[1] See T. Zammit, _The Halsaflieni prehistoric hypogeum at Casal
Paula, Malta_ (Malta, 1910).
[2] Sometimes the pillar which represents the _baetylus_, which seems
to have been the object of worship, (see A. J. Evans in _Journal of
Hellenic Studies_, xxi., 1901) stands free sometimes it serves as
support to the table stone which covers the niche, and sometimes
again monolithic tables occur. Conical stones (possibly themselves
_baetyli_) are also found.
MALTA (or MEDITERRANEAN) FEVER, a disease long prevalent of Malta and
formerly at Gibraltar, as well as other Mediterranean centres,
characterized by prolonged high temperature, with anaemia, pain and
swelling in the joints, and neuritis, lasting on an average four months
but extending even to two or three years. Its pathology was long
obscure, but owing to conclusive research on the part of Colonel
(afterwards Sir) David Bruce, to which contributions were made by
various officers of the R.A.M.C. and others, this problem had now been
solved. A specific micro-organism, the _Micrococcus melitensis_, was
discovered in 1887, and it was traced to the milk of the Maltese goats.
A commission was sent out to Malta in 1904 to investigate the question,
and after three years' work its conclusions were embodied in a report by
Colonel Bruce in 1907. It was shown that the disappearance of the
disease from Gibraltar had synchronized with the non-importation of
goats from Malta; and preventive measures adopted in Malta in 1906, by
banishing goats' milk from the military and naval dietary, put a stop to
the occurrence of cases. In the treatment of Malta fever a vaccine has
been used with considerable success.
MALTE-BRUN, CONRAD (1755-1826), French geographer, was born on the 12th
of August 1755 at Thisted in Denmark, and died at Paris on the 14th of
December 1826. His original name was Malte Conrad Bruun. While a student
at Copenhagen he made himself famous partly by his verses, but more by
the violence of his political pamphleteering; and at length, in 1800,
the legal actions which the government authorities had from time to time
instituted against him culminated in a sentence of banishment. The
principles which he had advocated were those of the French Revolution,
and after first seeking asylum in Sweden he found his way to Paris.
There he looked forward to a political career; but, when Napoleon's
personal ambition began to unfold itself, Malte-Brun was bold enough to
protest, and to turn elsewhere for employment and advancement. He was
associated with Edme Mentelle (1730-1815) in the compilation of the
_Géographie mathématique ... de toutes les parties du monde_ (Paris,
1803-1807, 16 vols.), and he became recognized as one of the best
geographers of France. He is remembered, not only as the author of six
volumes of the learned _Précis de la géographie universelle_ (Paris,
1810-1829), continued by other hands after his death, but also as the
originator of the _Annales des voyages_ (1808), and one of the founders
of the Geographical Society of Paris. His second son, VICTOR ADOLPHE
MALTE-BRUN (1816-1889), followed his father's career of geographer, and
was a voluminous author.
MALTHUS, THOMAS ROBERT (1766-1834), English economist, was born in 1766
at the Rookery, near Guildford, Surrey, a small estate owned by his
father, Daniel Malthus, a gentleman of good family and independent
fortune, of considerable culture, the friend and correspondent of
Rousseau and one of his executors. Young Malthus was never sent to a
public school, but received his education from private tutors. In 1784
he was sent to Cambridge, where he was ninth wrangler, and became fellow
of his college (Jesus) in 1797. The same year he received orders, and
undertook the charge of a small parish in Surrey. In the following year
he published the first edition of his great work, _An Essay on the
Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society,
with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other
Writers_. The work excited a good deal of surprise as well as attention;
and with characteristic thoroughness and love of truth the author went
abroad to collect materials for the verification and more exhaustive
treatment of his views. As Britain was then at war with France, only the
northern countries of Europe were quite open to his research at that
time; but during the brief Peace of Amiens Malthus continued his
investigations in France and Switzerland. The result of these labours
appeared in the greatly enlarged and more mature edition of his work
published in 1803. In 1805 Malthus married happily, and not long after
was appointed professor of modern history and political economy in the
East India Company's College at Haileybury. This post he retained till
his death suddenly from heart disease on the 23rd of December 1834.
Malthus was one of the most amiable, candid and cultured of men. In all
his private relations he was not only without reproach, but
distinguished for the beauty of his character. He bore popular abuse and
misrepresentation without the slightest murmur or sourness of temper.
The aim of his inquiries was to promote the happiness of mankind, which
could be better accomplished by pointing out the real possibilities of
progress than by indulging in vague dreams of perfectibility apart from
the actual facts which condition human life.
Malthus's _Essay on Population_ grew out of some discussions which he
had with his father respecting the perfectibility of society. His father
shared the theories on that subject of Condorcet and Godwin; and his son
combated them on the ground that the realization of a happy society will
always be hindered by the miseries consequent on the tendency of
population to increase faster than the means of subsistence. His father
was struck by the weight and originality of his views, asked him to put
them in writing, and then recommended the publication of the manuscript.
It was in this way the _Essay_ saw the light. Thus it will be seen that
both historically and philosophically the doctrine of Malthus was a
corrective reaction against the superficial optimism diffused by the
school of Rousseau. It was the same optimism, with its easy methods of
regenerating society and its fatal blindness to the real conditions that
circumscribe human life, that was responsible for the wild theories of
the French Revolution and many of its consequent excesses.
The project of a formal and detailed treatise on population was an
afterthought of Malthus. The essay in which he had studied a hypothetic
future led him to examine the effects of the principle he had put
forward on the past and present state of society; and he undertook an
historical examination of these effects, and sought to draw such
inferences in relation to the actual state of things as experience
seemed to warrant. In its original form he had spoken of no checks to
population but those which came under the head either of vice or of
misery. In the 1803 edition he introduced the new element of the
preventive check supplied by what he calls "moral restraint," and is
thus enabled to "soften some of the harshest conclusions" at which he
had before arrived. The treatise passed through six editions in his
lifetime, and in all of them he introduced various additions and
corrections. That of 1816 is the last he revised, and supplies the final
text from which it has since been reprinted.
Notwithstanding the great development which he gave to his work and the
almost unprecedented amount of discussion to which it gave rise, it
remains a matter of some difficulty to discover what solid contribution
he has made to our knowledge, nor is it easy to ascertain precisely what
practical precepts, not already familiar, he founded on his theoretic
principles. This twofold vagueness is well brought out in his celebrated
correspondence with Nassau Senior, in the course of which it seems to be
made apparent that his doctrine is new not so much in its essence as in
the phraseology in which it is couched. He himself tells us that when,
after the publication of the original essay, the main argument of which
he had deduced from David Hume, Robert Wallace, Adam Smith and Richard
Price, he began to inquire more closely into the subject, he found that
"much more had been done" upon it "than he had been aware of." It had
"been treated in such a manner by some of the French economists,
occasionally by Montesquieu, and, among English writers, by Dr Franklin,
Sir James Steuart, Arthur Young and Rev. J. Townsend, as to create a
natural surprise that it had not excited more of the public attention."
"Much, however," he thought, "remained yet to be done. The comparison
between the increase of population and food had not, perhaps, been
stated with sufficient force and precision," and "few inquiries had been
made into the various modes by which the level" between population and
the means of subsistence "is effected." The first desideratum here
mentioned--the want, namely, of an accurate statement of the relation
between the increase of population and food--Malthus doubtless supposed
to have been supplied by the celebrated proposition that "population
increases in a geometrical, food in an arithmetical ratio." This
proposition, however, has been conclusively shown to be erroneous, there
being no such difference of law between the increase of man and that of
the organic beings which form his food. When the formula cited is not
used, other somewhat nebulous expressions are sometimes employed, as,
for example, that "population has a tendency to increase faster than
food," a sentence in which both are treated as if they were spontaneous
growths, and which, on account of the ambiguity of the word "tendency,"
is admittedly consistent with the fact asserted by Senior, that food
tends to increase faster than population. It must always have been
perfectly well known that population will probably (though not
necessarily) increase with every augmentation of the supply of
subsistence, and may, in some instances, inconveniently press upon, or
even for a certain time exceed, the number properly corresponding to
that supply. Nor could it ever have been doubted that war, disease,
poverty--the last two often the consequences of vice--are causes which
keep population down. In fact, the way in which abundance, increase of
numbers, want, increase of deaths, succeed each other in the natural
economy, when reason does not intervene, had been fully explained by
Joseph Townsend in his _Dissertation on the Poor Laws_ (1786) which was
known to Malthus. Again, it is surely plain enough that the apprehension
by individuals of the evils of poverty, or a sense of duty to their
possible offspring, may retard the increase of population, and has in
all civilized communities operated to a certain extent in that way. It
is only when such obvious truths are clothed in the technical
terminology of "positive" and "preventive checks" that they appear novel
and profound; and yet they appear to contain the whole message of
Malthus to mankind. The laborious apparatus of historical and
statistical facts respecting the several countries of the globe, adduced
in the altered form of the essay, though it contains a good deal that is
curious and interesting, establishes no general result which was not
previously well known.
It would seem, then, that what has been ambitiously called Malthus's
theory of population, instead of being a great discovery as some have
represented it, or a poisonous novelty, as others have considered it, is
no more than a formal enunciation of obvious, though sometimes
neglected, facts. The pretentious language often applied to it by
economists is objectionable, as being apt to make us forget that the
whole subject with which it deals is as yet very imperfectly
understood--the causes which modify the force of the sexual instinct,
and those which lead to variations in fecundity, still awaiting a
complete investigation.
It is the law of diminishing returns from land, involving as it
does--though only hypothetically--the prospect of a continuously
increasing difficulty in obtaining the necessary sustenance for all the
members of a society, that gives the principal importance to population
as an economic factor. It is, in fact, the confluence of the Malthusian
ideas with the theories of Ricardo, especially with the corollaries
which the latter deduced from the doctrine of rent (though these were
not accepted by Malthus), that has led to the introduction of population
as an element in the discussion of so many economic questions in modern
times.
Malthus had undoubtedly the great merit of having called public
attention in a striking and impressive way to a subject which had
neither theoretically nor practically been sufficiently considered. But
he and his followers appear to have greatly exaggerated both the
magnitude and the urgency of the dangers to which they pointed.[1] In
their conceptions a single social imperfection assumed such portentous
dimensions that it seemed to overcloud the whole heaven and threaten the
world with ruin. This doubtless arose from his having at first omitted
altogether from his view of the question the great counteracting agency
of moral restraint. Because a force exists, capable, if unchecked, of
producing certain results, it does not follow that those results are
imminent or even possible in the sphere of experience. A body thrown
from the hand would, under the single impulse of projection, move for
ever in a straight line; but it would not be reasonable to take special
action for the prevention of this result, ignoring the fact that it will
be sufficiently counteracted by the other forces which will come into
play. And such other forces exist in the case we are considering. If the
inherent energy of the principle of population (supposed everywhere the
same) is measured by the rate at which numbers increase under the most
favourable circumstances, surely the force of less favourable
circumstances, acting through prudential or altruistic motives, is
measured by the great difference between this maximum rate and those
which are observed to prevail in most European countries. Under a
rational system of institutions, the adaptation of numbers to the means
available for their support is effected by the felt or anticipated
pressure of circumstances and the fear of social degradation, within a
tolerable degree of approximation to what is desirable. To bring the
result nearer to the just standard, a higher measure of popular
enlightenment and more serious habits of moral reflection ought indeed
to be encouraged. But it is the duty of the individual to his possible
offspring, and not any vague notions as to the pressure of the national
population on subsistence, that will be adequate to influence conduct.
It can scarcely be doubted that the favour which was at once accorded to
the views of Malthus in certain circles was due in part to an
impression, very welcome to the higher ranks of society, that they
tended to relieve the rich and powerful of responsibility for the
condition of the working classes, by showing that the latter had chiefly
themselves to blame, and not either the negligence of their superiors or
the institutions of the country. The application of his doctrines, too,
made by some of his successors had the effect of discouraging all active
effort for social improvement. Thus Chalmers "reviews _seriatim_ and
gravely sets aside all the schemes usually proposed for the amelioration
of the economic condition of the people" on the ground that an increase
of comfort will lead to an increase of numbers, and so the last state of
things will be worse than the first.
Malthus has in more modern times derived a certain degree of reflected
lustre from the rise and wide acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis.
Its author himself, in tracing its filiation, points to the phrase
"struggle for existence" used by Malthus in relation to the social
competition. Darwin believed that man advanced to his present high
condition through such a struggle, consequent on his rapid
multiplication. He regarded, it is true, the agency of this cause for
the improvement of the race as largely superseded by moral influences in
the more advanced social stages. Yet he considered it, even in these
stages, of so much importance towards that end that, notwithstanding the
individual suffering arising from the struggle for life, he deprecated
any great reduction in the natural, by which he seems to mean the
ordinary, rate of increase.
Besides his great work, Malthus wrote _Observations on the Effect of
the Corn Laws_; _An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent_;
_Principles of Political Economy_; and _Definitions in Political
Economy_. His views on rent were of real importance.
For his life see _Memoir_ by his friend Dr Otter, bishop of Chichester
(prefixed to 2nd ed., 1836, of the _Principles of Political Economy_),
and _Malthus and his Work_, by J. Bonar (London, 1885). Practically
every treatise on economics deals with Malthus and his essay, but the
following special works may be referred to: Soetbeer, _Die Stellung
der Sozialisten zur Malthusschen Bevölkerungslehre_ (Berlin, 1886); G.
de Molinari, _Malthus, essai sur le principe de population_ (Paris,
1889); Cossa, _Il Principio di popolazione di T. R. Malthus_ (Milan,
1895); and Ricardo, _Letters to Malthus_, ed. J. Bonar (1887).