miss

Martineau at the East India College. The change in style between his

early writings and his later was due to a real change in character,

produced by the concentration of his thoughts on the problem of poverty.

The success of the first _Essay on Population_[975] fixed for him the

work of his life. He was to set one neglected truth clearly before the

world; and he devoted himself wholly to it, pushing his inquiries not

only by study of authorities and facts at home,[976] but by his own[977]

and his friends’[978] travels, and by conversation and correspondence

with all that were likely to give him anything in conference.[979] He

sacrificed to it, fortunately or unfortunately, his youthful buoyancy

and freshness of style, though in speculation his opinions passed from

pessimism to a moderate optimism, and he was never too old in spirit to

unlearn a fault.

In his mature writings the composition is less faulty than the diction,

which is certainly too Johnsonian. The composition is a little bald and

often diffuse; but the meaning of each sentence is always clear, and in

economical writing that is the first of virtues. In a work of

imagination we may desire to have the greatest number of the greatest

ideas put into each sentence; but a scientific treatise is more often

concerned with a single truth in its full development; and the perpetual

recurrence of the same phrases in different connections is unavoidable,

in proportion to the thoroughness of the discussion. Great variety of

language would either imply in the writer or cause in the reader some

confusion of thought. It is not surprising, then, to find Malthus saying

substantially the same thing in nearly the same words, whether he is

presenting his views on Population directly in a book on the subject, or

placing them in their economical context in a book on Political Economy,

or touching them incidentally in a Corn Law pamphlet or _Quarterly_

article, or answering questions about them before a Commons Committee.

His abundant metaphors in the first essay[980] had simply led to

misunderstanding; and he deliberately renounced fine writing for high

thinking, present popularity for permanent usefulness.[981]

The first essay was the turning-point in his literary life. Except the

pamphlets on Haileybury College, all his later writings are economical.

His personal history, being uneventful, was, like a time of dull annals,

presumably happy. The fine portrait of him by Linnell,[982] taken in his

old age, gives a pleasing impression, not only of mildness and firmness,

but of serene contentment, without any trace of physical suffering or

physical defect, though it is certain he had the latter.[983] In person

he was tall and “elegantly formed.”[984] 1799 is the year of his first

Continental journey.[985] In January 1800 his father died, at the age of

seventy. In the same year appeared the tract on _The High Price of

Provisions_. In 1802 Malthus was again on the Continent.[986] In June

1803 he published the second (or quarto) essay, which seems, from a

passage in Edward Clarke’s _Travels_, to have been long expected by his

friends. “I am sorry,” writes Clarke to him from Constantinople on 16th

March, 1802, “to find you confess your breach of duty in not having

written a book. But you have been engaged in the press, because I heard

at the Palace that you had published a new edition of your _Population_,

and, moreover, I was there assured so long ago as last year that you had

written a work on the Scarcity of Corn. How does this accord with your

declaration? Perhaps it is a pamphlet, and therefore strictly not ‘a

book.’”[987]

It is not impossible that Clarke had heard this rumour from Lord Elgin,

and Lord Elgin from Pitt himself, for Pitt had visited Cambridge on the

eve of the dissolution following the Peace of Amiens. On the 16th

(December 1801) he was present at the Commemoration dinner in Trinity

College Hall.[988] The visit is described by Otter:[989] “It happened

that Mr. Pitt was at this time upon a sort of canvassing visit at the

university.... At a supper at Jesus Lodge in the company of some young

travellers, particularly Mr. Malthus, &c., he was induced to unbend in a

very easy conversation respecting Sir Sidney Smith, the massacre at

Jaffa, the Pacha of Acre, Clarke, Carlisle,[990] &c.” Though the talk

was largely on poetry and foreign politics, it may easily have embraced

economics; and the personal meeting may have helped to gain Malthus his

appointment as Professor of History and Political Economy at Haileybury

College. With or without Pitt, the appointment was made in 1805; and in

view of it Malthus was able to carry out, on 13th March 1804, his

marriage with Harriet Eckersall (daughter of John Eckersall of Claverton

House, St. Catherine’s, near Bath), to whom he had probably been for

some years engaged.[991] In 1806 he published the third edition of the

essay (in two volumes), in 1807 the fourth edition, and also the letter

to Samuel Whitbread on his Bill for amending the Poor Laws. If it is

true that he visited Owen at New Lanark, it must have been in the course

of the next seven years.[992] There is nothing signed from his pen in

that time but a letter to Lord Grenville in defence of the East India

College;[993] but in 1814 and 1815 he wrote the _Observations on the

Corn Laws_, the _Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of restricting

Importation_, and _The Nature and Progress of Rent_. In 1807 he had been

with Horner in Wales, impressing Horner, as they went together from

Raglan to Abergavenny, with his idea that the people should “live

dear”;[994] and in 1817 he visited Kerry and Westmeath. In the same

year, 1817, he published the fifth edition of his essay. 1818 would be

memorable to him as the year when Mackintosh joined him at Haileybury as

Professor of General Polity and Law in succession to Mr. Christian. In

1819 Malthus appears as Fellow of the Royal Society, though the honour

did not tempt him back into physical science.[995] In 1820 appeared the

first edition of the _Political Economy_. In 1821, Thomas Tooke, the

author of _High and Low Prices_, founded the Political Economy Club,

James Mill drafting the rules. Malthus, Grote, and Ricardo were among

its members; and the survivors are said to remember well the “crushing

criticisms” by James Mill of Malthus’ speeches.[996]

1823 is the year of the tract on the _Measure of Value_ and the

_Quarterly_ article on Tooke; 1824 of the paper on Population in the

_Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica_, and the article on the New

Political Economy in the _Quarterly Review_.[997] In 1825 he lost a

daughter, and went for his own and his wife’s health to the Continent.

In that year he contributed his first paper to the Royal Society of

Literature, of which he had been made an Associate two years before; and

that year saw Empson take the place of Mackintosh at Haileybury. In 1826

was published the sixth edition of the essay, the last published in his

lifetime. In 1827 we find him before the Emigration Committee, and we

have from his pen the _Definitions in Political Economy_, and the second

paper contributed to the Royal Society of Literature. In 1829 letters

passed between him and W. Nassau Senior, which were appended by the

latter to his _Lectures on Population_. In 1830 he wrote the _Summary

View_, which involved no new effort. Indeed his whole time seems to have

been spent in revising his _Political Economy_ in the light of his

public and private discussions with Ricardo, though he did not live to

print the new edition himself. Shortly before his death he said to some

one who rebuked him for his delay: “My views are before the public. If I

am to alter anything, I can do little more than alter the language, and

I don’t know if I should alter it for the better” (Empson, _l. c._ p.

472). He was one of the first Fellows of the Statistical Society,

founded in March 1834, and its first Annual Report contains a high

eulogy on him and his work; but he did not live to take much share in

its proceedings. He died suddenly of heart disease on Monday, 29th

December, 1834, on a visit to Mr. Eckersall at St. Catherine’s, where he

was spending Christmas with his wife and family. He is buried in the

Abbey Church at Bath, in the north aisle of the nave. Of his three

children, two survived him, of whom one, a daughter, is still

living.[998]

Brougham, in a letter to Macvey Napier (31st Jan., 1837), denies the

truth of an assertion of Empson’s, that Lords Lansdowne and Holland

tried to get preferment for Malthus, but failed; on the contrary, he had

himself, he says, offered Malthus a living, but Malthus had declined it

in favour of his son, Henry,[999] “who got it, and I believe now has

it.” Henry, however, did not become vicar of Effingham (near Leatherhead

in Surrey) till 1835, the year after his father’s death,—or of

Donnington (near Chichester in Sussex) till 1837, the year when Brougham

was writing. The second appointment may have been due to Empson’s

reproach or Otter’s influence. Henry died in August 1882 at the age of

seventy-six. Since, between the two parishes, he kept as many as four

curates at a time, the combined salaries of the two, amounting to £672,

seem a small income.[1000] His father himself told Gallois, the French

publicist, in 1820, that all his works till then had not brought him

above £1000. Gallois, repeating this to the poet Moore, slily remarked

that in England poetry seemed to be better paid than useful

learning.[1001] There is no reason for the belief that Malthus was made

rich by the second essay,[1002] or indeed by anything else. He did not

go the right way to be rich. He could no doubt have got Church

preferment if he had pursued it like Paley. At the end of his days, even

if he had desired it, he was too mild a partisan to be a _grata persona_

to the Whigs in office; he had acquiesced in the Reform of 1832, but

without enthusiasm,[1003] having a livelier interest in social than in

political changes. But the world after all used him kindly. Of worldly

comfort, after 1805, he had enough; and he was fully satisfied, as he

had reason to be, with his lot in the East India College. It gave him

nearly thirty years of the leisure which Godwin had justly counted the

true riches of life.

The position had its cares, for the college was an educational

experiment. Governor-General Wellesley[1004] had proposed to found a

college at Fort William, Calcutta, for the general education of the

civil servants of the Company as well as their special instruction in

Oriental languages. He pointed out that their functions, judicial,

administrative, diplomatic, were now totally unlike their names of

writer, factor, and merchant, and they needed something higher than the

commercial training which was all that was then required of them. The

Directors of the East India Company carried out his wishes so far as to

allow Fort William College to do the advanced training in languages; but

they thought that the general education should be given before the

cadets left England, and at the end of 1805 they passed a scheme for

establishing for that purpose a college at Haileybury, near Hertford. On

their nomination, instead of going out at once to India, the future

civil servants of India were to spend two or three years at Haileybury,

and to receive _first_ a General education on the lines of Oxford and

Cambridge, and _second_ a Special education to prepare them for their

duties in their province.[1005] The Professor of “History and Political

Economy” and the Professor of “General Polity and the Laws of England”

were regarded as giving both the general and the special kinds of

training. “As the study of law and political economy” (so runs the

scheme) “is to form an essential part in the general system of

education, it will be required that, in the lectures upon these

subjects, particular attention be given to the explanation of the

political and commercial relations subsisting between India and Great

Britain.”[1006] The two professors were required to give “(1) a course

of lectures on general history and on the history and statistics of the

modern nations of Europe, (2) a course of lectures on political economy,

(3) a course of lectures on general polity, on the laws of England and

principles of the British Constitution.”[1007] The other subjects were

Classics, Oriental Languages, Mathematics, and Natural Philosophy. The

college course lasted, as a rule, two years, each year consisting of two

terms of about five months each (Feb. to June, Aug. to Dec.); and there

were periodical examinations, honour lists, and prizes. The ages of the

pupils ranged from as low as fifteen to as high as twenty-two, and about

forty joined every year. Malthus would seldom have a class beyond twelve

or fourteen, all in the later year of their course.[1008]

The general discipline of the classes and the surveillance or want of

surveillance of the pupils in their private rooms were rather on the

model of an unreformed Oxford college than of a public school.[1009]

Sense of personal responsibility and habits of self-government were to

take the place of the schoolboy’s fear of punishment. Unhappily, before

learning the new motives, the boys too often abused the absence of the

old.[1010]

About half of the professors were in holy orders and did duty in the

college chapel. If Malthus took his turn with the rest, we need not

suppose with his clerical biographer that he magnified the office. His

sermons would always be earnest; they might often perhaps be too long.

His week-day lectures, unless he made them liker the first essay with

its fine writing than the later books with their plain unvarnished

arguments, could not have been very fascinating to immature youths,

especially as the lecturer had a slight defect in utterance.[1011] Eight

years of teaching convinced him that Political Economy was not, as he

once thought, too hard for boys of sixteen or seventeen;—“they could not

only understand it,” he said, “but they did not even think it

dull.”[1012] We may hope it was so; but in view of the whole case, it is

probable that our author’s labours, in the classroom and out of it, were

far from light, and that the pleasantness of the life was purchased with

a large share of discomfort.

The physical surroundings were all that could be desired. “We are so

rural and quiet here, that there can be no greater contrast [to London].

This house is in a cluster of tall shrubs and young trees, with a little

bit of smooth lawn sloping to a bright pond, in which old weeping

willows are dipping their hair, and rows of young pear trees admiring

their blooming faces. Indeed, there never was such a flash of shadowing

high-hanging flowers as we have around us; and almost all, as it

happens, of that pure, silvery, snowy, bridal tint; and we live, like

Campbell’s sweet Gertrude, ‘as if beneath a galaxy of overhanging

sweets, with blossoms white.’ There are young horse-chestnuts with

flowers half a yard long, fresh, full-clustered white lilacs, tall

Guelder roses, broadspreading pear and cherry trees, low thickets of

blooming sloe, and crowds of juicy-looking detached thorns, quite

covered with their fragrant May-flowers, half open, like ivory filigree,

and half shut like Indian pearls, and all so fresh and dewy since the

milky showers of yesterday; and resounding with nightingales, and

thrushes, and skylarks, shrilling high up, overhead, among the dazzling

slow-sailing clouds. Not to be named, I know and feel as much as you can

do, with your Trossachs, and Loch Lomonds, and Inverarys; but very

sweet, and vernal, and soothing, and fit enough to efface all

recollections of hot, swarming, whirling, and bustling London from all

good minds.”[1013]

Equally pleasant is a glimpse of the daily life at Haileybury, given by

Miss Martineau, who saw it in 1833. Malthus considered her one of his

best expositors;—“whereas his friends had done him all manner of

mischief by defending him injudiciously, my tales had represented his

views precisely as he could have wished;”—and he was at the pains to

seek her out in London and bring her down to the college.[1014] “It was

a delightful visit, and the well-planted county of Herts was a welcome

change from the pavement of London in August.... My room was a large and

airy one, with a bay window and a charming view.”[1015] She found desk,

books, and everything needed for her work. Her entertainers had guessed

from her books that she must be, like Malthus himself,[1016] fond of

riding; and she found her riding-habit and whip ready. Exploring the

green lanes round Amwell, Ware, and Hertford, on horseback, in parties

of five or six, seems to have been the chief amusement. “The subdued

jests and external homage and occasional insurrections of the young men,

the archery of the young ladies, the curious politeness of the Persian

professor [Ibrahim], the fine learning and eager scholarship of

Principal[1017] Le Bas, and the somewhat old-fashioned courtesies of the

summer evening parties are all over now, except as pleasant pictures in

the interior gallery of those who knew the place, of whom I am thankful

to have been one.”

When she again visited Haileybury, Malthus was gone; Professor Jones was

in his chair, and Empson in his house, probably one of the most

comfortable in a building which, if smaller, was much more picturesque

than the present school.[1018]

The “occasional insurrections of the young men” were a feature of the

college from the beginning. Sydney Smith writes to Lord Holland in June

1810, when there was talk of making Mackintosh professor at Haileybury:

“The season for lapidating the professors is now at hand; keep

Mackintosh quiet at Holland House till all is over;”[1019] and to

Whishaw in January 1818, when the appointment had been made: “His

situation at Hertford will suit him very well, peltings and contusions

always excepted. He should stipulate for ‘pebble money,’ as it is

technically termed, or an annual pension in case he is disabled by the

pelting of the students. By the bye, might it not be advisable for the

professors to learn the use of the sling (_balearia habena_)? It would

give them a great advantage over the students.”[1020] The lapidations

were probably no worse than similar scenes at our English and Scotch

Universities that have not yet destroyed the credit of these

institutions. But the opponents of the college complained of much more

than the insubordination of the students. Lord Grenville had made an

attack on it (in April 1813), on the ground that it separated the future

Civil servants from the ordinary life of Englishmen, and prevented them

from becoming imbued with “English manners, English attachments, English

principles, and I am not ashamed to say English prejudices.”[1021]

Malthus, who had gone up to London to hear Grenville’s speech in the

House of Lords, became champion of the college, and had no difficulty in

meeting this assault. The defence of the professors, as set forth by him

in 1817,[1022] was that the plan of the college was good in theory and

had proved good in practice. The insubordination was due to the

dependence of the professorial staff upon the Company’s Directors, who

had (till then) withheld from the teachers their best means of

discipline, the power of expulsion.

The students were as little likely as army or navy cadets to become

un-English; and they were much less likely to form a caste at Haileybury

than if they had been sent to an Indian college. The details of this

extinct controversy need not detain us. It is enough to say that Malthus

discharged his part with great vigour and something of his early

vivacity. At the best, it must be confessed, the college was a

compromise; and the unavoidable difficulties of the situation were quite

enough to try the mettle of the teachers. The cadets of the first year

might be fifteen or they might be eighteen, and there was no natural

aristocracy of senior boys to check the juniors. Those of the younger

age were physically and mentally more like schoolboys than

undergraduates, and unfit, as yet, for the quasi-independent life of the

latter. Many were unwilling to go to India at all, and it was their

parents or guardians who really feared the expulsion of incorrigibles.

But it was better that the unfit should be rejected in England, where

they could find other openings, than in India, where they could find

none; and it was better their training should be carried on where the

climate, the expense, and the moral, social, and intellectual advantages

were in keeping with their age and their state of pupilage. “Little

other change is wanting,” in the system as it then was, “than that an

appointment should be considered in spirit and in truth, not in mere

words, as a prize to be contended for, not a property already

possessed,[1023] which may be lost. If the Directors were to appoint

one-fifth every year beyond the number finally to go out, and the

four-fifths were to be the beat of the whole body, the appointments

would then really be prizes to be contended for, and the effects would

be admirable. Each appointment to the college would then be of less

value; but they would be more in number, and the patronage would hardly

suffer. A Director could not then, indeed, be able to send out an

unqualified son. But is it fitting that he should? This is a fair

question for the consideration of the Legislature and the British

public.”[1024] In these matters, at least, Malthus was no reactionary.

In spite of Joseph Hume and its other enemies, the college lived out its

half-century, and does not die out, on the pages of the _India

Register_, till the death of the Company in 1858. Its monopoly was gone

some time before then. An Act of 1827 provided, theoretically, for the

examination and appointment of India Civil servants who had not studied

at Hertford College. In 1833 provision was made for the limited

competition which Malthus had recommended.[1025] In 1855 came the end.

The Company was “relieved of the obligation to keep up the college;” the

reign of open competition, ushered in by Macaulay’s Report (Nov. 1854),

brought a new order of things; and the college was only continued till

those who had joined it at the time of the change had been able to

finish their course.[1026] There are numbers of old officials, like Sir

William Muir, who still hold it in affectionate remembrance;[1027] but

except in their memory it exists no more.

The work of Malthus was less in the East India College than in his

writings. But his connection with the college was perhaps the most

important of the external facts of his life; and it has helped to

preserve a record of scenes and incidents which reveal the character

more clearly than all the adjectives of panegyrists. Otter, Empson, Miss

Martineau, Sydney Smith,[1028] and Horner,[1029] may supply the

panegyrics; and the eulogy of Mackintosh is remarkable: “I have known

Adam Smith slightly, Ricardo well, Malthus intimately. Is it not

something to say for a science that its three great masters were about

the three best men I ever knew?”[1030]

His epitaph in Bath Abbey, probably from the pen of Otter, is given on

the following page.

SACRED TO THE MEMORY

of

=The Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus,=

LONG KNOWN TO THE LETTERED WORLD

BY HIS ADMIRABLE WRITINGS ON THE SOCIAL BRANCHES OF

POLITICAL ECONOMY,

PARTICULARLY BY HIS “ESSAY ON POPULATION.”

ONE OF THE BEST MEN AND TRUEST PHILOSOPHERS

OF ANY AGE OR COUNTRY,

RAISED BY NATIVE DIGNITY OF MIND

ABOVE THE MISREPRESENTATIONS OF THE IGNORANT

AND THE NEGLECT OF THE GREAT,

HE LIVED A SERENE AND HAPPY LIFE,

DEVOTED TO THE PURSUIT AND COMMUNICATION

OF TRUTH,

SUPPORTED BY A CALM BUT FIRM CONVICTION OF THE

USEFULNESS OF HIS LABOURS,

CONTENT WITH THE APPROBATION OF THE WISE AND GOOD.

HIS WRITINGS WILL BE A LASTING MONUMENT

OF THE EXTENT AND CORRECTNESS OF HIS UNDERSTANDING.

THE SPOTLESS INTEGRITY OF HIS PRINCIPLES,

THE EQUITY AND CANDOUR OF HIS NATURE,

HIS SWEETNESS OF TEMPER, URBANITY OF MANNERS,

AND TENDERNESS OF HEART,

HIS BENEVOLENCE AND HIS PIETY,

ARE THE STILL DEARER RECOLLECTIONS OF HIS FAMILY

AND FRIENDS.

_Born Feb. 14, 1766._ _Died Dec. 29, 1834._

INDEX.

Abbot, Chas., mover of Enumeration Bill, 173, 178

Africa, 105, 111

America, North, 17, 28, 69 _seq._;

Indians, 89 _seq._, 105, 111, 143, 167, 174, &c.;

cf. 369, 370 (American increase)

America, South, 88

Anderson, Adam, 173, 174

Anderson, Jas., 221, 377

Arabs, 109, 110

Aristotle, 113, 211, 214, 319, 356, 384

Bacon, Francis, 22, 47, 66, 124, 396

Bagehot, Walter, 227, 383

Ball, John, 385

Bamford, Sam., 298

Bentham, Jeremy, 43, 44, 323, 325, 331

Berkeley, Bishop, 201

Bert, Paul, 371

Births, no criterion of numbers, 149;

or of increase, 179;

cf. 161

Board of Agriculture, 176, 186, 216–218

Booth, David, 362, 371

Bosanquet, Chas., 291

Bounties, 31, 217, 220, &c.

Brassey, Thos., 257

Brougham, H., 228, 415

Brown, Dr. J., ‘Estimate,’ 173

Bruckner, Dr. John, of Norwich, 8

Buckle, H. T., 22, 33

Bullion Committee, 285 _seq._

Caird, Jas., 69, 75, 76, 245

Cairnes, J. E., 138, 245, 261

Cannibalism, 94

Carey, H. C., 65, 68, 70, 239, 395

Census, Swedish, 132;

English, B. I. ch. vii.

Chalmers, Geo., 174

Chalmers, Dr. Thos., 316, 409

Chartism, 298