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JUM1UKB  JAN  1      1923 

T- 


MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK 


AND  HIS  WORK3' 


BY 


JAMES  BONAK,  M.A. 


BALLIOL  COLLEGE,  OXFORD 


Jfonbon 
MACMILLAN    AND    CO. 

1  SS.'i 
Tkt  Riylit  of  Traiulalion  and  fepnwfurfbm  to  Anrrml 


LONDON : 

RICHARD  CLAY  AND  SONS, 

BREAD  STREET   HILL,     B.C. 


CONTENTS. 


MM 

INTRODUCTION vii 

BOOK  I.     THE  ESSAY. 

CHAP.  i.     FIRST  THOUGHTS,  1798 1 

„        II.      SECOND   THOUGHTS,  1803  

„       III.       THESES 60 

„    IV.   THE  SAVAGE,  BARBARIAN,  AND  ORIENTAL     ...  85 

„    V.   NORTH  AND  MID  EUROPE      119 

„   VI.   FRANCE 153 

„       VII.       ENGLAND,    SCOTLAND,    AND    IRELAND       170 

BOOK  II.     ECONOMICS. 

CHAP.  I.   THB  LANDLORDS       ...      207 

„    II.   THE  WORKING  MAN     254 

„   III.   GENERAL  GLUTS        282 

„    IV.   THE  BEGGAR    ...  303 

BOOK  III.     MORAL  AND  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY  319 
„      IV.     THE  CRITICS 

V.     BIOGRAPHY  ...  :•" 

INI.KX  .  4 US 


MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WOKE 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,  1798.  3 

book,  but  the  current  version  of  his  doctrines. 
Malthus  becomes  Malthusiauisin,  -  -  Darwin,  Dar- 
winism ;  and  if  Adam  Smith's  name  were  more 
flexible  he  too  would  become  an  epithet.1  As  it  is, 
Adam  Smith  has  left  a  book  which  "every  one 
praises  and  nobody  reads,"  Malthus  a  book  which 
no  one  reads  and  all  abuse.  The  abuse  is,  fortun- 
ately, not  quite  unanimous;  but  it  is  certain  that 
Malthus  for  a  long  time  had  an  experience  worse 
than  Cassandra's,  for  his  warnings  were  disbelieved 
without  being  heard  or  understood.  Miss  Marti- 
neau,  in  her  girlhood,  heard  him  denounced  "  very 
eloquently  and  forcibly  by  persons  who  never  saw 
so  much  as  the  outside  "  2  of  his  book.  This  was  in 
1816  ;  and  when  at  a  later  time  she  inquired  about 
him  for  herself,  she  could  never  find  any  one  who 
had  ivad  his  book,  but  scores  who  could  "  make 
;  ^ument  about  it  and  about,"  or  write  senti- 
mental pamphlets  on  supposed  Malthusian  subjects. 

carelessness  was  not   confined   to   the   gen 
public;    it     infected    the    savants.      Nothing    more 

rly   shows    how   political    economy,   or   at    i 
one  question  of   it.    had  descended    into  the   M 
an«l    become    a   common   recreation.     Even    Nassau 
William    Senior,    pcrhaj s     tin-    most    distingui 
professor  of  political  economy   in   his  day,  confessed 
with   |>cnit«-ncc  that    In-  had  trusted  more  to 

i    t«>   his  eyes  for  a   i  of    Malthusian 

id    ha«l    written    R    1-   irn-'d    criticism,   not 

of   til--    "pinion    of   Mr.    Maltlnn.    but    of   that    which 

ntnlkof  'SmUhuuiumu-v  !    71. 

D  2 


4  MAI/HITS   AND    HIS    WoIIK.  [BK.  I. 

'•  the  multitudes  who  have  followed  and  the  few  who 
endeavoured  to  oppose"  Mr.  Malthas,  have 
assumed  to  be  his  opinion.1 

The  "  opinion"  so  imagined  by  Senior  and  the 
multitude  is  still  the  current  Malthusianism.  A 
Malthusian  is  supposed  to  forbid  all  marriage.  Mr. 
Malthas  was  supposed  to  believe  that  "the  desire  of 
marriage,  which  tends  to  increase  population,  is  a 
stronger  principle  than  the  desire  of  bettering  our 
condition,  which  tends  to  increase  subsistence."  This 
meant,  as  Southey  said,  that  "  God  makes  men  and 
women  faster  than  He  can  feed  them."  The  old 
adage  was  wrong  then  :  Providence  does  not  send 
meat  where  He  sends  mouths ;  on  the  contrary,  He 
sends  mouths  wherever  He  sends  meat,  so  that  the 
poor  can  never  cease  out  of  the  land,  for,  however 
abundant  the  food,  marriage  will  soon  make  the 
people  equally  abundant.  It  is  a  question  of  simple 
division.  A  fortune  that  is  wealth  for  one  will  not 
give  comfort  to  ten,  or  bare  life  to  twenty.  The 
moral  is,  for  all  about  to  marry,  "  Don't,"  and  for 
all  statesmen,  "  Don't  encourage  them." 

This  caricature  had  enough  truth  in  it  to  save  it 
from  instant  detection,  and  its  vitality  is  due  to  the 
superior  ease  in  understanding,  and  therefore  greater 
pleasure  in  hearing,  a  blank  denial  or  a  blank  affirm- 
ation as  compared  with  the  necessary  qualifications  of 
a  scientific  statement.  The  truth  must  be  tokl,  how- 
ever, that  Malthus  and  the  rest  of  the  learned  world 

1  Senior,  Two  Lectures  on  Population,  1829,  Appendix,  pp.  56,  57. 
2  Senior,  I  c.,  p.  56. 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,   1798.  5 

were   by  no   means   at   utter   discord.      He    always 
treated  a  hostile  economist  as  a  possible  ally.      He 
was  carrying  on  the  work  of  their  common  Founder. 
In  the  Essay  on  Population  he  was  inquiring  into  the 
nature  and  causes  of  poverty,  as  Adam    Smith  had 
inquired  into  the  nature  and  causes  of  wealth.     But 
Malthus  himself  did  not  intend  the  one  to  be  a  men- 
supplement  to  the  other.     He  did  not  approach  the 
subject   from  a  purely  scientific  side.     He    had   not 
ted  long  years  of  travel  and  reflection  to  the  pre- 
paration of  an  economical  treatise.     Adam  Smith  had 
written  his  Moral  Sentinifnt*  seventeen  years  before 
his  greater  work.     When  he  wrote  the  latter  he  had 
l"-h:nd  him  an  academical  and  literary  reputation; 
and  he  satisfied  the  just  expectations  of  the  public 
by  giving  them,  in  the  two  quarto  volumes  of  the 
Wealth   of  Nations,  his  full-formed  and   completely 
digested   conclusions  and  reasonings  definitively  ex- 
pressed  (1776).      Malthus,  on  the  contrary,   L:  iin««l 
his  reputation  by  a  bold  and  sudden  stroke,  well  fol- 
lowed up.     His  Essay  was  an  anonymous  pamphlet 
in  a  political   controversy,  and  was  meant  to  turn 
the   light   of   political   economy   upon    the  political 
philosophy  of   the  day.      Whatever  the   eesay  con- 
tained  over   and   above   politics,    and    however    far 
afiel.l    the  author  eventually  travelled    in   the  ! 
e.  lit  inns,  there  is  no  doubt  about  the  first  origin  of 
tip  essay  itself.    It  was  not,  as  we  are  sometimes  told, 
that.  IH  inir  a  kind-hearted  clergyman,  he  set  himself 
t«»   v,  in.juiiv  whether   after  all    it  was   right  to 

in< Tease  the  numbers  of  the  population  without  curing 


6  MALTHUS  AND   HIS   WoRIv.  [UK.  i. 

for  the  quality  of  it.  In  1798  Malthus  was  no  doubt 
in  holy  orders  and  held  a  curacy  at  Albury  ;  but  he 
sivms  never  to  have  been  more  than  a  curate.  The 
Whigs  offered  him  a  living  in  his  later  years,  but  he 
passed  it  to  his  son ; l  and  we  should  be  far  astray  if 
we  supposed  his  book  no  more  than  the  "  recreations 
of  a  country  parson/'  "  Parson  "  was  in  his  case  a 
title  without  a  role  and  Cobbett's  immortal  nickname 
ia  very  unhappy.2  He  had  hardly  more  of  the  parson 
than  Condillac  of  the  abbe.  In  1798  Pitt's  Bill 
for  extending  relief  to  large  families,  and  thereby 
encouraging  population,  was  no  doubt  before  the 
country ;  but  we  owe  the  essay  not  to  William  Pitt, 
but  to  William  Godwin.  The  changed  aspect  of  the 
book  in  its  later  editions  need  not  blind  us  to  the 
efficient  cause  of  its  first  appearance. 

Thomas  Robert  Malthus  had  graduated  at  Cam- 
bridge as  ninth  wrangler  in  the  year  1788,  in  the 
t  \venty-second  year  of  his  age.  In  1797,  after  gaining 
a  fellowship  at  Jesus  College,  he  happened  to  spend 
some  time  at  his  father's  house  at  Albury  in  Surrey. 
Father  and  son  discussed  the  questions  of  the  day, 
the  younger  man  attacking  Jacobinism,  the  elder 

1  Macvey  Napier's  Correspondence,  p.  187.     Cf.  Pol.  Econ.,  2nd  ed., 
pp.  xxxv,  liv. 

2  «  Why,"  said  I,  "  how  many  children  do  you  reckon  to  have  at  last  ?  " 
"  T  do  not  care  how  many,"  said  the  man,   "God  never  sends  mouths 
without  sending  meat."     "Did  you  ever  hear,"  said  I,  "of  one  Parson 
Mallhus  ?  In-  wants  an  act  of  parliament  to  prevent  poor  people  from 
marrying  young,  and  from  having  such  lots  of  children."     "Oh,  the 
brute  !"  exclaimed   ihe  wife  ;   while  the  husband   laughed,  thinking  I 
was  joking.''— Cobb<>tt's  Advice  to  Young  Men,  Letter  3,  p.  83.     The 
references  to  Cohbctt  in  tin-    Ivsiy  are  probably,  7th  ed.,  pp.  310  and 
318,  cf.  p.  313  ;  but  his  name  is  not  mentioned. 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,  1  7 

defending  it.  Daniel  Malthus  had  been  a  friend 
and  executor  of  Rousseau,  and  was  an  ardent  believer 
in  human  progress.  Robert  had  written  a  Whig 
tiM'.-t,  which  he  called  T/ie  Crisis,  in  the  year  of 
Pitt's  new  loan  and  Napoleon's  Italian  campaign 
(1796);  but  he  did  not  publish  it,  and  his  views 
\\vre  yet  in  solution.  We  may  be  sure  the  two 
men  did  not  spare  each  other  in  debate.  In  the 
words  of  the  elder  Malthus,  Robert  then,  if  at  no 
other  time,  "  threw  little  stones  "  into  his  garden.  An 
old  man  must  have  the  patience  of  Job  if  he  can  look 
with  calmness  on  a  young  man  breaking  his  ideals. 
But  in  this  case  he  at  least  recognized  the  strength 
of  the  sliugcr,  and  he  bore  him  no  grudge,  though  he 
did  not  live  to  be  won  by  the  concessions  of  the  second 
essay  (1803).  That  Robert,  on  his  part,  was  not  want- 
ing in  respect,  is  shown  by  an  indignant  letter,  written 
in  1'Vliruary,  1800,  on  his  father's  death,  in  reply  to 
tin-  supposed  slight  of  a  newspaper  paragraph.1 

Tip;    fireside    debates    had    in     that     yoar    (1797) 

•  •ived    new   matter.     William    Godwin,    quondam 

son,    journalist,    politician,    and    novelist,    whose 

Politirfil    Justice  was    avowedly    a    "child    of    the 

volution,"2  hao!  written  anew  book,  the  /:'//<//>//•• 

in   which  many  of  his  old  positions  were  set  in  a 

new  light.     Th<    father  made  it  a  point  of  honour 

to  defend  tip-  Ekqmrtf;  the  0on  played  d0vflfsadvo- 

1\    from  conviction,  partly  for  the  sake  of 

1  Nam.  ly,  in  the  Monthly  Magazine  for  Jan.  1800.    But  see  below, 
<m  Parr't  Sermon,  p.  2,  and  Pol.  /lotio,  1 


8  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

argument ;  and,  as  often  happens  in  such  a  case, 
Robert  found  his  case  stronger  than  he  had  thought. 
Hard  pressed  by  an  able  opponent,  he  was  led,  on 
the  spur  of  the  moment,  to  use  arguments  which  had 
not  occurred  to  him  before,  and  of  which  The  Cii*i* 
knows  nothing.  In  calmer  moments  he  followed 
them  up  to  their  conclusions.  "  The  discussion,"  he 
tells  us,1  "  started  the  general  question  of  the  future 
improvement  of  society,  and  the  author  at  first  sat 
down  with  an  intention  of  merely  stating  his  thoughts 
to  his  friend  upon  paper  in  a  clearer  manner  than 
he  thought  he  could  do  in  conversation."  But  the 
subject  opened  upon  him,  and  he  determined  to 
publish.  This  is  the  plain  story  of  the  publication  of 
the  Essay  on  Population,  reduced  to  its  simplest  terms. 
At  the  very  time  when  the  best  men  in  both  worlds 
were  talking  only  of  progress,  Malthus  saw  rocks 
ahead.  French  and  English  reformers  were  looking 
forward  to  a  golden  age  of  perfect  equality  and 
happiness ;  Malthus  saw  an  irremovable  difficulty 
in  the  way,  and  he  refused  to  put  the  telescope 
to  his  blind  eye. 

There  had  been  Cassandras  before  Malthus,  and 
even  in  the  same  century.  Dr.  John  Bruckner  of 
Norwich  had  written  in  the  same  strain  in  his  Theorie 
da  Systems  Animal,  in  1767  ;2  and  a  few  years  earlier 
(in  1761)  Dr.  Robert  Wallace,  writing  of  the  Various 
Prospects  of  Mankind,  Nature,  and  Providence,  had 

1  Preface  to  first  edition  of  Essay,  1798. 

2  Ley.len,  1767,  translated  under  the  title  Philosophical  Survey  of  the 
Animal  Creation,  Lond.,  1708.     See  especially  chs.  vii.  and  x. 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,  1798.  9 

talked  of  community  of  goods  as  a  cure  for  the  ills 
of  humanity,  and  then  had  found,  very  reluct  untlv, 
one  fatal  objection — the  excessive  population  that 
would  ensue.  Men  are  always  inclined  to  inanv 
aiul  multiply  their  numbers  till  the  food  is  barely 
enough  to  support  them  all.  This  objection  had 
since  Wallace's  time  become  a  stock  objection,  to 
M.swercd  by  every  maker  of  Utopias.  It  was  left 
for  Malthus  to  show  the  near  approach  which  this 
difficulty  makes  to  absolute  hopelessness,  and  to 
throw  the  burden  of  proof  on  the  other  side.  As 
the  U'efilf/t  of  Natiotis  altered  the  standing  pre- 
sumption in  favour  of  interference  to  one  in  favour 
of  liberty  in  matters  of  trade,  so  the  Ewny  on- 
l^n^nl/tlion  altered  the  presumption  in  favour  of  the 
advocates  of  progress  to  a  presumption  against  tin-in. 
This  may  not  describe  the  final  result  of  the  e> 
but  it  is  a  true  account  of  its  immediate  effect,  i 
IV<>|,],«  had  heard  of  the  objection  before;  it  was  only 
now  that  they  began  to  look  on  it  as  conclusi 

IIo\v  had  Godwin  tried  to  meet  it,  when  it  was 
still  in  the  hands  of  weaker  men,  and  therefore  not 
at  ,-ill  conclusive?  He  could  not  ignore  it.  In  his 
iced  Justice  (1793)  he  had  given  the  outlines  of 
a  "simple  form  of  society,  without  government,"  on 
the  principle  of  Tom  Paine,  which  was  also  a  rect  i 

in  motto,  "Society  is  produced  by  our  wants, 

rnmcnt  by  our  wiekedbma."1     lie  says,  with  the 

ruling  philosophy,  that  man  is  born  a  blank,  and  hi* 

circumstances     m.ike     him     ir«">d     or    • 
1  Common8enu,  p.  1,  quoted  in  Pol.  Autict,  Bk.  1 1  .  h  i.  p.  124  (3id  «L). 


10  MALTHUS  AND   II IS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

Thanks  to  human  institutions,  especially  lawyers, 
sovereigns,  and  statesmen,  the  outward  circumstances, 
he  says,  are  as  bad  as  they  can  be.  Everywhere 
there  is  inequality.  There  is  great  poverty  alongside 
of  great  riches,  and  great  tyranny  with  great  slavery. 
In  the  same  way  the  best  of  his  novels,  Caleb  William* 
(1794),  tells  us  how  "things  as  they  are"  enable  the 
rich  sinner  to  persecute  the  poor  righteous  man.  But 
he  is  no  pessimist.  The  Political  Justice  does  not 
end  with  a  statement  of  evils.  It  goes  on  to  show 
that  in  the  end  truth  will  conquer ;  men  will  listen 
to  reason,  they  will  abandon  their  present  laws,  and 
they  will  form  a  society  without  law  or  government 
or  any  kind  of  force ;  no  such  things  will  be  needed 
when  every  man  listens  to  reason,  and  contents 
himself  with  plain  living  and  high  thinking.  There 
will  be  no  king  in  Israel ;  every  man  will  do  that 
which  is  right  in  his  own  eyes.  In  our  present 
society,  says  Godwin,  it  is  distribution  and  not 
production  that  is  at  fault.  There  is  more  than 
enough  of  wealth  for  all,  but  it  is  not  shared  amongst 
all.  One  man  has  too  much,  another  little  or  nothing. 
In  the  new  society  reason  will  change  all  that. 
Reason  tells  us  that,  if  we  make  an  equal  division, 
not  only  of  the  good  things  of  this  life,  but  of  the 
labour  of  making  them,  then  we  shall  secure  a  pro- 
duction quite  sufficient  for  the  needs  of  plain  livers, 
at  the  cost  of  perhaps  half-an-hour's  labour  in  a  day 
from  each  of  them. l  Each  of  them  will,  therefore, 

1  Pol.  Justice,  Bk.  VIII.  ch.  vi.  p.  484.    On  the  other  hand,  Franklin, 
in  his  Letter  on  Luxury,  Idleness,  and  Industry  (1784),  had  estimated  the 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,  1798.  11 

have  leisure,  which  is  the  true  riches,  and  lie  will 
use  the  time  for  his  own  moral  and  intellectual 
improvement.  In  this  way,  by  the  omnipotence  of 
truth  and  the  power  of  persuasion,  not  by  any 
violence  or  power  of  the  sword,  perfection  and 
happiness  will  in  time  be  established  on  the  earth. 
Godwin  made  no  essential  change  in  these  views 
in  the  later  editions  of  the  Political  Justice  (1796 
and  1798),  or  in  the  Enquirer  (1797).  "  Among  the 
faithless,  faithful  only  he,"  when  the  excesses  of  the 
T<-rmr  made  even  Sir  James  Mackintosh  (not  to  say 
IJishnp  Watson,  Southey,  and  Wordsworth)  a  luke- 
warm reformer.  Nothing  in  Godwin's  life  is  more 
admirable  than  the  perfect  confidence  with  which 
he  holds  fast  to  his  old  faith  in  democratic  principles 
and  the  perfectibility  of  man.  If  it  is  obstinacy, 

a  very  like  devotion ;  and  perhaps  the  only 
author  who  shows  an  equal  constancy  is  Condorcet, 

Girondist,  marked  out  for  death,  and  writing 
in  his  hiding-place,  almost  under  the  eyes  of  the 
Convention,  his  eager  book  on  the  Progress  of  lh<> 

>cs.  Nothing  but  intense  sincerity  and  sheer 
depth  of  conviction  could  have  enabled  these  men 
to  continue  the  defenee  of  a  dishonoured  cause. 
They  had  not  the  martyr's  greatest  trial,  the 
doubt  whether  he  is  n-lit.  The  ^'ivat  impression 

le  by  their  works  was  a  sign   that,  as  tin -y  felt 

str<>.  :h.-y     wrote    powerfully.       Malthus,    who 

i    of  them,  apologized  for  giving  serious 

necessary   labour  more  moderately  at   four   Ix.ur*.      Sir  Thou. 

<-urred  to  the  half-hour.     New  Moral  FPorW, 

i-p.  x,  xi. 


1-2  MALTHUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [BK.  I. 

criticism  to  Condorcet's  palpable  extravagances  by 
saying  that  Condorcet  has  many  followers  who  will 
hold  him  unanswerable  unless  he  is  specially  answered.1 
Of  Godwin,  Mr.  Sumner,  writing  in  1816,  says  that 
though  his  book  (the  Political  Justice)  was  becoming 
out  of  date,  it  was  still  "  the  ablest  and  best  known 
statement "  of  the  doctrines  of  equality  that  had  ever 
appeared  in  England.2  It  has  been  justly  called  the 
"first  text-book  of  the  philosophical  radicals."  The 
actual  effect  of  it  cannot  be  measured  by  the  number 
of  copies  sold  on  its  first  appearance.  Godwin  had 
placed  it  far  beyond  the  reach  of  ordinary  democrats 
by  fixing  the  price  at  three  guineas.  In  1793  many 
who  would  have  been  his  keenest  readers  could  not 
have  paid  three  shillings  for  it.  But  the  event 
proved  him  wise  in  his  generation.  The  Privy 
Council  decided  they  might  safely  tolerate  so  dear 
a  book ;  and  a  small  audience  even  of  the  rich  was 
better  to  Godwin  than  prosecution,  which  might 
mean  exile  and  no  audience  at  all.3  Few  writers 
of  our  own  day  have  so  good  an  excuse  for  making 
themselves  inaccessible  to  the  poor.  Godwin,  how- 
ever, like  Ruskin,  reached  the  poor  in  spite  of  his 
arrangements  for  avoiding  them.  He  filtered  down 
among  the  masses ;  and  his  writings  became  a 
political  as  well  as  a  literary  power  in  England, 

1  Essay,  1st  ed.,  pp.  161-2,  footnote. 

2  Records  of  the  Creation,  vol.  i.  p.  54,  note. 

3  Life  by  Kegan  Paul,  vol.  i.  p.  80.     Cf.  a  curious  passage  in  the 
Edinburgh  Review,  about  Godwin's  Population:  "As  the  book  was  dear, 
and  not  likely  to  fall  into  the  hands  of  the  labouring  classes,  we  had 
no  thoughts  of  noticing  it,"  July  1821,  p.  363. 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,  1798.  13 

long  before  he  had  a  poetic  son-in-law  to  give  him 
ed  glory.  If  a  species  is  to  be  judged  by  its 
best  individual,  then  Godwin  represents  better  than 
1'aine  the  class  of  political  writers  to  which  they  both 
1  >elong ;  and  many  fell  down  with  Godwin  when  he 
fell  down  before  Malthus. 

The   J. *ii(ju /'/•<'/•  was  less  popular  than  the  Political 
J>  Part  of  the  charm  of  the  latter  undoubtedly 

lay  in  the  elaborate  completeness  and  systematic 
order  of  the  whole  discussion.  The  foundations  were 
laid  in  the  psychology  of  Locke  ;  and  then  the  build- 
in-  \va>  raised,  stone  by  stone,  until  the  whole  was 
finished.  But  in  the  Enquirer  Godwin's  dislike  of 
law  had  extended  even  to  the  form  of  composition. 
He  had  been  wrong,  he  said,  in  trying  to  write  a 

stematic  treatise  on    society,  and    he   would   now 

n  tine  himself  to  detached  essays,  wholly  experi- 
mental, and  not  necessarily  in  harmony  with  one 
another.  "  He  (the  author)  has  carried  this  principle 
so  far  that  he  has  not  been  severely  anxious  relative 
to  inconsistency  that  may  be  discovered  between  the 
speculations  of  one  essay  and  the  speculations  of 
another."  The  contrast  between  these  two  sty  1« 
th<-  Contrast  between  a  whole  oratorio  and  a  miscel- 
ous  concert,  or  between  a  complete  poem  and  a 
volume  of  extracts. 

The  thoughts  were  the  sain.-,  thmi^h  th«  v  had  lost 

their    attractive    .  x juvssion.      The    essay    on    Avnrn^ 

tells  us,  am. »ng  other  things,  that  " a 

1    equality    is    that  '.  hirli.    in 

P.  T.  i:  my  n. 


U  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

speculation  and  theory,  appears  most  consonant  to 
the  nature  of  man,  and  most  conducive  to  the  exten- 
sive diffusion  of  felicity."  This  was  the  essay  which 
led  Malthus  and  his  father  into  their  fruitful  argu- 
ment. The  essay  on  Riches  and  Poverty,  and  the  one 
on  Beggars,1  contain  other  applications  of  the  same 
idea,  with  many  moralizing  digressions.  Godwin  has 
not  lost  his  sweet  Utopian  vision  ;  he  has  not  yielded 
to  the  objections  that  baffled  Dr.  Eobert  Wallace ;  he 
thinks  he  has  removed  all  objections. 

He  meets  them 2  by  saying  first  of  all :  "  There  is  a 
principle  in  the  nature  of  human  society  by  means  of 
which  everything  seems  to  tend  to  its  level/'  when  not 
interfered  with  ;  and  the  population  of  a  country  when 
left  to  itself  does  not  seem  to  increase  beyond  the  food. 
But  in  the  second  place,  supposing  things  not  to  find 
their  level  in  this  way,  the  earth  is  wide  and  the  evil 
day  is  far  off.  It  may  take  myriads  of  centuries  to 
till  the  untilled  acres  and  to  replenish  the  empty 
earth  with  people,  and  much  may  happen  before  then. 
In  fact,  he  views  the  subject  as  many  of  us  view  the 
question  of  our  coal  supply.  Before  it  is  exhausted 
we  may  be  beyond  the  need  of  it.3  The  earth  itself 
may  have  collapsed  with  all  its  inhabitants.  Don't 
let  us  refuse  a  present  blessing  from  fear  of  a  remote 
future  danger.  Besides,  it  is  not  very  hard  to 
imagine  a  safeguard.  Franklin  says  that  "  mind 
will  one  day  become  omnipotent  over  matter ; " 4  why 

1  Part  II.,  Essays  I.  and  III. 

2  Political  Justice,  Book  VIII.  ch.  ix.  pp.  515-19  (3rd  ed.). 

3  Cf.  Rich.  Jones,  Pol  Econ.  (1859),  p.  596. 

4  Quoted,  Political  Justice,  Book  VIII.  ch.  viii.  pp.  503,  520,  on  the 
authority  of  Price. 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,  1798.  15 

not  over  the  matter  of  our  own  bodies  ?     Does  not 
the  bodily  health  depend  largely  on  the  mind  ? 

"  A  merry  heart  goes  all  the  day  ;   // 
Y,  .u r  sad  tires  in  a  mile,  0  !  "        i> 

The  time  may  come  when  we  shall  be  so  full  of 
liveliness  that  we  shall  not  sleep,  and  so  full  of  life 
that  \ve  shall  not  die.  The  need  for  marriage  will 
be  superseded  by  earthly  immortality,  and  the  d<'*irr 
for  it  by  the  development  of  intellect.  On  the 
.\vd  earth  of  the  future  there  will  be  neither 
marrying  nor  giving  in  marriage,  but  we  shall  be 
in-  angels.  4<  The  whole  will  be  a  people  of  mm, 
and  not  of  children.  Generation  will  not  succeed 
generation,  nor  truth  have,  in  a  certain  degree,  to 
recommence  her  career  every  thirty  years.  Other 
improvements  may  be  expected  to  keep  pace  with 
\e  of  health  and  longevity.  There  will  be  no 
war,  no  crimes,  no  administration  of  justice  as  it  is 
call* •<!.  ami  no  government.  Besides  this,  there  will 
h«-  neither  disease,  anguish,  melancholy,  nor  resent- 
ment. Every  man  will  seek  with  ineffable  ardour 

good  of  all."  l 

This  sweet  .-train  had  l>een  enchanting  the  public 
for  four  or  iiv«-  years,  \\ln-n  Mai  thus  ventured  to 
interrupt  it  with  his  modest  anonymous  Essay  on 
th<'  rnncijili'  of  r<>i>nl<iti<>n  as  it  affirtx  ///<•  Future 
liujmn'rnn  at  of  Society.  Th.'  Wlltei  claims  to  bo 

as  hearty  a   philanthropist  as  Mr.  Godwin,  but  ho 
cannot  allow  th     \\Ni  to  be  father  to  the  thought, 

and    believe    in    ftitur<  :    r\  idcnce." 

1  /.  c.,  Book  VIII.  -h.  ix.  j..  58S. 


u->s.       It  .    bo 

.1   both 

:iuv  Ilk 
that    he  would 

A    the   • 
habi  :i    a    cl.  his 

. .  :  \       tn  1 

think:-.. ^.    I    see    tl;  t.ho 

change,  but    I  ;r@WU 

. 

•vlievir.  ilitj        Qltmt 

.uul    I  uiilli'iuiiuni. 

ud,   that    the- 
..iu'iit      Ni>  on 
the  t 

H  !lv»      pl\U»S  M 

•in    bai-barism    to   ri\  th 

: 
hiilivhluul  :ill.       1 

in    llu-    ti'iuh    ot'    tiiN 


L]  JFlBfc'T  THOUGHTS,  ; 


,  and  I  infer  from  them  the  impose: 

r  millennium. 

a  «peak  of  a  society,  he  continues,  where  tie 
member*  are  all  equally  comfortable  and  at  leisure, 
Suppose  it  fataHtshfd,  it  could  not  last  ;  it  would 

to  pieces  through  the  principle  of  population 
alone.  The  seven  jean  of  plenty  would  be  at 
ooee  devoured  by  seren  years  of  want.  The  proof  of 
this  is  abort  and  decisive:  —  Population,  when  un- 
checked, MMTfiaff  in  a  geometrical  ratio;  subsist- 
ence only  in  an  arithmetical  "  A  Blight  a  •  aaee 

with  nttaalx**  will  show  the  immensity  of  the 
power  iu  wmporisou  with  the  second  The  race 

of    plants  and    animals    shrinks    under    this  great 
restrictive  law,  and  the  race  of  man  cannot 
efforts  of  reason  escape  from  it.     Among  plant- 
animals  its  effects  are  waste  of  seed,  sickness, 
premature  death,  among  men  misery  an  the 

fanner  nrrrseiry,  the  latter  probable  in  the 

old  cottntriee  of  Europe,  popula  is   un- 

checked,    It  is  cheeked  by  want  of  room  and  food, 
Vice  and  misery,  and  the  fear  of  them,  are  ah 

ialmng"  the  numbers  of  the  people  with    tin- 

1      I,  "the 

f   neigK  %    eyes,"   there    are  fewer 

hindrances  to  early  marriage  ;  there  is  mm 
there  is  mor  »vork  is  th< 

of  a  happy  life      Jiv    <-v<  fJ   !;»  ?     ;•  f  i]  U  M   •     I  4 

<4y  aucbecked;    the   hard    •••  .11   at    least 

interfere  with  the    rearing   of    •  i.  -In-n  ; 

, 


18  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

people,  however  comfortable,  are  not  at  the  very 
highest  pitch  of  comfort,  or  at  the  highest  pitch  of 
purity  and  simplicity  of  life  ;  whereas,  by  assump- 
tion, Godwin's  imaginary  society  is  all  these.  If, 
therefore,  the  people  of  old  Europe  double  their 
numbers  once  a  century,  and  the  people  of  new 
America  (at  least  in  the  United  States)  once  in 
twenty-five  years,  we  may  be  sure  that  in  the 
millennial  society  of  Godwin, 

"Where  all  are  proper  and  well-behaved, 
And  all  are  free  from  sorrow  and  pain," 

the  increase  would  be  much  faster.  The  "  leisure " 
he  talks  of  would  soon  disappear,  and  the  old  scramble 
for  bread,  the  old  inequality  of  rank  and  property, 
would  again  become  the  order  of  the  day.  We  should 
have  our  own  kind  of  society  back  again,  with  its 
masters  and  servants,  landlords  and  tenants,  rich  and 
poor. l 

Therefore  (argues  the  writer  of  the  essay)  if 
Godwin's  society  were  once  made  it  could  not  last. 
But  we  grant  too  much  in  supposing  it  could  ever 
be  made.  We  cannot  believe  this  and  believe  in  the 
second  postulate  at  the  same  time ;  and  the  second 
postulate  is  so  certain  that  we  can  predict  by  it. 
The  same  causes,  then,  that  would  have  destroyed 
Godwin's  newly-formed  society  will  prevent  it  from 
ever  being  formed  at  all.  "  The  passion  between 
the  sexes  has  appeared  in  every  age  to  be  so  nearly 
the  same  that  it  may  always  be  considered,  in 

1  1st  ed.,  pp.  20,  173,  &c.,  7th  ed.,  Book  III.  ch.  ii. 


.  r.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,   1798.  19 


•  I'uio  language,  as  a  given  quantity."1     In  spite 
of    the    whimpering    of    old    men   and    roues,    "the 

-ures  of  pure  love  will  bear  the  contemplation 
of  the  most  improved  reason  and  the  most  exult«l 
virtue."2  Godwin  views  the  matter  in  a  dry,  int.  1- 

d  liirht,  and  asks  us  to  abstract  from  all  acces- 
sories before  we  form  an  estimate  of  the  passion  in 

;ion.  One  man  or  one  woman  will  then  be  as 
good  as  another.  But  he  might  as  well  tell  us  to 
strip  off  all  the  leaves  before  we  estimate  our  liking 
for  trees.  We  do  not  admire  the  bare  pole,  but  the 
whole  tree,  the  tree  with  all  the  "attendant  circum- 
stances" of  branches  and  foliage.  As  well  deprive 
a  magnet  of  its  chief  powers  of  attraction,  and  then 
ask  us  to  confess  it  as  weak  as  other  minerals.3  The 
fact  is,  that  man's  large  discourse,  which  marks  him 
out  from  the  brutes,  makes  him  hide  the  man' 

inct  under  a  mass  of  "attendant  circumstances" 
before  he  h-ts  himsrlf  l>r  drawn  by  it.  lie  will  not 
obey  tin'  instin«-t  Dimply  more  fer<t>,  or  in  animal 
fashion,  because  he  feels  it.  But  it  is  not  destro\ 
only  disguised.  The  love  is  riot  pmvly  intellectual. 
Reason,  with  its  calculation  of  cons.  <jumr<  •>.  ran 
save  a  in.-m  iV..m  th«-  abuse  of  a  pa-Mon,  but  cannot 
destroy  the  passion  itself;4  and  (he  might  1 

•  1)  its  "looking  before  and  includes  fan*  y 
as  well   as  thought.                  fehifl   ]  i    i'»n   thm  a.s  it 
is,  an  adoration  it  may  be  of  an  assemblage  of  acces- 
sories ;  it  can  n              -  out  of  the  world. 

'  1  WfCf  I-    210.  211. 

/.  p.  815. 


20  MALTHUS  AND   HIS   WORK.  [UK.  I. 

From  this  cheerful  premise,  what  conclusion 
follows  ?  One  not  altogether  cheerful :  Wherever 
Providence  sends  meat  He  will  send  mouths. 
Wherever  the  people  have  room  and  food,  they  will 
many  and  multiply  their  numbers,  till  they  press 
against  the  limits  of  both,  and  begin  a  fierce  struggle 
for  existence,  in  which  death  is  the  punishment  of 
defeat.  Godwin  and  the  whole  French  school  are 
sadly  wrong  in  attributing  all  inequality  to  human 
institutions ;  human  naturejs  to  blame,  and,  without 
any  artificial  aid,  this  one  passion  of  human  nature 
will  be  the  standing  cause  of  inequality,  the  most 
serious  obstacle  to  the  removal  of  it.1  Dr.  Robert 
Wallace  had  more  wisdom  than  he  wot  of.  A 

Examine  the  meaning  of  this  argument  and  its 
conclusion.  It  involves  an  answer  to  Godwin's  first 
defence  against  Wallace.  Here  is  something  very 
like  a  law  of  nature,  a  truth  past,  present,  and  future, 
or,  in  other  words,  a  truth  which,  being  scientific, 
ought  not  to  be  stated  in  terms  of  time  at  all : 
"  Where  goods  increase,  they  are  increased  that  eat 
them."  The  "  struggle  for  existence  "  (Malthus  uses 
the  very  phrase)  is  a  present  fact,  as  it  has  been  a 
past  fact,  and  will  be  a  future.  No  good  is  gained 
by  rhetorical  references  to  the  wideness  of  the  world 
and  the  possibilities  of  the  ages.2  In  our  own  day 
and  land  we  see  people  multiplying  up  to  the  limit  of 
the  food,  and  a  " great  restrictive  law"  preventing 

1  1st  ed.,  p.  17  ;  cf.  pp.  47-8. 

2  Even  Comte,  who  reproves  economists  for  saying  that  difficulties 
right  themselves  in  the  "long  run," thinks  that  this  particular  difficulty 
will  only  occur  there.     (Pos.  Phil,  ii.  128  (tr.)  ;  cf.  p.  54.) 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,  1793.  21 

them,  as  it  prevents  all  other  animals,  from  multiply- 
ing beyond  that  limit.1  In  our  own  day  and  country, 
mm  marry  when  they  cannot  support  a  family  ;  the 
children  whom  they  cannot  support  die  of  hunger  or 
sickness,  if  the  charity  of  the  public  does  not  interfere  ; 
—or  else  the  fear  of  misery  makes  men  avoid  a  mar- 
fur  which  they  have  not  the  means,  and  their 
celibacy,  whether  pure  or  impure,  keeps  the  numbers 
of  the  people  on  a  level  with  the  food.2  Godwin 
himself  had  written  in  so  many  words :  "  There  is  a 
principle  in  human  society  by  which  population  is 
perpetually  kept  down  to  the  level  of  the  means  of 
subsistence." s  Why  did  he  not  take  one  step  more, 
and  discover  what  that  principle  is?4 

The  fact  is  that  Godwin  was  at  once  intellectually 
nine  and  emotionally  cold,  His  ideal  would 
been  a  man  "  of  large  brain  and  no  affections ; " 
ami  when  he  wrote  the  Political  Justice  he  was  not 
aware  uf  his  own  defect.  At  a  later  time  he  was  not 
only  aware  of  it,  but  anxious  to  remove  it.  In  his 
Memoir  of  his  wife,  Mary  Wbllstonecraft  (1798),  and 
in  the  .story  of  Si.  Leon  (1799),  the  man  who  found 
tic-  philosopher's  stone,  and  b /came,  to  his  own 
sorrow,  immortal  on  earth,  he  confesses  that  he  has 
hitherto  taken  too  little  thought  of  feeling  as  an 
cl.-m.-nt  in  human  action.  If  Mary  had  l.ccn  too 
much  <>f  a  \\YrtlnT.  h  T  hu-band  had  been  too  1. 

*  J/  •.»,  62—60. 

VIII.  iii.  4G6. 

.ih  .1,  u>.  27i,  277.    Cf.  Gibbon, 
«•!..    I  .in    A;,,/,/,  -ul 

of  population  isregu:  : 


22  MALTIIUS  AND   HIS   WOKK.  [HK.  I. 

Like  Condorcet  (anil  like  Buckle),  lie  had  believed 
civilization  to  be  a  purely  intellectual  movement. 
He  had  dogmatized  on  the  omnipotence  of  truth 
and  reason,  and  inferred  the  growth  of  a  perfect 
society.  He  had  dogmatized  on  the  development  of 
intellect,  and  inferred  an  earthly  immortality.  More- 
over, in  the  Memoir,  and  in  St.  Leon,  if  he  had 
added  a  little  to  his  doctrines,  he  had  recanted  little 
or  nothing,  even  in  regard  to  immortality. 

St.  Leon  is  miserable  only  because  his  gift  is 
peculiar  to  himself;  an  immortality  that  is  common 
to  all  would  be  acceptable  to  all.  A  Methuselah 
would  not  be  melancholy  among  antediluvians.  Such 
was  probably  Godwin's  position.  The  mere  belief 
in  the  possibility  of  earthly  immortality  was  not 
uncommon ;  Godwin  is  careful  to  number  Bacon 
among  its  supporters.1  Malthus  was  probably  right 
in  tracing  it  to  the  unconscious  influence  of  Christi- 
anity,2 though  the  progress  in  Godwin's  days  of  the 
new  science  of  chemistry  had  perhaps  more  to  do 
with  it,  and  Godwin's  religion  was  never  more  than 
a  bare  Theism.3  It  was  held  by  Holcroft,  one  of 
Godwin's  most  intimate  friends,4  and  it  was  an 
important  part  of  Condorcet's  Sketch  of  the  Proyrexs 
of  the  Human  Sjjirif. 

In  the  days  of  the  Terror  (1794)  Condorcet,  from 
his  hiding-place  in  the  Kue  Servandoni,  had  written 
of  the  "  organic  perfectibility  of  man."  He  looked 

1  Pol  JH.S/.,  l>,,,,,k  YIN.  cli.  ix.  p.  520  n.  (3rd  ed.). 

2  Essay,  1st  ed.,  pp.  240-1. 

3  Due  to  Coleridge.     See  Godwin's  Life,  i.  3.".  4  Ibid.  i.  25. 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,  1798.  23 

to  medicine,  and  to  the  arts  and  sciences  in  general, 

Danish  disease  and  prolong  human  life  "indefi- 
nitely. Godwin  trusted  to  the  inward  development 
of  the  mind,  not  to  outward  appliances.2  But  by 
different  ways  they  arrive  at  the  same  terminus,  and 

ive  from  their  great  critic  very  much  the  same 
reception  there.  Malthus  points  out  to  Godwin  that 
there  is  no  sign  that  the  body  is  becoming  subjugated 
to  the  mind.  Even  philosophers,  said  he  (and  he 
wrote  feelingly,  as  he  had  the  malady  at  the  time  of 
writing),  cannot  endure  the  toothache  patiently,3  and 
even  a  merry  heart  will  not  enable  a  weak  man  to 
walk  as  fast  and  as  far  as  a  strong  man.  There 
is  no  change  in  the  human  body,  and  little  or  no 
change  in  the  relation  of  the  mind  to  it.  To  Con- 
dorcet  he  simply  points  out  that,  while  the  arts  have 
made  the  lengthening  of  life  "  indefinite,"  that  does 
not  mean  "  infinite."  Gardeners  can  grow  carnations 
"  indefinitely  "  large  ;  no  man  can  ever  say  that  he 
has  seen  the  largest  carnation  that  will  ever  be 

•a  ;    but    this    he   ran    say,    that    a    carnation   will 

never  be  aa  large  as  a  cabbaget?)The  limit  is  there, 

though  it  is  undefined,  and   there  is  a  limit  also  to 

•thfiiing  of  human  life,  though  no  one  can 

fix  it  to  a   year.     Condorcet  therefore  has  proved  an 

ily  immortality  only  by  a  misuse  of  the  word 
II-  has  shown  no  organic  change  in 

which  would    prove    tin     possibility  of   perfection 


r  nu  historique  dc*  progri*  dc  Vetprit  tmmnin  (3rd 

I  71*7  ,  p]..  .'is  I 
1  Political  Justi,;-,  VI  1  1.  ix.  520  n.  »  Euay,  l*t  cil,  p.  227. 


2i  MAI/THUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  I. 

iii  this  world.     Neither  has  Condorcet  repelled   the 
objection  which   troubled   Dr.   Wallace.     It   is   true 
that,  like  Godwin,  he  faces  the  difficulty  and  admits 
the   importance   of   it.1      The   growth   of  population 
will    always,   he    says,   cause    inequality ;    there  will 
always  be  a  rich  leisured  class  and  a  poor  industrial 
class ;    and    to    lighten  the   hardships  of   the  latter 
there  ought   to  be  a  State    Insurance   fund,   which 
will  make  all  the  poorest  citizens  sure  of  support. 
But    one    cannot    help    thinking,  if   all   are    sure   of 
support,   all  will   marry,  and  if  all  marry,  will  not 
the  difficulty  be  increased?2     Yes,  Condorcet  grants 
this ;    the  numbers  will   soon  be  too  great,  and  so 
throughout  the  ages  there  will  be  an  "oscillation" 
between  the  blessings  of  progress  and  the  evils  of 
overcrowding,  now  the  one  predominating,  now  ,the 
other.      In  despair   he   clutches  at   the  Cld  ^olli 
"  the  day  is  distant,"  but  he  feels  it  fail  him,  and 
must  needs  add  a  new  and  startling  solution  of  his 
own  which  Malthus  freely  denounces.3     This  is  not 
the  place   to   discuss  the  questions  associated  in  our 
own    times    with    Neo-Malthusianism.4      But    it    is 
beyond   all  doubt  that  the  Neo-Malthusians  are   the 
children  not  of  Robert  Malthus,  but  of  Robert  Owen. 
Malthus   was    not   Malthus   because   he   said,   "  The 
,  people  are  too  many;  thin  them  down "• —any  more 
than  Darwin  was  Darwin  because  he  said,  "  Species 

1  Esquisse,  pp.  362  seq.  z  Essay,  1st  ed.,  pp.  146,  150. 

3  Ih id.  p.  154  ;  Condorcet,  Esquisse,  pp.  364 — 373. 

4  The  locus  classicus  in  Malthns  is  Essay,  Append,  (of  1817),  p.  512  ; 
cf.  III.  iii.  286,  IV.  xiii.  474.     The  paj^s  are  those  of  the  7th  edition 
(Reeves  and  Turner),  a  reprint  of  the  6th. 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,  1798.  25 

arc  not  made,  Imt  grow."     If  Darwinians  arc  to  be 
judged  by  Darwin,  Malthusians  must  be  judged  by 
Malthus;  and  the  originality  of  neither  Malthus  nor 
Darwin  can  be  explained  by  a  single   phrase.      \Ve 
caniut  understand  the  meaning  of  an  author's  words, 
far  less  of  his  work,  till  we  know  the  context  in  which 
they  are  set.     Once  know  the  context  and  we  under- 
stand the  text.     The  devil,  citing  Scripture  for  his 
purpose,  only  succeeds  because  he  never  quotes  in  full. 
It   follows  that,  to    understand  the    full  meaning 
of  the  essay,  we  must  go  beyond  its  efficient  cause, 
and  take  a  view  of  its  material  cause,  or  the  whole 
circumstances  in  which  it  was  written.     If  the  text 
of    the    sermon    was    Godwin    and    Condorcet,    the 
;«j 'plication    was   to   the   poor   of  England  and   the 
philanthropists  who  were  trying  to  relieve  them. 
The  early  life  of  Malthus,  coinciding,  as  it  largely 
.  with  the  latter  half  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
coincides,  with  England's  greatest  industrial  revolution. 
Malthus  was  born  in  I7f>f>,  three  y»  ars  after  the  Peace 
of  Paris.     There  was  an  end,  for  the  time,  to  foreign 
,    and-  trade     was    making    a    l>ra\e    Mart.      The 
overies  of  e«al   and    imn    in    Northern    England, 
•_T   hand    in    hand    with    the   inventions  of  cot  ton - 
.-pinning  and   weaving,  \\eiv  l.e^inmng  to  convert    the 
poorest    counties    into    the    richest,    upsetting     tin 
•ieal  l>alanee.    The  lie  w  science  of  chemistry  had 
nn  to  prove  its  usefulness.     Wedgwood  was  per- 
eartbenware,  Urindh-y  rutting   his   canal-. 
Tel  f«.rd  laying  <»ut  his  roads  Watt  building  his  St 

Knidand  in  Human  day.-  had  !••  .-n  a  -i.mary  ; 


26  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

in  Inter  ages  she  had  been  a  pasture-ground  ;  she  was 
now  becoming  the  land  of  machinery  and  manufacture, 
as  well  as  the  centre  of  foreign  trade.  In  other  words, 
she  had  begun  an  industrial  change,  which  was  the 
greatest  till  then  in  her  history,  and  rich  in  the  most 
magical  improvements.  But  in  the  early  stages  of 
the  change,  the  evils  of  it  were  nearly  as  much  felt 
as  the  blessings.  The  sufferings  of  displaced  workmen, 
and  the  anarchy  of  the  new  factory  system,  supplant- 
ing home  labour,  and  making  the  word  "manu- 
facturer" forget  its  etymology,1  were  real  evils, 
however  transient*  Combined  with  the  general 
democratic  influence  of  an  expansive  manufacturing 
industry,  they  might  easily  have  caused  a  social 
convulsion  in  these  days  of  no  extraordinary  virtue  ; 
and  the  country  owed  its  escape  in  some  degree  to 
the  evangelical  movement  under  Whitefield  and  the 
Wesleys,  which  was  fatal  at  once  to  religious  torpor 
and  to  political  excitement.2  The  annoyances  of  a 
meddlesome  tariff  and  the  futile  attempts  to  exclude 
foreign  food  were  to  vanish  away  before  a  hundred 
years  had  passed ;  but  in  the  boyhood  of  Malthus 
the  voice  of  Adam  Smith  raised  against  them  in  the 
ll'cdltk  of  Nations  (1776)  was  a  cry  in  the  wilderness. 
There  was  a  general  agreement  that,  whether  the  high 
prices  prevailing  after  the  Peace  of  Paris  were  caused 
by  the  growth  of  the  population,  or  by  the  lessened 
value  of  silver,  or  by  the  troubles  in  Poland,  the 

1  Malthus  sometimes  uses  the  word  in  the  earlier  sense,  and  Adam 
Smith  seldom  in  the  hit  -r. 

2  Lscky,  Hist,  of  Eighteenth  Century,  vol.  ii.  p.  638. 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,   1798.  27 

remedy  was  not  to  lie  in  a  free  corn  trade.  The  poor 
were  not  to  have  cheap  corn,  they  were  to  have  large 
allowances.  Legislation  had  gone  backwards  in  this 
matter.  In  1723  a  new  law  had  introduced  a  wise 
workhouse  test  of  destitution,  which  might  have  pre- 
vented wilful  poverty  by  reducing  out-door  relief;  but 
the  clause  was  repealed  by  Gilbert's  Act  in  1782  ;  the 
poor  were  to  be  "  set  on  work  "  at  their  own  houses  ; 
and  the  new  stringency  gave  place  to  the  old  laxity, 
with  the  usual  results.  The  close  of  the  century  saw 
the  troubles  of  a  European  war  added  to  the  list,  and 
tlx-  ti«le  of  political  reform  ebbed  for  forty  years 
( 1  71)2— 1832).  Because  the  French  reform  had  gone 
too  far,  the  English  reform  was  not  allowed  to  take 

first  steps. 

It  is  a  commonplace  with  historians  that  the  French 
Revolution  would  have  been  very  different  without 
Voltaire  and  Rousseau  to  prepare  the  way  for  it. 
llun'j. T  and  new  ideas  are  two  advocates  of  change 
which  always  plead  best  in  cadi  other's  company; 
hunger  makes  men  willing  to  act,  and  the  new  ideas 
tin  -in  matter  for  enactment.  In  France,  when 
the  n-M.s  came  in  1789,  the  new  ideas  were  n..t  far 
to  sc.  k.  Writers  of  Utopias,  lV"in  I'luto  to  XI«'iv. 
and  from  Rousseau  to  Rusk  in,  have  always  adapted 
one  simple  p'.-in  :  tln-y  have  struck  out  the  salient 
rmitiea  of  their  own  time  and  inserted  the 
•site,  as  when  men  imagine  heaven  they  think 
of  their  deal  native  eountry  with  its  discomforts 
out.  Inequality  at  home  had  made  l-'ivn.-lmn-n  i 
to  dote  on  don  of  equality  \\hrn  Rousseau 


28  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  I. 

presented  it  to  them,  and  the  state  of  Nature  was 
the  state  of  France  reversed.  Philosophically,  the 
theorists  of  the  Revolution  traced  their  descent  to 
Locke,  and  their  ideas  wers  not  long  in  recrossing  the 
Channel  to  visit  their  birthplace. 

Even  if  Englishmen  had  not  had  in  America  a 
visible  Utopia,  or,  at  least,  Arcadia,  there  was  hunger 
enough  in  England  to  recommend  the  new  ideas  to 

o  o 

every  rank  in  society.  This  is  the  reason  why,  in 
1793,  Godwin's  book  was  so  successful.  It  was  not 
only  a  good  English  statement  of  the  French  doctrines 
of  equality,  and  therefore  a  book  for  the  times,  but 
it  had  a  vigour  of  its  own,  and  was  no  mere  transla- 
tion. Eousseau  and  Raynal  had  thought  it  necessary 
to  sacrifice  universal  improvement  to  universal 
equality  ;  they  saw  (or  thought  they  saw)  that  the 
two  could  not  go  together,  and  they  counted  equality 
so  desirable  that  they  were  willing  to  purchase  it  at 
the  expense  of  barbarism.  Now,  they  were  perhaps 
more  logical  than  Godwin ;  equality  may  mean  bar- 
barism. But  Godwin's  ideal  was  at  least  higher  than 
theirs ;  he  thought  of  civilization  and  equality  as 
quite  compatible,  for  he  thought  that  when  all  men 
were  truly  civilized  they  would  of  their  own  accord 
restore  equality.  As  he  left  everything  to  reason  and 
nothing  to  force,  his  book  was  in  theory  quite  harm- 
less ;  but  the  tendency  of  it  seemed  dangerous,  for  it 
criticized  the  British  constitution  in  a  free  way  to 
which  the  British  nation  was  not  accustomed.  In 
England,  moreover,  the  people  have  always  confounded 
ideas  with  persons.  They  were  not  in  love  with 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,  1798.  29 

liberty  when  it  took  the  form  of  an  American  "War 
of  Independence"  against  England,  and,  even  if 
equality  had  pleased  them  in  1789,  they  would  have 
nothing  of  it  after  the  Terror.  They  forsook  Fox  for 
Burke,  and  went  to  war  for  a  sentiment.  At  the 
time  when  Malthus  wrote,  the  bulk  of  the  English 
people  had  lost  their  enthusiasm  for  the  new  ideas. 
It  needed  some  fortitude  to  call  oneself  a  Reformer, 
or  even  a  Whig,  when  Napoleon  had  overrun  Italy 
and  was  faring  us  in  Egypt.  Pitt  held  all  persons 
seditious  who  did  not  believe  in  the  wisdom  of  the  war. 
But  even  Pitt,  though  he  now  ignored  the  need  of 
reform,  could  not  overlook  the  existence  of  distr«  — . 
In  1795  there  had  been  a  serious  scarcity;  war  prices 
had  become  famine  prices.  It  was  the  year  when 
"  the  lower  orders"  were  held  down  by  special  coer- 
cion acts ; l  it  was  the  year  when  the  king's  carriage 
^topped  by  a  mob  crying  "  Bread,  broad!"  Mr. 
Whitbivad  and  the  rest  thought  Parliament  ought  to 
"do  something";  and  Pitt  proposed  (1796)  to  meet 
th'>  difficulty  by  amending  the  Poor  Laws.  His 
bill  proposed  "to  restore  the  original  purity  of  the 
Poor  Laws  "  by  modifying  the  law  of  settlement  in 
th<«  direction  of  greater  freedom,  and  by  assisting  the 
working  man  in  other  ways.  One  of  these  other 
ways  was  an  attempt  of  a  harmless  kind  to  found 
s<-lin«>]s  (.f  industry,  another  to  attach  every  labourer 
friendly  society.  But  another  Irs*  innoenitly 
proposed  to  01 1  rou  ra  ire  the  growth  of  population  by 
making  the  poor  relief  greater  win-re  the  family  was 

1   •  :    '  i  to  Pol.  Jutt. 


30  MALTHUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [BK.  I. 

larger.  "  Let  us  make  relief/'  in  such  cases,  "  a 
matter  of  right  and  honour,  instead  of  a  ground  for 
opprobrium  and  contempt.  This  will  make  a  large 
family  a  blessing  and  not  a  curse  ;  and  this  will 
draw  a  proper  line  of  distinction  between  those  who 
are  to  provide  for  themselves  by  their  labour,  and 
those  who,  after  enriching  their  country  with  a 
number  of  children,  have  a  claim  upon  its  assistance 
foE-iheir  support."  l 

Malthus  in  1796  did  not  doubt  the  infallibility  of 
Pitt  in  such  a  matter  ;  The  Crisis  gives  no  hint  of 
objection.  But  in  1798,  with  his  new  light,  he  could 
no  longer  take  the  recruiting  officer's  view  of  popula- 
^ion.  If  he  had  had  a  good  case  against  Godwin  and 
Condorcet,  who  had  simply  failed  to  show  how  popu- 
lation could  be  kept  from  growing  too  fast,  he  had 
still  a  better  case  against  Pitt,  who  proposed  to  make 
it  grow  faster.  Besides,  their  schemes  were  merely 
on  paper;  they  had  no  chance  of  realizing  them, 
whereas  Pitt's  majority  would  carry  any  measure  on 
which  he  had  set  his  heart.  The  danger  from  this 
third  quarter  was  therefore  the  most  imminent.  But 
Malthus  needed  no  new  argument  for  it ;  he  needed 
simply  to  shift  round  his  old  argument,  and  point  the 
muzzle  of  it  at  his  new  enemy.  There  is  no  need,  he 
said,  to  encourage  marriage ;  there  is  no  need  for 
Government  to  make  population  grow  faster.  Wher- 
ever Providence  has  sent  meat,  He  will  soon  send 

1  Hansard,  Parl  Hist.,  vol.  xxxiii.  pp.  703  seq.,  Feb  12,  1796  ;  cf.  vol. 
xxxii.  pp.  687  seq.  The  "Speenli;mil;m<l  Act  of  Parliament"  was  really 
an  act  of  the  Berkshire  magistrates  (1795),  but  had  been  widely  imitated, 
and  had  certainly  prepared  the  way  1'or  Pitt's  bill. 


VP.  i.]    ,  FIRST  THOUGHTS,  1798.  31 

mouths  to  cat  it ;  and,  if  by  your  artificial  encourage- 
ments you  increase  the  mouths  without  increasing  the 
meat,  you  will  only  bring  the  people  one  step  nearer 
1  starvation,  you  will  only  multiply  .the  nation  without 
increasing  the  joy.  If  stalwart  numbers  are  strength, 
starving  numbers  are  weakness.1 

These  commonplaces  were  then  a  paradox.     Even 
at  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century  there  was  no 
party  in  the  English   House  of  Commons   identified 
with  enlightened  views  on  the  position  of  the  British 
workman.      Whitbread  had  always  some  measure  on 
hand  for  helping  the  labourer  out  of  the  rates,  or  by 
some  other  State  interference  ;    it  was  in    opposing 
one   of   Whitbread's   bills  that  the   Prime    Minister 
promised  to  introduce  his  own  memorable  measure. 
Fox  was  free  to  follow  either,  not  professing  to  under- 
stand   the    new    economical    doctrines.      Pitt,    who 
admired  Adam  Smith, — Fox,  Condorcet,  and  Godwin. 
who    owed    Smith    no    allegiance,2 — all   were  equally 
;rl»lind    in    this    matter.      All    Pitt's    study    of   the 
nth  book  of  the    7/W///   of  .W/Wv,  chapter  fifth. 
had   not   shown    him    the    fallacy   of    a   bounty   on 
children.     Yet  Malthus  had  got  his  light   from  no 
obscure  sources,   but  from  "  Hume,    Wallace,   Adam 
Smith,  and    Dr.  Pri<-e,"  '  who  were  all  well-known  and 
widely-read   authors  <>f  the   day.      "  The  p.-pulousness 
ncient  nations11  had  l>em  a  happy  hunting-ground 
rned   antiquarian  eesay    writen   over   half   a 

1  <  t    /.V<,/,/,  7th  •••!.,  1.  vii.  p.  65  ;  1st  ed.,  pp.  94,  W,  Ac. 

*  <;  •!.). 

•  Preface  to  Eaay,  2nd  ed. 


32  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

century.  Montesquieu,  Wallace,  and  Price l  claimed 
the  advantage  for  the  ancients.  David  Hume,  with 
his  usual  acute  divination,  decides  for  the  moderns, 
though  with  his  usual  irony  he  professes  to  adopt  a 
sceptical  conclusion,  and  makes  several  concessions 
to  Wallace.2  This  controversy  itself  might  have  been 
expected  to  bring  men  nearer  to  the  truth  on  the 
subject  of  population  than  it  actually  did.  It  was 
left  to  Malthus  to  convert  Hume's  probability  into 
a  certainty  from  a  higher  vantage-ground ;  but  the 
sifting  of  the  arguments  by  the  various  writers 
before  him  must  have  simplified  his  task.3  Other 
aids  and  anticipations  were  not  wanting.  As  early 
as  1786,  Joseph  Townsend,  the  Wiltshire  rector, 
had  written  a  Dissertation  on,  the  Poor  Laws,  which 
gives  an  admirable  statement  of  those  wise  views  of 
charity  and  poor  relief  that  are  only  in  these  latter 
days  becoming  current  among  us.  Malthus  records 
his  opinion  of  Townsend's  work  in  the  best  of  all 
possible  ways.  From  his  careful  inquiry  (in  the 
second  edition  of  the  Essay)  into  the  population  of 
European  countries,  he  omits  Spain  on  the  ground 
that  Mr.  Townsend's  Travels  in  Spain  has  already 
done  the  work  for  him.4 

The  Essay  on  Population  was  therefore  not  original 
in  the  sense  of  being  a  creation  out  of  nothing,  but 
in  the  same  way  as  the  Wealth  of  Nations.  In  both 

1  By  implication.     See  below,  Book  I.  ch.  vii.  p.  175. 
3  Moral  and  Political  Essays,  Vol.  I.,  Essay  XL,  Of  the  Populousness 
of  Ancient  Nations  (ed.  1768),  written  in  1752. 

3  So  even  Sir  James  Steuart,  Vol.  I.  Pol.  Econ.,  ch.  iii.  p.  22  (ed.  1805), 
ht  have  helped  him.     Steuart  wrote  in  1767. 

4  Essay,  Book  II.  ch.  vi. ;  7th  ed.,  p.  184. 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST   THOUGHTS,  1798.  33 

cases  the  author  got  most  of  his  phrases,  and  even 
many  of  his~  thoughts,  from  his  predecessors  ;  but 
he  treated  them  as  his  predecessors  were  unable  to 
do  ;  he  saw  them  in  their  connection,  perspective, 
and  wide  bearings.  We  must  not  assume  antici- 
pation where  there  is  mere  identity  of  language  or 
partial  identity  of  thought;  the  words  of  an  earlier 
writer  are  not  unfrequently  quoted  by  a  later  away 
from  their  logical  context,  and  therefore  not  as  part 
of  an  argument  of  which  the  writer  sees  the  conse- 
cutive premises.  This  is  true  of  Adam  Smith  when  he 
is  compared  with  Sir  Dudley  North,  Abraham  Tucker, 
<>r  the  other  prophets  of  free  trade1  catalogued 
MacCulloch  or  Blanqui.  They  talked  free  trade 
almost  as  Mons.  Jourdain  talked  prose,  without  know- 
ing it.  Precisely  the  same  is  true  of  Adam  Smith 
himself  in  relation  to  Malthus.  Of  his  own  genera  1- 
i/ations  he  is  complete  master.  Having  reasoned  up 
to  them,  lie  can  reason  down  from  them.  But,  when 
he  says,  "  Every  species  of  animals  naturally  multiplies 
in  proportion  to  the  means  of  their  subsistence/' 
"Tli.  demand  for  men  necessarily  regulates  the  pro- 
duetion  of  men,"2  he  has  not  anticipated  Malthus. 
His  phrases  are  touching  a  principle  of  which  he  < 
not  sc<  •  tin-  mO8t  important  b'-arin^^  ;  and  not  having 
reasoned  uj>  to  it,  he  makes  hardly  any  attempt  to 
reason  down  from  it.  .Malthus,  on  tin-  other  hand, 


1  P.n  .I.!,-  w.mM  inolu.l.'  V..!'  '  Europe,  ii.  304  n. 

TtMtt 
..this  essay.    Thea: 

•  uhitinn  ii  rujtr,  Aug.  1810,  ponsibh  '  X  Mallhus 

• 

D 


34  MALTHUS  AND   HIS   WORK.  [BK.  1 

lias  taken  fast  hold  of  a  general  principle,  and  is  able 
to  solve  a  number  of  dependent  questions  in  the  way 
of  simple  corollaries.  Others  may  have  given  right 
answers  to  the  special  questions  about  the  Poor  Law 
and  the  populousness  of  ancient  nations.  Malthus  is 
the  first  to  show  one  comprehensive  reason  why  all 
these  answers  must  be  right. 

This  was  the  secret  of  his  success.  As  Godwin's 
Political  Justice  was  successful  because  systematic, 
the  Essay  on  Population  was  successful  because  it 
seemed  to  put  chaos  in  order.  The  very  sadness  of 
his  conclusion  had  a  charm  for  some  minds ;  but  the 
bulk  of  his  readers  did  not  love  him  for  taking  their 
hopes  away,  they  loved  him  for  giving  them  new 
light.  Pestilence  and  famine  begin  to  lose  their 
vague  terrors  when  we  know  whence  they  come  and 
what  they  do  for  the  world.  Even  if  the  desire  of 
marriage  is  itself  an  evil,  it  is  well  to  know  the  truth 
about  it.  Ignorance  can  only  be  blissful  where  it  is 
total ;  and  wilful  ignorance,  being  of  necessity  partial, 
is  a  perpetual  unrest,  not  even  a  fool's  paradise.1 

The  truth  in  this  case  was  not  all  sadness.  In  the 
last  portion  of  the  essay  of  1798  Malthus  expounds 
an  argument  which  he  afterwards  reproduced  in 
later  editions  with  a  more  terrestrial  application. 
He  uses  the  style  of  Paley  and  the  Apologists,  and 
he  tries  to  discover  the  final  cause  of  the  prin- 
ciple of  population,  on  metaphysical  lines  that 
were  followed  by  Mr.  Sumner  nearly  twenty  years 
afterwards,  when  the  discussion  had  taken  a  new 

1  Compare  Essay,  Appendix  (to  3rd  ed.,  1807),  7tli  ed.,  p.  507. 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,  1798.  3'. 

turn.1  The  question  is  how  to  reconcile  the  suffering 
produced  by  the  principle  of  population  with  the 
g<>,  idness  of  God.  Malthus  answers  that  the  difficulty 
is  only  one  part  of  the  general  problem  of  evil,  the 
dill'erence  between  this  part  and  the  rest  being  that 
in  this  case  we  see  further  into  the  causes ;  and  it  is 
tli«  ivfore  the  easier  for  us  to  justify  the  ways  of  God 
to  man.  "Evil  exists  not  to  create  despair  but 
activity."2  We  ought  not  to  reason  from  God  to 
nature,  but  from  nature  to  God;  to  know  how  God 
\\orks,  let  us  observe  how  nature  works.  We  shall  then 
find  that  nature  sends  all  sentient  creatures  through 
a  long  and  painful  process,  by  which  they  gain  new 
qualities  and  powers,  presumably  fitting  them  for 
a  better  place  than  they  have  in  this  world.  This 
world  and  this  life  are  therefore  in  all  probability 
"  tin-  mighty  process  of  God,"  not  indeed  for  the  mere 
"probation"  of  man  (for  that  would  imply  that  his 
Maki-r  was  suspicious  of  him,  or  ignorant  of  what  was 
in  him),  but  for  the  "  creation  and  formation "  of 
human  mind  out  of  the  torpor  and  corruption  of 
dead  matter,8  "to  sublimate  the  dust  of  the  earth 
into  soul,  to  elicit  an  ethereal  spark  from  the  clod  of 
elay."  The  varied  influences  of  life  are  the  forming 
hand  of  the  Creator,  and  they  ;uv  infinitely  diverse, 
for  (in  spite  of  Solomon)  there  is  nothing  old  under 
i.1  Difficulties  generate  talent  I'll-1  first 

1    /  *  l«t  eel.,  p.  395. 

:.    ,      I        .ml   HIM  h  elm  were  pr-.bably  raggetted  b.r 
-f  Nature,  ^   (especially  I  20).     <  ! 

Book  III. 

!..  p.  381. 

D  2 


36  MAT/THUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

awakeners  of  the  mind  are  the  wants  of  the  body  ;  " 
it  is  these  that  rouse  the  intellect  of  the  infant  and 
sharpen   the  wits   of  the  savage.     Not   leisure   but 
necessity  is  the  mother  of  invention  : 
a  ' 


Locke  was  right  ;  the  desire  to  avoid  pain  is  even 
stronger  than  the  desire  to  find  pleasure.  In  this 
way  evil  leads  to  good  ;  for  pain,  which  is  a  kind  of 
evil,  creates  effort,  and  effort  creates  mind.  This  is 
the  general  rule.  A  particular  example  of  it  is,  that 
want  of  food,  which  is  one  of  the  most  serious  of 
evils,  leads  to  good.  By  contriving  that  the  earth 
shall  produce  food  only  in  small  quantities,  and  in 
reward  of  labour,  God  has  provided  a  perpetual  spur 
to  human  progress.  This  is  the  key  to  the  puzzle 
of  population.  By  nature  man  is  a  lotos-eater  till 
hunger  makes  him  a  Ulysses.  Why  should  he  toil, 
the  roof  and  crown  of  things  ?  Mainly  because,  if  he 
does  not  toil,  neither  can  he  live;  the  lotos  country 
will  soon  be  overpeopled,  and  he  must  push  off  his 
bark  again.  "  The  first  awakeners  of  the  mind  are 
the  wants  of  the  body,"  though,  once  awakened,  the 
mind  soon  finds  out  wants  beyond  the  body,  and  the 
devolopment  of  intellect  and  civilization  goes  on 
indefinitely.1  The  people  "tend  to  increase"  more 
quickly  than  their  food,  not  in  order  that  men  may 
suffer,  but  in  order  that  they  may  be  roused  to  save 

1  Cf.  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  p.  65  ;  later  editions,  I.  vi.  (beginning),  where  he 
says  that  sloth  is  the  natural  state  of  man,  and  his  activity  is  due  in  Ihe 
first  instance  to  the  "  strong  goad  of  necessity,"  though  it  may  be  kept 
up  afterwards  by  habit,  the  spirit  of  enterprise,  and  the  thirst  for  glory. 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,   1798.  37 

themselves  from  suffering.  The  partial  ill  of  all 
such  general  laws  is  swallowed  up  in  the  general 
good ;  and  the  general  good  is  secured  in  two  ways  : 
humanity  is  developed ;  the  resources  of  the  world 
ire  developed.  In  the  first  place,  the  intellect  of 
individual  men  is  developed,  for  the  constancy  of 
nature  is  the  foundation  of  reasoning,  and  human 
reason  would  never  be  drawn  out  unless  men  were 
absolutely  unable  to  depend  on  miracles,  and  were 
obliged  as  well  as  able  to  make  calculations  on  the 
basis  of  a  constant  law.  To  this  constancy  of  nature 
•wr  the  immortal  mind  of  a  Newton.  In  the  second 
place,  the  world  must  be  peopled.  If  savages  could 
have  got  all  their  food  from  one  central  spot  of  fertile 
ground,  the  earth  at  large  would  have  remained 
a  wilderness;  but,  as  it  is,  no  one  settlement  can 
support  an  indefinite  increase  of  numbers  ;  the 
numbers  must  spread  out  over  the  earth  till  they 
find  room  and  food.  If  there  were  no  law  of  in- 
crease, a  few  such  careers  as  Alexander's  or  Tamer- 
Iain's  niiirht  unpeople  the  whole  world ;  but  tin*  law 
exists,  and  the  t^aps  made  by  any  conqueror,  or  by  any 
pestilence,  are  soon  filled  to  overflowing,  while  the 
overflowing  flood  passes  on  to  reclaim  new  countries.1 
This  is  the  cosmology  of  Malthus.  "  Life  is, 
generally  speaking,  a  blessin-  independent  of  a  future 
"The  impivssions  and  excitements  of  this 
\\orld  are  th-  instruments  with  which  the  Supreme 

1   l  t  •-,!.,  pp.  360—366.    For  the  replenishment  of  the  gap  made  bj 
ircat  Plague  of  1348,  see  Prof.  Rogers,  Six  (Vnturiei  of  Work  and 
Wage*  (1884),  p.  226.  '  1st  e<lM  p.  391. 


38  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  i. 

Being  forms  matter  into  mind."  The  necessity  of  con- 
stant exertion,  to  avoid  evil  and  pursue  good,  is  the 
principal  spring  of  these  impressions,  and  is  therefore 
a  sufficient  reason  for  the  existence  of  natural  and 
moral  evil,  including  the  difficulties  which  arise  from 
the  principle  of  population.  All  these  are  present 
difficulties,  but  they  are  not  beyond  remedy.  They 
do  not  serve  their  purpose  unless  human  exertion 
succeeds  in  diminishing  them.  Absolute  removal 
Malthus  does  not  promise  ;  but,  while  believing  in 
science  and  reason  as  strongly  as  Condorcet  or 
Godwin,  declines  to  regard  an  earthly  immortality  as 
a  reasonable  hope,  and  points  us  instead  to  a  future  life 
and  to  another  world  for  perfection  and  happiness.1 

Perhaps  the  great  economist  went  beyond  his  pro- 
vince in  attacking  the  problem  of  evil.  In  the 
controversy  that  followed  the  essay  there  are  few 
references  to  this  part  of  it,  and  after  the  appearance 
of  the  second  edition,  where  this  part  is  omitted 
altogether,  people  forgot  the  existence  of  the  first 
edition.  From  the  way  in  which  Sumner  speaks  of 
the  difference  between  his  point  of  view  and  that 
of  Malthus,  it  might  fairly  be  suspected  that  he 
knew  nothing  of  the  first  edition ;  arid  yet  the 
second  of  his  two  learned  volumes  is  simply  an 
expansion  of  its  ideas.2  The  metaphysic  itself  might 

1  1st  ed.,  pp.  394-6  ;  cf.  pp.  241-6.    Compare  Mr.  Henry  George's  epi- 
logue to  Progress  and  Poverty.    It  is  right  to  remember  that  this  passage 
of  Malthus  was  written  two  years  before   Paley's  Natural   Theology, 
though   four    years  after    his    Evidences  of    Christianity,   and   many 
more  after  the  Moral  and  Political  Philosophy. 

2  R  of  Cr. ,  vol.  ii.  103. 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,  1793.  39 

deep  or  shallow;  it  would  be  impossible  to  tell 
till  we  heard  the  sense  in  which  the  metaphysical 
phrase.s  were  used,  and  that  we  have  hardly  any 
us  of  doing.  They  point  at  least  to  the 
41  monistic"  view,  that  there  is  no  gulf  between  mind 
and  matter.  We  might  believe  them  idealistic  in  a 
German  sense ;  but  we  cannot  forget  how  closely  the 
ethical  views  of  Malthus  are  connected  with  those  of 
the  English  moralists  of  his  century.  He  cannot  be 
said  to  have  a  place  in  the  history  of  philosophy; 
and  it  is  mainly  of  a  curious  personal  interest  to 
discover  that,  although  he  is  nominally  a  utilita- 

he  separates  himself  from  Paley  by  refusing  to 
allow  moral  value  to  action  done  from  either  fear  of 
punishment  or  hope  of  reward.1     There  is  no  indica- 
tion   that    he    was    a    metaphysical    genius.      His 
.'•s  in  the  heavier  German  literature  did  not 

ips  extend  much  farther  than  to  the  quaint 
nj,:imi>t  Johann  Peter  Slissmilch,2  from  whose 
(jufllic/i<>  ()rdn any  he  freely  drew  his  statistics. 

Malthus   at   one    time    intended    to   expound    his 

1    views   at   greater   length.8      In   other 

word.-,  tie   nirant   to   write  a  book  in  the  manner  of 

's  essays,  half  economical  and  half  literary.  We 
need  not  deeply  regret  the  "  particular  business," 
what. 'V. T  it  was,  that  nipped  this  intention  in  the 
bud,  besides  delaying  the  publication  of  the  essay  as 
we  now  have  it.4  The  metaphysical  and  theological 

1  Euay,  lat  ed.,  p.  387.  *  See  below,  Book  I.  ch.  v. 

r>6  note. 

4  I  c.     He  is  rra.ly  with  a  similar  rx.-usc  in  the  tract  on  the  Mi 
of  Value,  p.  r,i.     Wjj.  r    th«  re  is  no  will  there  is  no  way. 


40  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [UK.  I. 

passages,  as  they  stand,  have  the  look  of  an  episode, 
though  the  thought  of  them  is  logically  enough  con- 
nected with  the  tenor  of  the   book.     The   views   of 
the  author  on   the  other  world,   the  punishment  of 
the  wicked,  and  the  use  of  miracles,  have,  like  the 
philosophy,  mainly  a  personal  interest.     Adam  Smith, 
in    the    later   edition    of   his   Moral  Sentiments,   had 
omitted  at  least  one  very  marked  expression  of  theo- 
logical opinion  (on  the  Atonement)  that  had  appeared 
in  the   first   edition,1  and    perhaps   his    disciple    did 
well  to  follow  suit.     At  the  same  time,  omission  is 
not    recantation,  and    we  get   light  on   an   author's 
mind  and  character  by  discovering  any  views  in  which 
he  once  professed  to  believe.     A  writer  who  reached 
absolute  truth    at  a  very   early  stage   of  study,  has 
patronized  Adam  Smith 2  by  editing  his  chief  work, 
and    honoured   the    other    economists   by    tabulating 
their  conclusions  in  an  historical  introduction.     He 
extends  this  favour  to  Mai  thus.     The  reasonings  of 
Mai  thus  he  finds,  though  valuable,  are  not  free  from 
error ;    he    has    "  all    but    entirely   overlooked "    the 
beneficial  effects  of  the  principle  of  population  as  a 
stimulus  to  invention  and  progress.3     This  charge  is 
refuted   by  the   essay  even   in   its  later  form ;    but, 
placed  alongside  of  the  cosmology  of  the  first  edition, 

1  Part  II.  sect,  ii.  pp.  204-6. 

2  MacCulloch   (J.   R.),   editor  of    the   Commercial  Dictionary,   and 
probably  the  original  of  Carlyle's  Macrowdy.     No  one  could  have  a 
proper  reverence  for  the  Fathers  of  Political  Economy  who  perpetually 
referred  to  the  greatest  of  them  without  his  distinctive  proenomen. 

3  Introduction  to   W.  of  N.,  p.   lii.     So  the  writer  of  Progress  and 
Poverty  tells  us  "  the  doctrine  of  Mai  thus  did  not  originally  and  does  not 
necessarily  involve  the  idea  of  progression  "  (Bk.  II.  ch.i.  p.  89,  ed.  1881). 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST  THOUGHTS,   1798.  41 

it  seems  merely  grotesque.  Malthus  is  accused  of 
ignoring  the  very  phenomena  which  Malthus  glori- 
fies as  the  "  final  cause  "  of  the  principle  of  population. 
II  thought  he  had  explained  not  only  one  of  the 
chief  causes  of  poverty,  but  one  of  the  chief  effects ; 
if  Adam  Smith  had  shown  the  power  of  labour  as 
a  cause  of  wealth,  Malthus  thought  he  had  shown  the 

r  of  poverty  as  a  cause  of  labour.  No  doubt 
the  mistake  was  a  common  one  ;  and  (to  say  nothing 
of  the  encyclopaedias  and  biographical  dictionaries) 
tln-r,  \v  economical  text-books  which  do  justice 

to  Malthus  in  this  matter.1  But  one  who  speaks 
with  authority  should  not  be  content  with  a  borrowed 
.vleoVi'.  The  same  authority  tells  us  that  "  the 
w<»rk  of  Mr.  Malthus  is  valuable  rather  for  having 
awakened  public  attention  to  the  subject  than  for 

iving  anything  like  a  complete  view  of  the  depart- 

ni'  nt  of  the  science  of  which  it  treats."1      Malthus 

for  his  part  lays  no  claim  to  infallibility  ;  like  most 

pioneers,    he  is   sure    of   little    beyond   his   leading 

prmrij.lrs,   and   he  is  never  ashamed  to  rhan^'    his 

virws.8     But,   if   his  Essay  on   Population,  gradually 

\j-anded  as  it  was,  to  keep  pa< v  with 

tli.     M  anhin^    criticisms   of    thirty    years,    has   not 

bed    ill-    In-art  of  the  matter,  surely  there  is  no 

profit  in  discussion. 

t  (Kcon.  Studiet,  p.  136  *?.)•  W.  B.  Greg  (Enigma*  of  Ltfe), 
Social*  Gc»chtcJde  England*)  may  be  acquitted,  but  they  are 

Nation*,  Introduction,  p.  lii. 

1  See  e.  <j  the  Afeowre  of  Valut,  p.  23,  and  cf.  Pol  EC. 

L  ,j>.  234. 


42  MALTHL'S   AND   HIS   WOHK.  [UK.  I. 

The  fact  is,  that  though  the  anonymous  small  8vo 
of  1798  was  a  in  ere  draught  of  the  completed  work 
of  later  years,  its  main  fault  was  nut  incompleteness, 
but  wrongncss  of  emphasis.  When  a  man  is  writing 
a  controversial  pamphlet,  he  does  not  try  to  bring 
all  truths  into  the  front  equally  ;  he  sets  the  neg- 
lected ones  in  the  foreground,  and  allows  the  familiar 
to  fall  behind,  not  as  denied  or  ignored,  but  simply 
as  not  emphasized.  It  is  always  possible,  in  such 
cases,  that  the  neglected  truths,  though  unworthy 
of  the  old  neglect,  did  not  deserve  the  new  pre-emin- 
ence, and  must  not  be  allowed  to  retain  it.  Science, 
seeking  answers  to  its  own  questions,  and  not  to( 
questions  of  the  eighteenth  century,  has  no  toleration 
for  the  false  emphasis  of  passing  controversy.  It 
puts  the  real  beginning  first,  the  middle  next,  and 
the  end  last,  not  the  end  in  the  middle,  or  the 
last  firsjt.  Accordingly  it  takes  up  the  first  essay 
of  Malthus  on  population,  and  requires  the  author 
to  amend  it.  He  must  be  less  critical  and  more 
creative,  if  he  is  to  give  a  satisfactory  answer  to  the 
general  problem  which  he  has  chosen  to  take  in  hand. 
The  times  and  the  subject,  both,  demand  a  change  of 
attitude, — the  times,  because  political  theories  have 
now  become  less  important  than  social  difficulties, 
and  the  subject,  because  he  has  hitherto,  while  clearly 
explaining  the  difficulties,  done  little  more  than  hint 
at  the  expedients  for  overcoming  them.  True,  no 
critic  or  iconoclast  can  ever  fully  vanquish  an  opponent 
except  by  a  truth  of  his  own  which  goes  beyond 
the  opponent's  falsity;  and  it  is  to  this  he  owes 


CHAP,  i.]  FIRST   THOUGHTS,  1798.  43 

the  enthusiasm  of  his  followers.  But  he  does  not 
always  expound  the  truth  so  fully  as  the  error;  and 
so,  beyond  the  point  of  negation,  his  friends  ofim 
follow  him  rather  by  faith  than  by  sight.  This, 
then,  was  what  Malthus  had  yet  to  do;  to  state 
what  were  the  trustworthy  as  well  as  the  delusive 
methods  of  raising  modern  society,  and  what  were 
the  right  as  well  as  the  wrong  ways  of  ivlii .-\in-- 
the  poor. 

The  success  of  the  essay,  so  far,  had  been  very 
ivmarkable.  It  had  provoked  replies  by  the  dozen, 
and  an  unwilling  witness  tells  us  it  had  converted 
in* -nds  of  progress  by  the  hundred.1  \Ve  find 
Godwin  writing  to  .the  author  in  August  1798,2  and 
wi-  may  conclude  that  the  veil  of  anonyrnousness  was 
nut  very  thick,  though  Malthus  used  it  again  in  1800 
in  the  tract  on  High  Prices.  In  a  debate  in  the 
llnu.se  of  Commons  on  the  llth  February,  1800, 
Pitt  took  occasion  to  say  that,  though  he  still  believed 
his  new  Poor  Bill  a  good  one,  he  had  dropped  it  in 
i  once  to  the  objections  of  "  those  whose  opinions 
In-  was  bound  to  respect." '  1I--  mi-ant  IVntham  and 
Malthus.  \\Y  cannot  tell  which  had  the  ^ivatrr  >haiv 
of  tin-  nvdit.  luit  \\v  know  that  Malthus  regarded 
Pitt  and  I'aley  as  his  most  brilliant  converts.4  Pitt's 
ration  that  lie  still  believed  his  bill  to  be  a  good 

1  Godwin's  Thoughts  on  Parr's  Sermon,  1801,  p.  54 ;  cf.  Godwin'i 
Population  (1820),  Bk.  i.  27. 
•  Godwin's  Life,  by  Kegan  Paul,  vol.  i.  321. 
;  i  sard,  sub  dato,  p.  1429. 

fievfao,  Jan.  I^.'IT.  }>.  W  :  B£   /.'.«  •'.•/  M  /'opu- 
7th  .-d.  i  Kinjismi's  anil;  pears 

Vs  Correspondence,  p.  187.    Sec  below,  Book  \ 


44  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

one  could  only  mean  that  he  still  wished  to  believe 
it  so.  It  must  have  been  peculiarly  galling  to  a 
statesman  who  affected  the  political  economist  to 
find  that  not  only  the  solemn  criticisms  of  Mai  thus, 
but  the  jocose  "  Observations "  of  Bentham,1  which 
threshed  the  chaff  out  of  the  bill  clause  by  clause, 
had  turned  his  favourite  science  against  himself. 

1  Works,  vol.  viii.  p.  440. 


CHAP,  ii.]  SECOND   THOUGHTS,  1803.  45 


CHAPTER  II. 

SECOND     THOUGHTS,  1803. 

Exaggerations  of  the  First  Essay — Its  two  Postulates  not  co-ordinate  — 
1  'istinctive  feature  of  the  Second  Essay — Its  moderate  Optimism — 
Rough  Classification  of  Checks—  Y  mint  and  Mi.xnl  Motives 

— Freedom  as  understood  by  Godwin  and  by  Malthus — The  two 
men  contrasted. 

\Vniij;  Malthus  was  making  such  converts  as  Pitt, 
Paley,  and  Parr,  and  when  even  Godwin  acknow- 
ledged the  "  writer  of  the  essay "  to  have  made  a 

:  liable  addition  to  political  economy,"1  the  essay 
was  not  beyond  criticism.  There  were  some  familiar 
facts  of  which  the  writer  had  taken  too  little  account, 
and  they  were  impressed  on  him  by  his  critics  from 
all  si'lrs.  To  use  the  language  of  philosophy,  In*  had 
not  been  sufficiently  concrete;  he  had  gone  far  t.» 
fnmmit  Godwin's  fault,  and  consider  one  feature  of 
human  nature  apart  by  itself,  instead  of  seeing  it  in 
its  place  with  the  rest.  The  position  and  pros] 
of  civili/rd  society  in  our  own  day  depend  on  a 
combination  of  political,  intellectual,  physical,  an.l 

(\  causes,  of  which  the  growth   or  decrease  of 
I". j.ulation  may  be  only  an  effect.     If  we  are  part 

1   Thought*  on  Parr'*  Sermon,  \\  50. 


46  M^LTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK  i. 

m  in,  part  lion,  and  part  hog,  it  is  not  fair  to  assume 
the  predominance  of  the  hog  any  more  than  the 
predominance  of  the  man.  In  a  herd  of  animals,  as 
distinguished  from  a  society  of  men,  the  units  are 
simply  the  fittest  who  have  survived  in  the  struggle 
for  existence.  The  principle  of  population  is  in  the 
foreground  there ;  there  is  no  check  to  it  but  famine, 
disease,  and  death.  We  can  therefore  understand 
how  the  study  of  the  Essay  on  Population  led  Charles 
Darwin  to  explain  the  origin  of  species  by  a  generaliz- 
ation which  Malthas  had  known  and  named,  though 
he  did  not  pursue  it  beyond  man.1  The  "  general 
struggle  "  among  animals  "  for  room  and  food  "  means 
among  civilized  men  something  very  like  free  trade, 
the  old  orthodox  economical  panacea  for  economic 
evils;  and  the  essayist  agrees  with  Adam  Smith  in 
a  general* resistance  to  legislative  interference.  Bad 
as  are  the  effects  of  the  irremovable  causes  of  poverty, 
interference  makes  them  still  worse.  But  at  least, 
when  we  come  to  man,  the  struggle  is  not  so  cruel. 
"  Plague  take  the  hindmost "  is  not  the  only  or  the 
supreme  rule.  If  the  fear  of  starvation,  the  most 
earthly  and  least  intellectual  of  all  motives,  is  needed 
to  force  us  to  work  at  first,  it  need  not  therefore  be 
necessary  ever  afterwards.  The  baser  considerations 
are  by  their  definition  the  lowest  layers  of  our  pile  ; 
we  rise  by  means  of  them,  but  we  tread  them  down, 
and  the  higher  the  pile  the  less  their  importance. 
Within  civilized  countries,  in  proportion  to  their 

1  Essay,  1st  ed.,  pp.  17,  47,  48  ;  Origin  of  Species,  ch.  iii.  p.  50. 
Hence  Sir  Chas.  Lyell  even  denies  the  originality  of  Darwin  and 
Wallace  (Antiquity  of  Man,  ch.  xxi.  p.  456). 


CHAP,  ii.]  SECOND  THOUGHTS,  1803.  47 

civilization,  the  struggle  in  the  lowest  stages  is 
abolished ;  the  weakest  are  often  saved,  and  the 
lowest  raised,  in  spite  of  unfitness.1  View  man  not 
as  an  animal,  but  as  a  citizen;  view  the  principle 
of  population  as  checked  not  only  by  vice,  misery, 
and  the  i«-ar  of  them,  but  by  all  the  mixed  motives 
of  human  society,  and  we  recognize  that  Malthus, 
with  the  best  intentions,  had  treated  the  matter  too 
abstractly.  Godwin  had  over-rated  the  power  of 
ason,  Malthus  the  power  of  passion.  "It  is  pro- 
bable," lie  wrote  at  a  later  time,  "that,  having  found 
the  bow  bent  too  much  one  way,  I  was  induced  to 
bend  it  too  much  the  other,  in  order  to  make  it 
straight." ;  The  abstract  principle  of  increase  getting 
more,  and  concrete  humanity  less,  than  justice,  the 
next  step  was,  naturally,  to  deny  the  possibility  of 
permanent  improvement  in  this  world,  and  to  regard 
every  partial  improvement  as  a  labour  of  Sisyphus.8 

It  could  hardly  be  otherwise,  if  we  be^an.  like 
Malthus,  by  setting  down  the  desire  of  food  and  th.» 
desire  of  marriage  as  two  co-ordinate  principles.4 
Th<-v  are  not  really  co-ordinate.  It  is  true  not  mnvly 

A.    1!.  Wallace,  Confrilmtion*  to  Theory  of  Natural  Sel- 
and  ilu-  'li-'-usfiions  raised  tln-nMi|n.n,  1868.     See  also  Essays  in  Fhil<>- 

ticitm  (1883),  Essay  VIII.,  The  Mniffyle  /<•/ 
which  some  of  tin-  mixrd  motives  an-  further  dr>rribed. 

lix  to  5th  ed.,  1817  ;  7th  <•.!.,  ]>.  526.  Cf.  Bacon  (Eaeay 
XXXVIII.),  "to  bend  nature  lik.-  a  wand  tn  a  contrary  extreme  where- 
by to  set  r  in  Smith  had  used  the  .-i mile  of  a  bent  stick 

nisU  against  the  Mercantile 
'.'*)). 

say,  Isted.,  ]  .  ::•;:.     <  T.  Beniort  />"»•««  on  Pojniht 
and  ;  f  the  snail 

••ry  day  cliinln  >,  .m-l  fi-11  1 

«ay,  1st  ed.,  p.  10. 


48  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

of  most  men,  but  of  all  men  without  a  single  exception, 
that  they  cannot  live  without  food.  Even  if  a  man 
survive  an  abstinence  from  solid  food  for  forty  days, 
he  cannot  deny  himself  water,  and  he  is  for  all  useful 
purposes  dead  to  the  world  during  his  fast.  The 
second  postulate  of  the  first  essay  is,  on  the  contrary, 
true  only  of  most  men,  and  even  then  under  qualifi- 
cations. It  is  not  true  of  any  till  manhood,  and  it 
is  not  true  of  all  men  equally.  Some  are  beyond  its 
scope  by  an  accident  of  birth,  and  a  still  larger 
number,  whether  priests  or  laymen,  put  themselves 
beyond  its  scope  for  moral  reasons.1  Coleridge  puts 
the  case  pertinently  enough :  "  The  whole  case  is  this  : 
Are  they  both  alike  passions  of  physical  necessity, 
and  the  one  equally  with  the  other  independent 
of  the  reason  and  the  will  ?  Shame  upon  our  race 
that  there  lives  the  individual  who  dares  even  ask 
the  question."2 

Malthus  saw  that  he  had  been  hasty,  and  he  did 
not  republish  the  essay  till  he  had  given  it  five 
years  of  revision,  and  added  to  it  the  results  of  foreign 
travel  and  wider  reading.  In  1799  he  went  abroad 
with  some  college  friends,  Otter,  Clarke  the  antiquarian 
and  naturalist,  and  Clarke's  pupil  Cripps,3  and  visited 
Germany,  Sweden,  Norway,  Finland,  and  part  of 
Russia,  these  being  the  only  countries  at  that  time 
open  to  English  travellers.  After  his  return  he 

1  Cf.  St.  Matth.  xix.  12. 

2  MS.  notes  on  p.  vii  of  S.  T.  Coleridge's  copy  of  the  2nd  ed.  of  the 
Essay,  in  Brit.  Museum  (from  the  library  of  his  executor,  Dr.  Joseph 
H.  Green). 

3  See  Otter's  biographical  preface  to  Malthus'  Pol.  EC.  (1836),  p.  xxxvi, 
and  Otter's  Life  of  Clarke  (1825),  i.  437,  &c. 


CHAP.  IL]  SECOND  THOUGHTS,   1803.  49 

published  his  tract  on  the  Hiyh  Price  of  Provisions 
(1800),1  and  at  the  conclusion  of  it  he  promised 
a  new  edition  of  the  Essay  on  Population.  Some 
people,  he  says,  have  thought  the  essay  "  a  specious 
aijument  inapplicable  to  the  present  state  of  society/1 

aise  it  contradicts  preconceived  opinions;  but 
two  years  of  reflection  have  strengthened  his  con- 
viction that  he  has  discovered  "the  real  cause  of 
the  continued  depression  and  poverty  of  the  lower 
classes ; "  and  he  will  not  recant  his  essay  :  "  I  have 
deferred  giving  another  edition  of  it  in  the  hope  of 
being  able  to  make  it  more  worthy  of  the  public 

ition,  by  applying  the  principle  directly  and 
exclusively  to  the  existing  state  of  society,  and 
endeavouring  to  illustrate  the  power  and  universality 
of  its  operation  from  the  best  authenticated  accounts 
that  we  have  of  the  state  of  other  countries."  But 
he  was  not  satisfied  with  the  accounts  of  other  people. 
When  the  Peace  of  Amiens  let  loose  thousands  of 

-ure-seekers  on  the  Continent,  Malthus  went  to 

ice  and  Switzerland  on  no  errand  of  mere  pl«-a- 
sure  ;  and  he  was  luckily  at  home  again,  and  pas>in^ 
IIH  proof-sheets  through  the  press,  before  Napoleon's 
unj.  interference  with  English  travellers. 

I      was   a    happy   coincidence    that    in    the    dark 
daya  "f    17'JS,  .Malthus  should   write  only  of 

ty,  while  iii  thr   ,-hort  gleam  of  \ 
in    l^'-J  and    JS03,  when    the   tramp   of  armed   men 
ceased    for   the    moment,    he   should    recollect 
.    and   write  of    a  less  ghastly   restraint  on 

1  Sec  below,  Book  II     !..i;..  iv. 

I 


50  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  I. 

population,  a  restraint  which  might  perhaps,  like 
the  truce  of  Amiens,  hold  out  some  faint  hope  for 
the  future.  For  the  sake  of  the  world  let  us  hope 
that  the  parallel  goes  no  further.  The  wonder  is  not 
that  he  forgot  there  was  such  a  thing  as  civilization, 
but  that  amidst  wars  and  rumours  of  wars  he  should 
ever  have  remembered  it. 

In  the  preface  to  the  new  edition  (June  1803), 
he  says  he  has  "so  far  differed  in  principle"  from 
the  old  edition  "as  to  suppose  the  action  of  another 
check  to  population  which  does  not  come  under  the 
head  either  of  vice  or  misery,"  and  he  has  "tried 
to  soften  some  of  the  harshest  conclusions  of  the 
first  essay."  There  was  really  more  change  than 
this.  The  first  essay  contained  much  of  the  imper- 
fection of  the  sudden  magazine-article ;  and  if  the 
writer  had  lived  half  a  century  later  he  would 
probably,  instead  of  writing  a  small  book,  have  con- 
tributed a  long  article  to  a  monthly  or  quarterly 
magazine,  giving  a  review  of  Godwin's  political 
writings,  with  incidental  remarks  on  the  Poor  Bill 
of  Mr.  Pitt.  This  was  evidently  the  light  in  which 
he  himself  regarded  his  first  work,  or  he  would  not 
have  handled  it  so  freely  in  republication.  The  new 
edition  had  new  facts,  new  arrangement,  and  new 
emphasis.  He  had  not  written  a  book  once  for  all, 
leaving  the  world  to  fight  over  it  after  his  death. 
He  took  the  public  into  partnership  with  him,  and 
made  every  discussion  a  means  of  improving  his 
book.  This  gives  the  Essay  on  Population  a  unique 
character  among  economical  writings.  It  leads  the 


CHAP,  ii.]  SECOND  THOUGHTS,  1803.  51 

author  to  interpret  his  thoughts  to  us  from  many 
>us  points  of  view,  leaving  us,  unhappily,  often 
in  doubt  whether  an  alteration  of  language  is  or  is 
not  an  alteration  of  thought.  Malthus  adds  to  the 
difficulty  by  omitting  and  inserting  instead  of  re- 
writing in  full.  His  chapters  cease  to  be  old  without 
becoming  new. 

The  very  face  of  the  book  revealed  a  change.     In 

1798   it  was  An  Essay  on  tJie  Principle  of  Population 

as  it  affects   the  Future  Improvement  of  Society ;    in 

1803,  An  'Essay  on  the    Principle  of    Population,  or 

a    View   of  its   Past   and  Present   Effects  on    Human 

v.s\     The   dreams  of  the   future  are  now  in 

background,  and  the  facts  of  the  present  in  the 

foreground.     In    1798    Malthus   had   given  Godwin 

lie  :  — 

"  Colouring  he,  dilating,  magniloquent,  glorying  in  picture, 
He  to  a  matter  of  fact  still  softening,  paring,  abating, 
1 1    to  the  great  might-have-been  upsoaring,  sublime  and  ideal, 
i«j  the  merest  it- was  i  .  diminishing,  dwarfing." 

He  must  do  more  now,  or  his  political  economy  is 
a  dismal  science.  He  must  show  how  we  can  cling 
to  tin-  inatt.T  of  fart  without  losing  our  ideal.  It  is 
not  enough  to  refer  us  to  the  other  world.  How  far 
may  we  lia\v  hope  in  this  world?  Let  Malthus 

e   second  essay  is  his   answer;   and   if  second 

tli< »ughts  are  the  best,  then  we  may  rejoice  over  tin* 

:  it   lifts  the  cloud  from  the  first.     It 

•hat  on    thf  whole    tin*  ]>O\V<T  of  rivili/.at  ion  i- 

greater  than  tin-  powr  of  population  ;  th«>  pressure  of 

i:  2 


MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

the  people  on  the  food  is  therefore  less  in  modern  than 
it  was  in  ancient  times  or  the  middle  ages ;  there 
are  now  less  disorder,  more  knowledge,  and  more 
temperance.1  The  merely  physical  checks  are  falling 
into  a  subordinate  position.  There  are  two  kinds 
of  checks  on  population.  A  check  is  (a)  positive, 
when  it  cuts  down  an  existing  population,  (b)  pre- 
ventive, when  it  keeps  a  new  population  from  grow- 
ing up.  Among  animals  the  check  is  only  misery, 
among  savage  men  vice  as  well  as  misery,  and,  in 
civilized  society,  moral  restraint  as  well  as,  till  now, 
both  vice  and  misery.  Even  in  civilized  society  there 
are  strata  which  moral  restraint  hardly  reaches,  for 
there  are  strata  which  are  not  civilized.  On  the 
whole,  however,  it  is  true  that  among  animals  there 
is  no  sign  of  any  other  check  than  the  positive,  while t 
among  men  the  positive  is  gradually  subordinated  to 
the  preventive.  Among  men  misery  may  act  both 
positively  and  preventively.  In  the  form  of  war  or 
disease  it  may  slay  its  tens  of  thousands,  and  cut 
down  an  existing  population.  By  the  fear  of  its  own 
coming  it  may  prevent  many  a  marriage,  and  keep  a 
new  population  from  growing  up.  Vice  may  also  act 
in  both  ways  :  positively  as  in  child  murder,  prevent- 
ively as  in  the  scheme  of  Condorcet.  But  in  civilized 
society  the  forces  of  both  order  and  progress  are 
arrayed  against  their  two  common  enemies ;  and,  if 
we  recognized  no  third  check,  surely  the  argument 
that  was  used  against  Godwin's  society  holds  against 
all  society ;  its  very  purification  will  ruin  it,  by 
1  2nd  ed.,  Book  IV.  chap,  xii.;  7th  ed.,  p.  477. 


CHAP,  ii.]  SECOND  THOUGHTS,  1803.  53 

forbidding  vice  and    misery  to  check  the  growth  of 
population,  arid  by  thereby  permitting  the  people  to 
increase  to  excess.     There  is,  however,  a  third  check, 
which  Malthus  knows  under  the  title  of  moral  restraint. 
M«»ral   restraint  is  a    distinct   form  of  preventive 
check.     It   is  not   to   be  confused  with    an  impure 
celibacy,  which  falls  under  the  head  of  vice  ;  and  yet 
the    adjective    "  moral "    does   not   imply   that    the 
motives  are  the  highest  possible.1     The  adjective  is 
applied  not  so  much  to  the  motive  of  the  action  as  to 
the  action  itself,  from  whatever  motives  proceeding  ; 
and  in  the  mouth  of  a  Utilitarian  this  language  is 
not  unphilosophical.      Moral  restraint,  in  the  pages 
of  Malthus,  means  simply  continence  ;  it  is  an  absti- 
nence from  marriage   followed  by  no  irregularities.2 
-peaks  of  the  "  moral  stimulus  "  of  the  bounty  on 
corn,  meaning  the  expectations  it  produced  in   the 
minds  of  men,  as  distinguished  from  the  variations  it 
j 'ro.l ur.-d    in    the   prices   of  grain;3  and    the    word 
is  often,  like   "morale,"   used  in  military 
matters  to  denote  nn-utal  disposition,  as  distinguished 
from  material  resources.     The  vagueness  of  the  word 
is   perhaps   not    accidental,    for   nothing   is    valuer 
than     li  .1     niotivrs    which      it     drimtes  ;     but 

continence,  which  is  unambiguous,  would  smii   the 
better  \\oi-.l. 


1  2nd  e<l.,  I.  ii.  10,  1 1  ;  oft  \;v.  ISO;  7th  i.l.,  pp.  8  note,  262,  &c. 

II. 

3  7th  <•<!.,  j>.  351;  so  I.  ix.  82,  "n  <>f  incrcAno,  in  n 

owe  tv  m  n  makes  it 

due  not  to  physical  la\v  '  muan 

< 


54  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  i. 

With  the  enunciation  of  the  third  check  the  theory 
of  Malthus  entered  definitively  on  a  new  phase ;  and 
in  sketching  the  outlines  of  his  work  we  shall  no 
longer  need  to  treat  it  as  paradoxical  and  overstrained, 
but  as  a  sober  argument  from  the  ground  of  accepted 
facts.  The  author's  analysis  of  human  nature  has 
been  brought  into  harmony  with  common  sense.  He 
confesses  that  it  had  hitherto  been  too  abstract,  and 
had  separated  the  inseparable. 

The  mind  of  man  cannot  be  sawed  into  quan- 
tities ;  and,  even  if  it  is  possible  to  distinguish  the 
mixed  motives  that  guide  human  action,  the  fact 
remains  that  they  only  operate  when  together.  It 
is  probable  that  no  good  man's  motives  were  ever 
absolutely  noble,  and  no  bad  man's  ever  absolutely 
bestial.  Even  the  good  man  is  strongest  when  he 
can  make  his  very  circumstances  war  against  his 
power  to  do  evil.  Mixed  from  the  first  of  time, 
human  motives  will,  in  this  world,  remain  mixed  unto 
the  last,  whether  in  saint,  sage,  or  savage.  But 
civilization,  involving,  as  it  does,  a  progressive  change 
in  the  dominant  ideas  of  society,  will  alter  the  cha- 
racter of  the  mixture  and  the  proportion  of  the 
elements.  The  laws  of  Malthus  will  be  obeyed, 
though  the  name  of  Malthus  be  not  mentioned,  and 
the  checks,  physical  or  moral,  be  never  brought  to 
mind.  Society,  moving  all  together,  if  it  move  at  all, 
cannot  cure  its  evils  by  one  single  heroic  remedy  ; 
but  as  little  can  it  be  content  with  self-denying  ordin- 
ances, prohibitions,  or  refutations.  It  needs  a  positive 
truth,  and  an  ideal,  that  is  to  say,  a  religion,  to  give 


ii.]  SECOND  THOUGHTS,   1803.  55 

new  life  to  the  bodily  members  by  giving  new  hope 
to  the  heart.  "  The  fear  of  the  Lord  is  the  beginning 
of  wisdom,  but  the  end  of  wisdom  is  the  love  of  the 
L  >rd  and  the  admiration  of  moral  good."  l  It  follows 
that  an  economist,  if  he  knows  nothing  but  his 
economy,  does  not  know  even  that. 

No  economists  are  more  reproached  with  their 
want  of  idealism  than  Malthus  and  his  brethren. 
As  the  French  Revolutionists  were  said  to  believe 
that  the  death  of  their  old  rulers  would  of  itself  bring 
happiness  and  good  government,  so  these  writers  wen 
said  to  teach  that  the  mere  removal  of  hindrances 
would  lead  to  the  best  possible  production  and  dis- 
tribution  of  the  good  things  of  this  life.  The  ideal 
state  then,  as  far  as  wealth  was  concerned,  would  be 
anarchy  plus  the  police  constable.  Godwin  would 
have  dispensed  with  the  constable.  "Give  a  state 
v  enough,"  he  says,  "and  vice  cannot  exist  in 
it."  But  neither  he  nor  the  economists  desired  a 
merely  negative  change  or  removal  of  hindrances. 
Th«-ir  political  reformation  was  to  be,  like  the  Fro- 
nt, only  successful  as  it  went  beyond  image- 
breaking.  Malthns,  it  will  !>«•  fnmi 
.:  an  unqualified  advocate  of  lai  *<:  /;/;/•<-.•  and. 
(in  all  cases  wh»-iv  he  did  de.-iiv  it,  he  wished  to 
mak<  <•  small  only  to  make  public  opinion 
great.  Godwin  was  not  far  away  from  him  1 
If  he  was  wrong  in  attributing  to  >  murh  evil  to 

1  MaUlitu,  £«<iy,  Intnl..  ]• 

in  his  Lifr,  j.  70.     Hi"  published 

•  See  below,  Book  1 


56  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  I. 

institutions,  and  too  little  to  human  nature,  lie  has 
furnished  his  own  correction.  The  Political  Justice 
disclaimed  all  sympathy  with  violence ;  it  taught 
that  a  political  reform  was  worthless  unless  effected 
peacefully  by  reason ;  and  Malthus T  has  the  same 
cure  for  social  evils — argument  and  instruction.  The 
difference  between  them  is,  that  Malthus  takes  more 
into  account  the  unreasonableness  as  well  as  the 
reasonableness  of  men.  In  essentials  they  are  agreed. 
The  thorough  enlightenment  of  the  people,  which 
includes  their  moral  purification  as  well  as  their 
intellectual  instruction,  is  to  complete  the  work  of 
mending  all,  in  which  men  are  to  be  fellow-workers 
with  God — so  runs  the  teaching  of  Malthus  and  all 
the  greatest  economists  of-  the  last  hundred  years. 
Whether  the  evils  of  competition  are  many  or  few, 
serious  or  trifling,  depends  largely  on  the  character 
of  the  competitors  ;  and  the  more  free  we  make  the 
competition,  the  more  thoroughly  we  must  educate  the 
competitors.  Adam  Smith  was  well  aware  of  this  ; 
he  recommended  school-boards  a  hundred  years  before 
the  Acts  of  1870  and  1872  ;2  and  Malthus  was  not 
behind  him.3  They  are  aware  that  the  more  com- 
pletely we  exclude  the  interference  of  Government, 
the  more  actively  we  must  employ  every  other  moral 
and  social  agency.  Whether  Malthus  was  prepared 
to  exclude  the  interference  of  Government  entirely, 
even  under  this  condition,  we  shall  see  by-and-by. 

1  Essay,  7th  eel.,  B.  I V.  chap.  vi.  and  ix. 

2  Wealth  of  Nations,  B.  V.  ch.  i.  Pt.  iii.  Art.  2. 

3  Essay,  Book  IV.  ch.  ix.  of  7th  ed.,  esp.  p.  439. 


CHAP,  ii.]  SECOND  THOUGHTS,  1803.  ;,: 

The  characters  of  the  two  men,  Mai  thus  and  God- 
win, are  a  striking  contrast.  Malthus  was  the  student, 
of  quiet  settled  life,  sharing  his  little  wealth  with  his 
friends  in  unobtrusive  hospitality,  and  constantly 
using  his  pen  for  the  good,  as  he  believed,  of  the 
English  poor,  that  in  these  wretched  times  they  might 
domestic  happiness  like  his  o\vn.  There  never 
a  more  singular  delusion  than  the  common 
belief  in  the  hard-heartedness  of  Malthus.  Besides 
the  unanimous  voice  of  private  friends,  he  has  left 
testimony  enough  in  his  own  books  to  absolve  him. 
While  Adam  Smith  and  others  owe  their  errors  to 
intellectual  fallibility,  Malthus  owes  many  of  his  t<> 
his  tender  heart.  His  motive  for  studying  political 
economy  was  no  doubt  a  mixed  motive  ;  it  was  partly 
the  interest  of  an  intelligent  man  in  abstract  ques- 
tions ;  but  it  was  chiefly  the  desire  to  advance  the 
greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest  number.  In  his 
the  elevation  of  human  life  was  much  more 
important  than  the  solution  of  a  scientific  problem. 
Even  when  in  1820  he  wrote  a  book  on  tin  "  /V/W/- 
pleaof  P»r,lirf,!  R'onomi/"  lie  took  care  to  add  on  the 

red    irith    a  view  to  their  j/ni-- 
iv fusing  to  consider  in  abstractness  what 
always  exists  in  the  concrete.     His  keen  sympathy 
the  sufferings  of  displaced  workmen  led  him  to 
fight  a  losing  battle  with  Say  and  Ri<-ar«l»>  in  favur 
of  something  like  an  embargo  on  invention^  and  in 
protest  against  a  fancied  over-production.1  His  pi 

1  Cf.  even  £oay,  1st  ed.,  pp.  33,  34,  and  324.    But  tee  later,  I     II. 

u  i»d  ta 


58  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

life  showed  the  power  of  gentleness ;  Miss  Martineau 
could  hear  his  mild,  sonorous  vowels  without  her  ear- 
trumpet,  and  his  few  sentences  were  as  welcome  at 
her  dinner-table  as  the  endless  babble  of  cleverer 
tongues.  He  felt  the  pain  of  a  thousand  slanders 
"  only  just  at  first,"  and  never  let  them  trouble  his 
dreams  after  the  first  fortnight,  saying,  with  a  higher 
than  stoical  calmness,  that  they  passed  by  him  like 
the  idle  wind  which  he  respected  not.1  He  outlived 
obloquy,  and  saw  the  fruit  of  his  labours  in  a  wiser 
legislation  and  improved  public  feeling. 

With  Godwin  all  was  otherwise.  There  were  fight- 
ings within  and  fears  without.  With  an  immovable 
devotion  to  ideas  he  combined  a  fickleness  of  affection 
towards  human  beings.  He  heeded  emotion  too  little 
in  his  books  and  too  much  in  his  own  life,  yielding 
to  the  fancy  of  the  moment,  quarrelling  with  his  best 
friends  twice  a  week,  and  quickly  knitting  up  the 
broken  ties  again.  He  loved  his  wife  well,  but  hardly 
allowed  her  to  share  the  same  house  with  him,  lest 
they  should  weary  of  one  another.2  He  was  the 
sworn  enemy  of  superstition,  and  himself  the  arch- 
dreamer  of  dreams. 

Yet  when  we  contrast  the  haphazard  literary  life 
of  the  one,  ending  his  days  ingloriously 2  in  a  Govern- 
ment sinecure,  unsuccessful  and  almost  forgotten, 
with  the  academical  ease  of  the  other,  centred  in 

1  7th  ed.,  Append.,  p.  495.   Cf.  Miss  Martineau's  Autob,,  vol.  i.  p.  211; 
cf.  pp.  209,  210. 

2  Life,  vol.  i.  ch.  ix.  p.  233. 

3  Ingloriously,  because  of  the  severe  chapter  he  wrote  in  the  Political 
Justice, l  Of  Pensions  and  Salaries '  (ch.  ix.  of  Bk.  VI.). 


CHAP,  ii.]  SECOND  THOUGHTS,   1803.  59 

the  sphere  of  common  duties,  and  passing  from  the 
world  with  a  fair  consciousness  of  success,  we  feel 
a  sympathy  for  Godwin  that  is  of  a  better  sort  than 
the  more  liking  for  a  loser.  It  is  a  sympathy  not  sad 
enough  for  pity.  It  is  not  wholly  sad  to  find  Godwin 
in  his  old  age  a  lonely  man,  his  friends  dropping  off 
one  by  one  into  the  darkness  and  leaving  him  solitary 
in  a  world  that  does  not  know  him.  The  world  that 
had  begun  to  realize  the  ideas  of  Malthus  had  begun 
to  realize  the  ideas  of  Godwin  also.  It  was  a  world 
far  more  in  harmony  with  political  justice  than  that 
into  which  Godwin  had  sent  his  book  forty  years 
before.  It  was  good  that  Malthus  had  lived  to  see 
the  new  Poor  Law,  but  still  better  that  both  had  lived 
to  see  the  Reform  of  '32. 

They  passed  away  within  two  years  of  each  other, 
Malthus  in  the  winter  of  1834,  Godwin  in  the  spring 
of  1 83G,  the  year  of  the  first  league  of  the  people 
;ist  the  Corn  Laws.  In  their  death  they  were 
still  divided,  bat,  "si  quis  pioruni  manibus  locus," 
they  are  divided  no  longer,  and  they  think  no  hard 
thoughts  of  each  other  any  more. 


60  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 


CHAPTER  III. 

THESES. 

Position  stated  in  the  Essay — Tendency  of  Life  to  increase  beyond 
Food — Problem  not  the  same  for  Humanity  as  for  the  lower  forms 
of  Life — Man's  Dilemma — Tendency  to  increase  not  predicable  of 
Food  in  same  sense  as  of  Life — The  Geometrical  and  Arithmetical 
Ratios — Position  stated  in  Encyclopaedia  Britannica — Milne's  Con- 
firmation of  the  Geometrical  Ratio — Arithmetical  Ratio  proved 
differently — Private  Property  a  condition  of  great  Production — 
Fallacy  of  confusing  possible  with  actual  Production. — Laws  of  Man 
as  well  as  of  Nature  responsible  for  necessity  of  Checks — Position 
stated  in  "Summary  View"  — The  Checks  on  Population  classified 
(a)  objectively  and  (6)  subjectively — Relation  to  previous  Classifi- 
cation— Cycle  in  the  movement  of  Population. 

THE  second  essay  applies  the  theory  of  the  first  to  new 
facts  and  with  a  new  purpose.  The  author,  having 
gained  his  case  against  Godwin,  ceases  to  be  the  critic 
and  becomes  the  social  reformer.  Despairing  to 
master  all  the  forms  of  evil,  he  confines  his  study  to 
one  of  them  in  particular,  the  tendency  of  living 
beings  to  increase  beyond  their  means  of  nourishment. 
This  phenomenon  is  important  both  from  its  cause 
and  from  its  effects.  Its  cause  is  not  the  action  of 
Governments,  but  the  constitution  of  man ;  and  its 
effects  are  not  of  to-day  or  yesterday,  but  constant 
and  perpetual;1  it  frequently  hinders  the  moral 

1  Cf.  Essay,  7th  ed.,  II.  xiii.  p.  259. 


CHAP,  in.]  THESES.  61 

goodness  and  general  happiness  of  a  nation  as  well  as 
tin-  eijiul  distribution  of  its  wealth. 

This  is  the  general  position,  which  the  several 
chapters  of  the  essay  are  to  expound  in  detail.  It 
is  not  by  itself  quite  simple.  "  The  constant  tendency 
in  all  animated  life  [sic]1  to  increase  beyond  the 
nourishment  prepared  for  it"  is  in  one  sense  common 
to  humanity  with  plants  and  animals,  but  in  another 
sense  is  not  common  to  any  two  of  the  three.  It  is 

.inly  true  of  all  of  them  that  the  seeds  of  their 
life,  whencesoever  at  first  derived,  are  now  infinitely 
nuinorous  on  our  planet,  while  the  means  of  rearing 

i  are  strictly  limited.     In  the  case  of  plants  and 
animals  the  strong  instinct  of  reproduction  is  "  inter- 
rupted by  no  reasoning  or  doubts  about  providing  for 
,"-  and  they  crowd  fresh  lives  into  the  world 
only  to  have  them  at  once  shorn  away  by  starvation. 

i  the  exception  of  certain  plants  which  ape  their 

riors,  like  the  drosera,  and  certain  men  who  apo 
their  inferiors,  like  tin-  cannibals,  the  lines  of  differ- 
ence between  the  three  classes  of  living  things  are 
tolerably  distinct.  The  first  class,  in  the  struggle 

room  and  food,  can  only  forestall  each  other  and 
leave  each  other  to  die :  the  second  deliberately  pivy 
on  the  first  and  on  <M<-h  other;  while  the  thinl  prey 
on  both  the  rest.  But  with  man  this  "tendency  to 

ase   beyond    the    f 1      .Tillers   from   the   same 

act   in  the  nth'T  t\vo  cases  by  more  than  the  fact 
irger  resources  and  is  longer  in  reaching 

.unit.      'I  'met   is  e.ju.illy  strong  in  him,  but 

1  Amy,  I  ;•.  2.  .  \\  3. 


62  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

he  does  not  unquestioningly  follow  it.  "  Reason 
interrupts  his  career,"  and  asks  him  whether  he  may 
not  be  bringing  into  the  world  beings  for  whom  he 
cannot  provide  the  means  of  support.1  If  he  brushes 
reason  aside,  then  he  shares  the  fate  of  plants  and 
animals ;  he  tends  to  multiply  his  numbers  beyond 
the  room  and  food  accessible  to  them,  and  the  result 
is  that  his  numbers  are  cut  down  to  these  limits  by 
suffering  and  starvation.  There  is  nothing  in  this 
either  more  or  less  contrary  to  the  notion  of  a 
benevolent  Providence  than  in  the  general  power 
given  to  man  of  acting  rationally  or  irrationally 
according  to  his  own  choice  in  any  other  instance. 
On  the  other  hand,  if  he  listens  to  reason,  he  can  no 
doubt  defeat  the  tendency,  but  too  often  he  does  it  at 
the  expense  of  moral  purity.  The  dilemma  makes 
the  desire  for  marriage  almost  an  "  origin  of  evil." 
If  man  obeys  his  instincts  he  falls  into  misery,  and, 
if  he  resists  them,  into  vice.  Though  the  dilemma 
is  not  perfect,  its  plausibility  demands  that  we  should 
test  it  by  details,  and  to  this  test  Malthus  may  be 
said  to  have  given  his  whole  life.  His  other  econo- 
mical works  are  subordinate  to  the  essay,  and  may  be 
said  to  grow  out  of  it.  Though  we  cannot  omit  them 
if  we  would  fully  understand  and  illustrate  the  central 
work,  still  the  latter  must  come  first ;  and  its  matured 
form  requires  more  than  the  brief  summary  which 
has  been  given  in  the  two  preceding  chapters. 

The  body  of  the  book  consists  of  historical  details, 
and  particular  examples  showing  the  checks  to  popu- 

1  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  p.  3. 


CHAP,  in.]  THESES.  63 

lutimi  in  unrivili/'.,'d  and  in  civilized  places,  in  present 
and  in  past  times.  The  writer  means  to  bring  his 
conclusions  home  to  his  readers  by  the  "  longer  way  " 
of  induction.  As  this,  however,  was  not  the  way  in 
which  he  himself  reached  them,  or  even  stated  them 
at  first,  he  will  ask  us  first  of  all  to  look  at  the  terms 
of  the  dilemma  in  the  light  of  his  two  original 

ilatcs1  —  (a)  food  is  necessary,  (I))  the  desire  of 
marriage  is  permanent.  What  is  the  quickest  possible 
increase  of  numbers  in  obedience  to  the  second,  and 
of  food  in  obedience  to  the  first  ?  In  the  most  crucial 
of  the  known  instances,  the  actual  rapidity  of  the 
increase  of  population  seems  to  be  in  direct  proportion 
to  the  easy  possession  of  food  ;  and  we  can  infer  that 
tlic  ideally  rapid  increase  would  take  place  where  all 

I'-Vs  (whether  material  or  moral)  to  the  getting 
of  food  and  rearing  of  a  family  were  removed,  so 
that  nature  never  needed  to  remonstrate  with  in- 
stinct. "  In  no  state  that  we  have  yet  known  has 
ill.-  jM.wer  of  population  been  left  to  exert  itself  with 
perfect  freedom."2  We  can  guess  what  it  would  lu* 
from  the  animal  and  vegetable  world,  where  reason 
does  not  as  a  matter  of  fact  interfere  with  instinct  in 
any  rin-uii^t.inc'-s,  so  far  as  we  can  judge.  Benjamin 

!Jin,  in  a  passage  quoted  by  Malthus  in  this 
connection,1  supposes  that  if  the  earth  were  bared  of 

r  plants  it  miu  ivplmishcd  in  a  few  years 


-  e.    "  Food    in  -u.-li  propositions  includes  all 
'•easary  to  ! 

'  I  c.  :i'*  Observations   concerning  the  Increase  of  .> 


64  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  I. 

with  fennel  alone.  Even  as  things  are  now,  fennel 
would  fill  the  whole  earth  if  the  other  plants 
would  only  allow  it ;  and  the  same  is  true  of  each  of 
the  others.  Townsend's  goats  and  greyhounds  on 
Juan  Fernandez  are  a  better  instance,  because  not 
hypothetical.1  Juan  Fernando,  the  first  discoverer,  had 
covered  the  island  with  goats  from  one  pair.2  The 
Spaniards  resolved  to  clear  it  of  goats,  in  order  to  make 
it  useless  to  the  English  for  provisioning.  They  put 
on  shore  a  couple  of  greyhounds,  whose  offspring  soon 
caused  the  goats  to  disappear.  But  without  some 
few  goats  to  eat  all  the  dogs  must  have  died ;  and  the 
few  were  saved  to  them  by  their  inaccessible  refuges 
in  the  rocks,  from  which  they  descended  at  risk  of 
their  lives.  In  this  way  only  the  strongest  and 
fleetest  dogs  and  the  hardiest  and  fleetest  goats 
survived  ;  and  a  balance  was  kept  up  between  goat 
food  and  hound  population.  Townsend  thereupon 
remarks  that  human  populations  are  kept  down  by 
want  of  food  precisely  in  the  same  way. 

There  is  nothing  to  prevent  the  increase  of  human 
numbers  if  we  suppose  reason  to  have  no  need  (as 
in  the  lower  creatures  it  has  no  opportunity)  to  inter- 
fere. To  understand  the  situation,  however,  it  is 
best  not  to  assume  the  truth  of  this  parallelism,  but 
to  take  the  actually  recorded  instances  of  human 
increase  .under  the  nearest  known  approaches  to  abso- 
lute plenty  combined  with  moral  goodness,  that  is  to 


1  Dissertation  on  the  Poor  Laws  by  a  well-wisher  to  Mankind  (1786), 
pp.  42 — 45,  53.     He  is  quoting  Dampier's  Voyages,  vol.  i.  pt.  ii.  p.  88. 

2  It  is  fair  to  say  that  Ulloa,  B.  II.  ch.  iv.,  says  "  two  or  three  goats." 


CHAP,  in.]  TH1>  65 

say,  with  a  state  of  society  in  which  vice  is  at  a 
minimum.  "  In  the  northern  states  of  America,  where 
the  means  of  subsistence  have  been  more  ample,  the 
manners  of  the  people  more  pure,  and  the  checks  to 
r-irly  marriages  fewer  than  in  any  of  the  modern  states 
of  Europe,  the  population  was  found  to  double  itself 
for  some  successive  periods  every  twenty -five  years." ] 
From  this  near  approach  to  an  unchecked  increase, 
\\r  infrr  that  the  unchecked  would  mean  a  doubling 
in  l.-ss  than  twenty-five  years  (say  twenty,  or  perhaps 
fifteen),  and  that  all  population,  in  proportion  as  it 
i>  unchecked,  tends  towards  that  rate  of  increase. 

If  it  is  difficult   to  find  an  unchecked  increase  of 
population,  it   is  still   harder  to  find  an  unchecked 
increase  of  food ;   for  what  is  meant  is  not  that  a 
people  should  find  their  food  in  one  fertile  country 
with  as  much  ease  as  in  another,  but  that,  for  a  new 
jM-uj.l,.,  new  supplies  should  always  be  found  with  the 
same  ease  as  the  old  ones.     Now  it  is  not  necessary 
to  suppose  that   the  most  fertile  land  is  always  used 
first ; 2  very  often  it  might  only   be  used   late  after 
the  rest,  through  political  insecurity,  imperfect  agri- 
culture,  incomplete   explorations,    or    the    want    of 
capital;  but,  when  it  is  once  occupied,  tin*  question 
is,   will  it    supply  new  food  to  new  comers  without 
any  limit    at    all  '.      This   wmild   be  an    ideally    fertile 
land  corresponding  to   the  ideally  expanding  popu- 
:-»ii.      And   on   some  such    inexhaustible    increase 


1  ;  .-f.  7ih  .-I..  ,,.  n. 

1  Carey  (H.  C.)  ha*  certainly  made  a  good  caw  for  the  reverse.    Sea 
Prmc.  o/ Social  Science,  vol.  i.  oh,  iv.  (1858). 

I 


66  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  i 

of  food  an  unchecked  increase  of  population  would 
depend,  unless  men  became  able  to  live  without 
food  altogether. 

Malthus  afterwards  pointed  out,  in  the  course  of 
controversy,1  that  there  is  strictly  speaking  no 
question  here  of  the  comparison  of  two  tendencies, 
for  we  cannot  speak  of  a  tendency  to  increase  food 
in  the  same  sense  as  a  tendency  to  increase  popula- 
tion. Population  is  increased  by  itself;  food  is  in- 
creased not  by  food  itself,  but  by  an  agency  external 
to  it,  the  human  beings  that  want  it ;  and,  while  the 
former  increase  is  due  to  an  instinct,  the  latter  is  (in 
a  sense)  acquired.  Eating  is  instinctive,  but  not  the 
getting  of  the  food.  We  have,  therefore,  to  compare  an 
increase  due  to  an  instinctive  desire  with  an  increase 
due  to  labour,  and  "a  slight  comparison  will  show 
the  immensity  of  the-  first  power  over  the  second." 
Malthus  allows  that  it  is  difficult  to  determine  this 
relation  with  exactness  ; 2  but,  with  the  natural  liking 
of  a  Cambridge  man  for  a  mathematical  simile,3  he  m 
says  that  the  one  is  to  the  other  as  an  arithmetical 
to  a  geometrical  ratio, — that  is  to  say,  in  any  given 
time  (say  a  century)  the  one  will  have  increased  by 
multiplication,  the  other  only  by  addition.  If  we 
represent  both  the  population  and  the  food  at  the 
beginning  of  that  century  by  ten,  then  the  population 

1  Letter  to  Senior,  Appendix  to  Senior's  Lectures  on  Population,  pp. 
60—72. 

2  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  p.  5. 

3  He  might  have  been  warned  from  such  by  "  oi>  yeoj/zt  rpucaTf   aXX' 
ipwTucalc  dvdyruic"  (Plato,  Eepublic,  v.  458).    But  Bacon  had  applied  the 
fame  figure  still  more  widely  :  "  Custom  goes  in  arithmetical,  Nature 
in  geometrical  progression"  (Advancement  of  L.,  VI.  iii.  259;. 


CHAP,  in.]  THESES.  67 

will  double  itself  in  twenty-five  years ;  the  ten  will 
become  twenty  in  the  first  twenty-five  years,  forty  in 

second,  eighty  in  the  third,  one  hundred  and  sixty 
in  the  last,  while  the  food  will  only  become  twenty 
in  the  first,  thirty  in  the  second,  forty  in  the  third, 
fifty  in  the  fourth.  If  this  is  true,  it  shows  the 
tendency  of  population  to  outrun  subsistence.  But 
of  course  it  needs  to  be  shown  from  experience  that, 
while  the  strength  of  the  desire  remains  the  same  in 
tin-  Liter  stages  of  the  growth  of  population  as  in  the 
earlier,  the  laboriousness  of  the  labour  is  greater  in 
tin-  1  iter  stages  of  the  increase  of  food  than  in  the 
earlier.  It  is  the  plain  truth,  says  Mai  thus,  that 
nature  is  niggardly  in  her  gifts  to  man,  and  by  no 
in  cans  keeps  pace  with  his  desires.  If  men  would 

:y  their  desire  of  food  at  the  old  rate  of  speed, 
tli-  v  must  exert  their  mind  or  their  body  much  more 
than  at  first.1     An  obvious  objection  presents  itself. 
in m's  food  consists  after  all  of  the  lower  forms  of 
lit'.-,  animal  and  vegetable,  and  since  these  admittedly 
tend  to  inriva.se,  unchecked  by  themselves,  in  a  geo- 
metrical ratio,  it  might  be  thought  that  the  increase 
of   human    population  and   the  increase  of  its    food 
muld   j>n>err<l    together,   with  equal   ease.     But  the 
answ.-r  is  that   this  unchecked  geometrical  increase  of 
thr  first  could  go  on  only  so  long  as  there  was  room 
it     It  could  only  be  true,  for  example,  of  wheat 
in  the  corn-fi'-M  at   th«-  timr  whrii  the  seed  of  it  was 
sown,  an.  1  the   ii -hi  wtfl  all   before  it.     The  equality 
ios  would  only   be  true  of  the  first 

what  U  said  of  the  cosmology  of  M.ilthus  ahove,  pp.  34  9eq. 


68  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  i. 

crop.1  At  first  there  might  be  five  or  sixfold  the 
seed  ;  but  in  after  years,  though  the  geometrical 
increase  from  the  seed  would  tend  to  be  the  same, 
there  could  be  no  geometrical  increase  of  the  total 
crop  by  unassisted  nature.  The  earth  has  no  tendency 
to  increase  its  surface.  There  is  a  tendency  of  animals 
and  vegetables  to  increase  geometrically,  in  their 
quality  of  living  things,  but  not  in  their  quality  of 
being  food  for  man.  The  same  amount  of -produce 
might  no  doubt  be  gained  on  a  fresh  field,  from  the 
seed  yielded  by  the  first,  and  at  the  same  geometrical 
rate ;  but  this  assumes  that  there  is  a  fresh  field, 
and  we  should  not  then  be  at  the  proper  stage  to 
contrast  the  two  ratios.  The  contrast  begins  to  show 
itself  as  soon  as  the  given  quantity  of  land  has  grown 
its  crop,  and  its  animal  and  human  population  have 
used  all  its  food.  The  question  is  then  how  any 
increase  of  the  said  population,  if  they  are  confined 
to  their  own  supplies,  is  at  all  to  be  made  possible ; 
the  answer  is,  only  by  greater  ingenuity  and  greater 
labour  in  the  getting  of  food ;  and,  however  possible 
this  may  be,  it  can  hardly  be  so  easy  as  the  increase 
of  living  beings  by  their  own  act. 

The  degree  of  disparity  between  the  two  will  of 
course  depend  on  the  degree  of  rapidity  with  which 
an  unchecked  population  is  supposed  to  double  itself. 
Sir  William  Petty,2  with  few  trustworthy  statistics, 

1  Or,  keeping  in  view  Mr.  Carey's  exception,  we  should  say  not  perhaps 
the  first  crop,  but  the  earliest  in  which  the  farmer  did  justice  to  the  known 
resources  of  the  best  land. 

2  Political  Arithmetic — Essay  on  the  Multiplication  of  Mankind,  1682, 
pp.  7,  13  seq.,  especially  p.  21  (ed.  1755). 


CHAP,  in.]  THESES.  C9 

had  supposed  ten  years;  Euler,  with  somewhat  better, 
twelve  and  four-fifths;  but  Mai  thus  prefers  to  go  by 
the  safe  figures  of  the  American  colonies,  which  he 
always  regarded  as  a  crucial  proof  that  the  period  was 
not  more  than  twenty-five.     He  admits  the  risk  of  his 
own  mathematical  simile  when   he  grants  that  it  is 
more  easy  to  determine  the  rate  of  the  natural  increase 
of  population  than  the  rate  of  the  increase  of  food 
which   is  in  a  much    less   degree   natural  (or  spon- 
taneous) ;  and  he  argues  from  what  had  been  done  in 
England    in   his  own   time  that  the  increase  would 
not  even  be  in  an  arithmetical  ratio,  though  agricul- 
tural improvement  (thanks  to  Arthur  Young  and  the 
Board   of  Agriculture,  and   the  long  reign  of  high 
prices)  was  raising  the  average  produce  very  sensibly. 
If  the  Napoleonic  times  were  the  times  of  a  forced 
population  in  England,  they  were  also  the  times  of 
a  foi-erd  agricultural  production.     Yet  we  ourselves, 
long  after  this  stimulus,  and  after  much  high  farm- 
mknown  to  our  fathers,  have  reached   only  an 
ge  produce  of  twenty-eight  buslu-ls  per  acre  of 
aral>!c   land   as  com  pan  •<  I    with   twenty-three  in   1770,1 
\\hile  the  population  has  risen  from  about  six  millions 
to  thirty-live.     It  may  be  said  that  applies  only  to 
lint  until  lately  whrat-^rowin-  was  tin-  chid' 
t    of  all   our   scientific   agriculture;    and   this  is 
lit    »»f    a    eriitury's    improvements.        It   is   far 
an    arithmetical     in«T.  n     had    the 

prod;  n    nmliiplii  nfold.    al.»n--    with    the 

population,  this  would  not  overthrow  the  contention 

-.rJomeaC  led  Inter*  1880,  p. 


70  MALTHUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [BK.  i. 

of  Malthus,  for  he  is  not  speaking  of  any  and  every 
increase  of  food,  but  of  such  an  increase  made  by 
the  same  methods  and  by  the  same  kind  of  labour 
as  raised  the  old  supplies.1  Once  it  is  acknowledged 
that  to  raise  new  food  requires  greater  labour  and 
new  inventions,  while  to  bring  new  men  into  the 
world  requires  nothing  more  than  in  all  times  past, 
the  disparity  of  the  two  is  already  admitted.  The 
fact  that  the  two  processes  are  both  dependent  on  the 
action  of  man,  and  both  practically  illimitable,  does  not 
prevent  them  from  being  essentially  unlike.2  Objec- 
tors often  suppose  that  the  tendency  of  population  to 
outrun  subsistence  is  contradicted  by  the  existence  of 
unpeopled  or  thinly-peopled  countries,  just  as  if  the 
tendency  of  bodies  to  attract  each  other  were  con- 
tradicted by  the  incompressibility  of  matter.  The 
important  point  to  notice  is  that  the  one  power  is 
greater  than  the  other.  The  one  is  to  the  other  as 
the  hare  is  to  the  tortoise  in  the  fable.  To  make  the 
slow  tortoise  win  the  race,  we  must  send  the  hare  to 
sleep.3 

Carey  (Social  Science,  vol.  i.  ch.  iii.  §  5)  represents 
the  view  of  Malthus  by  the  following  propositions  :— 
1.  "Matter  tends  to  take  upon  itself  higher  forms," 
passing  from  inorganic  to  vegetable  and  animal  life, 
and  from  these  to  man.  2.  Matter  tends  to  take  on 
itself  the  vegetable  and  animal  forms  in  an  arithmetic 
ratio  only.  3.  It  tends  to  take  its  highest  form,  man, 
in  a  geometrical  ratio,  so  that  the  highest  outstrips 

1  But  see  below,  Bk.  II.  ch.  i.        2  2na  ed.,  I.  i.  p.  8  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  6. 
3  Essay,  IV.  iii.,  7th  ed.,  p.  407. 


CHAP,  in.]  THESES.  71 

the  lowest.  In  short  he  believes  that  Malthus  holds 
the  geometrical  increase  to  be  true  of  man  alone,  and 
only  the  arithmetical  to  be  true  of  animals  and 
vegetables.  But  Malthus  really  attributed  the 
tendency  to  geometrical  increase  to  all  life  whatso- 
ever, and  arithmetical  to  all  food,  as  such. 

In  Macvey  Napier's  Supplement  to  the  Encyclopedia 
BrUnnnica  (1824)  Malthus  has  left  his  mature  state- 
ment of  his  cardinal  principles,  and,  at  the  risk  of 
repetition,  that  account  may  be  added  here.  The 
main  difference  from  the  essay  is  in  arrangement  of 
the  leading  ideas;  and  we  may  learn  at  least  what 
he'  conceived  to  be  their  relative  importance  towards 
the  end  of  his  life. 

He  begins  by  observing  (l)  that  all  living  things, 
of  whatever  kind,  when  furnished  with  their  proper 
nourishment  tend  to  increase  in  a  geometrical  ratio, 
whether  (as  wheat)  by  multiplying  sixfold  in  one  year, 
or  (as  sheep)  by  doubling  their  numbers  in  two  years, 
tending  to  fill  the  earth,  the  one  in  fourteen,  the  other 
in  seventy-six  years.  But  (2)  as  a  matter  of  fact  they 
do  not  so  increase,  and  the  reason  is  either  man's 
want  of  will  or  man's  want  of  power  to  provide  them 
their  proper  soil  or  pasture.  The  actual  rate  of 

use  is  extremely  slow,  while  the  power  of  in«  i 
is   prodi-iuiis.       (3)    Physically   man    is   as    the   rest; 
and   it'  we  ask   what  is  the  factor  of  his  geometrical 
186,  We  ''an  "lily    tell   it,  as    in    the  case  of  \\hcat 

iheep,by  experience.     (4)  In  the  case  of  other 

living  beings,  where  there  are  most  mom   and   f....d 

is  greatest  increase.     These  conditions  are  best 


73  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

fulfilled  for  man  in  the  United  States,  where  the 
distribution  of  wealth  is  better  than  in  other  equally 
fertile  places,  and  the  greater  number  share  the 
advantages.  The  American  census  shows  for  the 
three  decades  between  1790  and  1820  a  rate  of 
increase  that  would  double  the  numbers  in  22^, 
22£,  and  23^  years  respectively,  after  we  deduct  as 
immigrants  ten  thousand  on  an  average  every  year. 

A  striking  indirect  confirmation  of  this  view  of 
the  American  increase  was  supplied  to  Malthas l  by 
Joshua  Milne,  the  author  of  the  Treatise  on  Annuities. 
His  calculations  were  founded  on  the  new  Swedish 
table  of  mortality.  This  table  had  been  drawn  up 
from  the  registers  of  the  first  five  years  of  the  century, 
years  of  unusual  healthiness ;  and  might  therefore  be 
presumed  to  represent  the  normal  condition  of  a  new 
and  healthy  country  like  the  United  States  better 
than  the  old  table  drawn  up  from  the  years  before 
sanitary  reform  and  vaccination.  Milne  took  the 
Swedish  table  as  his  guide,  and  one  million  of  people 
as  his  unit  of  measurement ;  he  calculated  in  what 
proportions  the  component  individuals  of  the  million 
must  belong  to  childhood,  youth,  mature  life,  and  old 
age,  in  order  that  by  the  principles  of  the  Swedish 
table  the  million  might  double  itself  by  natural 
increase  in  twenty-five  years  ;  and  he  arrived  at  a 
distribution  so  like  that  given  by  the  American 
census,  that  he  was  bound  to  conclude  the  American 
rate  of  increase  to  be  at  the  least  very  like  one  that 
doubles  a  population  in  twenty-five  years.  But  the 

1  Encycl  Brit.,  art.  Population.     Cf.  Essay,  7th  ed.,  p.  236  n. 


CHAP.  HI.]  THESES.  73 

iish  law  of  mortality  could  not  be  exactly  true 
of  the  United  States,  which  are  healthier  as  a  whole 
than  Sweden  even  in  Sweden's  best  years.1  The 
United  States  themselves  are  not  the  very  healthiest 
and  wealthiest  and  happiest  country  conceivable ; 
ami  their  increase  is  therefore  not  the  fastest  con- 

•ible.  If  the  observed  fact  of  increase  is  the  best 
proof  of  the  capacity  for  increase,  the  observed 
presence  of  checks  leads  to  an  a  fortiori  reasoning, 
whereby  we  infer  the  capacity  for  a  greater  inci 
than  any  actually  observed.  To  sum  up  the  whole  of 
this  first  branch  of  the  argument, — "taking  into 
consideration  the  actual  rate  of  increase  which  app« -ars 
from  the  best  documents  to  have  taken  place  over  a 
very  large  extent  of  country  in  the  United  States  of 
America,  very  variously  circumstanced  as  to  healthi- 
ness and  rapidity  of  progress, — considering  further 
the  rate  of  increase  which  has  taken  place  in  New 
Spain  and  also  in  many  countries  of  Europe,  where 
the  means  of  supporting  a  family,  and  other  circum- 
stances favouraltlc  to  increase,  bear  no  comparison 
with  those  of  the  United  States, — and  adverting 

iculnrly  to  the  actual  increase  of  population  which 
has  taken  place  in  this  country  during  the  l.i>t  twenty 
years2  under  the  formidable  ohstach-s  which  must 
press  themselves  upon  the  ;itt.-ntion  <.f  the  most 

1  Sweden  was  a  fu\ 

!'u rushed  sound  statistics.     1  unt  «.f  tl 

•  1  <>un    to   1880,  and  ita  prol.al.lc  future,  see    M 

•  onth                rOommoa  .1.  Soc.,  Dec.  1882). 

•ill    th.-    li: 

;icrea»Gwa  nidi  M  would  «l..ul.l.-  tli. 
one  years  at  the  lea  17). 


74  MALTHUS   AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

careless  observer,  it  must  appear  that  the  assumption 
of  a  rate  of  increase  such  as  would  double  the  popula- 
tion in  twenty-five  years,  as  representing  the  natural 
progress  of  population  when  not  checked  by  the 
difficulty  of  procuring  the  means  of  subsistence  or 
other  peculiar  causes  of  premature  mortality,  must 
be  decidedly  within  the  truth. ,  It  may  be  safely 
asserted,  therefore,  that  population  when  unchecked 
increases  in  a  geometrical  ratio  of  such  a  nature  as  to 
double  itself  every  twenty-five  years."  l 

The  problem  is  only  half  stated ;  it  is  still  to  be 
shown  what  is  the  rate  of  the  increase  of  Food.  The 
case  does  not  admit  the  same  kind  of  proof.  We 
can  suppose  an  unchecked  increase  of  men  going 
on  without  any  change  in  human  nature ;  we  have 
only  to  suppose  for  the  future  the  same  encourage- 
ment to  marriage  and  the  same  habits  of  life,  to- 
gether with  the  same  law  of  mortality.  But  with 
the  increase  of  food  the  causes  do  not  remain  the 
same.  If  good  land  could  be  got  in  abundance,  the 
increase  of  food  from  it  would  be  in  a  geometrical 
ratio  far  greater  than  that  of  the  men  ;  that  of  wheat, 
for  example,  would  be  sixfold,  as  we  have  seen.  But 
good  lauds  are  comparatively  few ;  they  will  in  the 
nature  of  things  soon  be  occupied ;  and  then  the 
increase  of  the  food  will  be  a  laborious  process  at  a 
rate  rather  resembling  a  decreasing  than  an  increasing 
geometrical  ratio.  "  The  yearly  increment  of  food,  at 
least,  would  have  a  constant  tendency  to  diminish ; " 
and  the  amount  of  the  increase  in  each  successive  ten 

1  Encyd.  Brit.,  1.  c. 


CHAP,  in.]  THESES.  75 

years  would  probably  be  less  and  loss.  In  pra< 
the  inequalities  of  distribution  may  check  the  in- 
crease of  food  with  precisely- the  same  efficacy  M 
actual  arrival  at  the  physical  limits  to  the  getting 
of  the  food.  "  A.  man  who  is  locked  up  in  a  room 
may  fairly  be  said  to  be  confined  by  the  walls  of  it, 
though  he  may  never  touch  them."1  But  the  main 
point  is,  that,  inequalities  or  no  inequalities,  there  is 
a  tendency  to  diminished  productiveness.  Under 
cither  condition  the  quantity  yielded  this  year  will 
not  be  doubled  or  trebled  for  an  indefinite  period  with 
the  same  ease  as  it  was  yielded  this  year.  In  a 
tolerably  well-peopled  country  such  as  England  or 
Germany  the  utmost  might  be  an  increase  every 
twenty-five  years  equal  to  the  present  produce.  But 
the  continuance  of  this  would  mean  that  in  the  next 
two  hundred  years  every  farm  should  produce  eight 
tinn-s  \\hat  it  does  now,  or,  in  five  hundred  years, 
twenty  times  as  mueh  ;  and  even  this  is  incredible, 
though  it  would  be  only  an  arithmetical  progression. 
No  doubt  almost  all  parts  of  the  eaith  are  now  more 
thinly  peopled  than  their  capacities  might  allow  ;  but 
the  difficulty  is  to  use  the  capaeities.  That  this  view<>f 
Malthu.s  need  not  imply  any  ignorance  or  any  disre- 
gard ».f  tin-  resources  of  high  farming  may  be  jinl^rd 
IVnm  tin-  iaet  that  <>ur  hi^he.-t  airrieiilt  ural  authority, 
who  reen^ni/rs  the  power  of  Kii<_di>h  faming  to  j.io- 
vide  on  emergency  even  for  our  entire  annual  wants, 
admits  at  the  same  time  that,  "\\hrre  full  emplov- 
:  and  the  m.-an^  of  subsistence  are  abundant, 

IN.  l.,p.  387. 


76  MALTlirs   AND   HIS   WORK.  [BK.  I. 

population  increases  in  geometrical  progression,  and 
therefore  in  a  far  more  rapid  proportion  than  the 
increased  productiveness  of  the  soil,  which  after  a 
certain  point  is  stationary."1  "It  follows  necessarily" 
(sums  up  Mai th us)  "  that  the  average  rate  of  the  actual 
increase  of  population  over  the  greatest  part  of  the 
globe,  obeying  the  same  law  as  the  increase  of  food, 
must  be  totally  of  a  different  character  from  the  rate 
at  which  it  would  increase  if  unchecked."  On  no 
single  farm  could  the  produce  be  so  increased  as  to 
keep  pace  with  the  geometrical  increase  of  population ; 
and  what  is  true  of  a  single  farm  is  true  in  this  case 
of  the  whole  earth.  Machinery  and  invention  can  do 
less  in  agriculture  than  in  manufacture,  and  they  can 
never  do  so  much  as  to  make  preventive  checks 
unnecessary.2 

This  is  the  argument  of  the  Encyclopedia  so  far  as 
it  relates  to  the  theses  of  the  essay.  Mai  thus  follows 
it  up  by  a  remark  on  the  institution  of  property. 
The  alternatives  to  his  mind  are  always  private 
property  as  we  now  have  it,  and  common  property  as 
desired  by  Godwin.  He  upholds  the  first  because, 
"  according  to  all  past  experience  and  the  best  observ- 
ation which  can  be  made  on  the  motives  which  operate 
upon  the  human  mind,"  the  largest  produce  from  the 
soil  is  got  by  that  system,  and  because  (what  is 
socially  much  more  important),  by  making  a  man  feel 
his  responsibility  and  his  dependence  on  his  own 
efforts,  it  tends  to  cause  prudence  in  marriage  as  well 
as  industry  in  work.  Common  property  has  not 

1  Caird,  Landed  Interest,  pp.  18,  46.  -  A'm-j/r/.  Brit,  1.  c. 


CHAP,  in.]  THESES.  77 

been  successful,  historically ;  and  tho  widest  extension 
of  popular  education  would  not  make  men  the  fii 

r  it.  There  is  indeed  a  sense  in  which  common 
property  might  tend  to  carry  production  farther  than 
private  property  ;  cultivation,  not  being  for  profit  but 

r  mere  living,  would  not,  like  the  present,  stop  at  the 
point  \vhere  production  ceased  to  be  a  good  invest- 
ment. But  this  would  mean 1  that  the  whole  energies 
of  the  society  were  directed  to  the  mere  getting  of 
food  ;  neither  the  whole  society  nor  any  part  of  it 
w«»uM  have  leisure,  for  intellectual  labour  or  enjoy- 
ment. Whereas  private  property  not  only  secures 
the  leisure,  but,  by  stopping  at  the  point  of  profit- 
ableness, it  keeps  an  unused  reserve,  on  which  society 
may  fall  back  in  case  of  need.  Malthus  therefore 
wmiM  Mand  by  private  property,  though  he  thinks 
that  private  proprietors  may  damage  the  national 
wealth  by  game-preserving,  and  injure  the  poorer 
classes  by  not  spending  enough  on  what  they  make.2 

The  actual  increase  of  population  (he  goes  on)  and 
the  necessity  of  checks  to  it  depend  on  the  difficulty 
of  getting  food,  from  whatever  cause,  whether  the 
exhaustion  of  the  earth  or  the  bad  structure  of, 
society;  and  the  difficulty  is  not  for  the  remote 
future  but  for  the  present. 

I  is  rhi.-lly  the  contrast  between  the  actual  and 
the  possible  supplies  that  makrs  nu-n  incredulous 
about  the  necessity  of  checks  ;  and  we  may  grant  that 

1  Apart,  he  ought  to  have  sai«l,  fr-mi  prudence  in  marriage,  whi.-h 
would  allow  each  man's  share  to  be  much  more  than  a  bare  living.  But 
see  below,  Bk.  II.  -1,.  ii. 

*  See  below,  Bk.  II.  ch 


78  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

under  an  ideal  government,  a  perfect  people,  and 
faultless  social  system  the  produce  would  at  first  be 
so  great  that  the  necessity  for  checks  on  population 
would  be  very  much  reduced  ;  but,  as  the  earth's 
productiveness  does  not  expand  with  population,  it 
would  be  a  very  short  time  before  the  pressure  of  the 
checks  would  reassert  itself — this  time  from  no  fault 
of  man,  but  from  the  mere  nature  of  the  soil.1  The 
bad  government  of  our  ancestors  left  much  produce 
unused,  and  in  consequence  we  have  for  the  present 
a  large  margin  to  draw  on.  But,  "  if  merely  since  the 
time  of  William  the  Conqueror  all  the  nations  of  the 
earth  had  been  well  governed,  and  if  the  distribution 
of  property  and  the  habits  both  of  the  rich  and  the 
poor  had  been  the  most  favourable  to  the  demand  for 
produce  and  labour,  though  the  amount  of  food  and 
population  would  have  been  prodigiously  greater  than 
at  present,  the  means  of  diminishing  the  checks  to 
population  would  unquestionably  be  less." 

But,  though  the  laws  of  nature  arc  responsible  for 
the  necessity  of  checks  to  population,2  "  a  vast  mass  of 
responsibility  remains  behind,  on  man  and  the  insti- 
tutions of  society."  To  them  in  the  first  place  is  due 
the  scantiness  of  the  present  population  of  the  earth, 
there  being  few  parts  of  it  that  would  not  with  better 
government  and  better  morals  support  twice,  ten 
times,  or  even  one  hundred  times  as  many  inhabitants 
as  now.  In  the  second  place,  though  man  cannot 

1  By  the  "  law  "  of  decreasing  returns.     See  below,  Bk.  II.  ch.  i. 

2  Mr.  Giffen,  in  the  Address  above  quoted,  speaks  as  if  Malthus  con- 
sidered the  positive  checks  as  the  "natural  checks"  (p.  531).     This, 
however,  is  against  his  distinct  statement  in  Essay,  7th  ed.,  App.  p.  480. 


CHAP,  in.]  THESES.  79 

remove  the  necessity  of  checks,  or  even  make  them 
press  much  more  lightly  in  any  given  place,i  he  is 
responsible  for  their  precise  character  and  particular 
mode  of  operation.  A  good  government  and  good 
institutions  can  so  direct  them  that  they  shall  be 
hurtful  to  the  general  virtue  and  happiness,  vice 
and  misery  disappearing  before  moral  restraint,  though 
after  all  the  influence  of  government  and  institutions 
is  indirect,  and  everything  depends  on  the  conduct  of 
tin-  individual  citizens. 

The  rest  of  the  article  contains  little  that  is  not 
in  the  Etsay  on  Population  (5th  ed.,  1817)  and  the 
ise  on  Political  Economy  (1st  ed.,  1820).  It 
gives  the  historical  sketches  of  the  former,  some  small 
part  of  the  economical  discussions  (e.g.  on  wages)  of 
tli«  latter,  and  a  short  answer  to  current  objections, 
together  with  some  tables  of  mortality  and  other 
figures,  of  more  special  interest  to  the  professional 
actuary  than  to  the  general  reader.  The  article  is 
an  authoritative  summary  of  the  author's  doctrines  in 
th.  ir  final  form.  It  was  not  his  last  work.  From 
the  fact  that  he  undertook  the  paper  in  Sept.  1821,2 
we  may  perhaps  iufer  that  he  placed  it  in  Macvey 
Naj.i.-r's  hands  in  the  year  1822.8  But  it  was  his 
last  attempt  to  re-state  the  subject  of  the  essay  in 
an  iipl«-|,.-iplrMt  f-Tin  \vith  anything  approaching  to 
fuln«->  <>t  d.  t ail,  and  it  shows  he  had  made  no  change 

1  ThH  IK  probably  the  meaning  ..f  tli.-  author's  phrase,  "alt« 
proportion"  ,..h,,k  r  the  degree  in  which 

.  prea»  up-  i  mber*  "  (Encydop.,  L  c.,  p.  4 1 

•  See  his  letter  of  that  date  in  Ma  -r's  Corrtipondenc*,  p.  29. 

;.ublUhed  till   1824.     It  WM  certainly  written  afU-r  the 
iwnlu  of  the  Gaums  of  1821  bad  been  published. 


80  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  i. 

in  liis  position.  The  Summary  View  of  the  Principle 
of  Population  (1830)  was  avowedly  an  abridgment 
of  the  article  in  the  Encyclopedia,  and  is  in  fact 
that  article  with  a  few  paragraphs  omitted  and  a 
few  pronouns  altered. 

The  clear  statement  of  the  two  tendencies  was,  in 
his  own  eyes,  the  least  original  part  of  his  work.  It 
had  been  often  perceived  distinctly  by  other  writers 
that  population  must  always  be  kept  down  to  the 
level  of  the  means  of  subsistence.  "  Yet  few  inquiries 
have  been  made  into  the  various  modes  by  which  this 
level  is  effected,  and  the  principle  has  never  been 
sufficiently  pursued  to  its  consequences,  nor  those 
practical  inferences  drawn  from  it  which  a  strict 
examination  of  its  effects  on  society  appears  to 
suggest."  What  some  people  would  count  the  more 
interesting  question  remained  to  be  considered — the 
question  that  touches  individuals  and  familiar  circum- 
stances more  nearly,  and  is  not  to  be  answered  by  a 
generality,  from  which  we  easily  in  thought  except 
our  own  individual  selves.  Since,  at  any  given  time, 
in  any  given  place,  among  any  given  people,  there  is 
(1)  a  tendency  of  population  to  outrun  subsistence, 
and  there  is  (2)  no  such  excess  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
in  what  way  or  ways  is  the  tendency  prevented  from 
carrying  itself  out  ?  As  was  said  above,2  this  is 
effected  in  two  kinds  of  ways — (l)  by  the  way  of 
a  positive,  (2)  by  the  way  of  a  preventive  check,  the 
former  cutting  down  an  actual  population  to  the  level 
'of  its  food,  the  second  forbidding  a  population  to 

1  Pref.  to  2nd  ed.,  pp.  iv,  v  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  vi.  2  p.  52. 


CHAP,  in.]  THESES.  81 

I  to  be  cut  down,  and  being,  so  far  as  it  is  volun- 
tary, peculiar  to  man  among  living  creatures.  Of 
the  positive,  all  those  that  come  from  the  laws  of 
nature  may  be  called  misery  pure  and  simple;  ami 
all  those  that  men  bring  on  themselves  by  wars, 
excesses,  and  avoidable  troubles  of  all  kinds  are  of  a 
mixed  character,  their  causes  being  vice  and  their 
consequences  misery.  Of  the  preventive,  that  restraint 
from  marriage  which  is  not  accompanied  by  any 
immoral  conduct  on  the  part  of  the  person  restraining 

If  or   herself  is  called    moral    restraint.     Any 

lint  which  is  prudential  and  preventive,  but 
immoral,  comes  under  the  head  of  vice,  for  every 
action  may  be  so  called  which  has  "a  general  tendency 
to  produce  misery,"  however  innocuous  its  immediate 
effects:1  We  find,  therefore,  that  the  positive  and  the 

ntive  checks  are  all  resolvable  into  vice,  misery, 
and  moral  restraint,  or  sin,  pain,  and  self-control, 
a  threefold  division  that  makes  the  second  essay 
"  dill'rr  in  principle  "  from  the  first.2 

\Ve  have  here  a  t  \\nfold  alongside  of  a  threefold 

ion  of  the   checks  to  population.     The   one    is 

made  from  an  objective,  the  other  from  a  subjective 

it  of  view.     The  division  of  checks  (1)  into  posi- 

has  regard  simply  to  the  outward 

population  is  in  those  two  ways  kept  down 

to   the   food.     Tin-    division  of   tin  -in  (2)   into  vice, 

misery,  and  moral  restraint    btfl  n  -_r;nd  t..  the  human 

1  condition,    the    state   of    his 

ugs  and  of  hi,  will.     For  pM>itiv.« 

.  2nd  cd.,  p.  1 1  n  ;  7th  «!..  }•  9  n. 

O 


82  MALTHUS  AND   HIS   \VOPvK.  [BK.  i. 

cheek  viewed  subjectively,  or  from  the  human  being's 
point  of  view,  is  the  feeling  of  pain  ;  the  will  is  not 
directly  concerned  with  it.  The  preventive,  from  the 
same  point  of  view,  is  of  a  less  simple  character.  First 
of  all,  moral  restraint  involves  a  temporary  misery  or 
pain  in  the  thwarting  of  a  desire  ;  "  considered  as  a 
restraint  upon  an  inclination  otherwise  innocent  and 
always  natural,  it  must  be  allowed  to  produce  a  certain 
degree  of  temporary  urihappiness,  but  evidently  slight 
compared  with  the  evils  which  result  from  any  of 
the  other  checks  to  population,"  l  and  "  merely2  of  the 
same  nature  as  many  other  sacrifices  of  temporary 
to  permanent  gratification  which  it  is  the  business 
of  a  moral  agent  continually  to  make."  The  reverse 
is  true  of  vicious  excesses  and  passions ;  in  their 
immediate  gratification  they  are  pleasant,  but  their 
permanent  effects  are  misery.  From  the  point  of 
view  of  the  will  the  case  is  clear,  for  the  state  of  the 
will  would  be  described  by  Malthus,  if  he  ever  used 
such  terms,  as  in  the  one  case  good,  and  in  the  other 
case  evil,  pure  and  simple.  Of  course  in  treating  the 
matter  historically  we  may  neglect  the  subjective 
point  of  view,  not  because  it  is  not  necessary  for 
proper  knowledge  of  the  facts,  but  because  it  leads 
to  a  psychological  inquiry,  the  results  of  which  are 
independent  of  dates. 

Malthus  goes  on  to  say  that,  in  all  cases  where 
there  is  the  need  for  checks  at  all,  it  is  the  sum-total 
of  all  the  preventive  and  positive  checks  that  forms 
the  check  to  population  in  any  given  country  at  any 
*&  i  2nd  ed.3  Bk.  I.  cli.  ii.  p.  10.  2  Adds  the  3rd  ed. 


CHAP,  in.]  THESES.  83 

u  time,1  and  his  endeavour  will  be  to  show  in 
what  relative  proportions  and  in  what  degree  they 
.ail  in  various  countries  known  to  us.  He  assumes 
further  that  the  preventive  and  the  positive  checks 
will  "  vary  inversely  as  each  other."  In  countries 
where  the  mortality  is  great  the  influence  of  the 
1'iwentive  check  will  be  small;  and,  where  the  pre- 

ive  check  prevails  much,  the  positive  check,  or  in 
brief  the  mortality,  will  be  small.  - 

In  society,  as  it  was  in  the  first  years  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  Mai  thus  thinks  he  can  trace  out  even 
by  his  own  observation  an  "  oscillation,"  or  what  it 
is  the  fashion  to  call  a  "  cycle,"  in  the  movement  of 
population.  History  does  not  show  it  well,  simply 

use  "  the  histories  of  mankind  which  we  possess 
a  iv  in  general  only  of  the  higher  classes,"  3  and  it  is 
the  lain  Hiring  classes  to  which  the  observation  applies. 
Their  painful  experience  of  the  ruder  checks  has  not 
ntrd  a  "  (  -on-taut  effort  "  in  the  labouring  popu- 
lation to  have  larger  families  than  they  can  well 
support.  The  consequence  is  that  their  numbers  an> 
increased;  they  must  divide  amongst  eleven  and  a 
half  millions  the  food  that  was  formerly  divided 
among  eleven  millions;  they  must  have  lower  wages 
and  dearer  provisions.  But  this  state  of  dis: 
will  so  check  population  that  in  process  of  ti  i,e  the 
numbers  will  !»••  almost  at  a  stand-till,  while  at 
same  time,  since  tin-  dnnund  for  f.M.d  has  Uvn  or. 


i  «L,  p.  21;  7th  ed.,  p.  9.  »  3rd  ed.  I  c.   * 

ii  ed,  p.  10.     Hit  own  book  h«a  he|»ed  to  make 
thi»  lea*  true. 

O  2 


84  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  r. 

and  labour  has  been  cheaper,  the  application  of  capital 
to  agriculture  will  have  increased  the  available  food. 
The  result  will  be  the  same  tolerable  degree  of  comfort 
as  at  the  beginning  of  the  cycle,  and  the  same  relapse 
from  it  as  at  the  second  stage.  He  conceives  the  two 
stages  to  follow  each  other  as  naturally  as  sunshine 
rain  and  rain  sunshine.  The  existence  of  such  a 
cycle  may  remain  concealed  from  the  ordinary  his- 
torian, if  he  looks  merely  to  the  money- wages  of  the 
labourer,  for  it  frequently  happens  that  the  labourer 
gets  the  same  sums  of  money  for  his  wages  during 
a  long  series  of  years  when  the  real  value  of  the  sums 
has  not  remained  the  same, — the  price  of  bread  in 
what  we  have  called  the  second  stage  of  the  cycle 
being  much  dearer  than  it  was  in  the  first,  and  than 
it  will  be  in  the  third.1  Though  Malthus  expressly 
qualifies  his  statements  by  showing  that  civilization 
tends  to  counteract  these  fluctuations,  it  certainly 
seemed  to  be  his  belief  in  1803  that  on  the  whole 
the  working  classes  of  Europe,  and  especially  of 
England,  were  powerless  to  escape  from  them.  How 
far  this  view  is  justified  will  be  seen  presently. 

1  2nd  ed.,  pp.  14,  15.     With  this  description  of  the  "  cycle  "  compare 
the  view  of  Marx  as  given  below  in  Book  IV. 


CHAP,  iv.]     THE  SAVAGE,  BARBARIAN,  AND  ORIENTAL.     85 


CHAPTER  IV.  x 

THE   SAVAGE,    BARBARIAN,    AND    ORIENTAL. 

Simile  supplanted  by  Fact — Savage  Life — Population  dependent  not  on 
possible  but  on  actual  Food — Indirect  Action  of  Positive  Checks — 
IIunjjLT  not  a  Principle  of  Progress— Otaheite  a  Crux  for  Common 
Sense — Cycle  in  the  Movement  of  Population — Piteairn  Island — 
rbarian  and   Oriental — Nomad   Shepherds — Abram  and   Lot — 
;ibri  and  Teutones — Gibjbon  versus  Montesquieu — "  At  bay  on  the 
limits  of  the  Universe  " — Misgovernment  an  indirect  Check  on  Popu- 
lation— Ancient  Europe  less  populous  than  Modern — Civilization 
the  gradual  Victory  of  the  third  Check. 

Tm:   main   position  of  the   essay   was  so    incontro- 

;l)lc,   that  when  the  critics  despaired  to  convict 

Malthas   of  a   paradox,  they   charged   him   with    a 

truism.     To  the  friendly  Hallam  l  the  mathematical 

basis   of  the  argument   appeared  as  certain   as   the 

multiplication  table,  and  the  unfriendly  Hazlitt  "  did 

not  see  what  there  was  to  discover  after  reading  the 

tal>lcs  of  Noah's  descendants,  and  knowing  that  the 

world  is  round."2     If  the  essayist  had  done  nothing 

more  than  put  half-truths  together  into  a  whole,  he 

M  have  "  entrenched  himself  in  to  impregnable 

i  ess  "  and  given  his  work  a  great  "  air  of  mastery." s 

But   lie   would   have    convinced    the   understanding 

M.irtineau,  Autob.,  v..l.  i.  p.  210. 

p.  20.     Cf.  below,  Book  IV. 
•  Pref.  to  2nd 


86  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

without  convincing  the  imagination.  Adam  Smith 
himself  would  have  done  no  more  than  half  his  work, 
if  he  had  been  content  to  prove  the  reasonableness  of 
free  trade  without  showing,  in  detail,  the  effect  of  it 
and  its  opposites.  Even  the  most  competent  reader 
has  seldom  all  the  relevant  facts  marshalled  in  his 
memory,  ready  to  command ;  and  he  will  always  be 
thankful  for  illustrations.  The  Essay  on  Population 
in  its  second  form  certainly  excelled  all  economical 
works,  save  one,  in  its  pertinent  examples  from  life 
and  history. 

Imagination  in  the  narrower  sense  of  the  word  is 
to  be  out  of  court.  Malthus,  like  Adam  Smith,  not 
only  leaves  little  to  his  reader's  fancy,  but  makes 
little  use  of  his  own.  His  own  had  misled  his  readers 
in  the  first  essay,  though  it  had  certainly  given  that 
little  book  much  of  its  piquancy ;  and  he  resolves  for 
the  sake  of  truth  to  chain  it  up,  as  Coleridge  chained 
up  his  understanding.  The  self-denying  ordinance 
is  only  too  fully  executed.  The  style  of  his  essay 
is  truly  described  by  himself1  as  having  gradually 
"  lost  all  pretensions  to  merit."  Edition  follows 
edition,  each  with  its  footnotes,  supplements,  re- 
arrangements, and  corrections,  till  the  reader  feels  that 
this  writer  "  would  be  clearer  if  he  were  not  so  clear." 

But  the  title-page  supplies  a  guiding  thread.  From 
the  second  edition  onwards  to  the  last,  "Past"  and 
"  Present "  appear  in  large  letters,  "  Future  "  in  small. 
The  entire  work  may  therefore  be  divided  according  to 
the  three  tenses,  with  the  emphasis  on  the  two  former. 

1  2od  ed.,  Pref.  p.  vi.     True  even  then,  and  much  more  afterwards. 


CHAP,  iv.]     THE  SAVAGE,  BAREAKIAX.  AND  ORIENTAL.      87 

The  first  book  is  devoted  to  the  past,  the  second  to 
the  present,  and  the  third  and  fourth  to  the  future. 

The  First  deals  with  the  less  civilized  parts  of  the 
w<  >rld  as  it  now  is,  and  the  uncivilized  past  times ; 
the  Second  with  the  different  states  of  modern 
Europe  ;  the  Third  criticizes  popular  schemes  of  future 
improvement ;  while  the  Fourth  gives  the  author's 
own  views  of  the  possible  progress  of  humanity. 

After  explaining  his  principles,  Multhus  takes  a 
survey  of  human  progress,  if  not  from  brute  to  savage, 
at  least  from  savage  to  citizen.  He  shows  us  how 
the  rude  and  simple  positive  checks  become  compli- 

1  with  the  preventive ;  and  he  leads  us  up  from 
barbarism  to  civilization  till  we  find  ourselves  in  a 
society  where  the  citizens  think  less  of  check  than  of 
clik-f  end,  and  less  of  self-sacrifice  than  of  self-devo- 
tion,  to  some  cause  or  person,  and  even  the  inferior 
members  act,  at  worst,  from  mixed  motives,  containing 
good  as  \\cll  as  evil  These  are  the  two  extreme  ends 
of  his  line.  It  would  be  useless  to  deny  that  he 

rs  longest  over  the  less  pleasing,  and  gives  Godwin 
some  excuse  for  questioning  his  logical  right  to  believe 
jn  the  more  pi-  it  all.1  At  the  same  time  it 

would  have  been  (even  logically)  impossible  for  him 
t<»  haw  attacked  Godwin  for  taking  abstract  views 
<»f  human  nature,  and  then  to  lia\v   persisted   in  an 
ion  of  his  own,  after  all   his  own  Europan 

1  ami   historical  studies.      His   fault  had  lain   in 

stive    )'i' niises,  not   in  false  reasoning;    and   he 

•dies  the  fault. 

1  Godwin,  On  Population,  I. 


88  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  I. 

Let  us  take  his  account  in  his  own  order.  Be- 
ginning with  present  savagery,  which  with  some 
qualifications  is  a  picture  of  our  own  past,  he  sifts 
out  the  descriptions  of  Cook,  Vancouver,  and  other 
travellers,  to  see  what  checks  to  population  operate 
in  different  grades  of  savage  humanity.  At  the  very 
bottom  of  the  scale  conies  Tierra  del  Fuego,  by 
general  consent  the  abode  of  pure  misery,  and  there- 
fore naturally  the  home  of  a  sparse  population.  Next 
come  the  natives  of  the  Andaman  Islands  and  of 
Van  Diemen's  Land.  "  Their  whole  time  is  spent  in 
search  of  food,"  which  consists  of  the  raw  products  of 
the  soil  and  sea ;  the  whole  time  of  every  individual 
is  devoted  to  this  one  labour,  and  there  is  neither 
room  nor  inducement  for  any  other  industries.  Vice 
is  hardly  needed ;  misery  in  the  shape  of  perpetual 
scarcity  and  famine  keeps  down  the  people  to  the  food. 
Third  in  the  scale  of  human  beings  are  the  New 
Hollanders,  the  original  inhabitants  of  North- West 
Australia,  among  whom  can  be  traced  not  only  the 
check  of  misery,  but  the  check  of  vice.  The  women 
are  so  cruelly  treated  at  all  times,  and  the  children 
have  so  harsh  an  upbringing,  that  there  is  no  difficulty. 
in  understanding  how  population  does  not  even  reach 
the  full*  limit  of  the  scanty  food.  War  and  pestilence 
make  the  assurance  doubly  sure.  As  savages  are 
entirely  innocent  of  sanitary  science,  the  dirt  of  their 
persons  and  their  houses  deprives  them  of  "  the 
advantage  which  usually  attends  a  thinly-peopled 
country,"  comparative  exemption  from  pestilence.1 

1  2nd  ed.,  p.  31  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  23. 


CHAP,  iv.]     THE  SAVAGE,  BARBARIAN,  AND  ORIENTAL.    89 

Even  the  North  American  Indians,  who  are  one  step 
higher  than  the  New  Hollanders,  come  under  the 
same  condemnation  for  overcrowding,  and  for  much 
else  besides.  The  account  which  Malthas  gives  of 
them  may  be  compared  with  that  of  De  Tocqueville 
half  a  century  later.  Romance  has  clung  to  them 
only  because  they  were  the  nearest  and  best-known 
savages  of  their  kind,  and  their  necessary  labours 
were  in  Europe  rich  men's  pleasures.  But  hunting 
and  river-fishing  cannot  yield  much  food  unless  pur- 
sued over  a  wide  area.  A  hunter  is  so  far  like  the 
t  of  prey  which  he  pursues,  that  he  must  go  long 
distances  for  his  food,  and  must  either  fly  from  or 
overcome  every  rival.  The  North  American  Indian 
must  therefore  either  go  West  after  his  old  food,  or 
else  he  must  stay  where  he  is,  to  beat  off  the 
Europeans,  or  to  adopt  their  food  and  their  habits. 
"  Tli'1  Indians  have  only  two  ways  of  saving  them- 
selves, war  and  civilization.  They  must  either 
destroy  the  Europeans  or  become  their  equals."  l  As 
the  civilization  of  a  nation  of  hunters  is  almost 
impoeaible,  their  extinction  seems  inevitable  The 
question  remains,  How  is  this  population  cut  down 
to  the  level  of  its  food  ? 

In  Malthas'  answer  to  the  question  occur  three 
remarks  of  great  general  importance.  First,  what 
limits  tin.-  numbers  of  a  people  is  not  the  possible 
but  the  actual  food.2  Second,  want  destroys  a 


1  DAnocratie  en  Ameri^>\  I't.  II.  «•],.  x.  p.  278.     Tl><>  uuth..r  is  in 
thor«.i  ,,H. 

1  2ndc.i  i.,  ],.  28. 


90  MALTHUS   AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

population  less  often  directly  by  starvation  than 
indirectly  through  the  medium  of  manners  and 
customs.1  Third,  the  mere  pressure  of  impending 
starvation  does  not  lead  to  progress.2 

Malthus  is  never  tired  of  insisting  on  the  first  of  these 
remarks  ;  and  a  proper  understanding  of  it  is  essential 
to  a  fair  judgment  on  his  doctrine.  He  never  says 
that  it  is  the  tendency  of  a  population  to  increase  up 
to  the  limits  of  the  greatest  possible  amount  of  food 
that  can  be  produced  in  a  given  country.  The  valley 
of  the  Mississippi  when  highly  cultivated  may  possibly 
support  a  hundred  millions ;  but  the  question  is  not 
what  it  would  do  when  highly  cultivated,  but  what 
it  can  do  when  cultivated  as  it  now  is  and  as  men 
now  are.  "  In  a  general  view  of  the  American 
continent  as  described  by  historians,  the  population 
seems  to  have  been  spread  over  the  surface  very 
nearly  in  proportion  to  the  quantity  of  food  which 
the  inhabitants  of  the  different  parts  in  the  actual 
state  of  their  industry  and  improvements  could  as  a 
matter  of  fact  obtain ;  arid  that  with  few  exceptions 
it  pressed  hard  against  this  limit,  rather  than  fell  short 
of  it,  appears  from  the  frequent  recurrence  of  distress 
for  want  of  food  in  all  parts  of  America."3  What  is 
said  here  of  the  Indians  a  hundred  years  ago  applies 
to  the  Colonists  now.  "  The  actual  state  of  industry  " 
is  of  course  a  much  more  improved  one  ;  but  the 
population  the  land  will  bear  is  still  in  propor- 
tion to  it,  and  the  amount  could  not  have  been 

1  2nd  ed.,  p.  25;  7th  ed.,  p.  18.     2  Ibid.  p.  43;  7th  ed.,  p.  31. 
3  Ibid.  p.  39;  7th  ed.,  p.  28. 


CHAP,  iv.]     THE  SAVAGE,  BARBARIAN,  AND  ORIENTAL.     91 

increased  till  the  actual  state  of  the  industry  had  first 
been  bettered.  One  cause  of  the  decay  of  the  numbers 
of  the  Indians  was  that  their  method  of  industry,  so 
far  from  becoming  better,  became  worse  by  their  con- 
tact with  Europeans,  and  therefore  the  limit  of  popula- 
tion was  actually  contracted  instead  of  being  extended.1 
This  explains  how  it  is  that  their  diminishing  numbers 
do  not  bring  them  greater  comfort.  Whether  the 
numbers  in  any  given  case  are  too  great  or  too  small 
depends  always  on  the  quantity  of  the  food  that  is 
divided  among  them ;  and,  where  the  food  decreases 
faster  than  the  population,  a  population  that  has 
become  smaller  numerically  becomes  actually  larger 
in  proportion  to  the  food.  The  statement  that 
•^land  or  any  other  country  could  bear  millions 
more  than  it  does  now  is  a  mere  reference  to  un- 
explored possibilities,  landing  us  in  the  infinite.  It 
may  be  answered  in  the  same  way  as  the  Eleatic 
puzzles  about  motion ;  land  infinitely  improvable 
does  not  mean  land  infinitely  improved,  as  matter 
infinitely  divisible  does  not  mean  matter  infinitely 
divided.  The  position  of  Malt  1ms  is  therefore  as 
follows:  given  a  peopl. -'s  skill,  and  given  its  stand- 
ard of  living  at  any  time,  its  numbers  are  always 
tending  to  lie  the  utmost  that  can  be  furnished  by 
that  skill  with  a  living  up  to  that  standard, — that  is 
to  say,  with  what,  according  to  that  standard,  arc  the 
necessaries  of  human  life.  Kit  her  a  diminution  of 
that  skill  or  an  increase  in  that  standard  would  cause 
population.  The  question  is  always  a  relative  one. 

1  2nded.,  p.  44;  7th  tdL,  j>.  3i. 


92  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  I. 

The  human  as  distinguished  from  the  animal 
character  of  the  problem  appears  not  only  in  that 
relativity  (which  affects  mainly  the  preventive  checks), 
but  in  the  indirect  way  in  which  the  positive  checks, 
if  we  may  say  so,  prefer  to  act.  It  is  as  if  they 
were  always  desirous  of  resolving  themselves  as  far 
as  might  be  into  preventive.  The  ultimate  check, 
Mai  thus  says,  is  starvation  ;  but,  he  adds,  it  is  seldom 
the  immediate  one.  The  higher  up  we  go  in  the 
scale,  the  more  it  is  hidden  away  out  of  sight.  Starv- 
ation is  interpreted,  by  all  grades  of  society  above 
the  lowest,  to  mean  the  loss  of  what  they  conceive  to 
be  the  necessaries  not  of  a  bare  living  but  of  endur- 
able life  ;  and  even  the  lowest,  instead  of  apprehending 
some  pain,  apprehend  some  bringer  of  it.  They  do 
not  allow  famine  to  kill  them  ;  they  create  manners 
and  customs  that  do  the  work  for  it,  keeping  the 
famine  itself  afar  off.  "  Both  theory  and  experience 
uniformly  instruct  us  that  a  less  abundant  supply  of 
food  operates  with  a  gradually  increasing  pressure  for 
a  very  long  time  before  its  progress  is  stopped.  It  is 
difficult  indeed  to  conceive  a  more  tremendous  shock 
to  society  than  the  event  of  its  coming  at  once  to  the 
limits  of  the  means  of  subsistence,  with  all  the  habits 
of  abundance  and  early  marriages,  which  accompany  a 
largely  increasing  population.  But,  happily  for  man- 
kind, this  never  is  nor  ever  can  be  the  case.  The 
event  is  provided  for  by  the  concurrent  interests  and 
feelings  of  individuals  long  before  it  arrives  ;  and  the 
gradual  diminution  of  the  real  wages  of  the  labouring 
classes  of  society  slowly  and  almost  insensibly  generates 


CHAP,  iv.]    THE  SAVAGE,  BARBARIAN,  AND  ORIENTAL.      93 

the  habits  necessary  for  an  order  of  things  in  which 
the  funds  for  the  maintenance  of  labour  are  stationary. 
.  .  .  The  causes  [of  the  retardation  of  population] 
will  be  generally  felt  and  [will]  generate  a  change  of 
habits  long  before  the  period  arrives."  l  "An  insuffi- 
cient supply  of  food  to  any  people  does  not  show 
itself  merely  in  the  shape  of  famine,  but  in  other 
more  permanent  forms  of  distress,  and  in  generating 

in  customs  which  operate  sometimes  with  greater 
force  in  the  prevention  of  a  rising  population  "  than  in 
the  destruction  of  the  risen.2  Robertson  the  historian 
truly  says,  that  whether  civilization  has  improved 
the  lot  of  men  may  be  doubtful,  but  it  has  certainly 
improved  the  condition  of  women.  Among  the  Indians 
and  almost  all  savages,  "  servitude  is  a  name  too  mild 
to  describe  their  wretched  state."  The  hard  life  of 
the  men  kills  their  instinctive  fondness  for  the  women  ; 
the  latter  are  therefore  less  likely  to  become  mothers, 
while,  if  they  do,  their  own  hardships  and  heavy  tasks 

i  great  hindrance  to  nursing.  It  is  not  surprising 
that  the  surviving  <  -liildivn  are  of  good  physique  ; 
none  but  the  exceptionally  strong  could  weather  tin*. 
cruel  discipline  of  childhood.3  In  South  America 
the  difficulty  of  upbringing  actually  led  to  an  en- 
forced monogamy,  as  well  as  to  lat<>  marriages  and 
tln-ir  imt  imfiv.ju.-nt  accompaniment,  invpdaritirs 
befon  marriage.  Su<  h  customs  diminish  numb«  is. 
But  even  tin-  adult  savages  do  not  find  life  easy. 
They  are  not  the  men  to  think  of  providing  for  a 


'    M  ,  •<  «rr.,  July  IftCH,  p.  34ft. 

«  Euay,  2n.l  ML,  i>.  25;  7th  ed.,  p.  18.          »  Ibid.  p.  29;  7th  i-,l.,  p.  21. 


94  MALTHQS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

rainy  day ;  in  the  short  moments  of  plenty  they  do 
not  think  of  the  long  days  of  want.  Intemperate 
living  as  well  as  the  rigour  and  the  accidents  of  a 
hunting  life  cut  off  numbers  in  their  prime.  They 
are  subject  to  diseases  and  invent  no  remedies.  Their 
acquiescence  in  dirt  leads  to  pestilences,  but  they  in- 
vent no  sanitary  reforms  ;  and  their  thinly -peopled 
country  loses  its  natural  exemption  from  epidemics. 
Their  wars  are  internecine,  for  they  are  largely 
prompted  by  sheer  self-preservation,  and  the  thought 
that  if  the  one  combatant  lives  the  other  cannot. 
Cannibalism  itself  was  at  first  due  to  extreme  want, 
though  what  occasional  hunger  had  begun,  hate  per- 
petuated in  a  custom.  This  and  the  low  cunning 
and  mean  strategy,  due  to  a  resolve  to  survive  at 
all  costs,  are  the  prime  inventions  of  the  struggle^  for 
existence  on  these  low  levels. 

Such  are  the  causes  by  which  the  numbers  of  the 
North  American  Indians  are  kept  down  to  a  very  low 
figure ;  but,  low  as  it  is,  the  figure  is  high  enough  for 
the  food.  Apart  from  a  difference  in  the  standard  of 
living,  the  proportion  of  population  to  food  is  similar 
over  the  inhabited  world  ;  and  in  the  same  neigh- 
bourhood or  among  cognate  races  it  will  be  almost 
identical.  A  diminution  in  one  Indian  tribe,  not 
being  voluntary,  will  not  be  the  cause  of  plenty  to 
the  survivors  ;  it  has  been  the  effect  of  want,  and  it 
will  simply  weaken  the  collective  force  of  the  tribe 
in  the  struggle  against  others.1 

The  supremacy  of  want  as  the  ultimate  check  on 

1  2nd  ed.,  pp.  37,  45  ;  7th  ed.,  pp.  27,  32. 


CHAP,  iv.]     THE  SAVAGE,  BARBARIAN,  AND  ORIENTAL.      95 

population  is  illustrated  by  the  instant  expansion  of 
population  which  is  produced  in  these  grades  of 
humanity  by  an  accession  of  plenty.  When  a  tribe 
falls  upon  fertile  land,  its  numbers  swell,  and  its  col- 
lective might,  depending  on  numbers,  becomes  greater. 
The  increase  of  food,  however,  seems  in  this  case  to 
I'-a-l  to  nothing  else  than  increase  of  numbers.  There 
is  a  melancholy  equality  of  suffering  between  tribe  and 
tribe,  as  well  as  between  members  of  the  same  tribe. 
There  is  no  distinction  of  rank,  but  only  of  sex  and 
bodily  strength,  as  regards  endurance  of  hardships. 

It  is  in  this  connection  that  Mai  thus  throws  some 
light  on  the  question  how  progress  could  ever  take 
place  at  all.  His  answer  is  not  unlike  Adam  Smith's 
remark  about  the  connection  of  high  wages  with  good 
work,  lie  says,  that  beyond  a  certain  limit,  hard 
fare  and  great  want  depress  men  below  the  very 
capacity  of  improvement ;  comfort  must  reach  a 
certain  height  before  the  desires  of  civilized  life  can 
come  into  being  at  all.  If  the  American  tribes,  he 
says,  have  remained  hunters,  it  is  not  simply  because 
they  have  not  increased  in  numbers  sufficiently  to 
render  the  pastoral  or  agricultural  state  necessary  to 
them.  Reasons  which  Malthas  does  not  pretend  to 
icnlarise,1  and  which  he  allows  to  be  unconnected 
with  mere  increase  or  decrease  of  numbers,  have  pre- 
vented these  tribes  from  ever  trying  to  raise  cat  th- 
row corn  at  all.  "If  hunger  alone  coul<l  have 
]T  >nij>t«  <1  the  savage  tribes  of  America  to  such  a 

1  Th ..u-li,  like  Coleridge  (MS.  note  in  another  place),  he  m. 

bran«  ly. 


96  MAT/THUS   AND   HIS  WORK.  [P.K.I. 

change  in  their  habits.  I  do  not  conceive  that  there 

O  ' 

would  have  been  a  single  nation  of  hunters  and  fishers 
remaining ;  but  it  is  evident  that  some  fortunate 
train  of  circumstances,  in  addition  to  this  stimulus, 
is  necessary  for  this  purpose  ;  and  it  is  undoubtedly 
probable  that  these  arts  of  obtaining  food  will  be  first 
invented  and  improved  in  those  spots  which  are  best 
suited  to  them,  and  where  the  natural  fertility  of  the 
situation,  by  allowing  a  greater  number  of  people  to 
subsist  together,  would  give  the  fairest  chance  to  the 
inventive  powers  of  the  human  mind."  "  A  certain 
degree  of  [political]  security  is  perhaps  still  more 
necessary  than  richness  of  soil  to  encourage  the  change 
from  the  pastoral  to  the  agricultural  state."  These 
passages  are  remarkable  because  they  seem  to  con- 
tradict the  general  tenor  of  the  author's  writings. 
We  were  told  with  great  emphasis  in  the  first  edition 
of  the  essay  that  difficulties  generate  talents,2  and 
even  the  second  and  later  are  full  of  approving  com- 
mentaries on  the  proverb,  "  Necessity  is  the  mother 
of  invention."3  The  contradiction  is  soon  solved. 
Mai  thus  has  no  faith  in  the  civilizing  power  of  com- 
petition when  it  means  a  struggle  among  starved 
men  for  bare  life,  but  much  faith  in  it  when  it  means 
the  struggle  for  greater  comfort  among  those  who 
already  have  the  animal  necessaries.4  The  signifi- 

1  2nd  ed.,  pp.  43,  92;  7th  ed.,  pp.  31,  64.     Cf.  I.  vi.,  2nd  ed.,  p.  82  n.  ; 
7th  ed.,  p.  57  n. 

2  See  above,  pp.  35,  36. 

3  E.g.  2nd  ed.,  II.  ii.  199;  7th  ed.,  p.  135. 

4  Compare  the  roggestive  remarks  of  Rogers,  Six  Centuries,  pp.  270, 
271.       He  thinks  that  a  movement  like  Lollardi.sm  could  not   have 
succeeded  in  times  of  utter  depression. 


CHAP,  iv.]     THE  SAVAGE,  BARBARIAN,  AND  ORIENTAL.     97 

cance  of  his  admissions  will  be  noticed  later.  Mean- 
while it  must  be  observed  that  the  passage  just 
quoted  is  not  perfectly  precise.  The  larger  the 
society,  the  greater  might  be  the  division  of  labour 
ami  consequent  stimulus  to  invention ;  but  a  tribe 
might  be  large  and  yet  have  little  in  it  of  a  society, 
and  still  less  of  a  division  of  labour.  Without 
such  favouring  circumstances  as  Malthus  mentions 
the  progress  cannot  take  place  ;  but  even  with  them 
it  need  not ;  they  are  therefore  not  the  real  motive 
power. 

The  account  of  the  state  of  population  among  the 
South  Sea  Islanders,1  which  comes  next  in  order  to 
the  chapter  on  the  American  Indians,  is  an  illustration 
of  these  remarks.  These  savages  live  in  a  fertile 
country  and  yet  they  make  no  progress.  As  this 
is  not  the  only  point  illustrated,  it  is  worth  while 
to  look  at  the  chapter  in  detail. 

Malthus  begins  by  observing  that  population  must 
not  be  thought  more  subject  to  checks  on  an  island 
than  on  a  continent.  The  Abbd  Raynal,  in  his  book 
on  the  Indies,  had  tried  to  explain  a  number  of 
modem  customs  that  retarded  population  *  by  r 

them  to  an    insular    origin.      He    thought  that 

were   caused  at   first  by   the    over-population 

of    Dritnin    and    other    islands,   and    were   imported 

in    into   tin*  continents,  to  the  perplexity  of 

r  ages.     But  as  a  matter  of  fact  population  on 

n  lands  is  subject  to  the  same   laws  as  on 

ml*,   though  the  limits  are  not  so  obvious  to 

<ny,  Book  I   •  h.  v.          *  E.  g.  r.  .  and  late  nrnrriagM, 


MALTIIUS   AND  HIS   WORK.  [BK.  i. 

common  observation,  and  the  case  is  not  put  so  neatly 
in  a  nutshell.  A  nation  on  the  continent  may  be  as 
completely  surrounded  by  its  enemies  or  its  rivals, 
savage  or  civilized,  as  any  islanders  by  the  sea ;  and 
emigration  may  be  as  difficult  in  the  one  case  as  in  the 
other.  Both  continent  and  island  are  peopled  up  to 
their  actual  produce.  "  There  is  probably  no  island 
yet  known,  the  produce  of  which  could  not  be  further 
increased.  This  is  all  that  can  be  said  of  the  whole 
earth.  Both  are  peopled  up  to  their  actual  produce. 
And  the  whole  earth  is  in  this  respect  like  an  island."1 
The  earth  is  indeed  more  isolated  than  any  island  of 
the  sea,  for  no  emigration  from  it  is  possible.  The 
question,  therefore,  to  be  asked  about  the  whole  earth 
as  about  any  part  of  it,  is,  "  By  what  means  the 
inhabitants  are  reduced  to  such  numbers  as  it  can 
support  ? " 

This  was  the  question  which  forced  itself  on  Captain 
Cook  when  he  visited  the  islands  of  the  Pacific  and 
Indian  Oceans.  Some  of  his  experiences  there,  espe- 
cially in  New  Zealand,  show  that  the  native  popu- 
lation was  kept  down  in  nearly  the  same  way  as  the 
American.  Their  chief  peculiarity  is  the  extreme 
violence  of  their  local  feuds.  The  people  of  every 
village  he  visited  petitioned  him  to  destroy  the 
people  of  the  next,  ami  "  if  I  had  listened  to  them 
I  should  have  extirpated  the  whole  race."  A  sense 
of  human  kinship  is  impossible  at  so  low  a  level 
of  being ;  and  the  internecine  wars  of  the  New 
Zealanders  were  the  chief  check  to  their  numbers, 

1  2nd  cd.,  p.  46  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  33.     Cf.  pp.  290  and  339. 


CHAI-.  iv.]     THE  SAVAGE,  BARBAIUAX,  AND  ORIENTAL.      99 

which,    from   the    distressing    effects   of    occasional 
•ities,  would  seem  always  at  the  best   to   have 
been  close  to  the  limits  of  the  food. 

The  first  impression  of  common  sense  is  that  dis- 
tress is  natural  where  food  is  scanty,  and  unnatural 
where  it  is  plentiful.  But  "if  we  turn  our  eyes  from 
the  thinly-scattered  inhabitants  of  New  Zealand  to  the 
•  led  shores  of  Otaheite  and  the  Society  Islands" 
find  no  such  phenomenon.  "All  apprehension 
of  death  seems  at  first  sight  to  be  banished  from  a 
country  that  is  described  to  be  fruitful  as  the  garden 
of  the  Hesperides."  But  reflection  tells  us  that 
happiness  and  plenty  are  the  most  powerful  causes 
of  increase.  We  might,  therefore,  expect  a  large 
population  in  Otaheite;  at  its  first  start  it  might 
double  itself  not  in  twenty -five  but  in  fifteen  years. 
tin  Cook  estimated  it  (on  his  second  voyage  in 
1773)  as  204,000.  How  could  a  country  about  one 
hundred  and  twenty  miles  in  circuit  support  an 
increase  that  doubled  these  numbers  in  twenty-live 
years?  Emigration  is  impossible,  for  the  other 
islands  are  in  the  same  situation.  Further  cultiva- 
tion is  inadequate,  for  scientific  invention  is  quite 
ing.  The  answer  is  that  the  increase  does  not 
take  place,  and  yet  there  is  no  miracle.  Licentious- 
ness among  the  higher  classes,  and  infanticide 
amongst  all  classes,  are  freely  practised.  The  free 
permission  of  infant'n -Me  no  doubt,  as  Hume  remarks,1 
tends  as  a  rule  rather  to  increase  than  to  diminish 

1  In  £«oyj,  vol.  I,  Essay  XL,  rojntbnune*  of  Ancient  Nations,  p. 

08). 

11   - 


100  MALTHUS  AXD  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  I. 

population,  for  "by  removing  the  terrors  of  too 
numerous  a  family  it  would  engage  many  people  in 
marriage,"  and  such  is  the  force  of  natural  affection, 
that  comparatively  few  parents  would  carry  out  their 
first  intentions.  But  in  Otaheite  in  its  old  state 
custom  had  made  infanticide  easy,  and  it  was  a  real 
check.  War  against  other  islands  was  a  third  check, 
frequently  destroying  the  food  as  well  as  the  people, 
thus  striking  down  two  generations  at  once.  All 
these  checks  notwithstanding,  the  population  was  up 
to  the  level  of  the  food,  and  there  was  as  much 
scarcity  and  keen  distress  as  on  any  barren  island. 

Such  at  least  was  the  state  of  things  discovered  by 
Captain  Cook  in  his  three  voyages  (the  last  in  1778) 
and  Captain  Vancouver  (in  1791).  On  the  other  hand, 
the  author  of  A  Missionary  Voyage  to  the  South  Pacific 
Ocean  in  1796-8  (London,  1799)  found  a  people  very 
scanty  as  compared  with  the  food.  The  accuracy  of 
both  accounts  is  borne  out  by  the  description  of  the 
habits  of  the  people  at  these  two  periods.  Captain 
Cook  says  they  were  careful  to  save  up  every  scrap  of 
food,  and  yet  suffered  often  from  famine.  The  mission- 
aries observe  the  frequency  of  famine  in  the  Friendly 
Islands  and  the  Marquesas,  but  say  of  the  Otaheitans 
that  they  are  extremely  wasteful,  and  yet  never  seem 
to  be  in  want.  Even  in  the  intervals  between  one 
of  Cook's  voyages  and  another  the  state  of  the  island 
had  altered.  Mai  thus  sees  here  an  illustration  of  two 
facts.  The  one  is  that,  apart  from  changes  in  the 
standard  of  living,  population  fluctuates  between 
great  excess  and  great  defect,  great  numbers  with 


CHAP,  iv.]    THE  SAVAGE,  BARBARIAN,  AND  ORIENTAL.    101 

great  mortality,  and  great  comfort  with  rapid  multi- 
plication of  numbers.  The  other,  which  explains  the 
first,  is  that  any  cause  affecting  population,  either 
towards  increase  or  towards  decrease,  continues  to 

for  some  time  after  the  disappearance  of  the 
circumstances  that  first  occasioned  it.  For  example, 
over-populousness  would  lead  to  wars,1  and  the 
enmities  of  these  wars  would  long  survive  their  first 
occasion.  Again,  over-populousness  would  lead  to 
greater  infanticide  and  vice,  which  would  become 
habitual.  New  circumstances  would,  no  doubt,  after 
a  time  bring  new  habits,  and,  to  use  the  author's 
words,  would  "restore  the  population,  which  could  not 
long  be  kept  below  its  natural  level  without  the  most 
extreme  violence.  How  far  European  contact  may 
operate  in  Otaheite  with  this  extreme  violence  and 

ont  it  from  recovering  its  former  population  is  a 
point  which  experience  only  can  determine.  But, 
should  this  be  the  case,  I  have  no  doubt  that  on 

ing  the  causes  of  it,  we  should  find  them  to  be 
aggravated  vice  and  misery."1  As  a  matter  of  fact 

r  European  contact  has  caused  a  diminution,  or 
exactor  inquiry  has  made  a  lower  estimate  of  the 
population  of  all  P«  .  The  people  of  the  whole 

Society  Islands  is  reckoned  at  between  15,000  and 
18,000,s  which  is  a  long  way  from  Cook's  estimate 
of  204,000  for  Otaheite  alone.  We  can  hardly 

however,  that  t  and  misery  of  Ota: 

are  more  than  ten  times  as  great  as  they  wei 

f.  Plato,  R*pt),  41. 

•  Behm  and  Wagner  (Berdlk.  d.  Erie,  1882)  gire  it  at  10,300. 


102  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  AYOKK.  [BK.  I. 

1773  ;  and  perhaps  we  may  suppose  Mai  thus  to  mean 
that,  if  the  European  influences  were  of  the  same 
character  at  the  end  as  they  were  at  the  beginning, 
and  were  as  pernicious  to  the  Polynesian  as  to  the 
Red  Indian,  the  language  of  pessimism  would  be 
justified.  The  passage  at  least  shows  how  unfair  it 
is  to  suppose  Malthus  to  desire  at  all  costs  a  small 
population ;  he  is  careful  to  say  that,  while  vice  in 
Otaheite  by  reducing  the  numbers  caused  a  transient 
plenty  among  the  survivors,  still  "  a  cause  which  may 
prevent  any  particular  evil  may  be  beyond  comparison 
worse  than  the  evil  itself." l  Life  itself  may  be 
bought  too  dear. 

No  good  is  done,  however,  by  denying  that  ex- 
cessive numbers  are  an  evil,  or  by  optimistic  asser- 
tion that  if  men  are  only  good  they  will  be  happy. 
There  is  at  least  one  Polynesian  island  whose  past 
history  gives  a  picturesque  proof  of  the  contrary. 
Pitcairn,  "  the  lonely  isle  of  the  Mutineers/'  was  a 
moral  contrast  to  Otaheite.  The  inhabitants  owed 
nothing  good  to  their  parents,  who  were  the  muti- 
neers of  H.M.S.  *  Bounty/  and  the  women  of  Otaheite 
that  came  with  them  in  1790,  when  they  first  took 
refuge  in  Pitcairn  Island.  They  owed  all  to  the 
religious  teaching  of  John  Adams,  which  made  them 
so  good,  that  there  were  few  like  them  on  the 
earth.2  But  in  latitudes  just  touching  the  tropics, 
with  a  single  square  mile  of  poor  soil,  surrounded 
by  wide  ocean,  they  had  no  outlet  for  trade  and 

1  2nd  ed.,  p.  57  n.;  7th  ed.,  p.  40  n. 

2  Rrport  of  Admiral  D'Horssy  to  the  Admiralty,  1878. 


iv.]    THE  SAVAGE,  BARBARIAN,  AXD  ORIENTAL.     103 

modern  arts.  Like  the  inhabitants  of  Godwin's 
t'lopia,1  they  soon  peopled  the  little  country  to  the 
full  extent  of  the  food  that  could  be  got  by  the  old 
methods,  and,  unlike  the  Utopians,  they  had  not 
skill  to  invent  new.  If  they  had  not  drawn  the 
line  for  themselves,  misery  would  have  done  it  for 
them.  Their  little  colony  at  its  first  founding  con- 

1  of  fifteen  men  and  twelve  women.  Fourteen 
men  and  many  women  died  off  in  the  course  of  the 
ten  years  which  passed  before  the  time  of  moral 
regeneration.  But  they  left  many  children;  and, 
win -11  the  patriarch  John  Adams  was  visited  by  a 
passing  ship  in  1814,  he  was  surrounded  by  a  happy 

•  of  devout  families.  Rapidly  outgrowing  the 
resources  of  the  place,  these  simple  folk  removed  in 
1831  to  Tahiti,  eighty-seven  strong.  Some  remained 
there  ;  others  had  no  pleasure  in  their  new  abode, 
and  came  back  to  suffer  affliction  with  the  people 
of  God,  believing  with  Mai  thus  that  "a  cause  which 
may  prevent  any  particular  evil  may  be  beyond  all 
comparison  worse  than  the  evil  itself."  The  evil  \ 

.  however,  and,  in  default  of  celibacy  or  new  ways 
of  luvad  winning,  t heir  only  cure  seemed  emigration. 
So  in  1855,  Tahiti  seeming  im-li^iMe,  they  jouni 
further  west  to  Norfolk  I>land.  Th»ui;_rh  there  are 
more  than  four  hundred  and  forty  to  the  square 
mile  in  England  and  Wales,  two  hundred  i"  "pie  of 
j.ii'iiitive  sort  had  been  certainly  too  many  for 
the  single  square  mile  of  Pite.-uni  Island  ;  and  they 
did  not  i  moment  too  soon,  ll-in  Bid 

«  Seoab-  7,  18. 


104  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

brought  back  two  entire  families  (of  seventeen 
persons)  in  1859.  One  or  two  stray  travellers  joined 
them  five  years  afterwards ;  but,  with  allowance  for 
these,  we  find  that  the  increase  of  population  on  Pit- 
cairn  Island  reaches  the  highest  estimate  of  Malthus. 
When  the  English  Admiral  D'Horsey  visited  the 
place  in  1878,  the  quarter  of  a  hundred  had  grown  in 
nineteen  years,  at  the  moderate  cost  of  twelve  deaths, 
to  a  population  of  ninety1  persons.  The  primeval 
virtues  will  avail  little  without  the  modern  arts. 

Returning  to  Malthus,  we  find  him  following  an 
order  of  his  own,  in  rough  conformity  with  the 
orthodox  progress  from  deer  to  sheep,  and  from 
sheep  to  corn.  He  takes  us  from  Polynesian  savages 
to  the  nomad  pastoral  nations  of  ancient  Europe.2 
The  vast  migrations  and  their  momentous  historical 
effects  he  ascribes  to  the  "  constant  tendency  in  the 
human  race  to  increase  "  beyond  its  food,  and  thinks 
that  when  history  has  been  rewritten  it  will  contain 
more  of  this.3  "  The  misfortune  of  history  is,  that 
while  the  particular  motives  of  a  few  princes  and 
leaders  are  sometimes  detailed  with  accuracy,  the 
general  causes  which  crowd  their  standards  with 
willing  followers  are  totally  overlooked."  4  At  first 
sight  the  phenomenon  of  civilized  agricultural 
nations  unable  to  repel  the  invasion  of  shepherds 
seems  incredible ;  a  country  in  pasture  cannot 
possibly  support  so  many  inhabitants  as  a  country 

1  Behm  and  Wagner  say  ninety-three. 

2  Essay,  Book  I.  ch.  vi.  3  See  above,  p.  83. 

*  2nd  ed.,  p.  68  n. ;  3rd  ed.,  p.  115  n.  He  afterwards  altered  "  totally  " 
to  «  often  entirely,"  7th  ed.,  p.  47  n. 


CHAP,  iv.]    THE  SAVAGE,  BARBARIAN,  AND  ORIENTAL.     105 

iii  tillage.     A  shepherd,  it  is  true,  is  nearer  to  the 
skilled  labourer  than  a  hunter  ;  he  does  not  simply 
take  what  nature  gives  him,  where  nature  puts  it  ; 
he  keeps  the  desired  objects  of  consumption  under 
his  own  control,  and  his  life  is  stronger  because  more 
social.     Early  African  colonization,  as  Adam  Smith 
pointed  out,  was  less  successful  than  early  American, 
because  the  natives,  being  shepherds  and  even  farmers 
rather  than  fishermen,  were  stronger  in  their  resources 
and  more  united  than  the  American  aborigines,  so 
that  the  European  intruders  were  not  able  to  displace 
them.1      We   should    have    expected    the    Scythian, 
(  'imbrian,  and  Gothic  invaders  of  ancient  times  to 
had    a    similar   rebuff.     "But    what    renders 
nations   of    shepherds    so   formidable    is   the   power 
\\lii.h   they  possess  of  moving  altogether,  and  the 
necessity  they  frequently  feel  of  exerting  this  power 
in   search  of  fresh  pasture  for  their  herds."'     They 
always  in  their  breeding  stock  a  reserve  of  food 
f<>r  an  emergency.     The  mere  consciousness  that  tli<  ir 
mode  of  life  does  not  bind  them  to  one  place  gives 
them    less  anxiety  about    providing  for  a   family. 
efore,  when  they  exhaust  one  region  and  begin 
to  feel   the   pinch   of  want,   they   make   an   armed 
^ration  on  the  scale  of  whole  tribes  at  once,  for 
tin-  o<  <  nji.ition  of  more  fruitful  regions,  and,  as  a  rule, 
the  conquest  of  them  by  force.     The  law  of  tin  ir  life 
is  a  series  of  periodical  "struggles  for  existence"8 
between  one  nation  and  another,  in  \\hi.-h  the  fittest 


Nation*,  Book  IV.  cli.  M  ,,.  286  (ed.  MacC.). 

•  2nded.,  p.  66;  7th  .,1.  p.  46. 
J  His  own  word  :  2nd  ed.,  p.  07  ;  7th  «1  .  ;• 


106  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

survive  at  the  cost  of  a  prodigious  waste  of  human 
life. 

The  milder  initial  stage  of  this  process  is  illustrated 
by  the  separation  of  Abram  and  Lot  in  the  book  of 
Genesis.1  Abram  "was  very  rich  in  cattle."  "Lot  also 
had  flocks  and  herds  and  tents.  And  the  land  was 
not  able  to  bear  them  that  they  might  dwell  together, 
for  their  substance  was  great,  so  that  they  could  not 
dwell  together.  And  there  was  a  strife  between  the 
herdmen  of  Abram's  cattle  and  the  herdmen  of  Lot's 
cattle."  They  agreed,  therefore,  to  separate,  Lot  choos- 
ing the  fertile  valley  of  the  Jordan,  Abram  going  to 
the  left  into  the  land  of  Canaan.  Migrations  of  the 
same  sort,  more  or  less  peaceable,  are  described  by 
modern  writers  as  extending  the  Russian  people  from 
time  to  time  farther  and  farther  to  the  south  and 
east.2  In  the  instances  best  known  to  history  the 
migrations  were  far  from  peaceable,  and  the  puzzle 
has  been  to  account  for  their  recurrence.  The 
slaughter  of  the  German  barbarians  by  Marius, 
Caesar,  Drusus,  Tiberius,  Germanicus  did  not  prevent 
the  reappearance  of  similar  hordes  of  invaders  a 
generation  later.  Claudius  destroyed  a  quarter  of  a 
million  of  Goths ;  Aurelian  and  Probus  had  the  same 
work  to  do  again.  Under  Diocletian  the  barbarians, 
finding  the  conquest  of  Rome  too  much  for  them, 
slaughtered  one  another  in  frontier  wars.  No  losses 
seemed  to  exhaust  the  permanent  possibilities  of 
population  in  those  quarters.  At  last  in  the  fourth 

1  Gen.  xiii.  1 — 9.     Essay,  2nd  ed,  p.  65  ;  7th  el.,  p.  45. 

2  See  e.  g.  Mackenzie  Wallace  :  Russia,  vol.  ii.  pp.  48,  90,  &c. 


CIIAIMV.]    THE  SAVAGE,  BARRABIAN,  AND  ORIENTAL,    107 

century  "  clouds  of  barbarians  seemed  to  collect  from 
all  parts  of  the  northern  hemisphere.  Gathering 
fresh  darkness  and  terror  as  they  rolled  on,  the 
congregated  bodies  at  length  obscured  the  sun  of 
Italy  and  sunk  the  Western  world  in  night."1 

Why  were  the  resources  of  the  North  so  inex- 
haustible ?  Simply  because  the  power  of  increase  is 
inexhaustible.  The  North  was  not,  it  is  true,  more 
densely  peopled  then  than  now.  "The  climate  of 
ancient  Germany  has  been  mollified  and  the  soil 
fertilized  by  the  labour  of  ten  centuries  from  the 
time  of  Charlemagne.  The  same  extent  of  ground 
which  at  present  maintains  in  ease  and  plenty  a 
million  of  husbandmen  and  artificers,  was  unable  to 
supply  a  hundred  thousand  lazy  warriors  with  the 
simple  necessaries  of  life.  The  Germans  abandoned 
their  immense  forests  to  the  exercise  of  hunting, 
cm  ployed  in  pasturage  the  most  considerable  part 
of  their  lands,  bestowed  on  the  small  remainder  a 
rude  and  careless  cultivation,  and  then  accused  the 
ss  and  sterility  of  a  country  that  refused  to 
maintain  the  multitude  of  its  inhabitants.  When 
the  return  of  famine  severely  admonished  them  of 
the  importance  of  the  arts,  the  national  distress 
was  sometimes  alleviated  l.y  the  emigration  of  a 
third,  perhaps,  or  a  fourth  part  of  their  youth."  In 
short,  the  countries  were  more  than  fully  ]" 
up  to  their  actual  prndncc  ;  ami,  though  by  agri- 
culture the  actual  ]>n>duce  would  have  been  made 
gre  t  agriculture  was  not  extended.  The 

1  Bsxty,  2nl  , -,!..  ],.  ,  1..  ],],.  :,o  :,i.       ?  G 


108  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [P.K.  i. 

passion  of  the  Germans  for  wine  did  not  lead  them 
to  plant  vineyards  by  the  Khine  and  Danube,  but 
to  rob  the  vintage  of  Italy.  "  Pigrum  quin  immo 
et  iners  videtur  sudore  acquirere  quod  possis  sanguine 
parare."1  Malthus  supposes  that  even  the  Mark 
system  of  land-holding,  with  its  absence  of  cities 
and  its  periodical  redistributions  of  land,  may  have 
sprung  from  a  political  motive,  the  fear  of  accustom- 
ing the  people  to  a  settled  agricultural  life,  and  the 
desire  to  make  emigration  less  irksome  to  them.2  So 
long  as  there  were  weaker  peoples  to  be  plundered,  the 
northern  nations  might  freely  double  their  numbers 
every  twenty -five  years,  or  oftener,  and  descend  again 
on  Italy  and  the  South.  Only  when  the  whole  was 
occupied  by  their  own  people  who  were  not  likely  to 
be  less  stout  for  defence  than  for  conquest,  were  the 
hordes  forced  back.  Not  perhaps  till  gunpowder  was 
invented  was  Europe  finally  safe  against  them.  Long 
after  their  last  inland  invasions,  the  Norsemen  found 
their  way  by  sea  to  the  shores  of  England  and  France. 
Gibbon's  account  of  the  matter  is,  according  to 
Malthus,  substantially  true.  The  only  flaw  is  that 
he  thinks  it  necessary,  in  denying  the  greater  popu- 
lousness  of  North  Europe  in  ancient  times,  to  deny 
the  possibility  of  a  rapid  increase  of  population.3  The 
German  people  were  on  the  whole  virtuous  and 
healthy  in  their  manners  of  living,  and,  the  checks 
to  increase  being  mainly  the  positive  ones  of  war 
and  famine,  the  increase  itself  was  prodigious.  But 

1  Tacitus,  Germ.  14.          2  2nd  ed.,  pp.  74,  77;  7th  ed.,  pp.  52,  53. 
3  Ch.  ix.  176:  "indeed  the  impossibility  of  the  supposition." 


CHAP,  iv.]    THE  SAVAGE,  BARBARIAN,  AND  ORIENTAL.     109 

Gibbon  is  greatly  in  advance  of  Montesquieu,  who 
believes  with  Sir  William  Temple,  Mariana,  and 
Machiavelli,  that  the  northern  countries  were,  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  more  densely  peopled  then  than  they 
art'  now,  and  that,  further,  when  the  Romans  repelled 
till-in,  a  huge  multitude  was  driven  far  north  and 
remained  there  biding  its  time.  The  same  (says 
M«>ntesquieu)  happened  under  Charlemagne,  and 
would  happen  again  if  a  modern  prince  were  to 
make  the  same  ravages  in  Europe ;  "  the  nations 
repulsed  to  the  north,  backed  against  the  limits  of 
the  universe,  would  there  make  a  firm  stand,  till  the 
moment  when  they  would  inundate  and  conquer 
Europe  a  third  time."  *  We  are  to  suppose  these 
immense  multitudes  living  "at  the  limits  of  the 
universe  "  on  ice  and  air  for  some  hundreds  of  years. 
If  this  is  to  answer  to  the  question-begging  question, 
why  the  North  is  less  fully  peopled  than  it  once 
was,  it  involves  a  miracle.  But  nothing  more  super- 
natural than  ordinary  laws  is  really  needed  to  explain 

movements  of  past. .ml  nations  a  thousand  years 
ago.  They  are  the  same  that  govern  the  Tartars  and 

>uins  now.2 

In  the  modern  nomads,8  it  is  true,  the  compara- 
tive  simplicity  of  the  circumstances   and  the  com- 

tive  thoroughness  of  our  knowledge  about  them, 
enable  us  to  see  plainly  that  the  loeal  distribution 
of  the  people  is  in  strict  accordance  with  the  local 

ribution    of    the    food,     in     other    words,    with 

.twfetir  ct  Decadence  de*  Romain*  eh.  xvi.  p.  138,  «l.  1876. 
1  -Eaay,  2nd  el.,  j>   7'-  ;  7th  cd.,  p.  63.  »  Ibid.  Bk.  1.  . -h. 


110  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  i. 

"  the  quantity  of  food  the  people  can  obtain  in  the 
actual  state  of  their  industry  and  habits. "  We 
should  see  the  same  thing  of  the  rest  of  the  world's 
inhabitants,  if  the  complicated  commerce  of  civilized 
nations  did  not  make  it  less  gross  and  palpable.  The 
power  of  the  earth  to  support  life  may  be  compared 
with  the  power  of  a  horse  to  carry  burdens.  He  is 
strong  in  proportion  to  the  strength  of  his  weakest 
part,  as  a  chain  to  the  strength  of  its  weakest  link ; 
and  the  earth's  powers  of  nourishment  are  great  in 
proportion  to  their  greatness  in  the  worst  seasons  of 
the  year.1  Again,  owing  to  imperfect  facilities  for 
distribution,  one  part  of  a  society  may  suffer  want 
when  another  is  in  plenty.2  Among  the  Tartars  and 
the  Arabs  this  is  plainly  seen  ;  and  it  is  clear,  too, 
how  the  waste  of  life  from  war  not  only  acts  as  a 
direct  check  on  population,  but  checks  it  indirectly 
by  repressing  productive  industry.  Its  fruits  would 
have  no  chance  of  preservation.  "  Even  the  con- 
struction of  a  well  requires  some  funds  or  labour  in 
advance,  and  war  may  destroy  in  one  day  the  work 
of  many  months  and  the  resources  of  a  whole  year."  3 
When  once  warlike  habits  have  become  fixed,  the  two 
evils,  war  and  scarcity,  reproduce  and  perpetuate  one 
another.  The  encouragements  held  out  to  large 
families  by  the  Mohammedan  religion  have  a  like 
effect.  "  The  promise  of  Paradise  to  every  man  who 
had  ten  children  would  but  little  increase  their 
numbers,  though  it  might  greatly  increase  their 

1  2nd  ed.,  p.  99;  7th  ed.,  p.  68.  2  7Lh  ed ^  p  82> 

*  2nd  ed.,  p.  92;  7th  ed.,  p.  63. 


CHAP,  iv.]     THE  SAVAGE,  BARBAKIAX,  AND  OIUEXTAL.    Ill 

ry."1  It  could  only  increase  their  numbers  if 
it  increased  their  food,  and  it  could  not  increase  their 
food  without  changing  their  warlike  habits  into  habits 
of  industry.  Failing  this,  it  simply  creates  a  constant 

siness  (through  want  and  poverty)  that  multi- 
plies occasions  of  war.  Fortunately  for  himself,  the 
Arab  often  proportions  his  religious  obedience  to  the 
extent  of  his  resources,2  and  in  hard  times,  "when 
there  is  a  pig  at  hand  and  no  Koran,"  he  thinks  best 
to  eat  what  God  has  given  him. 

Nothing  but  increase  of  food  will  permanently 
increase  population,  and  where  there  is  food  the  in- 
crease will  reach  up  to  it.  In  those  parts  of  Africa 
that  have  furnished  the  Western  slave  supplies,  there 
i  no  discernible  gap  from  the  "hundred  years* 
exportation  of  negroes  which  has  blackened  half 

lica,"  Even  in  Egypt,  where  there  is  a  striking 
contrast  between  natural  fertility  and  human  lethargy, 
the  cause  is  not  any  deficiency  in  the  principle  of 
increase.  It  is  that  property  is  insecure,  the  govern- 
ment being  despotic  and  its  exactions  indefinite.  It 
is  not  the  want  of  population  that  has  checked 
iii'hiMrv,  but  tin-  want  of  industry  that  has  checked 
population  ;  and  it  is  bad  government  that  has  occa- 
.  ant  of  industry.  "Ignorance  and  despot- 
ism seem  to  have  no  tendency  to  destroy  the  passion 
whirli  prompts  to  increase,  but  they  effectually  destroy 

'  li'-cks  to  it  from  reason  and  forethought.   .   .  . 


1  2nd  ctl.,  i>.  i.,  ]>.  05. 

1  Ibui.  i>.  ; 

1  Col  MS.  notes)  reminds  our  author  that  Mahomet  all 

oblations  of  */ 


11-2  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

Industry  cannot  exist  without  foresight  and  security  ; 
the  indolence  of  the  savage  is  well  known,  and  the 
poor  Egyptian  or  Abyssinian  farmer  without  capital, 
who  rents  land  which  is  let  out  yearly  to  the  highest 
bidder,  and  who  is  constantly  subject  to  the  demands 
of  his  tyrannical  masters,  to  the  casual  plunder  of  an 
enemy,  and  not  unfrequently  to  the  violation  of  his 
miserable  contract,  can  have  no  heart  to  be  indus- 
trious, and,  if  he  had,  could  not  exercise  that  industry 
with  success.  Even  poverty  itself,  which  appears  to 
be  the  great  spur  to  industry,  when  it  has  once  passed 
certain  limits  almost  ceases  to  operate.  The  indigence 
which  is  hopeless  destroys  all  vigorous  exertion,  and 
confines  the  efforts  to  what  is  sufficient  for  bare 
existence.1  It  is  the  hope  of  bettering  our  condition, 
and  the  fear  of  want  rather  than  want  itself,  that  is 
the  best  stimulus  to  industry ;  and  its  most  constant 
and  best  directed  efforts  will  almost  invariably  be 
found  among  a  class  of  people  above  the  class  of  the 
wretchedly  poor."  This  passage  repeats  an  idea 
expressed  in  every  book  of  the  essay.3  Government 
can  retard  the  increase  of  population  both  directly 
and  indirectly,  but  can  only  advance  it  indirectly, 
namely,  by  encouraging  industry,  more  especially 
agriculture.  For  example,  industrious  agriculture 
has  made  China  capable  of  bearing  a  great  population, 
though  other  causes  of  a  more  equivocal  character 
have  made  it  exceed  its  great  capacities,  and  its 
excessive  numbers  are  cut  down  by  famine  and  child 

1  Cf.  above,  p.  96,  &c. 

2  2nd  ed.,  III.  xi.  474-5;  7th  ed.,  III.  xiv.  381. 

J  Especially  Book  I.  ch.  x.,  the  chapter  on  Turkey. 


CHAP,  iv.]    THE  SAVAGE,  BARBARIAN,  AND  ORIENTAL.    113 

murder.1  The  Roman  emperors  found  it  impossible 
by  legislation  to  promote  the  increase  of  the  old 
Roman  stock,  because  they  found  it  impossible  to 
restore  the  old  Roman  habits  of  industry,  though 
believers  in  the  superior  populousness  of  ancient 
nations  used  to  mistake  their  intentions  for  ac.com- 
plished  facts 

In  the  eighteenth-century  dispute  about  the  popu- 
lousness of  ancient  nations  (one  particular  skirmish 
in  the  general  battle  of  the  books)  we  have  seen  that 
Mai  thus  declares  for  the  moderns.  He  gives  his 
opinion  in  detached  passages  ;  but,  putting  together 
different  parts  wherever  we  can  find  them,  we 
discover  his  proof  to  depend  on  two  principles,  which 
are  corollaries  of  the  primary  doctrine  of  the  essay. 
The  first  is,  that  without  the  extension  of  agriculture 
or  the  better  distribution  of  its  fruits  there  can  bev 
n<>  increase  of  population;2  the  second  is,  that  what- 
ever is  unfavourable  to  industry  is  to  that  extent 
unfavourable  to  population.3 

Now  in  the  early  days  of  Greece  and  Rome4  tin- 
population  ought  on  these  principles  to  have  brm 
a  large  one,  for  not  only  was  agriculture  actively 
pros.  but  property  and  wraith  were  more 

equally  divided  among  the  people  than  in  later 
tun' -s.  On  the  other  hand,  the  numbers  were  always 
up  to  the  level  of  the  resources ;  and  the  smalluess  of 
the  political  divisions  made  law-givers  like  Solon, 

«  £*wy,  fik.  I  China  and  Japan.' 

•  2nd  ed.,  p.  162;  7th  ed.,  p.  112.          •  /fc.  7th  ed.,  p.  HO. 

«  See  £«ay,  Bk.  I.  ch«. 


114  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

theorists  like  Plato  and  Aristotle,  conscious  of  the 
risk  of  over-population  and  full  of  plans  to  provide 
against  it.  It  is  one  of  Aristotle's  criticisms  of  Plato's 
Republic  that  Plato  has  not  sufficiently  met  this 
difficulty,  or  realized  that  a  community  of  goods  or  an 
equal  distribution  of  property  is  impossible  without  a 
limitation  of  families.  If  every  one  may  have  as 
many  children  as  he  pleases,  the  result  will  soon  be 
poverty  and  sedition.  Of  the  preventive  checks 
actually  recommended  by  the  highest  wisdom  of  the 
Greek  world,  the  mildest  is  late  marriages ;  the  rest 
include  exposure  and  abortion.  Colonization  was 
rather  adopted  in  practice  than  recommended  in 
theory.  Frequent  wars  and  occasional  plagues  were 
the  chief  positive  checks. 

In  Rome  even  more  evidently  than  in  Greece l  the 
causes  that  produced  inequality  of  property  led  also 
to  thinness  of  population.  In  our  own  days  the 
absorption  of  small  proprietors  by  large  would  have 
this  effect  in  a  less  degree,  because  the  large  would 
need  to  employ  the  labour  of  the  small.  In  Rome 
the  labour  was  done  by  slaves ;  and  the  wonder  was  not 
that  the  number  of  free  citizens  should  decrease,  but 
that  any  should  exist  at  all,  except  the  proprietors.2 

Yet  'the  legislation  of  Augustus  in  favour  of 
marriage,  and  the  universal  lamentation  of  the  later 
Roman  writers  over  the  extinction  of  the  old  Roman 
stock,  are  no  more  than  a  presumption  that  the 
population  was  decreasing,  not  a  proof  of  its  actual 

1  Sparta  is  the  chief  Greek  instance. 

2  2nd  ed.,  p.  172  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  118. 


CHAP,  iv.]    THE  SAVAGE,  BARBARIAN,  AND  ORIENTAL,     in 

small IK-SS,  while  the  prevalence  of  war  and  infanticide, 
so  often  used  to  prove  the  same  point,  tend  really 
to  do  the  opposite.  They  are  for  the  time  positive 
encouragements  to  marriage,  for  people  will  not 

ate  to  bring  children  into  the  world,  if  they  are 
either  free  to  kill  off  the  superfluous  or  certain  to 
find  sad  vacancies  ready  for  them.1  In  the  former 
case,  as  we  noticed,  parental  feeling  will  often  inter- 

\vith  the  infanticide,  and  save  rather  too  many 
than  too  few.2  Wars,  on  the  other  hand,  may  injure 
the  quality  of  the  population  by  removing  the  most 
.stalwart  and  even  the  most  intelligent  men  ;  but  there 
is  as  much  food  as  before,  there  is  more  room,  and 
tin -re  are  therefore  more  marriages,  till  all  the  gaps 
are  filled,  even  to  overflowing.3  Livy  need  not  have 
\\..ndered  that  in  the  Volscian  wars  the  more  were 
killed  the  more  seemed  to  come  on.  The  like  is  true 
nf  plague  and  famine  ;  epidemics,  like  the  small-pox, 
never  permanently  lessened  the  population, 
though  they  have  increased  the  mortality  of  the  in- 
fected countries.4  To  take  only  one  instance  (from 
Siissniilch)— a  third  of  the  people  in  Prussia  and 
Lithium  in  were  destroyed  by  the  plague  in  1710, 
and  in  1711  the  number  of  marriages  was  very  nearly 
double  the  average.6  Emigration  in  like  manner  may 
drain  off  the  best  blood  of  a  nation,  but  cannot  rod  in  •«• 
Itfl  numbers  for  any  length  of  time,  unless  the  nation 

1  2nd  ed.,p.  150  ;  cf.  pp.  164,  17^-3.    7th  ed.,  p.  104  ;  cf.  pp.  113,118. 

2  Beeabore,  p.  :•:». 

»  luted.,  p.  119  :  7th  ,,1.  AJM  :>15.    «  Amy, 7th  ed.,  p.  122. 

•  2nded.,  p.  2:.  I  .  7th  .1.  j..  -2W.    Cf.  2nd  ed.,  p] 

'.  IT    L18»1*Q  I  lump,  Pop.  qfAnc,  N.,  pp.  4K 

especially  504. 

I   i 


116  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

is  learning  a  new  standard  of  comfort.  Greece  and 
Rome  were  not  less  populous  because  they  were  great 
colonizers.1  The  known  existence  of  a  number  of  very 
active  checks  to  population,  instead  of  proving  that 
the  population  was  absolutely  small,  might  more 
naturally,  other  things  being  equal,  prove  it  to  have 
been  absolutely  large.  It  might  be  argued  that,  if 
the  population  had  not  been  great,  fewer  and  less 
potent  checks  would  have  done  the  work.2 

But  other  things  were  not  equal.  We  know  that 
the  gratuitous  distribution  of  foreign  corn  had  ruined 
Roman  husbandry.3  We  know  that  even  the  labour 
of  the  slaves  who  had  supplanted  the  free  labourers 
of  Italy  had  not  been  sufficiently  (or  sufficiently 
well)  directed  to  agriculture.  Moreover,  the  increase 
by  marriage  in  the  number  of  slaves  did  not  even 
balance  the  decrease  in  the  number  of  the  free  men  ; 
else  why  should  the  Romans  need  to  import  fresh  car- 
goes of  slaves  every  year  from  all  parts  of  the  world  ? 4 

In  short,  the  Roman  habits  had  become  "  unfavour- 
able to  industry,  and  therefore  to  population."  The 
very  necessity  for  such  a  law  as  the  Papia  Poppsea 
would  indicate  a  moral  depravity  inconsistent  with 
habits  of  industry.  This  strong  argument  had 
escaped  even  Hume,  who  thought  that  the  people 
would  increase  very  fast  under  the  Peace  of  Trajan 
and  the  Antonines,  forgetting  that  the  people  could 

*  7th  ed.,  pp.  163,  387,  394  ;  2nd  ed.,  pp.  113,  287,  292.     Cf.  1st  ed., 
pp.  118-19,  123  n. 

2  2nd  ed.,  p.  178  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  122.  3  7th  ed.,  p.  380,  top. 

4  2nd  ed.,  p.  175;  7th  ed.,  p.  120. 


CHAP,  iv.]     THE  SAVAGE,  BARBARIAN",  AND  OHIKNTAL.    117 

not  unlearn  their  habits  in  so  short  a  time  ;  unlearn- 
i.s  harder   than  learning,   especially  for  a  whole 
people ;  and,  "if  wars  do  not  depopulate  much  when 
industry  is  in  vigour,  peace  does  not  increase  popu- 
•a    much  when  industry  is  languishing."       Con- 
trariwise, it  might  be  argued  that  the  prevention  of 
child-murd  T  in  India  will  not  cause  over-population, 
win -ii  it  is  part  of  a  general  policy  accustoming  the 
people  to  European  habits. 

Allow,  then,  that  general  viciousness  is  inconsistent 

with    general    industry,    and   it  follows   that   those 

ancient  nations  in  which  the  first  prevailed  were  less 

populous   than  the  modern.     This  seems  to  be  the 

ment  of  Malthus  brought  to  a  focus.     From  the 

nee  of  censuses,2  it  is  strictly  deductive  ;  there 

could  not  have  been  so  many  people  as  now,   and 

therefore  there  were  not.3 

Expressed  in  more  technical  language,  the  meaning 
is,  that  where  there  is  nothing  present  but  the  posi- 
tive check  and  the  lower  kind  of  preventive,  the 
habits  of  the  people  are  necessarily  such  as  to  hinder 
an  increase  of  food  and  thereby  of  population.  When 
Europe  was  less  civilized,  it  was  not  more,  but  less 
thi.-kly  peopl 

1  2nd  ed.,  p.  175 ;  7th  ed.,  p.  120. 

•  2nd  . •,!..]..  !*<>;  7th,  l.j,   ui.     "It  is  therefore  upon  these  causes 
].--ii.l.-ntlyof  [Jn.l.-d.snys'besides']  actual  enumerations,— 
on  which  we  can  with  certainty  rely." 

1  Dr.  Wallace,  Du*  >  55,  had  given  Attica  in  its  palmy  days 

a  population  of  608  to  the  square  mile;    Eirjl.m.l    in  tin-  nineteenth 

187. 

«  Jbay,  Irt  «  ..p.  120,  in  Of. 

Wealth  </ jYa/ioiu,  IV.  vii.  254,  255. 


118  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  I. 

This  argument  seems  to  be  weakened  by  one 
consideration — that  the  poor  in  our  day  put  more 
into  their  idea  of  necessaries ;  they  have  a  higher 
standard  of  living  than  the  poor  2000  years  ago.  It 
might  therefore  be  said  with  justice  that  over-popula- 
tion (a  peopling  beyond  the  food)  begins  much  sooner 
with  us  than  with  them,  for  it  begins  at  a  point 
much  farther  removed  from  starvation,  and  that 
therefore  with  the  ancients  a  given  amount  of  food 
would  go  farther  and  feed  more.  But,  if  we  look 
only  to  the  poor  in  each  case,  the  difference  between 
the  ancient  standard  of  comfort  and  the  modern 
is  unhappily  much  smaller  than  the  difference 
between  their  meagre  industrial  resources  and  our 
ample  ones,  for  our  powers  of  production  have  grown 
far  more  rapidly  than  the  comfort  of  our  labouring 
population.  Such  difference  as  there  is  in  the 
standards  is  only  made  possible  by  moral  restraint, 
which  has  a  closer  affinity  with  modern  civilization 
than  with  ancient  or  mediaeval.1  The  history  of 
modern  civilization  is  largely  the  history  of  the  gradual 
victory  of  the  third  check  over  the  two  others  ;  and, 
as  one  of  the  chief  allies  of  the  third  has  been  com- 
mercial ambition,  the  victory  of  moral  restraint,  by 
causing  a  larger  industry,  has  caused  in  the  end  not 
a  smaller,  but  a  larger  population.2  The  increase  by 
being  deferred  has  been  made  only  the  more  certain 
and  permanent.  »/ 

1  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  p.  598 ;  7th  ed.,  p.  476. 

2  I.  c..cf.  2nd  ed.,  pp.  175,  178  ;  7th  ed.,  pp.  12Q,  122. 


c:i.u-.    v.]  XuRTH    AND    MID   EUROPE.  119 


CHAPTER  V. 

NORTH   AND   MID    EUROPE. 

Different  Effects  of  Commercial  Ambition  in  different  Countries — No 
>in;^le  safe  Criterion  of  National  Prosperity — Sussmilch's  "  Divine 
Plan "— Malthus  in  the  Region  of  Statistics— Hia  Northern  Tour 
—  In  Norway  the  truth  brought  home  by  the  very  nature  of  Place 
and  Industries— In  Sweden  less  obvious — In  Russia  quite  ignore  1  — 
Foundling  Hospitals  indefensible — Tendency  of  People  to  multiply 
beyond,  up  to,  or  simply  with  the  Food — Author  tripping — Facts 
the  Interpreters  and  the  Interpreted — Holland — The  best  pater 
patrice — Emigration  in  various  Aspects — Evidence  of  the  Author 
before  Emigration  Committee — Switzerland,  St.  Cergues  and  Leysin 
—The  pens  asinorum  of  the  subject. 

Tm:  broad  difference  between  a  savage  and  a  civil- 
ized population  is,  that  the  positive  checks  prevail  in 
tlic  j'l-eventive  in  the  other, — and  between 
ancient  and  modern  civilizations,  that  vice  and  misery 
nl  in  the  one,  moral  restraint  in  the  other.1     Yet 
\  eivili/nl  nation  in  modern  times  has  not  only 
passed  through   those  three  stages  in  the  course  of 
its  past  history,  but  contains  them  all  within  it  now 
as   a    matter  of  observation.      Its    early    history    was 
an    «  ur  after   independence  or   bare   life,  its 

history  an  endeavour  after  full  development; 
there   are  in    it    to   which    eivili/.ation 

has  not  des«-.-n.l.-«l.  and   in  which   the  struggle   for 
istence  prevails,  alongside  of  strata  in  which 

1  E»$ay  on  Population,  2nd  cd.,  p.  180  ;   7th  ed.,  p.  184 


120  MALTHUS  AND   HIS   WOUK.  [BK.  I. 

the  struggle  is  towards  ideals  of  commercial  ambition 
and  social  perfection. 

The  view  which  Malthus  takes  of  commercial  am- 
bition is  substantially  that  of  Adam  Smith.  As 
soon  as  commerce  is  separated  from  slavery,  as  soon 
as  wealth  is  a  man's  own  acquisition,  got  by  the 
sweat  of  his  own  brow,  then  the  desire  of  wealth 
has  a  new  social  aspect.  It  becomes  what  Adam 
Smith  calls  "  the  natural  desire  of  every  man  to  better 
his  own  condition  ; "  and  as  such  it  creates  modern 
commercial  society,  as  opposed  both  to  the  ancient 
society  built  upon  slavery,  and  to  the  feudal  built 
upon  war. 

This  vis  mediatrix  reipuUica,  the  desire  of  rising 
in  the  world,  so  glorified  in  the  Wealth  of  Nations1 
and  in  the  Essay  on  Population?  is  really  not  easy 
to  define.  It  is  a  very  composite  motive ;  and 
the  same  differences  of  race  (whatever  their  origin), 
which  lead  to  differences  of  intellect  and  language 
also  affect  a  nation's  standard  of  comfort,  as  soon  as 
it  can  be  said  to  have  one.  By  the  influence  of  good 
climate  and  much  intercourse  with  foreigners,  along 
with  advantages  of  upbringing,  and  perhaps  of  race, 
a  nation  of  Southern  Europe  comes  to  put  into  its 
notion  of  happiness  a  great  many  more  elements  than 
a  northern  nation,  which  has  to  hew  its  model  out  of 
much  poorer  materials.  The  Norwegian  standard  will 
be  simpler  than  the  Parisian.  But  there  is  more 
behind.  The  question  is  not  simply  one  of  like  and 

1  E.  g.  II.  iii.  152,  1  ;  IV.  ix.  304,  2  (ed.  MacC.). 
2  E.  g.  7th  ed.,  pp.  307,  434,  473  4. 


CHAP,  v.]  NORTH  AND  MID  EUROPE.  mi 

unlike  elements,  or  of  many  and  few  elements,  but 
of  the  treatment  of  them  by  the  human  subject. 
Tlui  English  notion  of  comfort  differs  from  the  French 
in  its  elements,  which  are  probably  more  in  number 
as  well  as  other  in  quality,  and  have  a  third  peculi- 
arity quite  distinct  from  the  other  two,  their  effect 
on  the  habits  of  the  persons  concerned. 

French  writers  have  noticed  that  the  English 
fanner  works  hard  for  such  an  income  as  will  give 
him  the  innumerable  little  luxuries  of  toilet,  dinner- 
taMe,  and  drawing-room,  that  make  up  the  English 
i«l< -a  of  comfort,  while  the  French  farmer  works  hard 
that  he  may  be  able  to  buy  another  farm.1  The  one 
-  up  to  his  income  ;  and  in  his  efforts  to  preserve 
it  he  is  enterprising  and  persevering;  he  is  always 
ing  to  rise  to  the  class  above  him.  The  other, 
on  the  contrary,  is  more  content  with  his  position  in 
society ;  and  simply  wishes  to  make  it  stronger,  by 
gaming  more  property.  His  willing  privations  in 
time  of  plenty  are  rewarded  by  his  secure  provision 
in  time  of  want ;  he  has  always  his  land  to  sell. 

Both  are  moved  by  the  civili/ing  "desire  to  better 
one's  own  condition";  but  it  leads  in  the  ono  case 
to  simple  saving,  the  old  stocking,  the  piece  of  land, 
or  ili-  nftft&t,  in  the  other  to  active  using,  the  steam- 
plough  first,  that  th«-  piano  and  pony-carriage  may 
follow  afterwards.  There  is  some  trut h  in  M.  T.im.-'s 
:<lox,  "The  Englishman  provides  for  the  future 
not  by  his  savings  but  by  his  expenses." !  If  capital- 
izing means  using  as  well  as  savh  -.  il.'-rc  is  a  sense 

1  Toine,  AngUttrre,  pp.  176,  232  a  •  Ibid.  p.  233. 


1^  MALTIIUS  AND   HIS   WORK.  [BK.  I. 

in  which  the  French  and  English  divide  the  two 
functions  between  them. 

This  is  what  prevents  the  economist  from  making 
any  exact  predictions  about  the  effect  of  the  vis  media- 
trix reipMiccB.  He  may,  like  Adarn  Smith,  find  it 
doing  good  work  in  the  undermining  of  feudalism,1 
and  he  may  point  out  that  at  any  rate  it  would 
make  a  better  guide  to  the  world  than  military  glory, 
which  means  unhappiness  to  one  half  the  world,  and 
a  very  mingled  happiness  to  the  other  half.  But  he 
cannot  predict  its  effect  on  men  whose  characters  are 
unknown  to  him.  He  cannot  even  tell  whether  a 
man  is  wealthy  or  not,  till  he  knows  what  his  wants 
are,  for  wealth  exists  to  satisfy  wants,  wants  change 
with  human  progress,  the  notion  of  wealth  expands 
with  civilization,  and  the  luxuries  of  one  age  and 
one  man  are  the  necessaries  of  another.  It  is  im- 
possible to  treat  this  relative  question  as  if  its 
conditions  were  absolute,  and  to  deal  with  men  as 
we  would  with  figures  on  a  slate.  Two  and  two 
do  not  always  make  four  in  such  a  case,  but  some- 
times five,  and  frequently  only  three.  A  new  vista 
of  comfort  spread  before  different  men  may  stimulate 
one,  spoil  another,  and  leave  a  third  unmoved. 

It  is  not  surprising  then  that  the  question,  "  By 
what  various  modes  is  population  kept  to  the  level  of 
the  food  in  the  states  of  modern  Europe  ?  "  is  not  a 
simple  one.  On  some  grounds  it  would  seem  com- 
paratively easy  to  get  the  answer.  There  are  figures 
to  be  had,  and  in  many  cases  a  census ;  there  is  a 

1  Wealth  of  Nations,  III.  iv.  183,  2,  &c. 


v.]  NORTH   AND   MID    EUROPE.  123 

general  similarity  of  circumstances  which  produces  a 
general  similarity  of  habits,  and,  therewith,  of  the  move- 
ments of  population.  But  there  is  no  invariable  on  In- 
of  mortality  and  generation.  The  rates  of  births  and 
deaths  are  not  the  same  for  all  nations ;  they  depend 
on  the  conduct  of  human  beings,  and  may  differ  not 
only  in  different  countries,  but  in  different  parts  of  the 
same  country.  In  the  same  way,  we  have  no  single 
statistical  criterion  of  the  healthy  state  of  a  popula- 
tion, just  as  it  might  be  said  we  have  no  single  criterion 
uf  the  commercial  prosperity  of  a  country,  still  less  of 
its  happiness.  The  two  former  stand  to  the  last  as 
the  parts  to  the  whole.  A  healthy  population  and  a 
prosperous  trade  are  parts  of  the  happiness  of  a  nation, 
though  they  do  not  constitute  the  whole  of  it.  To 
ascertain  whether  a  nation  is  happy  or  not,  we  have  to 
tak«'  into  account  these  two  parts  of  happiness  along 
with  many  others.  The  parts  in  their  turn  consist  of 
many  parts.  We  measure  the  state  of  trade  not  only 
by  imports  and  exports,  railway,  banking  and  Clearing 
House  returns,  and  the  gains  of  the  public  revenue, 
but  by  subscriptions  to  churches,  charities,  and  schools, 
by  savings  banks  and  benefit  societies,  sales  of  books, 
pictures,  and  luxuries  of  all  kinds,  by  the  state  of 
workmen's  wages,  by  the  poor-law  returns,  by  the 
number  of  nuuriageft,  emigrants,  and  recruits  for  the 
army  ;  ami  we  could  make  little  use  of  most  of  these 
figures  without  the  census  returns  and  the  ivj.,,rts  of 
Registrar  Gem -ml.  In  the  same  way,  to  measure 
tin-  healthiness  of  a  population  and  ascertain  whrt In-l- 
it i>  safely  nml.T  the  level  of  its  food,  tending  to  pass 


1-21  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  I. 

beyond  it,  or  simply  rising  up  to  it,  and  to  ascertain 
by  what  ways  and  means  the  process  is  going  on,  we 
need  instead  of  one  single  general  criterion  a  whole 
array  of  particular  tests.  It  is  in  the  infancy  of 
statistical  science  that  men  yield  to  appearances  and 
"  suppose  a  greater  uniformity  in  things  than  is 
actually  found  there." ] 

This  was,  for  example,  the  failing  of  Johann  Peter 
Slissmilch,  one  of  the  earliest  inquirers  into  the 
movements  of  population.  A  book  like  Sussmilch's 
had  the  same  relation  to  the  Essay  on  Population 
as  astrology  to  astronomy,  or  alchemy  to  chemistry ; 
it  prepared  the  way  for  the  more  accurate  study. 
Siissmilch  first  published  his  researches  in  1761, 
while  the  Seven  Years'  War  was  still  in  progress. 
He  dedicated  it  to  Frederick  the  Great,  as  became  a 
patriot  and  Church  dignitary ;  and  entitled  it,  The 
Divine  Plan  in  the  Changes  through  which  the  Human 
Race  passes  in  Birth,  DeatJi,  and  Marriage.  The  Divine 
plan  is  the  one  set  forth  in  the  exhortation  to  Noah 
in  Genesis — the  peopling  of  the  earth  ;  2  and  the  book 
tries  to  show  the  particular  arrangements  by  which 
the  plan  is  carried  out.  One  condition  is,  he  says, 
that  fertility  be  greater  than  mortality ;  the  births 
must  exceed  the  deaths.  On  an  average  at  present 
each  marriage  produces  four  children ;  and  "  the 
present  law  of  death  "  is  on  an  average,  taking  town 
and  country  together,  1  in  36  ;  out  of  36  men  now 
living,  1  must  die  every  year.  In  the  country  it  is 
from  1  in  40  to  1  in  45  ;  in  the  town,  from  1  in  38 
1  Bacon,  Nov.  Org.,  I.  xlv.  2  See  below,  Bk.  IV. 


CHAP,  v.]  NORTH  AND  MID  EUROPE.  125 

to  1  in  32.  There  is  a  yearly  excess  of  births  repre- 
sented by  1  in  10  and  5  in  10.  The  increase  must 
have  been  faster  at  first  than  it  is  now  ;  and  the 

:is  God  took  to  effect  His  end  in  each  case  was 
the  lengthening  and  shortening  of  human  life.  In  the 
times  of  Methuselah  there  must  have  been  a  very 
different  law  of  mortality,  perhaps  one  death  in  a 
hundred  ;  the  length  of  life  was  greater ;  and  prob- 
ably the  power  of  parentage  lasted  longer.  The 
average  number  of  children  might  be  about  twenty 
in  a  family  instead  of  four;  and  the  doubling  of 
population  would  take  place  in  ten  or  twenty  years, 
instead  of  as  now  in  seventy  or  eighty.  Antedilu- 
vians were  long  lived  because  their  long  lives  were 

led  for  the  replenishment  of  the  earth;  and  the 
extreme  length  was  shortened  so  soon  as  the  time 
came  when  the  same  end  could  be  reached  in  other 
ways.  AVhen  we  observe  the  remarkable  adaptive- 
ness  of  man  which  enables  him  alone  among  the 
creatures1  to  live  in  any  latitude,  and  when  we 
observe  how  he  has  been  preserved  while  many 
animals  have  become  extinct,  we  need  have  n«> 
doubt  that  the  replenishment  of  the  earth  was  really 
tin-  J)ivine  purpose.  It  is  remarkable  too  that, 
though  more  sons  are  born  than  daughters,  death 
equalizes  their  numbers  before  mature  life.  The 
"system"  which  prevails  in  the  increase  of  man  is 
like  the  march  of  a  military  iv/micnt,  in  which  all 
the  men  have  th-  ir  places,  actions,  and  accoutrements 
determined  f-r  them.  The  proportion  of  sons  to 

1    Bl  •  ;•:  s       hog,  adds  Gibbon,  DecL  «  \    }>.  ITln. 


120  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

daughters,  and  deaths  to  births,  Siissmilch  regards 
as  a  tolerably  fixed  one  ;  the  discovery  of  unexpected 
uniformities  overjoys  him  greatly,  and  he  regards 
the  man  who  first  used  the  London  bill  of  mortality 
to  detect  these  uniformities  as  a  sort  of  statistical 
Columbus.  In  short,  his  book  is  an  economical 
Th<;odicee,  a  long  piece  of  pious  deductive  reasoning  ; 
and  it  is  curious  to  find  Germany  producing  two  such 
optimistic  books  at  a  time  when  it  was  even  further 
from  the  millennium  than  its  neighbours. 

The  facts  of  Siissmilch,  ill-sifted  as  they  were,  gave 
Malthas  a  much  firmer  ground  of  reasoning  than 
the  scanty  patches  of  evidence  about  the  population 
of  ancient  and  barbarous  nations.  He  is  at  last  in 
the  region  of  statistics  as  opposed  to  conjecture, 
and  in  the  region  of  the  personal  observation  and 
travel  of  men  who  were  at  least  asking  his  own 
questions.  But  the  fate  of  the  bills  of  mortality 
and  other  records,  in  the  hands  of  Price  and 
Wallace,  to  say  nothing  of  Petty  and  Siissmilch, 
shows  how  important  was  Malthas'  work  as  an 
interpreter  of  statistics.  Statistics  were  a  novelty 
in  his  day.  As  Adam  Smith  wrote  on  the  Wealth 
of  Nations  without  any  full  statistics  of  the  wealth, 
and  none  at  all  of  the  population,  of  his  own  country, 
Mai  thus  wrote  his  first  essay  when  there  was  no 
census ;  and,  for  some  time  afterwards,  so  compara- 
tively isolated  were  the  nations  of  Europe,  that 
to  be  at  all  certain  of  his  facts,  an  author  needed 
to  verify  and  collect  them  by  journeying  in  person, 
and  seeing  the  scenes  with  his  own  eyes.  This 


CHAP,  v.]  NORTH   AND  MID  EUROPE. 

essential  work  of  an  investigator  Mai  thus  did  not 
leave  undone;  and  his  chapters  on  the  state  of 
population  in  modern  European  nations  are  to  a 
large  extent  a  record  of  his  own  observations.  He 
went  for  a  summer  trip  in  1799  with  three  college 
fii-  ncls,  Dr.  Edward  Clarke,  Mr.  Cripps,  and  Mr. 
Otter,  afterwards  Bishop  of  Chichester.  They  went 
by  Hamburg  to  Sweden,  and  there  the  party  broke 
up  into  two,  Clarke  and  his  pupil  Cripps  going 
farther  north,  Otter  and  Malthus  going  on  through 
Norway  to  visit  Finland  and  St.  Petersburg.1  These 
the  only  European  countries  where  English 
travellers  could  easily  make  their  way  in  those 
s.2  In  1802  he  saw  France  and  Switzerland,3 
but  seems  not  to  have  left  the  kingdom  again  till 
1825,  when  the  journey  was  taken  for  the  sake  of  his 
wife's  health,  on  the  death  of  one  of  his  cliildivn. 
and  he  was  little  in  the  mood  for  investigations. 
The  tours  of  1799  and  1802  are  the  only  ones 
that  have  left  substantial  traces  on  his  economical 
work4 

In  all  his  travels  he  found  the  foreigner  as  ignorai.t 
as  the  Englishman  on  the  subject  of  population. 
Only  twice  did  he  hear  the  truth  expounded  to 
him  ;  in  Norway  during  his  first  tour,  and  in 
Switzerland  during  his  second.  In  the  latter  case 

1  See  above,  p.  48. 

*  The  phrase  on  p.  216  of  2nd  ed.  (p.  148  of  7th),  "in  the  pn « 
Minim .  r  «.f  IT-ss,    j,  j,r..lmbly  a  slip.     We  do  not  hear  elsewhere  of  any 

*o  early.    See  below,  Bk.  V. 

*  Sec  above,  p.  49.    <T.  i'n-1  .  •!.,  j>.  2*1 ;  7tl>  :i,  &c. 

!n:r  movements  and  other  details  <.f  hi*  life,  see  Bk. 
V.  (Biography). 


128  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

the  enlightenment  was  confined  to  one  individual ; 
but  in  the  former  the  whole  nation  was  wise. 
While  the  Swedish  Government  was  continually 
crying  for  more  people,  and  trying  to  "encourage 
population,"  the  Norwegian  Government  and  people 
seemed  to  have  understood  that  the  first  question 
must  be,  "  Are  there  means  to  feed  more  people  ? " 
If  not,  then  we  multiply  the  nation  without  increas- 
ing the  joy.  Of  course  there  are  cases  where  we 
might  thin  down  the  nation  and  still  less  increase 
the  joy.  Mere  scantiness  of  numbers  is  no  advan- 
tage to  a  nation,  any  more  than  fewness  of  wants 
to  an  individual ;  it  may  mean  a  low  state  of  civil- 
ization, in  both  cases.  It  is  not  by  any  means  so 
good  for  a  country  to  be  wasted  by  a  pestilence  as 
to  be  opened  up  by  a  new  trade.  The  denser  the 
population,  the  better; — so  says  Malthus  himself; 
— but,  he  adds,  let  it  be  a  population  of  strong, 
comfortable  citizens,  or  let  us  stand  by  the  small 
numbers  and  the  slow  increase. 

Look  now  at  Norway.1  If  we  were  dealing  with 
uncivilized  times  under  the  reign  of  positive  checks, 
we  should  expect  an  overflowing  population,  a  large 
body  of  poor,  and  in  times  of  scarcity  a  great  deal 
of  distress.  There  had  been  no  wars  for  half  a 
century,  the  cold  climate  kept  away  epidemics,  and 
what  else  was  left  but  famine  to  keep  down  the 
population  to  the  limits  of  the  food  ?  Vice  was  not 
taken  into  the  service,  and  emigration  was  seldom 
practised  then  in  these  regions.  But  Malthus  visited 

1  2nd  and  7th  edd.,  Bk.  II.  ch.  i. 


CHAP,  v.]  NORTH   AND   MID   EUROPE.  129 

the  country  in  one  of  the  hardest  yean  ever  known 
in  Europe,  1799,  and  found  the  Norwegians  "  wrar- 

;i  face  of  plenty  and  content,  while  their  neigh- 
bours the  Swedes  appeared  to  be  starving."1  He 
found  the  death-rate  lower  in  Norway  than  in  any 
country  in  Europe.2  The  population,  however,  was 
hardly  increasing  at  all  ;  and  the  proportion  of  mar- 

•s  to  the  whole  numbers  of  the  people  was  smaller 
than  in  any  country  except  Switzerland.8  The  posi- 
ti\v  check  was  largely  superseded  by  the  preventive. 
The  virtue  of  foresight,  he  says,  is  elsewhere  forced 
upon  the  upper  classes  by  the  smallness  of  their  circle 
and  the  fewness  of  openings  in  business  or  professions  ; 
in  Norway  it  is  forced  upon  all  classes  alike  by  the 
evident  Mnallness  of  the  country's  resources,  and  by 
the  peculiarities  of  the  national  industry.  There  is 
almost  no  variety  of  occupation  or  division  of  labour. 
The  humbler  classes  are  almost  all  "housemen" 
(/ti/xiiniiH/),  labourers,  who  receive  from  a  farmer  in 

;-  feudal  fashion  a  small  house  and  a  little  piece 
of  land  in  return  for  occasional  labour  on  his  fields. 
In  other  countries  men  may  easily  fall  into  the  fallacy 
of  rivditing  the  whole  of  the  land  with  a  greater 
power  of  supporting  people  than  the  power  possessed 
1  y  t  he  sum  of  its  parts.  In  the  great  towns  of  Central 
Europe  a  man  has  perhaps  some  excuse  for  trusting 
to  the  chapter  of  accidents;  in  the  great  variety  of 
occupations  he  may  have  some  excuse  for  thinking 


2nd  ed.,  p.  189  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  129. 
3  The  Rurnian  figures  being  incredible.     &•••  later,  j> 
»  2nd  ed.,  p.  184  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  126. 

K 


130  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

there  will  surely  be  a  vacancy  for  him,  and  he  may 
"  e'en  take  Peggie."  Norway,  however,  is  to  manu- 
facturing countries  what  the  country  districts  else- 
where are  to  the  towns  elsewhere.  In  the  country 
districts  an  excess  of  population  cannot  be  hidden, 
and  the  superfluities  must  go  to  the  towns.  Those 
who  marry,  therefore,  when  there  is  no  vacancy  for 
them,  do  so  with  the  alternatives  of  poverty  or 
migration  clearly  before  their  eyes.  In  Norway 
every  peasant,  not  to  say  every  farmer,  knows  quite 
certainly  whether  there  is  an  opening  for  him  or  not, 
and,  if  there  is  not,  he  cannot  marry.1 

The  conditions  of  the  problem  were  in  this  way 
simplified,  and  the  problem  itself  was  satisfactorily 
answered.  The  only  districts  where  Mai  thus  saw 
signs  of  poverty  were  on  the  coast,  where  the  people 
live  by  fishing  ;  the  openings  for  a  fisherman  are  not 
so  distinctly  limited  in  their  numbers  as  the  openings 
for  a  farmer. 

Time  has  united  Norway  and  Sweden  under  one 
king  (1814),  and  Sweden  now  presents  no  unfavour- 
able contrast  with  Norway.  Even  in  1825  Malthus 
wrote  2  that  the  progress  of  agriculture  arid  industry, 
and  the  practice  of  vaccination,  had  caused  a  steady 
and  healthful  increase  of  population  since  1805. 
He  would  be  pleased  to  find  too  by  the  census  that 
the  population  of  Norway  had  increased  very  greatly 
in  proportion  to  its  poor.  The  improvement  con- 
tinues. The  paupers  were  about  one  per  cent,  of 

1  2nd  ed.,  pp.  188, 189  ;  7th  ed.,  pp.  128,  129.  Cf.  Thornton's  chapter 
(II.)  on  the  "  Social  Effects  of  Peasant  Proprietorships,"  Peas.  Prop. 
(ed.  1874),  p.  55.  2  In  6th  ed.,  1826.  See  7th  ed.,  p.  144. 


CHAP,  v.]  NORTH   AND   MID  EUROPE.  131 

the  population  in  1869  (when  they  were  nearly  five 
per  cent,  in  England),  which  seems  to  have  meant  a 
decrease  from  previous  years  j1  but  between  1865  and 
1875  the  population  had  increased  fourteen  per  cent, 
in  spite  of  considerable  emigration.2  Malthus  would 
recognized  with  satisfaction  that  the  nation  had 
been  "  either  increasing  the  quantity  or  facilitating 
the  distribution  "  of  its  food,3  that  is  to  say,  improving 
either  its  agriculture  or  its  manufactures.  It  has 
really  done  both.  Though  the  growth  of  the  popu- 
lation has  been  greater  in  the  centres  of  manufacture, 
has  been  progress  also  in  the  country  districts. 
.Many  of  the  old  customs  and  laws  that  hampered 

iculture   have  ceased  to    exist.4     Malthus  himself 

s  that,  if  Government  would  remove  hindrances 
to  agriculture,  and  spread  sound  knowledge  about  it, 
it  would  do  more  for  the  population  of  the  country 

in  liv  establishing  five  hundred  foundling  hospitals.5 
II<  in-.-d  imt  have  confined  his  recommendation  to  agri- 
culture ;  and  elsewhere  he  states  the  truth  in  broader 

ins:  "The  true  eueniiiM-vment  to  marriage  is  the 
hi'_rh  price  of  labour,  and  an  increase  of  employments  \ 
wlii.-h  require  to  !»•  supplied  with  proper  hands."6 
Remove  hindrances  to  trade  and  spread  sound  know- 
l,.,lLr,-  nf  jt --that  (in  his  view)  is  the  way  to  increase 
the  quantity  and  facilitate  the  distribution  of  the 

•ducts   of    agriculture;     and,    t«>  jud^c    by    results, 

the  Norwegian  Government  has  followed  it. 

1  7.  •••  Book  on  Foreign  Poor  Laiex,  1875,  p.  109. 

'         Rook,  1880,  p. 

dMtcif  JbM 
*  A'wriy,  7th  ed.,  p.  139  ;  cf.  pp.  151,  152.  •  P> 


132  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  i. 

Sweden,1  as  it  then  was,  furnished  a  striking  con- 
trast to  Norway.     Mai  thus  had  the  advantage  there 
of  the  earliest  and  most  regular  of  European  censuses, 
beginning    with    the   year    1748,   and   continued   at 
intervals  first  of  three  and  then  of  five  years.      He 
found  that  there  was  a  large  mortality,  though  the 
conditions  of  life  were  superficially  the  same  as  in 
Norway.      The   only  explanation    he   could  see  was 
that  the  size  and  shape  of  the  country,  as  well  as  its 
mode  of  government,  did  not  so  forcibly  bring  home 
to  the  people  the  need  of  restraint  as  in  Norway,  while 
at   the  same  time   the  hindrances  to  good    farming 
were  even  more  serious  than  in  the  smaller  country. 
From  the  very  contiguity  and  general  similarity  of 
the   two  countries,  they  proved   Malthus'  point,  by 
the  Method  of  Difference,  almost  as  well  as  a  deliber- 
ate experiment  could  have  done.     It  was  not  that 
Norway   had    an   absolutely   small   and    Sweden    an 
absolutely  large  population  ;  considerations  of  absolute 
greatness   or  smallness   never  enter  into  this,  if  into 
any,  economical  question.     But  Norway  had  a  moder- 
ately  large   population    in    proportion    to    her   food, 
while  Sweden  had  in  the  same  regard  an   excessive 
population,  a  population  which  was  sparely  fed  even 
in    average   years,    and    decimated    by    famine   and 
disease  in  years  below  the  average. 

Russia,2  which  was  the  third  scene  of  Malthus' 
travels,  had  this  in  common  with  Norway  and  Sweden, 
that  the  movement  of  its  population  was  unlike  that 
of  Central  Europe,  and  that  the  eccentricity  was  due 

1  Essay,  Bk.  II.  ch.  ii.  2  Ibid.  Bk.  II.  ch.  iii. 


CHAP,  v.]  NORTH   AND   MID  EUROPE.  133 

to  a  clearly  definable  cause.  In  Norway  the  shape 
and  climate  of  the  country  and  the  fewness  of  the 
available  occupations  forced  the  Government  and  the 
people  to  restrain  rather  than  to  encourage  the 
increase  of  numbers ;  in  Sweden,  under  conditions 
less  simple,  the  habits  of  the  people  conspired  with  a 
false  policy  of  the  Government  to  produce  an  exces- 
increase.  In  both  cases  we  have  something 
diilbrent  from  the  typical  modern  society  of  Central 
Europe,  with  its  full  division  of  labour,  its  system 
of  large  factories,  and  its  extensive  substitution  of 
machinery  for  hand  labour.  Russia  was  as  old- 
fashioned  as  Norway  and  Sweden  in  this  respect ; 
and  her  physical  vastness  made  her  a  difficult  country 
to  know,  in  these  days  of  slow  communication.  It 
is  Dot  surprising  that  the  statistics  available  in  the 
of  Maltlms  were  open  to  grave  suspicion.  The 
<lrath-rate  was  given  as  1  in  60,  while  in  Norway 
itself  it  had  not  been  lower  than  1  in  48,  and  it 
is  about  1  in  53  in  England  now,  yet  the  number 
of  marriages  and  of  births  and  the  size  of  families 
no  smaller  than  elsewhere.1  These  facts  by 
themselves  would  simply  suggest  a  rate  of 

increase   going   on    in    the   country  concerned;    and 
hus  allows  that   there  is  great  scope  f«>r  snrh  in 
ia.     But  there  was  one  othn    fa.-t   that  strength- 
ened   his   doubts   about  the   vital  statistics  of  that 
n.untry;    contrary  to    the    ex|>«-r;rh'  ,1    i.th.-r 

countries,  it  was  Raid   that   in  Russia  more  women 
born  than  in.  11.     In  others,  more  men  ore  born 

«  2nd  ed.,  pp.  213-14;  7th  ed  M7. 


134  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

than  women,  and  the  numbers  are  only  equalized 
gradually,  by  the  greater  risks  of  masculine  life,  as  the 
years  go  on.  In  Sweden,  with  a  climate  not  milder 
than  Russia,  this  had  long  been  observed.1  It  turned 
out  on  inquiry  that  the  Russian  method  of  registration 
allowed  loopholes  for  more  omissions  in  the  deaths  than 
in  the  births.  Public  institutions,  including  hospitals 
and  prisons,  had  been  left  out  of  account ;  and  the 
deaths  in  the  foundling  hospitals  were  alone  quite 
sufficient  to  alter  the  average  very  significantly  for  the 
worse.  Malthus'  hatred  of  Foundling  hospitals  is  only 
equalled  by  his  dislike  of  Poor  laws.  The  idea  of 
such  institutions  was,  like  that  of  Pitt's  Poor  Bill, 
purely  philanthropic.  They  were  "to  enrich  the 
country  from  year  to  year  with  an  increasing  number 
of  healthy,  active,  and  industrious  burghers,"2  that 
would  otherwise  be  doomed  to  death  soon  after 
birth.  It  used  to  be  said  of  the  bounty,  granted  by 
the  Government  of  India,  on  slaughtered  snakes,  that 
it  really  kept  up  the  supply,  for  the  natives  bred  them 
to  catch  the  bounty.  The  foundling  hospitals  had 
an  opposite  effect.  They  were  meant  to  multiply  and 
they  tended  to  destroy.  They  encouraged  a  mother 
to  desert  her  child  at  the  precise  time  it  needed  the 
minute  and  careful  attention  that  only  a  mother  can 
give.  "  It  is  not  to  be  doubted  that,  if  the  children 
received  into  these  hospitals  had  been  left  to  the 
management  of  their  parents,  taking  the  chance  of  all 
the  difficulties  in  which  they  might  be  involved,  a 

1  2nd  ed.,  pp.  214-15  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  147,  foot. 

2  Ibid.  p.  218  j  7th  ed.,  p.  150.     Cf.  above,  p.  30. 


CHAP,  v  ]  NORTH   AND   MID  EUROPE.  135 

much  greater  proportion  of  them  would  have  reached 
the  age  of  manhood  and  have  become  useful  members 
of  the  state." l  But,  besides  increasing  the  mortality 
of  chill  rep,  they  injure  the  very  "  mainspring  of  popu- 
lation " '  by  discouraging  marriage  and  encouraging 
irregularities.  In  his  talks  with  his  father,  Malthus 
hud  no  doubt  discussed  the  propriety  of  Rousseau's 
conduct  in  sending  his  children  to  the  Paris  Foundling 
Hospital.  He  would  certainly  have  declared  against 
Rousseau.  To  those  who  argue  that  the  foundling 
basket  may  prevent  child-murder,  he  answers  that  an 
occasional  murder  from  "  false  [?]  shame  "  is  saved  at 
a  very  dear  price  by  the  violation  of  "  the  best  and 
most  useful  feelings  of  the  human  heart,"  which  the 

once  of  such  an  institution  teaches  to  the  poor. 
To  relieve  parents  of  the  care  of  their  children  is 
bad  for  the  parents,8  because  it  takes  away  from 
them  a  responsibility  essential  to  full  citizenship  and 
civilizing  in  its  effects  on  human  character; — and  it  is 
unjust  to  their  fellow-citizens,  because,  like  the  Poor 
Laws,  it  relieves  one  portion  of  society,  (in  this  case 
r  the  worst  than  the  poorest)  at  the  expense  of 
all  the  restA  and  finds  a  career  for  pauper  appivn- 
to  the  prejudice  of  independent  workmen  and 
tli.-ir  children.4  In  the  third  place,  like  the  Poor 

s,  it  promises  an  impossibility —to  relieve  all  that 
It   ehildren  are  to  be  received   without    limit, 

resources  for  maintaining  ihem  should  be  without 

1  2nd  ed.,  p.  219  ;  Til.  .  -1 .,  j.  .151.  Com  pure  Price,  Obtcrvatiotu,  p.  280 
note ;  and  especially  Hume,  Pop.  of  Anc.  N.,  p.  445  (ed.  1768). 
1  tfway,  •'  •  Euay,  2nd  ed.,  p.  220  ;  7th  , -.1 ..  p.  151. 

•  Ibid.  p.  221  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  152. 


13e  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  I. 

limit ;  otherwise  an  excessive  mortality  is  quite 
unavoidable.1  The  second  reason  is  no  doubt  an 
economical  commonplace;  it  is  the  first  and  third 
that  are  most  characteristic  of  Malthus.  He  never 
forgets  that  human  wants  and  human  wills  are  an 
element  in  every  economical  phenomenon,  and  there- 
fore considers  that  the  effects  of  character  on  actions 
and  of  actions  on  character  are  of  great  economical 
importance.  He  will  not  allow  that  it  can  be  right, 
even  for  a  Government,  to  make  promises  that  cannot 
be  performed.  These  two  plain  principles  give  the 
tone  to  the  later  chapters,  where  he  interprets  for 
us  the  comparatively  full  statistics  of  Central  Europe 
and  our  own  England.2 

The  law  of  population  may  be  described  (though 
not  in  the  exact  words  of  Malthus)  as  among 
savage  peoples  the  tendency  to  increase  beyond  the 
food,  and  among  civilized  to  increase  up  to  it.  So 
Professor  Rogers  founds  his  estimate  of  the  numbers 
of  the  English  people  in  the  thirteenth  and  four- 
teenth centuries  on  the  principle  that  "there  were 
generally  as  many  people  existing  in  this  country 
as  there  have  been,  on  an  average,  quarters  of  wheat 
to  feed  them  with. "  3 

In  the  case  of  highly  progressive  modern  nations 
such  statements  would  be  beyond  the  truth;  and 
we  must  either  say  that  they  tend  to  increase  not 
beyond  but  along  with  the  food,  or  else  we  must 

1  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  pp.  216-17  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  149. 

2  Ibid.  7th  ed.,  Bk.  II.  chs.  iv.  to  x.,  as  rearrange  1  in  the  3rd  ed. 

3  Six  Centuries  of  Work  and  Wages,  pp.  118,  119. 


CHAP,  v.]  NORTH   AND   MID  EUROPE.  137 

define  food  itself  very  widely.  Ill  the  first  case 
"tendency"  will  mean  the  abstract  possibility  de- 
pending on  the  one  physiological  condition;  in  th" 
others  it  is  the  concrete  nett  possibility  depending 
011  all  the  various  conditions  together.  In  a  gem-nil 
JUT  face  to  his  chapters  on  Central  Europe,  Mai  thus 
quite  recognizes  these  distinctions  and  warns  us 
;ist  exact  statements.  "It  seldom  happens,"  he 
says,  "  that  the  increase  of  food  and  of  population 
is  uniform  ;  and  when  the  circumstances  of  a  country 
an-  varying  either  from  this  cause  or  from  any  change 
in  the  national  habits  with  respect  to  prudence  and 
cleanliness,  it  is  evident  that  a  proportion  which  is 
trin-  at  one  period  will  not  be  at  another.  Nothing 
is  more  difficult  than  to  lay  down  rules  on  this 
subject  that  do  not  admit  of  exceptions." l 

After  this  it  is  hard  to  believe  what  he  tells  us 
elsewhere,  that  "the  only  criterion  of  a  real  and 
permanent  increase  in  the  population  of  any  country 
is  the  increase  of  the  means  of  subsistence."1  It 
would  be  at  best  a  negative  criterion  and  *////•  ^n<\ 
non, — there  can  be  no  increase  of  numbers  \\ithout 
•46  "f  foo.l, — though  ev.-n  then  it  is  not  true  of 
a  "forced  population,"  living  d<»\vn  to  a  lower  food.1 
But  there  clearly  may  he  an  increase  <•!'  f«>.»d  without 
an  increase  of  numbers,  unless  the  character  of  the 
people  is  sn.-h  that  they  do  nothing  with  the  food 

except    increase    by    it.     Therefore,    th<»u-h,   within 

iride  limits  iixed  f..r  us  l.y  invariable  (pialities 

':  .  l .  II.  ;N.  ]..  150,     Ct  -'M.I  ed., 

p.  3i!  -JOB.  7th  "1,  i».  200. 

»  Rid  2i:  260. 


138  MALTHUS   AND   HIS  WORK.  [UK.  i. 

of  human  nature,  predictions  are  justifiable  on  the 
ground  of  the  law  of  population l  or  any  other 
economical  laws,  none  that  specify  a  particular  course 
of  action  as  a  result  of  a  particular  event  are  trust- 
worthy, till  we  know  the  character  of  the  people 
concerned.2  Mai  thus  always  tries  to  bear  this  in 
mind ;  and,  when  he  tells  us  that  the  lists  of 
births,  marriages,  and  deaths  in  Mid  Europe  give 
more  information  about  its  internal  economy  than 
the  observations  of  the  wisest  travellers,3  he  is 
at  once  interpreting  those  figures  in  the  light  of 
a  principle,  and  interpreting  the  principle  by  means 
of  the  figures.  This  appears  when  we  look  at 
the  four  chief  conclusions  of  the  general  chapter 
in  question.  The  first  is  the  proposition  that  in 
the  present  state  of  our  industrial  civilization  the 
marriages  depend  very  closely  on  the  deaths,  and  the 
births  on  the  marriages.4  Montesquieu  says  that 
wherever  there  is  room  for  two  persons  to  live 
comfortably  a  marriage  will  certainly  take  place.5 
In  old  countries  experience  is  usually  against  any 
sure  expectation  of  the  means  of  supporting  a 
family  ;  the  place  for  a  new  marriage  is  only  made 
by  the  dissolution  of  an  old.  As  a  rule  therefore 
the  number  of  annual  marriages  is  regulated  by  the 

1  See  above,  p.  18. 

2  So  in  substance  Cairnes  in  his  rehabilitation  of  the  Wages  Fund. 
Leading  Principles,  pp.  196  seq.     Cliffe  Leslie  passim. 

3  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  p.  240 ;  7th  ed.,  p.  155. 

4  Ibid.  p.  247  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  160. 

6  "  Partout  ou  il  se  trouve  une  place  oti  deux  personnes  peuvent  vivre 
commodement,  il  se  fait  un  mariage." — Esprit  des  Lois,  Bk.  XXIII.  ch. 
x.  (not  XXII.,  as  in  7th  ed.). 


CHAP,  v.]  NORTH    AND   MID   EUROPE.  139 

number  of  annual  deaths.  "Death  is  the  most 
powerful  of  all  the  encouragements  to  marriage,"1 
while  on  the  other  hand  the  marriages  are  a  frequent 
cause  of  the  deaths.  In  almost  every  country  there 
is  too  great  a  frequency  of  marriages,  which  causes 
were  a  forced  mortality.  Which  of  these  two 
mutual  influences  is  the  more  powerful  depends  on 
circumstances.  In  last  century  the  proportion  of 
annual  marriages  to  inhabitants  was  in  Holland 
generally  as  1  in  107  or  108.  But  in  twenty-two 
Dutch  villages  it  was  as  1  in  64.  Siissmilch  ex- 
plain* -d  this  anomaly  by  the  number  of  new  trades 
in  Holland  and  the  new  openings  for  workmen. 
Malthus  would  not  have  denied  this  possibility,  his 
startling  paradox  about  death  being  only  a  particular 
case  of  the  general  principle  that  "  the  high  price  of 
ir  is  the  real  encouragement  to  marriage."2  But 
in  this  case  the  explanation  ought  to  have  applied 
to  all  Holland  if  to  any  part  of  it.  The  real 
reason  came  out  when  Malthus  observed  that  the 
mortality,  which  was  as  1  in  36  in  Holland  generally, 
was  as  1  in  22  in  those  villages.  The  additional 
marriages  did  not  really  increase  the  population. 
They  were  caused  by  the  high  number  of  deaths 
which  provided  op^iin^s  for  the  living;  and  the  lii^h 
nuinln  r  of  deaths  was  caused  by  the  unhealth 
of  the  region  and  of  its  prevailing  industries  which 
were  manufacturing  rather  than  agricultural.  The 
in  every  larire  population  is  between  having 

1  Euay,  tad  "1..  i-  M7  :  7ili  •  ••!.,  p-  160. 
8  Ibid,  iind  «!.,  p.  i."Jl  ;  7th  .-.I.,  p.  152. 


140  MALTHUS   AND   HIS   WO  UK.  [BK.  I. 

many  lives  which  end  soon,  and  few  which  last  long. 
Greater  healthiness  in  the  conditions  of  life  will  result 
in  the  latter.  We  find  as  a  matter  of  fact  that,  where 
there  has  been  the  sanitary  improvement  as  well  as 
simply  the  "replenishment"  of  an  old  country,  the 
marriage-rate  goes  down  at  the  expense  of  the  death- 
rate,  and  there  is  an  economy  of  human  life  and 
suffering. 

Putting  the  parts  of  his  exposition  together,  we 
get  something  like  a  deductive  scheme  of  the  growth 
of  population  in  old  countries  under  an  industrial 
revolution  like  that  of  the  eighteenth  century.  The 
first  effect  of  the  discovery  of  new  minerals,  and 
even  (with  some  qualifications)  of  the  invention  of 
new  machines,  is  to  provide  new  employment  for 
working  men,  and  many  new  opportunities  for  mar- 
riage ;  the  proportion  of  marriages  therefore  becomes 
at  once  greater  without  any  alteration  (from  this 
cause  at  least)  in  the  death-rate.  But,  when  the 
first  burst  of  progress  has  passed,  and  the  succeeding 
improvement  is  not  by  leaps  and  bounds,  but  at  a 
uniform  rate,  then  the  proportion  of  marriages  will 
decrease,  as  the  new  situations  are  filled  up  and 
there  is  no  more  room  for  an  increasing  population. 
Once  the  country  is  really  "  old "  in  the  sense  of 
fully  peopled  and  unprovided  with  new  sources  of 
employment,  then  the  marriages  will  be  regulated 
principally  by  the  deaths,  and  (the  habits  of  the 
people  remaining  the  same)  will  bear  much  the 
same  proportion  to  each  other  at  one  time  as  at 
another.  It  is  not,  however,  exactly  the  same  pro- 


CHAP,  v.]  NORTH   AND   MID   EUROPE.  141 

portion  for  all  old  countries,  simply  because  the 
habits  and  standards  of  living  are  different,  to  say 
iinthing  of  healthiness  or  unhcalthiness  of  climate 
and  occupation.  For  similar  reasons  it  is  not  the 
same  for  towns  as  for  country  districts.1  "A  general 
measure  of  mortality  for  all  countries  taken  together" 
would  be  useless  if  procurable ;  but  it  cannot  be 
procured.2 

Habits,  however,  are  sufficiently  fixed  to  make  us 

in  that  "any  direct  encouragements  to  marriage 
must  be  accompanied  by  an  increased  mortality."8 
They  spur  a  willing  horse.  Montesquieu  and  Stiss- 
mildi,  although  they  both  enlarge  on  the  evils  of 
over-population,  still  think  it  a  statesman's  duty 
to  be,  like  Augustus  and  Trajan,  the  father  of  his 
people  by  encouraging  their  marriages.  But,  if  many 
marriages  mean  many  deaths,  the  princes  or  statesmen 
who  should  really  succeed  in  this  patriotic  policy 
mi -lit  more  justly  be  called  the  destroyers  than  the 
fatln-rs  of  their  people.4 

If  Mai  thus  had   been  asked   how  a  prince  could 
best   become   a   real  pater  patrite,   he   would     have 

•d  two  or  tlnvr  ways.  The  prince  might  direct 
bis  mind  to  the  improvement  of  industry,  especially 
of  agriculture.5  He  might  circulate  news  and  know- 
ledge on  these  subjects ; '  or,  as  we  should  say  now, 
he  nii^ht  institute  agricultural  exhibitions,  and  regular 

ultural  statistics  of  home  mid  fmvi^n  production. 

i    i'  18-9  ;  7th  ed.,  pp.  161-2.  •  Ibid. 

1  2n-:  l''.  ;   Till  .-.I.,  ]..  ]:.:>.     Tin-  It.ili.-  .-m-  tlie  author's. 

4   /  :  :   Tth  •  •«!.,  i>.   i'  *  Ibid. 

•  2nd  eel.,  p.  205;  7th  ed,  i> 


112  MALTHUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [UK.  i. 

He  would  in  this  way  increase  the  population  by 
1  if  1  ping  to  increase  the  food. 

In  the  second  place,  he  might  benefit  trade  every- 
where by  giving  it  the  security  of  good  government 
and  impartial  justice,  a  peaceful  foreign  policy  and 
light  taxation. 

In  the  third  place,  he  might,  together  with  all 
these,  encourage  Emigration.  Malthas  devotes  a 
special  chapter  of  the  essay  to  this  subject ;  and, 
though  the  chapter  is  in  a  later  part  of  his  work 
(Bk.  III.  ch.  iv.1),  this  seems  the  best  place  to  touch 
on  the  subject.  Emigration,  he  says,  is,  apart  from 
political  distinctions,  the  same  thing  as  migration ; 
and,  if  it  is  economically  good  for  a  man  to  go  from 
a  poor  land  at  his  door  to  a  rich  in  the  next  county, 
it  cannot  be  economically  bad  for  him  to  go  from  a 
poor  district  of  his  own  country  to  a  rich  across  the 
sea.  The  mere  length  of  the  journey  or  the  difference 
of  latitude  does  not  affect  the  economical  nature  of 
the  change. 

Economical  motives,  however,  have  come  very  late 
in  all  the  great  European  emigrations.  It  was  not 
the  desire  of  finding  room  for  the  over-crowded 
families  at  home,  but  desire  of  the  metal  gold,  or 
else  it  was  the  simple  love  of  adventure,  or  ambition 
of  conquest,  that  first  sent  the  Spanish,  Portuguese, 
English,  and  Dutch  to  the  far  East  and  far  West.2 
"  These  passioos  enabled  the  first  adventurers  to 
triumph "  over  obstacles  that  would  have  deterred 

1  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  pp.  387  seq. ;  7th  ed.,  pp.  287  seq. 
2  Ibid. 


CHAP,  v.]  NORTH    AND    MID   KUROPE.  143 

quiet  industrial  emigrants,  "  but  in  many  instances 
in  a  way  to  make  humanity  shudder,  and  to  defeat 
the  very  end  of  emigration.  Whatever  may  be  the 
diameter  of  the  Spanish  inhabitants  of  Mexico  and 
IVru  at  the  present  moment,  we  cannot  read  the 
accounts  of  the  first  conquests  of  these  countries 
without  feeling  strongly  that  the  race  destroyed  was, 
in  moral  worth  as  well  as  numbers,  superior  to  the 
race  of  their  destroyers."  The  settlers  that  followed 
on  the  heels  of  these  pioneers,  though  they  were 
more  like  real  emigrants,  went  unskilfully  to  work. 
Th»-y  seemed  to  expect  that  "the  moral  and  mechani- 
cal habits"  which  suited  the  old  country  would  suit 
tli«  nr\v/  and  everything  would  go  on  as  it  did  at 
home.  At  first  therefore  there  would  be  a  redundant 
population2  in  the  new  country  rather  than  in  the 
old,  for,  however  great  the  possible  produce  of  the 
colony,  the  actual  produce  would  be  less  than  the 
wants  of  the  new-comers  on  their  first  arrival.  To 
all  this  must  be  added  the  fact  that,  though  econo- 
mically a  far  and  a  near  place  are  alike,  they  are  very 
different  to  the  sentiments  of  men.  Patriotism  is 
no  fault,  and  tin-  bivakin^  of  home  ties  is  a  real  evil 
to  the  individuals,  however  beneficial  the  emigration 
may  be  to  the  nation.  Men  are  slow  to  move,  not 
only  from  thr  unrritain  prospects  of  success,  but  from 
that  r/.v  in  man  \\hi<-h  is  always  counteract in^ 

ili.-  PtJ  iii't/infrir  of  rMiniHTrial  ambition.     In  addition, 
therefore,  to  tin-  nn-n-  uneasiness  of  poverty  and  thr 
re  of  getting  a  living,  there  is  need  of  some  spirit 

ed.,  p.  391  ;  7th  ed.,  pp.  289  90.  '  Ibid. 


144  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

of  enterprise,  to  make  men  willing  and  successful 
emigrants.1  Those  who  felt  distress  most  would  often 
have  been  the  most  helpless  in  a  ne\v  country; 
they  needed  leaders  who  were  "  urged  by  the  spirit 
of  avarice  or  enterprise,  or  of  religious  or  political 
discontent,  or  were  furnished  with  means  and  support 
by  Government ; "  otherwise,  "  whatever  degree  of 
misery  they  might  suffer  in  their  own  country  from 
the  scarcity  of  subsistence,  they  would  be  absolutely 
unable  to  take  possession  of  any  of  those  uncultivated 
regions  of  which  there  is  such  an  extent  on  the  earth." 
Emigration  then  (according  to  Malthus)  is  not  likely 
to  happen  unless  political  discontent  and  extreme 
poverty  have  brought  the  emigrants  to  such  a  plight 
that  it  is  better  for  their  country  as  well  as  for  them- 
selves that  they  should  go.  "  There  are  no  fears  so 
totally  ill-grounded  as  the  fears  of  depopulation  from 
emigration."  :  Emigration  is  not  even  a  cure  for  an 
over-population ;  and  is  much  recommended  only 
because  little  adopted.  Gaps  made  in  the  population 
of  old  countries  are  soon  filled  up  ;  room  found  in  the 
ne\v  is  soon  occupied.  If  emigration  is  proposed  as  a 
means  of  securing  an  absolutely  unrestricted  increase 
of  population  by  placing  old  countries  in  the  position 
of  new  colonies,  the  hope  will  be  soon  and  for  ever 
cut  off.3 

Towards  the  end  of  his  life,  Malthus  had  an  oppor- 
tunity of  explaining  his  views  on  this  subject  to  an 
audience  of  statesmen.  He  appeared  as  a  witness 

1  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  p.  393  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  291. 
2  2nd  ed.,  p.  395  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  292.  3  Ibid. 


CHAP,  v.]  N«  >RTH  AND  MID  EUROPE.  145 

before  the  Select  Committee l  of  the  House  of  Commons 
"  to  inquire  into  the  expediency  of  encouraging  emi- 
o  rat  ion  from  the  United  Kingdom,"  and  his  influence 
is  traceable  in  their  Reports.  They  reported  *  that 
there  had  been  in  the  United  Kingdom  a  "  redundant 
population,"  in  Ireland  agricultural,  in  Scotland  and 
England  manufacturing;  that  one  cause  of  it  hud 
been  the  unavoidable  displacement  of  hand  labour  by 
machinery ; 8  that  meanwhile  the  British  colonies  in 
America,  Africa,  and  Australia  had  few  men  and 
plenty  of  land,  and  that  it  would  benefit  the  whole 
empire  if  parishes  could  convert  their  probable  or 
actual  paupers  into  emigrants,  always  provided  that 
the  remaining  population  could  be  induced  not  to 
grow  so  fast  as  to  fill  the  whole  gap  thus  created.4 
"  The  testimony "  (said  the  Committee  in  their  third 
Report 6)  "  which  was  uniformly  given  by  the  practical 
witnesses  has  been  confirmed  in  the  most  absolute 
manner  by  that  of  Air.  .Malthas,  and  your  Committee 
ran  not  but  express  their  satisfaction  at  finding  that 
the  experience  of  facts  is  thus  strengthened  through- 
out by  <:•,. ip-nil  i-.-asoning  and  scientific  principles." 
They  were  more  disposed  than  tin -ir  witness  himself 
to  a  priori  reasoning,  and  in  many  of  their  leading 

1  Appointed   in   March  1826,  in  the  tot  thirteen  in  Lord 

;»ool's  Government  Mai  thus  came  before  them  on  5th  May,  1827. 
See  Third  Report  of  Emigration  Committee,  pp.  9,  10,  and  f<>r  In.-  evidence 
pp.  31 1  tcq. 

*  1st  Report,  1828  (May);  2nd,  1827  (April).   The  free  use  of  technical 
terms  is  not  nurpriwi  itical  economy  was  then  a  popular  study. 

x  am  pies  see  1st  Report,  pp.  46,  57  ;  2nd  Report,  pp.  63,  102 ; 

•  2nd  R<  j  1827  (June).  *  p.  0. 

L 


146  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

questions  he  declined  to  follow  them.1  But  he  agreed 
with  their  main  conclusions,  allowing  that  under 
certain  conditions  it  would  be  even  a  financial  advan- 
tage to  remove  unemployed  workmen  to  the  colonies 
rather  than  suffer  them  to  become  paupers  at  home, 
and  adding,  that,  if  he  was  against  the  admission  of 
any  legal  claim  to  relief  in  ordinary  cases  of  pauper- 
ism, still  more  would  he  be  against  it  when  the 
pauper  had  before  him  the  alternative  of  assisted 
emigration.2  Plis  own  view  of  emigration  had  not 
changed  since  he  wrote  in  1803.  It  was  to  him  a 
partial  remedy  ;  and  it  is  more  useful  when  spon- 
taneously adopted  by  the  people 3  than  when  pressed 
on  them  by  their  Government.  Under  the  torture 
of  the  question  he  conceded  no  more.4 

As  a  temporary  expedient,  the  essay  tells  us,5 
"  with  a  view  to  the  more  general  cultivation  of  the 
earth  and  the  wider  extension  of  civilization,  it  seems 
to  be  both  useful  and  proper,"  and  is  to  be  encour- 
aged, or  at  least  not  prevented,  by  Governments.  All 
depends  on  the  rate  of  wages.  If  wages  were  high 
enough  to  enable  people  to  live  with  what  they 
counted  reasonable  comfort  at  home,  we  may  be  sure 
their  domestic  and  patriotic  ties  would  be  strong 
enough  to  keep  them  there.  The  complaint  that 
emigration  raises  wages  is  most  unreasonable.  At 
the  utmost  it  prevents  wages  from  falling  too  low, 

1  Cf.  below,  ch.  vii.  (on  Ireland),  especially  pp.  197  and  199. 

2  3rd  Report,  p.  315,  qu.  3257. 

3  The  Emigration  Committee  recommended  that  the  help  of  the  state 
should  only  be  given  on  condition  of    a    local  initiative  and  local 
contribution. 

4  See  e.  g.  qu.  3370.  5  7th  ed.,  p.  292. 


CHAP,  v.]  NORTH  AND  MID  EUROPE.  147 

and  helps  to  heal  the  mischief  caused  by  fluctuations 
in  trade. 

\\V  shall  find  at  a  later  stage  that  Malthus  is 
keenly  aware  of  the  unhappiness  caused  in  modern 
industrial  societies  by  changes  in  the  demand  for 
goods,  occurring  even  in  the  natural  (or  uninter- 
rupted) course  of  trade.  A  movement  in  favour  of 
emigration  in  1806  and  1807  led  him  to  insert  a 

j;raph  in  the  fourth  edition  of  his  essay  which 
explains  the  relation  of  emigration  to  these  changes. 
1 1  accepts  the  statement  of  Adam  Smith,  that  "  the 
demand  for  men,  like  that  for  any  other  commodity, 
necessarily  regulates  the  production  of  men;"1  but 
In  adds  (as  Cairnes  added  later)  that  it  takes  some 
little  time  to  bring  more  labour  into  the  market  when 
•••  is  demand  for  it,  and  some  little  time  to  check 
the  supply  when  once  it  has  begun  to  flow.8  A 
family  may  be  reared  to  catch  high  wages,  and  the 

:  wages  may  have  gone  before  the  family  has 
arrived  at  maturity.  Malthus  distinguishes  between 
a  normal  or  slight  "  oscillation  "  of  this  kind,  and  an 
excessive  redundancy  caused  by  an  unusual  stimulus 
to  production — the  stimulus,  for  example,  of  the 

_rn  wars  and  the  foreign  trade  of  the  years  before 
Waterloo.  In  the  normal  case  we  must  submit  to 

inevitable;  in  the  exceptional  we  may  find  an 
outlet  in  emigration.  No  doubt,  even  if  tin -iv  he  no 
emigration,  in  the  long  run  the  labour  market  will 

>   i.      '  v    I    rift  ae  (MacC.'i  ed.).    "Other"  is  not  a  slip;  the 

us  of  his  cynicUm. 

"/,  III.  iv.  298,  of  which  the  concluding  paragraph  WM  added  in 
1817. 


148  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

right  itself ;  but  the  process  will  be  a  very  painful 
one  to  the  workmen  concerned.  Emigration  is  the 
humane  and  politic  remedy. 

In  some  cases,  such  as  Norway  and  the  uplands  of 
Switzerland,1  there  would  seem  to  be  no  need  for 
Government  to  teach  the  people  to  emigrate.  Cir- 
cumstances should  do  it  for  them  ;  but  human  beings 
are  influenced  by  habit  and  "  chance  "  as  much  as 
by  any  deliberate  motive,  commercial  or  otherwise. 
In  the  Swiss  uplands,  as  Malthus  knew  them,  "  a 
habit  of  emigration  depended  not  only  on  situation 
but  often  on  accident."  Three  or  four  successful 
emigrations  "  have  frequently  given  a  spirit  of  enter- 
prise to  a  whole  village,  and  three  or  four  unsuccessful 
ones  a  contrary  spirit."  :  This  is  illustrated  by  the 
contrast  of  two  parishes,  both  in  the  Canton  de  Vaud, 
St.  Cergues  in  the  Jura,  and  Leysin  3  in  the  Bernese 
Alps  near  Aigle.  The  movements  of  population  in 
Leysin  puzzled  M.  Muret,  the  Swiss  economist,  who 
drew  up  a  paper  on  the  depopulation  of  Switzerland 
for  the  Economical  Society  of  Berne  in  the  year  1766. 
He  found  that  in  this  parish  of  four  hundred  people 
tli ere  were  born  every  year  on  an  average  only  eight 
children,  whereas,  elsewhere  in  Canton  de  Vaud,  to 
the  same  number  of  people  eleven  (in  Lyonnais 
sixteen)  children  were  a  common  proportion.  The 
difference,  he  observed,  disappeared  by  the  age  of 
twenty,  when,  if  we  may  say  so,  the  difference  died 
off,  the  eight  in  Leysin  being  healthier  than  the 

1  Essay,  7th  ed.,  Bk.  II.  ch.  v.        2  2n<l  ed.,  pp.  275-6  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  169. 
3  Or  "  Leyzin,"  as  Malthus  spells  it. 


CHAP,  v.]  NORTH   AND    MID  EUROPE.  149 

eleven  (or  sixteen)  elsewhere.  Muret  infers  from 
this,  that  "  in  order  to  maintain  in  all  places  the 
proper  equilibrium  of  population,  God  has  wisely 
ordered  things  in  such  a  manner  as  that  the  force  of  life 
in  each  country  should  be  in  the  inverse  ratio  of  its 
fecundity."  l  There  is,  however,  no  need  to  suppose 
a  miracle.  The  fact  was  simply  that  the  place  and 
the  employments  were  healthy,  that  the  people  had 
not  formed  habits  of  emigration,  that  their  resources 
were  stationary,  that,  therefore,  they  married  late,  had 
few  children,  and  were  long-lived.2  The  subsisting 
marriages  were  to  the  annual  births  as  12  to  1  ;  the 
births  were  to  the  living  population  as  1  to  49  ;  and 
the  number  of  persons  above  sixteen  were  to  those 
below  as  3  to  I.3  This  would  show  that  mere  number 
of  births  is  no  criterion  of  the  size  of  a  population, 
for  it  took  only  about  half  of  the  ordinary  number 
of  births  to  keep  up  a  population  of  four  hundred  in 
the  parish  of  Leysin.  In  St.  Cergues  the  subsisting 
marriages  were  to  the  annual  births  as  4  to  1  (inst.  a«l 
of  12  to  1  as  at  Leysin),  the  births  were  to  the  living 
population  as  1  to  26,  and  the  number  of  persons 
above  and  below  sixteen  just  equal.  That  is  to  say, 
St.  Cergues  had  nearly  twice  as  many  births  a  year 
in  jTopHrtion  to  the  population,  and  more  than  twice 
as  many  marriages  ;  but,  instead  of  three-fourths  of 
its  living  population  being  above  sixteen  (as  at  Leysin), 
those  above  and  those  below  Were  <  ju  il  in  number, 
and  St.  Cergues  had  a  smaller  proportion  of  adults 

1  £«ay,  2nd  cd.,  p.  271 ;  7th  ed.,  p.  166. 
1  Avenge  sixty-one  yean.  *  2nd  ed.t  p.  274  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  168. 


150  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

than  Leysin.  On  the  other  hand,  the  death-rate  was 
nearly  the  same  ;  the  healthiness  was  nearly  as  great. 
How  came  it  then  that  the  population  of  St.  Cergues 
was  only  one  hundred  and  seventy-one,  as  against  the 
four  hundred  and  five  of  Leysin  ?  What  became  of 
the  children  born  ?  Seeing  that  they  did  not  die, 
and  did  not  appear  on  the  registers  of  the  living, 
we  infer  that  they  left  their  native  village ;  that 
is  all.  The  situation  of  the  parish  of  St.  Cergues, 
on  the  high  road  from  Paris  to  Geneva,  suggested 
emigration ;  and,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  place  had 
become,  like  most  highland  hamlets,  a  breeding-place 
for  the  lowlands  and  the  manufacturing  towns.  The 
annual  drain  of  adults  made  room  for  the  favoured 
remnant  to  marry  and  have  large  families.  Even 
Leysin,  though  it  lay  on  no  high  road,  might  conceiv- 
ably (says  Malthus)  have  exchanged  its  stay-at-home 
character  for  a  habit  of  emigration,  and  might  then 
have  doubled  its  birth-rate  without  raising  the  death- 
rate.  It  is  one  of  the  fallacies  of  old  statisticians  to 
infer  a  large  population  from  a  high  birth-rate  ;  in 
an  old  country,  if  the  rate  of  births  is  high  in  com- 
parison with  the  number  of  living  inhabitants,  it 
means  either  many  deaths  or  much  emigration. 

The  people  of  an  old  country,  if  they  cannot  or 
will  not  emigrate,  must,  according  to  Malthus,  either 
look  for  a  high  death-rate  or  accustom  themselves 
to  late  marriages.  M.  Muret's  figures  showed  that 
many  cantons  of  Switzerland  had  adopted  this  last 
course  in  the  eighteenth  century.  In  the  Canton  de 
Vaud,  for  example,  the  proportion  of  marriages  to 


CHAP,  v.]  NORTH  AND  MID  EUROPE.  K>1 

living  inhabitants  (I  to  140)  was  lower  than  in  Nor- 
way itself.  In  a  pastoral  country  the  limits  of  human 
resources  are  so  obvious  that  the  people  cannot  fail  to 
be  impressed  with  the  need  of  limiting  their  numbers. 
Pastoral  industry,  again,  feeds  more  than  it  employs,1 
and  the  unemployed  must  look  for  employment  else- 
where. This  was  one  reason  why  there  were  so 
many  Swiss  in  foreign  service.  "  When  a  father 
has  more  than  one  son,  those  who  are  not  wanted 
on  the  farm  are  powerfully  tempted  to  enrol  them- 
selves as  soldiers,  or  emigrate  in  some  other  way,  as 
the  only  chance  to  enable  them  to  marry." 2  Mai  thus 
was  a  little  disappointed  with  the  condition  of  the 
s  peasantry  when  he  saw  them  in  1803.  Per- 
haps, he  says,  they  were  still  suffering  from  the  wars 
in  which  the  "Helvetic  Republic"  had  been  involved 
by  its  French  allies ;  but  more  probably  they  were 
suffering  from  the  unwise  attempts  of  their  Govern- 
inrnt  in  the  previous  century  to  "encourage"  what 
they  then  thought  was  a  declining  population.8  The 
peasant  who  guided  Malthus  to  the  sources  of  the 
Orbe4  talked  freely  to  him  on  the  poverty  of  tin- 
district,  which  he  ascribed  to  early  and  imprudent 
marriages,  "le  vice  du  pays";  he  would  have  a  law 
passed  to  prevent  a  man  marrying  till  ho  was  forty, 
ami  a  woman  till  she  was  elderly.  !!«•  said  that  at 
one  time  the  introduction  of  stone  polishing  had  -.  i\.  n 
the  people  high  wages  and  led  them  to  expect  constant 

1  2nd  ed.,  p.  280  ;  7  173,  top.    The  remark  savours  of  paradox. 

p.  280,  foot;  7th  ed.,  p.  173. 
*  Ibid,  p.  281 ;  7th  ed.,  p.  «  See  above,  p.  127. 


132  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  I 

employment ;  changes  of  fashion l  had  helped  to  drive 
the  industry  away,  but  the  habits  taught  by  it  had 
remained  so  fast  rooted  in  the  people  that  emigration 
itself  brought  no  relief  to  their  overflowing  numbers. 
But  this  self-taught  Malthusian  had  not  learned  his 
lesson  perfectly.  He  fancied  that  the  fertile  lands 
of  the  low  countries,  with  their  abundance  of  corn 
and  employments,  could  never  experience  the  evil 
of  over  population.  This  was  true  only  in  the 
unhappy  sense  that  they  had  greater  unhealthiness 
and  a  greater  mortality,  providing  room  for  early 
marriages  and  many  births. 

It  is  easy  to  see  that  Mai  thus  over- valued  his 
prize.  The  pons  asinorum  of  the  subject  is  the 
doctrine  that  over-population  is  not  a  question  of 
absolute  numbers  or  absolute  quantity  of  food  and 
fertility  of  soil,  but  of  the  numbers  in  relation  to 
the  food,  in  whatever  place  or  time ;  and  the  young 
peasant  had  not  crossed  it. 

1  Compare  above  on  "  oscillations,"  p.  147,  and  below,  Bk.  II.  chs.  ii. 
and  iii. 


CHAP,  vi.]  FRANCE.  153 


CHAPTER  VI. 

FRANCE. 

French  Numbers  a  Problem  to  Europe  in  1802,  because  Law  of  Increase 
not  understood — Effects  of  War — Lament  for  the  unborn  millions 
eighty  years  ago — More  fitting  now — Good  Distribution  and  Pro- 
duction-sometimes  inseparable — The  Stationary  State — Malthusand 
the  French  Revolution. 

IN  the  order  of  his  writing  Malthus  follows  the 
order  of  his  travels,  and  takes  France l  after  Switzer- 
land. France  presents  us  with  facts  of  an  almost 
unitjue  kind.  But  before  the  Revolution  it  had  no 
trustworthy  parish  registers  to  show  to  the  English 
inquirer ;  and  Malthus  would  not  have  lingered  over 
it,  if  in  1802  the  public  mind  had  not  been  perplexed 
by  a  riddle,  about  French  population  and  its  increase 
during  war,  of  which  he  had  the  key.2 

The  essay  is  not  meant  for  a  mere  history,  and  its 
author  is  not  careful  to  be  full  in  his  historical  details 
if  he  has  a  body  of  facts  sufficient  for  his  purpose. 
If  even  says,  about  some  conjectures  of  his  own 
based  on  French  figures,  that  he  had  only  adopted 
the  figures  for  the  sake  of  illustration,  and  hod  not 
supposed  them  to  be  strictly  true.  "It  will  be  1-ut 

1  Euay,  7th  ed.,  Bk.  II.  ch«.  vi  .  vii. 
'  2nd  ed.,  p.  285  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  175. 


154  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

of  little  consequence  if  any  of  the  facts  or  calculations 
which  have  been  assumed  in  the  course  of  this  chapter 
should  turn  out  to  be  false.  The  reader  will  see  that 
the  reasonings  are  of  a  general  nature,  and  may  be 
true  though  the  facts  taken  to  illustrate  them  may  be 
inapplicable." l  This  is  not  a  wary  admission.  Never- 
theless, the  chapter  on  France  is  one  of  the  most 
telling  in  the  essay.  The  substance  of  it  may  be 
stated  very  shortly. 

"  It  has  been  seen,"  he  says,  "  in  many  of  the 
preceding  chapters,  that  the  proportions  of  births, 
deaths,  and  marriages  are  extremely  different  in 
different  countries,  and  there  is  the  strongest  reason 
for  believing  that  they  are  very  different  in  the  same 
country  at  different  periods  and  under  different  cir- 
cumstances." The  truth  of  this  remark  is  borne 
out  not  only  by  the  contrast  between  the  France  and 
the  Switzerland  of  that  time,  but,  as  we  shall  find, 
by  the  contrast  between  the  France  of  1803  and  the 
France  of  to-day.  It  is  not  singular  that  Malthus 
should  (wrongly)  expect  the  Swiss  to  become  his 
pupils  more  easily  than  the  French,  for  in  his  day 
both  the  mortality  and  the  number  of  marriages 
were  greater  in  France  than  in  Switzerland.3 

He  spends  most  pains  in  illustrating  the  contrast 
between  the  France  before  the  Revolution  and  the 

1  2nd  ed.,  p.  296  ;  cf.  7th  ed.,  p.  182  n.     "  Indeed  in  adopting  Sir  F. 
d'lvernois's  calculations  respecting  the  actual  loss  of  men  during  the 
Revolution,  I  never  thought  myself  borne  out  by  facts,  but  the  reader 
will  be  aware  that  I  adopted  them  rather  for  the  sake  of  illustration 
than  from  supposing  them  strictly  true." 

2  7th  ed.,  p.  188.  3  7^  ed>j  p<  176  .  cf<  p<  175 


CHAP,  vi.]  FRANCE.  155 

France  at  the  Peace  of  Amiens.  In  many  ways  it 
was  fortunate  that  he  confined  himself  to  the  Repub- 
lican period.  It  was  the  time  when  the  moral  position 
of  France  was  highest,  and  she  was  warring  not  for 
conquest  but  for  defence.  Switzerland  had  exem- 
plified the  fact  that  Emigration  does  not  permanently 
check  population,  but,  on  the  whole,  encourages  it. 
France,  at  the  time  chosen,  exemplified  the  fact  that 
even  the  most  destructive  Wars  have  a  similar  effect 
on  the  growth  of  numbers.  What  Malthus  had 
proved  more  or  less  deductively  in  regard  to  ancient 
nations  he  was  able  to  show  more  inductively  by 

sties  in  regard  to  modern.  Great  surprise  was 
expressed  in  the  early  days  of  this  century  that,  in 
spite  of  her  enormous  losses,  France  had  not  dimin- 

1  in  population.  Malthus  says  she  had  rather 
increased  than  diminished.  According  to  the  estimate 
of  the  Constituent  Assembly,  which  was  confirmed 
by  the  calculations  of  Necker,  the  population  in  1792, 
before  tin-  war,  was  26,000,000.  In  1801  it  seems, 
from  the  n  turns  of  the  Prefects,  to  have  been  about 
28,000,000.1  In  ten  years  the  incna-o  had  been 
2,000,000,  or  200,000  a  year.  Yet  at  a  medium  calm- 
latioii  Francis  in  addition  to  the  ordinary  deaths,  had 
lost  by  tin-  war  about  1,000,000  of  men  up  to  that 

•   or  100,000  ji    \<  n.     How,  on  the  principles 

lalthus,  were  the  two  facts  to  be  reconciled  • 
To  reconcile  them  he  shows,  first,  how,  according 
to  the  figures  given  by  Frenchmen  themselves,  th< 
numbers  of  the   unmarried    Mir v Ivors  at  home  v 
1  7th  ed.,  pp.  177,  181  n.  »  Hn-i.,  j-   178  and  n. 


156  MALTHUS   AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

more  than  enough  to  have  kept  up  in  case  of  necessity 
the  old  number  of  marriages  and  the  old  rate  of 
increase ;  second,  how  from  general  principles  there 
was  a  presumption  in  favour  of  a  rapid  increase  at 
such  a  time  ;  and  third,  how  the  social  and  industrial 
conditions  of  the  French  people  since  the  Kevolution 
were  favourable  to  an  increase  of  population.  First, 
then,  he  shows  that  the  entire  body  of  unmarried 
persons  was  large  enough  in  spite  of  the  war  to  fill 
the  vacancies  and  keep  up  the  old  rate  of  increase. 
The  body  of  the  unmarried  is  formed  by  the  "  accu- 
mulation "  year  by  year  of  the  numbers  of  persons, 
rising  to  marriageable,  age,  who  are  not  married  (or 
say  briefly  of  the  marriageable  unmarried,  including 
widows  and  widowers).  This  accumulation  will  only 
stop  when  the  yearly  accessions  thereto  are  no  more 
than  equal  to  the  yearly  mortality  therein.  The  size 
of  this  body  will  therefore  vary  with  the  character  of 
the  particular  nation  considered.  In  the  Canton  de 
Vaud  it  was  equal  to  the  whole  number  of  the 
married  ;  but  in  France  both  the  mortality  and  the 
marriage  rate  were  higher  than  in  Switzerland,  and 
the  unmarried  were  therefore  a  smaller  fraction  of 
the  total  numbers.  Assuming  from  the  French 
authorities l  a  certain  birth  and  death  rate,  and  assum- 
ing from  the  same  authorities  that  the  unmarried 
men  for  the  period  before  the  Kevolution  were  one 
and  a  half  millions  out  of  five  millions  that  were 
marriageable,  it  would  appear  that  every  year  there 
were  600,000  persons  arriving  at  the  marriageable 

1  Not  above  suspicion.     See  7th  ed.,  p.  176  n. 


CHAP,  vi.]  FRANCE.  157 

age,  of  whoni  (since  about  220,000  is  the  annual 
number  of  marriages)  440,000  marry.  The  surplus 
of  unmarried  is  therefore  160,000  persons,  or  about 
80,000  men.  It  follows  that  for  war  purposes  (if 
mere  numbers  be  considered)  the  reserve  fund  of  men 
would  be  nearly  one  and  a  half  millions,  and  every 
n«'\v  annual  surplus  of  80,000  youths  above  eighteen 
might  be  taken  for  military  service  without  any 
diminution  in  the  number  of  marriages.1  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  it  is  putting  the  case  somewhat 
strongly  to  suppose  as  many  as  600,000  to  be  taken 
for  service  in  the  first  instance,  and  150,000  additional 
troops  to  keep  up  the  supply  every  year.  But  this 
would  still  leave  in  the  first  instance  nearly  900,000 
for  the  reserve  fund,  which  with  the  annual  80,000 
could  bear  a  drain  on  it  of  150,000  for  ten  years,  and 
leave  a  balance  of  200,000  altogether,  or  20,000  a 
year.  In  other  words,  there  would  be  room  for  an 
increase  in  the  number  of  marriages  of  nearly  20,000. 
1 t  would  not  be  miraculous  then  if  the  French  popu- 
lation should  continue  to  increase  in  the  face  of  great 
losses  in  war,  for  the  increase  before  the  war  had  been 
very  much  less  than  the  greatest  possible. 

In  the  second  place,  the  circumstances  of  the 
civilian  population  made  an  increase  very  likely. 
Many  out  of  the  reserve  fund  of  unmarried  men  will 
in  the  course  of  ten  years  be  past  the  military  age, 
but  not  past  the  age  of  marriage.  The  150,000 
i  its  would  probably  be  taken  from  the  300,000 

I itary  advantage  of  an  inorc^in^  i»"j»n  -inted  out 

also  in  Le on  Newenhain's '  Ireland,'  Klin,  far.,  July  1808,  p.  350. 


158  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  i. 

who  every  year  rose  to  marriageable  age,  and  the 
marriages  would  be  kept  up  from  the  older  unmarried 
men,  in  the  scarcity  of  younger  husbands.  It  may 
be  remembered,  too,  that  in  the  early  years  of  the 
war  so  many  youths  married  prematurely  to  avoid 
service,1  that  the  Directory  were  obliged  (in  1798)  to 
extend  the  conscription  to  the  married  men.  But 
even  when  the  husbands  were  removed  to  the  war 
the  marriages  were  not  necessarily  childless,  and 
would  thus,  at  the  least,  be  a  means  of  adding  to  the 
people's  numbers  that  did  not  exist  before  the  Revolu- 
tion. The  facility  of  divorce,  too,  though  bad  both 
in  morals  and  in  politics,  would  at  least,  in  the 
existing  scarcity  of  men,  act  somewhat  like  polygamy, 
and  make  the  number  of  children  greater  in  propor- 
tion to  the  number  of  husbands.  It  is  said,  too,  that 
there  were  more  natural  children  born  in  France  after 
the  Revolution  than  before  it ;  and,  since  the  peasants 
were  better  off  after  it  than  before  it,  there  was  a 
better  chance  that  more  of  the  children  than  formerly 
should  survive. 

In  the  third  place,  there  is  no  doubt,  says  Malthus, 
that  the  division  of  the  domain  lands  and  the  creation 
(or  at  least  the  multiplication)  of  peasant  properties 
have  had  a  great  influence  both  on  wealth  and  on 
population.  They  add  to  population  more  than  to 
wealth,  for  they  increase  the  gross  produce  of  food 
at  the  expense  of  the  nett  surplus.  "  If  all  the 
land  of  England  were  divided  into  farms  of  £20  a 
year,  we  should  probably  be  more  populous  than 

1  Cf.  Josiah  Tucker,  On  Trade,  p.  17  (3rd  ed.,  1753). 


CHAP,  vi.]  FRANCE.  I'O 

we  are  at  present,  but  as  a  nation  we  should  be 
extremely  poor.  We  should  be  almost  without  dis- 
posable revenue,  and  should  be  under  a  total  inability 
of  maintaining  the  same  number  of  manufactures  or 
collecting  the  same  taxes  as  at  present."1  But  the 
ion  of  lands  was  at  least  in  favour  of  the  gross 
produce,  and  even  the  passing  traveller  was  inclined 
to  think,  from  the  appearance  of  the  fields  and  the 
style  of  the  field  labour,  that,  however  severely  the 
manufacturing  industry  of  France  might  have  suffered 
during  the  war,  her  agriculture  had  rather  gained 
than  lost.2  The  absence  of  so  many  strong  men  with 
the  armies  would  not  only  raise  wages  at  home  and 
make  the  labourers  better  off,  but  by  pro  tanto 
lessening  the  demand  for  food  and  taking  from  those 
at  home  the  burden  of  supporting  so  many  men, 
would  not  raise  the  price  of  food  with  the  wages, 
but  would  allow  real  wages  to  rise.  This  would 
co-operate  with  political  causes  in  making  the  people 
desert  the  towns  for  the  country,  and  thereby  it 
would  reduce  the  death-rate,  which  is  always  higher 
in  towns  than  in  the  country.  It  is  attested  by 
Arthur  Young  (no  friend  to  the  Essay  on  Population) 
that  the  high  mortality  of  France  before  the  Revolu- 
tion (according  to  Necker  1  in  30)  was  caused  by  an 
over-population  which  the  changes  at  the  Revolution 
t'  n  led  to  remove.  The  probability  is,  therefore,  that 

1  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  p.  297  n  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  185,  which  omits  one  clause. 
Cf.  2nd  ed.,  pp.  290-1  ;  7th  cd.,  j.j..  17i»,  180. 

8  2nd  ed.,  p.  291  ;  7th  ed.,  pp.  179,  180.  Cf.  the  often-quoted  passages 
about  the  bleak  rock  and  the  garden.  \M-:;I.-H  (be  it  remarked)  before 
and  n  lie  Revolution,  in  Arthur  Young's  Travel*  in  France 

(Bury  St.  Edmunds,  1792),  pp.  36,  37,  42  ;  cf.  p.  341. 


160  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

the  births  increased  and  the  deaths  decreased  during 
the  ten  years  after  the  Eevolution ;  and  there  could 
be  no  difficulty  in  understanding  the  increase  of 
population  in  spite  of  the  war.  ID  the  later  editions 
of  the  essay l  Malthus  confesses  that  his  French 
figures  need  revision ;  the  returns  of  the  Prefects 
for  1801-2  and  other  Government  papers  had  given 
a  smaller  proportion  of  births  than  he  had  thought 
probable,  for  the  period  before  the  Revolution.  But 
(he  remarks)  the  Prefects'  returns  do  not  embrace 
the  earlier  years  of  the  Eevolution,  precisely  the 
time  when  the  encouragement  to  marriage  would  be 
greatest  and  the  proportion  of  births  highest.  In 
any  case  they  show  that  the  population  of  France 
is  not  less  but  greater  since  the  Revolution.  If  in 
the  latter  part  of  this  period  the  increase  was  affected 
by  the  decrease  of  deaths  rather  than  by  increase  of 
births,  they  not  only  leave  his  position  untouched, 
but  give  him  a  result  that  would  highly  please  him. 
Certainly  in  England  and  in  Switzerland,  and  pro- 
bably in  every  European  country,  the  rate  of  mortality 
has  decreased  in  the  last  two  hundred  years,  through 
the  greater  healthiness  of  the  conditions  of  life ;  and 
it  is  not  at  all  surprising  that  a  population  should 
be  kept  up  or  even  made  to  increase  with  a  smaller 
proportion  of  births,  deaths,  and  marriages  than  before.2 
The  French  labouring  classes  at  the  beginning  of 
the  Revolution  were  seventy-six  per  cent,  worse  fed, 
clothed,  and  supported  than  their  fellows  in  England.3 

1  E.  g.  5th,  1817  ;  7th  ed.,  ch.  vii.  2  7th  ed.,  p.  188. 

3  Arthur  Young,  Travels  in  France,  pp.  410,  437. 


CHAP,  vi  ]  FRANCE.  161 

Th.-ir  wages  wore  10cT.  a  day  (as  compared  with 
1*.  5d.)t  while  the  price  of  corn  was  about  the  same ; 
but  their  condition  and  their  remuneration  had  been 
decidedly  improved  by  the  Revolution  and  the 

ion  of  tho  national  domains.  Wages  in  money 
(since  Young  wrote)  had  risen  to  1$.  3d.  a  day ;  and, 
according  to  some  authorities,  the  real  wages  had 
become  even  higher  than  in  England.1  The  new 

ibution  of  wealth  had  been  followed  by  an 
immense  increase  in  the  production  of  it,  shared  by 
the  producers  themselves,  and  making  France  im- 
mensely stronger  as  a  nation  either  for  offence  or 
defence.2  Such  an  improvement  in  the  condition  of 
the  people  would  naturally  be  followed  by  diminution 
in  the  deaths ;  and  a  diminution  in  the  deaths  must 
lead  either  to  an  increase  of  population  or  to  a 
decrease  in  tin-  marriages  and  births.  The  latter 
(which  is  presumably  an  increase  of  moral  restraint) 
has  followed.  In  the  ten  years  after  the  Peace  of 
Amiens  the  population  seems  to  have  increased  only 
very  slow  ;  perhaps  no  propo- 

sition more  incontrovertible  than  this,  that  in  tw.» 
countries,  in  which  the  rate  of  increase,  the  natural 
healthiness  of  climate,  and  the  state  of  towns  an  1 
3  are  supposed  to  be  nearly  the  same,  tho 
one  in  which  the  pressure  of  poverty  is  the  greatest 
will  have  the  greatest  proportion  of  births.  «l<ath-, 

riages,''  "  versd* 

Malthus1  survey  of  population   in    France  applies 

1  Amy,  7th  «L,  p.  1S9.  (To,  Mod,  Jfcmy*,  i.  184. 

7th  cd ,  p.  188. 

M 


1G2  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

only  to  his  own  lifetime,  and  indeed  only  to  the 
earlier  part  of  that.  To  do  him  full  justice  we  must 
place  his  picture  of  the  real  losses  of  war  alongside 
of  his  description  of  the  compensations. 

The  constant  tendency  of  population  to  increase 
up  to  the  limits  of  the  food  may  be  interpreted  (in 
the  case  of  war)  as  the  tendency  of  the  births  in  a 
country  to  supply  the  vacancies  made  by  death. 
The  breaches  are  not  permanent ;  they  are  among  the 
reparable  as  distinguished  from  the  irreparable  mis- 
chiefs of  war.  But  this  does  not,  from  a  moral  or 
political  aspect,  afford  the  slightest  excuse  for  the 
misery  caused  thereby  to  the  existing  inhabitants. 

"  Can  you  by  filling  cradles  empty  graves  ? " 

There  is  an  exchange  of  mature  beings  in  the  "  full 
vigour  of  their  enjoyments"1  for  an  equal  number 
of  helpless  infants.  Not  only  is  this  a  waste  of  the 
men  who  died,  but  it  is  a  deterioration,  for  the  time 
being,  of  the  quality  of  the  whole  people ;  they  will 
consist  of  more  than  the  normal  proportion  of  women 
and  children ;  and  the  married  will  be  men  and 
women  who  in  ordinary  times  would  have  remained 
single.  When  the  drain  of  men  for  military  service 
begins  to  exhaust  the  reserve  of  unmarried  persons, 
and  the  annual  demands  are  in  excess  of  the  number 
annually  rising  to  marriageable  age,  then  of  course 
war  will  actually  diminish  population.2  Till  that 
point  is  reached,  war  may  alter  the  units  and  spoil 
the  quality  of  the  population,  but  will  not  lessen  its 

1  A  characteristic  utilitarian  touch.  2nd  ed.,  p.  295,  top  ;  7th  ed., 
p.  183.  2 


CHAP,  vi.]  FRANCE.  103 

total  volume.  Sir  Francis  Ivernois,  from  whom 
Multlius  took  some  of  his  figures,  went  too  far  in 
tin-  other  direction  when  he  told  us  we  must  not  look 
so  much  at  the  deaths  in  battle  or  in  hospital,  when 
we  are  counting  up  the  destructive  effects  of  war 
or  revolution,  as  at  the  remoter  results  ;  "  the  number 
of  men  war  has  killed  is  of  much  less  importance 
than  the  number  of  children  whom  it  has  prevented 
and  will  still  prevent  from  coming  into  the  world." 
He  supposes  one  million  of  men  to  have  been  lost  in 
the  Revolution  itself,  and  one  and  a  half  millions  in  its 
wars ;  and  he  says  that,  if  only  two  millions  of  these 
ha<l  been  married,  they  would  have  needed  to  have  had 
six  children  each  in  order  that  a  number  of  children 
o<|iial  to  the  number  of  their  parents  (i.  e.  four  millions) 
should  be  alive  thirty-nine  years  afterwards.  We 
ought,  he  thinks,  to  mourn  not  only  for  the  two  and  a 
half  millions  of  men  killed,  but  for  the  twelve  millions 
whom  their  death  prevented  from  being  born.  To 
whirh  Malthas  wisely  answers  that  the  >l;iin,  being 
full  grown  men,  reared  at  no  little  cost  to  themselves 
and  their  country,  may  be  fitly  mourned,  but  not  the 
unborn  twelve  millions,  whose  appearance  in  the 
world  would  only  have  sent  or  kept  a  corresponding 
number  out  of  it, — and  "if  in  the  best-governed 
country  in  Europe  we  were  to  mourn  the  posterity 
which  U  j.iv\vnt.-«l  from  coming  into  1  •>  should 

always  wear  the  habit  of  grief."1 

If  Sir  Francis  Ivernois  could   have   foreseen   the 
history  of  French  population  for  seventy 

1  2nd  ed,  p.  294  ;  7th  od.,  p.  183. 

M  2 


1C4  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  i. 

the  time  when  he  wrote,  he  would  have  had  more 
reason  to  utter  his  curious  lament. 

"  The  effect  of  the  Revolution,"  wrote  Mai  thus  in 
1817,  "  has  been  to  make  every  person  depend  more 
upon  himself  and  less  upon  others.  The  labouring 
classes  have  therefore  become  more  industrious,  more 
saving,  and  more  prudent  in  marriage  than  formerly ; 
and  it  is  quite  certain  that  without  these  effects  the 
Revolution  would  have  done  nothing  for  them." l  The 
country  districts  -  which  took  the  least  active  part  in 
the  Revolution  have  been  the  most  resolute  in  con- 
serving the  results  of  it.  Over-population  in  France 
is  known  only  in  the  towns.  At  the  beginning  of  the 
eighteenth  century — say  one  hundred  and  fifty  years 
ago  (1732) — under  Louis  XV.  the  population  of  France 
was  estimated  at  twenty  millions  of  people.2  There 
is  good  reason  to  believe  that  the  habits  of  the  people 
were  entirely  different  from  what  they  are  now  ;  they 
were  even  said  to  be  famous  for  their  large  families.3 
In  1776  their  numbers  were  about  twenty- four  mil- 

1  Essay,  7th  ed.,  p.  320  (III.  vii.). 

2  Levasseur,  France  avec  ses  Colonies  (1875),  p.  842.     According  to 
Anderson,  Chron.  Ded.,  Vol.  III.  p.  xliii,  some  said  twenty,  others  seven- 
teen.  But  Mr.  Kitchin  cites  Vauban  to  show  that  there  had  been  a  decline 
in  population  from  fifteen  to  thirteen  millions  between  the  beginning  of 
the  war  of  Succession  and  the  end  of  it  (1702,  1713). —  History  of  France, 
vol.  iii.  p.  342.     Cf.  Fox  Bourne's  Life  of  Locke,  i.  p.  350 ;  Vauban's 
Dime  Eoyale,  pp.  162-3. 

3  Josiah  Tucker,  Essay  on  Trade  (3rd  ed.,  1753),  p.  14.     There  may 
be  rhetorical  exaggeration  in  his  statements.     "The  subordination  of 
the  common  people  is  an  unspeakable  advantage  to  the  French  in  respect 
to  trade.     By  this  means  the  manufacturers  [workmen]  are  always  kept- 
industrious.     They  dare  not  run  into  debauchery  ;  to  drunkenness  they 
are  not  inclined.     They  are  [practically  by  the  law  of  military  service] 
obliged  to  enter  into  the  married  state,  whereby  they  raise  up  large 
families  to  labour,  and  keep  down  the  price  of  it  ;  and  consequently,  by 
working  cheaper,  enable  the  merchant  to  sell  the  cheaper." 


vi.]  FRAN  165 

lions,1  at  the  Revolution  of  1789  about  twenty 
millions,-  in  1831  thirty-two  and  a  half,  and  in  1866 
thirty-eight.  At  the  present  time,  from  loss  of  terri- 
tory ami  fmin  decrease  of  numbers  in  certain  parts 
of  the  country,  they  are  little  more  than  thirty-seven 
and  a  half  millions — not  much  more  than  the  popu- 

11  of  Great  Britain,  a  country  neither  so  large  nor 
so  fertile.  Even  in  1815  Hal  thus  spoke  of  France 
as  having  a  more  stationary  and  less  crowded  popu- 

:i  than  Britain,  though  it  was  richer  in  corn.8 
The  population  of  1881  showr.l  an  increase  of  766,260 
that  of  1876,  and  was  in  all  37,672,048.4  It 
increases  not  by  augmentation  in  the  number  of 
births,  for  that  has  been  actually  lessening,  but  by 
diminution  in  the  deaths.  The  population  of  Britain" 
has  trebled  itself  within  the  present  century  ;  that  of 
•ice  has  not  even  doubled  itself  in  a  century  and  a 
half,  with  every  allowance  for  a  varying  frontier.  The 
fears  which  Malthus  expressed,6  that  the  law  of  inherit- 
ance and  compulsory  division  of  property  would  lead 
to  an  excessive  and  impoverished  country  population, 
have  not  been  1  The  industrial  progress  of 

the  country  has  been  very  great.     Fifty  years  ago  the 
production  of  win  -at  was  only  the  half  of  what  it   is 

>  Wealth  of  Nation*,  IV.  ill  pp.  220-1. 

•  See  above,  p.  155.     Levoraeur  make*  ur  Young, 
who  comtidera  France  over- populated  by  five  or  *ix  mi II long,  makes  it 

v-six  (Travel*  in  France,  pp.  468-9  ;  cf.  p.  47  -had  nude 

it  tli 
'  Groiim/j  of  an  Opinion,  Ac.,  p.  12.    See  below,  I'.k.  II   .  -li.  i. 

*  <  -nan*  a*  given  in  Annmtirt.  de  V&onomie  PoHtiqttt  (1882),  p.  899. 

"tomy  (1820),  pp.  433  MO..    Cliffe  Leslie  ( Afor.  and  Pol. 
£i*iy»,  1879,  p.  424)  attributes  the  few  births  to  the  very  Law  ••: 
-.     :   -\  ..      .         itiiu    VM  .ilr.i.-l. 


166  MALTHUS   AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

to-day,  of  meat  less  than  tlie  half.  In  almost  every 
crop  and  every  kind  of  food  France  is  richer  now 
than  then  in  the  proportion  of  more  than  2  to  1. 
In  all  the  conveniences  of  life  (if  food  be  the  neces- 
saries) the  increased  supply  is  as  4  to  1,  while  foreign 
trade  has  become  as  6  to  1.  Since  property  is  more 
widely  distributed  in  France  than  elsewhere,  an 
increase  of  production  is  much  more  certain  to  mean 
a  benefit  to  the  whole  people.  But  there  are  certain 
classes  of  goods,  chiefly  necessaries,  of  which  (even 
in  a  land  like  England,  where  the  great  wealth  is  in 
a  few  hands)  it  is  impossible  profitably  to  extend  the 
production  without  pari  passu  extending  the  distri- 
bution. When  articles  of  food  are  imported  in  vast 
quantities,  they  cannot,  from  the  nature  of  things, 
go  entirely  to  the  rich  ;  the  rich  can  easily  eat  and 
drink  beyond  the  normal  value,  but  not  much  (with- 
out Gargantua's  mouth)  beyond  the  normal  quantity; 
and,  at  least  in  the  case  of  our  own  country,  very  little 
is  exported  again.  Generally  speaking,  it  is  a  true  say- 
ing that,  the  more  the  food,  the  more  are  fed.  But 
what  is  true  of  necessaries  in  England  is  true  even  of 
other  goods  in  France.1  The  "  average  wealth  of  each 
person  "  is  not  there,  as  often  elsewhere,  a  mere  arith- 
metical entity,  but  a  very  near  approach  to  the  ordi- 
nary state  of  the  great  majority  of  the  people ;  and 
this  average  wealth  is  thought  by  good  authorities 2 
to  have  more  than  doubled  since  the  beginning  of  the 

1  In  the  country  districts  at  least.    On  the  relation  of  luxury  to  trade, 
&c.,  see  below,  Bk.  II.  ch.  iii.  p.  268. 

2  E.  g.  by  M.  Levasseur  in  La  France  avec  ses  Colonies  (1875),  p. 
853. 


CHAP,  vi.]  FRANCE.  167 

century.     The   population,  on   the   other   hand,   has 
only  increased  by  one-half;  and  the  average  duration 
of  life  has  lengthened  from  twenty-eight  to  thirty- 
seven   years.      In  a  paper  of   Chateauneufs  (1826) 
quoted  by  MaeCulloch,1  it  was  said  that  the  French 
people  were  improving  their  condition  by  diminishing 
their  marriages.     The  statistician  Levasseur,  on  the 
contrary,  with  the  facts  of  another  half-century  before 
him,  tells  us  that  married  people  in  France  are  the 
majority  of  the  population,2  the  average  age  of  marriage 
being  twenty-six  for  the  women,  and  rather  more  than 
thirty  for  the  men.     The  birth-rate,  however,  is  the 
^  in  Europe,8  being  1  in  37,  as  opposed  to  1  in 
'27  f<>r  England.     It  is  by  refusing  to  fill  the  cradles 
that  they  leave  the  graves  empty.      Yet  France  is 
less  healthy  than  England.     Its  death-rate  in  1882 
was  22*2  per  thousand,  while  in  England  it  was  19  6.4 
•  •re    are   other   features   which   make   the   case 
unique.      There   are  few  foreigners  in  France  ;    the 
numbers  of  the  French  people  are  neither  swelled  by 
immigration  nor  reduced  by  emigration.     Since  the 
expulsion  of  the   Huguenots  and  the  colonization  of 
Canada,  few  nations  have  been  so  rooted  in   their 
own  country ;  even  Algerian  and  Tunisian  conquests 
are  due  to  no  popular  passion  for  colonizing.     The 
peasant  properties  have  made  the  people  averse  to 
movem« 

At  present  most  Frenchmen  remain  during  life  in 

1  Appendix  to  FTra/M  o/Aafiotu,  note  iv.  p.  465. 

I  e.  pp.  846,  840  O.  7  .....     JM,  l-".i. 

AyMrar.frntraf*  45(A  Report,  for  1882,  pp.  cii,  crii. 


163  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BR.  i. 

the  same  Department  in  which  they  were  born ; l 
and  recent  observers  tell  us2  that  a  military  career 
is  becoming  distasteful  to  all  classes.  Taking  the 
absence  of  immigration  as  balanced  by  the  absence 
of  emigration,  we  are  brought  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  population  of  France  is  stationary  by  its  own 
deliberate  act. 

How  far  this  is  in  accordance  with  the  views  of 
Malthus  it  is  impossible  to  say  in  one  word.  It  is 
at  least  the  result  of  the  prudence  which  he  was 
always  preaching.  But  his  prudence  lay  in  the  defer- 
ring of  marriage ;  and  this  is  not  the  form  which 
prevails  in  France.  Moreover,  he  thought  with  Adam 
Smith  that  the  progressive  state  and  not  the  stationary 
was  the  normal  one  for  humanity ;  if  the  whole  world 
became  contented  with  what  it  had  got,  there  would, 
in  his  opinion,  be  no  progress,  and  the  resources  and 
capacities  of  human  beings  and  of  the  world  would 
not  be  developed.  In  fact,  he  retained  the  aspirations 
of  the  Revolution,  which  the  country-folk  in  France 
seem  in  danger  of  losing  ;  he  wished  men  to  have 
hopes  for  the  future  as  well  as  a  comfortable  life  in 
the  present ;  he  saw  no  virtue  in  mere  smallness  any 
more  than  in  mere  bigness  of  numbers  ;  he  desired  as 
great  as  possible  a  population  of  stalwart,  well-in- 
structed, wise,  and  enterprising  men ;  he  thought 
that,  without  competition,  ambition,  and  emulation, 
and  without  the  element  of  difficulty  and  hardship, 
human  beings  would  never  fully  exert  their  best 
powers,  though  he  also  thought  that  a  time  might 

1  Levasseur,  La  France,  1.  c.  2  E.  g.  Times,  1.  c. 


CFIAP.  vi.]  FRANCE.  169 

come  when  the  lower  classes  would  be  as  the  middle 
classes,  or,  in  his  own  words,  when  the  lower  would 
iininished  and  the  middle  increased,  and  when, 
mainly  through  the  action  of  the  labourers  them- 
BS,  inventions  would  .become  a  real  benefit,  because 
accompanied  by  lighter  labour  and  shorter  hours  for 
the  labourers.1  As  for  that  love  of  humanity,  that 
was  so  much  present  in  the  words  and  thoughts  if 
not  in  the  deeds  of  the  men  of  the  Revolution,  he  had 
a  full  share  of  it.  He  desired  a  longer  life  for  the 
living,  and  fewer  births  for  the  sake  of  fewer  deaths. 
His  work  was  like  that  of  the  lighthouse,  to  give 
light  and  to  save  life. 

say,  7th  ed.,  IV.  xiii  p.  474 ;  2nd  ed.,  IV.  ad.  p.  594. 


170  MALTHUS   AND   HIS  WORK.  [EK.  i. 


CHAPTER   VII. 

t, 

ENGLAND,    SCOTLAND,    AND   IRELAND. 

Prevailing  Checks  —  Proposed  Census  of  1753  —  Brown's  Estimate  — 
Depopulation  of  England  in  Eighteenth  Century — Opposing  Argu- 
ments —  Census  of  1801  —  Interpretation  of  Returns  —  Relative 
Nature  of  the  Question  of  Populousness — Scotland  to  England  as 
Country  to  Town — Industrial  changes  since  the  Union — Ireland 
under  English  rule  in  Eighteenth  Century  and  after — The  Wall 
of  Brass— Virtue  without  Wisdom— The  Potato  Standard— The 
Emigration  Committee — The  New  Departure. 

IN  dealing  with  the  question  of  population  in  his 
own  country,1  Malthus  tries  to  answer  at  least  three 
distinct  questions : — What  were  the  checks  actually 
at  work  in  those  days  ?  Had  the  numbers  of  the 
people  increased,  or  not,  in  the  eighteenth  century  ? 
What  conclusions  on  either  point  may  be  drawn  from 
the  English  census  ? 

The  first  question -was  answered  with  comparative 
fulness  in  the  essay  of  1798.  It  is  remarked  there 
that  in  England  the  middle  and  upper  classes  increase 
at  a  slow  rate,  because  they  are  always  anxious  to 
keep  their  station,  and  afraid  of  the  expense  of 
marriage.2  No  man,  as  a  rule,  would  like  his  wife's 

i  2nd  ed.,  II.  ix.  ;  7th  ed.,  II.  viii.,  ix.  2  1st  ed.,  pp.  63,  64. 


CHAP,  vii.]  ENGLAND.  171 

social  condition  to  be  out  of  keeping  with  her  habits 
and  inclinations.  Two  or  three  steps  of  descent  will 
be  considered  by  most  people  as  a  real  evil.  "  If 
society  be  held  desirable,  it  surely  must  be  free, 
equal,  and  reciprocal  society,  where  benefits  are  con- 

<1  as  well  as  received,  and  not  such  as  the 
dependant  finds  with  his  patron  or  the  poor  with 
tli<i  rirli."  So  it  happens  that  many  men,  of  liberal 
education  and  limited  income,  do  not  give  effect  to 
an  early  attachment  by  an  early  marriage.  When 
thrir  passion  is  too  strong  or  their  judgment  too 
k  for  this  restraint,  no  doubt  they  have  blessings 
tint  counterbalance •  the  obvious  evils;  "but  I  fear 
it  must  be  owned  that  the  more  general  consequences 
of  such  marriages  are  rather  calculated  to  justify 
than  to  repress  the  forebodings  of  the  prudent."1 
What  Maltlms  desires,  as  we  infer  from  the  general 
tenor  of  his  book,  is  that  all  classes  without  exception 
should  show  reluctance  to  impair  their  standard  of 
living;  and  his  hatred  of  the  Poor  Laws  is  due  to 
his  conviction  that  they  hinder  this  end.  The  subject 
will  be  more  fully  discussed  by-and-by.2  In  tlio 
chapters  on  England  it  is  little  more  than  mentioned, 
the  author  devoting  himself  chiefly  to  the  statistical 
data  of  the  census  and  registers. 

In   this  connection    it    was   impossible  for  him   to 
avoid  the  question  that   ha  1  long  agitated  the  minds 

oliticians.     Had   the  numbers   of    the   English 
people    been    decreasing    or    increasing    since    the 

1  1st  el,  pp.  65-6  ;  cf.  2nd  rd.,  p.  300,  and  7th  ed.,  p.  198. 
*  See  below,  Bk.  I  to. 


172  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

Kevolution  of  1688,  and  especially  in  the  course  of 
the  eighteenth  century  ?  Economists  of  the  present 
day  are  overloaded  with  statistics ;  but,  when  Adam 
Smith  wrote  the  Wealth  of  Nations,  he  was  unaware 
of  the  numbers  of  his  own  nation.  To  estimate 
population  without  a  census  is  to  study  language 
without  a  dictionary  ;  there  had  been  no  census  since 
the  coming  of  the  Armada,1  and  it  was  not  till  one 
hundred  years  after  that  event  that  statistical  studies 
came  much  into  favour.  An  annual  enumeration  of 
the  people  was  proposed  in  the  House  of  Commons  in 
1753,  as  a  means  of  knowing  the  numbers  of  our 
poor.2  But  the  proposal  was  resisted  as  anti- Scrip- 
tural and  un-English,  exposing  our  weakness  to  the 
foreigner  and  spending  public  money  to  settle  the 
wagers  of  the  learned.  There  was  probably  a  fear8 
that  the  tax-gatherer  would  follow  on  the  heels  of  the 
enumerator,  as  he  had  done  in  France.  The  House 
of  Lords  beat  off  the  bill,  and  left  England  in 
darkness  about  the  numbers  of  its  people  for  another 
half-century,  though  something  like  a  census  of 
Scotland  was  made  for  Government  in  1755.4  As 
without  the  Irish  Famine  we  might  not  have  had 
the  total  Repeal  of  the  Corn  Laws,  so  without  the 
worst  of  all  possible  harvests  in  1799  we  might 
have  had  no  census  in  1801,  for  Parliament,  when 

1  The  numbers  given  then  were  five  millions. — Froude,  Hist,  of 
England,  i.  3. 

*  See  Hansard,  Parl.  Hist.,  xiv.  1317. 

3  Not  unfelt  in  1801.     So  Arthur  Young  speaks  as  if  the  agricultural 
interest  had  not  unfrequently  regarded  the  Board  of  Agriculture  as  a 
new  instrument  of  taxation.    (Report  on  Suffolk,  p.  16.) 

4  In  charge  of  Rev.  Alexander  Webster. 


CHAP,  vii.]  ENGLAND.  173 

they  passed  Mr.  Abbot's  Enumeration  Bill  in  1800, 
looked  to  an  enumeration  of  the  people  to  guide 
them  in  opening  and  closing  the  ports  to  foreign 
grain.  The  practical  question  about  the  increase  or 
decline  of  English  numbers  was  connected,  in  logic 

ell  as  in  time,  with  the  controversy  about  the 
comparative  populousness  of  ancient  and  modern 
nations.  The  same  year  (1753)  which  saw  the 

npt  to  settle  by  census  the  question  of  England's 
depopulation,  saw  also  the  publication  of  Dr.  Robert 
Wallace's  reply  to  Hume's  Essay  on  the  Populousness 
of  Anni'rtt  NnfiD/is,  in  his  Dissertations  on  the  Numbers 
<,/'  Mankind  in  Ancient  and  Modern  Times.  One  of 
Hi  -my  Fox's  objections  to  Hardwicke's  Marriage  Act 
(of  1753)  was  that  it  would  check  population.1  We 
are  told2  that  the  academical  discussion  roused 

.lion    on   the    Continent,  and   a  French  savant, 

mdes,  published  an  estimate  of  the  numbers  of 
modern  nations,  in  which  England  was  made  much 
inferior  to  France,  having  only  eight  millions  against 
twenty.  This  was  too  much  for  English  patriotism. 

i  in  our  own  day  a  great  war  and  a  iVw  reverses 
usually  fill  Kn.nland  for  a  year  or  two  with  forebodings 
of  decay.  Written  in  1757  (at  the  In-hming  of  the 

u  Years'  War),  Dr.  John  Brown's  />///,/,//,'  of  th<> 

\er%  ninl  I'ri/ti'ijitrx  of  f/i<>  Times  was  only  the 
most  popular  of  a  host  of  gloomy  pamphlets  too 

1  I'm-!.   //;.</.  v..l.  \\.  j>.  <;:>,  quoted  by  Mulnm,  Hint,  of  EH-I 

i.ito,  ch.  xxxi.  p.  39.     Of.  Travel  v  h     i. 

],.  11. 

*  Dr.  •/<•,  of  Commerce,  In 


174  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  I. 

prejudiced  to   be    of  much   use  for  statistics.1     Dr. 

Adam  Anderson2  sides  with  the  moderns  and   the 

optimists.      The    contributions   of  Dr.   Brackenridge 

and  Richard    Forster  to  the   discussion   survive   by 

the   mention   of  them   in    Price's    Observations    (pp. 

182-3)  and  in  George  Chalmers'  Estimate  (ch.  xi.  193), 

this  last  giving  on  the  whole  perhaps  the  most  lucid 

history  of  the  whole  depopulation  controversy.     We 

know  from  Goldsmith's  Traveller  (1764)  and  Deserted 

Village  (1770),   with   its  charming   illogical  preface, 

that  even  in  peace  the  subject  was  not  out  of  men's 

thoughts.      A   similar   panic   in    Switzerland,   which 

owed  its  beginning  to  England,3  seems  afterwards  to 

have  reacted  on  England  itself.     The  American  War 

of  Independence  revived  the  languishing  interest  in 

the  controversy.     This  time  it  was  the  English'  and 

not   the   antiquarian   topic   that   fell    into   powerful 

hands.     Dr.  Richard  Price,  the  Radical  dissenter,  the 

friend  of  Dr.  Franklin,   and  the  inventor  of  Pitt's 

Sinking   Fund,    did    battle,    in    his    Observations    on 

Reversionary    Payments    (1769),    on    behalf    of    the 

pessimistic    view ;  Arthur   Young,   the    agriculturist, 

the  traveller  and  the  talker,  led  the   opposition    to 

him,4   and    was   supported   by   Sir   Frederick   Eden, 

William  Wales,  John  Hewlett,  and  last  but  not  least 

by  George  Chalmers.5 

1  See  especially  Estimate  (7th  ed.,  1758),  Vol.  I.  Pt.  II.  sect.  viii. 
pp.  186  seq.  2  Chron.  Ded.,  ibid. 

3  I.  e.    to  the  discussion  described  by  Dr.  Anderson.     Cf.  Mai  thus, 
Essay,  7th  ed.,  p.  164.     Muret's  pessimistic  paper  was  printed  in  1766. 

4  In  his  Political  Arithmetic,  1774. 

6  Estimate  of  the  Comparative  Strength  of  Britain  during  the  present 
and  four  preceding  Reigns,  by  George  Chalmers,  F.R.S.,  S.A.,  Isted.,  1782. 


CHAP,  vii.]  ENGLAND.  175 

Gregory  King1  and  Justice  Hale1  in  the  seven- 
teenth century,  Dr.  Campbell3  in  the  eighteenth,  had 
agreed  that  the  numbers  of  Norman  England  must 
needs  have  been  small,  for  the  government  was  bad  ; 
Dr.  Price,  on  the  contrary,  had  maintained  the  paradox 
that,  though  the  Revolution  of  1688  brought  a  "  hap- 
pier government,"  the  numbers  of  the  people  had 
ever  since  declined.4  He  reasoned  from  the  decreased 
number  of  dwelling-houses  assessed  to  window  tax 
a  ml  house  duty,  as  compared  with  those  assessed  to 

ih  (or  chimney)  money  before  the  Revolution.5 
Opponents  denied  the  accuracy  of  his  data,  and 
thought  his  estimate  of  four  and  a  half  or  five  in- 
habitants to  a  house  too  low.  He  pointed  to  the  evil 
influence  of  a  "devouring  metropolis,"  a  head  too 
large  for  the  body,  and  of  great  cities  that  were  the 
"  graves  of  mankind.  "  6  Here,  too,  both  the  data  and 
•  •e  were  doubtful.  He  argued  from  tin* 

•  •asing  produce  of  the  Excise  duties.  Opponents 
answered  that,  even  if  the  figures  were  right,  a 
changed  public  taste  had  lessened  the  consumption 
of  many  taxable  articles,  and  many  taxed  ones  were 
supplied  free  by  smuggling.7  He  laid  stress  on  the 

1  Natural  and  Political  Obenatum*,  1696.     Apud  Davenant  and 


1   1         tiw  Origination  ud 

1  Ii'^al  Survey  of  Or***  Britain,  1774. 

4  Cf.  Chalmers  EttimaU,  p.  4,  Pref.  p.  cxx  John  Howletl'f 

Examination  of  Dr.  Priced  Buoy  (Maidstone),  1781. 

*  Cf.  Macaulay,  History,  cb 

•  ObMTBtiioiM,  supplement,  p.  366.    Cf.  Mai  thus,  Ei*iy,  App.  p.  519. 
Arthur  Young,  Fntnt*  p.  409.    The  whole  subject  will  be  considered 

l.iVr  :n  DOOM   !;•  -n  «   Hi  <  oft]  trM 

7    BM    "'-".,  ..........  <„,.,;,',„;.    1771*. 


176  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [UK.  i. 

difficulty  the  Government  found  in  raising  troops  in 
the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century  as  compared 
with  the  end  of  the  seventeenth,  though  he  took  this 
as  a  symptom,  not  a  cause,  and  complained  at  the 
same  time  quite  consistently  that  the  increase  of  the 
army  and  navy  and  of  military  expenditure  in  three 
great  wars  had  been  a  potent  cause  of  diminished 
population.  Opponents  answered  that  the  first  was 
really  a  symptom  not  of  decline  but  of  prosperity  ; 
the  abundance  of  other  employments  kept  men  from 
the  need  of  enlisting  in  the  army ;  and  they  answered 
too  often,  that  the  second  (the  war  expenditure)  was 
good  for  trade.  They  were  safer  in  urging  that  for 
the  first  part  of  the  century  the  long  peace  (1727-40) 
and  the  good  harvests  (1731-50)  made  the  presump- 
tion of  increase  very  strong.1  Price  made  much  of 
the  emigrations  to  America  and  to  the  East  and  West 
Indies.  It  was  answered  that  the  known  possibility 
of  emigration  would  give  men  at  home  the  greater 
courage  to  have  a  family.  Even  the  engrossing  and 
consolidation  of  farms  and  the  enclosure  of  commons, 
which  he  considered  to  be  against  population,  would, 
said  his  opponents,  increase  the  food,  and  therefore 
the  people,  though  perhaps  not  the  people  on  the 
spot ; 2  and  the  increase  of  paupers  was  thought  to  be 
a  sign  of  overflowing  numbers.  He  saw  a  cause  of 

1  But  see  the  caveat  in  the  Registrar-General's  44£/i  Report  (for  1881), 
p.  vi :  The  price  of  wheat  and  the  marriage  rate  do  not  always  vary 
inversely. 

2  In  the  same  way  the  returns  to  the  Board  of  Agriculture  at  the  end 
of  the  century  are  full  of  (not  quite  disinterested)  praises  of  enclosures 
as  an  encouragement  of  population. 


CHAP,  vii.]  KNO.LAND.  177 

depopulation  in  the  increased  luxury  and  extravagance 
of  the  people  of  England.  At  the  beginning  of  the 

iiy  Lrin  -drinking  was  credited  with  an  evil  effect 
on  population.1  Wlien  the  opponents  of  Price  did  not 
meet  this  with  Maudeville'a  sophism,  luxury  benefits 

,  they  an.s  \vered  that  what  had  become  greater 
was  not  the  national  vices  but  the  national  standard 
of  comfort,  the  expansion  of  which  implied  an  in- 
n-rase of  general  wealth  and  presumably  of  popula- 
tion.2 Beyond  doubt  too  (it  was  argued)  the  gein-ral 

h  was  better,  and  medical  science  had  won  some 
triumphs.'  Malthus.  Imwever,  warns  us  against  this 
unent;  great  unhealthiness  is  no  proof  of  a  small 
population  nor  healthiness  of  a  large.4  In  the  ten 
years  after  the  American  War  of  Independence 
(1783-93)  til-  prosperity  of  the  country  seems  to 
have  advanced  by  leaps  and  bounds,  only  to  make 
depression  the  more  observable.  Dr. 
Price,  who  did  not  live  to  see  the  relapse,  seems  to 
have  confessed  his  error.  "  In  allusion  to  a  dimin- 
ishing population,  on  which  subject  it  appears  that 
he  has  so  widely  erred,  he  says  very  candidly  that, 
perhaps  he  may  have  been  insensibly  influenced  t«> 
maintain  an  opinion  once  advanced."5  Yet 


1  Lecky,  Eighteenth  Cent.,  i.  201,  479  *q.  Restrictions  on  the  sale 
were  successfully  adopted  by  IMham  in  17.M,  at  the  time  when  the 
question  of  dej>  •  t<>  th<  i- 

*  An  unMfe  presumption.    See  below,  Bk.  I  Ac. 

i 

«  Jfoay,  2nd  «!.,  p.  317  ;  7th  cd.,p.  198,  compared  with  7th  ed.,  p.  189, 
to.,  ftbov.  -16. 

•  £uay,  7th  ed.,  p.  108  note  ;  ant  printed  in  3rd  od.  (1806),  p. 
461  n. 

N 


178  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  I. 

opinion  was  not  fully  convinced  till  1801,  when 
"  the  answers  to  the  Population  Act  at  length  happily 
rescued  the  question  of  the  population  of  this  country 
from  the  obscurity  in  which  it  had  been  so  long 
involved."  * 

There  is  no  good  reason  to  believe  that  at  the  end 
of  last  century  the  fear  of  depopulation  had  given 
place  to  a  fear  of  over-population.2  Malthus  and 
Arthur  Young  stood  almost  alone  in  their  opinion.3 
Alarm  was  felt  by  the  agricultural  interest,  not  lest 
there  should  be  an  excessive  population,  but  lest  the 
population  should  get  its  food  from  abroad.  The 
population  it  was  feared  had  grown  beyond  the 
English  supplies  of  food ;  but  of  over-population,  in 
the  wider  sense  of  an  excess  beyond  any  existing  food, 
the  general  public  and  the  squires  had  learned  little 
or  nothing  in  these  years ;  and  we  have  no  reason  to 
attribute  to  Malthus  any  share  in  the  merit  of  passing 
the  Enumeration  Bill.  It  was  brought  forward  in  an 
autumn  session  of  Parliament  (Nov.  1800)  specially 
convened  because  of  the  scarcity.  It  was  moved 
by  Mr.  Abbot,4  who  had  made  his  name  more  as 
a  financier  than  as  an  economist,  and  was  chiefly 
remarkable  afterwards  as  a  vigorous  opponent  of 

1  2nd  ed.,  p.  202  n.  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  194  n. 

2  This  is  asserted  in  the  Preliminary  Report  to  the  last  English 
census  (1881).     Against  the  idea,  see  the  Annual  Register's  reviews  of 
Eden's  work  on  the  Poor  (1797),  and  of  his  Estimate  of  English  numbers 
(1800).     The  Register  had  numbered  Burke  and   Godwin  among  its 
writers,  and  was  not  likely  to  be  behind  public  opinion. 

3  See  the  review  of  Arthur  Young's   Question  of  Scarcity  plainly 
stated,  1800,>in  Ann.  Register,  sub  dato. 

4  ChairniaA'of  tlie  Committee  on  the  Public  Finances  1797,  Speaker  of 
the  Commons  1802,  Lord  Colchester  1817. 


vii.]  KNGLAND.  179 

Catholic  Emancipation.  The  motion  was  seconded 
by  Mi.  Wilberforce ;  and  the  combination  of  finance 
and  philanthropy  was  irresistible.  Malthus,  though 
the  true  interpreter  of  the  census,  neither  caused 
it  in  the  first  instance  nor  found  it  of  immediate 

in  spreading  his  doctrines. 

The  first  census  would  hardly  have  justified  him 

in  treating  as  obsolete  the  old  quarrel  about  depopu- 

ii ;    it  had   decided  only   the  absolute   numbers 

in  the  first  year  of  the  nineteenth  century,  not  the 

progress  or  relapse  during  the  eighteenth.     Besides 

;ig  the   actual  numbers   of   the   people  in  1801, 

the  census  no  doubt  gave  "  a  table  of  the  population 

of  England  and   Wales  throughout  the  last  century 

calculated  from  the  births."     But  the  births,  though 

rite,  were  an  unsafe  criterion  ;  and,  for  the 
population  at  the  Revolution  of  1688,  Malthus  would 
depend  more  on  "  the  old  calculations  i'mm  the  number 
of  houses."1  He  finds  no  difficulty  of  principle  in 
admitting  with  kman.  tin-  editor  of  the  census 

returns  and  observations  tin -rcon,  that  the  rapid  in- 
crease of  the  English  people  since  1780  was  du 

ivase  of  deaths  rather  than  to  the  increase  of 

births.*     Such  a  phenomenon  was  not  only  possible 

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

rate   of   deaths  could   give  no  sure  means  of 

judging  the  numbers.     After  a  famine*  or  pcstil« 

i  2nd  ed.,  p.  318 ;  7th  ed.t  p.  804.    Cf.  2nd  «L,  p.  317  ;  7th  «1 
192,  203,  206,  219,  Ac. 

»  2nd  o.l  7th  ed.,  pp.  201,  202,  foot  Compare  44th  Repi. 

o/ /<••:/.  <;<".  (Knu'liind).  p.  v. 

»  AM  c.  g.  in  1800-1  compared  with  1802-3  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  214. 


180  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  I. 

for  example,  the  rate  of  births  might  be  twice  as  high 
as  usual,  and  by  the  standard  of  births  the  numbers 
of  the  people  would  be  at  their  maximum,  when  a 
comparison   with   the   rate    of  deaths   or   an   actual 
enumeration  would  show  them  to  be  at  the  mini- 
mum,1 whereas  a  low  rate  of  births,   if  lives  were 
prolonged  by  great  healthiness,  might  certainly  mean 
an   increase,   perhaps   a   high   increase,  of  numbers. 
But  at  the  particular  time  in  question  the  factory 
system  was  coming  into  being,  and   manufacturing 
towns   were  growing    great   at  the   expense  of   the 
country  districts.     The  conditions  of  life  in  towns  are 
at  the  best  inferior   to  those   in  the  country ;    new 
openings  for  trade  would  add  not  only  to  the  marriages 
but  to  the  deaths  and   the   births.2     The   presump- 
tion was  not  all  in  favour  of  healthiness ;   and  the 
registers  at  that  particular  time  could  not  tell   the 
whole  truth  ; — the  drain  of  recruits  for  foreign  service 
would  keep  down  the  lists  of  burials  at  home,  while 
allowing  an  increase  of  births  and  marriages.3     For 
these  and   other   reasons,   Malthus,  while  he   agrees 
with  Eickman  that  the  general  health  has  improved, 
trusts  little  to  his  calculations   from  registers  ;    and 
concludes  that  even   the   census   gives   us   no   clear 
light   on  the  movement  of  population  in   the   eigh- 
teenth century.     We  can  be  certain  that  population 
increased   during  the   last    twenty  years  of  it,  and 

1  2nd  ed.,  p.  319  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  205.     Cf.  passages  cited  on  last  page. 

2  Cf.  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  pp.  308-9  ;  7th  ed.,  pp.  198-9. 

3  2nd  ed.,  pp.  312-13  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  201.   The  2nd  ed.  has  a  reference  to 
"the  late  scarcities"  wanting  in  the  later  edds.      Registration,  be  it 
remembered,  was  then  of  baptisms  and  burials,  not  births  and  deaths. 


CHAP.  MI.]  ENGLAND.  181 

almost   certain   that  the  movement  was   not  down- 
wards Imt  upwards  since  the  Peace  of  Paris ;  and  we 

'  good  ground  for  believing  that  it  was  rather 
ii])  wan  Is  than  downwards  even  in  the  earliest  years 
of  the  century,  during  the  good  harvests  and  the  long 
peace  of  Walpole,1  and  that  over  the  whole  country 

movement  of  population  was  less  fluctuating  in 
England  than  on  the  Continent.2  The  author's  admis- 
sion, that  the  proportions  of  the  births,  deaths,  and 
mania  ires  were  very  different  in  our  country  in  his 
time  from  what  they  used  to  be,s  seems  to  put  tli«i 
census  of  1801  out  of  court  altogether  in  the  question 
of  depopulation,  especially  as  there  were  no  previous 
('numerations  with  which  to  compare  it.  The  figures 
from  the  parish  registers  for  the  whole  of  the  century, 
(hat  were  included  in  the  "returns  pursuant  to 
tin-  Population  Act,"  in  addition  to  the  enumeration, 
turned  out  on  examination  to  be  unsatisfactory.4 

Malthus,  however,  was  able  to  prove  some  solid 
conclusions  from  the  census  of  1801.  It  had  shown, 
for  example,  as  regards  marriages,  that  the  proportion 
of  them  to  the  whole  numbers  of  the  people  was,  in 
1801,  as  1  to  123},  a  small,  r  proportion  than  any- 
where except  in  Norway  and  Switzerland,5  and  the 
more  likely  to  be  true,  because  Hanlwicke's  Marriage 
Act  had  made  registration  of  marriages  more  careful 

1  See  above,  p.  176.    Cf.  on  the  other  band  the  concession,  2nd  ed.,  p. 

7th  cd.,  p.  203,  middle, 
1  £«ay,  2nd  ed.,  p.  319  ;  7th  cd.,  pp.  805-6.  '  7th  ed.,  p.  188. 

kman  himself  allowed  their  defectivenew.    See  Jtoay,  2nd  ed., 
p.  304  ;  7th  cd.,  p.  196.     Cf.  above,  p.  179. 

•  2nd  ed,  p.  302  ;  7th  cd.,  p.  194.     By  the  fayvtrar-Gintrart  Report 
for  1882  it  wmi  M  1  in  64}  in  that  year. 


182  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

than  of  burials  and  baptisms.  In  the  early  part  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  the  pessimist,  Dr.  Short,  had 
estimated  the  proportion  (with  much  probability)  as 
1  to  115  ;  and  it  would  appear,  therefore,  that  at 
neither  end  of  the  century  were  the  marriages  in  a 
high  proportion  to  the  numbers,  or  had  population 
increased  at  its  highest  rate.  Again,  Malthus  thinks 
it  proved  by  the  census  that,  since  population  has 
as  a  matter  of  fact  increased  in  England  in  spite  of  a 
diminished  rate  of  marriages,  the  increase  has  been 
at  cost  of  the  mortality,  the  fewer  marriages  being 
partly  a  cause,  partly  a  consequence,  of  the  fewer 
deaths  of  the  later  years.1  Those  that  married  late 
might  have  consoled  themselves  with  the  reflection 
that  they  were  lessening  not  the  numbers  but  the 
mortality  of  the  nation.  It  was  no  doubt  difficult  to 
estimate  the  extent  to  which  such  causes  operated, 
or  the  degree  in  which  the  national  health  had  been 
improved.  In  any  case  the  census  guides  us  better 
than  the  registers,2  for  it  carries  us  beyond  the 
inferred  numbers  to  numbers  actually  counted  out 
at  a  given  time.  Neither  the  census  nor  the  registers 
can  be  rightly  interpreted  without  a  knowledge  of 
the  social  condition,  government,  and  history  of  the 
people  concerned.  In  undeveloped  countries,  like 
America  and  Eussia,  or  in  any  old  countries  after 
special  mortality,  a  large  proportion  of  births  may  be 
a  good  sign  ;  "  but  in  the  average  state  of  a  well- 
peopled  territory  there  cannot  well  be  a  worse  sign 
than  a  large  proportion  of  births,  nor  can  there  well 

1  2nd  eel.,  p.  303  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  195.  2  7th  ed.,  p.  205. 


CHAP,  vii.]  ENGLAND.  1-3 

be  a  better  sign  than  a  small  proportion."  Sir 
Francis  d'lveruois  had  very  justly  observed  that,  if 
the  various  states  of  Europe  published  annually  an 
•t  account  of  their  population,  noting  carefully  in 
a  second  column  the  exact  age  at  which  the  children 
die,  this  second  column  would  show  the  comparative 
goodness  of  the  governments,  and  the  comparative 
happiness  of  their  subjects; — a  simple  arithmetical 
statement  might  then  be  more  conclusive  than  the 
devereet  argument.  Malthus  assents,  but  adds  that 
should  need  to  attend  less  to  the  column  giving 
the  number  of  children  born,  than  to  the  one  giving 
the  number  which  n  ;K  li« d  manhood,  and  this  number 
will  almost  invariably  be  the  greatest  where  the  pro- 
portion of  the  births  to  the  whole  population  is  the 
least."  l  Tried  by  this  standard,  which  is  much  more 
truly  the  central  doctrine  of  Malthus  than  the  ratios, 
our  own  country  was  even  then  better  than  all,  save 
European  countries.  Tried  by  it  to-day,  we 
have  still  a  good  place.  Though  no  great  European 
countries,  except  Austro-Hungary  and  Germany,  have 
had  more  marriages,  in  the  twenty  years  from  1861 
to  1880,  not  only  these,  but  Holland,  Spain,  and 
Italy,  have  had  more  birtks,  and  all  of  tln-m  except 
Denmark,  Norway,  and  Sweden  have  had  more  death*, 
in  proportion  to  their  numbers.1 

One  great  advantage  of  the  census  is,  that  it  enables 
the  registrars  to  calculate  from  their  own  data,  with 
certain  sure  limits  of  t  old-out  numbers  )••  hin.l  and 

1  2nd  ed.,  pp.  21.1-14  ;  7th  «d.,  p.  SOI 
•  46*  frport  tf  AyMwftNffta  (England),  (1882),  p.  cl 


184  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

before  them.     "When  the  registers  contain  all   the 
births  and  deaths,  and  there  are  the  means  [given  by 
the  census]  of  setting  out  from  a  known  population, 
it  is  obviously  the  same  as  an  actual  enumeration."  l 
]\Ialthus    suggested  in   1803  that  the  experiment  of 
1801  should  be  repeated  every  ten  years,  and  that 
registrars'  reports  should  be  made  every  year.2     This 
has  been  done ;  and,  if  both  have  been  accurate,  then 
the  registers  of  the  intervening  years,  on  the  basis  of 
the  decennial  enumeration,  ought   to   make  us  able 
to  calculate  the  numbers   for  any  intervening  year. 
Accordingly,  the  population  of  England  in  1881,  as 
calculated  from  the  births  and  deaths,  was  little  more 
than  one-sixth  of  a  million  different  from  the  numbers 
as  actually  counted  over  on  the  night  of  the  4th  of 
April  in  that  year.3     The  growth  in  the  last  decade, 
1871  to  1881,  was  higher  than  in  any  since  1831-41  ;4 
the   births   were   more   and   the   deaths   fewer  than 
usual.       Another   London   has   been   added   to   our 
numbers  in  ten  years.5 

This  gives  no  sure  ground,  however,  for  prediction. 
To  suppose  a  country's  rate  of  increase  permanent 
is  hardly  less  fallacious  than  to  suppose  an  invariable 
order  of  births  and  deaths  over  the  world  generally. 
Even  if  we  are  beyond  the  time  when  we  need  to 
make  any  allowance  for  increasing  accuracy  and  fulness, 
and  if  we  may  assume  that  no  given  census  has  any 

1  7th  ed.,  p.  210.  2  2nd  ed.,  p.  302  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  194  n. 

3  Numbers  calculated  by  "  natural  increment,"  i.  e.  births  and  deaths 
— 26,138,248  ;  numbers  actually  enumerated— 25,968,286.— Preliminary 
Report,  p.  iii. 

4  '31-'41,  incr.  14'52  ;  '7l-'81,  incr.  14'34. 

6  Or  three  and  a  quarter  millions  of  people  to  England  and  Wales  alone. 


CHAP,  vii.]  ENGLAND.  185 

units  to  sweep  into  its  net  that  through  their  fear  or 
an  official's  carelessness  escaped  its  predecessor,  still 
we  cannot  take  the  rate  of  increase  from  one  census 
to  another  as  a  sure  indication  of  the  future.  With 
some  qualifications  the  words  of  Hal  thus  apply  to  us 
in  1881  quite  as  accurately  as  to  our  fathers  in  1811  : 
"  This  is  a  rate  of  increase  which  in  the  nature  of 
things  cannot  be  permanent.  It  has  been  occasioned 
by  the  stimulus  of  a  greatly  increased  demand  for 
labour,  combined  with  a  greatly  increased  power  of 
production,  both  in  agriculture  and  manufactures. 
These  are  the  two  elements  which  form  the  most 
effective  encouragement  to  a  rapid  increase  of  popula- 
tion. What  has  taken  place  is  a  striking  illustration 
of  the  principle  of  population,  and  a  proof  that,  in 
spite  of  great  towns,  manufacturing  occupations,  and 
the  gradually  acquired  habits  of  an  opulent  and 
luxuriant  people,  if  the  resources  of  a  country  will 
admit  of  a  rapid  increase,  and  if  these  resources 
are  so  advantageously  distributed  as  to  occasion  a 
constantly  increasing  demand  for  labour,  the  popula- 
tion will  not  fail  to  keep  pace  with  them."  l  It  was 
a  rate  of  increase  which  he  saw  would  double  the 
population  in  less  than  fifty-five  years;  and  this 
doubling  has  really  happened.  The  numbers  for 
England  in  1801  were  8,892,536;  and  in  1851  they 
17,927,609.  Malthus  had  not  anticipated  ;my 
terchaiiLr«  -  in  manufacture  and  trade  than  those 
of  his  own  day;  and  he  clearly  expected  that  the 
rate  of  increase  would  not  continue  and  the  numbers 

1  Ttli  t-»l.,  ltt  first  in  5th  ed.,  1817). 


186  MALTHUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [UK.  I. 

would  not  be  doubled.  The  one  thing  certain  was  the 
impossibility  of  safe  prediction  on  the  strength  of 
any  existing  rate.  A  writer  at  the  beginning  of  this 
century  prophesied  the  extinction  of  the  Turkish 
people  in  one  hundred  years;  Sir  William  Petty  at 
the  end  of  the  seventeenth  century  predicted  that  in 
1800  London  would  have  5,359,000  inhabitants.  But 
the  Turks  are  not  yet  extinct;  London  in  1800  had 
less  than  a  million  of  people,  and  has  taken  eighty  years 
more  to  raise  them  to  the  number  in  the  prophecy.1 

If  prediction  was  difficult  in  the  case  of  England, 
it  was  not  less  so  in  the  case  of  the  other  parts  of 
the  United  Kingdom.  The  conditions  of  society  and 
industry  were  quite  different  in  the  three  countries ; 
and  to  judge  of  the  actual  or  probable  growth  of 
population  in  Scotland  or  Ireland,  we  must  first,  as 
with  England,  clearly  understand  these  conditions. 
In  the  early  part  of  this  century  even  more  than 
now,  Scotland2  stood  to  England  as  the  country 
districts  of  England  now  stand  to  its  great  towns. 
Continual  migration  from  country  to  town  may  be 
said  to  have  been  its  normal  state  ;  and  the  largest 
towns  were  in  England.  The  change  from  a  militant 
and  feudal  to  an  industrial  society  was  nowhere  so 
marked  as  in  Scotland  after  the  Union,  and  especially 
after  the  rebellion  of  1745.  The  hereditary  judgeships 
of  highland  chiefs  were  swept  away ;  the  relation 

1  Essay,  7th  ed.,  p.  258  ;  cf.  Prel  Kept.  Census,  1881,  p.  ix. 

2  The  account  of  Scotland  in  the  Essay,  Bk.  II.  ch.  x.,  is  taken  from  the 
Statistical  Account  of  Sir  John  Sinclair,  1791-99.     Sinclair  was  acting,  on 
the  south  side  of  the  Tweed,  as  President  of  the  Board  of  Agriculture. 
See  below,  Bk.  II.  ch.  i  p.  218. 


CHAP.  MI.]  SCOTLAND  AND   IRELAND.  187 

.veen  chief  and  clansmen  became  the  unromantic 
relation  of  landlord  and  tenant.  The  displacement 
of  household  work  by  the  factory  system,  and  of  hand 
ur  by  machinery,  crowded  the  great  towns  of 
Scotland  at  the  expense  of  the  country  districts ;  and 
rn.wded  the  great  towns  and  manufacturing  districts 
of  England  at  the  expense  of  Scotland.  The  flood 
of  North  Britons  into  England  was  not  of  Bute's 
making  ;  and  it  was  greatest  after  and  not  before  the 
o  of  Paris,  although  under  that  peace  and  a 
stuUe  government  the  farming,  the  manufacturing, 
the  banking,  and  the  foreign  trading  of  Scotland  it- 
had  grown  great  enough  (it  might  have  seemed) 
to  employ  the  whole  population  at  home.  Cotton 
manufacture,  which  on  the  whole  is  the  typical 
industry  of  these  latter  days,  was  peculiarly  English.1 
Slicrji-  farming  at  home  and  cotton-spinning  in 
England  combined  to  depopulate  the  Scotch  high- 
lands and  much  of  the  lowlands.  The  highlands* 
with  their  strongly- marked  physical  features  and 
ly  limited  industrial  possibilities,  were  some- 
what in  the  position  of  Norway.  In  the  highlands 
proper  there  were  no  mineral  riches;  there  were  moor- 
lands, mountains,  streams,  lochs,  h<ath«i,  bra«-k.-n. 
and  l»M_r;  tin-  patches  of  cultivable  soil  would 
bear  a  scanty  crop  of  oats,  and  perhaps  clover,  barley, 
or  potatoes.*  This  description  applied  to  a  large  half 

1  There  was  vory  littl.-  in  S  It  ia  only  once  men 

M.i.  Cull, „•!,  >ays  "ni-vep,"  but  he  had  overlooked  Wealth 
• *  IV.  vii.  251-2. 

2  Tin- la  i.     Sec  Report*  to  Board  of  Agricv 
Central  Highland*  (1794),  p.  21. 


188  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK  i. 

of  entire  Scotland ;  and  we  must  bear  it  in  mind  to 
understand  the  saying  of  Mai  thus  in  1803:  "Scotland 
is  certainly  over-peopled,  but  not  so  much  as  it  was  a 
century  or  half  a  century  ago,  when  it  contained  fewer 
inhabitants." 1  The  highlands  are  over  their  whole 
extent  what  the  lowlands  are  as  regards  their  hills,  fit 
only  for  sheep.  Sutherland  has  about  thirteen  in- 
habitants to  the  square  mile  now,  and  Midlothian 
seven  hundred  and  forty-six ;  but  Sutherland  and  not 
Midlothian  may  be  over-peopled.  Sutherland  as  com- 
pared with  her  former  self,  when  she  had  thirty  or  forty 
to  the  square  mile,  may  be  more  or  she  may  be  less 
over-peopled  than  she  once  was ;  we  cannot  tell  till  we 
know  what  her  wealth  was  and  how  it  was  distributed. 
Under  the  patriarchal  government 2  of  early  times 
the  wealth  of  the  country  consisted  literally  in  its  men. 
If  a  chief  were  asked  the  rent  of  his  estate,  he  would 
answer  that  it  raised  five  hundred  men  ;  the  tenant 
paid  him  in  military  service.  Adam  Smith  remembers 
that  in  the  Jacobite  Eebellion,  which  disturbed  his 
country  at  the  time  he  was  studying  at  Oxford,  "  Mr. 
Cameron  of  Lochiel,  a  gentleman  of  Lochaber  in  [the 
west  highlands  of]  Scotland,  whose  rent  never  exceeded 
£500  [English]  a  year,  carried,  in  1745,  eight  hundred 
of  his  own  people  into  the  rebellion  with  him." 8 
Subdivision  of  land  meant  more  retainers  and  greater 
honour;  and  so  the  highlands  were  peopled  not  to 
the  full  extent  of  the  work  to  be  done,  but  actually  to 

1  2nd  ed.,  p.  334  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  229. 

2  Not  feudal  but  pre-feudal,  or  allodial.     See  Wealth  of  Nations,  III. 
iv.  183,  1. 

3  Wealth  of  Nations,  ibid. 


CHAP,  vii.]  SCOTLAND   AND   IRELAND.  189 

the  full  extent  of  the  bare  food  got  from  the  soil1 
On  the  establishment  of  a  strong  government  and 
the  abolition  of  their  hereditary  judicial  privileges,2 
the  chiefs  soon  became  willing  to  convert  the  value 
in  men  into  a  value  in  money,  exchanging  dignity  for 
profit.  They  no  longer  encouraged  their  tenants  to 
large  families;  and  yet  they  made  no  efforts  to 
remove  the  habits,  which  the  tenants  had  formed,  of 
having  them.3  It  was  this  change  that  gave  Sir 
Walter  Scott  the  materials  for  his  most  powerful 
pictures  iii  /  </  and  other  novels.  But  it  is  the 

distress  of  the  chiefs  that  is  tragic  to  him,  rather  than 
the  misery  of  the  clansmen.  The  clansmen  for  their 
part  had  under  feudalism  been  brought  up  to  be 
fanners  or  cattle-dealers  and  nothing  else;  there  was 
as  lit  tit  variety  of  occupation  in  the  highlands  then 
as  in  Ireland  now.  Undoubtedly  too  they  had  that 
customary  right  of  long  possession,  which  law  so  often 
construed  into  a  legal  title  in  the  case  of  more 
influential  men.  It  was  true  also  that,  if  the  native 
liiirh landers  would  not  cultivate  that  poor  soil,  no 
igers  would,  and,  if  it  was  politically  desir- 
aM«-  that  the  country  should  remain  peopled,  the 
only  way  to  secure  this  was  to  prevent  the  native 
exodus.4  No  such  attempt  was  made ;  but,  on  the 
contrary,  the  highland  landlords  followed  the  way 
that  led  to  the  highest  rents ;  they  consolidated  their 

1  Selkirk,  Highland*,  1805,  p.  25.        *  See  the  Legend  of  Montro**,  Ac. 
1  Adam  Smitl  I     viii.  36,  1  (the  often-quoted  deacn; 

ilf-starve<l  women  "  with  tlx-ir  twenty  children  in  contrast 

i«  "pampered  fine  lady"  with  few  or  none. 
4  Report*  to  Board  of  Agriculture:  Central  Highland*,  1794,  p.  52. 


190  MALTHUS   AND   HIS   WORK.  [BK.  i. 

farms ;  they  exchanged  agriculture  for  pasture  ;  they 
substituted  deer  for  sheep.  Almost  every  highland 
district  has  sooner  or  later  passed  through  all  these 
three  stages,  and  with  the  same  result,  the  employ- 
ment of  fewer  and  fewer  men.1  The  discarded 
men  had  two  courses  before  them,  migration  to  the 
lowlands2  or  emigration  to  the  colonies.  The  farm 
labourer  would  migrate,  the  farmer  emigrate.  The 
landlords  incurred  and  often  deserved  odium  for  the 
manner  of  their  evictions ;  but  they  treated  the 
evicted  better  than  the  average  British  capitalist 
treats  his  dismissed  hands.  They  usually  provided 
passages  and  often  procured  settlements  abroad  for 
them.  Lord  Selkirk,  one  of  the  few  writers  on  this 
subject  that  preserves  a  judicial  calmness,  advised  his 
countrymen  to  acquiesce  in  the  "depopulation"  of  the 
highlands,  but  to  draw  the  stream  of  emigration  to 
our  own  colonies.  He  himself  drew  it,  so  far  as 
he  could,  to  the  Eed  River  settlement  and  Prince 
Edward  Island. 

From  the  middle  of  last  century  to  the  beginning 
of  this,  emigration  went  on  except  when  war  made 
it  impossible.  The  dangerous  qualities  of  the  high- 
Liu  ders  made  them  very  valuable  in  the  three  great 
wars  that  prevented  them  from  leaving  the  country 

1  Wealth  of  Nations,  III.  iv.  184,  1  (written  1774),  a  passage  which 
shows  that  the  clearances  and  the  consequent  cry  of  Depopulation  are 
to  be  looked  for  as  early  as  the  middle  of  the  century.     We  are  some- 
times told  that  from  the  '45  to  the  end  of  the  century  was  the  golden  age 
of  highland  farmers.     But  the   willingness  of  the   clansmen  to   enter 
Chatham's  highland  regiments  would  hardly  imply  great  contentment. 

2  Cf.  Essay  on  Pop.,  pp.  332  (2nd  ed.),  227  (7th  ed.),  and  Selkirk,  I  c.} 
pp.  43  scq.     Contra,  tee  lieport  of  Crofters  Commission,  1884,  p.  51. 


CHAP.  MI.]  SCOTLAND   AND   IRELAND.  191 

with  their  families.  It  may  be  that  this  very  military 
consideration  induced  the  English  Government  to 
connive  at  the  clearances  at  first ;  and  interference 
at  any  later  stage  was  very  difficult.  As  it  is,  in 
th'-  end  even  the  Sutherland  evictions1  seem  simply 
to  have  shifted  the  population  and  not  removed  it. 
In  spite  of  emigration  Sutherland  had  as  many  in- 
habitants at  the  last  census  of  1881,  as  at  the  first 
in  1801,  namely,  above  23,000.  Fishing,  an  industry 
new  to  a  great  part  of  the  highlands,  made  this 
phenomenon  possible.  Fishing  villages  have  grown 
at  the  expense  of  inland  farms.  But  this  is  not  the 
whole  truth.  Till  the  time  when  free  trade  began 
to  distend  Glasgow  and  other  great  towns  of  Scot- 
land, the  highland  counties  taken  altogether  had 
art  nail  v  increased  in  population,  as  compared  with 
what  they  were  in  1801.  The  subsequent  fall  is 
due  not  to  any  great  clearances  or  emigrations,  but 
nother  cause  that  had  been  acting  though  not 
conspicuously  for  some  time  before.  This  was  migra- 
tion to  the  industrial  centres  of  the  lowlands.  In 
the  days  of  the  Tudors  there  were  complaints  in 
England  of  the  decay  of  towns,  because  a  strong 
government  had  at  last  made  the  protection  of  walled 
towns  superfluous,  and  industry  had  spread  itself  in 
peace,  where  it  was  wanted.  But  two  centuries  1  it.  r 
tin -re  was  decay  not  of  the  towns  but  of  the  country 
districts,  because  industry  was  taking  forms  that 
in  i'le  concentration  necessary.  At  first,  both  in 

1  Made  0  Marquis  of  Stafford  between  1807  :n 

i  year  the  popular  odium  was  at  its  height,  and  the  land  1<  ml  made 
his  defence  in  a  well-known  pamphlet  by  his  factor,  James  Loch. 


192  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  i. 

England  and  Scotland,  there  was  a  real  diminution 
in  the  rural  population  ;  there  had  been  for  the  time 
a  real  diminution  of  the  work  to  be  done  in  the 
country,  and  a  transference  of  it  to  the  towns.  The 
hand-loom  weaver  had  been  supplanted  by  the  power- 
loom.  The  little  villages,  where  the  workman  lived 
idyllically,  half  in  his  farm  and  half  in  his  workshop, 
now  either  sent  their  whole  families  to  the  towns, 
thus  stopping  their  contributions  to  the  parish  regis- 
ters in  the  country  and  swelling  those  of  the  town, 
or,  still  keeping  the  parents,  sent  three-fourths  of 
the  children  there,  thus  making  the  country  registers 
a  very  untrustworthy  reflection  of  the  real  state  of 
the  population  in  the  country  districts.  That  country 
villages  in  every  part  of  Scotland,  but  especially  near 
the  large  cities,  are  "  breeding  grounds  "  of  this  latter 
description l  is  perfectly  well  known ;  and  the  same  is 
true,  in  a  less  degree,  of  England.  This  is  one  reason 
why  even  the  purely  rural  districts  of  Scotland  have 
greatly  increased  in  apparent  population  since  1801, 
and  most  of  them  are  increasing  still ;  the  readiness 
of  the  Scotch  to  emigrate  has  caused  the  large 
families  quite  as  much  as  the  large  families  the. 
emigration.  Another  reason  is,  that  even  in  the 
country  districts  there  is  now  more  work  to  be  done 
and  it  is  done  better.  Orthodox  economists  may 
count  this  an  example  of  the  self-healing  effects  of 
an  economical  change  that  causes  much  suffering  at 
first.  It  is  fair  to  say  that  this  eventual  cure  is 

1  Of.  Malthus,  Essay,  7th  ed.,  p.  229,  top  ;  cf.  pp.  221  ft.,  223  ft.  ;  2nd 
ed.,  pp.  326-7. 


CHAP,  vii]  SCOTLAND    AND    IKKLAXD.  193 

neither  more  nor  less  complete  than  the  cure  of  the 
analogous  hardships  of  the  newly-introduced  factory- 
in,  and  the  temporary  inconveniences  of  sudden 
trade.     What  keen  commercial  ambition  can  do 
it   lias  done,  and  its  success  is  at  least  sufficiently 
complete  to  justify  us  in  saying  of  Scotland  to-day 
what   Mai  thus  said  of  it  eighty  years  ago  :    it  was 
most  over-populated  when  it  had  fewest  inhabitants. 
•rn  improvements,  however  short  of  perfection, 
have  at  least  both  in  England  and  in  Scotland  abso- 
lutely put  an  end  to  periodical  famines.     Even  the 
scarcities  of  1799  and  1800,  though  they  caused  great 
oss  in  both  countries,  were  not  famines  in  either  of 
i  ;  ami,  since  the  repeal  of  the  Corn  Laws  in  1846, 
i  such  general  distress  as  was  caused  in  Scotland 
by  the  potato  blight  cannot  occur  again.     That  dis- 
tress itself  was  as  nothing  compared  with  the  terrible 
dearths  from  which  Scotland  used  to  suffer  five  or  six 
times  a  century,  and  which  England  experienced  as 
late  as  the  seventeenth.1     The  dismal  picture2  which 
Malthus    draws  of    the  condition   of    the    Scott  Mi 
peasantry  reminds  us  that  it  is  not  much  more  than 
a  century   since   Scotland   took   her    first   steps   in 
civilization   and   turned    her   energies   from   war   to 
commerce.      Her  population  at  the   '45  was  abmit 
one 'and    a   quart- r    millions,    in    1801    about    one 
and  a  half;    but  in  1861  more  than  three,  and  in 
1881  three  and  three  .ju.-irters.     Population  ther« 

»  See  Mahhtw,  Euay,  7th  ed.,  p.  887.    Of.  Fair  in  Mali*.  Journ., 
16th  Feb.  1846. 

*  Drawn  chiefly  from  the  Statistical  Account  of  Scotland,  1791-99. 

0 


194  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [I<K.  I. 

lias  more  than  doubled  within  the  century.  But 
even  now  there  are  only  a  hundred  and  twenty-one 
inhabitants  to  the  square  mile,  as  compared  with  four 
hundred  and  forty-five  in  England.  The  wealth  of 
the  country  has  increased  immensely  faster  than  the 
population  ;  it  has  multiplied  fivefold  since  the  middle 
of  this  century,  and  tenfold  since  the  beginning  of  it.1 
The  history  of  population  in  Ireland  would  have  fur- 
nished Malthus  with  still  more  striking  illustrations  of 
his  principles,  if  his  life  had  lasted  a  few  years  longer. 
He  contents  himself  (till  the  6th  edition  of  the  Essay 2) 
with  a  single  paragraph :  "  The  details  of  the  popula- 
tion of  Ireland  are  but  little  known.  I  shall  only 
observe,  therefore,  that  the  extended  use  of  potatoes 
has  allowed  of  a  very  rapid  increase  of  it  during  the 
last  century.  But  the  cheapness  of  this  nourishing 
root,  and  the  small  piece  of  ground  which,  under  this 
kind  of  cultivation,  will  in  average  years  produce 
the  food  for  a  family,  joined  to  the  ignorance  and 
depressed  state 8  of  the  people,  which  have  prompted 
them  to  follow  their  inclinations  with  no  other 
prospect  than  an  immediate  bare  subsistence,  have 
encouraged  marriage  to  such  a  degree,  that  the 
population  is  pushed  much  beyond  the  industry  and 
present  resources  of  the  country  ;  and  the  consequence 
naturally  is,  that  the  lower  classes  of  people  are  in 
the  most  impoverished 4  and  miserable  state.  The 
checks  to  the  population  are  of  course  chiefly  of  the 

1  Lavergne,  Econ.  Eur.  de  VAngleterre,  ch.  xx.  p.  310. 

2  The  6th  simply  adds  the  numbers  of  the  people  from  the  census  of 
1821,  with  hardly  any  comment. 

3  2nd  ed.  says  "barbarism."  4  2nd  ed.,  "depressed." 


CHAP.  MI.]  SCOTLAND  AXD  IRELAND.  195 

positive  kind,  and  arise  from  the  diseases  occasioned 
by  squalid  poverty,  by  damp  and  wretched  cabins, 
by  bad  and  insufficient  clothing,1  and  occasional 
want.  To  these  positive  checks  have  of  late  years 
been  added  the  vice  and  misery  of  intestine  com- 
motion, of  civil  war,  and  of  martial  law."  2 

In  his  review  of  Newenham's  Statistical  and  7/A- 
torical  Enquiry  into  the  Population  of  Ireland  m  1808,8 
and  in  his  evidence  before  the  Emigration  Committee 
in  1827,  Malthus  uses  even  stronger  language.  We 
may  quote  from  the  latter  document  as  the  less  known 
of  the  two.  In  1817  he  had  spent  a  college  vacation 
in  visiting  Westmeath  and  the  lakes  of  Killarney,4 
and  was  able  to  speak  from  personal  knowledge  of  the 
country.  He  was  asked  : — 

Qu.  3306.  "  With  reference  to  Ireland,  what  is 
your  opinion  as  to  the  habits  of  the  people,  as  tending 
to  promote  a  rapid  increase  of  population  ?  " — "  Their 
habits  are  very  unfavourable  in  regard  to  their  own 
condition,  because  they  are  inclined  to  be  satisfied 
with  the  very  lowest  degree  of  comfort,  and  to  marry 
with  little  other  prospect  than  that  of  being  able  to 
get  potatoes  for  themselves  and  their  children." ' 

1  2nd  ed.  a'lds,  "by  the  filth  <>f  their  persons." 

1  2nd  ed., pp.  334-5  ;  7tlml.,p.  2-J!>.  He  refers  to  the  rebellion  of  1795- 
98,  that  was  prelude  to  the  Union  of  1800,  and  was  fn-sh  in  his  memory. 

'  Edit*.  Review,  July  1808,  the  only  review  in  that  journal  assigned  to 
him  by  express  testimony. 

f  Report  of  Emigration  Committee  (1827),  Evid.,  qu.  3225. 

•  In  the  article  on  Newenham  he  in. -i.l« -ntally  utters  the  paradox  ih.it 
in  view  of  the  low  standard  of  food  the  people's  indolence  is  almost  an 
advantage,  for  it  prevents  wages  falling  quite  down  to  that  level.— Art 
P.  311.  Ct  jBway,  IV.  xi.  456-7.  For  his  view  of  potatoes  in  Ireland, 


195  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  I. 

3307.     "  What  are  the  circumstances  which   con- 
tribute to  introduce  such  habits  in  a  country  ?  " 
"  The  degraded  condition  of  the  people,  oppression, 
and  ignorance." 

3311.  "  You  have  mentioned  that  oppression  con- 
tributes to  produce  those  habits  to  which  you  have 
alluded  ;  in  what  way  do  you  imagine  in  Ireland  there 
is  oppression  ? "  — "  I  think  that  the  government  of 
Ireland  has,  upon  the  whole,  been  very  unfavourable 
to  habits  of  that  kind ;  it  has  tended  to  degrade  the 
general   mass   of  the   people,    and    consequently   to 
prevent  them  from  looking   forward   and   acquiring 
habits  of  prudence." 

3312.  "Is  it  your  opinion  that  the  minds  of  the 
people  may  be  so  influenced   by  the    circumstances 
under  which  they  live,   in   regard  to  civil   society, 
that  it  may  contribute  very  much  to  counteract  that 
particular  habit  which  leads  to  the  rapid  increase  of 
population  ? "-— "  I  think  so." 

3313.  "  What  circumstances  in  your  opinion  con- 
tribute to  produce  a  taste  for  comfort  and  cleanliness 
among  a  people  ?  "•  — "  Civil  and  political  liberty  and 
education."  l 

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

3317.  "What  effect  would  any  change  of  the 
moral  or  religious  state  of  the  government  of  that 
country  produce  upon  persons  occupying  such  posses- 
sions ? " — "  It  could  not  produce  any  immediate  effect 
if  that  system  were  continued  ;  with  that  system  of 

1  Cf.  Review  of  Newenham,  p.  352. 


CHAP.  MI  ]  SCOTLAND  AND  IRELAND.  197 

occupancy  there  must  always  be  an  excessive  redund- 
ancy of  people,  because,  from  the  nature  of  tolerably 
good  land,  it  will  always  produce  more  than  can 
mployed  upon  it,  and  the  consequence  must  be 
that  there  will  be  a  great  number  of  people  not 
employed." 

3318.  "  Is,  therefore,  not  the  first  step  towards  im- 
provement in  Ireland  necessarily  to  be  accomplished  by 
an  alteration  of  the  present  state  of  the  occupancy  of 
the  laud  ?"  This  was  a  leading  question,  but  ^lalthus 
would  not  be  led.  He  replied,  "I  think  that  such 
an  alteration  is  of  the  greatest  possible  importance, 
but  that  the  other  (the  change  in  the  government) 
should  accompany  it ;  it  would  not  have  the  same 
force  without."  In  his  answers  to  later  questions  he 
gave  his  view  at  greater  length  on  the  causes  of  the 
difference  between  English  and  Irish  character. 

Answ.  to  qu.  3411.     "At  the  time  of  the  intro- 
duction of  the  potato  into  Ireland  the  Irish  people 
in    a   very   low   and   degraded   state,  and  the 
ased  quantity  of  food  was  only  applied  to  in- 
crease the  population.    But  when  our  [English]  wages 
«'f  labour  in  wheat  were  high  in  the  early  part  of 
the  last    century,  it  did  not  appear  that  they  were 
employed  merely  in  tin   maintenance  of  more  families, 
but  in  improving  tin-  condition  of  the  people  in  tln-ir 
general  mode  of  livi 

3413.  "  You  attribute  the  difference  of  the  character 
of  tin*  people  to  the  dilV«-ivnce  of  food  ?"•— "  In  a  great 
measure." 

1  Cf.  Rogers,  Six  CenturU*  of  Work  and_Wagei  (1884),  p.  484. 


193  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  i. 

3414.  "  What  circumstance  determines  the  differ- 
ence of  food  in  the  two  countries  ?"•— "  The  circum- 
stances are  partly  physical  and  partly  moral.1     It  will 
depend  in  a  certain  degree  upon  the  soil  and  climate 
whether  the  people  live  on  maize,  wheat,  oats,  pota- 
toes, or  meat." : 

3415.  "  Is  not  the  selection  in  some  degree  de- 
pendent on  the  general  state   of  society  ? " — "  Very 
much  on  moral  causes,  on  their  being  in  so  respect- 
able a  situation  that  they  are  in  the  habit  of  looking 
forward,  and  exercising  a  certain  degree  of  prudence  ; 
and    there    is    no    doubt   that  in   different   countries 
this  kind  of  prudence  is  exercised  in  very  different 
degrees." 

3416.  "  Does  it  depend  at  all  on  the  government 
under    which    they    live  ? " — "  Very    much    on    the 
government,  on  the  strict  and  equal  administration  of 
justice,  on  the  perfect  security  of  property,  on  civil, 
religious,  and  political  liberty ;  for  people  respect  them- 
selves more  under  favourable   circumstances   of  this 
kind,  and  are  less  inclined  to  marry,  with  [out]  the  pros- 
pect of  more  physical  sustenance  for  their  children." 

3417.  "  On  the  degree  of  respect  with  which  they 
are  treated  by  their  superiors  ?  " — "  Yes  ;  one  of  the 
greatest  faults  in  Ireland  is  that  the  labouring  classes 
there  are  not  treated  with  proper  respect  by  their 


1  In  a  sense  already  frequently  noticed.     So  in  answer  3401,  where 
he  seems  to  accept  the  phrase  "  moral  degradation  "  as  applied  to  Ireland. 

2  Of.  above,  pp.  95  and  195  n.     Professor  Rogers  must  have  forgotten 
such  passages  as  these  when  he  wrote  the  62nd  and  63rd  pages  of  his 
Six  Centuries  of  Work  and  Wages  (1884),  though  he  furnishes  his  own 
correction  on  a  following  page  (484). 


CHAP,  vir.]  SCOTLAND  AND  IRELAND.  199 

riors  ;  they  are  treated  as  if  they  were  a  degraded 
:>le." 

Thereupon  he  is  again  asked  a  leading  question  of 
a  somewhat  cynical  character,  but  he  is  again  cautious 
in  his  answer. 

3418.  "Does   not   that   treatment  mainly  arise 
from  their  existing  in  such  redundancy  as  to  be  no 
object  to  their  superiors'?" — "In  part  it  does  perhaps  ; 
but  it  appeared  to  take  place  before  that  [redundancy] 
was  the  case,  to  the  same  degree." 

The  questioner,  however,  begs  the  question  and 
asks  : 

3419.  "  The  number  being  the  cause  of  their  treat- 
ment, will  not  their  treatment  tend  to  the  increase 
of  that  number?'     and  the  answer  is:    "Yes,  they 
act  and  react  on  each  other." 

Accordingly  bis  opinion  in  1827  is,  as  it  was  in 
1803,  that  emigration  conjoined  with  other  agencies 
will  be  good  for  Ireland,  but  by  itself  will  leave 
matters  no  bettor  than  they  were. 

Alongside    of    his   weighty   words    in    the    essay 

and    in    the   evidence   it    is   worth   while   to    place 

words  written  by  Adam  Smith   half  a  century 

:  — 

"By  tin;  union   with  England,  the  middling  and 

i  ior  ranks  of  people  in  Scotland  gained  a  complete 

nee  from  the  power  of  an  aristocracy  whi<  h 

had  always  before  o]>]»ivv~rd   tin-in.      My  a  union  with 

Great  Britain,  th.    greater  part  of  the  people  of  all 

lea    in    I n  land   would  gain  an  equally  conij 
drliverance  from  a  much  more  oppressive  aristocracy, 


200  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  I. 

an  aristocracy  not  founded,  like  that  of  Scotland,  in 
the  natural  and  respectable  distinctions  of  birth  and 
fortune,  but  in  the  most  odious  of  all  distinctions, 
those  of  religious  and  political  prejudices  ;  distinc- 
tions which,  more  than  any  other,  animate  both  the 
insolence  of  the  oppressors  and  the  hatred  and  indig- 
nation of  the  oppressed,  and  which  commonly  render 
the  inhabitants  of  the  same  country  more  hostile  to 
one  another  than  those  of  different  countries  ever 
are."1 

With  such  passages  before  us,  we  cannot  consider 
the  two  economists  to  have  been  behind  their  age  in 
their  Irish  policy.  In  regard  to  accurate  figures,  the 
later  economist  was  little  better  off  than  the  earlier. 
Ireland  was  not  included  in  the  first  two  censuses  of 
1  801  and  1811.  In  1695  its  population  was  estimated 
by  Captain  South  as  little  more  than  one  million ; 2 
in  1731,  by  inquiry  of  Irish  House  of  Lords,  at  two 
millions;  in  1792  by  Dr.  Beaufort  at  a  little  above 
four  millions  ;3  in  1805  by  Newenham  at  five  and  a 
half  millions  ;  in  1812  an  imperfect  census  gave  it 
as  nearly  six  millions  ;  in  the  census  of  1821  it  was 
6,800,000.  It  was  clear  that  the  population  of 
Ireland  was  increasing  even  then  faster  than  that  of 
England.4  But  between  these  dates  and  our  own 

1  Wealth  of  Nations,  V.  iii.  430,  1,  2. 

2  Sir  Wm.  Petty  made  it  1,100,000  in  1672.    See  MacCulloch,  Append, 
to  Wealth  of  Nations,  (IV.)  462. 

3  See  Sir  H.  Parnell's  evidence  in  3rd  Report  to  Emigration  Committee, 
1827,  p.  200.     He  thinks  that  between  1792  and  1821  the  population  of 
Ireland  had  doubled  itself. 

4  Malthus,  Evidence  before  Emigration  Committee,  1827  ;  3rd  Report, 
qu.  3430,  p.  327. 


CHAP,  vii.]  SCOTLAND  AND   IRELAND.  201 

times  comes  an  episode  striking  enough  to  provide 
all  economical  histories  with  a  purpurcus pannt<*. 

For  about  two  generations  England  had  perpetrated 
in  Ireland  her  crowning  feats  of  commercial  jealousy, 

i lousy  not  more  foolish  or  wicked  against  Ireland 
than  it  was  against  the  American  colonies,  or,  till 
1707,  against  Scotland,  but  more  easily  victorious. 
I  r.  Lind  had  not  begun  to  be  in  any  sense  an  industrial 
country  till  the  reigns  of  Elizabeth  and  James  I. ; 
and  the  wars  of  the  succeeding  reigns  hampered  her 
early  efforts.  She  had  fair  corn  and  meadow  lands, 
and  perhaps  the  best  pastures  in  the  world  for  sheep 
ami  eat  tl<-.  The  English  farming  interest  became 
impatient  of  Irish  competition,  and  a  law  was  passed 
to  forbid  the  importation  of  Irish  sheep  and  cattle 
dairy  produce  into  England  (1665,  1680).  By 
reason  of  the  later  Naviirition  Acts,  Ireland  could  not 
make  amends  for  this  by  trading  with  America,  for 
all  such  trading  must  be  by  way  of  England  and  in 
English  ships,  nor  by  trading  with  France  for  the 

e  reason.     England  in    IHT  jealousy  would  have 
surround- d  i:h    a   cordon   quite   as    close    as 

Berkeley's  wall  of  brass.1  As  soon  as  a  considerable 
woollen  manufacture  grew  up,  En-land  stepped  it 
l.y  l.-L'Matinii.  which  (in  lf>9(j)  forbad.-  tin-  <  xport- 
of  Irish  woollens  not  only  to  England  but  to 
any  other  country  whatever.  English  inter!,  rcnce, 

1  Qnerirt(  1735)  134:  "  Wheth.  r  if  tin  rcwaiia  wallof  brama  thoutuid 

cleanly  and  con  -11  tin-  lun-1,  and  reap  the  fruiU  of 

44  caged  raU"  of  the  Corn  Law  pamphlet*  give  us  the  other  side  of  the 


202  MALTHUS  AND    HIS  WORK.  [BK.  i. 

if  it  had  done  no  more,  added  immensely  to  the 
uncertainties 1  and  fluctuations  of  Irish  trade.  The 
growth  of  industries  like  the  woollen  manufacture 
had  set  on  foot  a  growth  of  population  which  did 
not  stop  with  the  arrest  of  the  industries.  As  often 
happens,2  the  effects  of  an  impulse  to  marriage  lasted 
far  beyond  the  industrial  progress  that  gave  the 
impulse.  But  this  means  hunger  and  suffering,  if 
not  death.  In  the  case  of  Ireland,  the  ruin  of  all 
industries  but  farming  over  more  than  three-fourths 
of  the  land  led  to  an  absolute  dependence  of  the 
people  on  the  harvest  of  their  own  country  ;  and, 
where  it  failed  them,  they  were  brought  face  to  face 
with  dearth  or  famine.  It  led  also  to  the  peopling 
of  the  country  districts  at  the  expense  of  the  towns,3 
instead  of  (as  usual)  the  towns  at  the  expense  of 
the  country.  If  Goldsmith's  Deserted  Village  is  not 
English,  it  is  not  Irish.  By  the  year  1780,  when 
Lord  North  from  fear  of  rebellion  granted  free  trade 
to  Ireland  with  Great  Britain,  the  mischief  had  been 
made  almost  incurable.  The  great  increase  in  the 
Irish  population,  like  the  great  increase  in  the  English, 
may  be  said  to  begin  in  a  free  trade  movement.  In 
the  worst  days  of  legal  persecution  it  might  have 
been  said  of  the  Irish  Catholic  population,  the  more 
they  were  afflicted  the  more  they  multiplied  and 
grew.  Lavergne4  thinks  their  greater  increase  was 

1  "  Of  such  consequence  in  the  encouragement  of  any  industry  is  a 
steady  unvarying  policy." — Arthur  Young,  France,  p.  388. 

2  See  above,  p.  151,  &c.  3  See  above,  pp.  191-2. 

4  1.  c.  p.  399.    Cf.  Lecky,  Eighteenth  Cent.,  vol.  ii.  pp.  222  seq. ;  Itevicw 
of  Newenham,  pp.  349,  350. 


CHAP.  VIL]  SCOTLAND  AND  IRELAND.  203 

due  first  to  the  physiological  law,  that  in  the  case  of 
all  animals  the  means  of  reproduction  are  multiplied 
in  proportion  to  the  chances  of  destruction  [?],  and 
second  to  the  instinctively  sound  tactics  of  a  people 
otherwise  defenceless.  The  probability  is,  too,  that 
they  remained  quiet  under  their  multitudinous  indus- 
trial, political,  and  religious  disqualifications  so  long, 
because  they  were  reduced  to  that  depth  of  misery 
that  kills  the  very  power  of  resistance ;  and  poverty 
at  its  extreme  point  is  a  positive  but  not  a  preventive 
check  on  population.  Where  things  are  so  bail, 
marriage,  it  is  thought,  cannot  make  them  worse,  and 
marriage  would  go  on  at  the  expense  of  a  high 
mortality,  general  pauperism,  or  continuous  emigra- 
t  i«'ii.  The  pureness  of  marriage  relations  in  Ireland, 
though  in  itself  a  much  greater  good  than  its  conse- 
ices  were  evil,  acted  as  it  would  have  done  in 
Godwin's  Utopia ; !  apart  from  wisdom,  virtue  itself 
had  its  evils.  Potatoes  by-and-by  came  into  general 
use;  and  the  ba«l  harvests,  which  taught  even  the 
Scotch  and  English  poor2  to  make  frequent  use  of 
this  substitute  for  corn,  converted  it  in  Ireland  fnun 
a  substitute  into  a  staple.  Economists  viewed  this 
change  with  almost  unanimous  disapproval.  In  the 
view  of  Malthns  it  was  the  cheapness  of  thi* 
that  ina«l«-  it  dangerous  for  the  lul><unvrs  ;  his  theory 
of  wages  led  him  to  object  to  cheap  corn  on  the  same 
grounds.8  On  the  principle  that  it  iire.ls  difficulties 

1  See  above,  p.  18. 

'  7th  e.!.,   p.  378  ft.    Of.  TV,/.  JBcon.,  lit  ed.,  pp.  252,  290,  and 

.T..I  Nf 
•  Snay,   III .  v.ii.  328  (Ent  In  5th  ed.).    See  later,  p.  268,  &c. 


204  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  i. 

to  generate  energy,  the  Irish  are  made  indolent  by 
their  cheap  food,  and  make  no  use  of  it  except  to 
increase  by  it.  Living  on  the  cheapest  food  procur- 
able, they  could  not  in  scarcity  fall  back  on  anything 
else.  Every  man  who  wished  to  marry  might  obtain 
a  cabin  and  potatoes.1  At  the  lowest  calculation,  an 
acre  of  land  planted  with  potatoes  will  support  twice 
as  much  as  one  of  the  same  quality  sown  with 
wheat.2  There  are  other  objections  to  a  potato  diet. 
It  is  a  simple  (as  opposed  to  a  composite)  diet,  and 
it  involves  a  low  standard  of  comfort.  The  second 
is  not  the  same  as  the  first,  for  a  people  that  had  no 
variety  in  their  food  might  conceivably  have  a  great 
variety  in  their  other  comforts.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
however,  it  was  none  of  these  three  supposed  disad- 
vantages of  the  potato  that  proved  the  bane  of  the  Irish 
population,  but  a  fourth  one,  its  liability  to  blight.3 

The  figures  of  the  census  tell  their  own  tale.  In 
1821  the  Irish  people  numbered  6,801,827  ;  in  1831, 
7,767,401;  in  1841,  8,199,853;  but  in  1851,6,514,473. 
In  each  previous  decade  the  increase  approached  a 
million ;  in  the  last  there  was  not  only  no  increase, 
but  a  decrease  of  more  than  a  million  and  a  half. 
There  had  been  a  disastrous  famine  followed  by  great 
emigrations.  What  happened  on  Lord  Lansdowne's 
estate  in  Kerry  is  an  example  of  what  took  place 
over  Ireland  generally.4  That  estate  comprehended 

1  Essay,  7th  ed.,  pp.  452-3  ;  2nd  ed.,  pp.  575-6. 

2  Ibid.,  p.  323  ft.  (7th)  ;   MacCulloch,  Appendix  to   W.  of  N.,  p. 
467,  2. 

3  Essay  on  Pop.,  2nd  ed.,  p.  576  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  453  ft. 

4  Lavergne,  pp.  423-4. 


CHAP,  vii.]  SCOTLAND  AND   IRELAND.  205 

about  100,000  acres,  on  which  before  the  famine  there 
was  a  population  of  16,000  souls.  When  the  famine 
(Mine  a  fourth  part  of  them  perished  and  another 
fourth  emigrated.  In  course  of  time,  thanks  to 
money  sent  by  relatives  from  America  and  advances 
made  by  Lord  LansJowne,  the  emigration  continued 
with  such  rapidity  that  only  2000  souls  were  left  on 
the  estate.  The  famine  taught  the  people  how  to 
rate,  and  gave  them  some  idea  of  the  meaning 
of  over-population.  The  rural  districts  of  Ireland 
are  probably  over-peopled  now ;  but  there  seems 
reason  to  believe  that  a  body  of  tenants,  who  are 
little  short  of  peasant  proprietors  in  security  of 
tenure,  and  who  have  been  forced  into  a  knowledge 
of  the  world  outside  Ireland,  will  not  retain  the 
habits  of  the  old  occupiers.1  Without  a  change  of 
hal 'its,  peasant  proprietorships  would  have  done  little 
for  France,  and  will  do  little  for  Ireland. 

This  would  certainly  have  been  the  judgment  of 
.Mai thus  on  things  as  they  are  now  in  Ireland, 
r  Catholic  Emancipation,  Disestablishment,  and 
the  Land  Act.  In  his  own  time  he  was  wise  enough 
to  see  that  the  first  could  not  be  delayed  without 
injustice  and  danger.  The  rapid  increase  of  tho 
Catholic  population  would  soon,  he  foresaw  in  1808,2 
bring  the  question  of  Emancipation  within  the  range 
of  "  practical  politics,"  and  if  the  measure  had  been 

a  1876  tin        .  mi's  Report  showed  that  there  were 

tli- -n  fewer  marriage*  in  Ireland  than  in  En--  r..]>,,rti«n  to  the 

.  .iifl  th.it  ill  v  came  later.    Of.  the  18f/i  fbport,  for  Ireland 
(1882),  pp.  18. 

*  Ikview  of  Newenham,  pp.  351-4. 


206  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  I. 

passed,  as  he  urged,  in  1808,  instead  of  twenty  years 
later,  the  labour  of  conciliating  Ireland  might  have 
proved  easier,  and  the  political  change  might  have 
helped  to  produce  that  change  in  the  habits  of  the 
people  which  Malthus  deemed  essential  to  its  per- 
manent prosperity. 


BOOK  II.    ECONOMICS. 

CHAPTER   I. 
THE    LANDLORDS. 

Need  of  an  Economical  Digression — The  Hegemony  of  Adam  Smith's 
School — Cardinal  Doctrines  of  tin.-  Malthusian  Economy — Scope, 
Method,  Details — Malthus  doing  Injustice  to  his  Economics — 
Human  Character  of  his  Doctrines — Agricultural  Situation  in  1794 — 
History  of  Corn  Laws — Malthus  on  Rent  in  1803  and  afterwards — 
Observations  on  the  Corn  Laws — Grounds  of  an  Opinion — N» 
and  Progress  of  Rent — Ricardo's  Criticisms — Agricultural  Improve- 
ments— Malthusian  Ideal  of  Commercial  Policy — The  Wall  of  Brass 
— Limits  to  Commercial  Progress. 

THE  Essay  an  Population  deals  with  the  past,  the 
present,  and  the  future.  We  have  tried  to  follow  its 
account  of  past  and  present,  and  must  now  consider 
the  author's  view  of  future  prospects  and  of  tho 
various  schemes  (including  his  own)  for  making  the 
futuiv  Ix-tiiT  than  the  present. 

To  do  justice  to  this  half  of  the  essay,  we  must 
tak«  further  liberties  with  its  arrangement.  For 
the  sake  of  explaining  the  historical  genesis  of  the 
essay,  we  have  already  taken  first '  that  criticism  of 
Godwin  and  Condorcet  which  in  the  later  essay 
comes  in  th-  of  the  work/  on  the  heels  of  the 

«  See  above,  Bk.  I.  ch.  i. 
•  2nd  ed.,  Bk.  III.  cha.  L  to  iii. ;  7th  ed,  Bk.  III.  cha.  i.  and  ii. 


203  }1  AT/THUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

account  of  population  in  the  United,  Kingdom,  the 
point  where  we  have  now  arrived ;  and  the  chapter 
on  emigration  has  been  used  before  i£s  time.  There 
ivmuiii,  out  of  the  fourteen  chapters  of  the  third  book 
of  the  essay,  eleven  still*  untouched .,;  and  in  all  but 
one1  a  knowledge  of  the  general  economical  doctrine 
of  Malthus  is  indispensa&e  to  a  clear  and  just  under- 
standing of  him.  No  apology  is  needed  then  for  a 
somewhat  long  digression,  in  which  the  chief  econo- 
mical writings  of  our  author  are  briefly  analyzed.  It 
is  not  wholly  a  digression,  as  the  substance  of  seven  2 
out  of  ten  chapters  will  be  found  incorporated  with 
it,  and  their  logical  connection  with  the  author's 
economical  theories  (so  far  as  it  exists)  will  be  shown. 
As  a  thoroughly  practical  man,  Malthus  knew  that 
philanthropy  can  do  little  without  sound  doctrine ; 
and  his  economical  theories  belong  to  the  substance 
of  his  work.  They  were  developed,  unlike  the  Essay 
on  Population,  in  quiet  controversy  among  friends  ; 
Ricardo,  James  Mill,  and  Jean  Baptiste  Say,  who 
were  critics  of  the  Political  Economy r,  had  been  con- 
verts of  the  Essay.  These  were,  however,  the  very 
men  who  came  nearest  to  identify  orthodox  economics 
with  rigorous  abstraction.  Malthus  himself,  labour- 
ing to  build  up  the  neglected  pathology  of  economic 
science,  was  not  chargeable  with  this  fault.  His  first 
work  had  happily  fixed  into  an  intellectual  principle 
his  natural  inclination  to  look  at  speculative  questions 

1  7th  ed.,  ch.  iii.  (on  Owen,  &c.),  which  replaces  a  reply  (2nd  and  3rd 
edd.)  to  Godwin's  first  reply. 

3  All  except  those  on  pauperism.  When  pauperism  is  reached,  the 
thread  of  the  essay  is  again  taken  up. 


i  ]  THE  LANDLORDS.  209 

in  their  relations  to  practice,  and  to  look  at  "  things  as 
they  are  " l  rather  than  as  they  might  be.  Ricardo's 
first  work,  bearing  wholly  on  finance,1  had  unhappily 
fixed  for  him  his  inclination  to  treat  every  social 
question  as  a  problem  in  arithmetic.  In  both  cases 
the  excitement  of  controversy  would  make  the  im- 
pression deep*  r. 

The  two  economists  both  start  from  Adam  Smith,1 
as  theologians  from  the  Bible.  It  was  becoming  clear 
that  these  Scriptures  were  of  doubtful  interpretation. 
Men  were  to  choose  between  the  Calvinism  of  Ricardo 
and  the  Annininui.sni  of  Malthus;  and,  when  the  two 
writers  turned  from  their  debates  with  the  public  to 
debates  with  each  other,  no  less  a  prize  was  in  ques- 
tion than  the  hegemony  of  the  school. 

Tli is  was  won  by  Ricardo,  whose  Principles  of 
Political  Economy  and  Taxation  (1817)  were  accepted 
by  James  Mill,  MacCulloch,  Nassau  Senior,  to  say 
nothing  of  others,  as  the  Institutes  of  their  creed. 
MacCulloch  thought  it  not  worth  his  while  to  print 
what  Ricardo  had  thought  it  worth  his  while  to  write, 
in  vindication  of  his  positions  against  Malthus.4  The 
strongest  ally  of  Mai  thus  was  Sismondi.  It  was  not 
till  Ricardo  had  reigned  for  thirty  years  that  there 
waa  serious  sign  of  defection,  when  the  son  of  James 
Mill  broke  with  his  father's  traditions;'  and,  though 

>  Pot.  Earn.,  1820,  Introd.  p.  11.  Of.  Tract  on  Tata*,  p.  60  ft,  and 
•bore,  p.  37. 

•  Higk  Pric*  of  Button,  1809.    See  below,  p.  286. 

•  M*lthu»,  Pol  Be,  2,  5,  M,  Ac. ;  Jtoay  on  Pop.,  Pitt. 
Ac.                   Principle*  of  Pol.  Scon,  and  Toon.  (1817),  Pref. 

•  I  -face  to  Work*,  p.  x  v 

•  J.  8.  Mill,  Political  Jbonomy,  1848  and  1849.    It  WM  not  a  eon. 

P 


210  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  u. 

in  the  hands  of  Thornton,  Cliffe  Leslie,  Walker,  and 
others,  the  reaction  has  been  carried  to  the  utmost, 
the  eclipse  of  Eicardo  has  done  nothing  to  rescue 
Multhus  from  obscurity.  The  very  success  of  the 
Essay  on  Population  may  have  deepened  the  oblivion 
of  the  other  writings  in  virtue  of  the  popular  fallacy 
that  a  man  cannot  be  equally  great  in  general  theory 
and  in  the  advocacy  of  one  particular  reform. 

The  Political  Economy  of  Malthus  has  its  faults  ; 
but  it  contains  in  outline  the  main  truths  which 
writers  of  our  own  time  think  they  have  established 
against  Kicardo.  First  and  foremost,  he  maintains 
with  them  that  the  proper  study  of  the  science  is 
not  Wealth,  but  Man,  or  more  definitely,  Wealth  in 
relation  to  Man.  The  qualities  of  man  and  the 
earth  he  cultivates  are  according  to  Malthus  so  many 
and  variable  in  relation  to  each  other  that  a  study 
of  their  relations  cannot  be  an  exact  science  like 
mathematics ;  it  may  contain  "  great  general  prin- 
ciples "  to  which  there  are  few  exceptions,  and 
"  prominent  landmarks  "  that  will  be  safe  guides  to 
us  in  legislation  or  in  life  ;  but  "  even  these  when 
examined  will  be  found  to  resemble  the  most  general 
rules  in  morals  and  politics  founded  upon  the 
known  passions  and  propensities  of  human  nature/' * 
Human  conduct  is  characterized  by  such  variation 
and  aberration  that  we  must  always  be  prepared  for 

breach.  The  new  faith  and  the  old  perplex  each  other  and  the  reader, 
in  the  pages  of  Mill. 

1  Pol.  Econ.,  Introd.  Cf.  the  Discussions  on  the  Measure  of  Value, 
Pol.  Econ.,  ch.  ii.,  and  pamphlet  on  the  subject.  So  Roscher,  National- 
okonomie,  §  1  and  n. 


CHAP,  i.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  211 

exceptions   to  our  principles,  and  for   qualifications 
which  spoil  the  charm  of  uniformity,  but  are  faithful 
•  •ts,1  like  George  Eliot's  "analyses  in  small  and 
subtle  characters,"  which  stimulate  no  enthusiasm  but 
alone  tell  the  whole  truth.     In  the  second  place,  we 
are   told   that   the   nature  of   the   subject   makes  a 
peculiarly   cautious   Method    necessary.       Our    first 
business   being   to  account  for  things  as   they  are,2 
till  we  are  sure  that  our  theories  do  so  we  cannot 
act  on  them.8     A  good  economical  definition  must 
conform  to  the  ordinary  usage  of  words.     We  must 
take  if  possible  a  meaning  which  would  agree  with 
the  ordinary  use  of  words  "  in   the  conversation  of 
educated  jH-rsons."4     If  this  does  not  give  sufficient 
distinctness,  we  must  fall  back  on  the  authority  of  the 
most  < « 1,  l,i;it» d  writers  on  the  science,  particularly  of 
the  founder  or  founders  of  it ;  "in  this  case,  whether 
the  term  be  a  new  one  born  with  the  science,  or  an 
old  one  used  in   a  new  sense,  it  will  not  be  strains 
to   the   generality  of  readers,   or  liable   to  be  mis- 
understood."6    If  any  word   must  have  a  different 
meaning  from  that  adopted  by  either  of  tin  ><•  author- 
ities, the  new  sense  must  not  only  be  free  from  the 
faults  of  the  old,  but  must  have  a  ch -ar  and  recog- 
nizable   positive    n- 'fulness.      The    new    definitions 
should    be  consistent  with   the   old;   and  the   same 
terms  should  be  used  in  the  same  sense,  except  wh.uo 

1  A-  3). 

•  I  J&oriomy,  preceded  by  an  inquiry  into  tho 
rules  which  ought  t«  t  lie  definition  and  uw 

remark*  on  the  deviation*  from  these  rales  i; 
wrii  PL  5. 

4  ZtyCnMon*,  p.  4.  •  ll.i  ' 

r  :. 


212  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

inveterate  custom  insists  on  an  exception.  When 
all  is  done,  it  is  still  impossible  in  a  social  science 
like  political  economy  to  find  a  definition  entirely 
beyond  cavil.1 

"  Wealth  "  must  include  all  the  "  material  objects 
that  are  necessary,  useful,  or  agreeable  to  mankind  ;  " 
"  productive  labour "  must  be  the  labour  which 
realizes  itself  either  in  such  material  objects  or  the 
increased  value  of  them ;  or  else  we  wander  from 
common  language,  and  our  discussions  travel  off  into 
indefmiteness.  Economical  reasoning  must  be  a  de- 
duction from  observed  facts  of  nature  and  of  human 
nature  verified  by  general  experience.  Malthus 
professes  to  have  used  this  cautious  method  through- 
out, and  the  theory  of  population  was  only  the 
particular  instance  where  circumstances  enabled  him 
to  make  his  verification  most  complete.  "  I  should 
never  have  had  that  steady  and  unshaken  confidence 
in  the  theory  of  population  which  I  have  invariably 
felt,  if  it  had  not  appeared  to  me  to  be  confirmed, 
in  the  most  remarkable  manner,  by  the  state  of 
society  as  it  actually  exists  in  every  country  with 
which  we  are  acquainted."3  On  the  other  hand, 
Eicardo,  legislating  for  Saturn,  gives  us  little  or 
no  verification  by  experience.  It  is  true  that  he 
admits  qualifications  and  exceptions  to  his  own  state- 
ments ;  and  he  would  have  winced  a  little  at  his  own 

1  Definitions,  pp.  6,  7. 

2  Pol  Econ.  (1820),  p.  28.     "And  have  an  exchangeable  value,"  was 
the  Ricardian  addition  ;  and  in  the  Quarterly  Bev.,  Jan.  1824,  p.  298, 
Malthus  weakly  allows  the  addition  to  pass. 

3  Pol.  Econ.,  Introd.  p.  11. 


CHAP,  i.]  THE  LANDLORDS.  213 

biographer's  assertion  that  "Mr.  Ricardo  paid  com- 
II.IT  itively  little  attention  to  the  practical  application 
of  general  principles ;  his  is  not  a  practical  work."  l 
But  he  makes  no  use  of  the  admissions ;  his  illustra- 
tions as  a  rule  are  not  historical,  but  imaginary  cases 
and    the   verification   is   wanting.       In   a   letter   to 
Malthus  (written  on  the  24th  November,    1820)  he 
says :  "  Our  differences  may  in  some  respects,  I  think, 
be  ascribed   to  your  considering   my  book   as  more 
practical  than  I  intended  it  to  be.     My  object  was 
to  elucidate  principles,  and   to  do  this  I  imagined 
strong   cases,  that   I    might   show  the  operation    of 
these  principles."1       In    Maltlms  and   Adam  Smith, 
imaginary  cases  are  rare  exceptions,  actual  examples 
from  life  or  history  are  the  rule.     Malthus  goes  so 
far  in  this  direction  that  (to  use  his  own  phraseology) 
In-  is   tempted   to  subordinate  science   to  "utility." 
:i    Adam   Smith,   though   he   had   abundance   of 
good-will  to  his  kind,  did  not  write  to  do  good  but 
to   expound   truth.      To   Malthus   the   discovery   of 
truth  was  less  important  than  the  improvement  of 
society.     When  an  economical   truth  could  not   be 
made  the  means  of  improvement,  he  seems  to  hav»» 
lost  interest  in  it.     His  pointed   warning   to  others 
nst  this  error8  maybe  regarded  as  a  confession 
of  his  own  liability  to  it;  and,  if  he  obeyed  his  own 
warning    at    all,   his    position    was    at    the    best    lik«» 
of  the   latter-day  utilitarians,  who   try  to  reach 

1  MacCullocb,  Life  of  Ricardo,  prefixed  to  Princ.  tf  Econ.  and  Taxation 
(ed.  1876),  p.  \ 

1  Letter  quoted  by  Empwn  in  Klin.  Review,  Jnn.  1837. 
9  Pol  £con.,  Pref.  pp.  12,  13  (2nd  ed.).    CC  above,  p.  57. 


214  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

happiness  by  making  believe  not  to  tbiiik  of  it. 
If  his  science  had  been  less  biassed  by  utility,  it 
might  have  been  more  thorough  ;  and  we  might  not 
have  had  in  our  own  time  a  Ricardian  socialism, 
appearing  like  the  ghost  of  the  deceased  Ricardian 
orthodoxy  sitting  crowned  upon  the  grave  thereof. 
He  has  the  virtue  of  refusing  to  join  the  economical 
Pharisees,1  who  would  not  admit  the  elasticity  of 
economical  laws,  lest  they  should  discredit  their 
science ;  but  he  is  to  blame  for  not  pushing  his 
quarrel  against  Ricardo  with  the  same  energy  as 
against  Godwin.  His  forces,  in  this  campaign,  were 
worse  drilled  and  worse  handled.  It  is  justly  said  by 
Gamier  (Diet,  de  VEcon.  Pol.,  art.  'Mai thus'),  that  in 
spite  of  its  title,  the  Political  Economy  of  Malthus  is 
not  the  exposition  of  a  system,  but  simply  a  collection 
of  economical  papers  on  various  subjects  that  had 
been  brought  specially  under  his  notice  in  discussion 
with  his  friends,  or  (we  might  add)  in  his  college 
class.  This  itself  would  lead  him  to  present  a  much 
less  solid  front  to  the  enemy  than  he  did  in  the  Essay. 
To  come,  in  the  third  place,  to  Details,  we  find  the 
human  character  of  the  Political  Economy  of  Mai  thus 
appearing  not  only  in  his  view  of  population,  where  all 
is  at  last  made  to  depend  on  the  personal  responsibility 
of  the  individual  man,  and  legislation  is  good  or  bad 
according  as  it  strengthens  or  weakens  that  responsi- 
bility,— but  in  his  view  of  the  Value  of  goods,  as 
measured  by  human  labour, — in  his  view  of  demand 

1  Arist,  Ethics,  x.  1.    Some  thought  pleasure  was  the  goal,  but,  for  the 
sake  of  others,  "one  must  not  say  so." 


CIIAP.  I.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  215 

and  supply,  as  sharing  the  inconstancy  of  the  human 
rea  that  enter  into  both  of  them, — in  his  view 
of  the  Kent  of  land,  as  determined  by  the  effects  of 
hum  a  n  industry  and  skill  as  well  as  by  the  natural 
qualities  of  the  soil, — in  his  view  of  the  Wages  of 
labour,  as  regulated  not  by  an  unchangeable  but  by 
a  progressive  minimum, — in  his  view  of  luxury,  as 
being  equally  with  parsimony  necessary  to  produc- 
tion, and  preventive  of  over-production, — and  in  his 
view  of  free  trade,  as  a  rule  to  which  we  must  make 
exceptions  if  we  would  not  cause  sufferings. 

Thf.se  doctrines  had  a  distinct  relation  to  current 

events.     Political  and    social    changes  were  reacting 

on  political  economy.     As  Godwin  and  Pitt  provoked 

the   essay  of   1798,  the  scarcity  of  1799  and   1800 

called  forth  the  pamphlet  on  High  Prices  (1 800).     As 

the  latter  bears  directly  on  the  Poor  Law,  it  will 

best  be  considered  when  the  thread  of  the  Essay  on 

Population  is  taken  up  again  j1  and  the  same  applies 

to  the  letter  of  Malthus  to  Whit  bread  (1807).     The 

distresses  of  a  tinn-  when  wheat  went  so  high  as  £6 

instead  of  its  normal  40*.  or  50$.,  would 

;,illy  niak'-  tin-  relirf  <»f  the  poor  a  question  of  the 

day.     Tli.    In-h   prices  of  corn  increased  the  number 

of  enclosures  and  Enclosure  Bilk      Mr*    than   three 

ions   of  acres,  or  about   a   twelfth    part    of   the 

entire  area  of  England  and   Wales,  are  said  to  have 

ken  from  waste  into  cultivation   between  1800 

and  1820.     The  average  price  of  ^heat,  always  th< 

staple  food  of  the  people  when  they  could  get  it,  had 

*  See  below,  cb.  iv. 


216  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

been  55s.  lid.  for  the  years  preceding,  viz.  from  1790 
to  1799  inclusive  ;  it  was  82s.  I2d.  from  1800  to  1809 
inclusive,  and  88s.  8d.  from  1810  to  1819  inclusive, 
after  which  it  fell  (for  the  next  decade)  to  58s.  5d.} 
In  1883-4  it  was  35s.  8d.  a  quarter,  which  means  a 
four-pound  loaf  (of  medium  quality)  at  k\d.  or  5d. ; 
but  at  its  lowest  during  the  war  (in  1803)  it  was  at 
57s.  Id.,  and  the  loaf  was  at  6%d.  or  7d. 

Yet  agriculture  had  not  been  standing  still.  Arthur 
Young,  whose  eccentric  energy  benefited  every  one 
but  himself,  and  fell  little  short  of  genius,  betted  his 
nineteen  volumes  of  Annals  of  Agriculture  against  Sir 
John  Sinclair's  twenty- one  volumes  of  the  Statistical 
Account  of  Scotland,  that  the  Government  of  Pitt 
would  not  establish  a  Board  of  Agriculture.  But 
Farmer  George  did  establish  one,  in  1793;2  Young 
paid  his  bet  and  became  Secretary ;  Sinclair  gained  his 
nineteen  volumes  and  became  President  of  the  new 
Board ;  and  together  they  did  much  to  make  farmers 
and  landlords  aware  of  the  rotations  of  crops,  disuse 
of  fallows,  new  manures,  road-makings,  that  the 
Secretary  had  been  preaching  in  vain  for  thirty  years.3 

When  the  great  scarcities  of  1799-1800  took  place, 
the  Board  was  equal  to  the  occasion.  It  urged  the 
Government  to  get  supplies  of  rice  from  India ;  it 
preached  earnestly  the  cultivation  of  waste  lands  and 
the  temporary  conversion  of  grass  lands  into  corn- 

1  Porter's  Progress  of  the  Nation,  p.  148  (ed.  1851).  Cf.  MacCulloch, 
Wealth  of  Nations,  Notes,  p.  525.  2  Dissolved  in  1817. 

3  Between  1767  and  his  death  in  1820,  he  wrote  no  less  than  a  hundred 
volumes  on  agriculture.  His  bet  is  given  in  Sir  J.  Sinclair's  Life  by 
Archdeacon  Sinclair,  i.  253. 


CHAP,  i.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  217 

B.  The  last  was  done  widely  enough  when  the 
prices  of  corn  were  high.  The  second,  except  when  it 
meant  enclosure  of  commons,  was  hardly  done  at  all  ; 
and  there  was  a  strange  impression  that  the  efforts 
of  the  Board  were  at  bottom  a  political  movement 

ust  ecclesiastical  titles  and  the  Established  Church. 
The  importation  of  rice  would  have  been  of  immense 
immediate  service ;  but  by  the  time  the  order  had 
reached  India  and  the  rice  ships  had  come  back  to 
England,1  the  famine  was  over,  the  people  preferred 
wheat,  and  ,£350,000  of  bounty  were  thrown  away.2 
Nothing  shows  the  insularity  of  English  commercial 
policy  better  than  the  remedies  generally  proposed 
in  those  days  for  curing  the  evils  of  a  bad  harvest. 
The  House  of  Commons  passed  self-denying  ordin- 
ances8 and  brown-bread  bills,  and  offered  a  bounty 
on  potatoes.4 

There  was  some  talk  inside  the  House  of  enforcing 
a  minimum  rate  of  wages,  and  outside  of  enforcing  a 
maximum  price  of  bread.  The  people  were  told  to 
eat  red  herring  in>t«-ad  «•!'  luvad  ;  philanthropic  soup 
shops  were  opened;  distilleries  and  starch  manu- 
factories were  threatened  with  prohibition.  Krlirf 
fr.'in  the  poor  rates  was,  however,  th«-  favourite  \\.-iy 
of  cutting  the  knot.  Better  that  our  jn-ojilc  should 
nd  on  each  other  than  on  the  foreigner.  This 
fear  of  dependence  was  the  more  pardonable  then,  as 

1  At  the  end  of  1801. 

*  Communication  to  Board  of  Agriculture,  iv.  232-5(1805).   Cf.  Ann. 

7.  that  the  members  should  always  use  mixed  instead  of  pure 
jrfes*  n  M    ir  •    Inn.  Be?.,  1801,  p.  129. 


218  MALTHUS  AND   HIS   WORK.  [BK.  n. 

there  were  times,  in  the  war  with  Napoleon,  when 
England  was  more  completely  alone  against  the 
world  than  she  is  ever  likely  to  be  again.  It  was 
a  much  more  culpable  folly  to  pretend1  that  the 
scarcity  was  due  to  "forestalling  and  regrating,"2  and 
that  England  could  have  provided  for  herself  well 
enough,  even  in  1799  and  1800,  but  for  the  corn- 
dealers  and  the  large  farms  and  the  enclosures  and 
the  new-fashioned  husbandry.  The  new  learning, 
however,  went  on  its  way.3  The  benefits  of  it  may 
have  gone  to  farmer4  or  to  landlord, — the  question 
was  much  debated, — but  they  did  not  go  to  the 
labourers.  The  same  is  true  of  the  improvements  in 
cattle-breeding  introduced  by  Bakewell  of  Leicester 
and  Chaplin  of  Lincoln,  and  encouraged  by  the  Smith- 
field  Club  (1798),  which  has  long  outlived  the  Board 
of  Agriculture.  The  life  of  the  country  labourers  was 
little  changed.  They  and  their  wages  could  not 
remain  entirely  unaffected  by  the  growth  of  manu- 
facturing towns.  But  custom  still  had  the  chief 
power  over  wages,  and  had  no  little  influence  on 
rents.  From  the  reports  sent  from  the  Scotch, 
English,  and  Welsh  counties  to  the  Board  of  Agri- 
culture in  1794,  it  does  not  appear  that  wages  were 
at  all,  or  rent  very  closely,  in  correspondence  with  the 
amount  of  the  produce.5  Rents  were  far  from  being 

1  As  was  done,  e.  g.,  by  Chief  Justice  Kenyon,  King's  Bench,  Rex  v. 
John  Rusby,  Nov.  1799. 

2  See  J.  S.  Girdler,  Forestalling,  &c.  (1800),  S.  J.  Pratt'spoem  on  Bread 
for  the  Poor  (1800). 

3  Girdler,  I.  c.  pp.  46,  48,  &c. 

4  Philps,  Progress  of  Great  Britain,  p.  132. 

6  Cf.  the  figures  given  in  Malthus'  Tract  on  Value,  pp.  69-79,  and  in 


CHAP,  i.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  219 

rack  rents,  and  wages  were  far  from  varying  with 
the  necessary  expenses  of  the  labourer.  In  truth 
ca<  h  country  district  in  the  days  before  railways  and 
steamboats  was  nearly  in  the  same  isolation  with 
regard  to  the  rest  as  all  England  was  with  regard 
to  foreign  nations.  The  price  of  farm  produce  was 
indeed  tending  to  be  equal  over  England,  as  now 
over  the  world.  Wages  were  displaying  no  such 
tendency.  Of  all  goods  a  man  is  the  most  difficult 
to  move,1  for  you  must  first  persuade  him  ;  and 
human  inertia  by  making  men  stationary  will  kerp 

s  low.  So  it  was  in  1794.  The  exertions  of 
landlord  and  tenant  were  directed  therefore  rather  to 
keep  up  corn  than  to  keep  down  wages.  They  wore 
beginning  to  fear  for  their  monopoly  of  the  corn 
market.  The  English  Government  had  done  its  best 
to  keep  their  market  for  them.  A  law  of  Charles 
II.  passed  in  1670  virtually  prohibited  importation 
of  foreign  wheat  till  the  price  of  home  wli 

53*.  4</.  a  quarter,  and  made  it  free  only  when 
tin-  home  price  was  80*.  The  Revolution  of  1688 
brought  a  new  phase  of  commercial  policy.  The 
new  rulers,  to  conciliate  the  agricultural  classes  and 
atone  for  the  burdens  which  had  lieen  tran>fenvd 
to  them  from  the  industrial  e hisses,  granted  a  bounty 
of  5*.  a  quarter  on  the  exportation  of  wheat  so  long 
as  the  home  price  was  not  over  48*.  In  this 

.  after  exportation  in  the  days  of  the  Romans, 

Profeaor  Roger.'  Six  Ontemt  of  Work  and  Wage*,  pp.  487  *e?.,-lx.th 

of  th«-m  tal.  i'uor. 

'    ir.,.'"-,  ./  .V<'         .  I  il,  1. 


220  MALTHUS   AND   HIS   WORK.  [HK.  n. 

and  alternate  exportation  and  importation  according 
to  the  seasons  in  after  times,  there  was,  after  the  Revo- 
lution, exportation  encouraged  by  a  bounty,  while  im- 
portation was  still  hindered  by  duties.  The  intention 
was  at  once  to  attract  capitalists  to  agriculture  and  to 
reward  those  already  engaged  in  it.  By  this  means 
not  only  would  the  farmers  be  attached  to  the  new 
dynasty,  but  England  would  provide  all  her  own  food.1 
But  the  very  increase  of  tillage  kept  down  prices 
and  gave  the  landowners  little  benefit.  Whenever  a 
scarcity  occurred  the  laws  were  suspended,  and  the 
bounty  and  duties  were  taken  off  together.2  Exporta- 
tion, however,  was  the  rule  till  a  little  after  the  middle 
of  the  century,  say  at  the  beginning  of  George  TII.'s 
reign,  when  the  tide  had  fairly  turned.  Especially 
after  the  Peace  of  Paris  (Nov.  1762),  commerce  was 
extended  and  population  with  it.  Canals  were  made, 
roads  improved,  and  home  trade  prospered.3  We 
could  no  longer  raise  enough  corn  for  our  own  wants.4 
In  1766,  the  year  of  our  author's  birth,  there  were 
scarcities,  Corn  Riots,  and  suspensions  of  the  Corn 
Laws ; 5  but  the  bounty  was  kept  up  in  name  to  the 
end  of  the  century.  In  1795  and  1796  the  price  of 
wheat  rose  to  80s.  a  quarter,  in  1797  and  1798  it 
sank  to  54s. ;  but,  at  the  end  of  harvest,  1799,  it  rose 
to  92s.,  in  1800  to  128s.,  and  before  the  harvest  of 
1801  to  177s.  The  quartern  loaf  (under  6d.  in  1885) 

1  On  the  whole  subject  see  Craik,  Hist,  of  Commerce,  ii.  142-5. 

2  Macpherson,  ditto,  iii.  148  (year  1728),  307  (year  1757). 

3  Ibid.,  iii.  329,  331  ;  MacC.,  Comm.  Diet.  (ed.  1871),  p.  430. 
*  Cf.  Essay  on  Population,  p.  352  (7th  ed.).     Cf.  above,  p.  25. 
6  Macpherson,  iii.  438,  452. 


CHAP.  I.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  -iM 

once  within  \d.  of  2$.  !  Then  came  a  cycle  of 
comparative  plenty.  Wheat  between  1802  and  1807 
was  at  75*.  on  an  average,  and  a  new  Corn  Law  in 
1804  prohibited  importation  till  the  home  price  should 
ri.se  to  63s.  Between  1808  and  1813  it  was  108*. 
on  an  average;  and  it  was  as  high  as  140*.  9d.  in 
the  severe  winter  (1812-13)  of  Napoleon's  retreat  from 
Moscow.  But  in  the  spring  of  1815  wheat  was  at 
60*.  If  it  should  rise  to  63*.  the  ports  would  be 
opened,  and  there  was  not  even  the  Protection  of 
war.  The  farmers  and  landowners  were  terror- 
stricken,  the  political  economists  divided,  and  the 
bill  for  raising  the  importation  price  to  80*.  was 
hurried  through  the  House.  The  bounty,  relaxed  in 
1773,  had  been  finally  repealed,  in  1814.1  As  the 
sliding  scale  of  duties  was  not  introduced  till  1827, 
we  are  to  regard  Malthus  and  Ricardo  as  writing  on 
rent  (in  1815  and  1820)  under  the  severe  Corn  Law 
of  1815,  as  well  as  when  the  wisdom  of  passing  that 
measure  was  still  under  debate.  All  thoir  discus- 
sions on  rent  bear  consciously  or  unconsciously  upon 
the  Corn  Laws  of  their  own  time. 

Malthas  is  rightly  considered  the  first  clear  ex- 
pounder in  England  of  the  economical  doctrine  of 
rent.  Dr.  James  Anderson,  a  contemporary  of  Adam 
Smith,  was  no  doubt  before  his  age  in  his  view  of  the 
subject;1  but,  perhaps  because  he  was  better  known 

1  Cf.  Malthns,  Euay  on  Pop.,  p.  453  (2nd  ed.) ;  (hound*  of  an  Opinion, 
Ac.,  p.  43. 

*.  National  Industry  of  Scot!  208-9(1779).     Mac- 

Cullnch  ha*  quoted  other  pottages  (H'.  \  -if ion*,  xlviii.  n.,  and 

NoU  on  Rent,  p.  453,  1,  and  n.).   Sir  Edward  West  agrees  with  Malthus 


222  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  IT. 

as  an  agriculturist  than  as  an  economist,  he  does  not 
seem  to  have  made  converts.  The  "  simultaneous 
rediscovery"  of  the  true  doctrine  by  West  and 
.Mai thus  in  1815  may  be  compared  with  the  simul- 
taneous discovery  of  the  Darwinian  theory  by  Wallace 
and  Darwin  in  1859.  The  times  were  ripe  for  it. 
Maltlms  gives  no  certain  sound  on  the  subject  in  the 
early  editions  of  the  Essay  on  Population.  In  the 
second  he  even  says  that  "  one  of  the  principal 
ingredients  in  the  price  of  British  corn  is  the  high 
rent  of  land  "  (p.  460;  cf.  p.  444).  However,  needing 
to  lecture  on  Rent  to  his  pupils  at  Haileybury  in 

1805,  he  saw  the  unsoundness  of  this  position,  and  in 

1806,  in  the  third  edition  of  the  essay,  the  passage  is 
dropped,  and  we  are  told,  "  universally  it  is  price  that 
determines  rent,  not  rent  that  determines  price  "  (vol. 
ii.  p.  266).     The  passage  is  repeated  in  the   fourth 
edition  (1807).1     But  when  the  time  came  for  a  fifth 
edition,  in   1817,  the  whole  of  the  chapters  on  Corn 
Laws  and  bounties,  which  are  the  only  chapters  of  the 
essay  that  deal  much  with  rent,  were  recast,  to  ex- 
press the  clearer  views  which  the  author  had  already 
expounded  elsewhere.     In  the  spring  of  1814,  in  the 
excitement  of  debates  on  the  abolition  of  the  bounty 
and  on  new  laws  to  keep  out  foreign  grain,  Mai  thus 
was  led  for  the  fourth  or  fifth  time  in  his  life  to  take 
the  field  as  a  pamphleteer.2     This  time,  however,  lie 
came  forward,  he  said,  not  to  take  a  side  but  to  act 
as    arbitrator.     His    "  Observations   on    the   effects    of 

in  his  qualified  approval  of  the  Corn  Laws.     See  Price  of  Corn,  &c., 
p.  139.  i  A  reprint  of  the  3rd  (?) 

2  If  we  include  the  Crisis,  it  would  be  the  fifth  time. 


CRAP.  I.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  £-3 

the  Corn  Laws,  and  of  a  rise  or  fall  in  the  price  of 
corn  on  the  agriculture  and  general  wealth  of  the 
country"  (1814),1  professed  to  balance  the  arguments 
for  and  against  the  Corn  Laws,  and  did  it,  he  said, 
so  judiciously,  that  his  own  friends  were  in  doubt  to 
which  opinion  he  leaned.2  To  later  readers  the  bias 
is  not  doubtful.  It  appears  even  in  such  a  passage  as 
the  following,  which,  incidentally,  shows  us  his  view 
of  rent,  nearly  matured  : — "  It  is  a  great  mistake  to 
suppose  that  the  effects  of  a  fall  in  the  price  of  corn 
on  cultivation  may  be  fully  compensated  by  a  diminu- 
tion of  rents.  Rich  land,  which  yields  a  large  nett 

.  may  be  kept  up  in  its  actual  state,  notwithstand- 
ing a  fall  in  the  price  of  its  produce,  as  a  diminution 
of  rent  niav  be  made  entirely  to  compensate  this  fall, 
and  all  the  additional  expenses  that  belong  to  a  rich 
and  highly-taxed  country.  But  in  poor  land  the 
fund  of  rent  will  often  be  found  quite  insufficient  for 
this  purpose.  Tli<-re  is  a  good  deal  of  land  in  this 
country  of  such  a  Duality,  that  the  expenses  of  its 
cultivation,  together  with  the  outgoings  of  poor's 
: lies,  and  taxes,  will  not  allow  tin-  farmer  to 
pay  more  than  a  fifth  or  sixth  of  the  value  of  the 
whole  produce  in  the  shape  of  rent.  If  we  were  to 
suppose  the  prices  of  grain  to  fall  from  75*.  to  50*. 

quarter,  the  whole  of  such  a  rent  would  be 
absorbed,  even  if  the  price  of  the  whole  produce  of  the 
farm  did  not  fall  in  proportion  to  the  price  of  grain, 
and  making  some  allowance  for  a  fall  in  the  price  of 

1  It  was  popular  enough  to  reach  a  3rd  edition  in  1815. 
•  See  Ground*  o/  on  Opinion,  Ac.,  p.  1 


224  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  ir. 

labour.  The  regular  cultivation  of  such  land  for 
grain  would  of  course  be  given  up,  and  any  sort  of 
pasture,  however  scanty,  would  be  more  beneficial 
both  to  the  landlord  and  farmer."  The  drift  of  the 
pamphlet  may  be  shortly  stated.  The  writer  refused 
to  go  with  Adam  Smith  in  identifying  corn  with 
food,  and  attributing  to  it  in  that  capacity  an  un- 
changeable value,  which  made  any  rise  of  price 
futile  for  the  encouragement  of  tillage.  He  thought 
that  it  was  perfectly  possible  to  encourage  tillage  by 
Corn  Laws ;  but  was  it  good  policy  ?  Before  he 
could  answer  this  question,  he  felt  bound  to  con- 
sider several  others.2  Under  free  trade  would  Great 
Britain  grow  her  own  corn  ? — if  not,  ought  Govern- 
ment to  interfere  to  secure  this  ? — if  so,  would  laws  to 
hinder  importation  be  the  best  kind  of  interference  ? 
The  answer  to  the  first  is,  that  other  countries  have 
soils  more  fertile  than  Britain ;  Poland  can  ship  corn 
at  Dantzig  for  England  at  32s.  a  quarter;3  and,  if  there 
were  free  trade  over  Europe,  the  rich  lands  which  are 
not  English  would  send  their  plenty  to  relieve  the 
wants  of  their  neighbours.  If  Corn  Laws  have  not 
made  us  grow  our  own  corn,  free  trade  would  not.  In 
answer  to  the  second  question,  no  doubt  it  is  sound 
economy  to  buy  in  the  cheapest  market  and  sell  in 
the  dearest ;  and,  if  we  had  regard  to  nothing  but  the 
greatest  "wealth,  population,  and  power,"  the  rule 
would  be  invariable  ;  foreign  imports  of  food  are  in 
every  case  a  good  thing  for  the  country,  and,  if  there 

1  Observations,  pp.  20-1.  2  Ibid.,  p.  17. 

3  The  English  price  in  Nov.  1884. 


CHAP,  i.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  225 

is  evil  in  the  matter,  it  is  not  in  them  but  in  the  bad 
season  which  makes  them  necessary  ;  moreover,  a  free 
trade  in  corn  secures  a  steadier  as  well  as  cheaper 
supply  of  grain.1  But,  on  the  other  hand,  dependence 
on  other  nations  for  the  first  necessary  of  life  is  a 
source  of  political  insecurity  to  the  nation  so  depend- 
ing ;  and,  though  the  dependence  is  mutual,  identity 
of  commercial  interests  seldom  prevents  nations  from 
going  to  war  with  each  other  ;  "  we  have  latterly  seen 
the  most  striking  instances,  in  all  quarters,  of  Govern- 
ing its  acting  from  passion  rather  than  interest."  2 
And  it  might  be  argued  that,  if  we  give  up  agricul- 
ture for  manufacture,  we  change  the  character  of  our 
people  ;  manufacturing  industry  conduces  to  mental 
activity,  to  an  expansion  of  comforts,  to  the  growth 
of  the  middle  classes,  and  to  the  growth  with  them 
of  political  moderation  ;  but  it  is  more  subject  than 
agriculture  to  the  fluctuations  of  fashion,  which  lead 
to  chronic  destitution  and  discontent,  and  the  con- 
ditions of  artizan  life  are  "  even  in  their  best  state 
unfavourable  to  health  and  virtue."8  Virtue  an«l 
happiness  after  all  are  the  end  ;  wealth,  population, 
and  power  are  but  the  means,  Mai  thus  himself 
believes  in  something  like  a  golden  mean,  a  balam-0 
of  the  two  industries,  which  legislation  might  pos- 
.  preserve.1  There  is  another  and  less  plausible 


1  OfoerwitiovM 

1  Ibuf.,  p.  28.  hypothesis  Mividuals, 

i  mta,  as  Cobden  experienced. 

my  of  tln»  rjnrsti  -in  1n.th   in  morals  n- 
teem  to  be  of  the  nature   of  the  problems  de  maximit  ct  minimi*  in 

Q 


226  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

argument  on  the  same  side.  .  Assuming  that  wages 
vary  with  the  price  of  corn,  high  money  wages,  and 
therefore  high  prices  of  corn,  are  an  advantage  to 
working  men,  who  would  have  more  money  to  buy 
the  goods  of  the  foreign  countries  where  prices  of 
corn  were  low  and  goods  were  cheap.  This  argu- 
ment, though  our  author  is  inclined  to  yield  to  it, 
is  inconsistent  with  his  own  views  of  wages  and  the 
facts  he  cites  in  support  of  them.1  More  cogent  is 
the  plea  that  it  would  be  unfair  suddenly  to  with- 
draw a  long-established  protection,  though  (it  might 
be  replied)  we  are  no  more  bound  to  be  gradual  in 
abolishing  protection  than  in  concluding  peace  during 
war.  But  the  real  question  is,  whether  once  protected 
is  to  mean  always  protected,  and  protected  in  an 
always  increasing  degree,  for  it  was  this  increased 
protection  that  was  proposed  in  1814  and  1815.  It 
may  be  true  that  if  we  protect  manufacture  we  ought 
to  protect  agriculture  ;  but,  instead  of  protecting  both, 
why  not  set  both  free  1  Statesmen  had  no  courage, 
however,  to  be  free-traders,  in  days  when  the  separate 
articles  protected  were  as  many  as  the  millions  in  the 
National  Debt,  and  each  article  represented  a  vested 
interest.  Malthus  does  riot  seem  to  expect  Parlia- 
ment to  give  free  trade  a  moment's  consideration. 
But  the  friends  of  the  new  Corn  Laws,  besides  using 
the  commonplaces  of  protectionism,  argued  from  the 
change  in  the  value  of  the  English  currency.  When 
paper  were  paper  prices,2  the  importation  price  of  the 

fluxions  ;  in  which  there  is  always  a  point  where  a  certain  effect  is  the 
greatest,  while  on  either  side  of  this  point  it  gradually  diminishes." 
1  Cf.  even  Observations,  pp.  5,  12,  13.         2  See  below,  chs.  ii.  and  iii. 


CHAP,  i.]  THE  LANDLORDS.  227 

law  of  1804  could  be  soon  reached,  and  foreign  corn 
came  in  much  faster  than  the  real  or  the  bullion 
prices  of  it  would  have  allowed.  There  was  also 
the  long  array  of  standing  arguments  for  Corn  I. 
that  lay  stress  on  the  heavy  taxation  of  the  country, 
and  are  meant  to  show  that  the  agricultural  classes 
bear  most  of  it,  and  are  thus  handicapped  against 
the  foreigner.  From  Malthus  himself  the  old  leaven 
of  protectionism  was  never  wholly  purged  away. 
Titt,  though  in  a  less  degree,  he  suffered  his 
politics  to  corrupt  his  political  economy,  and  drag 
him  back  from  the  "  simple  system  of  natural  liberty  " 
into  "  the  mazes  of  the  old  system."  l  English  people 
the  Repeal  of  the  Corn  Laws  will  hardly  care 
to  thrash  the  old  straw  out  again.  Perronet  Thomp- 
son's Catechism  of  ike  Corn  Laws  is  the  best  storehouse 
of  the  old  arguments  and  their  refutations,  set  forth 
with  a  liveliness  to  which  no  other  English  economical 
writing  has  the  slightest  claim.2 

The  real  opinion  of  Malthus  came  out  in  the  second 
Corn  Law  pamphlet  on  the  Grounds  of  an  Opinion  on 
tltr  /V/ry  <>f  /•/•.%•//•/>//////  ////'  Imjiorltidon  of  Fo/ 
Corn  (1815).  Betwmi  the  two  came  the  tract  on 
Rent,  which  i>  rath.-r  an  economical  book  than  a 
political  pamphlet,  and  will  be  noticed  immediately. 
11  i  i  lares  himself  in  favour  of  a  temporary 

1  The  expression  of  Grenville  in  a  letter  to  Pitt,  1800.  See  Stanhope, 

1  Unless  perhaps  Mr.  Bagehot's.     Col.  Thompson  understood  the 

i  only  in  iU  cruder  f»nu.     In  answer  :'.'*7  <>f  tW 

M  meet*  the  objection  that   free  trade  w.-ul-l  only 

increase  ]•  by  Baying:  "No  man  has  a  right  to  prevent  us 

Q  * 


228  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

duty  on  imported  corn  to  countervail  the  artificially 
low  value  of  the  currency, — "  to  get  rid  of  that  part 
of  our  prices  which  belongs  to  great  wealth,  combined 
with  a  system  of  restrictions." 

He  warns  the  Government  that  they  should  not  take 
such  a  step  to  benefit  a  particular  trade,  but  only  to 
benefit  the  public.  The  motives  are  those  constantly 
professed  by  defenders  of  the  Navigation  Act — not 
private  interests  but  public  policy.  Since  he  wrote 
his  Observations  circumstances  had  changed.  The 
sudden  peace  had  brought  the  then  unprecedented 
combination  of  a  bad  harvest  and  low  prices  ;  the 
value  of  the  currency  had  fallen  fast ;  and  last,  and 
not  least,  France,  the  best  corn  country  in  Europe, 
had  begun  to  prohibit  the  exportation  of  grain 2  in 
dear  years.  We  must  therefore,  he  says,  keep  up  the 
high  farming  which  the  war  taught  us,  by  keeping  up 
the  high  prices  of  the  war.  Eighty  shillings  might 
not  be  too  high  a  price,  for  the  limit  of  prohibited 
importation. 

It  seems  extraordinary  that,  after  so  clearly  recog- 
nizing that  "  wealth  does  not  consist  in  the  dearness 
or  cheapness  of  the  usual  measures  of  value,  but  in 
the  quantity  of  produce,"  and  that  exports  are  not 
so  good  a  criterion  of  wealth  as  the  "  quantity  of 
produce  consumed  at  home,"  3  Mai  thus  should  recom- 
mend the  increase  of  abundance  by  means  of  artificial 
dearness.  It  is  a  poor  consolation  to  us  that  he  was 
no  worse  than  Brougham,  who  voted  for  the  Corn 

1  Grounds,  &c.,  p.  46  n.  2  Ibid.,  pp.  3,  11,  12, 

3  Ibid.,  pp.  30,  33. 


CHAP.  I.]      .  THE  LANDLORDS.  229 

Law  in  1815,  and  for  the  support  of  the  Navigation 
Act  in  1849, — and  little  worse  than  Ricardo,  who 
would  allow  a  temporary  restriction  for  the  sake  of 
leaseholders.1  A  better  is  that  he  was  advocating  a 
policy  that  was  against  his  private  interests  as  a 
holder  of  a  fixed  salary  and  owner  of  three  per  cents.2 
But  at  the  best  the  atmosphere  of  these  two  tracts  is 
a  little  depressing. 

The  tract  on  Rent  is  more  bracing.  It  was  the 
first-fruits  of  the  larger  work  on  Political  Economy 
(1820);  and  its  substance  had  been  delivered  in  the 
professor's  lectures  at  Haileybury.  It  expounds  the 
Nature  and  Progress  of  Rent  with  clearness  and 
intelligibility,  if  without  the  liveliness  of  1798. 
Mai  thus  gives  us  to  understand  that,  to  explain  this 
or  any  other  economical  notion,  we  must  keep  as 
closely  as  possible  to  the  usage  of  ordinary  language, 
the  language  of  clear-thinking  ordinary  men.8 

To  them,  rent  does  not  mean,  as  by  derivation, 
simply  produce  or  profit ;  nor,  as  to  a  Frenchman 
now  an«l  to  Bailie  Nicol  Jarvie  in  his  days,  interest 
on  a  debt.  It  means  a  certain  price  paid  to  a  land- 
lord for  the  use  of  his  land.  But  such  a  definition 
is  too  wide.  It  might  include  the  proceeds  of  a 
monopoly,  or  an  interest  on  capital,  or  a  Government 
,  or  a  legal  rate,  or  a  toll,  or  a  payment  for 
service  rendered.  We  must  define  the  term  a  little 
more  cl<  arly. 

There  is  a  certain  portion  of  a  landlord's  income 

1  Ricardo,  Work*,  p.  385  (MacC.'s  ed).     For  remarks  on  this  pn 
Malthas'  tract  see  ibid.,  p.  382. 
1  Grounds,  &c.,  p.  3G  n.    Cf.  Ricardo,  p.  390.         »  See  above,  p.  211. 


230  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

and  of  a  peasant  proprietor's  earnings  that  has  an 
origin  and  character  distinct  from  the  rest,  and 
demands  the  economist's  separate  attention,  whether 
it  alone  receives  the  name  of  rent  or  not ; — this  is, 
the  excess  of  the  produce  of  land  beyond  the  cost 
of  production  and  the  current  rate  of  profits.  Re- 
present these  in  money  ;  and  suppose  the  current 
profit  five  per  cent.  Suppose  that  a  tenant  lays  out 
£500  on  his  farm,  and  gets  by  the  harvest  and 
farm  produce  not  only  £500  plus  £25,  but  £600  ; 
the  additional  £75,  which  would  if  retained  by  him 
be  over  or  extra  profits  as  compared  with  the  rate 
usual  among  farmers  and  men  of  like  business,  is  the 
value  of  his  rent ;  and  the  landlord  can  take  that 
from  him  without  impoverishing  him.  Rent  is  that 
portion  of  the  produce  which  remains,  after  all  the 
outlay  of  the  cultivator  has  been  repaid  him  together 
with  the  current  profits.  From  accidental  or  tempo- 
rary causes  the  money  rents  of  land  may  be  more  or 
less  than  this ;  but  this  is  the  point  to  which  actual 
rents  will  gravitate.1 

So  far  as  this  account  goes,  it  might  seem  that 
Malthus'  description  is  too  general ;  it  would  include 
the  extra  profits,  for  example,  of  any  monopoly  or  a 
royalty  for  the  use  of  a  patent ;  and  Ricardo's  defini- 
tion, "  the  price  paid  for  the  indestructible  powers  of 
the  soil,"  might  seem  more  definite.  But  Malthus  is 
rather  too  specific  than  too  general.  He  is  thinking 
of  agricultural  land  only,  and  that  mainly  as  pro- 
ducing food  for  man.  If  his  description  of  -  the 

1  Pol  Econ.,  ch.  iii.  sect.  i.  p.  134  (1820). 


CHAP.  I.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  231 

Nature  of  rent  adds  little  to  that  of  Adam  Smith,1 
account  of  its  Causes,  which  he  himself  was  the 

to  grasp,  is  characteristic  and  peculiar. 
First,  he  says,  fertile2  soils  yield  a  produce  that 
more  than  feeds  the  producer.  This  may  be  put 
more  generally  than  Malthus  has  put  it.  If  rent 
is  to  be  paid,  there  must  be  wherewithal  to  pay 
and  there  cannot  be  so  if  production  does  no 
more  than  repay  cost.  There  may,  however,  be  a 
production  beyond  mere  repayment  of  cost,  not  only 
iti  fanning  but  in  all  trades.  The  very  principle 
of  the  division  of  labour  and  the  separation  of 
trail's  implies  that  devotion  to  one  occupation  makes 
men  so  dexterous  in  production  that,  besides  pro- 
viding for  themselves,  they  have  an  overplus  where- 
with to  supply  their  other  wants  and  the  wants  of 
others.3  This  overplus,  where  the  facilities  for  trading 
were  specially  good,  might  be  so  much  above  the 
plus  of  an  ordinary  profit  that  the  granter  of 
ih';  facilities,  who  is  usually  the  ground  landlord, 
might  get  the  lion's  share  of  it,  and  still  leave  the 
user  of  the  facilities  as  thriving  as  his  uri^h hours. 
On  the  other  hand,  if  no  such  overplus  can  be  earned, 
no  such  rent  can  be  paid.  Rent,  in  short,  when  it 
is  paid  by  men  of  business,  either  in  town  or  in 
country,  means  over-profits,  and  gromnl-n -nts  mean 
advantage  of  situation. 

>    HV-iW,  ,./  .VaWoiu,  I.  xi.,  beginn 

1  He  doe*  not  always  prefix  tl»i«  qimlifimii.m  ;  1-nt.  that  )..•  intended 
it  appears  m  th«.  Tract  <m  Rent,  p.  3  n.  :    N,.t  every  laii 

yields  food  will  yield  rent     Cf.  PoL  Econ.  (1820  ,  ]•. 

1  Compare  Trad  <m  -BeiU,  p.  16  n. 


232  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

The  second  cause  of  rent,  according  to  Malthus, 
who  is  considering,  be  it  remembered,  the  cause  of 
the  Progress  of  rents  as  well  as  of  their  actual  volume 

o 

at  any  given  time,1  is  the  peculiarity  belonging 
to  agricultural  land,  that  the  demand  increases  with  . 
the  supply;  in  other  cases  the  demand  is  external 
to  the  supply,  but  in  this  case 2  the  supply  creates  its  ( 
demand.  Where  there  is  food  there  will  be  mouths. 
In  the  supply  of  food  no  over-production  is  possible.3 
It  is  here  that  the  Essay  on  Rent  is  connected  with 
the  Essay  on  Population.  By  the  law  of  population 
the  tendency  is  that  where  food  enough  for  six  is 
being  produced  by  two,  the  other  four  will  soon 
make  their  appearance ;  and  so,  thinks  Malthus,  the 
farmer  makes  his  customers  by  simply  making  his 
wares.  Something  like  this,  we  might  add,  would 
happen  in  a  completely  developed  co-operative  society, 
where  the  makers  would  sell  to  each  other  and  buy 
from  each  other.  It  is  even  true,  in  a  sense,  of  all 
manufacturers  as  things  now  are,  in  proportion  as 
their  articles  come  near  to  being  necessaries ; — if 
they  supply  that  without  which  people  cannot  live, 
they  go  far  to  bring  people  into  being.  Malthus, 
however,  regarded  it  as  much  more  true  of  agricul- 
tural production  than  of  any  other.  He  regarded 
food  as  the  chief  necessary,  and  thought  with  Adam 

1  The  title  of  the  tract  is,  An  Inquiry  into  the  Nature  and  Progress 
of  Rent,  and  the  Principles  by  which  it  is  regulated.     It  appears  from  a 
letter  of  Malthus  to  Sir  John  Sinclair  on  31st  Jan.,  1815,  that  it  was  passing 
through  the  press  in  that  month.    Sinclair,  Correspondence,  i.  391  (1831). 

2  As,  he  might  have  added,  in  education. 

3  Pol.  Econ.  (1820),  p.  142,  but  especially  p.  187.     Cf.  Tract  on  Rent, 
pp.  8—12. 


CHAP,  i.]  THE  LANDLORDS.  233 

Smith,  that  "wheii  food  is  provided  it  is  compara- 
tively   easy    to    find    the    necessary    clothing    and 
ing."1      Against   this  we   need   only  remember, 
how    the   Essay  on    Population  showed   that    it   was 
only  in  the  lower  stages  of  existence  that  increase 
of  mere  food  involved  increase  of  population;  and  so 
the  t»  •ndency^ofthe  supply  to  create  it8"own  demamT 
.   on   the   author's   own   showing,   nothing   more 
than   a  tendency.2      His    economical   reasoning   was 
swayed  a  little  by  his  circumstances.     The  insularity 
of  English  life  in  his  days  prevented  him  from  con- 
ing  how  a  nation   could   safely  derive   half   its 
food  from  abroad ;    what  Adam  Smith  had  thought 
too  good  to  be  likely,3  he  thought  too  dangerous  to 
be  desirable.    Good  or  bad,  it  is  our  position  now,  and 
the  result  is,  first,  that  the  supply  of  food  does  not,  in 
the  same   degree  or  way,  produce  its   own   demand 
as  formerly,  and,  second,  that  our  other  productions 
are,  even  more  truly  than  the  agricultural,  the  supply 
creates  its  own  demand,  for  they  give  the  po\\cr 
of  buying  the  food  that  feeds  new  demaixlers.     The 
production  carried  on,  on  the  surface  of  th<    l;m,l,  has 
come  in  this  way  to  be  a  more  potent  cause  of  the 
Progress  of  rents  than  production  from  the  soil  it>» -If. 
With  this  restiit*  ni« m   the  second  of  Maltlms'  ra 
nt  becomes  perhaps  a  little  more  int<  lli^iMe. 
ll:>  third  r;msr  is  that  ^,,,,.1  l.md  is  scarce.     Lan<ls 
differ   in   fertil  i    there   is   not,  as   in   a   new 

country,  enough  of  the  most  fertile  to  supply  all  our 

1  tot,  i-.  i". 
»  Wealth  of  Nation*,  IV.  ii.  307,  2  ;  cf.  IV.  v.  240,  2. 


234  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

wants.  When  the  produce  of  the  inferior  begins  to 
be  absolutely  necessary,  the  inferior  will  be  cultivated 
at  a  price  enough  to  repay  cost  and  give  ordinary 
profits  to  the  farmer.  But  what  is  simply  enough  to 
do  that  for  him  will  do  much  more  than  that  for  all 
the  holders  of  superior  lands,  and  all  that  is  much 
more  can  be  taken  by  a  landlord  as  rent  without 
placing  the  tenant  at  any  disadvantage  as  compared 
with  his  neighbours.  As  soon  as  this  happens  in  a 
country,  the  extra  profits,  which  are  called  by  econo- 
mists rent,  will  appear  in  it ;  and  the  growth  of 
population,  by  leading  to  an  increased  demand  for 
food  and  to  an  increased  price  of  it,  will  cause  the 
cultivation  of  inferior  lands,  or  else  a  more  expen- 
sive cultivation  of  the  old  ones  ;  and  again,  since  the 
necessary  new  supplies  cannot  be  permanently  kept 
up  without  one  or  other  of  these  two  resources,  the 
price,  and  with  it  the  rent,  will,  in  the  absence  of 
inventions,  remain  permanently  higher.  In  other 
words,  this  third  cause  is  the  "  law  of  diminishing 
returns." 

It  is  this  law  of  diminishing  returns  which  bulks 
most  largely  in  the  tract  of  Sir  Edward  West,  written 
in  the  same  year  as  that  of  Malthus.  West's  theory 
of  rent  is  simply,  "  that  in  the  progress  of  the 
improvement  of  cultivation  the  raising  of  rude  pro- 
duce becomes  progressively  more  expensive,  or  in 
other  words,  the  ratio  of  the  net  produce  of  land 
to  the  gross  produce  is  continually  diminishing." l 

1  Essay  on  the  Application  of  Capital   to  Land,  with   observations 
showing  the  impolicy  of  any  great  restriction  of  the  importation  of 


CHAP,  i.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  .         235 

He  sees  how  near  Adam  Smith  came  to  it  when  he 
said,  that  in  the  progress  of  cultivation  the  total 
amount  of  rent  increased,  but  the  proportion  of  it 
to  the  produce  diminished,  so  that  from  being  e.y. 
half  the  produce  it  became  one-third.1  He  sees,  as 
<  v.  u  in  1798  Malthus  had  seen,2  that  but  for  this 
law  population  might  increase  indefinitely  on  a  few 
fertile  lands  instead  of  spreading  over  the  globe 
( \V,-.st,  p.  13),  whereas  because  of  this  law  inventions 
in  agriculture  are  not  able  to  remove  "  the  necessity 
of  having  recourse  to  inferior  land,  and  of  bestowing 
capital  with  diminished  advantage  on  land  already 
in  tillage"  (p.  50).  He  pushes  the  principle  so  far 
as  to  say  broadly  that  whatever  increases  agricultural 
production  increases  cost,  while  whatever  increases 
manufacturing  production  diminishes  cost  (p.  48), 
inferring  that  the  former  must  tend  abroad  and 
the  latter  at  home  to  prevent  the  displacement  of 
English  agriculture  by  foreign  competition.  As  he 
had  little  or  no  influence  on  Malt hus,  his  tract  need 
not  be  noticed  in  detail  ;  it  is  enough  to  say  that, 
while  West  is  superior  in  style  and  arrangement, 
Malthus  is  the  more  comprehensive.  West  is  el- 
and simpler  because  he  includes  less. 

Looking  at  the  three  causes  together,  we  see  that 

first  and  last  relate  to  the  statics,  and   the  second 

to  tin  dynamics  of  the  subject.    We  need  to  remember 

Malthus  is  having  regard  in   the  first  instance 

corn,  and  that  the  bounty  of  1888  <1i-l  n-t  lower  the  price  of  it.    By  a 

College,  Oxford.     (1  M15.)    Page  8. 

>    I  148,  1.  '  Away,  Isted.,  p.  3C3. 


236  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

not  to  the  value  but  to  the  quantity  of  the  produce. 
Now,  apart  from  questions  of  value,  it  is  possible  there 
might  be,  in  a  country,  land  yielding  to  the  sower  more 
than  he  sowed;  but  it  might  be  an  ordinary  excess, 
secured  by  all  producers  in  that  country,  for  the  land 
might  be  all  equally  fertile,  and  production  from 
land  might  be  the  most  fertile  of  industries.  In  that 
case,  even  if  the  land  was  a  State  monopoly  and  the 
producer's  gains  could  be  taken  from  him  by  a  tax, 
there  would  be  nothing  corresponding  to  rent,  in  the 
received  sense.  But,  as  soon  as  there  were  differences 
in  the  fertility,  and  therefore  differences  in  the 
quantity  produced  at  the  same  cost,  the  farmer  who 
had  the  difference  on  his  side  could  be  said  to  have 
a  rent.  It  is  this  surplus,  conjoined  with  the  insti- 
tution of  private  property,  that,  according  to  Malthus, 
makes  leisure  and  mental  progress,  and  even  great 
material  prosperity,  possible.1  The  rent  is  properly 
the  extra  profits,  and  not  the  equivalent  paid  over 
for  them  to  a  landlord ;  rent  can  easily  exist  without 
a  landlord.  "  It  may  be  laid  down,  therefore,  as  an 
incontrovertible  truth,  that,  as  a  nation  reaches  any 
considerable  degree  of  wealth,  and  any  considerable 
fulness  of  population,  which  of  course  cannot  take 
place  without  a  great  fall  both  in  the  profits  of  stock 
and  the  wages  of  labour,  the  separation  of  rents,  as  a 
kind  of  fixture  upon  lands  of  a  certain  quality,  is  a 
law  as  invariable  as  the  action  of  the  principle  of 
gravity.  And  that  rents  are  neither  a  mere  nominal 
value,  nor  a  value  unnecessarily  and  injuriously 

1  Tract  on  Kent,  p.  16  ;  Essay  on  Pop.  (7th  ed.),  p.  327.     Cf.  above. 


CHAP,  i.]  THE  LANDLORDS.  237 

transferred  from  one  set  of  people  to  another,  but  a 
most  real  and  essential  part  of  the  whole  value  of 
the  national  property,  and  placed  by  the  laws  of 
nature  where  they  are,  on  the  land,  by  whomsoever 
possessed,  whether  the  landlord,  the  crown,  or  the 
actual  cultivator."  l 

It  is  the  second  cause  that  brings  the  first  and  third 
into  operation  in  such  a  way  as  to  produce  the  rents 
that  we  actually  know  in  an  old  country.  The  fertility 
which  secures  a  produce  beyond  cost  makes  extra 
profits  possible ;  the  growing  population,  which  gives 
the  produce  a  value,  makes  them  actual ;  and  the 
gradations  in  fertility,  whereby  a  uniform  increase  in 
the  value  of  produce  creates  far  from  uniform  extra 
profits  to  different  cultivators,  give  the  extra  profits 
the  peculiar  graduated  character,  which  is  character- 
istic of  rent  in  the  economical  sense  of  the  word. 

Malthus  believed  himself  to  have  included,  in  this 
theory  of  rent,  what  truth  there  was  in  the  view  of 
the  French  economists  and  of  Adam  Smith,  when 
they  spoke  of  rent  as  due  t<>  ih<  •  «|ii  alities  of  the  soil 
and  not  to  an  ordinary  monopoly.  His  contemporaries 
admitted  him  to  have  been  the  first  clear  expounder 
of  the  subject.  But  his  most  eminent  brother  econo- 
mist found  general  agreement  quite  consistent  with 
emphatic  divergence  in  details,2  not  wonderful  in  a 
wiit.-r  who  regarded  every  economical  question  as  a 
ular  case  of  the  problem  of  value  rather  than  of 
wealth. 

1  Rent,  p.  20  ;  cf.  pp.  18,  57.   Kuay  on  Pop.,  2nd  ed.,  p.  433  ;  7th  ed., 

I  f  we  look  only  to  the  clear  monied  rent,"  &c. 
1  Ricardo,  Preface  to  Principle*  of  Pol.  Econ.  and  Taxation. 


238  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

Ricardo  admits  that  his  own  theory  of  rent  is 
simply  a  farther  development  of  the  Malthusian.  In 
an  essay  on  The  Influence  of  a  low  price  of  Corn  on 
the  ProJUs  of  Stock,  slioioincj  the  inexpediency  of  Re- 
strictions on  Importation  (1815),1  published  in  answer 
to  the  two  tracts  of  Malthus  above  mentioned,  he 
makes  this  quite  clear,  and,  unlike  his  disciples,  is 
warm  in  praise  of  his  rival's  powers  as  an  economist.2 
He  agrees  with  the  definition  (of  the  Tract  on  Rent) 
that  rent  is  "  that  portion  of  the  value  of  the  whole 
produce  which  remains  to  the  owner  after  all  the 
outgoings  belonging  to  its  cultivation  have  been 
paid,"  including  an  ordinary  rate  of  profits  for  the 
employed.3 

But,  whereas  Malthus  regards  rent  as  increased  by 
whatever  lessens  the  outgoings  in  any  shape  or  form, 
Ricardo  considers  that  can  happen  in  one  way  only, 
namely,  by  the  increased  cost  of  raising  the  last  part  of 
the  necessary  supplies.  Arithmetically  it  was  clear 
that,  if  you  had  four  items  making  up  the  total 
expense  of  cultivation,  whatever  reduced  any  one  of 
the  items  pro  tanto  reduced  the  total.4  Accordingly, 
Malthus  said  that  rent  could  be  increased  by  such  an 
accumulation  of  capital  as  will  lower  the  profits  of 
stock, — -such  an  increase  of  population  as  will  lower 

1  Reprinted  by  MacCulloch  in  his  edition  of  Pol.  Econ.  and  Taxation, 
pp.  367—390. 

2  MacCulloch  ed.  of  Pol.  Econ.  and  Taxation,  p.  374  n. 

3  Ibid.,  p.  371. 

4  So  Prof.  Rogers  ascribes  the  high  rents  of  the  seventeenth  and 
eighteenth  centuries  very  largely  to  the  low  wages  ;  higher  ones  would 
have  "reduced  rent  first,  and  profits  afterwards." — Six  Centuries,  j». 
482  ;  cf.  pp.  480  and  492. 


CHAP,  i.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  239 

the  wages  of  labour, — such  agricultural  _improye- 
mcnts  or  such  increase  of  the  cultivator's  exertions 
a>  will  diminish  the  number  of  labourers  needed, — 
or  such  an  increase  in  the  prices  of  produce  from 
increased  demand  as  will  increase  the  difference 
between  the  expense  of  production  and  the  price  of 
produce.1  Ricardo,  on  the  other  hand,  says  that 
profits  can  never  be  reduced  by  mere  accumulation  of 
capital  or  competition  of  capitals,  but  only  by  the 
progressively  less  fruitful  character  of  the  investments 
to  be  found  for  capital  as  accumulation  goes  on.  As 
long  as  there  is  fertile  land  to  be  had,  yielding  a  rich 
return  to  capital,  no  one  will  accept  a  poor  return. 
"  If  in  the  progress  of  countries  in  wealth  and  popu- 
lation new  portions  of  fertile  land  can  be  added  to 
such  countries  with  every  increase  of  capital,  profits 
would  never  fall  nor  rents  rise." 2  In  things  as  they 
are,  capital  soon  accumulates  beyond  the  rich  invest- 
ments and  has  to  take  the  poorer.  Sooner  or  later, 
even  in  a  new  colony,  a  point  is  reached  where  fertile 
land  will  not  supply  food  enough  for  the  growing 
population  except  at  an  increased  cost.3  Now,  if  the 
supply  is  absolutely  required,  the  most  costly  portion 
of  it,  whether  it  be  got  by  an  extension  of  cultivation 
to  poorer  lands,  or  by  a  more  thorough  cultivation 
of  the  richer,  will  determine  the  price  of  all  the  rest, 

.»  Pol.  Eeon.  (1820),  p.  161  (ch.  iii.  sect.  iii.). 

•  P,,i  ft,  375,  379-80  ;  cf.  pp.  71  nn<l  7:2,  l.ut 
especially  68  ft.                    on  the  whole  follows  Adam  Smith.  I 

Mill  luis  foil  irdo. 

*  So  far  M  the  account  is  meant  to  be  historical,  it  must  be  corrected 
by  Carey.    See  above,  p.  65. 


240  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [DK.  n. 

for  there  cannot  be  two  prices  in  the  same  market ; 
and  the  profits  of  the  producer  of  it  will  determine 
the  profits  of  all  his  fellow-cultivators,  for  there 
cannot  be  two  rates  of  profit  in  the  same  business. 
Furthermore,  the  agricultural  profits  will  determine 
the  rate  in  other  businesses,  for  in  a  full-formed  society 
the  rate  in  the  others  must  bear  a  fixed  relation  to 
the  rate  in  this  business,  so  that  the  one  cannot 
materially  vary  without  the  other.1  Therefore  the 
greater  cost  of  the  last  portion  of  the  necessary  supply 
of  food  will  lower  profits  generally,  will  thereby 
increase  the  range  of  extra  profits  from  the  richer 
soils,  and  will  thereby  raise  rents. 

The  difference  between  the  two  men  is,  that  what 
Malthus  makes  only  one  cause,  Ricardo  makes  the  only 
one,  the  increased  cost  of  cultivation.2  Ricardo  and 
his  friends  have  certainly  put  cause  for  effect.3  It  is 
of  course  in  the  first  instance  the  high  prices  that 
lead  to  the  costly  cultivation,  and  not  vice  versa,  for 
without  the  high  prices  the  produce  of  the  costly 
cultivation  would  not  be  profitable. 

Malthus  was  asked  by  the  Committee  on  Emigra- 
tion :  "  Among  other  effects  of  resorting  to  a  soil 
inferior  to  any  now  in  cultivatio.n,  which  is  involved 
in  the  proposition  of  cultivating  waste  lands,  would 
not  one  be  to  raise  the  rents  of  all  the  landlords 

1  Ricardo,  1.  c.  p.  372  and  n.  Cf.  below.  He  appeals  to  Adam  Smith's 
principle  of  compensation  (Wealth  of  Nations,  I.  x.). 

a  Rogers  (Six  Centuries,  p.  352)  goes  so  far  the  other  way  as  to  make 
improvements  the  only  cause  of  an  increase  of  rent,  though  the  passage 
should  be  read  with  p.  480,  and  especially  pp.  482  and  492. 

3  E.  g.  Mrs.  Fawcett,  Pol.  Econ.  for  Beginners,  pp.  65,  66  ;  and  even 
West,  on  Rent,  p.  50. 


CHAP,  i.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  241 

throughout  Great  Britain  and  Ireland  ? " — He  an- 
'1  :  k{  I  think  not.  The  cultivating  of  poor  lands 
is  not  the  cause  of  the  rise  of  rents ;  the  rise  of  the 
price  of  produce  compared  with  the  costs  of  produc- 
tion, which  is  the  cause  of  the  rise  of  rents,  takes 
place  first,  and  then  such  rise  induces  the  cultivation 
of  the  poorer  land.  That  is  the  doctrine  I  originally 
stated,  and  I  believe  it  to  be  true ;  it  was  altered  by 
others  afterwards."  l 

On  the  other  hand,  what  makes  the  high  prices 
permanent  instead  of  temporary,  is  the  fact  that  the 
cultivation  essential  to  the  completeness  of  the  supply 
cannot  be  other  than  costly.2  It  is,  therefore,  not 
wrong  to  consider  costly  cultivation  as  one  cause  of 
the  permanence  of  high  prices,  and  therewith  of  high 
rents.  But  Ricardo  goes  further,  and  counts  it  the 
only  cause. 

Through   the  whole  progress  of  society,  he   says, 

1'iotits  are  regulated  by  the  difficulty  or  facility  of 

procuring  food  ;  and,  "  if  the  smallncss  of  profits  do 

not  check  accumulation,  there  are  hardly  any  limits 

!ic  rise  of  rent  and   the  fall  of  profit."     Nothing 

increase  the  general  rate  of  profit  but  the  eheupen- 

of  food;8    as   by  improvements  in   agriculture, 

whieh,  by  securing  the  same   production   with   less 

ur,    for  tin-    time   innvasc   the  profits  and   lower 

rents.4      1  li«    laii'llnnl's  interest  is  therefore  at  all 

;*>re,1827,p.  321,<|i;  IVrr.  Thompson,  True  TTwory 

of  Rtnt.  34,  Ac.  (1832,  9th  ed.). 

'   Tract  on  Pofat,  p.  6. 
»  Ricardo,  Low  Price  of  Com,  Ac.,  Wvrkt,  pp.  373,  380,  381,  &c. 

«  1  79. 

B 


212  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

times  opposed  to  that  of  every  other  class  in  the 
community,1  for  it  means  dear  food,  low  profits,  and 
high  rents.  Still,  high  rents  are  not  the  cause  either 
of  the  dear  food  or  the  low  profits,  but  are,  equally 
with  them,  the  effect  of  a  common  cause,  more  costly 
cultivation.  The  effect  of  a  costly  cultivation  on 
wages  might  seem  vi  terminorum  to  be  a  raising  of 
them,  for  wages  depend  on  the  proportion  of  the 
supply  of  labourers  to  capital's  demand2  for  them, 
and  by  assumption  there  was  a  greater  demand.  But 
since  the  cause  of  the  rise  of  price  was  in  the  first 
instance  an  increase  of  population,  it  follows  that  the 
increased  cost  of  raising  the  most  costly  supplies  of 
corn  will  be  incurred  not  by  higher  payment  of  old 
labourers,  but  by  employment  of  new.  Wages  again 
will  buy  less  corn,  for  corn  has  risen.  "  While  the 
price  of  corn  rises  ten  per  cent.,  wages  will  always 
rise  less  than  ten  per  cent.,  but  rent  will  always 
rise  more  ;  the  condition  of  the  labourer  will  generally 
decline,  and  that  of  the  landlord  will  always  be  im- 
proved." '  In  his  statement  of  the  doctrine  of  wages, 
Eicardo  is  perhaps  more  careful  in  1815  than  he  is 
in  1817,  saying  that,  "as  experience  demonstrates 
that  capital  and  population  alternately  take  the  lead, 
and  wages  in  consequence  are  liberal  or  scanty,  nothing 
can  be  positively  laid  down  respecting  profits  as  far 
as  wages  are  concerned."4  But  even  in  1817  his 
exposition  is  hardly  more  rigid  than  that  of  Malthus 

1  Ricardo,  Works,  1.  c.  p.  378. 

2  Pol.  Econ.  and  Tax.,  ibid.  pp.  50  seq.,  esp.  pp.  54,  55. 

3  1.  c.  p.  55  ft. 

4  Low  Price,  &c.,  ibid.,  p.  379. 


CHAP.  I.]  THE  LANDLORDS.  243 

liimself.  So  far  is  he  from  recognizing  an  iron  law 
driving  wages  down  to  "the  natural  price  "or  bare 
necessaries,  that  he  thinks  the  market  rate  may  be 
constantly  above  the  natural  for  an  indefinite  period, 
and  he  regards  the  natural  itself  as  expansive.  The 
whole  chapter  on  wages1  shows  a  just  understanding 
of  the  Essay  on  Population.  Nevertheless,  if  Ricardo 
in  one  sense  made  too  much  of  the  principle  of  popu- 

n  in  relation  to  Rent,  in  another  sense  he  made 
too  little  of  it.  He  does  not  see  that  in  a  progressive 
country  it  counteracts  the  tendency  of  improvements 
in  agriculture  to  cheapen  produce,  and  thereby  reduce 
rents  ;2  agricultural  rents  have  risen  since  1846  largely 
because  of  high  farming.  He  does  not  grant  that 
high  or  low  wages  can  affect  rent,  because  he  regards 
them  as  purely  relative  to  profits,  and  making  with 
profits  a  total  amount,  of  which  only  the  proportions 
vary ;  but  it  is  difficult  to  believe  that  the  rise  in 
agricultural  wages  since  1873  or  so  can  have  failed  to 
]>lay  a  part  in  keeping  down  farmers'  rents  since  that 

.  As,  however,  our  view  of  the  power  or  power- 
lessness  of  lowered  profits  or  lowered  wages  to  increase 
i' ut  will  be  found  to  depend  on  our  view  of  the 
causes  of  valuo,  ami  H  tin-  difference  of  the  two 
economists  on  the  relation  of  wages  to  profits  might 
tin-  apj.raranre  of  a  technical  subili-ty,  these  two 
it. -ins  of  the  total  may  be  passed  by  for  the  present. 

In  regard  to  agricultural   improvements  the  issue 
seemed  plainer,  and  the  evidence  seemed  all  for  Ricanlo 


Pol.  Econ.  and  Tax.,  ch.  v.  ;  cf.  Malthm,  7V.  Econ.  (1820),  p.  230. 
«  Butcf.  FForfc,p.  377  n. 

tt  2 


244  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

and  against  Malthus.     In  a  country  depending  chiefly 
on  itself  for  grain,  a  general  adoption  of  improvements 
would   seem  to  make  supplies   cheaper    because  less 
costly,  and  therefore  to  lower  rents  because  forcing 
farmers   to   lower   prices.      Even  Mr.   Mill   did   not 
break  away  from  Eicardianism  at  this  point,1  though 
he  speaks   less   unreservedly  than  Eicardo  upon  it. 
Malthus,    on   the    other   hand,  who   regards  rent    as 
depending  largely  on  the  ability  of  the  agricultural 
supply  to  create  its  own  demands,  regards  rent,  accord- 
ingly, as  at  all  times  keeping  pace  with  the  increase 
of  grain  caused  by  improvements,  unless  the  improve- 
ments outrun  population.     What  cheapness  does  in 
other   cases   is    to   make   an   article    accessible  to    a 
circle  of  buyers  previously  excluded  from  it.    Every 
one  is  a  buyer  of  agricultural  produce  and  no   one 
is  excluded  ;    but  the  temporary  cheapness  of  grain 
creates  new   buyers  by  making  marriage   accessible 
to  a  wider  circle. 

The  progress  of  rents  in  fact  results  from  the 
conflict  of  two  economical  tendencies — the  tendency 
of  economical  expedients  to  lower  prices,  and  the 
tendency  of  an  increasing  population  to  raise  them. 
If  Malthus'  ripest  view  of  population  be  true,  then 
a  cheapening  of  food  among  a  civilized  people  by  no 
means  leads  to  a  corresponding  increase  of  their 
numbers,  and  therefore  the  course  of  improvement 
would  tend  so  far  towards  a  diminution  of  price,  and 

1  Pol.  Econ.,  IV.  iii.  §  4.  Cf.  Walker,  Land  and  its  Rent,  pp.  177-81, 
though  it  has  been  pointed  out  that  on  p.  178  that  writer  omits  Mill's 
qualifying  phrase,  (improvements)  "  suddenly  made." 


CHAP.  I.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  245 

therewith  of  rent.  If  rents  depended  on  the  price  of 
corn  alone,  economical  expedients  (including  not  only 
the  direct  aids  to  tillage,  mechanical  and  chemical 
inventions  directly  applied  to  it,  but  the  indirect  aids, 
free  trade,  railways,  and  steamers)  must  certainly  have 
red  rents  in  the  last  hundred  years.  But  the 
reverse  is  true,1  chiefly  because  the  produce  of  a  farm 
is  ceasing  to  mean  wheat,  and  coming  more  and  more 
to  mean  cattle  and  dairy  produce,  which  have  not 
fallen  but  risen  in  price  in  one  hundred  years,  while 
corn  has  actually  fallen.  This  variety  of  productions 
has  proved  financially  an  equivalent  to  what  Malthus 
(seventy  years  ago)  considered  the  main  cause  of  greater 
extra  profits  to  the  farmer  and  greater  money  rents 
to  the  landlord — the  increased  fertility  of  the  soil  in 
the  matter  of  grain,  and  an  increased  price  keeping 
pace  with  it. 

The  commercial  policy  of  England  has  become  what 
Mil  thus  describes  in  the  latter  part  of  the  Essay  on 
Population  as  a  combination  of  the  agricultural  and 
the  commercial  systems.  His  views  on  this  subject 
became  modified  as  he  grew  older,  lu  the  second 
«lit i«m  he  says:2  "Two  nations  might  increase 
exactly  with  the  same  rapidity  in  the  exchangeable 
6  of  the  annual  produce  of  their  laml  ami  labour; 
yet  ...  in  that  which  had  applied  itself  chiefly  to 
agriculture,  the  poor  would  live  in  i^n-atcr  plenty, 
and  population  wouM  rapidly  increase  ;  in  that  which 

«  See  Sir  James  Caird's  table  appended  to  Landed  Initrett  (1878).  Cf. 
Cairne'*  E**ny*  in  Pol  EC.,  vi.  p.  216. 
«  Bk.  III.  ch.  vii  p.  429. 


24C  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

Lad  applied  itself  chiefly  to  commerce,  the  poor  would 
be  comparatively  but  little  benefited,  and  consequently 
population  would  either  be  stationary  or  increase  very 
slowly."  "In  the  history  of  the  world  the  nations 
whose  wealth  has  been  derived  principally  from 
manufactures  and  commerce  have  been  perfectly 
ephemeral  beings  compared  with  those  the  basis  of 
whose  wealth  has  been  agriculture.  It  is  in  the  nature 
of  things  that  a  state  which  subsists  upon  a  revenue 
furnished  by  other  countries  must  be  infinitely  more 
exposed  to  all  the  accidents  of  time  and  chance  than 
one  which  produces  its  own." 1  It  is  not,  he  thinks, 
because  of  her  trade,  but  because  of  her  agriculture 
that  England  is  so  rich  in  resources ;  it  is  not  with- 
out danger  that  our  commercial  policy  has  diverted 
capital  from  agriculture  into  manufacture  and  com- 
merce. About  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century 
we  were  strictly  an  agricultural  nation,  and  we  were 
safe,  for  in  a  country  whose  commerce  and  manu- 
facture increase  from  and  with  the  improvement  in 
agriculture  there  is  no  discoverable  germ  of  decay. 
But  all  is  changed  now ;  and  there  is  reason  to  fear 
that  our  prosperity  is  temporary,  and  we  have  only 
risen  by  the  depression  of  other  nations.2  When  the 
nations  that  now  supply  us  with  cheap  corn  shall 
have  prospered  like  ourselves  and  increased  their 
population  till  corn  is  dear  among  them,  then  we 
shall  be  ruined.  The  evils  of  scarcity  are  so  dreadful 
that  it  is  worth  our  while  to  give  special  encourage- 

1  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  Bk.  III.  ch.  viii.  p.  437. 
2  Ibid.,  1.  c.  ch.  ix.  pp.  443  seq. 


.-.I.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  247 

ments  to  agriculture,  and,  in  order  to  be  certain  to 
have  enough,  to  have  in  general  too  much.1  Other- 
wise "  we  shall  be  laid  so  bare  to  the  shafts  of  fortune 
that  nothing  but  a  miracle  can  save  us  from  being 
struck."'  "If  England  continues  yearly  her  import- 
ations of  corn,  she  cannot  ultimately  escape  that 
decline  which  seems  to  be  the  natural  and  neces- 
sary consequence  of  excessive  commercial  wealth ; 
and  the  growing  prosperity  of  those  countries  which 
supply  her  with  corn  must  in  the  end  diminish 
her  population,  her  riches,  and  her  power," — not 
indeed  in  the  next  twenty  or  thirty  years,  but  "  in 
the  next  two  hundred  or  three  hundred."3  In  1803 
Mai  thus  had  much  in  common  with  the  author  of 
Great  Britniii  independent  of  Commerce,  to  say  nothing 
of  the  French  economists.  He  cannot  be  said  to 
have  entirely  lost  the  bias  in  favour  of  Agriculture 
in  later  years.  In  the  Political  Economy,  reviewing 
the  last  five  centuries  of  English  work  and  wages,4 
he  tries  to  explain  away  the  instances  where  rising 
prices  of  corn  and  an  "  influx  of  bullion "  seem  to 
have  injured  the  condition  of  the  labourer ;  and  there 
can  be  little  doubt  he  was  indirectly  answering  an 
objection  to  Corn  Laws.  When  depreciation  of  the 
currency,  whether  through  American  discoveries  or 
suspensions  of  cash  payment,  has  occurred,  the  re- 
bound from  it  (he  says)  has  made  prices  fall  much 
more  than  wages,  and  so  (we  are  to  infer),  when  prices 

1  JEway,  Bk.  III.  ••},.  ix.  p.  45<X  •  7&M.,  ch.  r.  p.  465. 

»  /«rf.f  Bk.  V.  ch.  x.  p.  468  n. 

<   1'oL  Scon.  (1820),  pp.  227  *?.,  (1S36)  pp.  240  *q. 


243  MALTHUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [UK.  n. 

are  kept  high,  wages  will  follow.  It  may  be  doubted 
if  he  had  weighed  the  full  consequences  of  such  a 
contention  in  the  light  of  his  own  principles  of  free 
trade.  Professor  Rogers1  has  had  the  valuable  aid  of 
old  College  accounts.  Malthus  had  little  besides 
Eden,  Arthur  Young,  and  the  Reports  to  the  Board  of 
Agriculture ;  and  it  is  doubtful  if  he  fully  understood 
the  effects  on  the  labourer  of  Henry  VII. 's  debase- 
ment of  the  currency,  or  could  apply  the  analogy  to 
the  depreciation  in  his  own  day.2  But  on  the  whole, 
as  years  went  on,  he  became  less  physiocratic.  He 
came  to  acknowledge  that,  if  a  purely  agricultural 
country  might  in  some  cases,  like  America,  be  the 
best  possible  for  the  labourer,  it  might  in  other  cases, 
like  Poland  or  Ireland,  be  the  worst  possible  for  him. 

1  Six  Centuries  of  Work  and  Wages,  ch.  xii.,  esp.  p.  345. 

2  The  facts  of  Malthus'  "  review  "  may  be  roughly  given  in  the  follow- 
ing diagram,  where  the  bar  indicates  the  wheat  earned  per  day  by  the 
agricultural  labourer.     The  amount  for  1350  assumes  that  the  Statute  of 
Labourers  was  successful. 

One  peck.  Two  pecks. 

1340  (before  Plague)  : 

1350  (after  Plngue)  j 

1400  : : 

1500  : I i 

1603  ! 

1650  i 

1699  : 

1730  j : 

1766  i i 

1811  : 

1822    ?  \ : 


Add  1884,  taking 
at  14s.  a  week  and 
wheat  at  36s.  a 
quarter,  or  Is.  l\d.  a 
peck. 


CHAP.  I.]  THE   LANDLORDS. 

If  we  hear  that  the  labourer  in  one  country  earns 
in  a  year  fifteen  and  in  another  nine  quarters  of 
wlu-at,  we  cannot  be  sure  that  the  former  is  the 
better  off  till  we  know  the  value  of  other  things  in 
the  country  in  comparison  with  wheat.  If  manu- 
factures were  very  dear  in  comparison,  then  the 
labourer's  wages  except  in  food  would  go  very  little 
way,  unless  in  a  case  like  America,  where  the  quantity 
is  so  great  that  it  makes  up  for  the  little  value  of  corn 
•s.  In  Poland  the  value  of  corn  is  so  low,  and 
there  is  so  little  capital  in  the  country,  that  the  high 
corn  wages  mean  low  real  wages,  and  the  population 
is  either  stationary  or  very  slow  in  its  increase.  The 
prosperity  of  an  agricultural  country,  then,  depends 
on  other  causes  than  the  direction  of  its  attention  to 
the  one  industry  of  agriculture,  and  without  knowing 
these  we  could  not  infer  or  predict  it.1 

Malthus  in  fact  reached  the  point  at  which  he  was 
always   glad   to   arrive,    the   medium    between    twox 
extreme  views.2      He   would   neither   approve   of  a 
purely  agricultural  nation,  whose  danger  was  want 
of  capita],  nor  of  a  purely  commercial,  whose  danger 
was  want  of  food.     In  a  purely  commercial,  every- 
thing depends  on  a  superiority  in  industry,  machinery, 
and  tr;i<l<  ,  which  from  the  nature  of  things  cannot x 
last.     Not  only  f.uvign  but  domestic  competition  will 


1  7th  «•«!..  pp.  321  «cg.  (Bk.  III.  oh.  viii.\  first  in  1 
•  Cf.  above,  p.  225  n.     In  Pol  Econ.  (1820),  p.  432,  he  says,  "  All  the 
great  reunite  in  Pol.  Econ.  respecting  wealth  depend  upon  proportions." 
:          L  a.l.led  (p. 376),  "net  only  thnv,  but  tlir-u^lmut  tin-  whole  range 
iv  .iii.l  .irt.       So  he  tli  inks  a  peck  of  wheat  a  good  "middle  point" 
,08.     Pol.  Econ.  (1820),  p.  284,  (1836)  p.  254. 


250  MALTHUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [BK.  n. 

bring  down  profits,  and  thereby,  by  discouraging 
saving  and  enterprise,  diminish  the  demand  for 
labour  and  bring  the  population  to  a  standstill. 
Christendom  has  seen  Venice,  Bruges,  Holland  lose 
their  trade  by  their  neighbours'  gain.1  To  say  that 
the  nations  of  the  world  ought  to  be  allowed  to 
develope  their  trade  as  freely  as  the  provinces  of  a 
single  empire,  is,  in  his  opinion,  to  overlook  the 
reality  of  political  obstacles.  If  England  were  still 
separated  into  the  kingdoms  of  the  Heptarchy, 
London  could  not  be  what  it  is.  The  interest  of  a 
province  and  the  interest  of  an  independent  state  are 
never  the  same.2  To  one  who  believes  political 
divisions  inevitable,  there  can  be  little  hope  for  uni- 
versal free  trade.  Malthus  is  unable  to  rise  to  the 
cosmopolitan  view  of  Cobden,  and  he  never  seems  to 
see  that  by  ignoring  political  barriers,  free  trade  may 
really  weaken  them.  His  ideal  is  a  state  which 
combines  agriculture  and  commerce  in  equal  propor- 
tions.3 The  prosperity  of  the  latter  implies  the  decay 
of  feudalism  and  the  establishment  of  secure  govern- 
ment ;  with  security  comes  the  spontaneous  extension 
of  enterprise  and  a  steady  demand  for  labour.  Since 
the  two  great  classes  of  producers  provide  a  market 
,  for  each  other,  wealth  will  constantly  grow,  and 
without  risk  of  sudden  check  by  a  foreign  influence. 
The  prosperity  of  such  a  country  may  (he  thinks)  last 
practically  for  ever,  and  we  might  answer  in  the 
affirmative  for  our  own  country  the  query  of  Bishop 

1  Essay,  7th  ed.,  Bk.  III.  cli.  ix.  pp.  328  seq.     Cf.  pp.  334,  338. 

2  Ibid.,  p.  332.  3  Ibid.,  Bk.  III.  ch.  x.  pp.  334  seq. 


CHAP.  I.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  251 

IVikeley  about  his.1  "The  countries  which  unite 
great  landed  resources  with  a  prosperous  state  of 
commerce  and  manufactures,  and  in  which  the  com- 
mercial part  of  the  population  never  essentially 
exceeds  the  agricultural  part,  are  eminently  secure 
from  sudden  reverses.  Their  increasing  wealth  seems 
to  be  out  of  the  reach  of  all  common  accidents,  and 
there  is  no  reason  to  say  that  they  might  not  go  on 
increasing  in  riches  and  population  for  hundreds,  nay 
almost  thousands  of  years."  2  They  would  go  on  in 
fact  till  they  reached  the  extreme  practical  limits  of 
population,  which  under  the  system  of  private  property 
would  mean  such  a  state  of  the  land  as  would  "  enable 
the  last  employed  labourers  to  produce  the  mainten- 
ance of  as  many  probably  as  four  persons,"  the  man, 
his  wife,  and  two  children.  As  soon  as  the  labour 
ceases  to  produce  more  than  this,  it  ceases  to  be 
worth  the  employer's  while  to  give  the  wages  and 
employ  the  labour.  These  practical  limits  are  far 
from  the  limits  of  the  earth's  power  to  produce  food, 
and  a  Government  which  compelled  every  member 
of  society  to  devote  himself  wholly  to  the  raising  of 
food  and  necessaries,  would  succeed  in  coming  nearer 
to  those  f.ut IK  r  limits,  though  at  the  expense  of 

y thing  we  mean  by  civilization.8  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  even  the  practical  limit  is  not  approached 
by  way  of  a  uniform  decline  of  profits  and  of 
population.  Various  causes,  acting  at  irregular  in- 

ils,  stave  off  the  event.     The  decline  of  general 

1  See  above,  p.  201  n.    Cf.  Jfray  on  Pop.,  ".'  ''37. 

*  Away,  1.  c.  p.  338.  »  I  c.  Bk.  III.  cb.  x.  pp.  338-9. 


252  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  ir. 

profits,  the  introduction  of  long  leases  and  large 
farming,  would  bring  more  capital  to  the  land ; 
improvements  in  agriculture  will  increase  the  produce, 
inventions  in  manufacture  will  lessen  the  cost  of  the 
agriculturist's  comforts,  and  make  his  wages  and 
profits  go  farther ;  the  opening  of  a  foreign  market 
may  raise  home  prices ;  a  temporary  rise  in  the  value 
of  agricultural  produce  may  stimulate  the  investment 
of  capital  in  farming.  So  Malthus  concludes,  for 
reasons  not  unlike  Cliffe  Leslie's,1  that,  though  there 
is  a  tendency  of  profits  to  fall,  yet  the  tendency  is 
often  defeated.  Though  there  is  much  truth  still  in 
many  of  his  statements,  the  conclusion  he  draws  from 
them,2  that  we  ought  by  a  judicious  system  of  corn 
duties  and  corn  bounties  to  keep  the  price  of  food 
steady  and  secure  a  large  home  supply,  is  quite  out 
of  court  now.  The  variations  in  price  have  been 
under  free  trade  very  moderate  ;  and  the  supply  from 
one  quarter  or  another  has  never  failed  us.  Free 
trade  is  no  longer  among  our  problems. 

It  must  be  added,  however,  that  there  is  no  reason 
why  the  "practical  limits"  should  not  exist  under 
a  paternal  or  fraternal  socialism  as  well  as  under 
the  present  social  system.  Even  if  industry  were 
initiated  and  directed  not  by  individuals  but  social- 
istically  by  Government,  the  sole  motive  need  not  be 
to  increase  the  mere  numbers  of  the  people,  and 
therefore  the  mere  total  quantity  of  food  needed  for 

1  Fortnightly  Review,  Nov.  1881,  his  last  writing.     Cf.  Essay,  1.  c.  pp. 
340—342. 

2  In  two  long  chapters  on  Corn  Laws  and  Bounties,  Essay  on  Pop., 
Bk.  III.  ch.  xi.  pp.  343—367.     Cf.  above,  pp.  226  seq. 


CHAP.  I.]  THE   LANDLORDS.  253 

a  bare  life.  The  motive  of  socialistic  government 
would  be  to  secure  a  high  degree  of  comfort,  not  a 
bare  subsistence,  for  all ;  and  therefore,  at  the  cost  of 
a  limitation  of  numbers,  society  would  still  remain  at 
a  distance  from  its  greatest  possible  production  of 
food.  Whether  such  a  limitation  of  numbers  is 
likely  to  take  place  in  the  reconstituted  society  is 
discussed  elsewhere.1 

i  See  below,  Bk.  IV. 


254  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 


CHAPTER  II. 

THE   WORKING  MAN. 

Measure  of  Value,  1823 — In  what  sense  Labour  a  Measure — Diffi- 
culties— Arguments  of  the  Tract  on  Value — Measure  in  the  same 
Country — Measure  in  different  Countries— Measure  at  different 
Periods  in  the  same — Measure  as  applied  to  varying  Value  of 
Currency — The  Royal  Literary  Society — The  Definitions — Wages 
— The  Minimum  of  Social  different  from  the  Minimum  of  Physical 
Necessaries — High  Wages,  how  made  Permanent — The  "  Wages 
Fund,"  whose  Invention,  and  how  far  a  Reality — "  The  New  School 
of  Political  Economy,"  its  three  Tenets — A  General  Glut  in  what 
Sense  possible. 

As  the  Eent  and  Corn  pamphlets  deal  chiefly  with 
Mother  Earth,  the  tract  on  the  Measure  of  Value1 
deals  chiefly  with  Father  Work.  The  search  for  a 
common  measure  of  value  is  not,  to  Malthus,  a 
purely  academical  problem.  He  considers  such  a 
measure  desirable  because  in  any  inquiry  into  the 
wealth  of  nations  it  is  important  to  distinguish 
between  the  rise  of  one  commodity  and  the  fall  of 
another.  The  former  is  an  intrinsic  alteration  of 
value  which  will  affect  every  exchange  in  which  the 
object  is  concerned ;  the  latter  an  extrinsic  which 
affects  only  the  one  exchange,  of  the  object  in 

1  The  Measure  of  Value  stated  and  illustrated,  with  an  application 
of  it  to  the  alteration  in  the  value  of  the  English  currency  since  1790. 
(April)  1823. 


CHAP,  ii.]  THE   WORKING    MAX.  255 

question  with  the  foreign  object  that  has  been 
altered.  By  value  of  course  is  to  be  understood 
economic  value,  or  "  the  power  of  commanding  other 
objects  in  exchange,"  not  value  in  the  (not  uncommon) s 
wider  sense,  of  usefulness  in  supplying  wants.1  The 
economic  value  of  anything,  taken  in  relation  to  some 
object  which  never  changes  its  value  from  intrinsic 
causes,  may  be  called  the  "natural  or  absolute  value" 
of  that  thing,  and  the  object  with  which  it  was 
compared  maybe  called  the  "  measure"  of  absolute  or 
natural  value,  in  other  words,  of  the  value  which  a 
tiling  must  fetch  if  its  supply  is  to  be  continued. 
"While  not  only  money  but  any  and  every  object  may 
be  such  a  measure  of  value  for  a  limited  place  and 
,  even  money  itself  is  not  a  good  measure  for 
widely  different  places  or  for  long  periods  of  time  ; 
and  corn,  which  is  better  for  long  periods,  is  worse 
for  short. 

Labour  is  better  than  either,  but  Labour  is  am- 
biguous. We  may  measure  the  value  of  any  tiling 
cither  by  the  labour  it  has  cost  us  in  the  making  of  it, 
which  gives  us  Ricardo's  sense  of  natural  value,  or  by 
the  labour  it  will  purchase  after  it  is  made.  Adam 
Smith,2  who  preferred  labour  both  to  money  and 
corn  as  the  measure  of  value,  wavered  between  these 
two  meanings  of  the  terms.  Mai  thus  declares  at 
once  against  th.  first  sense.  Labour,  he  says,  in  the 
sense  of  coat  does  not  altogether  determine  value  and 

1  So  Tract  on  Value,  p.  1.  But  in  DtfnitioM  value  ia  "  the  relation 
of  one  object  to  some  other  or  others,  in  exchange,  resulting  'from  the 

i  thin-*  i.<  li.-l.l       •!>  f.   lo,  -n  ;  cf.  with  def.  6). 
1  Adam  Smith,  Wealth  of  Nation*,  1    \ 


236  MALTHUS   AND   HIS   WORK.  [BK.  n. 

therefore  cannot  measure  it,  even  for  similar  places 
and  times.  In  1820  Malthus  had  been  of  opinion 
that  a  mean  between  corn  and  labour  was  a  better 
measure  of  value  than  labour  itself;  but  since  1823 
he  recurred  to  the  view  of  Adam  Smith,1  and  held 
that  the  amount  of  the  unskilled  common  day  labour 
of  the  agricultural  labourer,  which  a  thing  will 
purchase  or  command,  is  a  good  measure  of  the  value 
of  it  even  at  widely  different  places  and  times. 
"  Agricultural  labour  is  taken  for  the  obvious  reasons 
that  it  is  the  commonest  species  of  labour,  that  it 
directly  produces  the  food  of  the  labourer,  and  that 
it  is  the  most  immediately  connected  with  the  grada- 
tions of  soil  and  the  necessary  variations  of  profits. 
It  is  also  assumed  with  Adam  Smith,  Mr.  Ricardo, 
and  other  political  economists,  that,  on  an  average, 
other  kinds  of  labour  continue  to  bear  the  same 
proportions  to  agricultural  labour." 2  The  bodily 
exertion  of  the  labourer  does  not  change ;  it  is  the 
same  sweat  of  the  brow,  the  same  sacrifice  of  physical 
force.  When  corn,  for  example,  will  command  a 
less  amount  of  labour  than  it  would  have  done  a 
century  before,  we  may  be  sure  it  is  because  of  a 
change  not  in  the  labour  but  in  the  corn ;  and  we 
ought  therefore  to  say  not  that  labour  has  risen  in 
value,  but  that  corn  has  fallen.  Malthus'  search  for  a 
permanent  element  in  the  changeable  has  led  him  to 
individual  human  labour  as  the  economical  unit.  If 

1  Measure  of  Value,  p.  23.    Cf.  Pol.  Econ.  (1820),  pp.  126  seq.;  (1836), 
pp.  84,  93  seq. 

2  Measure  of  Value,  p.  20  n.   On  pp.  23-4  he  adds,  "  taking  the  average 
of  summer  and  winter  wages." 


CHAP,  n.]  THE  WORKING   MAX.  257 

the  Chinese  labourer  has  lower  wages  than  the 
English,  it  is  not  because  his  labour  is  of  lower  value, 
but  because  his  necessaries  are  of  higher.  Wages  are 
higher  in  the  United  States  not  because  labour  is  of 
higher  value,  but  because  necessaries  are  of  lower.1 
Of  course  when  skill  enters  into  the  labour,  the  unit 
is  not  the  same ;  but,  when  we  look  only  at  unskilled, 
we  find  confirmation  of  Malthus'  view  in  the  ex- 
perience of  the  elder  and  the  younger  Brassey  as 
employers  of  labour,  that  quantity  for  quantity  "  the 
cost  of  the  labour  [the  expense  of  it  to  the  employer] 
is  the  same  everywhere"  over  the  world.2  The 
measure,  however,  is  by  no  means  out  of  court  as 
regards  skilled  labour;  the  difference  in  kind  may 
be  stated  in  terms  of  a  difference  in  degree.  If  the 
watchmaker's  labour  be  paid  at  the  rate  of  10s.  a 
<l;iy,  and  the  common  agricultural  labourer's  only 
at  U.  8</.,  the  former  may  be  stated  as  equivalent  to 
six  'lays'  common  labour.8  Malthus  has  in  his  mind 
a  scale  of  compensation  such  as  is  drawn  out  by 
A -lira  Smith  in  the  tenth  chapter  of  the  first  book 
of  the  Wealth  of  ^V///^//.v.4  Disagreeableness,  diffi- 
culty, inconstancy,  responsibility,  risk  of  failure,  are 
so  many  disabilities,  for  each  of  which  a  compensa- 
tion must  b«  iii;i'l<*  to  the  workman  in  the  scale  of 
his  wage*,  as  adding  in  effect  so  many  more  hours' 
labour ;  and  each  higher  class  of  workman  must  be 

»  See  below,  p.  268.  Pol  Econ.  (1820),  p.  125  ;  (1836)  p.  102,  Ac.; 
Tract  on  Vahtf^  passim. 

*  Work  and  Wagt*  ch.  iii.  p.  75.  Malthns,  Pol  Scon.,  2nd  ed.,  pp. 
106  M|  >  Cf.  II  -.21,  Ac. 

4  MacC.'s  ed.,  pp.  45  *••/  >r(  on  Fata*,  p.  20  n.,  above  quoted. 

8 


258  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

paid  tlic  unit  of  common  labourer's  wages,  with  the 
compensations  superadded.  In  practice  this  means 
that  men  will  not  be  found  in  sufficient  numbers  to 
do  the  higher  class  work  unless  the  wages  are  suffi- 
cient to  make  it  worth  their  while  to  undergo  the 
disabilities.  It  is  assumed  that  this  scale  has  been 
adjusted  by  custom  and  the  "  higgling  of  the  market" 
from  generation  to  generation,  till  in  any  given 
neighbourhood  each  of  the  several  skilled  trades  has  a 
definitely  recognized  place  in  the  series.1 

This  reasoning  seems  less  convincing  when  we 
consider  that  the  translation  of  skill  into  terms  of 
hours  would  be  different  in  different  localities,  and 
that  the  common  labour,  which  is  the  unit,  would 
vary  in  the  same  way.  The  measure  of  value  would 
hold  only  for  a  given  place,  time,  and  people.  To 
escape  from  the  difficulty,  we  must  consider  the 
difference  between  the  common  labour  at  one  time 
and  place  and  the  common  labour  at  another  as  itself 
measurable,  and  allow  for  it ;  or  else  we  must  consider 
it  as  too  small  to  disturb  our  conclusions,  and  so  neglect 
it  altogether.  To  reduce  common  labour  to  its  theo- 
retically simplest  terms  is  to  reduce  it  to  something 
below  our  experience ;  and  to  reduce  it  to  its  actually 
simplest  in  the  given  cases  is  to  reduce  it  to  one  thing 
in  England,  a  second  in  France,  a  third  in  India,  a 
fourth  in  America.  There  are  differences  of  quality 
which  cannot  be  with  any  certainty  resolved  into 
differences  of  quantity ;  such  are  the  differences  of 
individuals,  the  differences  of  nations,  the  differences 

i  Cf.  Ricardo,  Pol.  Econ.,  Works  (ed  MacC.),  p.  15. 


CHAP,  ii.]  TIIK   WORKING    MAX.  259 

of  races.  It  will  be  found,  also,  that  the  part  played 
by  common  as  opposed  to  skilled  labour,  and  by  agri- 
cultural as  opposed  to  manufacturing  labour,  differs 
so  much  between  country  and  country  that,  in  order 
to  use  labour  as  a  measure,  we  should  need  other 
measures  in  addition  to  it.  In  short,  if  we  had  data 
enough  to  apply  this  measure,  we  should  have  data 
enough  to  dispense  with  it. 

It  was  possibly  the  force  of  these  considerations 
that  led  Malthus,  as  time  went  on,  to  approach  some- 
what nearer  to  Ricardo,  whose  measure,  so  far  as  he 
hail  one,  was  not  the  labour  purchased  but  the  labour 
that  entered  into  cost.  But  he  adhered  to  the  sub- 
o  uf  his  doctrine  as  expressed  in  the  tract;  and 
his  positions,  in  detail,  were  as  follows  : — 

The  power  of  one  object  to  command  another  in 
exchange  is  influenced  either  by  a  change  in  the 
object  itself,  or  by  a  change  in  the  other.  If  we 
fun nd  a  case  where  there  was  never  a  change  in  the 
first  object  itself,  then  we  should  have,  in  that  first, 
a  measure  of  natural  or  absolute  as  opposed  to 
nominal  or  relative  value,  i.  e.  a  measure  of  that 
value  of  an  article  which  satisfies  the  " conditions  of 
the  supply  "  of  it,  and  enables  its  production  to  be 
continued  without  loss  to  the  producers.  By  "  con- 
ditions of  supply"  is  meant  Ricardo's  "cost  of 
production"  with  the  addition  of  ordinary  profits. 
No  measure  of  muk't  or  ivlative  values  is  possible; 
and  to  have  a  measure  of  natural  value  itself  we  must 
make  two  postulates, — that  natural  value  dope n. Is 

on  "labour  and    profits"  (we),  on  rent   little  it   ai 

s  2 


200  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

all,  and  that  the  "  wages "  of  labour  are  also  the 
"  value  "  of  labour, — what  labour  is  paid  is  also  what 
labour  will  fetch.  It  is  easy  to  apply  the  measure 
where  only  labour  is  concerned,  for  then  the  labour 
that  the  things  cost  is  a  sufficient  measure  ;  it  would 
be  evident,  at  any  change,  that  the  things  had  become 
cheaper,  not  the  labour  dearer.  But  in  present 
society  value  is  more  complicated ;  labour  is  no  doubt 
the  chief  source  of  it,  but  profits  are  a  very  consider- 
able one.1  The  natural  conditions  of  supply,  however, 
may  be  stated  in  terms  of  labour,  just  as  if  labour 
had  been  the  sole  ingredient.  This  would  give  us 
a  measure  for  the  same  country  at  the  same  place 
and  time.  The  total  quantity  of  labour  that  an  article 
cost,  with  the  addition  of  ordinary  profits  stated  in 
terms  of  labour,  would  be  the  same  as  that  quantity 
of  labour  which  an  article  would  purchase  in  its 
natural  value. 

In  the  case  of  different  countries,  at  the  same  time, 
the  difficulties  are  not  quite  the  same.  Exchange  is 
there  determined  not  by  labour  but  by  money  prices  ; 
and  money  is  of  very  different  value  in  the  one 
country  and  in  the  other.  But  the  differences  in  the 
value  of  money  in  different  countries  are  in  proportion 
to  the  different  prices  of  agricultural  labour — 1500 
days'  labour  at  ±d.  a  day  in  India,  at  2*.  in  England, 
meaning  £25  and  £150  respectively;  and,  if  fixed 
capital  to  the  value  of  300  days'  labour  were  advanced 
to  each  of  them,  while  profits  calculated  in  days' 
labour  were  twenty  per  cent,  m  the  one  case,  ten 

1  Meas.  of  Value,  pp.  8—12. 


CHAP,  ii.]  THE  WORKING    MAX.  «r,l 

in  the  other,  the  result  would  be  an  article  whose 
conditions  of  supply  would  require  in  the  one  case  a 
money  price  of  £31,  in  the  other  of  £168.  The 
difference  is  no  doubt  due  to  the  superior  efficiency 
of  English  industry  and  skill  which  enables  England 
to  purchase  the  precious  metals  more  cheaply,1  but 
the  cost  of  getting  the  money  would  not  tell  us 
the  true  present  value  of  the  money  in  England  or  in 
India.  It  is  not  the  labour  spent  on  the  gold,  but 
the  labour  purchased  by  it,  that  will  help  us  here. 
In  each  country  within  itself  we  would  measure  the 
natural  value  of  money  as  well  as  of  anything  else 
by  what  labour  it  will  purchase  ;  know  the  difference 
between  the  value  of  money  in  the  one  and  its  value 
in  the  other  by  the  difference  between  the  amount 
of  labour  it  will  purchase  in  the  one  case  and  the 
amount  it  will  purchase  in  the  other.2 

In  the  case  of  different  periods  in  the  same  country, 
though  we  have  not,  as  in  the  case  of  two  different 
countries,  the  test  of  an  actual  exchange,  wo  cm 
still  use  labour  as  the  measure.  We  must  allow 
for  the  higher  profits  of  the  earlier  period  ;  and 
on  the  (Ricardian)  principle  that  profits  and  v 

inversely,    though    corn     wages    have    risen, 

profits    have   in    proportion    fallen,    and    the    total 

value  of  the  produce  measured  by  its  power  of  pur- 

chasing   labour    must     be    the    sanio/     iho    purchased 

ur  then  representing  the  producing  labour  plus 


1  Meat,  of  Fa/u«,  pp.  22,  65.     Of.  Cairnes,  Australian  A>V 
J?»ny*  in  Pol  Earn.  (pp.  92  teq.;  cf.  pp.  37,61),  (1873),-fiwt  published 

<ucr>»  Mag.,  Sept  1859. 
>  Meat,  of  Value,  p.  23.  •  Ibid.,  pp.  27—29. 


MALTHUS  AND   HIS   WORK.  [BK.  n. 

the  then  rate  of  profits.     From  Ricardo's  dogma  it 
seems  (to  Malthas)  to  follow  directly  that  the  value 
of  labour  is  constant.1     Taking  the  labour  they  will 
purchase  as   the   best  measure  of   the  value  of   the 
precious  metals,  as  of  anything  else,  we  have  light 
on  one  of  the  pressing  questions  of  the  day  (in  1823), 
the  causes  of  the  changing  value  of  money.      The 
causes  affect  not  the  labour  but  the  money,  and  they 
are  of  two  kinds.     The  first  Malthus  describes  as  a 
primary  or  necessary  cause,  namely,  the  variation  in 
profits  depending  on  the  (Ricardian)  theory  of  the  in- 
terlocking of  wages  and  profits,  and  the  (Malthusian) 
theory  of  the  relation  of  profits  to  rent.     Dear  corn 
due  to  difficult  cultivation  would  lower  profits,  and 
would  alter  the  value  of  money,  but  only  in  relation 
to  raw,  not  in  relation  to  manufactured  produce,  or 
at  least  (from  the  effects  of  Ricardo's  principle  of  the 
inverse  variation  of  wages  and  profits)  not  to  the  same 
extent.      But   the    second,    which   is   a    "  secondary 
and  incidental "  class  of  causes,  affects  both  raw  and 
manufactured  goods,  and  is  often  enough  to  completely 
dwarf  the  effects  of  the  primary  cause ; 2 — it  is  the 
general   commercial   situation   of    a   country, — "  the 
fertility   and   vicinity   of    the   mines,    the    different 
efficiency  of  labour  in  different  countries,  the  abund- 
ance or  scarcity  of  exportable  commodities,  and  the 
state  of  the  demand  and  supply  of  commodities  and 
labour  compared  with "  the  precious   metals.3     The 

1  Meas.  of  Value,  p.  29  n. 

2  He  might   have  said  simply  that  the  one  is  intrinsic,  the  other 
extrinsic,  in  relation  to  the  agricultural  products  themselves. 

3  Meas.  of  Value,  p.  (13. 


CHAP,  ii.]  THE  WORKING    MAN. 

efficiency  of  labour  and  a  prosperous  commerce,  with 
a  great  consequent  demand  for  corn  and  labour, 
often  more  powerful  in  making  bullion  cheap 
than  agricultural  productiveness  and  high  profits  in 
making  bullion  dear  and  corn  cheap.  During  the 
war — say  from  1790  to  1814 — we  had  an  instance  of 
this,  and  since  the  war — say  from  1814  to  1823 — 
\ve  have  had  a  clear  instance,  he  thinks,  of  the 


converse.1 


T\vo  elaborate  papers  on  the  measure  of  value, 
written  in  1825  and  1827,  show  that  Malthus  was 
becoming  inclined  to  make  less  of  his  differences  with 
Ricardo.2  They  were  intimate  friends ;  their  dis- 
cussions had  no  bitterness ;  and,  to  use  the  words  of 
one  of  them,  "both  were  so  anxious  for  the  truth  that 
sooner  or  later  they  would  have  agreed." 3  These 
papers  are  a  fulfilment  of  his  duty  not  (as  we  might 
guess)  as  a  fellow  of  the  Royal  Society  or  a  member 
of  the  Political  Economy  Club,4  but  as  an  associate 
of  the  Royal  Society  of  Literature.5  "  That  branch  of 
literature "  [*/c]  "  on  which  it  shall  be  his  duty  to 
communicate  with  the  Society  once  a  year  at  least " 
is  described  as  "political  economy  and  statistics."' 
II<  <!<>rs  little  credit  in  these  papers  to  his  literary 
faculty.  Their  composition  is  laboured  and  devoid 

1  Meat,  of  Value,  pp.  67  seq.    Cf.  below,  pp.  283  seq. 

•  \\"ii.»  allows  cost  to  play  a  greater  part  in  vulu«'.   Cf.  below,  pp.  278-9. 
But  Ricardo,  Pol  Econ.,  sect  vi  p.  28,  disclaims  belief  in  any  universal 
measure  of  value. 

»  Mjiltlm-,  quoted  by  I  Rev.,  Jan.  1837,  p.  499. 

MI  S.  1819,  and  a  member  of  Pol.  Econ.  Club  at  its  founda- 

tion in  1^ 

•  4tb  May,  1825  ;  7th  Nov.,  1827.     Trantadlont  of  R.  S.  L.,  v..l.  i. 
part  i.  i» .  1 7 1 .  •  Report  of  R.  8.  L.,  1824,  p.  21. 


MALTIIUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

of  ornament.  The  first  is  On  the  Measure  of  the 
Conditions  necessary  to  the  Supply  of  Commodities ;  and 
the  thesis  is,  that  "the  natural  and  necessary  con- 
ditions of  the  supply  of  all  commodities,"  that  are 
not  monopolies,  are  represented  and  measured  by 
the  labour  which  they  will  on  an  average  command, 
and  by  nothing  else.  The  second  is  On  the  Meaning 
w Inch  is  most  usually  and  most  correctly  attached  to 
the  term,  Value  of  Commodities ;  and  the  thesis  is,  that, 
when  value  is  used  without  a  qualifying  adjective  or 
reference  to  any  special  equivalent  in  a  possible  ex- 
change,1 the  term  refers  to  the  "  conditions  of  supply." 
When  we  say,  for  example,  anything  is  sold  at  a  price 
far  above  its  true  value,  we  mean  far  above  its  co^t 
price,  including  under  "  cost "  the  average  rate  of  profits 
that  must  go  to  the  maker  if  he  is  to  live  by  his 
trade.  The  two  papers  taken  together  form  a  sort  of 
indirect  proof  of  the  position  taken  up  in  the  tract 
on  the  Measure  of  Value  (1823),  and  the  relevant 
parts  of  the  second  edition  of  the  Political  Economy 
(1836),  and  may  be  stated  briefly  thus  : — The  labour 
commanded  by  an  article  is  generally  the  measure 
of  that  article's  cost ; — but  that  article's  cost  is 
what  people  generally  mean  by  its  value ; — therefore 
the  labour  commanded  by  an  article  is  the  measure 
of  that  article's  value  in  the  ordinary  sense  of  the 
word. 

The  second  paper  was  written  at  the  same  time  as 
the  Definitions  in   Political   Economy,  and  illustrates 

1  We  might  expressly  wish  to  know  a  coat's  value  in  money  or  its 
value  in  cutlery  or  coals.  The  Professor  at  the  Breakfast-table  talks 
of  "  Madeira  worth  from  two  to  six  Bibles  a  bottle." 


CHAP,  ii.]  THE   WORKING    MAX.  265 

the  rule  laid  down  there,  prescribing  adherence,  when 
possible,  to  the  meaning  which  economical  terms  bear 
in  the  mouths  of  ordinary  folk.1  The  Definitions,  for 
example,  repeat  from  (or  with)  the  second  paper, 
"  when  no  second  object  is  specified,  the  value  of 
the  commodity  naturally  refers  to  the  causes  "  which 
determine  "  the  estimation  in  which  it  is  held  "  "  and 
the  object  which  measures  it."  '  "  The  natural  value 
of  a  commodity  at  any  place  and  time "  is  "  the 
estimation  in  which  it  is  held  when  it  is  in  its 
natural  and  ordinary  state,'1  as  "determined  by  the 
elementary  costs  of  its  production,"  or  in  other  words, 
by  "  the  conditions  of  its  supply."  And  the  measure 
of  the  natural  value  of  a  commodity  at  any  place 
and  time  is  "  the  quantity  of  labour  for  which  it  will 
exchange  at  that  place  and  time  when  it  is  in  its 
natural  and  ordinary  state." 3 

As  a  literary  production  the  book  written  for  the 
public  is  superior  to  the  papers  prepared  for  the  men 
of  letters.  Next  to  the  first  Essay  on  Population,  the 
critical  parts  of  the  Definitions  give  the  most  pleasant 
examples  of  the  author's  style.  The  two  papers 
above  mentioned  are  chiefly  important  as  showing  the 
importance  which  Malthus,  unlike  Ricardo,  attached  to 
til-  question  of  a  measure  of  value.4  A  contemporary 
writer  said  very  happily  that  the  fault  of  Ricardo  was 

»  Definitions  (1827),  p.  235. 
2  I.  e.  to  the  object  which  measures  that  cost-value. 
»  Ibid.,  p.  243. 

4  See  above,  p.  254.     Ricardo's  long  correspondence  with  Malthus  on 
1-ject  is  mentioned  by  Empson,  AWm.  Rev.,  1.  c.  p.  469.     Empson's 
extract*  from  it  are  the  most  valuable  part  of  his  article. 


266  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

to  generalize  too  much,  and  of  Malthus  to  generalize 
too  little.  Malthus,  he  added,  is  a  keen  observer 
but  poor  in  analysis  ;  he  is  "  so  occupied  with  particu- 
lars that  he  neglects  that  inductive  process  which 
extends  individual  experience  throughout  the  infini- 
tude of  things,"  and  converts  knowledge  into  science. 
"  As  presented  by  Mr.  Eicardo,  political  economy 
possesses  a  regularity  and  simplicity  beyond  what 
exists  in  nature ;  as  exhibited  by  Mr.  Malthus,  it  is  a 
chaos  of  original  but  unconnected  elements."  ]  On  the 
other  hand,  the  testimony  of  a  recent  German  writer 
is  very  different.  Malthus,  he  tells  us,  resembles 
Ricardo  in  his  sombre  view  of  human  life  and  frank 
statement  of  unpleasant  facts.  Their  names  are 
often  associated,  and  no  doubt  both  are  children  of 
their  times.  But  their  leanings  were  really  unlike. 
Ricardo  took  up  certain  ideas  of  his  time  in  their 
narrowest,  clearest,  and  harshest  form,  and  applied 
them  wholly  in  the  interest  of  capital.  Malthus  is 
far  less  narrow.  His  influence  on  economics  has  been 
much  smaller  than  Ricardo's  ;  but  he  will  be  found 
"  by  far  the  more  suggestive  and  less  prejudiced  of 
the  two,"  and,  if  he  found  more  opponents,  it 
is  because  he  was  less  understood  and  less  read.2 
The  sprightly  Dialogues*  of  De  Quiricey  contribute 
nothing  to  the  discussion  on  value  ;  but  they  show 


1  R.  Torrens,  Production  of  Wealth,  1821,  pp.  iv,  v. 

2  Held,  Sociale  Geschichte  Englands,  p.  205. 

3  Dialogues  of  Three  Templars  on  Political  Economy,  1824  (Works, 
Black,  1863,  vol.  iv.).    All  depends  on  the  assumption  in  the  middle  of 
Dialogue  I.  p.  196,  ("it  is  Mr.  Ricardo's  doctrine  that,"  &c.),  and  on  the 
confinement  of  the  discussion  to  natural  value  (p.  198). 


cn.vp.  ii.]  THE   WORKING   MAX.  267 

Low  completely  Ricardo  had  won  the  ear  of  the 
ny  world,  and  how  little  pains  the  opponents  of 
Mai  thus  took  to  do  him  justice.  Malthus  reduced 
the  problem  to  many  elements ;  Ricardo  to  few  ; 
and  the  latter,  as  certainly  easier  to  understand, 
was  readily  represented  as  the  likelier  to  be  true. 
Simplicity  in  such  a  case  is  a  treacherous  virtue ;  and 
the  apparent  chaos  may  have  been  much  nearer  the 
truth  than  the  apparent  cosmos,  if  there  was  a  hidden 
Haw  in  the  latter  and  a  latent  principle  of  union 
in  the  former.  Sound  or  unsound,  such  a  principle 
may  be  traced  in  the  most  abstract  discussions  of 
Malthus.  We  shall  find  this  true  when  we  compare 
his  views  with  Ricardo 's  on  the  nature  and  causes 
of  value  itself,  and  the  movements  of  prices.  We 
may  recognize  it  even  in  these  discussions  on  the 
nnusure  of  value.  The  measurement  of  all  value 
by  individual  human  labour  is  of  a  piece  with  the 
author's  final  view  of  population,  where  all  is  made  to 
depend  on  individual  responsibility.  The  main  weak- 
ness of  the  position  is  perhaps  that  by  unskilled 
labour  he  means  always  agricultural,  and  does  not 
sufficiently  recognize  how  in  manufacturing  England 
it  has  JM  rhaps  become  easier  to  measure  unskilled  by 
skilled  than  the  latter  by  the  former.  The  difficulty 
met  Robert  Owen,  wh.-n  in  his  Labour  Evcfiangcs*  he 
not  only  tried  to  reduce  all  values  to  a  common 
measure  in  labour,  but  to  make  labour  a  means  of 

1  Mftunire  of  Fn/mr,  p.  20  n. 

1  London,  1832;  Birmingham,  1833.  TheCon  \*uemblyn] 

ime  mefUMiTv,   l>ut  \\.i\.   in    1791.    See  Roscher, 

National  Vkon.  (1879),  p.  298. 


268  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

exchange,  for  which  it  is  certaiuly  worse  suited  thaii 
money. 

Labour  as  something  to  be  rewarded  by  Wages  has 
a  more  evident  connection  with  the  principles  of  the 
Essay  on  Population  than  labour  as  the  measure  of 
all  values.  In  this  case  unskilled  agricultural  labour 
is  again  the  unit.  The  first  "  condition  of  the 
supply"  of  this  labour  is  the  necessaries  of  life,  in 
such  quantities  as  will  enable  the  labourers  to  main- 
tain their  numbers  or  to  increase  them,1  as  the  case 
may  be.  If  the  former  only,  the  price  of  labour  is 
not,  as  Ricardo  says,  the  "  natural,"  but  really  a  most 
unnatural  price,  for  it  would  mean  that  the  country 
giving  it  had  arrived  at  the  final  limit  of  its  resources.2 
Necessaries,  however,  are  not  a  simple  or  even  a 
fixed  element.  We  can  of  course  measure  them  in 
corn  if  we  like  ;  but  they  consist  not  only  of  the 
prime  necessary,  the  staff  of  life,  but  of  other  absolute 
necessaries,  of  shelter  and  clothing,  and  many  "  con- 
veniences "  which  have  become  necessaries,  inasmuch 
as  they  are  essential  to  healthy  life,  such  as  soap  and 
shoes  and  candle-light.  It  has  happily  become  a 
truism  that  the  necessaries  of  life  are  not  a  fixed  but 
an  expanding  factor.  Even  if  competition  were 
always  to  drive  wages  down  to  a  "  minimum  of  social 
necessaries,"  *  social  are  always  beyond  animal  neces- 
saries ;  our  basest  beggars  are  in  the  poorest  thing 

1  The  words  are,  "  enable  the  labourers  to  maintain  a  stationary  or 
an  increasing  population  "  (Pol  Econ.,  1836,  p.  218).     The  awkwardness 
of  the  sentence  may  be  due  to  bad  editing ;  but  we  read  elsewhere  of 
the  "  price  of  wages" 

2  Pol.  Econ.,  1836,  pp.  218,  223.  3  See  Lassalle  and  Marx. 


CHAP,  ii.]  THE  WORKING    MAtf.  269 

superfluous  ;  and  "  the  barest  social  necessaries  "  seem 
likely  in  process  of  time  to  mean  a  high  standard  of 
comfort.  To  raise  the  minimum  of  social  necessaries 
is  the  way  to  raise  wages  really,  universally,  and 
almost  irrevocably.1  Malthus  himself  declares  that 
"it  is  the  diffusion  of  luxury  "  in  this  sense  of  the 
word,  "  among  the  mass  of  the  people,  and  not  an 
excess  of  it  in  a  few,"  that  seems  to  be  advantageous, 
both  for  national  wealth  and  national  happiness. 
Puley's  ideal  of  national  prosperity,  "  a  laborious 
frugal  people  ministering  to  the  demands  of  an 
opulent  luxurious  nation,"  is  heartily  scouted  by  him. 
The  luxuries  of  the  few  rich,  he  says,  harass  the 
industry  of  the  poor  by  varying  with  the  fashion ; 
but  the  luxuries  of  the  poor,  when  embodied  in  their 
general  standard  of  living,  are  not  only  the  best  kind 
of  check  to  population,  but  the  steadiest  encourage- 
ment to  general  trade.2  He  seems  to  have  supposed 
the  elevation  in  the  standard  of  living  to  have  been 
effected,  like  the  progress  of  nations  in  civilization,  by 
the  happy  improvement  of  an  accidental  advantage, 
by  the  retention  of  high  wages,  when  once  secured 
in  a  time  of  brisk  trade  in  the  ordinary  way  of  com- 
petition ;  the  workmen,  in  short,  succeeded  in  making 
permanent  and  de  jure  a  change  once  de  facto  for  the 
time  effected.8  "  When  our  wages  of  labour  in  wheat 

1  Cf.  Maltha^  Pol.  Econ.  (1836),  pp.  224,  225,  Ac,  Euay  on  Popula- 
tion, 7th  e<l ,  II I .  viii.  323,  but  especially  IV.  xiii.  473.  See  also  Rogers, 
Six  Centorie*,  ch.  viii.,  '  The  Famine  and  the  Plague,'  especially  pp.  233 
—242. 

»  Malthus,  £«My  on  Pop.,  IV.  xiii    17.1;  ,  •  ind  434. 

«  Cf.  especially  Eaay  on  Pop.  (2nd  ed.),  Ill  ix.  444.     "TV 
of  labour  has  been  rising — not  to  fall  aga 


270  MALTHUS  AM)   Ills    WO  [UK.  u. 

were  high  in  the  early  part  of  the  last  century,  it  did 
not  appear  that  they  were  employed  merely  in  the 
maintenance  of  more  families,  but  in  improving  the 
condition  of  the  people  in  their  general  mode  of 
living." l  Malthus,  without  knowing  it,  was  certainly 
father  of  the  theory  of  a  Wages  Fund.  The  theory 
is  that  the  average  wages  of  the  labouring  classes  at 
any  given  time  are  high  or  low  in  proportion  to  the 
great  or  small  amount  of  circulating  capital  devoted 
to  the  payment  of  wages,  or,  as  it  is  sometimes 
expressed  (more  tersely  and  inexactly),  wages  depend 
on  "  the  ratio  of  population  to  capital."  This  might 
mean  no  more  than  the  arithmetical  truism  that  we 
may  always  find  the  average  wages  by  dividing  the 
total  sum  received  by  the  total  number  of  recipients  ; 
and  the  quotient  would  be  unalterable  only  in  the 
sense  in  which  all  other  facts  might  be  said  to  be 
so,  in  retrospect.  But  it  is  usually  taken  to  mean 
that  the  first  total  could  not  at  any  given  time  have 
been  greater  or  less  than  it  actually  was,  being  fixed 
unalterably  by  circumstances,2  and  so  "  devoted  "  or 
"determined"  to  the  payment  of  wages.  The  simplest 
test  of  this  theory  is  the  application  of  it  to  the  case 
of  a  single  individual  capitalist  and  his  payments  in 
wages.  Suppose  he  has  a  capital  of  £10,000,  £5000 
fixed  and  £5000  circulating;  and  suppose  that  the 
latter  means  wages  only  (instead  of  chiefly),  and  is 

1  Emigr.  Comm.  (1827),  p.  326,  qu.  3411;  cf.  3408,  3409.     Cf.  above, 
p.  197. 

2  The  chief  of  them  being  the  rate  of  profits  which  is  at  the  given  time 
enough    to  induce  the   "  undertaker "    (or  "  enterpriser ")  to   continue 
business. 


CHAP,  ii.]  THE  WORKING    MAX.  271 

paid  to  one  hundred  men  ;  —  £50  a  year  will  be  the 
average  wages  of  the  hundred  men  ;  and,  by  the 
theory,  given  the  rate  of  ordinary  profits  and  given 
the  "  desire  of  accumulation  "  at  the  time  and  place, 
it  could  not  possibly  have  been  cither  more  or  less. 
But,  as  the  profits  are  not  unconditional,  neither  are 
the  wages  ;  the  capitalist  might  conceivably,  to  save 
his  business,  keep  it  up  in  bad  times  at  a  loss,  and 
pav  wages  at  the  expense  of  profits  and  at  the  expense 
of  his  personal  pleasures.1  He  has  often  the  choice 
before  him  to  spend  more  on  fixtures,  or  more  on 
new  hands,  or  more  on  further  employment  of  the 
old  hands.  In  truth,  too,  though  wages,  especially 
in  England,  are  often  in  the  first  instance  advanced 
out  of  capital,  they  are  always  meant  to  be  paid  out 
of  the  gross  returns,  and  in  every  sound  business 
really  are  so.  The  workman  and  employer  make 
their  contract  beforehand,  and  expect  each  other  to 
abide  by  it,  be  the  profit  much  or  little;  the  wages 
depend,  therefore,  directly  on  this  contract,  and  indi- 
rectly on  that  which  is  the  means  of  fulfilling  the 
contract  on  the  master's  side,  the  price  of  the  article 
made.  The  price  of  the  article  is  the  real  wages 
fund  ;  2  and  therefore  the  wages  fund  must  be  as 
flexible  as  market  prices,  and  the  actual  wages  as 
changeable  as  are  the  powers,  habits,  and  desires  of 
\vo  contracting  parties. 


1  See  Mil  'Labour,'  /  -V/,,;.//,  tfy/kweusMay  1869.  Cf. 

Walker  on  The  Wage*  Question,  pp.  140  9tq. 

*  So  in  Quarterly  Review,  Jan.  1824,  p.  315,  Malthns  nay*  profits 
depend  rather  on  the  demand  for  produce  than  on  the  demand  for 
labour. 


272  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WOUK.  [BK.  IT. 

The  theory  of  a  wages  fund  was  formed  from  the 
facts  of  a  perfectly  exceptional  time,  and  on  the 
strength  of  two  truths  misapplied,  the  doctrine  of 
Malthus  (on  Population)  in  its  most  unripe  form, 
and  of  Ricardo  (on  Value)  in  its  most  abstract. 
J.  R.  MacCulloch  seems  to  have  been  the  first  who 
put  the  two  together  to  deduce  a  rigid  law  of  wages. 
"  The  market  rate  of  wages,"  he  says,  "is  exclusively 
dependent  on  the  proportion  which  the  capital  of  the 
country,  or  the  means  of  employing  labour,  bears  to 
the  number  of  labourers.  There  is  plainly,  therefore, 
only  one  way  of  really  improving  the  condition  of 
the  great  majority  of  the  community  or  of  the  labour- 
ing class,  and  that  is  by  increasing  the  ratio  of  capital 
to  population,"  which  the  labourers  for  their  part  can 
only  do  by  diminishing  the  supply  of  labour. 1 

Even  Mrs.  Marcet,  a  docile  Ricardian,  had  put  the 
case  more  carefully.  "  Work  to  be  performed  is  the 
immediate  cause  of  the  demand  for  labour  ;  but,  how- 
ever great  or  important  is  the  work  which  a  man 
may  wish  to  undertake,  the  execution  of  it  must 
always  be  limited  by  the  extent  of  his  capital,  i.  e. 
by  the  funds  he  possesses  for  the  maintenance  or 
payment  of  his  labourers." 2  She  professes  to  be 
expounding  the  received  doctrine  of  her  day.  Mac- 
Culloch's  exposition  is  much  more  rigid.  When  he 
speaks  of  the  "  funds  devoted  to  the  payment  of 

1  Discourse  on  Pol  Econ.,  by  J.  R.  MacCulloch,  pp.  61,  62  (1st  and 
2nd  edd.),  1825. 

2  Conversations  on  Pol.  Econ.,  1817  (1st  and  2nd  edd.),  p.  137.     Mrs. 
Marcet's  memory  is  preserved  for  latter-day  readers  by  Macaulay's  refer- 
ence to  her  in  the  essay  on  Milton. 


CHAP,  ii.]  THE  WORKING   MAX.  273 

wages,"  he  means  "  that  portion  of  the  capital  or 
w« -a  1th  of  a  country  which  the  employers  of  labour 
intend  or  arc  willing  to  lay  out  in  the  purchase  of 
labour."  It  "may  be  larger  at  one  time  than  at 
another.  But,  whatever  be  its  magnitude,  it  obviously 
forms  the  only  source  from  which  any  portion  of  the 
wages  of  labour  can  be  derived.  No  other  fund  is 
in  existence  from  which  the  labourers  as  such  can 
draw  a  single  shilling.  And  hence  it  follows  that 
the  average  rate  of  wages  or  the  share  of  the  national 
capital  appropriated  to  the  employment  of  labour 
falling,  at  an  average,  to  each  labourer,  must  entirely 
depend  on  its  amount  as  compared  with  the  number 
of  those  amongst  whom  it  has  to  be  divided."  l 
Neither  MacCulloch,  nor  James  Mill,  nor  John  Mill 
in  his  early  writings,  nor  apparently  any  of  the  ex- 
pounders of  the  theory,  were  in  the  habit  of  describ- 
ing the  fund  as  "unconditionally"  devoted  to  the 
payment  of  wages,  though  John  Mill,  in  restating 
the  position  after  he  abandoned  it,  gives  us  so  to 
understand.2  Something  like  unconditional  deter- 
mination, however,  is  assumed  in  all  the  reasonings 
of  the  school.  Adam  Smith's  frequent  use  of  the 
words  "  funds  devoted "  or  "  funds  determined "  to 
this  or  that  purpose  may  easily  have  been  misunder- 
stood. Certainly  in  his  pages  they  mean  no  inflexible 
compulsion.  He  says  the  demand  of  those  who  li 
by  wages  can  only  increase  in  proportion  to 

1  Dweouw,  L  c.   Ct  MacC.'s  Pol  Econ.,  Pt.  III.  ch.  ii.  p.  378  (ed.  1843) ; 
Pr.  •  |  Manual  of  Pol  Econ.,  p.  131  (1876). 

•  Jam-*  Mill,  Kim.  (1821),  p.  25  ;  .l..l,n  Mill,  7'rinctpte.,  II.  xi.  §  1. 
Cf.  Fort,  tev.,  1809,  May  ;  Thornton,  Labour,  II.  i.  p.  83. 

T 


•274  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [UK.  n. 

increase  of  the  "  funds  "   which   are  "  destined "  for 
the  payment  of  wages,  these  funds  being  (he  adds) 
either  the  surplus  revenue  of  an  idle  monied   man 
who  will  "  naturally "  use  any  addition  to  them  in 
increasing   his    staff    of    domestic   servants,    or    the 
increased   capital  of  the  capitalist  who  will  just  as 
"  naturally  "  use  them  in  employing  more  workmen.1 
The   word    "  destined "    is    so   far,    with    him,    from 
implying  any  iron    necessity   that   it  means   simply 
"  intended " ;  and  the  intention  is  one  that  can  be 
foiled  or  altered.     He  speaks  of  the  "  funds  destined 
for  the   consumption"  of  the  manufacturing   class,2 
and  of  the  townsfolk's  "  fund  of  subsistence," 3  mean- 
ing simply  their  food ;  he  even  speaks  of  the  funds 
destined  for  the  repair  of  the  high  roads  in  France.4 
Even  the  strong  passage  in  Book  I.  chap,  viii.,  "  the 
demand   for   those   who   live    by   wages   necessarily 
increases  with  the  increase  of  the  revenue  and  stock 
of  every  country,  and  cannot  possibly  increase  with- 
out it,"  stops  considerably  short  of  the  doctrine  of  a 
rigid  wages  fund.     It  is  never  suggested  by  Adam 
Smith  that  the  wages  fund  is  inelastic,  and  that  wages 
could  not  at   any  given  time   have  been  greater  or 
less  than  they  actually  were.     The  doctrine  is  seldom 
traced  further  back  than  to  Malthus ;    and  Malthus 
cannot  be  shown  to  have  held  the  doctrine.     With 
express  reference  to  the  passage  last  cited  from  the 
Wealth  of  Nations,   he  says  that  "  it  will   be  found 
that  the  funds  for  the  maintenance  of  labour  do  not 

1  Wealth  of  Nations,  I.  viii.  p.  31,  2.  2  Ibid.,  IV.  ix.  306,  1. 

3  Ibid.,  IV.  ix.  310,  2.  *  Ibid.,  V.  i.  327,  2. 


CHAP,  ii.]  THE  WORKING  MAN.  275 

necessarily  increase  with  the  increase  of  wealth,  and 
very  rarely  increase  in  proportion  to  it,  and  that 
the  condition  of  the  lower  classes  of  society  does 
not  depend  exclusively  upon  the  increase  of  the  funds 
for  the  maintenance  of  labour  or  the  power  of  sup- 
porting a  greater  number  of  labourers  "  (Essay,  7th  ed., 
III.  xiii.  363).  The  condition  of  the  working  classes 
depended,  he  thought,  partly  on  the  rate  at  which  the 
"  funds  for  the  maintenance  of  labour," l  or,  as  he 
expressed  it  at  first,  "  the  resources  of  the  country  " 2 
and  the  demand  for  labour  are  increasing,  and  partly 
on  the  "  habits  of  the  people."  Among  their  habits 
we  should  need  to  put  their  education  and  their 
power  of  union  among  themselves,  and  consequent 
strength  in  a  struggle  with  the  masters,  to  obtain 
or  to  raise  the  market  rate  of  wages.  From  Ricardo 
he  differed  on  the  subject  of  wages  very  much  as 
on  the  subject  of  value.  Ricardo  looked  at  cost 
price  as  the  natural  value  of  an  article,  and  mere 
subsistence  aa  the  natural  wages  of  labour.  Malthas 
could  do  neither. 

The  issues  between  the  two  economists  are  nowhere 
so  well  or  so  calmly  stated  as  in  a  paper  written  by 
Malthus  (a  few  months  after  Ricardo's  death)  in  the 
^//A ////  /,Vr//w,8  where  he  deals  with  MacCulloch's 
treatise  on  Political  Economy.'  In  that  article  Malthus 
ITU  fosses  to  regard  the  political  economy  of  Ricardo, 

1  Pol.  JEfcon.,  ed.  1836,  ch.  iv.  sect  ii.  p.  224. 

*  Ibid.  ed.  1820,  ch.  iv.  p.  248. 

»  Quarterly  Review,  Jan.  1824.    Cf.  below,' p.  288. 

«  Supplement  to  Encyclopedia  Britannica.    Cf.  above,  p.  71. 

T    1 


276  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  n. 

James  Mill,  and  most  of  the  economical  writers  in  the 
Ehicydopadia,  as  a  new  and  wrong  departure.  It  is 
said  to  have  been  regarded  by  the  writer  as  one  of  the 
best  economical  papers  he  ever  wrote  ;T  and,  among 
other  virtues,  it  has  the  merit  of  perfect  courtesy  and 
respect  towards  the  persons  criticized.  Their  system, 
he  says,2  is  remarkably  like  that  of  the  French 
economists.  They  "  were  equally  men  of  the  most 
unquestionable  genius,  of  the  highest  honour  and 
integrity,  and  of  the  most  simple,  modest,  and  amiable 
manners.  Their  systems  were  equally  distinguished 
for  their  discordance  with  common  notions,  the 
apparent  closeness  of  their  reasonings,  and  the  mathe- 
matical precision  of  their  calculations  and  conclusions 
founded  on  their  assumed  data.  These  qualities  in 
the  systems  and  their  founders,  together  with  the 
desire  so  often  felt  by  readers  of  moderate  abilities 
of  being  thought  to  understand  what  is  considered  by 
competent  judges  as  difficult,  increased  the  number 
of  their  devoted  followers  in  such  a  degree,  that  in 
France  it  included  almost  all  the  able  men  who  were 
inclined  to  attend  to  such  subjects,  and  in  England  a 
very  large  proportion  of  them. 

"  The  specific  error  of  the  French  economists  was 
the  having  taken  so  confined  a  view  of  wealth  and  its 
sources  as  not  to  include  the  results  of  manufacturing 
and  mercantile  industry. 

"  The  specific  error  of  the  new  school  in  England  is 
the  having  taken  so  confined  a  view  of  value  as  not  to 

1  Einpson  in  Edin.  Rev.,  Jan.  1837,  p.  496. 
3  Quart.  Bev.,  Jan.  1824  (no.  lx.),  pp.  333-4. 


CHAP,  ii.]  THE   WORKING   MAX.  177 

include  the  results  of  demand  and  supply,  and  of  the 
relative  abundance  and  competition  of  capital. 

"  Facts  and  experience  have,  in  the  course  of  some 
years,  gradually  converted  the  economists  of  France 
from  the  erroneous  and  inapplicable  theory  of  Quesnay 
to  the  juster  and  more  practical  theory  of  Adam 
Smith ;  and,  as  we  are  fuDy  convinced  that  an  error 
equally  fundamental  and  important  is  involved  in  the 
system  of  the  new  school  in  England  as  in  that  of  the 
French  economists,  we  cannot  but  hope  arid  expect 
that  similar  causes  will,  in  time,  produce  in  our  own 
country  similar  effects  in  the  correction  of  error  and 
the  establishment  of  truth." 

The  new  school  has,  according  to  Malthus,  three 
main  principles.  The  first  is,  that  what  determines 
value  is  the  quantity  of  labour  that  a  thing  costs 
to  make, — the  second,  that  supply  and  demand  do 
not  as  a  rule  affect  values, — and  the  third,  that 
fertility  of  soil  and  not  competition  regulates  tho 
rate  of  profits.  The  new  school  thinks  that  profits 
enter  so  little  into  the  price  of  an  article  that  they 
may  "be  neglected  altogether  in  the  computation  of 
the  causes  of  value.  But  (says  Malthus)  the  value 
of  a  stone  wall  would  be  due,  nearly  all  of  it,  to 
labour,  and  the  value  of  a  cask  of  old  wine  kept  for 
twenty  or  thirty  years  would  be  largely  due  to 
profits.  £50  worth  of  stone  wall  would  have  much 
more  labour  "  worked  up  in  it"  than  £50  worth  of 
old  wine.  It  is  not  sufficient  to  answer  that  profits 
are  simply  accumulated  wages.  As  well  say  that 
five  is  another  name  for  four.  Ricardo  himself 


278  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WOlUv.  [UK.  ir. 

introduced  many  qualifications  into  his  own  statement 
that  value  is  due  to  labour.  The  principle  (he 
confessed)  was  modified  by  the  use  of  machinery 
and  by  the  unequal  durability  of  capital.1 

Malthus  admits  the  truth  of  Ricardo's  dogma  that 
profits  and  wages  can  only  increase  at  each  other's 
expense,  and  he  even  applies  this  principle  of 
Ricardo's  in  a  new  way  to  the  facts  of  the  commer- 
cial depression  that  had  prevailed  since  the  peace.2 
It  was  universally  allowed  there  had  been  a  less 
demand  for  labour  and  a  great  fall  in  wages,  but, 
it  was  also  allowed,  a  much  greater  fall  in  profits ; 
so  that  wages  while  lower  in  gross  amount  bore  a 
higher  proportion  to  profits  than  before.  The  reason 
was  that,  while  the  competition  of  labourers  was 
great,  the  competition  of  capitalists  with  capitalists 
was  still  greater.  The  result  was  a  universal  fall  of 
prices ;  the  wages,  though  relatively  greater,  were 
absolutely  less  in  amount,  and  the  demand  for  labour 
would  have  been  greater  if  prices  had  risen  and  the 
capitalist  had  got  greater  returns  to  his  capital. 
Malthus  would  not  go  farther  than  this,  and  the 
Ricardian  doctrine  needs  to  be  otherwise  applied  to 
yield  the  doctrine  of  a  wages  fund.  It  was  applied 
in  some  such  way  as  follows : — Competition  drives 
prices  down  to  the  cost  of  production  ;  this  means 
that  at  any  given  time  the  sum  total  of  profits  and 
wages  cannot  be  more  than  they  actually  are,  and 

1  Ricardo,  Pol.  Econ.  and  Tax.,  ch.  i.  sections  iv.,  v.  ;   Works,  pp.  20, 
25.     Cf.  Malthus,  Pol.  Econ.,  1820,  p.  104,  and  the  whole  of  section  iii. 
pp.  72  seq.  ' 

2  Quart.  Rev.,  1.  c.  p.  324  ;  cf.  p.  315.     Cf.  above. 


CHAP.  IL]  THE   WORKING    MAX.  279 

both  are  kept  down  by  competition  to  their  mini- 
mum ;  the  masters  could  not  give  higher  wages 
without  cutting  down  their  profits,  the  men  could 
not  get  less  wages  without  either  starving  or  being 
driven  to  seek  other  employments.  Malthus  does 
not  so  apply  his  doctrines.  To  him,  what  fixes  the 
sum  total  of  wages  and  profits  is  not  the  cost  of 
production,  but  the  demand  for  the  thing  produced  ; 
not  the  labour  spent  on  a  thing,  but  the  labour  that 
others  are  willing  to  give  for  it ;  and  the  cause  of 
value  is  not  cost,  but  demand  acting  with  supply. 

rdo,  who  prefers  to  confine  his  theories  to  natural 
value,  allows  that  the  state  of  the  demand  and  supply 

s  market  value  above  or  depresses  it  below  cost 
price ;  and  he  does  not  see  how  seriously  his  own 
qualifications1  impair  the  truth  of  his  theory  of 
value  even  when  the  value  is  "  natural." 2  It  is  true, 
on  the  other  hand,  that  the  supply  at  any  given  time 
is  a  supply  that  will  not  be  kept  up  unless  the  cost 
price  be  paid  back.  The  cost  price  would  certainly 
be  the  minimum  below  which  prices  could  not  ]><  T- 
manenlly  pass.  But  to  Ricardo  the  cost  in  labour  is 
the  formal  as  well  as  the  material  cause  of  a  value ; 
to  Malthus  it  is  only  the  material,  and  only  part  of 
that,  a  mere  sine  qua  nnn,  while  the  efficient  is  the 
«1-  inand,  and  the  final  is  tin-  consumption  of  the  article 
1>\  its  last  buyer  or  user. 
The  thinl  l.-.i-ling  tenet  of  the  new  school,  says 

1   r»l.  Scan,  and  Tax.,  ch.  L  sections  iv.  and  v. 
*  Any  Riven  value,  it  might  be  added,  is  influenced  by  custom  as  well 
03  competition. 


280  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  n. 


,  is  that  the  rate  of  profits  in  a  country 
depends  on  the  fertility  of  the  soil  there,  and  not, 
as  Adam  Smith  thought,  on  the  competition  of 
capital  with  capital  for  employment.  Against  them 
Multhus  maintains  that  there  is  no  necessary  (though 
there  is  a  frequent)  connection  between  the  pro- 
ductiveness of  industry  and  the  rate  of  profits, 
still  less  between  the  latter  and  the  productiveness 
of  any  one  single  industry,  such  as  agriculture. 
Profits  depend  on  the  proportion  of  the  whole  pro- 
duce which  "goes  to  replace  the  advances  of  the 
capitalist  "  ;  but  this  proportion  may  remain  the 
same  when  the  productiveness  of  industry  is  very 
various.  In  the  previous  eight  or  nine  years,  say 
from  1815  to  1824,  there  had  certainly  been  no 
costliness  in  production.  Corn  had  been  cheap,  and 
farmers'  losses  had  led  to  the  discontinuance  of 
high  farming,  and  especially  of  the  forced  cultivation 
of  the  dear  years.  The  production,  therefore,  was  at 
the  cost  of  much  less  labour.  But  profits,  instead  of 
higher,  were  much  lower.  Abundance  of  produce 
and  competition  of  producers  had  caused  a  fall  in 
the  value  of  produce,  so  that  it  was  possible  for 
the  labourer  to  receive  a  greater  share  of  what  he 
made,  though  his  labour  had  not  become  more  pro- 
ductive. Ricardo  does  not  take  sufficient  account 
of  the  influence  of  prices,  both  on  wages  and  on 
profits. 

There   had   in   fact    been   over-production   and   a 
general   glut.      James   Mill's    Elements    of   Political 


CHAP,  ii.]  THE  WORKING  MAX.  281 

Economy^  contain  a  careful  demonstration  that 
general  gluts  are  impossible.  It  was  emphatically 
a  controversial  passage,  and  in  the  pages  of  John 
Mill  it  has  the  look  of  an  anachronism.  All  de- 
pended on  the  meaning  of  "general."  If  it  meant 
universal,  the  case  was  impossible.  It  is  incredible 
that  all  without  exception  should  have  something  to 
sell  and  no  wish  to  buy.  To  offer  anything  for 
sale  must  of  itself  imply  a  desire  to  buy  something 
else  with  it,  either  directly  or  by  means  of  money. 
Even  a  very  near  approach  to  universality  is  not  easy 
to  understand ;  and  it  would  mean  simply  that  a  bad 
organization  of  the  world's  markets  had  prevented 
buyers  and  sellers  from  reaching  each  other,  and  pre- 
vented goods  from  going  where  they  are  wanted,  at 
the  time  when  they  are  wanted ;  it  would  mean  that 
not  the  malady  but  the  scale  and  degree  of  it  had 
passed  belief. 

1  1821,  p.  186,  ch.  iv.  sect,  iii     "That  consumption  is  coext. 
with  production." 

.,  III.  xiv.     "  Of  excess  of  supply."    Cf.  I.  v.  §  3,  p.  42. 


282  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 


CHAPTER  III. 

GENERAL    GLUTS. 

French  War  and  English  Trade — English  Currency — Bullion  Committee 
— Restriction  not  the  only  Cause  of  High  Prices — Ricardo  on 
Currency — Tooke  on  Prices — Say  on  Gluts — English  Trade  from 
1824 — High  and  Low  Wages — Some  Fallacies  of  Malthus. 

THE  discussion  on  General  Gluts  was  simply  a  phase 
of  the  discussions  on  Value ;  and  the  prominence  of 
such  discussions  in  the  political  economy  of  sixty 
years  ago  was  largely  due  to  the  peculiar  effects  on 
trade  and  prices  of  a  twenty  years'  war  with  France. 
The  theories  of  economists  were  becoming  most 
abstract  precisely  at  the  time  when  the  justest  general- 
izations were  most  severely  tested  by  abnormal  con- 
ditions. Even  if  the  Industrial  Revolution  heralded 
by  the  Wealth  of  Nations  had  been  allowed  a  free 
course,  the  new  conditions  of  manufacture  would  have 
raised  new  economical  questions ;  and  they  could  not 
have  failed  to  turn,  to  some  extent,  on  the  subject 
of  value,  which  Adam  Smith  had  by  no  means  ex- 
hausted. But  there  was  no  free  course.  War  was 
declared  against  England  by  France  in  1793.  In 
the  same  year  Pitt  was  forced  to  offer  English  mer- 
, chants  a  loan  of  public  money,  to  cure  a  financial  crisis. 
Then  followed,  under  the  long  Tory  supremacy,  heavy 


CHAP,  in.]  GENERAL  GLUTS.  283 

taxes,  repressive  laws,  and  something  more  nearly 
approaching  a  war  of  classes  than  anything  known 
in  England  before  or  since. 

The  effects  of  the  first  ten  years  of  the  French 
war  (1793  to  1802)  were  to  all  appearance  rather  - 
good  than  bad.  Britain  itself,  unlike  the  other 
belligerent  countries,  was  always  intact,  and  the 
labours  of  British  manufacturers  could  go  on  as  if 
nothing  unusual  was  happening  on  the  Continent. 
Our  command  of  the  sea,  to  say  nothing  of  the 
conquest  of  new  countries,  gave  us  trade  which 
others  lost,  and  made  amends  for  the  annulment  of 
the  French  treaty  of  commerce,  and  the  loss  of  the 
Dutch  trade.  In  18 06  the  situation  became  less 
pleasant.  The  Berlin  and  Milan  decrees  excluding 
us  from  almost  every  country  in  Europe,  the  retali- 
atory Orders  in  Council  and  consequent  alienation  of 
America  did  real  <lamage  to  English  commerce.  The 
very  expectations  they  caused  of  a  probable  scarcity 
of  particular  goods  sent  up  prices ;  and,  with  the 
.scarcity,  contributed  to  an  acute  disturbance  of 
trade,  which  lasted  about  five  years  for  the  Continent 
and  three  years  more  for  America  (1807-12,  1S07- 
15).  New  markets  were  opened  to  us  in  South 
America  ;  and  the  pent-up  commercial  enterprise  of 
our  countrymen  vented  itself  in  that  direction,  with 
wild  disregard  of  the  needs  of  consumers  in  that 
quarter.1  The  same  happened,  with  more  reason,  in 
1814  and  1815.  When  peace  was  restored,  it  was 
thought  that  the  whole  Continent  must  be  eager  to 

1  A  cargo  of  skates  was  sent  to  Rio  Janeiro  in  1808. 


284  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

have  our  goods,  after  being  so  long  without  them  ; 
and  we  sent  them  lavishly  everywhere  without  wait- 
ing for  orders.  Unhappily  the  rest  of  Europe  was 
exhausted  by  the  war,  which  had  lessened  their 
production ;  and  such  products  as  they  could  offer 
us  in  exchange  for  our  manufactures  we  seldom  took 
without  taxing.  The  very  food  that  we  most  wanted 
from  them  we  were  careful  to  keep  out  till  the  last 
moment.1  Anything  more  unlike  the  "  simple  system 
of  natural  liberty "  could  not  be  conceived ;  and  the 
'  result  certainly  seemed  to  be  an  over-production  on 
our  part ; — it  was  at  any  rate  a  reign  of  low  prices 
and  deep  commercial  depression.  This  was  not  all. 
Since  1797  we  had  had  a  paper  currency  of  uncertain 
value.  In  that  year  the  Bank  of  England,  whose 
department  of  issue  was  not  then  separated  from  its 
department  of  banking,  gave  advances  to  Government, 
in  return  for  which  it  was  relieved  of  immediate 
obligation  to  pay  gold  to  the  holders  of  its  notes. 
As  long  as  the  issues  were  moderate,  the  notes  kept 
their  value;, but  this  was  a  time  when  economical 
substitutes  for  the  currency,  cheques  and  bills  and 
County  notes,  were  lessening  the  proportion  of  the 
Bank's  notes  to  the  total  transactions  of  trade ;  and 
the  Bank's  power  of  calculating  the  public  need  with- 
out the  natural  safety-valve  of  convertibility  became 
more  and  more  fallible;  the  circulation  soon  con- 
gained  superfluous  paper,  which  dragged  down  the 

1  The  intention  of  the  new  Corn  Law  of  1815  was  to  keep  out  all 
foreign  grain  till  the  home  price  should  reach  80s.  a  quarter,  or  the 
loaf  Is.  See  above,  p.  221. 


CHAP,  in.]  GENERAL  GLUTS.  285 

whole  currency.  In  these  circumstances,  discussions  on 
currency  gained  an  interest  they  could  never  have 
hud  in  the  abstract ;  and  they  led  to  measures  of  the 
most  practical  and  permanent  usefulness.  Ricardo's 
tract  The  High  Price  of  Gold  Bullion  a  Proof  of 
the  Depreciation  of  Bank-Notes  (1809)  prepared  the 
way  for  the  Bullion  Committee  of  the  House  of 
C.'inmons  (1810),  and  through  them  for  our  own 
r.ank  Charter  Act  (1844).  Malthus  played  a  more 
quiet  part.  His  chief  writings  on  the  subject  of  the 
currency  were  two  magazine  articles,  one  in  the 
liin\f//i  lirriew  of  February  181 1,1  and  another 
in  the  Quarterly  Review  of  April  1823. 

The  first  treats  of  The  Depreciation  of  Paper  Cur- 
/,  and  is  a  review  of  pamphlets  by  the  leading 
advocates  and  assailants  of  the  principles  of  the 
Bullion  Committee's  Report.  The  Committee  had 
inquired  into  three  subjects  :  the  high  price  of  gold 
bullion,. the  state  of  the  currency,  and  the  state 
of  the  foreign  Exchanges.  As  to  the  first,  they 
found  that,  while  an  ounce  of  standard  gold  w;i> 
converted  at  the  Mint  into  £3  \7s.  Ityd.  (which 
sum  was  therefore  the  Mint  price  of  gold  bullion), 

1  The  article  on  the  Bullion  question,  in  August  of  the  same  year,  might 

,  if  it  was  ii"i  Francis  Homer's.     Cf.  Homer's  Ltfe,  vol.  i.  ch.  vi., 

dates  April  and  Sept.  1805, from  which  it  appears  that  Homer  was  working 

l:.ir«l  at  tin-  ijiii-iii.n  and  meant  to  write  on  it,  ns  he  mi-lit  have  done 

in  1H  1,  tiv-h  fr..in  his  i-xju-ri-nc*-  on  theliulliun  ('onuuittoe.     As 

t<>  th«-  Fi-l.nmry  jirti.-h-,  the  authorship  is  shown  partly  by  internal 

/.//V.  v..l.  ii.  p.  68  (Jan.  1811) :  "I  received 

Malthu-'  V  \]  mid  h.  i  it   t..  him 

with  >iirh  i  t  .  in.-  in  p. -ru-invj  it,"  &c.     MacCulh>«h 

di.l  not  Infill  t«.  wn:  m.  jRet>.  till  1818. 

See  Note*  and  Qwriet,  5th  Oct,  1878. 


286  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

the  said  ounce  could  not  in  the  years  1806-8  be 
bought  by  the  Mint  for  less  than  £4  in  bank-notes, 
or  in  1809  for  less  than  £4  10s.  The  market  price 
had  risen  to  that  extent  above  the  Mint  price,  of 
gold  bullion.  As  to  the  second,  they  found  that 
guineas  had  gone  out  of  circulation,  and  were  practi- 
cally replaced  by  small  notes  between  £1  and  £5. 
Finally,  as  to  the  third,  they  found  that  from  the  end 
of  1808  the  Exchanges  had  become  more  and  more 
unfavourable  to  England,  till  in  1809-10  they  were 
with  Hamburg  nine,  with  Amsterdam  seven,  with 
Paris  more  than  fourteen  per  cent,  below  par.  After 
examination  of  witnesses  and  consideration  of  their 
evidence,  the  Committee  resolved  "  that  there  is  at 
present  an  excess  in  the  paper  circulation  of  this 
country,  of  which  the  most  unequivocal  symptom  is 
the  very  high  price  of  bullion,  and  next  to  that  the 
low  state  of  the  Continental  Exchanges ;  that  this 
excess  is  to  be  ascribed  to  the  want  of  a  sufficient 
check  and  control  in  the  issues  of  paper  from  the 
Bank  of  England,  and  originally  to  the  suspension  of 
cash  payments,  which  removed  the  natural  and  true 
control."  The  effects  had  been  very  serious,  especially 
on  the  wages  of  common  country  labour  (Report, 
p.  73) ;  and  the  Committee  recommend  a  speedy 
return  to  the  principle  of  cash  payments,  whether 
the  nation  be  at  peace  or  war,  though  caution 
demands  that  this  take  place  gradually,  in  the  space 
of  two  years.  It  took  place,  not  in  two  years,  but  in 
more  than  ten,  namely  on  1st  May  1821,1  Parliament 

1  For  the  history  of  the  currency  in  the  interval  see  Miss  Martineau's 


CHAP,  in.]  GENERAL  GLUTS.  287 

not  agreeing  to  the  change  till  1819.1  Cobbett's 
venture  (to  be  broiled  on  a  gridiron  when  the  Bank 
paid  in  gold)  seemed  a  perfectly  safe  one. 

Both  Malthus  and  Ricardo  agreed  with  the  Report 
of  the  Bullion  Committee.  Ricardo  indeed  is  in  a 
sense  the  father  of  it.  Malthus  (in  the  Edin.  Review) 
speaks  strongly  of  the  bad  policy  and  injustice  of 
continuing  the  suspension,  and  he  does  not  spare  the 
Bank  of  England  and  its  mischievous  monopoly,2  or 
the  "  practical  men  "  and  their  narrow  views.3  Yet 
he  finds  fault  with  Ricardo  here  as  elsewhere  for 
making  his  statements  too  absolute.  Malthus'  fault 
is  in  the  contrary  direction  ;  he  qualifies  too  much.4  N 
He  thinks  that  Ricardo  has  gone  too  far  in  attributing 
all  the  movements  of  the  Exchanges  to  excessive  or 
defective  currency ;  a  purely  commercial  excess  of 
imports  over  exports  might,  he  thinks,  cause  thev 
same  effects,  and  even  in  the  high  price  of  bullion  it 
was  the  commercial  difficulty  that  began  what  the 
depreciation  of  currency  continued.  Ricardo,  who 
replies  in  a  long  appendix,6  answers,  in  substance, 
that  in  any  and  every  case  money  goes  from  where 
it  is  cheaper  to  where  it  is  dearer,  and  therefore  from 

Jntrod.  to  Hist,  of  Peace,  Bk.  II.  ch.  iii.  ;  Hist,  of  the  Peace,  Bk.  I.  rh.  iii. 
and  ch.  xv.  ;  Cobbett's  Paper  v.  Gold;  Macleod's  Banking,  vol.  ii.,  end 
of  ch.  ix.  pp.  174 — 221,  much  the  completest  account. 

1  Peel  changed  his  views  then  on  Currency,  as  he  did  later  on 
C;itli.i!i«-  Kmaii'-ij.ation  and  the  Corn  Laws. 

*  p.  370.    He  speaks  approvingly  of  the  American  free  trade  in 
l.aiikiir.'  in  a  way  that  would  hav«  pleased  Cobden. 

>  p.  .",71. 

4   /     /   11   :::•:••    ;i;  lain- <>f  this  even  in  f»o  clear  a  paper  as  that  on 
iliam.     See  Homer's  Life,  vol.  i.  j.p.  436-7  (tub  dato  1808). 

*  Works  (ed.  MacC.),  pp.  291—296. 


288  MALTHUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [HK.  11. 

where  the  currency  has  lost  value  to  where  it  has 
gained  it.  But  this  hardly  meets  the  contention  of 
Multhus,  that  the  efficient  cause,  though  it  affects  the 
currency,  is  not  in  all  cases  the  currency  itself,  and 
in  the  case  of  an  unequal  balance  of  trade,  however 
temporary,  the  cause  of  the  exportation  of  the  money 
is  rather  the  superfluity  of  the  goods  in  the  foreign 
country  than  the  deficiency  of  the  money  there  ; — it 
would  be  otherwise  when  the  first  cause  was  in  the 
currency  itself.  The  rest  of  the  article  contains  little 
that  is  new  to  readers  of  the  Political  Economy,  and 
the  reference  to  a  possible  over-production  is  chiefly 
valuable  as  a  sign  of  the  authorship,  and  as  showing 
that  the  views  of  the  author  were  becoming  fixed. 
The  personal  acquaintance  of  Malthus  with  Ricardo 
dates  probably  from  the  appearance  of  this  article;1  and 
they  continued  to  discuss  and  correspond,  in  perfect 
friendship,  till  the  death  of  Ricardo  in  Sept.  1823.2 

His  friendship  with  the  Edinburgh  Reviewers 
remained  unbroken ;  and,  when  he  wrote  in  the 
Quarterly  Review,  it  was  the  Review  not  the  writer 
that  had  changed.  On  finance,  indeed,  the  Quarterly 
Review  had  been  saved  from  unsoundness  by  Canning's 
influence,3  and  an  article  on  Tooke's  Prices  need  have 
no  politics. 

There  can  be  little  doubt  that  Thomas  Tooke 4  was 
right  in  holding  the  difference  between  the  Mint 

i  Ricardo,  Works  (MacC.),  p.  xxi.  *  Cf.  below,  Bk.  V. 

3  Homer's  Life,  vol.  ii.  p.  68  (Jan.  1811). 

4  Thoughts  and   Details  on  High  and  Low  Prices  during  the  Last 
Thirty  Years,  1793—1823.   The  later  ed.  of  1838  in  three  vols.  is  more 
valuable. 


CHAP,  in.]  GENERAL  GLUTS.  289 

price  anJ  the  market  price  of  gold  bullion  to  be  the 
full  measure  of  the  effect  of  this  depreciation  upon 
prices,  the  rest  of  the  increase  being  due  to  great 
demand  with  small  supply,  being  as  a  rule  much 
exaggerated  and  in  its  worst  forms  purely  local.  He 
pointed  out  that  there  was,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  no 
coincidence  between  the  Bank's  contraction  or  exten- 
sion of  its  issues  and  the  fall  or  rise  of  prices  in  the 
market  outside.  Prices  rose,  for  example,  in  1795 
and  1796,  when  the  Bank's  circulation  had  been  not 
extended  but  contracted  to  meet  the  commercial 
crisis;  and  in  1798,  when  the  Bank's  issues  were 
larger,  prices  actually  fell  to  what  they  had  been  in 
1793.  Moreover,  when  some  prices  went  up,  others 
went  down.  When  the  prices  of  provisions  went 
up  in  1799  and  1800,  the  prices  of  colonial  wares 
went  down.  The  ruling  cause  (Tooke  argues)  was  not 
the  issue  of  many  or  few  bank-notes,  but  scarcity 
and  plenty,  especially  the  plenty  of  a  good  harvest 
and  the  scarcity  of  a  bad  one.  Wages  in  the  same 
way  flu. mated  rather  by  the  harvests  than  by  the 
currency,  but  not  by  either  so  much  as  by  the 
changes  in  general  trade  ;  it  would  not  be  true  to 
say  that  the  high  or  low  prices  produced  high  or 
low  wages,  but  what  produced  the  one  produced  the 
nth.-r.  The  recoil  of  the  speculation  that  followed 
the  Peace  brought  down  both  together  ;  there  was 
a  glut  not  only  of  goods  but  of  hands;  and  th«  n> 
were  the  discarded  men  of  the  army  to  swell  the 
numbers  of  tin;  uiu-mployed.  The  Luddite  outbi 

list   machines,    as   taking   work   uway    from    the 


290  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

hands,  had  made  a  notable  beginning  in  1812  during 
the  war  ;  in  1816,  the  year  after  the  Peace,  they  began 
again  with  greater  violence.  The  discussions  of  Say 
and  Malthus  on  Over-production,  and  the  reasonings 
in  Eicardo  (1817)  and  James  Mill  (1821)  on  Wages 
and  the  Wages  Fund,  are  as  truly  commentaries  on 
these  events  as  the  Letter  of  Cobbett  to  the  Luddites l 
or  the  volumes  of  Tooke  on  Prices. 

Malthus  has  adroitly  used  the  work  of  Tooke  to 
support  his  own  economical  positions.  In  a  review  in 
the  Quarterly  for  April  1823  2  (pages  214  seq.)  he 
tries  to  show  that  Mr.  Tooke's  conclusions  as  to  the 
high  and  low  prices  of  the  past  thirty  years  prove  the 
following  general  statements  : — First,  that  values  and 
therefore  prices  depend  on  the  supply  compared  with 
the  demand,  and  are  only  affected  by  the  labour  re- 
quired to  produce  goods  (i.  e.  by  what  Kicardo  counts 
the  main  cause  of  value)  so  far  as  this  labour  is  the 
main  condition  of  their  supply ;  second,  that  the 
supply  and  demand  are  chiefly  affected  by  the  seasons, 
and,  of  the  other  causes,  war  may  limit  the  supply  but 
can  hardly  cause  a  demand  ;  third,  that  when  demand 
outruns  supply  trade  is  brisk,  when  supply  outruns 
demand  trade  is  dull ;  and  that,  finally,  a  long-con- 
tinued deficiency  or  a  long-continued  excess  of  this 
kind  brings  with  it  a  fall  or  a  rise  in  the  value  of  the 
precious  metals.3  Malthus,  however,  goes  further  than 

1  Political  Register,  30th  Nov.,  1816. 

2  Internal  evidence,  e.  g.  p.  237  of  the  Quarterly,  compared  with  p.  65 
of  Measure  of  Value,  would  show  his  authorship,  and  the  article  is 
ascribed  to  him  by  Tooke,  Prices,  ed.  1838,  vol.  i.  p.  21. 

3  L  c.  pp.  215-16. 


CHAP,  in.]  GENERAL   GLUTS.  291 

Tooke  with  the  Bullion  Committee.  Though  on  the 
bullion  question  the  opposing  parties,  Bosanquet  and 
Ricardo,  seemed  to  him  to  be  devoted  to  a  precon- 
ceived theory,1  the  Report  itself  was  "  more  free  from 
this  error  of  preconception  than  any  work  that  had 
appeared  on  the  subject;"2  and  he  agreed  with  it  that 
there  had  been  a  greater  rise  of  prices  and  of  wages 
at  the  end  of  the  period  of  restriction,  than  could  be 
explained  by  the  bad  seasons,  and  demand  for  men, 
and  the  difference  between  paper  and  gold.  He  is 
old-fashioned  enough  to  think  that  even  with  conver- 
tibility there  might  be  over-issue  and  depreciation, 
and  speculation  on  a  basis  of  paper.  His  reasoning 
on  this  point  is  hardly  sound.  It  depends  on  a 
misapplication  of  the  axiom  that,  in  the  case  of 
necessaries,  a  very  small  deficiency  in  the  supply  will 
cause  a  very  great  increase  in  the  price, — e.  g.  that 
wheat  may  rise  from  100  to  200  per  cent,  when  the 
deficiency  of  the  crops  is  not  more  than  15  or  30.3 
The  profits  of  English  farmers  between  1793  and 
1815  must  therefore  have  been  enormous ;  and 
Mai  thus,  though  he  loves  agriculture  above  manu- 
facture, has  taken  account  of  these  high  gains  of 
individuals  in  judging  the  cause  of  the  Agricultural 
Interest  against  the  public.4  But  in  connection  with 
currency  he  actually  speaks  as  if  those  gains  were 


1  Bosanquet,  Practical  Observations  on  the  Report  of  the  Bu'lion 
Committee  (1810)  ;  Ricardo,  The  High  Price  of  Bullion  a  Proof  of  the 
Depreciation  of  Bank- Notes  (1809),  and  his  Reply  to  Bosanquet  (1811). 

*  1.  c.  Pol.  Econ.,  Introd.  (1820),  pp.  6  and  7  n.,  (1836)  p.  5  n.  Cf. 
Tooke,  Prices,  Part  I.  p.  6  (ed.  1823). 

1  Tooke,  Prices,  Part  111.  j>.  91.  *  See  Trad  on  Value,  p.  18. 

U  2 


202  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

a  public  advantage ;  he  does  not  see  they  were  a 
mere  transference  of  public  wealth,  not  an  addition 
to  it.  The  farmer,  he  says,  is  obviously  "  able  to  set 
in  motion  a  much  greater  quantity  of  industry  than 
before,"  at  least  till  wages  have  risen.  "  The  specific 
funds  destined  for  the  maintenance  of  labour,  though 
diminished  in  quantity,  are  by  this  happy  provision  of 
nature  increased  in  their  efficiency ; "  labourers  get 
more  employment,  and  there  is  "  a  burst  of  prosperity 
to  the  producing  classes." 

This  is  a  near  approach  to  a  worse  fallacy  than  the 
Wages  Fund.  The  archaic  reasoning  is  the  more 
unhappy,  because  the  reasoner  proceeds  to  use  it 
in  a  good  cause.  Jean  Baptiste  Say 2  had  taught 
that  all  increased  or  diminished  demand  depended  on 
increased  or  diminished  supply,  and  argued  thence, 
with  James  Mill  and  Ricardo,  the  impossibility  of 
general  or  rather  universal  gluts.  Goods3  being 
always  meant  to  be  exchanged  with  goods,  one  half 
will  furnish  a  market  for  the  other  half;  and  thus,  as 
production  (which  gives  the  means  of  buying)  is  the 
sole  source  of  demand  (so  far  as  demand  is  effective), 
an  excess  in  the  supply  of  one  article  merely  proves  a 
deficiency  in  the  supply  of  another,  and  is  improperly 
called  over-production.  Indeed,  whereas  consumption 
takes  an  article  away  from  the  market,  production 
brings  one  into  it,  and  thereby  increases, pro  tanto,  the 
demand  by  increasing  the  means  of  buying.  James 


1  Quarterly,  April  1823,  p.  230. 

2  Econ.  Pol,  Part  III.  ch.  ii.,  2nd  ed.,  1842  ;  1st  ed.,  1802. 

3  "  Products  "  is  Say's  word,  however. 


CHAP,  in.]  GENERAL  GLUTS.  203 

Mill's  neat  demonstration  of  this  doctrine1  would  ln» 
quite  conclusive  if  we,  first  of  all,  defined  demand 
and  supply  so  as  to  include  each  other,  and,  second, 
supposed  general  to  mean  universal.  The  reply  of 
Multhus  himself  is  that  goods  are  not  always 
exchanged  for  goods,  but  frequently,  perhaps  most 
frequently,  for  labour.  Say  rejoins  that  he  for  his 
part  used  a  term  ("products")  which  includes  both 
goods  and  services,  and  that  the  latter  are  always 
the  real  object  of  an  exchange.2  Malthus  makes  a 
better  point  when  he  accuses  his  opponents  of  treating 
goods  as  if  they  were  mathematical  symbols,  instead 
of  objects  of  human  consumption  owing  their  whole 
character  to  human  wants.3  But  his  case  could  be 
made  convincing  even  on  his  opponents'  premises. 
Division  of  labour,  all  admitted,  is  limited  by  the 
extent  of  the  market ; 4  allow  that  the  most  satis- 
factory cure  for  the  limitation  is  to  widen  the  market, 
not  to  lessen  the  division  of  the  labour — still,  given 
the  limitation  of  the  market,  the  extension  of  the 
division  of  the  labour  will  cause  an  over-production. 
All  that  Malthus  maintained  was  that  this  might 
happen  in  a  great  many  cases  as  well  as  in  a  few; 
Say  went  as  near  as  he  dared  to  the  assertion  that  it 
could  not  happen  at  all. 

1  Elements  (1821),  oh.  iv.  sect.  iii.  pp.  186  seq.     "That  consumption  is 
coexteii-i  v.-.with  urn.luninn."    Mill  taught  thisasearly  as  1808  in  his  tract 
t  Spence)  Commerce  defended. 

1  Lettres  d  M.  Malthus  swr  different*  sujets  cCecon.  pol,  notammcnt  sur 
let  cause*  de  la  stagnation  general*  du  commerce  (1*20),  pp.  2G  seq. 

8  Pol.  Econ.  (1820),  p.  355,  (1830)  p.  316.   Against  Say's  general  pos 
see  Definitions,  p.  5<>  n. 

4   Wealth  of  Nations,  I.  iii. 


294  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [DK.  n. 

The  question  of  a  market,  again,  is  not  a  mere 
question  of  numbers  but  of  wants.  A  carpet  factory, 
for  example,  among  a  people  who  preferred  bare  floors 
would  have  no  market,  whatever  the  numbers  and 
even  the  wealth  of  the  people.  Say  does  not  do  full 
justice  to  Mai  thus  in  this  connection.  He  thinks 
that  the  author  of  the  Essay  on  Population  cannot 
consistently  believe  in  the  possibility  of  a  great 
abundance  of  products  together  with  a  stationary 
number  of  parsimonious  consumers.  But  Malthus 
had  allowed  that  in  one  case,  the  case  of  food,  there 
could  be  no  over-production,1  the  want  in  that  case 
being  constant,  whereas,  curiously  enough,  Eicardo 
thinks  that  food  is  the  one  object  of  which  there 
might  be  a  glut.  "  If  every  man  were  to  forego  the 
use  of  luxuries  and  be  intent  only  on  accumulation,  a 
quantity  of  necessaries  might  be  produced  for  which 
there  could  not  be  any  immediate  consumption.  Of 
commodities  so  limited  in  number  there  might 
undoubtedly  be  a  universal  glut,  and  consequently 
there  might  neither  be  demand  for  an  additional 
quantity  of  such  commodities  nor  profits  on  the 
employment  of  more  capital.  If  men  ceased  to 
consume  they  would  cease  to  produce.  This  ad- 
mission does  not  impugn  the  general  principle/'  for 
there  is  no  likelihood  of  such  a  contingency  as  it 
supposes ; — there  is  a  limit  to  the  desire  of  food, 
but  there  is  no  limit  to  the  desire  of  other  good 

1  See  above,  p.  232.  A  curious  footnote  in  Essay  on  Pop.,  3rd  ed.,  vol.  ii. 
p.  264,  suggested  that  there  might  be  over-production  in  the  case  of  high 
farming  when  its  cost  made  the  farmers  charge  more  than  the  public 
could  bear.  But  this  note  disappeared  afterward* 


CHAP,  in.]  GENERAL  GLUTS.  295 

things.1  The  insatiableness  of  human  desires  is  here 
assumed  by  Ricardo  to  be  always  full-grown,  instead 
of  what  it  is,  in  perhaps  three-fourths  of  the  world, 
an  undeveloped  possibility.  Till  we  know  that  the 
possibility  has  become  actual,  we  cannot  take  for 
granted  that  all  we  produce  will  be  wanted. 
Mai  thus  did  not  enter  with  sympathy  or  even  with 
full  intelligence  into  the  spirit  of  modern  trade.  But 
he  sees  that  large  manufacture,  with  its  complement 
of  speculative  trading,  must  succeed  or  fail  precisely 
as  it  has  judged  rightly  or  judged  wrongly  of  its 
markets,  for  it  no  longer,  like  the  old  English  small 
production,  waits  for  orders — it  anticipates,  woos,  and 
coaxes  them.  He  believes  that  the  awakening  of 
n Kin's  insatiable  wants  will  tend  to  secure  us  against 
Kuth  over-population  and  over-production,  by  creating 
a  high  standard  of  living.  The  taste  for  luxuries, 
whatever  its  positive  advantages,  from  the  educa- 
tional or  artistic  point  of  view,  confers  at  least  this 
economical  benefit.2 

Malthus  gets  a  similar  result  by  applying  to  wages 
his  favourite  idea  of  the  golden  mean.  The  "  funds 
destined  to  pay  wages"  may,  he  says,  be  increased 
either  by  high  prices  or  by  great  production  at  low 
prices, — increased  value  without  increased  quantity, 
<>r  increased  quantity  without  increased  value.  The 
r  is  the  more  secure  way,  but  it  lies  on  the 
road  to  "glut."  The  most  desiral-lc  plan  is  the  union 

,  Pol  Ecoiv.  and  T»  ii.  xxi.  p.  176  (MacCull.'i  cd.). 

Mill  (Element*,  ;  .,  194)  is  more  rigid. 

1  E$$ay,  7th  ed.,  IV.  xui.  473. 


£96  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [DK.  n. 

of  the  two.  "There  is  somewhere  a  happy  mean, 
where,  under  the  actual  resources  of  a  country,  both 
the  increase  of  wealth  and  the  demand  for  labour 
may  be  a  maximum.  A  taste  for  conveniences  and 
comforts  not  only  tends  to  create  a  more  steady 
demand  for  labour  than  a  taste  for  personal  services, 
but  by  cheapening  manufactures  and  the  products  of 
foreign  commerce,  including  many  of  the  necessaries 
of  the  labouring  classes,  it  actually  enlarges  the  limits 
of  the  effectual  demand  for  labour,  and  renders  it 
for  a  longer  time  effective." l  If  any  one  had  urged 
against  this,  in  the  words  of  Mill,  that  a  demand 
for  goods  is  not  a  demand  for  labour,  but  simply 
gives  labour  a  new  direction.  Malthus  would  probably 
have  answered  that  the  new  direction  was  all 
important,  because  the  trade  begun  in  it  might  be  a 
trade  in  goods  more  widely  used,  and  might  therefore 
last  longer  and  more  steadily  than  the  old  trade. 

We  see  that  in  his  views  of  this  subject,  expounded 
tediously  enough,  and  at  unnecessary  length,  Malthus 
had  constant  thought  of  the  relations  of  production 
and  distribution  to  consumption  as  well  as  to  each 
other,  for  the  condition  of  the  people  was  always 
more  important  to  him  than  the  state  of  the  articles 
concerned.  But  he  never  yielded  to  his  feelings  so  far 
as  to  adopt  Sismondi's  reactionary  ideas  on  the  effects 
of  machinery  on  the  workmen.  He  never  wrote  any 

1  Pol.  Econ.  (1836),  ch.  iv.  sect.  iii.  p.  239,  slightly  altered  from  1st 
ed.,  1820,  ch.  iv.  sect.  iii.  p.  266. 

2  Sismondi,  Nouveaux  Principes  de  I'ficon.  Pol,  1819.     See  Malthus, 
Pol  Econ.  (1820),  p.  420,  (1830)  pp.  325  n.,  366  n.     Cf.  on  the  other  hand 
Essay,  III.  xiii.  372-3  and  n. 


CHAP,  in.]  GENERAL   GLUTS.  297 

description  of  the  evils  of  division  of  labour  at  all  so 
strong  as  Adam  Smith's.1  He  goes  little  farther  than 
Ricardo,  who  says  in  a  well-known  passage  : — "  The 
same  cause  which  may  increase  the  nett  revenue  of 
the  country  may  at  the  same  time  render  the  popula- 
tion redundant  and  deteriorate  the  condition  of  the 
labourer,"  for  all  the  increase  may  possibly  be  devoted 
to  fixed  and  not  circulating  capital,  to  machinery  and 
buildings  instead  of  wages.2  Ricardo's  admission,  that 
he  was  wrong  in  not  recognizing  this  sooner,  makes 
us  wonder  (as  men  were  even  then  doing  in  Germany 
over  similar  confessions  of  their  philosophers)  whether 
his  demonstrations  are  more  accurate  than  ordinary 
reasonings.  His  brother  economists  never  claimed 
infallibility.  Adam  Smith  gave  up  his  defence  of 
Usury  Laws.3  Mai  thus  amended  his  first  views  on 
population,  to  say  nothing  of  the  measure  of  value.4 
Mill  gave  up  the  Wages  Fund.  It  was  only  the 
minor  economists  who  proudly  remained  at  the  end 
where  they  were  at  the  beginning.  James  Mill  re- 
fused to  follow  Ricardo  in  allowing  that  food  could 
be  over-produced,  and  MacCulloch  refused  to  go  with 
hi  in  in  the  admission  above  quoted,  that  increase  of 
wealth  might  go  to  fixed  capital  instead  of  wages.6 

1  Wealth  of  Nations,  V.  i.  art.  ii.  pp.  350—353  (ed.  MncC.).     II 
outrivjillrd  li\-  I'Vr^uson,  Civil  Society,  parts  iv.  and  v.  (ed.  1773). 

«  3rd  ed,  -  I    Pol.  EC.  and  Tax.  (1821),  ch.  xxxi.  pp.  468-9,  ed.  Mac- 
Cull  ,  pp.  235-6.     Cf.  below  (Critics).     It  is  the  po*iti..n  of  U 

8  If  we  believe  Bowring,  Life  of  Bentham  (ed.  1843),  p. 

4  "Suppi'-in:  tli.it    his  opinions  have  not  altered  within    the  last 
twelve  in  i;ili  ." — De  Quincr.y,  vol.  iv.  p.  231. 

•James  Mill.   /•;/,»„„/  l:»i.     ICtcCttlL,   /'../.   /•>..  p.  207. 

Cf.  the  tract  Mordccai  MuUion  (1826). 


298  MALTHUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [BK.  n. 

Orthodox  economy  became  most  abstract  when  on  the 
death  of  Ricardo  in  1823  its  doctrines  passed  into  the 
hands  of  the  Minor  Prophets. 

In  the  last  ten  years  of  his  life  Malthus  made 
no  serious  change  in  his  economical  views,  and 
approached  no  nearer  to  the  Ricardians.  They  were 
years  when  economists  and  political  reformers  had 
not  learned  to  work  together  so  harmoniously  as  they 
were  to  do  after  his  death.  Huskisson's  changes  in 
commercial  policy  were  preparing  the  way  in  high 
quarters  for  free  trade.  The  sliding  scale  of  corn 
duties  introduced  in  1826  pointed  on  the  whole  in 
the  same  direction.  But  the  agitation  of  the  humbler 
classes  for  political  freedom,  made  solid  as  it  was 
by  an  appreciable  progress  in  popular  education,1 
and  kept  within  bounds  of  law  by  the  influence  of 
Cobbett,2  went  on  in  a  way  apart ;  and  it  will  be 
remembered  how  Chartism  stood  aloof  from  the  Anti- 
Corn-Law  League.  A  man  might  be  an  advanced 
economist  and  social  reformer  and  a  reactionary  in 
politics.  In  1824,  when  trades  unions  were  for  the 
first  time  allowed  by  law  and  the  Factory  Acts  were 
still  too  imperfect  to  give  the  weak  a  fair  chance 
against  the  strong,  the  "natural  state  of  things,"  free 
development  of  individual  and  national  faculties,  did 
not  exist;  and  Malthus,  who  missed  them  keenly, 
would  have  been  much  amazed  to  hear  that  his 
f  doctrines  were,  like  Ricardo's,  a  vindication  of  things 

1  Especially  by  Sunday  Schools,  according  to  the  testimony  of  Samuel 
Bamford.— Radical,  vol.  i.  p.  7  (1844). 

2  We  have  his  counterpart  in  our  own  day. 


CHAP,  in.]  GENERAL  GLUTS.  299 

as  they  are.  Not  only  the  notorious  fact  of  his  opposi- 
tion to  Ricardo,  but  his  views  on  commercial  policy 
are  against  the  notion.1  At  the  Peace  there  were 
many  fallacies  current  about  wages.  The  new  Corn 
Law  of  1815  had  inaugurated  the  aggressive  policy  of 
the  agricultural  interest,  who  frankly  endeavoured,  by 
forms  of  law,  to  convert  an  occasional  scarcity  into  a 
permanent  one,  and  keep  prices  at  80s.  a  quarter.  Not 
a  few  false  friends  of  the  working  man  recommended 
him  to  countenance  the  law  and  let  his  bread  be  made 
dear,  for  then,  said  they,  his  wages  would  be  made 
high.  Many  manufacturers,  on  the  other  hand,  were 
declaring  the  interest  of  the  country  to  be  low  wages, 
and,  unto  that  end,  cheap  food  and  a  great  population. 
Mai  tli  us  was  with  neither.  His  partial  approval  of 
the  new  Corn  Law  was  no  doubt  based  on  erroneous 
grounds  ;  but  he  held  no  such  mistaken  views  of 
wages.  His  opinion,  if  not  sufficiently  obvious  from 
his  general  views  of  population,  was  laid  down  ex- 
plicitly in  all  his  writings.  He  says,  for  example  : 
"If  a  country  can  only  be  rich,  by  running  a  success- 
ful race  for  low  wages,  I  should  be  disposed  to  say  at 
once  '  Perish  such  riches  !  '  "*  "It  is  most  desirable 
that  the  labouring  classes  should  be  well  paid,  for  a 
much  more  important  reason  than  any  that  can  relate 
to  \\valth,  namely,  tin:  happiness  of  the  great  mass  of 
society."8  Being  a>k'-«l.  "In  a  nati«mal  point  of  view, 
even  if  it  wore  admitted  that  the  low  rate  of  v 


••  below,Bk.  III.,for«li-<i>r.«-f  of  tho.  h.ir.-i  that  he  was  reactionary 
in  his  p"  many  •  •<-,,  n»minil  optimist* 

a  Pd.  Econ.,  1820,  p.  236.  »  I  c.  p. 


300  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK  n. 

was  an  advantage  to  the  capitalist,  do  you  think  it 
fitting  that  labour  should  be  kept  permanently  in  a 
state  bordering  on  distress,  to  avoid  the  injury  that 
might  accrue  to  the  national  wealth  from  diminishing 
the  rate  of  profit  ? "  he  answered,  "  I  should  say,  by 
no  means  fitting  ;  I  consider  the  labouring  classes  as 
forming  the  largest  part  of  the  nation,  and  therefore 
that  their  general  condition  is  the  most  important 
of  all." ' 

He  thinks,  however,  that  the  change  from  low 
to  high  wages  might  quite  possibly  so  reduce  profits 
as  to  make  trade  unprofitable.  We  might  need  to 
sacrifice  something  of  our  commercial  prosperity.  He 
cannot  rise  to  the  conception  of  a  society  in  which 
the  entire  body  of  workmen  as  consumers  would  be 
a  sufficient  market  for  the  same  body  as  producers. 
He  cannot  rid  himself  of  the  idea  that  a  body  of 
unproductive  consumers  is  a  social  necessity,  to  give 
a  stimulus  to  production  by  developing  the  wants 
which  the  manufactures  are  to  satisfy.  It  seems 
easy  to  answer  that  those  unproductive  consumers 
can  only  pay  for  the  manufactures  by  means  of  other 
products,  whencesoever  obtained,  and  there  seems  no 
reason  why  their  producers  should  not  obtain  them.2 
If  the  workmen  themselves  had  the  wants  and  sup- 
plied them  by  their  own  labour,  all  the  results  that 
Malthus  desires  would  be  obtained  without  invidious 

1  Emigr.  Comm.  (1827),  p.  317,  qu.  3281. 

2  Some  such  view  is  suggested  by  Malthus  himself,  Essay,  IV.  xiii. 
p.  473  (cf.  Pol.  EC.,  1820,  p.  475),  a  passage  which  it  is  hard  to  reconcile 
with  the  passages  in  the  Quarterly  and  in  the  Pol.  EC.  that  speak  of  the 
necessity  of  a  special  class  of  unproductive  consumers. 


CHAP,  in.]  GENERAL   GLUTS.  301 

distinctions  of  classes,  and  with  distinct  improvement 
in  the  condition  of  the  workmen.  His  aims,  at 
.  were  good.  The  indispensable  leisure  ^would 
be  secured  if  the  hours  of  labour  were  shortened, 
as  he  desired  them  to  be.  "  1  have  always  thought 
and  felt  that  many  among  the  labouring  classes  in 
this  country  work  too  hard  for  their  health,  happi- 
ness, and  intellectual  improvement." l  The  general 
wealth  therefore,  if  need  be,  must  be  sacrificed  to 
the  general  happiness.  Factory  Acts  that  would  pre- 
vent children  from  labouring  too  young  or  too  long2 
he  thoroughly  approves ;  though  such  Factory  Acts 
as  would  interfere  with  adult  labour  he  considers 
an  injustice  to  the  work-people  themselves,  and  a 
hopeless  interference  with  "the  principles  of  com- 
petition, one  of  the  most  general  principles  by  which 
the  business  of  society  is  carried  on."  3  The  salvation 
of  the  labouring  classes  must  come  from  themselves, 
from  their  own  "  simultaneous  resolution  to  work 
iVwer  hours  in  the  day."  But  trades  unions,  as  we 
now  know  them,  had  not  then  come  into  being  ;  and 
he  talks  of  a  future  improvement  of  the  working 
classes  in  knowledge,  comfort,  and  self-restraint,4  with 
much  hesitation. 

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


1  Pol  Econ.  (1820),  ch.  vii.  sect.  ix.  p.  473.     Cf.  Tract  on  P 

48  n. 

*  Euay  on  P<»;>..  III.  iii.  p.  282  (in  pelnti.-n  to  Robert  Owen).    Cf.  tho 
whole  ch.  xiii.  of  Book  1 1 1 .,  \v  here  he  treats  of  "  Increasing  Wealth  as  it 

.ti«.n  .,f  tli--  Poor." 

«  lli.l.,  ].  o,  pp.  -J74-5. 


302  MALTIIUS   AND   HIS   WORK.  [BK.  ir. 

or  the  workmen,  are  by  no  means  identical  with  the 
economics  of  Kicardo  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  Eicardo  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  Govern- 
ment 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  Eicardo,  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. 


CHAP,  iv.]  THE   BEGGAR. 


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  con- 
demned— 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  doc- 
trines of  Malthus,  the  chapters  on  commercial  policy 
and  the  Corn  Laws,1  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  "dif- 
ferent 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.  Tlii- 
division  of  the  subject  could  not  be  maintained  very 
strictly.  The  "systems  proposed"  no  doubt  were 
in  most  cases  mere  theories  and  could  be  consid 

1  See  above,  pp.  245  teq.  and  252. 


304  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

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

After  a  chapter  (iv.)  on  Emigration2  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  doc- 
trines 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 

1  See  below,  Bk.  IV.,  and  cf.  above,  p.  208. 
2  See  above,  p.  142. 


CHAP,  iv.]  THE   BEGGAR.  305 

not  only  of  the  new  Poor  Law,  but  of  all  our  latter- 
da}'  sock-ties  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 : l — "  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  har- 
mony 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 
rnra#M.l  at  not  finding  the  provision  which  they  had 
been  taught  to  expect.  The  guests  learn  too  lato 
ill*  ir  error,  in  counteracting  those  strict  orders  to  all 
intruders,  issued  by  the  great  mistress  of  the  feast, 
who,  wishing  that  all  II.T  Bursts  should  have  plenty, 
and  knowing  that  she  could  not  provide  for  unlimin  d 

1  The  pawMig1  in  lull  because  by  recent  critics  it  is  mu<  h 

garbled  ;  «.  g.  inProyreu  and  Poverty,  VII.  i.  301  n. 

X 


306  MALTIIUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n 

numbers,  humanely  refused  to  admit  fresh  comers 
when  her  table  was  already  full."1 

Our  neighbours'  misfortunes  have  seldom  been 
made  so  picturesque.  The  figure  itself  was  no  new 
one.  Lucretius  had  written  : — 

*'  Cur  non,  ut  plenus  vitae  con  viva,  recedis  ] " 2 

and  Fenton,  in  Pope's 3  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  AVindham  are 
said  to  have  been,  beyond  others,  delighted  with 
its  conservative  moral.4  Mai  thus  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 

1  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  IV.  vi.  531. 

2  Lucretius,  iii.  951.     Cicero's  simile  of  the  theatre  open  to  all  comers, 
but  Riving  each  man  his  own  seat,  had  special  application  to  Property 
(De  Fiuibus,  iii.  20). 

3  Epitaph  on  Fenton. 

4  James  Qrahame's  Population  (1816),  p.  34.     Of.  Quarterly  Rev.,  Dec. 
1812,  p.  327;  Hazlitt,  Spirit  of  the  Age,  'Malthus,'  end. 


CHAP,  iv.]  THE   BEGGAR.  307 

so  doing  he  pinched  the  guests  at  the  lower  end  of 
th.«  table."1 

Even  the  friends  of  Malthus  thought  the  passage 
too  gloomy  ;  and,  as  every  one  noticed,2  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 
//////  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.8  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 
fmi'ly  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 

*  Book  III.  Parti,  ch.  iv.  (17 

in,  Population  (1820),  I.  iii.   17.     T)u>  withdrawal  wa* 
My  due  to  Sunnier.   See  Otter,  Life  of  Malthua  in  Pol.  EC.  (1836), 
p.  Iii. 

*  Cf.  Euay,  2nd  ed.,  pp.  400,  401,  and  mi  ,  p.  298  n.    Ct 
J05  and  297  n.    Cf.  also  Tooke,  above  quoted,  p.  H 


308  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

conditions  of  the  time,  however,  the  author's  views 
w«  iv  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  forestall- 
ing and  regrating.1  Mai  thus  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.).2  Neither 
could  he  agree  with  the  notion  that  the  paper  cur- 
rency had  done  it  all.3  Settling  down  to  his  parish 
work  in  Surrey,  he  watched  the  course  of  events. 
\\  hat  happened,  he  said,  there  and  presumably  else- 
where 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.4  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 

1  Cf.  above,  p.  220. 

2  On  Bounties  and  the  Corn  Trade.    Cf.  High  Price  of  Provisions,  p.  3. 

3  1.  c.  p.  23.     See  above,  p.  239.     Also  Corn  Law  Catechism,  1839, 
qu.  244. 

4  1.  c.  pp.  9 — 11.    Cf.  the  "  make  up  "  and  "  bread  money  "  mentioned  in 
Report  of  Poor  Law  Commission,  1834,  p.  27. 


CHAP,  iv.]  THE  BEGGAR.  309 

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.1  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," 
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  con- 
tinued 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 
<>f  the  [certainty  of]  periodical  returns  of  such  seasons 
of  distress  as  we  have  of  late  experienced."  2  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.8 
The  second  waa  a  stronger  reason  ; — in  the  language 
\iint,  the  claim  allowed  (with  little  qualification4) 
by  the  English  Poor  Laws  was  a  claim  that  could  not 


rice,  Ac.  pp.  19, 20.  •  I  c.  p.  27.    Of.  above,  p.  43, 

3  1st  ed.,  pp.  82,  83  ;  7th  ed.,  pp.  3<  • 

4  Euay.  7th  «••!.,  Aj-jM-Mlix,  p.  493. 


310  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [DK.  II. 

1  >e  made  universal  without  contradiction.  If  every  one 
exercised  the  supposed  right  of  demanding  relief,  no 
community  could  fulfil  the  supposed  duty  of  granting 
it.1  If  it  could  have  been  fulfilled,  Mai  thus  thinks, 
the  obligation  would  have  held ;  and,  instead  of  de- 
claring "  I  cannot,  therefore  I  ought  not,"  he  would 
have  confessed,  "  I  can,  therefore  I  ought." 2  As  the 
case  stands,  he  agrees  with  Sir  Frederick  Eden  in 
tlii nking  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."  s  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 
countr}r,  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." 4  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, 

1  He  borrows,  as  he  himself  says,  the  language  of  Sir  Frederick  Eden 
on  the  State  of  the  Poor  (1797).     See  Essay  on  Population,  2nd  ed.,  p. 
417  n.  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  308  n. 

2  Letter  to  Whitbread  (1807),  pp.  12,  13  ;  cf.  Essay,  p.  445  ft. 

3  Quoted,  Essay,  III.  vi.  308  n.     ,  4  7th  ed.,  III.  vi.  303 ;  1st  ed  ,  p.  365. 


CHAP,  iv.]  THE  BEGGAR.  311 

the  aggregate  mass  of  happiness  among  the  common 
people  would  have  been  much  greater  than  it  is  at 
present." '  This  was  his  belief  to  the  end.2 

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  com- 
mitted on  the  whole.  It  used  to  be  common  on 
Held- days  for  dragoons  to  have  their  hats  blown  off 
and  to  be  thrown  from  their  horses.  At  last  a  general 
orders  to  punish  every  man  to  whom  either  of 
these  accidents  happened ;  since  then  hardly  any- 
body 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 

race,  and  its  privates  by  physical  punishment ;  he 
considered  that  the  occasional  suffering  of  an  innocent 
individual  does  less  harm  to  an  army  than  the  toler- 
ation of  negligence,  which  makes  tin;  negligence 

ter.s     So  far  as  legal  relief  goes,  Malt  1ms  would 
1  Otti  .''.05. 

1  See  e.  g.  Emigration  Committee,  1827  '-23. 

1  I.)r  -ore's  View  of  Society  and  M«>  /'ranee,  Swiber- 

land,  and  Germany  (7tb  ed.,  1780).  }>.  144—157. 


312  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  n. 

recommend  the  same  martial  severity,  and  try  to  put 
men  on  their  guard  against  poverty  by  making  them 
Lear  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 
•re  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  sup- 
posed not  to  take  their  orders  from  a  commander,  but 
to  "  fend  for  themselves."  Society  under  socialism 
may  resemble  an  army,  but  not  society  under  indi- 
vidualism. Mai  thus,  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  sup- 
ported 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 


CHAP,  iv.]  THE  BEGGAR.  313 


would  in  such  a  case  have  beeii  fatal.  "The 
desire  of  bettering  our  condition  and  the  fear  of 
making  it  worse,  like  the  vis  mediatrix  natures  in 
j'hysics,  is  the  vis  mediatrix  reipublicce  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 
f'-ar  of  the  Poor  Law  the  rich  will  often  refuse  to 
build  cottages,  lest  their  occupants  become  paupers.1 
In  the  third  place,  pauper  children,  like  foundlings, 
do  not  live  long.2 

In  his  Letter  to  Samuel  Whitbread,  M.P.,  on  his 
proposed  Bill  for  the  a  mr,  id  incut  of  the  Poor  Laws 
(1807),  Malthus  allows  that  abolition  must  not  come 
till  public  opinion  is  ripe  for  it  ;  but  he  recommends 
lation  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 
t<>  have  the  effects  expected  from  their  abolition  here. 
In  reply  to  Mahhus,  it  might  be  urged  that  the 
POO!  Laws  Ale  not  entirely  j.eculiar  to  Kn-lmd,  but 
occur  in  I>emnark  and  elsewhere.8  In  the  second 


,,  7th  ,.!.,  III.  vi.  p.  307  ;  ••«€«  (1827),  qu. 

1  I.  c.  i>] 

3  Report*  to  Local  Oov.  Ld.  on  Foreign  Poor  Laict,  1875,  p.  7. 


314  MAT/THUS   AND   HIS   WORK.  [UK.  ir. 

place,  as    MacCulloch  argues   in  a  letter,   aimed    at 
^laltlm.*,   to    Macvey  Napier,1    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,2 
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  discri- 
minating 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    re- 
sponsibility 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.3 

1  Macvey  Napier's  Correspondence,  pp.  29  seq.    Date  30th  Sept.,  1821. 

2  Report  of  Poor  Law  Comm.,  1834  ;  Remedial  Measures,  p.  227. 

3  l-Ixsay  on  Population,  Appendix,  p.  492.     It  was  probably  this  dis- 
claimer of  public   duty  that   led   Coleridge   to  complain,   "the  entire 
tendency  of  the  modern  or  Molthusian  political  economy  is  to  denation- 


iv.]  THE  BEGGAR.  315 

Let  a  law  be  passed,  he  said,  declaring  that  no 
legitimate  child  born  from  any  marriage  taking  place 
u  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  know- 
ledge of  this  law,  and  to  enforce  it  more  strongly  on 
the  minds  of  the  lower  classes  of  people,  the  clergy- 
man of  each  parish  should,  previously  to  the  solemniz- 
ation 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  MIC.-  throw  oil'  the 
li-in^  ^-nerat  ion  from  their  mi>'Tal>le  ami  helpless 
dependence  upon  the  Government  and  the  rich." 
Both  tlx'ir  irritation  atj  iin-t  the  upper  classes  and 
their  helplessness  in  devising  expedients  in  time  of 


nlize"(7V  K.W.,  j- 

may  have  been  simply  tl  !  ilthus,  like  Ki.-unl«>,  advocated 

laiMf.                    <1   in  tliiH  nw  it  is  singular  1m  should  n,.t  have  said 

" 

i>  r.30. 


316  MALTIIUS  AND   HIS   WORK.  OK.  u. 

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."1 
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  philan- 
thropists. Dr.  Chalmers  applied  it  in  his  Parochial 
System,  which  would  have  been  an  admirable  substi- 
tute for  the  Poor  Law  on  the  (unfortunately  untrue) 
hypothesis  of  an  absence  of  sects.  The  Mendicity 
Society  (dating  from  1815)  and  the  Charity  Organiza- 
tion (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.2  But  it  allowed  the 
riii'ht  only  to  the  indigent,3  refusing  all  relief  in  aid  of 
wages  to  the  merely  poor  and  the  able-bodied ;  and 
irried  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 

1  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  p.  539.  2  E.  g.  Report  of  Commissioners,  p.  13. 

3  Report,  pp.  227-8. 


CHAP,  iv.]  THE   BEGGAR.  317 

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  inde- 
pendent class  is  depressed."  l  If  this  meant  that  poor 
ivliff  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  Esmy  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  life- 
time 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  tin- 
way  of  justice,  of  mercy,  and  of  self-interest.  The 
history  of  the  English  Poor  Law  is  ample  proof  thai 
men  do  not  instinctively  follow  their  own  interest. 
It  was  the  rat» -payer's  interest,2  unless  he  was  an 
employer,  thai  relief  should  be  sparely  given;  and  it 
was  given  lavi.-hly.  It  was  the  poor  man's  interest 
to  be  thrifty  and  snl».T;  and  as  a  rule  he  was  neither. 

1  Report,  p.  2 

J  Even  if  he  were  a  poor  ratepayer,  voting  a  Hum  of  which  his  i 
'il.otir  wonM  pay  tlic  lar^-r  .-hnre. 


318  MALTJIUS  AND   HIS   WORK.  [UK.  n. 

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 
Mai th us  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  Philo- 
sophy— Teleology  and  Utility — Benevolence  and  Self-love — Malt  bus 
and  Paley — Greatest  Happiness — Earthly  Paradise— Mai  thus  and 
the  French  Revolution — Multhus  not  a  Political  Reactionary — 
Not  committed  to  laissezfaire — His  Modifications  of  that  Doctrine 
— Utilitarianism  phu  Nationality — Experience  as  much  the  Riddle 
as  the  Interpretation — The  State  an  Organism — Political  Ideals 
before  and  after  1846. 

Tm:  moral  philosophy  of  Malthas,  like  that  of  Aris- 
tutle,  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  regu- 
lated and  harmonized;  they  are  not  to  be  extinguished, 
"i-  •  ven  diminished  in  intensity.1  There  is  a  way  of 
so  gratifying  the  desires  that  they  produce  a  general 
balance  of  consequences  in  favour  of  happiness ;  and 
tin-re  is  an  opposite  way  with  opposite  effects.  Tli«- 
former  is  evidently  the  way  of  nature,  for  utility 
is  the  only  guide  of  conduct  we  Jiave  apart 

L'n.l..l..  p.  .J>,  ,'1;  .-f.  j.p.  3:»-J  t,,p  and  390. 


320  MALTHUS   AND   HIS  WORK.  [UK.  HI. 

Scripture.1  We  must  not  eradicate  any  impulses  ;  but 
we  must  follow  none  so  far  "  as  to  trench  upon  som^ 
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.2 
Nature  shows  us  the  wrongness  of  an  act  by  bring- 
ing from  it  a  train  of  painful  consequences.  Dis- 
eases, 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,3  it  seems  a  benevolent  dispens- 
ation 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."4  As  epidemics  in- 
dicate 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.5 
In  this  case  it  has  taken  a  longer  experience  to  teach 

1  Essay,  7th  ed.,  IV.  x.  pp.  442-3  ;    cf.  p.  161. 

2  7th  ed.,  IV.  i.  p.  390.     Cf.  above,  p.  37. 

3  Not  quite  logical,  if  the  test  of  a  virtuous  action  is  its  tendency  to 
produce  happiness. 

4  Ibid.,  IV.  i.  p.  390. 

6  2nd  ed.,  pp.  489,  490,  501  ;  7th  ed.,  pp.  390, 401.  Cf.  Paley,  M.  and 
P.  Phil.,  I.  vi.,  II.  iv.  ;  Tucker,  Light  of  Nature  (1st  ed.,  1768),  vol.  ii. 
ch.  xxix.,  esp.  §  12. 


BK.  in.]       MORAL  AND  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY.  321 

men  the  conduct  most  favourable  to  happiness,  and 
therefore  the  conduct  right  for  them.  But  even  the 
best  food,  best  clothing,  and  best  Chousing  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  excep- 
tionally 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.1  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. 
<l  \Yli.-ii  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  crm-lly 
diminished  if  the  prospect  of  a  good  meal,  a  w;mn 

1  Essay,  7th  e-1 .,  IV.  i.  391.  Kant's  test  of  a  moral  law,  so  far  as  it 
wo*  not  purvly  dogmatic,  was  roost  easily  illustrated,  or  he  would  have 
said  parodied,  by  this  Utilitarian  arguiu 

Y 


322  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  in. 

bouse,  and  a  comfortable  fireside  in  the  evening  were 
not  incitements  sufficently  vivid  to  give  interest  and 
cheerfulness  to  the  labours  and  privations  of  the 
day."1  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  Eachel,  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.2  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."3  Such  a  passage,  though 
it  disappeared,  with  other  flowers  of  language,  in  the 
later  editions  of  the  essay,  show  us  that  Malthus, 
jthough  wiser,  was  not  colder  than  his  fellow-men, 
jand  drew  his  facts  from  experience  as  well  as 
observation,  of  the  matters  concerned.4 

1  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  p.  487  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  392. 

2  Ibid.,  2nd  ed.,  p.  488  ;  7th  ed.,  pp.  392-3  ;  cf.  p.  398. 

3  Ibid.,  1st  ed.  (1798),  p.  211. 

4  The  passage  in  A  Tale  of  the  Tyne,  which  left  no  trace  on  Miss 


BK.  in.]       MORAL  AND  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY.  323 

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.1  As  it  is,  the 
disparity  of  the  two  powers  leads  to  an  over-spreading 
of  the  world  ;  men  are  led  to  avoid  over-crowding  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  what- 
ever justice)  is  made  the  chief  end  of  the  earth, 
though  his  own  chief  end  is  not  supposed  to  be 
realized  there.2 

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," ! 

ieau'8  own  memory,  but  so  faithfully  expounded  Malthus  that  ho 
called  on  purpose  to  thank  li«  r  f..r  it  (Autobwgr-i  *•  253)>  "  «wH>"  i<l1  '»- 

i  in  th.    li-ht  .,f  th(;*e  extract*  as  ch.  iii.  p.  56  of  ed  1833. 
i  2nd  ed.,  pp.  491-2  ;  7th  ed.t  p.  395.     See  above,  p.  36. 
8  2nd  ed.,  p.  494  ;  7th  ed.,  p.  397.     Cf.  above,  p.  38. 
»  Tin-  phrase  in  Euay,  7th  td.,  p.  401. 

Y     ] 


324  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  in 

preferred  where  he  could  to  draw  rather  from  Tucker 
than  from  Paley.  Abraham  Tucker1  (the  "  Edward 
Search"  who  began  the  Liffht  of  Nature  in  1756, 
and  finished  it,  blind,  in  1774)  lived  for  nearly  fifty 
years2  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  Liffht  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,"3  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 

1  Not  to  be  confused  with  his  contemporary,  Josiah  Tucker,  Dean  of 
Gloucester,  the  forerunner  of  Adam  Smith. 

2  1727  to  1774,  the  year  of  his  death.     Betchworth,  now  absorbed  in 
Mrs.  Hope's  estate  of  Deepdene,  was  on  the  farther  side  of  Dorking 
from  Albury  and  the  Eookery. 

3  This  lucid  epithet  is  ascribed  to  George  III. 


BK.  in.]       MORAL  AND   POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY.  325 

no  doubt  believe  their  suspicions  confirmed.  But 
Mai  thus  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.1 

It  is  open  to  many  criticisms.  In  his  ethics  he 
seems  to  have  made  no  distinct  analysis  or  classi- 
fication 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  indiscri- 
minate 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.1 
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,8 
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 

1  A  point  of  difference  has  been  noted  above  (p.  39)  and  below  (p.  330). 
He  differs  from  Bentbam  also,  who  would  not  gratify  the  passions  but 
destroy  them.  See  Held,  Soc.  GetchichU,  p.  213. 

»  Euayt  7th  ed.,  IV.  x.  441.  »  Ibid.,  IV.  i.  3'Jl. 


326  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  in. 

of  his  Maker  in  carrying  out  the  teleology  of  his 
passions,  as  well  as  the  teleology  of  nature  itself.1 
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  persons  most  concerned.2 
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.3 
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  mani- 
fested, 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.4  As  animals,  we  follow  the  dictates  of 
nature,  which  would  mean  unhindered  passion  ;  but  as 
reasonable  beings  we  are  under  the  strongest  obliga- 

1  See  above,  p.  35.  2  7th  ed.,  p.  441  ft.  3  Ibid.,  p.  442  top. 

4  Essay,  III.  ii.  279,  explains  in  this  way  the  popular  prejudice  which, 
in  one  case  at  least,  visits  the  same  sin  more  severely  in  a  woman  than 
in  a  man. 


BK.  in.]       MORAL  AND  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY. 

tions  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."1  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  a< -timi 
to  promote  or  diminish  the  general  happiness  is  our 
only  criterion  of  its  morality.* 

From  this  it  directly  follows  that,  1>» •< -a use  the  free 

1  Essay,  7th  cd.,  IV.  x.  442. 

«  7/..W..  IV.  ii.  .101.  Cf.  Paley,  Moral  Philos.,  Vol.  I.  Book  II.  ,-h.  iv. 
p.  65,  there  quot.,1,  aiul  Tucker,  L.  of  N.  (1st  ed.),  vol.  ii  ch.  xxix., 
especially  §§  5-7  and  12. 


323  MALTHUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [UK.  m. 

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. 

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  selfish- 
ness," 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." '  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  im- 
possible 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 

1  Essay,  7th  ed.,  IV.  x.  443,  444  ft. 

2  Ibid.,  IV.  viii.  432,  433,  compared  with  p.  492. 


MORAL  AND  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY.  329 


wants,  we  must  recognize  that  its  existence  has  been 
due  to  a  wise  provision  for  the  general  happiness.1 
^Jalthus  does  not  deny  at  the  same  time  that  bene- 
volence is  always  the  weaker  motive,  and  needs  con- 
tinually 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.2 
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  Popula- 
tion would  diminish  the  numbers  of  the  people  too  far. 
He  (or  his  spokesman)  answers 3  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 
tlii.s  point  being  surrounded  on  all  sides  with  dangers 
is  only  according  to  the  analogy  of  all  ethical  ex- 
uce."  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  affec- 
tions. The  prevailing  error  in  the  game  of  life  is, 
not  that  we  miss  the  prizes  through  excess  of  timidity, 

1  Essay,  7th  ed.,  App.  pp.  492-3.     Cf.  7th  ed.,  p.  280:  "Self-love  is 
tli--  •  •••••at  marhi-  *   III.  vii.  .'I1 1. 

/  /»'er.,  1810  (Aug.),  an  article  on  Ingrain's  Disquisitions  on 

»/;«„.. an.l  [  lla/liM'^l  /..//,  /.</,(   Kffriiifo  M 

of  Malthus  to  the  Review  were  close  at  this  tim« ,  nnd  as  the  argument-* 
run!  tin-  style  are  remark-ibly  like  our  author's,  there  is  at  least  a 
jiMilaliility  that  he  wrote  the  arti.-l.-,  .Irll'ivy  al't.-r   his  ••u-ti.m  pr< 
it  with  a  h«-a«l  and  tail  t«>  (lionise  the  authorship.     ('f-  ('"••khuni's  Ltfe 
of  Jeffrey,  Vol.  I.  301,  302,  cf.  285. 


330  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [P.K  in. 

but  that  we  overlook  the  true  state  of  the  chances 
in  our  eager  and  sanguine  expectations  of  winning 
them.1  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."  2 

In  his  view  of  the  passions  and  of  the  moral 
sentiments,  Malthas  is  clearly  a  man  of  the  eigh- 
teenth 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." '  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  ; "  4  and,  "  provided 
we  discover  it,  it  matters  nothing  by  what  means  ;  "• 

1  Cf.  Wealth  of  Nations,  I.  x.  48,  49. 

2  Edin.  Rev.,  1810  (Aug.),  p.  475. 

3  Paley,  Mor.  and  Pol  Phil,  I.  vii.  9  ;  cf.  Malthus,  Essay,  IV.  ii. 
397,  &c.     Cf.  above,  p.  39.  4  Paley,  ibid.,  I.  iv.  14. 


CK.  in.]       MORAL  AND  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY.  331 

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  faculties1 
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.2 

By  the  vagueness  of  their  phraseology  when  they 
spoke  of  the  general  sum  of  happiness,  the  older 
utilitarians  avoided  some  of  the  difficulties  that  en- 
counter their  successors.  Apart  from  the  hardness 
of  defining  happiness  and  a  sum  of  happiness,8 
there  is  a  difficulty  in  fixing  the  precise  extent  of 
the  generality.  The  tendency  of  utilitarianism  in 
the  hands  of  Bcntham  was  towards  equality  and  the 

1  See  above,  p.  37.    The  passages  tli.-n-  dtad  cmupli-i.-ly  r.-fuh-  H.-l.l's 
assertion  that  u  Malthus  aj.pral.  <1  to  Utility  in  the  teeth  of  his  b<- 
the  Bible  "  (Social*  GctchichU  Etujtmuti,  Book  I.  ch.  ii.  p.  234). 

1  Mor.  and  Pol.  /'/,;/.,  vii.  10. 

1  "  Any  .  may  be  denominated  *  happy  '  in  whirh  the  am<>m>t 

or  aggregate  of  pleasure  exceeds  that  of  pain."— Paley,  M.  an, I  /  / 7,  , 
I.  vi 


332  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  in. 

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  Mai  thus  thinking1  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,  what- 
ever an  "  amount "  of  happiness  may  mean.  Mai  thus 
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.2  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."1 
Mai  thus  would  not,  for  example,  have  wished  to 
see  the  highlands  of  Scotland  brought  back  to  their 
ancient  condition,  in  which  they  had  greater  numbers 

1  Essay,  7th  ed.,  III.  vi.  305. 

2  See  Mr.  Sidgwick's  Method  of  Ethics,  p.  385  ft. 

3  Quoted  from  The  Crisis,  by  Einpson,  Edin.  Rev.,  Jan.  1837,  p.  482. 


BK.  IIL]       MORAL  AND  POLITICAL   PHILOSOPHY.  333 

than    now  living  in  rude  comfort,  but  also  greater 
numbers  exposed  to  precarious  indigence.1 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  certain  (in  spite  of  a 
common  prejudice)  that  Mai  thus  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  compara- 
tively but  little  known,"2 — 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 
(j"(i  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  reform- 
ation must  not  only  remove  all  the  evils,  but  must 
positively  amend  and  transform  all  the  three  branches 
•ocial  economy, — the  making,  the  sharing,  and  tin* 
using  of  wealth, — not  one  or  even  two  of  them 
alone.  Every  Utopian  scheme  should  be  tested  by 

1  Report  of  the  Crofter*  Commission,  1884,  p.  9. 
•  jE«ay,  IV.  iii.  407. 


334  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  m. 

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.1 

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 ; 2  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.3  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." 4  "  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 

1  It  would  help  the  social  reformer  to  learn,  e.  g.  from  clergymen, 
guardians  of  the  poor,  and  police  magistrates,  what  exact  proportion  of 
the  destitution  within  their  experience  has  been  due,  (a)  to  the  fault  of 
the  victim,  (6)  to  the  fault  of  his  parents,  (c)  to  the  fraud  or  oppression 
of  others,  and  (d)  to  the  mere  accidents  of  trade. 

2  7th  ed.,  p.  280.         3  III.  ii.  434.       *  Scenes  of  Clerical  Life,  p.  250. 


BK.  in.]       MORAL  AND  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY.  335 

must  feel  the  strongest  conviction  of  such  an  obliga- 
tion. 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  defer  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  un- 
married."1 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 
chanty  well  directed,  would  probably  be  all  the  means 
necessary  to  produce  the  best  practicable  effects."2 
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 

1  7th  •  -.1..  ]>.  404. 

'  p.  404,  1817.   As  early  a*  1803  (Euay,  2nd  c<l.,  IV.  xi.  589)  Mai  thus 
recommended  Savings  tanks. 


336  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  HI. 

tlic  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  mis- 
fortunes against  which  no  prudence  or  foresight  could 
provide." l  It  must  be  brought  home  to  the  poor 
that  "  they  are  themselves  the  cause  of  their  own 
poverty."  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  Kevolution 
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;3  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  Eights  of  Man,  a  watchword 
borrowed  from  France  by  the  American  Eepublic,  to 
be  restored  again  at  the  Eevolution.  Paine's  book  on 
the  Riff /its  of  Man,  in  reply  to  Burke's  Reflections  on  the 
r r atch  Revolution,  had  been  widely  read  before  it  was 
suppressed  by  the  English  Government;  and  Godwin 
and  Mackintosh4  were  not  silenced.  Malthus  himself, 


1  7th  ed.,  p.  397.     Cf.  p.  407,  &c. 

2  7th  ed.,  p.  405.     To  make  the  whole  picture  complete  we  must  add 
what  is  said  above  (ch.  i.)  on  the  place  of  man  on  the  earth,  and  also  (Bk. 
III.  chs.  ii.  and  iii.)  on  industrial  society  as  it  might  be. 

3  See  above,  p.  298. 

4  Mackintosh  changed  but  never  recanted.     See  Macaulay's  Essays. 


BK.  in.]       MORAL  AND  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY.  337 

as  a  Whig,  docs  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  Abbe 
Raynal  and  some  other  writers  of  the  Revolution.1 
As  the  same  assertion  was  practically  made  by  the 
English  Poor  Law,  which  had  venerable  conserva- 
tive 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,2  he  had  himself  a  lingering  preference  for 
agriculture  over  manufacture ;  and  he  himself  spoke 
of  a  "natural"  price,  a  "natural"  progress  of  opu- 
lence, a  "natural"  rate  of  wages,  and  "natural 
liberty."  To  him  as  to  the  French  writers,  Nature8 
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 
M-p; irate  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.4  If  we 

«  Euay,  7th  ed.,  IV.  vi.  420- 1 .  •  W.  of  N.,  I 

*  More  strictly,  what  grows  of  itself  is  natural ;  what  makes  it  grow 
of  itself  is  Nature.  «  See  e.  g.  £«ay,  p.  390. 

Z 


333  MALTIIUS   AND   HIS   WORK.  [UK.  in. 

hivnk  Nature's  laws,  she  will  punish  us.  At  Nature's 
mighty  feast  there  is  no  cover  laid  for  the  super- 
fluous 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  Malthas  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."1  He  followed  Fox  rather  than 
Burke,  and  lost  neither  his  head  nor  his  temper  over 
the  Revolution.  "Malthus  will  prove  a  peace- 
monger,"  wrote  South ey  in  1808.2  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  ;3  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 

1  Life  of  Godwin,  ii.  266. 

2  Soutliey  wished  some  "Crusader"  like  Ri--kman  1<>  write  economical 
articles  for  the  Quarterly  and  keep  out  Malthus  (Life  and  Letters,  vol. 
iii.  p.  188). 

3  Essay,  III.  vii.  318  :  written  in  1817. 


BK.  in.]        MORAL    AND  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY.  339 

the  most  remarkable  chapters  in  the  second  edition 
of  the  essay1  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  know- 
ledge 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."2  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 
i inli -finitely  if  despotism  had  not  been  found  prefer- 
a!>l'-  to  anarchy.  In  England  "  the  Government  of 
tin*  laM  twenty  years3  has  shown  no  great  love  of 
peace  or  liberty,"  and  the  country  gentlemen  have 

1  2nd  ed.,  IV.  vi. ;  7th  ed.,  IV.  vi.  and  vii    He  must  have  remembered, 
when  he  wrote  these  \\MnK  th<»  imprisonment  of  hi*  ]•<>•  -r  tut ..r  (Jilbert 
Wak.-ti.-ld  fur  a  seditious  pamphlet  (1799-1800).     See  below,  Bk.  V. 
8  7th  ed.,  p.  417. 
»  7th  ed.,  p.  4-Ji;  :  u  ritt«n  in  1817.    For  the  tendency  of  the  V 

•!ut  ion  to  look  to  Government  for  « \,  r\ thing,  gee  t.  g. 
Dyer's  Modem  Europe,  vol.  iv.  ch.  Hi.  p.  304. 

Z  2 


310  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  in. 

apparently  surrendered  themselves  to  Government  on 
condition  of  being  protected  from  the  mob.1  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,2 
in  "  absolute  monarchy,  the  easiest  death,  the  true 
euthanasia  of  the  British  constitution."  The  "  tend- 
ency 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.3 

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,4  and  thinks  the  Tory  arguments  against 
instructing  the  poorer  classes  "  not  only  illiberal, 
but  to  the  last  degree  feeble,  if  not  really  disin- 
genuous."5 "  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  am- 

1  7th  ed.,  p.  418. 

2  Essays  Moral  and  Political,  vol.  i.  p.  49  :    *  The  British  Parlia- 
ment.' 

3  Malthus,  Essay,  2nd  ed.,  p.  502;    7th  ed.,  p.  402.     Cf.  a  striking 
passage  in  the  review  of  Newenham,  Edin.  Rev.,  July  1808,  pp.  348-9. 

4  E.  g.  7th  ed.,  pp.  438-9  and  478.     Cf.  above,  p.  56.     Homer's  letter 
to  Malthus  in.  Feb.  1812  (Mem.  of  Horner,  vol.  ii.  pp.  109-10)  shows 
it  was  an  active  sympathy.     Malthus  agreed  to  act  as  a  "  steward  "  at 
one  of  Lancaster's  meetings  in  London. 

6  2nd  ed.,  pp.  556-7  :  opponents  "  may  fairly  be  suspected  of  a  wish 
to  encourage  their  ignorance  as  a  pretext  for  tyranny." 


BK.  in.]       MORAL  AND  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY.  241 

bitious  demagogues  than  an  ignorant  people."1  These 
words  were  written  in  1803,  four  years  before 
Whitbread  made  his  motion  on  Schools  and  Savings 
Banks,  and  thirteen  years  before  Brougham's  Com- 
mittee on  Education.2  Mai  thus  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  con- 
veniences 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. 
Tin-  effect  of  a  good  Government  in  increasing  the  pru- 
dential lial>its  and  personal  respectability  of  the  lower 
classes  of  society  has  already  been  insisted  on ;  but 
inly  this  effect  will  always  be  incomplete  without 
a  good  system  of  education,  and  indeed  it  may  be 
that  no  Government  can  approach  to  perfection  that 

1  7  ••!>.  555-6. 

*  Miss  Martineau,  Uiti.  of  Peace,  I.  vii.  117-18. 


312  MALTHUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [UK.  in. 

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." 

Our  author's  historical  sense  saved  him  from  Kicar- 
dian  presumptions  in  favour  of  laissez  faire.  Writers 
go  too  far,  however,  in  declaring  unlimited  com- 
petition to  be  against  the  spirit  of  his  work,  and 
asserting  that  he  undervalued  the  influence  of  institu- 
tions, only  that  he  might  save  his  country's  institu- 
tions from  hasty  reform.2  He  knew  that  society  did 
not  grow  up  on  economical  principles ;  instead  of 
beginning  with  non-interference,  and  extending  inter- 
ference 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  laisscz  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 

1  Essay,  7th  ed.,  IV.  ix.  440,  441.  2  Held,  Soc.  Gesch.,  p.  215. 


BK.  in.]        MORAL  AND   POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY.  343 

one  could  divest  himself.     But,  though  Malthus  often 
.-}>"aks  as  if  the  burden  ought  to  lie  specially  on  a  man's 

latives  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 
y__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;1  and  he  admits, 
therefore,  in  the  second  place,  that  the  state  should 
interfere  witli  the  "system  of  natural  liberty/'  posi- 
tively, to  educate  the  citizens,2  and  to  grant  medical 
aid  to  the  poor,3  to  assist  emigration,4  and  even  to 

v.  direct  relief  in  money  to  men  that  have  a  family 
of  more  than  six  children,5 — as  well  as  negatively,  to 
restrict  foreign  trade  when  it  causes  more  harm  to 
the  public  than  irnod  to  the  tra»  1.  rs,fl  and  to  restrict 
the  home  trade  where  children's  labour  is  concerns 

1  See  above,  pp.  95,  96,  &c.      •  See  above,  ]» 

»  Et*in.  7th  ad.,  I  V.  x.  446-7.    4  Ki..i-T.  Ct.mni.  (1827),  qu.  3310. 

*  IV.  ;      Potatoes  are  a  godsend  to  such,  he  says  in  on 
place  (£  .Inly  1808,  p.  344). 

•  See  above,  Bk.  II.  cl.  »  See  above,  p.  301. 


344  MALTHUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [BK.  in. 

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,  pos- 
sessed 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  philo- 
sophy 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.1  It  makes  the  weak 

E.  g.  Essay,  IV.  ix.  43J. 


BK.  in.]        MORAL   AND  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY.  345 

strong,  and  tends  to  remove  indolence,  not  cr 
it.1  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  circum- 
stances 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  per- 
fertly  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."  II* 
could  ivjoin,  however,  that  (even  if  we  ^rant  tin; 
practical  possibility  of  such  a  perfect  enlightenment) 
diiv.-t  ivii.-f  appeals  far  more  to  indolence  than  in- 
direct,1  and  the  good  of  the  indirect  can  often,  the 

1    In  C.-nuany  poor  scholar*  from  tin-  country  an-  ••ftm,  wli.-n  alt.-n.l- 

:  >ity,  billeted  for  bread  nn<l   l>utt»r  mi   tin-  well-to-do 

•  •it  i/.-ns  ;  and  learning  proves  on  th«-  whole  so  inconsistent  \\  iih  laziness, 

tint  the  practice  does  not  make  them  unwilling  to  earn  their  own  living 

1  A  protective  duty  is  in  f  of  tin-  protected  in.ln-trv.  1 

a  rule  tlu-  protected  are  secured  again- 1  in<h>K-n<v  1  y  th.  ir  ..\\n  doi 


346  MALTIIUS   AND   HIS   WOIIK.  [P.K.  in. 

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  com- 
mitted 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  irre- 
spective 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 

competition  ;   and  the  fault  of  protection  lies  elsewhere  than  in  en- 
couragement of  indolence. 


UK.  in.]        MORAL  AND  POLITICAL   PHILOSOPHY.  347 

individual  happiness  of  isolated  units,  and  showed 
him  that  the  real  unit  was  a  group.  The  state  to 
^lultlius  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  partner- 
ship of  past  traditions,  present  privileges,  and  future 
hopes.1  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.2 

The  nation  is  a  little  world  within  the  great  world, 
and  (in  the  analogy  of  the  great  world  it  is  the  scene 
where  difficulties  generate  talents  and  bring  out  the 
character.3  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  philo- 
pophy  of  Malthus  as  Utilitarianism  plus  a  Nation- 
ality. The  individualism  of  Malthus  is  limited  l»y 
the  particular  institutions  and  particular  interests  of 
the  Kurdish  nation.4  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  limit*  -d  in  its  interference  with  the  citizens  only 
by  its  powrs  nf  doing  good  to  them.  But  he  holds 
with  Adam  Smith  and  the4  other  economists  that  its 
of  doing  good  to  them  arc  very  much 


1  Renan,  Qu'erf  ce  rpCunc  Nation  t 

*  Cf.  above,  p.  225.  »  Cf.  p.  36. 

4  'I'll.-  rra«-ti..M  a/aiu-t  Hou  raeau  and  Godwin  may  partly  a  .....  >nnt  f«>r 
the  :sm. 


348  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  m. 

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.1  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  in- 
dividuals, to  provide  for  the  people  the  education 
that  is  supposed  to  chasten.  Even  when  that  pro- 
vision has  been  made,  the  education  will  not  do  its 
perfect  work  if  it  has  not  included  the  particular 

1  See  above,  ch.  i. 


BK.  in.]        MORAL  AND  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY.  3-40 

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  pre- 
sent. 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,  Mai  thus  would  no  doubt  hav.- 
justified  his  own  consistency.  But  the  modern  reader 
might  justly  reply  to  Mai  thus,  that  we  have  often  to 
judge  tendencies  as  well  as  results,  and  experience 
becomes  then  an  uncertain  guide ;  he  might  complain 
that  Maltlms  himself  is  sometimes  led  to  judge  both 
of  them  by  a  half-acknowledged  supplementary  priii 
riplt-  of  tin-  balance  of  classes  and  safety  of  the 
mean,  which  can  be  applied  in  a  way  very  unfavour- 
to  popular  rights.  He  might  urge  that  the 


350  MALTHUS   AND   HIS    WOIIK.  [UK.  in. 

apparent  success  of  an  institution  might  have  been 
due  to  a  concurrent  cause  that  cancelled  its  defects, 
and  \ve  canunt  always  pronounce  on  its  merits  from 
experience  of  it.  How  can  experience  help  us  unless 
we  have  the  key  to  its  interpretation  1  Without 
Midi  a  key  nothing  would  be  so  false  as  foots  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  riot,  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.1  If  we  inter- 
pret 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 
\\itli  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 

1  Some  one  has  said,  "Was  man  nicht  definiren  kann,  zielit  man  als 
Or^misinus  an  ;"  and  we  had  been  told,  long  before,  that  a  simile  is 
either  "  idem  per  idem  "  or  "  idem  per  aliud,"  either  of  them  a  logical 

fallacy. 


BK.  in.]        MORAL   AND   POLITICAL   PHILOSOPHY.  351 

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 
In-  able  to  show  some  service  rendered  to  his  country- 
men, 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  pro- 
portion   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.      Educa- 
tion 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    dis- 
cussion, in  order  that  progress  may  be  made  in  th«' 
-t   of  all  ways,   by  the   moral   and    intellectual 
development  of   the    individual   citizens,   which   will 
soon  express  itself  in  their  institutions.     With  these 
postulates,   halt    from   the   old    economists   and    ha.f 
thr  n.-\v  iv f.rmcra,  on   th<>  way   to  !.«•   : 


MAT/THUS   AND   HIS   WORK.  [I-.K.  ITT. 

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, 
Avho  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,  arid  his  obliga- 
tion to  repay  service  with  service.  Later  political 
philosophy  would  press  the  counter-claims  of  the  com- 
munity 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 


BK.  in.]       MORAL  AND  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY.  333 

a  heavier  burden  of  taxes.     It  would  not  leave  men 
to  do  as  they  willed  with  their  own.1 

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  power- 
lessness  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  tho 
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. 

1  /:«ay,  Bk.  IV.  ch.  x   j.   1 15.    "Every  man  has  a  ri«ht  to  do 
he  will  with  his  own."    But  the  question  ia :— What  is  his  own  t 

A  A 


354  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  in. 

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." l  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. 

1  Professor  T.  H.  Green,  Liberal   Legislation  and   Freedom  of  Con- 
tract, Oxford,  1881. 


BOOK    IV. 

THE    CRITICS. 

Three  Questions  for  the  Critics — Parr  and  Thoughts  on  Parr — Pulpit 
Philosophy— Godwin's  Blessing  in  1801— The  Curbing  in  1820— 
Theology— The  Command  to  Noah— The  Ratios—  Population 
"fitful"— S.  T.  Coleridge  among  the  Economists — James  Grahanie 
— 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 
ot  Critics — Ethics  of  the  Hearth  and  of  the  World — End  and  Means 
of  Malthus. 

Tin:  critics  of  Malthus  had  three  questions  before 
;i  :  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  tin-  <{uostion  of  human  perfect ilulity.  The  rela- 
tions of  Malthus  and  (Jn.lwin  are  as  it  were  the  talc 
nn  which  tin*  play  is  founded. 

Godwin's  yW/7/Vv//  ,///.v//Vr  was  written  in  1793,  his 

A  A  2 


356  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  iv. 

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  ferminorum,  and  a  widening  out  of  the 
feelings  that  usually  prevail  between  local  neighbours 
would  only  make  those  feelings  thin  and  watery.1 
Man's  obligations  cannot  be  stretched  beyond  his 
powers  ;  he  has  no  powers,  and  therefore  no  obligation 
to  do  good  unto  all  men.2  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 

1  rf)v  <pt\iav  avayKciiov  vS'iprj  yivevOai.      Ar.  Pol.,  II.  ii. 
2  See  above,  p.  310. 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS.  357 

at  the  expense  of  the  rest,  and  forgets  duties  that  lie 
near  to  him,  towards  kindred  and  friends  and  neigh- 
bours ;  he  neglects  common  duties  of  life  in  favour  of 
thf  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  Hos- 
pital, 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  pub- 
lished version  of  it  contained  large  quotations  from 
the  Essay  on  Population  and  large  direct  commenda- 
tions 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 
Styles1  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).8  Burke  had  denounced 
him  for  this  in  his  Refections;*  but,  if  Parr  could 
do  the  same  thing  on  the  other  side  a  few  yrars 
a  ft  <  T\vards,  it  cannot  have  been  any  great  singularity. 
I 'a  IT'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. lam.  >  Mackintosh,  a  former  friend  and  political 

1  Ducourte  on  the  Christian  Union.    See  Eaay  on  Population,  7th 
ed.,  ]>.  -2:>  \  ii. ;  Price,  Ofoervations,  p.  806  n. 

10,  and  Paul,  cxxii.  2  teq. 
*  See  cap.  pp.  12—18,  and  20  (4th  ed.,  1790). 


358  MAT/THUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [BK.  iv. 

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'1  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  Mai  thus  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,2  under 
the  title,  Thoughts  on  Dr.  Parrs  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  "  veuom "  of  Dr.  Parr. 
If  he  had  changed  some  of  his  views  it  was  not  in 
deference  to  their  criticism.  Of  the  Essay  on  Popu- 
lation, "  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.3  Parr  had  hailed  it  as  a  complete 
demonstration  that  Godwin's  scheme  of  equality 

1  Pt.  II.  Essay  V.  pp.  228  seq.     Life,  ii.  292.     Cf.  ii.  64. 

2  Life,  ii.  64. 

8  Thoughts,  p.  10  and  n.  Cf.  pp.  43,  45.  In  Progress  and  Poverty 
(p.  93,  ed.  1881)  we  are  told  that  Godwin  "  until  his  old  age  disdained 
a  reply  "  to  Malthus. 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS.  359 

would  not  work,  and  many  better  men  had  felt  their 
mouths  shut,  and  had  begged  Godwin  to  speak  for 
them.  Godwin  consents  in  these  TItoughts.  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 
wither  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.  Tin* 
Lri.in<l  propoMtiniis  and  outlines  of  his  work  will,  I 

re,  !•»•  f 'mi  no!  not  less  conclusive  an«l  nTtain  than 
they  are  new.  For  myself,  I  cannot  refuse  to  take 
some  pride  in  so  far  as  by  my  writings  I  gave  the 

ion  and  fmni-hed  an  incentive  to  the  producing 


360  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  iv. 

so  valuable  a  treatise"  (p.  56).  Surely  concession 
could  no  further  go.  Godwin  even  admits  the  arith- 
metical and  geometrical  ratios.1  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  fore- 
doomed ?  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.8 
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.3 
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 

1  Thoughts,  p.  61.  2  Ibid.,  p.  67.  3  Ibid.,  pp.  72-3. 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS.  261 

be  that  the  population  would  not  be  the  great. -t 
possible,  but  considerably  within  the  limits  of  the 
food  ;  and  yet  you  object  to  present  society,  that  its 
arrangements  prevent  the  "  greatest  practicable  popu- 
lation." 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  immedi- 
ately make  their  condition  worse."  l 

This  was  no  doubt  a  point  against  Godwin,  but  it 

was  also  a  point  against  Malthus  himself.     The  » 

in  its  first  form  had  not  made  sufficient  allowance  f  >r 

"prudence";  and  the  introduction  of  moral  restraint 

in  the  se«-«»ud  <-<lition  might  very  plausibly  have  been 

l)ed  by  Godwin's  friends  to  Godwin  himself,  in 

<>f    the    elaborate  reply  to   the    Thoughts   in  a 

ehapt'T   afterwards  dropped.8      Godwin  said   to   him 

aftrrwanN  that,  he  had  no  right  to  introduce  a  new 

element  into  his  solution  of  the  problem,  and  pretend 

/•-.  of  Godwin  L  324. 

1  See  above,  p.  208  n.     In  tin-  r.th  edition  he  turna  his  back  on  Go  1\\  in 
and  addrcaaea  (.)»••  ii. 


3G2  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  iv. 

that  it  was  the  same  solution  as  before  j1  if  he  altered 
his  premises  he  ought  to  alter  his  conclusion.  To 
which  Mai  thus  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 
imself  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  pub- 
lished an  elaborate  reply  to  the  Essay  on  Population. 
The  politicians,  the  political  economists,  the  bulk 
of  the  press,  and  the  public  had  accepted  the  Mal- 
thusian  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 


1  So  Coleridge  (MS.  note  to  p.  vii  of  his  quarto  copy  of  the  essay)  : 
"And  of  course  you  wholly  confute  your  former  pamphlet,  and  might 
have  spared  yourself  the  trouble  of  making  up  the  present  quarto." 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS.  303 

not  serve  their  turn.  Still  it  seemed  true  that  time 
had  dec  la  ml  for  Mai  thus,  and  Godwin  had  fallen  out 
of  notice.  Sydney  Smith's  assertion,1  "  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  reputa- 
tion. Pitt,  Paley,  and  Copies  ton  were  with  Malthus ; 
he  had  gained  over  Hallam  among  historians,  James 
Mill,  Senior,  and  Ricardo  among  economists,  Broug- 
ham, .Mackintosh,  and  even  Whitbread  among  poli- 
ticians. Southey,  Hazlitt,  and  Cobbett  were  not  a 
sufficient  make-weight.  Hazlitt  in  his  Reply  to  the 

//  on  Population  (in  letters  of  which  some  appeared 
in  Cobbett's  Pol.  Register,  1807)  acknowledges  the 
popularity,  though  he  predicts  its  decay.2  It  seems 
el.-ar  that  in  educated  circles  at  least  the  view  of 
.Malthus  was  as  early  as  1820  what  it  was  in  1829, 
"the  popular  view,"1  which  is  quite  compatible, 
as  Darwin  long  experienced,  with  great  unpopularity 
in  particular  (juartcrs.  No  better  evidence  could  be 
given  of  tiiis  popularity  than  the  unwilling  testimony 
.L'iveu  by  Godwin  himself  in  his  new  book.4  At  the 
end  of  1819  Brough  mi  had  ivf.-nvd  in  the  House  of 
Commons  to  the  principle  of  Malthus  as  "one 'of  the 
soundest  principles  of  political  economy/'  and  said  it 

melancholy  to  observe  how  the  press  scouted  it 
and  abused  its  defenders.5  The  press,  howev.-r,  was 

/.'«>.,  1802,  on  Dr.  Kennel's  Dueourtet,  Syd.  Sm.,  Work*  i.  p.  8. 
f  p.    18.      Compare   De  Quincey's  -answer   t««    11  a/litt    in   London 
Magazine,  1823    v..].  vi,i.  ,,,,  :•,  j:»,  459,  569,586). 
»  Senior,  Lect.  on  J  -   I'opulation,  I.  iv.  p.  27 

6  Cf.  also  speorh  -n  l):  ><ard,  *u6  dato,  p.  1109. 


364  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  iv. 

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  con- 
tributed 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  pos- 
terity ")  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  dis- 
cussed the  first.  The  use  of  the  second  implies  a 
misunderstanding  of  the  Malthusian  position,  for  it 
ignores  distinction  between  actual  and  possible  sup- 
plies of  food,  and  does  not  allow  that  a  man  is 
"  confined"  by  four  walls  unless  he  touches  them.1 

1  See  aLove,  p.  75.     Cf.  also  above,  pp.  142  seq.,  on  Emigration. 


BK.IV.]  THE   CRITICS.  305 

Godwin  does  not  mend  the  argument  by  comparing 
it  to  the  objection  brought  against  Christianity — "  the 
world  is  not  yet  Christianized";  still  less  by  iippealing 
to  Christianity  itself,  and  taunting  Malthus  with  the 
texts,  "  Increase  and  multiply,"  "  Happy  is  the  rnau 
that  hath  his  quiver  full  of  them,"  "made  a  little 
lower  than  the  angels/'  "forty  sons  and  thirty  grand- 
sons, which  rode  on  threescore  and  ten  ass  colts," 
"In  the  last  days  some  shall  depart  from  the  faith, 
forbidding  to  marry."1  Malthus  had  been  attacked 
in  1807  by  a  Puritan  or  Covenanting  pamphlet  en- 
titled, '  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.'2  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 
(Jn.l,  but  substitutes  for  Him  sometimes  the  principle 
of  Population,  sometimes  that  of  Necessity."  Sa«ll»T 
inaiiy  years  later  declared  in  the  same  spirit  that  "tin? 
insults  tin  theory  of  Malthus  levels  at  God,  and  th<». 
injuries  it  meditates  inflicting  upon  man,  \\ill  !•»• 
(in  lured  by  neither."8 

Once  for  all,  1«  t   Parson  Malthus  explain  his  con- 

1  «  /m.,  I.  xiii.  106.    Cf.  I.  iv.  22,  II.  ii.  1  \'2.  VI.  vi.  585. 

«  Hawick,  1H>  ^ly  p.  84.          •  Sadler,  A>/m.,  I.  i.  15  (1830). 


3G6  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [UK.  iv. 

sistency  with  the  religious  text-book  of  his  Church. 
Prior  to  the  injunction  given  to  men  to  increase 
and  multiply,  come,  says  Maltlius,  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  popu- 
lation, not  an  unhealthy,  vicious,  and  miserable  one. 
And,  if,  in  endeavouring  to  obey  the  command  to 
increase  arid  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."  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 

1  Append,  to  3rd  ed.,  1806;  7th  ed.,  p.  485;  cf.  pp.  395,  446,  and  al. 


BK.IV.]  THE  CRITICS.  367 

a  wicked  replenishing  were  not  desirable,  an  un- 
hu[)]>y  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  writ- 
iugs  of  Parson  Malthus  inconsistent  with  his  ecclesias- 
tical 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.1  Godwin,  however,  had  given  more  than 
two  years  of  hard  labour  to  the  writing  of  it ; 2  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  calcula- 
tions and  his  own  deductions  from  them.  He  himself 
"  could  not  pursue  a  calculation  for  an  hour  without 
1>< 'ing  sick  to  the  lowest  ebb."3  If  Booth  lagged 
1. rhin. I  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,  lie  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,  an.l 
the  world  is  delivered  from  this  accursed  apology  in 

>  See  Appendix  to  cd.  1825,  7th  ,-,!.,  ,,.  527. 
»  I  c.  p.  259. 


368  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [HK.  iv. 

favour  of  vice  and  misery  and  hard-heartedness  and 
oppression/' l  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.2  A  few  of  his  younger  friends3  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.4  But  the 
fact  remains  not  only  that  poor  Godwin  made  no 
bread  and  butter  by  it,5  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  182 1,6  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.7  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 

1  Life,  ii.  259,  260.    Cf.  what  Godwin  writes  to  Sir  John  Sinclair, 
July  1821  (Sinclair's  Correspondence,  i.  393).  2  I.  c.  p.  271. 

3  Morgan  and  Rosser,  e.  g.     See  Life,  ii.  272-5;  cf.  p.  280. 

4  Edin.  Rev.,  July  1821,  p.  364.  6  Life  of  Godwin,  ii.  274. 

8  Ibid.,  pp.  274-5.  7  No.  1,  Oct.  1802,  esp.  p.  26. 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS.  369 

substantial  argument  against  Mai  thus.  Godwin  takes 
up,1  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  1806,2  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,8  were  Dr.  Price,  Styles,  Benjamin  Franklin, 
Euler,  and  Sir  William  Petty,  supplemented,  for 
figures,  by  Short  and  Slissmilch  and  the  censuses  of 
*the  United  States  and  England,  and,  for  principles, 
by  Adam  Smith  and  Hume.  We  have  already  seen 4 
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  popula- 
tion can  never  be  quite  exactly  geometrical 5  (which 
Malthus  would  admit), — that  America  was  an  excep- 
tion 6  (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), 

1  Population,  I.  i. 

*  Appendix  to  3rd  ed.,  p.  520  n.;  7th  ed.,  p.  491  n. 

1  See  hia  Letter  to  Godwin,  dated   October   1818,  and  quoted  in 
Godwin's  Population,  Bk.  II. ch.  i.  pp.  116—123,  with  rmnmenU. 
«  See  above,  p.  66.  *  Population,  II.  x.  244-7. 

•  E.  g.  II.  xi.  274,  282,  but  especially  I.  iv.  25,  and  for  the  third 
nr/uni«-iit,  pp.  29,  30,  cf.  pp.  43—50,  Ac.    Cf.  also  Godwin  to  Sinclair  in 

lair's  Corrarpono'ence,  i.  .':. 

15  n 


370  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [UK.  iv. 

— that  the  normal  increase  is  not  that  of  America 
but  that  of  Sweden,1  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  Irish- 
woman 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 
increase  of  the  numbers  is  natural  (or  sponta- 
neous), but  that  of  the  food  is  greater  still ; 2  the  great 
increase  is  not  natural,  but  due  to  immigration ; 3 
there  has  been  no  great  increase  at  all.4  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,5  and  is  a  fitful 
principle.6  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 

1  Population  tends  to  double  in  a  hundred  years,  and  there  is  no  risk 
of  over-population  except  in  occasional  times  of  dull  trade  (Letter  of 
Godwin  to  Sinclair,  Sinclair's  Correspondence,  1.  c.).    A  notable  exception. 

2  Population,  II.  xi.  251-2.       3  IV.  i.       4  II.  ii.  127,  and  cf.  above. 
»  II.  xi.  287,  &c.,  &c.  «  III.  iii.  327  seq. 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS.  371 

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.1  Free- 
thinkers had  not  as  yet  identified  themselves  with 
the  party  of  order  in  physics ;  and  perhaps  Godwin 
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.2 

If  economical  criticism  was  weak  with  Godwin, 
the  political  philosopher,  it  was  still  weaker  with 
Coleridge,  the  philosophizing  poet.  The  main  criti- 
cisms of  Coleridge3  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 
.Maltlms  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 
hims«  !f  in  an  impre-nal.l.-  l«»mvss,  Coleridge  breaks 
in  :  "  If  by  the  main  principle  the  author  means  both 

1  Coups  dUtat  in  nature.  Paul  Bert,  L?  En*cigi\emci\t  Prinuure,  1880, 
p.  ixviii. 

'  Edinburgh    Review,  July    1821.     Cf.   Letter    to  the   Rev.    T.    I: 
MalthuH  by  David  Booth  (1823),  who  absurdly  assumes  Malthus  to  be 
viewer.     Though   inu-nml  evidence  dispels  this  fancy,  it  shows 
that  Mallhus  was  still  believed  to  write  for  the  Edinburgh  Review. 
'  Others,  in  Table  Talk  and  Biogr.  Literaria,  are  chiefly  declamation. 

B  B  2 


372  MALTHUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [UK.  iv. 


Fad1  (i.  c.  that  population  unrestrained  should 
infinitely  outrun  food)  and  the  deduction  from  the 
fact,  i.  e.  that  the  human  race  is  therefore  not  inde- 
finitely 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 

1  In  these  quotations  the  capitals  are  in  the  original,  and  the  italics 
correspond  to  underlinings. 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS.  373 

irrationally  small,  supposing  the  human  race  healthy,  y  *£ 
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  genera- 
tions 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 
th.  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 


374  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  iv. 

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  main- 
tain 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. 
Mai  thus  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 1  hitherto 
considered  by  every  one  (Southey  included)  to 
be  Sou  they 's.  This  applies  to  the  subsequent  MS. 
notes,  which  are  happily  briefer.  Coleridge  finds 
fault  with  Mai  thus  (p.  11)  for  using  the  words 
virtue  and  vice  without  defining  them,  apparently 
overlooking  the  footnote  under  his  very  eyes  (p. 

1  Arthur  Aikin's  Annual  Review,  vol.  ii.  (for  1803)  pp.  292  seq.  Cf. 
Southey's  Life  and  Correspondence  (ed.  1850),  vol.  ii.  p.  251,  20th  Jan. 
1804  :  "  Yesterday  Malthus  received,  I  trust,  a  mortal  wound  from  my 
hand  ; "  cf.  vol.  vi.  p.  399,  and  vol.  ii.  p.  294.  There  is  no  hint  of 
obligation  to  Coleridge. 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS.  375 

11  n.)  which  says,  "  The  general  consequence  of 
vice  is  misery,  and  this  consequence  is  the  precise 
reason  why  an  action  is  termed  vicious." ]  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  Virtue2  and  Happiness  of 
llational  beings.  We  mention  this  not  under  the 
miserable  notion  that  any  state  of  society  will  render 
those  actions  capable  of  being  performed  with  con- 
science and  virtue,  but  to  expose  the  utter  unguarded- 
ness  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 8  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 
jiffy  pages  to  prove  an  axiom !  to  illustrate  a  self- 
cvi.lcnt  truth  I  It  is  neither  more  nor  less  than  book- 
making  I"  He  thinks,  however,  that  what  Malthus 
"f  Condorcct  applies  to  liimself; — though  his 

1  Cf.  above,  ch.  iii.  pp.  81  *«q.,  and  Bk.  III. 
1  <S'<  plains  a  thing  bj  itscit 

3  Ik-  probably  meant  353nl,  hut  his  numbers  are  careless. 


376  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  iv. 

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.1  The  remaining  marginal  notes  are 
chiefly  of  an  interjectional  character,2  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. 
Except  for  the  interest  attaching  even  to  the  foolish 
wrords  of  a  great  man,  it  would  not  have  been  worth 
wrhile  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.4  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 

1  On  margin  of  p.  364,  2nd  paragr.  :  "  Quote  and  apply  to  himself." 
8  E.  g.  on  p.  65  opposite  to  lines  5,  6,  "  Ass  ! "  a  monosyllabic  refine- 
ment omitted  in  Southey's  review. ; 

3  First  in  1817,  7th  ed.,  pp.  509  seq. 

4  One  of  the  charges  (p.  18  :  that  Malthus  recommends  the  same 
remedies  as  Condorcet)  is  sufficient  to  stamp  the  character  of  the  book — 
An  Inquiry  into  the  Principle  of  Population,  &c.,  by  James  Grahame. 
Its  Introduction  gives  a  useful  list  of  writers  on  both  sides  ;  see  p.  71. 
(Edin.,  1816.)     Simonin  repeats  Grahame's  charges,  with  more  mistakes 
of  his  own.     See  his  Hist,  de  la  Psychologic  (1879),  pp.  397-9, 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS.  377 

(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.1  Grahame  himself 
does  not  deny  the  tendency  to  increase  beyond  food 
(p.  102),  but  thinks  emigration  a  sufficient  remedy 
(p.  104). 

Empson,2  playfully  classifying  the  opponents  of 
Malthus,  says  there  are  some  who  will  not  com- 
prehend "  out  of  sheer  stupidity,  like  Mr.  Grahame," 
or  out  of  sentimental  horror,  like  Southey,3  Coleridge, 
and  Bishop  Huntingford ; 4  or  because,  like  Sadler 6 
and  Godwin,  who  followed  Price  and  Muret,6  they 
imagine  the  law  of  population  to  vary  with  the  cir- 
cumstances ;  or  else  because  they  invent  laws  of  their 
own,  like  Anderson,  Owen,  and  Poulett  Scrope;7 

1  7th  ed.,  p.  511.  Cf.  above,  p.  52,  and  the  reply  to  Godwin's  Reply, 
Essay,  2nd  ed.,  III.  iii.  384. 

*  Edinburgh  Review,  Jan.  lv 

1    Life  and  Correspondence  of  Southey,  vol.  iii.  pp.  21-2,  and  p.  188. 

4  Bishop  of  Gloucester  and  later  of  Hereford.  Theolog.  Works 
(1832). 

6  "The  prolificneas  of  human  things,  otherwise  similarly  circum- 
stanced, varies  inversely  aa  th-  ir  numbers."— Sadler,  Popn.,  v«.l.  iii.  p.  352 
(1830).  Reviewed  somewhat  caustically  by  Macaulay  in  Edin.  Rev., 
1 830.  See  Trevelyan's  Life  of  Macaulay,  vol.  L  p.  126.  Cf.  Sn.llrr's 
*  Reply '  to  Edin.  Rev.  His  weakest  point  was  his  use  of  "  inver- 

•  Malthus,  Essay,  II    v.  (7th  ed.),  pp.  164,  166  ;  cf.  p.  485. 

T  G.  P.  Scrope,  M.P.,  Pol  Econ.,  1833,  &c,  Malthus,  Essay,  III  iii. 
(7th  ed.),  282-6  (Owen),  IV.  xii.  457  (Owen),  III.  xiv.  380  n.  (Anderson). 


378  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [I,K.  iv. 

or  because,  like  Weyland,1  they  deny  the  premises 
of  Malthus  as  well  as  the  conclusion.  Weyland, 
like  Grahame,  has  the  honour  of  a  special  refut- 
ation 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 
atural  or  spontaneous  rate  in  all ; 2  we  cannot  take 
the  height  of  Chang  or  of  the  Hale  Child  as  the 
natural  standard  of  the  height  of  all.  To  this 
Multhus  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  in- 
crease 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 


1  John  Weyland,  junr.,  F.R.S.    The  Principles  of  Population  and  Pro- 
duction as  they  are  affected  by  the  Progress  of  Society  with  a  view  to 
Moral  and  Political  Consequences,  1816. 

2  So  Arnold  Toynbee,  Industrial  Revolution,  p.  107. 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS.  379 

of  his  first  cardinal  proposition,1  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.2 

\V<«  yland  thinks  that,  without  any  moral  restraint, 
population  will  keep  within  limits  of  the  food,  in 
proportion  as  it  reaches  a  high  state  of  morality, 

jion,  and  political  liberty.3  Malthus,  on  the  con-  r 
trary,  would  say  that,  without  moral  restraint,  even 
morality,  religion,  and  political  liberty  will  not  save 
a  people  from  wretchedness  ; 4  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." 

One  argument  of  Weyland's6  has  some  weight  in 
it.      With  a  rich  soil,  high  farming,  and  abundant 
food,  the  bulk  of  the  people  of  a  country  might  by     / 
tin-  natural   division  of  labour  be  employed  in  manu-^ 
facture,  and  their  unhealthy  manner  of  life  in  towns 
might  so  check  population  that  it  might  be  far  from 
keeping  up  to  the  level  of  tin-  food.     Malthus  replies 

iii.  p.  21.     He  adds,  as  hia  second  :  "  This  tendency  can  never 
be  (lestn>\ 
*  Essay,  Appendix,  p.  517.  *  Propos.  iii  and  iv. 

"</.  1   • .  p.  521,  a  very  strong  passage. 
6  Append,  p.  526.  •  Pop.  and  Prod.,  pp.  82  stq. 


380  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  iv 

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" * 

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."2  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  experimenting3  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.4 
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.5 
In  other  words,  he  would  reduce  the  English  standard 
of  living  to  the  common  Irish  one,  milk  and  potatoes. 

7th  ed.,  I.  ii.  12  n.  ;  2nd  ed.,  p.  16. 

Tour  in  Southern  Counties  of  England,  1767,  p.  342. 

Between  1767  and  1820.     Cf.  above  (England). 

Travels  in  France,  pp.  408-9  (ed.  1792)  and  al. 

Essay  on  Pop.,  7th  ed.,  pp.  449,  451  seq. ;  Annals  of  Agriculture, 
no.  239,  pp.  219  seq.  (quoted  in  Essay,  App.  pp.  496-7).  Young  had 
reproached  Malthus  for  denying  the  right  to  relief. 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS.  381 

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."1  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 
l>y  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. 

f\ 

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 

1  TraveU  in  France,  ed.  1792,  pp.  438-9. 


382  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  iv. 

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.1 

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  Partners/dps  in 
the  Land*  ("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 
v  y^  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  com- 
munism ;  there  might  even  be  communism  without  an 
absolute  equality,  such  as  would  put  idle  and  indus- 
trious 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 

1  App.  to  Essay,  pp.  499,  500.     It  is  not  true  that  "  Owen  was  right 
ay  against  Malthus  when  he  regarded  a  certain  amount  of  comfort  as  the 
indispensable  condition  of  a  moral  life,  and  thought  that  a  considerable 
increase  of  man's  powers  of  production  was  possible  "  (Held,  Soc.  Oesch. 
England's,  pp.  351-2).     Malthus  himself  did  both. 

2  The  Plan  is  quoted  by  Cobbett,  Pol.  Reg.,  Dec.  14,  1816.     Malthus 
(Pol.  EC.  (1820),  pp.  434,  435,  (1836)  p.  378)  thinks  that  "co-proprietor- 
ship"  of  Government  with  the   landlords,   after  the  scheme  of  the 
Economistes  and  on  the  analogy  of  Oriental  "sole  proprietorship," might 
become  too  ready  an  engine  of  taxation  for  a  military  despotism. 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS. 

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 
da -si's.1  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  in- 
<  quality  of  conditions  to  have  been  necessary  in  order 
to  raise  man  from  the  indolence  and  apathy  of  the 
_re  to  the  activity  and  intelligence  of  civilized 
life,  it  does  not  follow  that  the  continuance  of  the 
xii IK*  stimulus  should  be  necessary  when  this  activity 
and  energy  of  mind  has  been  once  gained."2 

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  tliat 
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.8  There  is  an  air 
of  collusiveness  in  the  remark  that,  in  proportion 

«  See  above,  pp.  87,  1 12,  Ac.  f  E**ay,  7th  ed.,  p.  284. 

,  Econ.  81  >  !>!•.  135  tcq.,  and  by  Scuili.  y 

in  A  i  i .  /  ,v  view  above  quoted. 


384  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [OK.  iv. 

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  with- 
out allowing  the  individual  his  private  property.1  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  pro- 
bably 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. 

1  III.  iii.  286.  This  and  the  rest  of  his  argument  (even  its  appli- 
cation to  Civil  Liberty)  is  to  be  found  in  Aristotle,  Politics,  ii.  3  and  4, 
but  esp.  5.  Stl  di  fjirjfii  TOVTO  XavQavuv,  &c. 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS.  385 

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.1  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 
u ul ike  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  argu- 
ment, he  examines  Owen's  attempt  to  deal  with  it.2 

Since  Malthus,  every  complete  reform  has  needed 
to  face  in  some  way  or  other  the  question  which  ho 
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. 
Mivart8  to  be  the  basis  of  Darwinism.  "Every 
individual  has  to  endure  a  very  severe  struirule  f«»r 
existence  owing  to  the  tendency  to  geometrieal 

1  Euay  on  Pop.,  7th  ed.,  p.  282.  f  See  above,  p.  24. 

•  Qcvwnt  of  Specie*,  2nd  ed.,  1671,  p.  6. 

C  C 


386  MALTHUS   AND   HIS  WORK.  [P>K.  iv. 


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  jn  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  ne-w  (p.  92)  ; 
— fifth,  Malthus  does  not  distinguish  between  tend- 
ency to  increase  and  actual  increase,  and  is  there- 
fore 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 
11  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  ; l — that  better  industry  would  keep 
a  larger  population  (p.  107)  ; — Malthus  says  that  vice 
and  misery  are  necessary  (p.  109)  ; — Malthus  does  not 

1  The  puzzling  effect  of  counting  up  one's  great-grandfathers  and 
great-grandmothers  up  to  the  twentieth  degree  or  so  is  described  by  Black- 
stone  as  quoted  by  Godwin  (Popn.}  and  re-quoted  by  Hazlitt  (Spirit  of  the 
Age,  1825,  p.  273, '  Godwin ').  The  puzzle  is  less  if  we  remember  that  our 
remote  ancestors  must  have  married  into  each  other's  families,  or  rather 
were  scions  in  the  end  of  the  same  families.  We  cannot  go  back  to  a 
single  pair  except  through  the  "  prohibited  degrees." 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS.  -  387 

see  that  vegetables  and  animals  increase  faster  than 

o      -  —  -  •"•        ——   -•        .  —         i    —    —  •        —         f"^  .      A  ^Tf 

£opujajtion__(p.  115), — or  that  the  increase  of  man  in-^ 
volves  the  increase  of  his  food  (p.  116),  for  a  division  ** 
of  labour  makes  man  produce  more  than  he  consumes  v,  / y 
(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,1 — 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  tweuty  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 

1  We  are  to  understand,  therefore,  that  Malthus  and  the  author  agree 
that  population  needs  a  check,  and  are  simply  not  agreed  iMoi  the 
checks  are  to  be. 

C  C  2 


388  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  iv. 

the  real  law  of  population  is  common  to  Mr.  George 
with  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer  ; 1  what  is  wrong  is  common 
to  him  with  Godwin.2 

The  view  of  Karl  Marx,3  the  prophet  of  the  Inter- 
national 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  accumu- 
lation 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  pro- 
gressive production  of  a  population  which,  in  relation 
to  capital,  is  a  surplus  or  superfluity,  an  over- 
population ; — the  cause  which  increases  the  net 

1  See  below,  p.  392. 

2  See  above,  p.  370.     The  sixteen  positions  not  touched  in  their  own 
place  will  be  met  by  a  reference  to  the  following  places  in  this  book  : 
i.  to  p.  20,  add  Essay,  2nd  ed.  Bk.  III.  ch.  iii.  p.  383,  ii.  to  p.  37,  iii.  to 
p.  338,  iv.  to  pp.  51,  78,  v.  to  p.  80,  vi.  to  p.  83,  viii.  to  p.  113,  ix.  to  p. 
376,  x.  to  p.  67,  xi.  to  pp.  231,  297,  see  Essay,  7th  ed.  p.  381,  xii.  to  pp. 
70,  75,  91,  xiii.  to  p.  393,  xiv.  to  pp.  91,  270,  xv.  to  p.  294,  xvi.  to  p.  69, 
and  xvii.  to  p.  75. 

3  Das  Kapital,  7ter  Abschn.  23tes  Kap.  pp.  653  seq.  (ed.  1872);  cf. 
646  seq. 


BK.IV.]  THE  CRITICS.  389 

uue  of  the  country  at  the  same  time  renders  the 
population  redundant  and  deteriorates  the  condition 
of  the  labourer.1  So  far  from  deploring  the  existence 
of  this  redundant  class,  the  capitalists  depend  on  it,2 
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. 

Itlius  with  his  narrow  views  understands  the 
surplus  population  to  be  superfluous  absolutely  in 
itself,  and  not  merely  in  relation  to  capital ;  but 
(•v.-u  he  recognizes  that  over-population  is  a  necessity 
of  modern  industry." !  In  proof  of  these  statements 
he  quotes  the  words  of  Malthus  (Pol.  Econ.,  ed.  1836, 
pp.  215,4  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 
<>f  labourers  cannot  be  brought  into  [the]  market, 
in  consequence  of  a  particular  demand,  till  a  ft  ti- 
the lapse  of  sixteen  or  eighteen  years ;  and  the 
conversion  of  revenue  into  capital,  by  Caving,  may 

ie  language  of  Ricardo,  ch.  xxxi.  p.  236  (quoted  by  Marx,  p. 
656  n.).  Cf.  above,  p.  297.  Cf.  also  Marx,  pp.  427 

2  Cf.  what  Prof.  Rogers  says  in  Six  Centurie*,  p.  229,  of  the  attempt 
made  in  th.    fifteenth  century  to  increase  tli  um"of  a^ 

tural  labour  for  the  benefit  of  the  farmers  and  landlords.     Also  above, 
p.  164  n. 

*  Marx,  Owi,  p.  659.  «  Misprinted  in  Marx  as  854. 


390  MALTHUS   AND   HIS   WORK.  [UK.  iv. 

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 ; 1  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  dis- 
appear ; 2 — 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  writings3  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  desir- 
able for  the  workmen.4  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. 

1  See  above,  pp.  137,  188,  &c.          2  See  above,  p.  335. 
3  See  above,  pp.  299,  335,  &c.          4  Das  Kap.,  p.  549  n. 


BK.  iv.]  THE  CRITICS.  391 

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 : l  "  When  I  say  Eden's  work  on  the  Poor  was  the 
only  important  writing  by  a  disciple  of  Adam  Smith 
iii  the  eighteenth  century,  I  may  be  reminded  of  the 
essay  of  Mai  thus.  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.  .  .2  With  exception  of 
Ortes8  the  Venetian  monk,  an  original  and  clever 

1  Da*Kap.,i>.  641  n. 

*  The  passage  omitted  is  n.-iili.-r  tme  nor  decent. 

*  O.  M.  Ortes  ftylemont  tulla  popolasionc  (1790). 


302  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  iv. 

writer,  most  of  the  writers  on  Population  are  Pro- 
- 1  a ut  clergymen,"  a  contrast,  he  goes  on,  to  the 
days  when  political  economists  were  all  philosophers. 
Marx  adopts  l  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  ? 2  Would  not  the  millennium  of  the  Socialist,  like 
that  of  the  Christian,  postulate  a  religious  conver- 
sion 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  unselfish- 
ness, which  not  one  in  a  hundred  thousand  in  our 
day  exhibits  at  any  time,  shall  at  once  become  the 

1  Das  Kap.,  p.  549  n. 

2  Of.  above,  p.  382,  and  Malthus,  Essay,  2nd  ed.  III.  iii.  386,  where 
he  says  that  Duty  and  Interest  must  work  together. 


BK.  iv.]  TUB  CRITICS.  393 

invariable  daily  rule  of  all  without  exception.  But 
Co  operation,  if  it  neglects  JVIalthus,  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 
."  founded  on  striking  biological  analogies,  that 
the  general  development  of  intellect  iu  the  race  will 
weaken  the  passion  for  marriage  and  supersede  the 
necessity  for  any  checks  on  it ; l — 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  indi- 
viduals. 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,  Malthas  would 
probably  have  pointed  t>ut,  first,  that  unless  the 
jippi-titc  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  mm 
to  their  responsibilities  and  strengthening  their 
power  of  ivstnint  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 

1  'Theory  of  Popul  ><?r  Rev.,  April  1852,  pirated  by 

the  0  f.'wor  Trail  in  1877  (Kii.e  neue  Berftterun^sfteorte),  and 

substantially  ma  nt  uiii..  1  by  iU  author  (Mr.  Herbert  Spencer)  in 

../.,/./,    V.,1.    II      I 


394  MALTHUS  AND  HIS   WORK.  [BK.  iv. 

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  misapplies  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,  Mai  thus  would  have 
replied  as  to  Condorcet : l 

"  What  can  we  reason  but  from  what  we  know  ? " 

This  brief  survey  of  typical  critics  and  comment- 
ators 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  Mai  thus  by  their 
motives,2  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.3^ 

II.  Others   admit    that    it    is   unanswerable,    but 

1  Essay,  7th  ed.  269.  2  Above,  p.  377. 

3  E.  g.  Hazlitt,  Reply  to  Essay  on  Population,  p.  20. 


BK.  iv.]  THE   CRITICS.  395 

iv t iiia  a  philosophical  faith  ia  the  future  discovery 
of  some  contrary  principle.1 

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,2 — and 
that  no  mere  arithmetical  increase  of  food  has  been 
proved,  but  something  much  more  rapid,3 — or  (6)  in 
regard  to  the  checks  on  population,  asserting  that  no 
checks  are  necessary,4 — that  vice  and  misery  some- 
times add  to  population  instead  of  checking  it,5 — 
that  to  include  moral  restraint  is  to  stultify  the 
original  doctrine,6 — 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,7 — that  important  checks  have  been 
omitted, .  the  chief  being  misgovernment,8  bad  laws,9 

1  W.  R.  Greg,  Enigmas  of  Life,  8th  ed.,  1874,  pp.  58  seq.  This  was 
nearly  Godwin's  position  in  his  first  reply. 

1  Sadler  on  Population,  and  Reply  to  Edinburgh  Review.  Go«l win, 
Population,  Bk.  VI.  ch.  ii,  &c. 

»  Carey  (H.  C.),  Princ.  of  Social  Science  (1858),  vol.  i.  ch.  xiv.  ;  cf. 
above,  p.  74  seq.  H.  George,  Progress  and  Poverty,  pp.  115,  116.  Sadler, 
p.  70,  Ac. 

4  Godwin,  Sadler,  &c. 

•  Sadler,  pp.  354-5,  &c.     Cf.  Adam  Smith,  W.  of  N.,  I.  viii.  36.     See 
above,  pp.  82,  83. 

•  Godwin,  see  above,  p.  361.     Sou  they,  Life  and  Corresp.,  III.  188. 
Bagehot,  Econ.  Studies,  pp.  133  seq.    Cf.  George,  II.  ii.  94.     Above,  pp. 
363,381. 

'  Besant,  Law  of  Population  «•!,.  iii.     Cf.  Malthas,  pp.  407  seq.  (IV. 

Cobbett,  Taking  Leave  of  his  Countrymen  (1817),  p.  6  ;  1' 
Register,  4th  Jan.  1817,  p.  26,  Ac.,  &c.     Above,  p.  329. 
1  Godwin,  Population,  passim.      George,  II.  ii.  102,  109.     Above, 
ill,  112. 

•  Godwin,  ibid.;  George,  pp.  138,  259,  &c.,&c.;  Coleridge,  MS. 


396  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  iv. 

high   feeding,1  intellectual   development,2  and   those 
of  Owen.3 

There  is,  besides,  an  a  priori  criticism,  which  is 
either  (I.)  ecclesiastical,4  alleging  that  Malthus  con- 
tradicts the  Bible  or  some  other  authority, — (II.) 
theological,5  that  he  denies  Providence, — or  (III.) 
doctrinaire,6  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/  that  he  runs  counter  to  the  moral 
sense  and  the  natural  benevolence  of  men  and  cos- 
mopolitan 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  found- 
ation. In  the  Empire,  Christianity  may  have  raised 
the  people,  and  Stoicism  the  philosophers,  to  the 
wider  morality  without  the  training  of  the  narrower, 

p.  358  (of  Essay,  2nd  ed.),  where  for  "physical  constitution  of  our 
nature  "  he  would  read,  "  in  the  existing  system  of  society."  So  verbatim 
Southey  in  Aikin's  Ann.  Rev.  \.  c. 

1  Doubleday,  True  Law  of  Population  (1841).     Above,  p.  65.     See 
Herbert  Spencer,  Biology,  Vol.  II.  pt.  vi.  ch.  xii.  pp.  455,  480,  &c.     The 
phy.siologi.sts  have  amply  refuted  Doubleday. 

2  Herbert  Spencer.    See  above,  p.  393.    W.  R.  Greg,  Enigmas.  Above, 
p.  394. 

3  New  Malthusians.     See  above,  p.  24. 

4  See  above,  pp.  365  seq.   The  orthodoxy  of  Malthus  is  proved  not  by  a 
few  orthodox  sentences  which  can  be  gleaned  from  him  (as  from  Bacon), 
or  even  by  the  discovery  of  flaws  in  the  received  doctrine,  but  by  the 
whole,  logic  of  the  essay.  6  See  above,  pp.  365  seq. 

6  See  above,  p.  336.  7  See  above,  p.  328. 


BK.IV.]  THE   CRITICS.  397 

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 
O/o£  T&SIOS)  must  be  the  common  highway  to  good- 
ness in  a  society  of  ordinary  men.  If  poverty  were 
no  evil,  churlishness  would  be  no  vice.  But  extreme 
poverty1  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  moniKcrs  of  it,  who,  if  the\ 
good  at  finst  in  si.it e  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  n'.<|K»M>il»ility  <>nly  in  its  individual 
members ;  and  no  member  of  it  can  free  his 

1     Sr,.   Hl-Vr.    ],.    %. 


398  MALTHUS   AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  iv. 

soul  by  the  purity  of  a  collective  or  representative 
conscience. 

The  doctrine  of  Mai  thus  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  Crou  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 — Hie  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  bio- 
^rniphical  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  1837.1  Otter 
was  the  college  companion  and  life-long  friend  of 
Mai  thus ;  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. 

II     i;itli«T,  D.ini  1  Malthus,  was  born  in  1730,  and 

1  Th ••  (in  le  is  shown  by  Macvey  Napier's  Letters 

*tt&  dato,  and  that  of  the  biogr.  preface  by  Empson's  art,  p.  472. 


400  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  v. 

went  to  Queen's  College,  Oxford,  in  1747,1  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,2 
or  from  Dr.  Johnson's  reason  of  poverty,  for  he  was 
a  gentleman  commoner,  but  probably  from  a  con- 
tempt for  the  distinction  itself.3  His  mind  was  active 
and  open,  and  he  seems  to  have  formed  literary 
friendships  that  stood  his  son  in  good  stead  after- 
wards. 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 
]ess  pleasant  and  certainly  not  the  less  useful  for 
being  disburdened  of  some  of  its  society ;  I  imagine 
you  will  say  the  same  of  Cambridge."4  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  grand- 
father's name  of  Sydenham,5  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 

1  "Daniel   Malthus,  17,  Sydenham  de  parochia  Sti.  Giles   Londini 
Armigeri  films  "  (Matriculation  entry,  Easter  terra,  1747). 

2  See  Gibbon's  Memoirs,  p.  46  (ed.  Hunt  and  Clarke),  and  Jeffrey's 
Life,  i.  40. 

*  Cf.  Wealth  of  Nations,  V.  i.  art.,  pp.  341  foil. 

4  Biogr.  pref.  to  Pol  Econ.  (1836),  p.  xxvi. 

6  The  name  Malthus  itself  is  probably  Malt-hus,  or  Malthouse  (cf. 
Shorthouee,  Maltby),  which  still  occurs  as  a  surname  in  England. 
Francis  (or,  some  say,  Thomas)  Malthus  wrote  on  '  Fireworks,  fortifica- 
tion, and  arithmetic,'  in  French  and  in  English,  1629. 


BK.  v.]  BIOGRAPHY.  401 

in  his  fifteenth,  their  father  ill  1821  in  his  sixtv- 
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 
04th  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  mea-i  • 
biographies.1  His  father,  full  of  the  teaching  of  the 
Emile,  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 
ny,  fireside  and  hillside  philosophizing,2  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.8  In  his 

1  Except  perhap*  in  a  letter  quoted  by  Otter,  biogr.  prcf.  p.  ixvii. 
(date  1788). 

*  I.  c.  p.  xxv. 

3  /  which  show,  however,  that  at  6fty-aeven  the 

strength  had  fulled  a  little. 

D  D 


402  MALTHUS   AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  v. 


little  valley  it  was  easy  for  Daniel  Mai  thus  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  description1  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;2  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.3  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.4  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.5  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 

1  "  He  was  not  born  to  copy  the  works  of  others."  —  Letter  in  Gentl. 
Mag.,  Feb.  1800.     See  above,  p.  7,  and  Otter,  p.  xxii. 

2  Otter,  pp.  xxi,  xxii. 

3  So  he  urges  Robert  continually  to  "apply  his  tools."   "  I  hate  to  see 
a  prl  working  curious  stitches  upon  a  piece  of  rag."  —  Otter,  p.  xxvi. 

4  Gentl  Mag.,  Jan.  1800,  p.  86  ;  cf.  Feb.  1800,  p.  177  ;  Otter,  p.  xxvi. 
6  Monthly  Mag.,  March  1800,  Otter,  p.  xxii.     What  and  where  were 

the  pieces  we  are  not  told. 


BK.  v.]  BIOGRAPHY.  403 

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  "  Emile "  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 
(>  .  or  the  Su tinner1 8  Ramble  of  Mr.  Geoff ry 

V'ildgoose,1  we  should  not  fancy  him  the  best  guide 
for  ingenuous  youth.  The  book  is  a  coarse  and 
offensive  satire  on  AV  hit  field  and  Wesley;2  and  shows 

1  Written   in    1772,  and   rcpubli^hed   in   Mrs.   Barbauld's  series  of 
British  AW/wte,  1820.     Graves  lived  at  Claverton  from  1750  till  hi* 

a  his  ninetieth  year.    He  became  Fellow  of  All  Souls  in 
1730,  and  may  have  known  Daniel  Mai  thus  at  Oxford. 

2  \Vli-. in  !).•  nam.-s  and  <|U"U»s  freely.    Tucker,  in  Light  of  batons, 
shows  the  same  open  dislike  of  them,  but  with  imirh  more  good -In 

and  taste. 

D  D  2 


404  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  v. 

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  passed1  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."  2  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  accord- 
ance with  Daniel  and  the  Emile.  "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."  The 
tutor's  best  service  is  to  point  the  pupil  to  the  best 
authors  and  give  him  advice  (not  lectures)  when  he 

1  In  1780  or  thereabouts. 

2  WakefielcTs  Life  (1804),  vol.  i.  p.  214.     It  is  curious  to  remember 
that  Marat  is  said  to  have  been  an  usher  at  a  Warrington  School  a  short 
time  before  this.  3  Wakefield's  Life,  i.  p.  344. 


BK.  v.]  BIOGRAPHY.  405 

wants  it.  There  was  self-denial  as  well  as  wisdom 
in  WakefielcTs  view,  for  in  one  case  at  least  the 
})ii[»il  showed  his  proficiency  by  departing  from  the 
opinions  of  his  tutor. 

\VukrfirU,  himself  a  Fellow  of  Jesus,1  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  1785.2  Robert  esteemed  him 
highly.  He  described  him  twenty  years  afterwards s 
as  a  man  "  of  the  strictest  and  most  inflexible  inte- 
grity," 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,4  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 
justice  in  its  writings.  Though  a  foe  to  the 
thirty-nine  Articles,  Wakeficld  was  a  stout  believer  in 
Tin  1st ianity,  an«l  attacked  Paine's  Age  of  Reason  in 
a  rough  style  that  contrasts  strongly  with  the  sober 
remarks  of  Malthus  on  Paine's  ////////*  of  .]fan. 

»  Elected  in  1776.     See  Life,  i.  p.  Ill  ft. 

1  Otter,  I  c.  p.  xxvii  ft. 

1  L<  1 1    to  Wakefi  L  pp.  454— 46a   A  compn 

of  thi*  :  1,  /,,/,-.  !: 

(••  l.y  hi-  <>\vn  acknowledgment "),  moke*  it  almost  certain  that  the  letter 
is  by  Malthus. 

!th  such  very  different  men  as  Watson,  Bi.«hnp  of  Llandaff, 
and  Thomas  Paine. 


408  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [UK.  v. 

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,1  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,2  was  his  college  tutor,  and 
spoke  highly  of  him.3  It  says  much  for  his  mathe- 
matical powers  that  in  spite  of  his  wide  general  read- 
ing 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.4 
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 

1  Though  at  college  he  took  several  prizes  for  Latin  and  Greek  and 
English  Declamations.     We  may  hope  that  his  defect  of  utterance  had 
not  become  pronounced  at  that  date,  or  that  the  declamations  were  not 
always  declaimed. 

2  Wakefield,  Life,  ii.  p.  9.  s  Otter,  I  c.  p.  xxv. 

4  Otter  himself  was  fourth  wrangler  in  1790,  and  E.  D.  Clarke  junior 
optime  in  the  same  year. 


BK.  v.]  BIOGRAPHY.  407 

navigator.  The  son  had  answered  that  there  would 
be  ample  time  after  the  Tripos  to  make  the  appli- 
cations, 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  sub- 
mission to  your  judgment),  I  promise  you  at  the 
expiration  of  that  time  to  be  a  decent  natural  philo- 
sopher, and  not  only  to  know  a  few  principles,  but 
to  be  able  to  apply  these  principles  in  a  variety  of 
useful  problems." l  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." 2 

Though  the  son  had  the  best  of  this  personal  con- 
troversy, 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  ad- 
mirable companion,  sympathetic  and  generous,  and 
making  everybody  easy  and  amused  about  him.8 
He  was  a  favourite  at  home.  When  the  family  was 
removing  from  the  Rookery  at  Dorking  to  the 
Cottage4  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 

1  Otter,  I  c.  p.  xx%  *  I  c.  p.  x  *  I  c.  p.  x  > 

4  On  the  road  leading  out  of  Albury  towards  Quildford,  a  snug  little 
low-roofed  house  clinging  to  a  hill  slope,  leas  ambitious  than  the  Rookery, 
but  not  without  its  pleasant  garden  walks,  trees,  and  shrubberies. 


408  MALTIIUS   AND   HIS   WORK.  [BK.  v. 

. vbody  says  they  will  make  room  for  Robert.*'  It 
was  llobert'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;1 
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  Popula- 
tion 2  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,3 

1  See  above,  p.  7. 

3  Of  winch  the  genesis  has  been  sufficiently  described  above,  Bk.  I.  ch.  i. 

3  One  of  his  sources  is  shown  by  Essay,  IV.  ix.  438  :  "  In  some  con- 
versations with  labouring  men  during  the  late  scarcities."  Cf.  the  tract 
on.  Tlie  High  Price  of  Provisions,  p.  10,  etc. 


BK.  v.]  BIOGRAPHY.  409 

but  by  his  own1  and  his  friends'2  travels,  and  by 
conversation  and  correspondence  with  all  that  were 
likely  to  give  him  anything  in  conference.8  He  sacri- 
;  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  con- 
cerned with  a  single  truth  in  its  full  development ; 
11  nd  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 

1  See  above,  pp.  48,  49  (abroad),  and  p.  195  (in  Ireland). 
*  Clarke  (E.  D.)  (Life  by  Otter,  vol.  ii.  p.  1">)  ivl'.-r<  i..  a  h-tter  fr.»m 
Maltlm.-,  a-king  about  tin?  Foundling  Hospital  at  St.  Petersburg  (date 
March   1800).     Cf.  ibid.,  p.  39  :   "As  for  Malthus,  tell  him  he 
u<Tth  writiii'_'  t".     i1  ,|1(.<l  up  iii  other  nutters  and  obliterating 

all  traces  •• :  image.  .  .   II.  !  al  trap  de  ptomb pow  tm 

tourift"  [tie].     So  he  draws  on  Mac  kintal,  \vhrn  tin-  IMI.T  i.-  in  India, 
in  1804.    See  Mack  P  lift, 

1  E.g.  Ricardo,  Senior,  and   Dr.  Tin.-.  Chalmers  (who  paid   him   a 
flying  0  t   1  .  r  I  ^2  :  Life  by  Hanna,  vol.  ii.  p.  358),  an«l  I 

•  r  (Memoir*  and  Corrcsp.,  e.  g.  vol.  i.  p.  406).     In  i.  436  of  his 
Memoir*  Homer  speaks  of  having  gom-  with  .!•-!, n  \Vhi-ha\v.  the  bar- 

1  ilthu-at  Haili-vliiirv  in  1H)«.  an.l  takes OCCa«i< -n  t 
his   n  "f  truth  a1«»ve  the  •  an«l   versatility  of 

though  that,  he  sa\  k  like  a-:  ;irofdulne«. 


410  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK  v. 

the  reader  some  confusion  of  thought.  It  is  not  sur- 
prising, 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 1  had  simply  led  to  misunderstanding ; 
and  he  deliberately  renounced  fine  writing  for  high 
thinking,  present  popularity  for  permanent  usefulness.2 
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,3  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.4  In  person  he  was  tall  and  "  elegantly 
formed."6  1799  is  the  year  of  his  first  Continental 

1  E.  g.  the  reservoir,  p.  106  ;  but  the  most  extravagant  is  perhaps  the 
botanical  figure,  on  p.  273,  where  he  says  that  "  the  forcing  manure," 
employed   to  cause  the  French   Revolution,  has  "burst  the   calyx  of 
humanity."     Macaulay  uses  a  similar  metaphor  of  precisely  the  same 
event,  in  the  Essay  on  Burleigh. 

2  His  own  command  of  metaphor  made  it  the  easier  for  him  to  turn 
the  edge  of  an  opponent's.     See  e.  g.  his  handling  of  Weyland's  Giant, 
Musket-ball,  and  Swaddling-clothes,  in  Essay,  Append,  pp.  514 — 521. 

3  Engraved  by  Fournier  for  the  Dictionnaire  de  V  Economic  Politique, 
art.  « Malthus.'  4  See  below,  p.  418  n. 

6  Genii.  Mag.,  March  1835,  p.  324. 


BK.  v.]  BIOGRAPHY.  411 

journey.1  In  January  1800  his  father  died,  at  the  age 
of  seventy.  In  the  same  year  appeared  the  tract  on 
77t<'  Hif/k  Price  of  Provisions.  In  1802  Malthus  was 
;iirain  on  the  Continent.2  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  Popu- 
lation, 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/"3 

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  Com- 
memoration dinner  in  Trinity  College  Hall.4  The  vi>it 
is  described  by  Otter:5  "It  happened  that  Mr.  Pitt 

1  Euay  (7th  ed.),  II.  Hi.  148,  where  "winter  of  1788"  is  perhaps  for 
1708,  though  it  is  1788  in  the  second  and  all  subsequent  editions ;  or 
else  "  preceding  "  may  be  wrong.  Cf.  High  Price  of  Prov.,  p.  2. 

1  Cf.  above,  pp.  48,  127,  which  should  be  read  in  conjunction  with 
this  Biography. 

•  Life  of  Clarke,  vol.  ii.  p.  183.   We  know  from  a  footnote  in  the  essay 
7th  ed.,  p.  194)  that  pan  of  it  at  least  WEB  written  in  1802. 
mli..pe,  Ltfe  of  Pitt,  iii.  p.  36;  cf.   p.   53.     "Our  election  at 
Cambridge  was  perf. .  tl\ 

6  L  203-4  n. 


412  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [BK.  v. 

was  at  tliis  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.  Malt-bus,  &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,1 
&c."  Though  the  talk  was  largely  on  poetry  and 
foreign  politics,  it  may  easily  have  embraced  econo- 
mics ;  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.2  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.3  There  is  nothing  signed  from 
his  pen  in  that  time  but  a  letter  to  Lord  Grenville  in 

1  Earl  of  Carlisle,  the  poet.     See  Engl.  Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers. 

2  Otter,  I.  c.  p.  xxvi.     Cf.  Essay,  1st  ed.,  pp.  210-12.     Genii.  Mag., 
April  1804,  p.  374.   A  compliment  which  Otter  pays  him  (in  an  obituary 
in  the  Athenceum,  10th  Jan.  1835),  that  his  servants  stayed  long  with 
him,  would  fall  more  naturally  to  his  wife. 

3  Mr.  Sargant   (Life  of  Owen,  p.  85)  says,  on  the  authority  of  Mr. 
Holyoake,  that  Malthus  visited  New  Lanark  in  its  palmy  days.    Owen's 
work  then  was  after  Malthus'  own  heart ;  he  was  reforming  the  world 
by  beginning  with  one  individual  corner  of  it.     Cf.  Essay,  III.  iii. 
£82  ft. 


BK.  v.]  BIOGRAPHY.  413 

defence  of  the  East  India  College  j1  but  in  1814  and 
1815  he  wrote  the  Observations  on  the  Corn  Laics,  the 
of  an  Opinion  on  the  Policy  of  restricting  Im- 
portation, and  The  Nature  and  Progress  of  Rent.  In 
1807  he  had  been  with  Horncr  in  Wales,  impressing 
Homer,  as  they  went  together  from  Eaglan  to  Aber- 
gaveimy,  with  his  idea  that  the  people  should  "live 
dear";2  and  in  1817  he  visited  Kerry  and  Westmeatli. 
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  Hailey- 
bury  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.8  In 
1820  appeared  the  first  edition  of  the  Political 
<>iiiy.  In  1821,  Thomas  Tooke,  the  author  of 
///////  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 
<  iiti(  i-ins"  by  James  Mill  of  Malthus'  speeches.4 

1823  is  tin-  Y«-;ir  of  the  tract  on  the  Measure 
of  Value  and  the  Quarter/I/  article  on  Tooke;  1824 
of  the  paper  on  Population  in  the  Supplement  to 

1  See  below,  p. 

1  Memoinof  I  1».  406.    Cf.  Miss  Martin,  .ui,  Hut.  of 

Peace,  Introducli  »n,  II.  i.  257. 

3  He  WM  made  a  n i-  the  French  Institute  nn<I.  in  1833,  one  of 

th<  TIM  f, reign  AMoci*t<»8  of  the  Acad.  des  Sciences  Mor  .  and  a 

mrmlKsr  of  the  Royal  Academy  of  Berlin  (Otter,  1.  c.  p.  xli).    See  Chaa. 
ic,  Notice,  and  Gamier,  Diet,  de  Vfk.  PoL 
.  /.//.  ,././,,me*  Mill  (1888),  p.  199. 


414  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [HK.  v. 

the  Encyclopedia  Britannica,  and  the  article  on  tlie 
New  Political  Economy  in  the  Quarterly  Review.1 
In  1825  he  lost  a  daughter,  and  went  for  his  own 
and  his  wife's  health  to  the  Continent.  In  that 
\  oar  he  contributed  his  first  paper  to  the  Koyal 
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  Vieiv,  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,  /.  c.  p.  472). 

1  All  that  is  certainly  known  of  the  bulk  of  his  contributions  to  the 
Edin.  Review  is  that,  like  those  of  James  Mill  and  Mackintosh,  they  do 
not  occur  before  the  twentieth  number  of  it  (in  July  1807).  See  B;iin, 
Life  of  James  Mill,  p.  75  n.  Homer  mentions  (Memoirs,  Vol.  I.  p.  437) 
the  article  on  Newenham's  Population  of  Ireland,  1808,  and  another  (of 
which  he  had  seen  the  MS.)  Feb.  1811  (Vol.  II.  p.  68).  But  see  above, 
p.  285,  note. 


BK.  v.]  BIOGRAPHY.  415 

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  proceed- 
ings. 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.1 

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  Mai  thus  a 
living,  but  Malthus  had  declined  it  in  favour  of  his 
son,  Henry,2  "  who  got  it,  and  I  believe  now  has  it." 
Jl<  jiry,  however,  did  not  become  vicar  of  Effinghain 
(11  «Mr  Leatherhead  in  Surrey)  till  1835,  the  year 
after  his  father's  death,  —  or  of  Donnington  (nrar 
(  hidi.st.r  in  Sussex)  till  1837,  the  year  wlu-n 
Brougham  was  writing.  The  second  appointment 
may  have  been  due  to  Empson's  reproach  or  Otter's 
influence.  Henry  died  in  August  1882  at  tin-  au<> 
of  sev«  -nty-six.  Since,  between  the  two  parishes, 


apocryphal  story  of  his  eleven  daughters  is  given  and  exposed 
by  Gamier,  Did.  <U  / 

*  Otter's  w.n  -in  -law.    "  I  <  1  was  asked  what  he  would 

have  dour  if,  like  the  Good  Samaritan,  he  had  found  a  man  half  dead  by 

tin-  r.-a.l-ide;  he  answered  (on  the  analogy  of  flies),  "I  hh<'ul«l  ha\f 

kill*-.]    liim  outright."     Contrast  t)i<>  .-l-iM'*  mif  his  father's 

name  parable  in  Euay,  \\ 


4H>  MALTHUS  AND   HIS   WORK.  [UK.  v. 

lie  kept  as  many  as  four  curates  at  a  time,  the 
combined  salaries  of  the  two,  amounting  to  £672, 
seem  a  small  income.1  His  father  himself  told  Gallois, 
the  French  publicist,  in  1820,  that  all  his  works  till 
then  had  riot  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.2  There  is  no  reason  for  the  belief 
that  Malthus  was  made  rich  by  the  second  essay,3 
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 
Eeform  of  1832,  but  without  enthusiasm,4  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. 

1  Clergy  List,  1881. 

2  Moore's  Memoirs,  Journals,  &c.  (ed.  Russell,  1853),  vol.  iii.  p.  148, 
date  Sept.  1820.     Moore  himself  speaks  of  meeting  Malthus  and  Iris  wife 
when  he  was  on  a  visit  to  Mackintosh  at  Haileybury  in  May  1819.    Ibid., 
ii.  315. 

3  Volksvermehrung,  p.  9.     Kautsky  sometimes  trips,  but  he  is  more 
accurate  than  most  of  Malthus'  foreign  biographers.    Chas.  Comte  (in  his 
Notice  historique  sur  la  vie  et  les  travaux  de  M.  T.  R.  Malthus,  read  to 
Acad.  of  Mor.  and  Pol.  Sciences,  28th  Dec.,  1836)  converts  Haileybury 
into  Ayleslmry  (p.  31). 

4  Pol.  Econ.  (1836),  p.  380  n.    Sydney  Smith  wrote  to  Grey  about  him 
without  success,  in  1831  (Holland's  Life  of  Sydney  Smith,  vol.  ii.  p.  328). 


BK.  v.]  BIOGRAPHY.  417 

The  position  had  its  cares,  for  the  college  was  an 
educational  experiment.  Governor-General  Wellesley1 
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  func- 
tions, 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  educa- 
tion 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  Ha 
bury,  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  Hailcy- 
bury,  and  to  receive  first  a  General  education  on  tho 
lines  of  Oxford  and  Cambridge,  and  second  a  Sp 
education  to  prepare  them  for  their  duties  in  th«  ir 
province.1  The  Professor  of  "  History  and  Political 
Economy"  and  the  Professor  of  "General  Polity  and 

1  Richard,  th.  ]„-.,  .n.    See  his  Minute  of  18th  August, 

1800,  quoted  by  Ma! thus  in  his  Statem  nt*. 

a  Remitter  aiul  Directory  (Hatch ard),  year  1807,  pp.  xxiv  #q. 
f  the  establishment  of  the  E.  India  <  These 

two  branches  of  th.    I  v  programme  corresp.>n.l  in  ti 

to  the  Competitive  and  the  Further  examinations  of  candidates  i 
Civil  Service  of  India  as  at  present  conducted.      Malthus  claims  the 
credit  of  making  the  test  in  Oriental  languages  a  necessary  condition 
of  final  appointment  (Statement*,  p.  100). 

i:  i: 


MALTHl'S   AND   HIS    WOIiiv.  [DK.  v. 

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   com- 
mercial relations  subsisting  between  India  and  Great 
Britain."        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."         The    other   subjects  were    Classics, 
Oriental  Languages,  Mathematics,  and  Natural   Phi- 
losophy.    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.      Mai  thus   would    seldom   have    a   class 
beyond  twelve  or  fourteen,  all   in  the  later  year  of 
their  course.3 

The  general  discipline  of  the  classes  and  the  sur- 
veillance or  want  of  surveillance  of  the  pupils  in  their 
private  rooms  were  rather  on  the  model  of  an  unre- 

1  Accordingly  Malthus  gets  many  of  bis  illustrations  from  India,  e.  g. 
Pol  EC.  (2nded.),  pp.  154-5. 

2  India  Rcf/uitcr,  1.  c.  p.  xxv. 

8  There  must  be  some  on  the  Pension  List  who  still  remember  him. 


DK.  v.]  BIOGRAPHY.  419 

funned  Oxford  college  than  of  a  public  school.1  Sense 
of  personal  responsibility  and  habits  of  self-go  vern- 
iiK'iit  were  to  take  the  place  of  the  schoolboy's  ft-ar 
of  punishment.  Unhappily,  before  learning  the  new 
motives,  the  boys  too  often  abused  the  absence  of 
the  old.2 

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.3  Eight  years  of  teaching 
convinced  him  that  Political  Economy  was  not,  as 
he  oiK-0  thought,  too  hard  for  boys  of  sixteen  or 
seventeen  ;  —  "they  could  not  only  Onderstand  it,'1  he 
said,  "but  they  did  not  even  think  it  dull."4  We 

-in  the  first  there  was  a  school,  affiliated  with  the  college  t: 
11  fined  to  its  future  pupil*.     The  present  school  is  of  later  origin. 
ittmcnU,  p.   L08»&C,     Tin*   i.l.-a  «.f  tin-  pmjH-r  preparation   f«>r  ft 
civilian's  ran-.-r  in  India  .-liiiu.-*  in  with  Mn!  thus'  idea  of  the  first  re., 
of  good  citizenship  at  home  and  everywhere, 

*  A  hare-lip.    Miss  Mart  in.  -an,  who  .1.-  -.-ril  •«•.««  it,  a  Ids  t 

:  t  were  sonorous,  whatever  might  become  <-f  ih    BQHMB  »nt  ."     But 
sin-  n:  tdmwitttont  her  ear  trumpet    Auiobiogr^i.  327-8.    Cf. 

,  p.  68.    Sydney  Smith  says,  "  1   wmild  almost  consent  to  speak 
as  inarticii  1  think  and  act  as  wiseh  i  y  Holland, 

vol.  ii   p.  326.     He  attributes  a  si.  y«w»<l» 

with  perhnp.H  M  niurh  m-riounnrHs.      |  Holland,  v  'J56-7. 

«  LetUr  to  Lord  GnnvUlr(  181  3).  p   14   Cf.  what  he  *my§  of  i 
ance  of  teaching  P*>1  ntary  Mhools,  &c.  £«*fy, 


IV.  i 


420  MALTHUS  AND  HIS  WORK.  [UK.  v. 

may  hope  it  was  so  ;  but  in  view  of  the  whole  case, 
it  is  probable  that  our  author's  labours,  in  the  class- 
room 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,  broad- 
spreading  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  venial, 


BK.  v.]  BIOGRAPHY.  421 

and  soothing,  and  fit  enough  to  efface  all  recollections 
of  hot,  swarming,  whirling,  and  bustling  London 
from  all  good  minds."  * 

Equally  pleasant  is  a  glimpse  of  the  daily  life  at 
Hailcybury,  given  by  Miss  Martineau,  who  saw  it  in 
1833.      ]\Ialthus    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.2 
"  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."8 
She  found   desk,  books,  and   everything  needed   for 
her  work.     Her  entertainers  had  guessed  from  her 
books  that  she  must  be,  like  Malthus  himself,4  fond 
of  riding ;  and  she  found  her  riding-habit  and  whip 
ready.     Exploring   tin-    Lrn  <  n    lanes   round   Amwoll, 
Ware,  and  Hertford,  on  horseback,  in  parties  of  live 
or  six,  seems   to   have   been    the   chief  amusement. 
"  'I  he  subdued  jests  and  external  homage  and  occa- 
sional   insurrections  of   the  young  men,  the  an -h« TV 
of  the   young   ladies,  the   curious  politeness  of   the 
Persian    professor  [Ibrahim],  the   fine  learning  and 

1  J(  i  ,  vol.  il  pp.  339,  340.    To  Mr*.  C.  Inne*,  9th  May,  1841. 

*  Autobiagr-i  *•  327-     Other  visit*  of  Malthus  to  her  ar. 
iii.  83,  L  25a     For  her  view  of  him  and  his  work  see  especially  i. 
200,  209,  253,  331. 

«  lt>  ^-9. 

4  Of.  1st  Eua\j,  pp.  225-G,  which  shows  him  on  the  Hunting-Field. 


MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  v. 

eager  scholarship  of  Principal l  Le  Bas,  and  the  some- 
what 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." 

AY  hen  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.2 

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  pro- 
fessors is  now  at  hand ;  keep  Mackintosh  quiet  at 
Holland  House  till  all  is  over ; " 3  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  (balearis  habena)  ?  It  would  give 
them  a  great  advantage  over  the  students."4  The 

1  A  slip  of  the  pen  for  "  Professor."    The   Principal   was  J.   H. 
Batten,  F.R.S. 

2  Where   the   fear   expressed   in    some    quarters    (see    Statements, 
p.  87)  that   the  place   would   become   a   barrack    has    been    realized 
architecturally. 

3  Life  by  Holland,  vol.  ii.  p.  73. 

4  1.  c.  vol.  ii.  p.  150. 


BK.  v.]  BIOGRAPHY. 

Insulations    wore   probably   no   worse    than    similiir 
scenes  at  our  English  and  Scotch  Universities  that 

>  not  yet  destroyed  the  credit  of  these  institu- 
tions. But  the  opponents  of  the  college  complained  of 
much  more  than  the  insubordination  of  the  stud 
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/'1  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  18 17,2  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 

ts  to  become  un-English  ;  and  they  were  much 
less  likely  to  form  a  caste  at  Haileybury  than  if  they 

in  House  of  Lor.K  April  Otli.  I,  pp.  750, 

1  •Slat.-im-nl-  iv~j..-.'ti!i'_;  the   Ka-t    Imli:i  < '..ll.-^'.  with   JHI 

liaiyrs  latrly  1  it    in   tli'    < 

prietors'  (1817).    Cf.  his  '  Letter  t«  nville,  occasion 

flomeobaerv.  ]>on  the  I  MMi-hm. 

(1813).    Cf.  IWin.  .Rev.,  Dec.  M». 
l»ss  fully  ; 
but  both  pamphlet*  contain  rabstmntially  the  name  argument*. 


424  MALTHUS  AND   HIS  WORK.  [UK.  v. 

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,1  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 

1  A  property  it  often  was,  in  the  most  literal  sense,  being  bought  and 
sold  for  cash.     See  Hist,  of  Peace,  Introd.  II.  ii.  329-30. 


BK.  v.]  BIOGRAPHY.  425 

best  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."1  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 
H»  rtford  College.  In  1833  provision  was  made  for 
the  limited  competition  which  Malthus  had  recom- 
mended.2 In  1855  came  the  end.  The  Company  was 
"relieved  of  the  obligation  to  k< cp  up  tin-  eoll.-ge;" 
the  reign  of  open  competition,  ushered  in  by  Ma< -au- 
lay's  Report  (Nov.  1854),  brought  a  new  <>rd 
things ;  and  the  college  was  only  continued  till  tln.se 
who  had  joined  it  at  the  time  oft  he  change  had 
able  to  finish  their  course.8  There  are  numbers  of  old 

1  Statement*,  p.  103  n. 

•  Candidates  were  to  Denominated  in  grouji*  of  f.mr.  tlu-  l>r<t  of  'he 
four  to  have  the  appointim-iit.     Cf.  Mill  ami  \Vil-on'>  / 
Book  ill.  eh,  Ir  j..  381. 

1  The  uteps  of  the  change  may  be  followed  in  tin-  fourth  Report 
(1858)  of  the  Civil  Service  CbmmtMMmm,  pp.  xix  *eq.  and  228  *cq.  Cf. 
also  their  first  Report  (1855). 


426  MALTIIUS   AND   HIS  WORK.  [BK.  v. 

officials,  like  Sir  William  Muir,  who  still  hold  it 
in  affectionate  remembrance ; l  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,2  and  Horner,3  may  supply  the  panegyrics  ;  and 
the  eulogy  of  Mackintosh  is  remarkable  :  "  I  have 
known  Adam  Smith  slightly,  Eicardo  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  ? " 4 

His  epitaph  in  Bath  Abbey,  probably  from  the  pen 
of  Otter,  is  given  on  the  following  page. 

1  For  proofs  of  their  regard,  see  the  letters  quoted  in  the  blue-book  of 
1876  on  "the  Selection  and  Training  of  candidates  for  the  Civil  Service 
of  India," passim,  and  Trevelyan's  "Competition  Wallah"  (1864),  pp.  7, 
8,  15,  16,  but  cf.  149. 

2  See  Works,  Review  of  Kennel,  footnote. 

3  Memoirs,  Vol.  I.  p.  436,  &c. 

4  Quoted  in  Empson,  Edin.  Rev.,  Jan.  1837,  p.  473.    Sinclair's  'Corre- 
spondence' (1831),  amongst  other  curious  matter,  gives  the  autographs 
of  the  three  great  masters  (I.  101). 


BK.  v.]  BIOGRAPHY.  4£7 


SACRED   TO  THE   MEMORY 


(The  \lcb.  £f>omas  Robert 


LONG   KNOWN   TO  THE   LETTERED   WORLD 
BY    HIS   ADMIRABLE   WRITINGS   ON  THE   SOCIAL   BRANCHES   OP 

POLITICAL   ECONOMY, 
PARTICULARLY  BY   HIS   "ESSAY  ON  POPULATION." 

ONE  OP  THE  BEST  MEN  AND  TRUEST  PHILOSOPHERS 

OP  ANY  AGE   OR    COUNTRY, 

RAISED   BY   NATIVE   DIGNITY   OF   MIND 

ABOVE   THE   MISREPRESENTATIONS   OP  THE   IGNORANT 

AND   THE    NEGLECT   OP  THE   GREAT, 

HE   LIVED   A   SERENE   AND   HAPPY   LIFE, 

DEVOTED  TO   THE   PURSUIT   AND   COMMUNICATION 

OP  TRUTH, 
SUPPORTED  BY  A  CALM  BUT  FIRM   CONVICTION  OP  THE 

US!  OP   HIS   LABOURS, 

CONTENT  WITH  THE  APPROBATION  OF  THE  WISE  AND  GOOD. 

HIS  WRITINGS  WILL   BE   A  .LASTING   MOMMT  NT 
OF  THE  EXTENT  AND  CORRECTNESS  OP  HIS   UNDERSTANDING. 

THE  SPOTLESS  INTEGRITY  OP  HIS    PRINCIPLES, 
THE  EQUITY  AND  CANDOUR  OP  HIS   NA'l 
HIS  SWEETNESS  OP  TEMPER,  URBANITY  OP  MANNERS, 

AND  TENDERNESS  OP  HI 
HIS   BENEVOLENCE  AND   HIS    1 

ARE  THE  STILL   DEARER  RECOLLECTIONS  OP   HIS   FAMILY 
AND  FRIENDS. 

Born  Feb.  14,  17CC.  Died  D#.  99,  1834. 


INDEX. 


ABBOT,  Chas.,  mover  of  Enumer- 
ation 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 
B-.s-.-mquet,  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 

Checks  on  population,  classified, 
52,  81,  passim  B.  I.  and  B.  IV. 

China,  112,  113 

Clarke,  Edw.,  48,  127,  B.  V. 
passim 

Cobbett,  Wm.,  6  and  note,  287, 
290,  298,  338,  363,  395 

Cobden,  R.,  225,  287,  353  ;  cf.  55 

Coleridge,  S.  T.,  the  Poet,  22,  48, 
95,  111,  371  seq. ;  the  MS.  notes 
genuine  ?  374  ;  cf.  48,  377 

Comte,  Auguste,  20,  344  ;   cf.  213 

Comte,  Charles,  413,  416 

Condorcet,  Marquis  de,  11,  22 — 
24,  30,  31,  375,  &c. 

Conversion  of  the  world,  the  pos- 
tulate of  Socialism  as  of  Chris- 
tianity, 392 

Cook,  Captain,  passim  B.  I.  ch.  iv. 

Co-operation,  232,  300,  352,  392 

Copleston,  Dr.  E.,  363 

Corn  Laws,  B.  II.  ch.  i.  ;  corn  as 
measure  of  value,  224,  255-6 

Corn  Law  Catechism,  227,  308 

Cosmology  of  Malthus,  34  seq. 

Cosmopolitanism,  347,  356,  396  ; 
cf.  328 

Cripps,  127 

Critics  of  Malthus,  1,  45,  B.  IV. 
passim 

Currency,  226-7,  and  B.  II.  ch.  iii. 

Cycle,  83,  84,  147 


INDEX. 


429 


_ 

reasing    returns,   law    of,  234 
sea. :  i,  78 

:iitions  in   Pol.  Econ.,'   211, 

265,  and  generally  B.  II.  cli.  ii. 

udence  on  the  foreigner,  217, 

>,  233;    dependent    poverty, 

310 

Depopulation  controversy,  173  seq. 

Depreciation  of  currency,  285,  and 

generally  B.    II.   ch.    hi.  ;    cf. 

248-9 

:.  but  ion,  when   keeping  pace 
with  production,  166 
Doubleday,  Th-.s.,  396 
Dyer,  T.  H.,  339 

EI-KF.RSALL,   Harriet    (Mrs.   Mal- 

thus),  412  ;  cf.  322 
Economists,  47,  247,  248,  276 

inv,  political,  its  method, 
&c.,  B.  II.  ch.  i.  ;  Club  tii-t 
founded,  263,  413  ;  place  among 
the  studies  of  youth,  419 

1.,  'the  State  of  the 
Poor'  (1797),  248,  310,  ,v  . 
'Edinburgh  Review,'  notice  of 
Malthus,  43;  connection  with 
Multhus,  33,  329,  364,  371,  412  ; 
but  »ee  '  Malthus,  T.  R. ' ;  notice 

•dwin,  12,  368,  371 
Education,  56,  77,  275,  298,  301, 
340,  341  ;  cf.  403,  404,  419,  420 
.  Ill 

ration,  B.  I.  ch.  v.  ;  Commons 
Committee,  /.  e.  and  195  scq., 
240. 

Empson,    \Vm.,   43,   213  n.  ;    his 
cfoKsili'  ation  of  critics,  377,  394  ; 
life  of  Malthus,  399 
Enclosures,  176,  215,  217 
'  Encyclopaedia  Britannica,'  article 
of  Malthus  in  Supplement,  70 
tea. 

md,  !'.    I.  oi    vii. 
Essay  on  Population,  editions,  2 ; 

&c.  ;  B.  I. 
I:    T. 

:  LU,  n.  in. 

Eulcr,  69,  369 

FACTORY  Act*  345 

• 

Ferguson,  Adam,  297 


Fifth  Monarchy  M.-n,  385 

Finland,  48.  127 

Foundling  Hospitals,  134,  135  ;  cf. 

409 

Fox,  Ch.  J.,  29,  31,  338 
Fox,  Henry,  17:* 
France,  B.  I.  ch.  vi. 
Franklin,  Benj.,  10,  14,  63,  369 
Frend,  tutor  of  Malthus,  406 
Fyffe,  C.  A.,  161 

GALLOIS,  416 

Gamier,  his  article  on  Malthus  in 
'  Diet,  de  I'Econ.  Pol.,'  214,  410, 
415 

George,   Henry,   38,    40;   cf.  236, 
382  ;  on  population,  385—388 
:••  III.,  29. 

Germany,  126,  183 

Gibbon,  Edw.,  21  n.,  107,  108,  400 

Giffen,  R.,  72  n.,  78  n. 

Gilbert's  Act,  27 

Glut,  or  over-production,  B.  II. 
ch.  iii. 

Godwin,  Win..  7  ;  Pol.  Justice,  9 
—11,  &c.  ;  cf.  355,  371  ;  En- 
quirer, 13,  14;  cf.  355  —  371  ; 
Caleb  Williams,  10  ;  Memoir  of 
Mary  Wollrtonecimft,  21 ;  St. 
Leon,  21,  22,  31  ;  Parr's  Sermon, 
43  n.,  45,  358  ;  Population,  43, 
87,  364  seq.  ;  character,  58  ;  in 
hands  of  'Edinburgh  Review,' 
12,  368,  371 

Government,  influence  on  popula- 
tion, 112,  &c.  ;  due  to  our 

wirkrdi:  n£       from 

passion,  225  ;  Whig,  as  patrons, 
415,  IK. 

Grahame,  Jas.,  376  seq. 
Graves,   Rich.,  tutor  of  Malthus, 
404  seq. 

II.,  354 
\v.  i;.,  n 
Grote,  George,  41  a 

II.Mi.ETBURT     College,     Malthu*' 

fcura  in,  I  i  416 

teq. ;   ration  d'Mrc    and  death, 
.<"/.  ;  i'!iy!<icul  surroundings, 
420 

...  II.,  85,  363 

\V.,  85,  329,  372,  386,  394 

:'.:'.  1.  38S 
Highlands,  150,  187—190 


430 


INDEX. 


4  Iliu'li  Price  of  Pro visions,'  43,  49, 

215,  307,  408,  411 
'High  Price  of  Gold  Bullion,' 285 
Ili>t«>rv,  needs    to   be   re-writ  ten, 

83  ;   nf    English    commerce,   25, 

282,  283,  298  ;  Corn  Laws,  219  ; 

currency,  286 

Holcroi'r,  friend  of  Godwin,  22 
Holland,  B.  I.  eh.  v. 
Holvnake,  <  r.  J.,  412 
Horner,  Francis,  B.  V.  passim;  cf. 

285,  340,  &c. 
Hume,   David,  31,  32,  99,  115  n., 

11(5,  135,  173,  &c.,&c. 
Hume,  Joseph,  4:M 
Huntingtbrd,  Bishop,  377 

INDIA,  child  murder,  117  ;  cf.  115 
India  Civil  Servants,  417  seq. 
Ingram,.  Disquisitions  on  Popula- 
tion, 329 

Ireland,  146,  172,  and  B.  I.  ch.  vii. 
d:Ivernois,  Sir  F.,  154,  163 

JEFFREY,  Francis,  329  ;  description 
of  Haileybury,  418 

KANT,  E.,  309,  321,  323 
Kautsky,  Karl,  416 

LABOUR,  as  the  measure  of  value, 
and  as  earning  wages,  B.  II. 
ch.  ii. 

Land  and  its  rent,  B.  II.  ch.  i. 

Lassalle,  268 

Lecky,  W.  E.  H.,  26,  177,  202 

Leslie,  Cliffe,  138,  165,  210,  252 

Levasseur,  E.,  164  seq. 

Levellers,  385 

Locke,  J.,  13 

Luddites,  290 

Luxuries,  215,  225,  295.  See  Stan- 
dard of  living. 

Lyell,  Sir  Chas.,  46 

MACAULAY,  T.  B.,  272,  336  ;  review 

of  Sadler,  377,  410,  425 
MacCulloch,  J.  R.,  33,  40,  167,  B. 

II.  ch.  i.  passim 
Mackintosh,  Sir  Jas.,  B.  V. passim; 

cf.  336 

Macleod,  H.  D.,  287 
Malthus,  Daniel,    7,   399  seq. ;  cf. 

135,  324 
Malthus,  Henry,  6,  415 


Malthus,  T.  R.,  his  several  works  : 
Crisis,  7,  30  ;  K.->ay  mi  Popula- 
tion, B.  I.  chs.  i.  ii.  and  imasim; 
High  Price  of  Provisions,  43,  49, 
307,  &c.  ;  Letter  to  \Vliitl.ivad, 
215,313  ;  Article  on  Newenham, 
93,  195,  202;  other  articles  in 
'Edinburgh'  and  'Quarterly,' 
33,  212,  271,  275,  285  and  note, 
288,  290,  329,371  ;  Observations 
on  the  Corn  Laws,  2^2,  223j 
Grounds  of  an  Opinion,  227  ; 
Nature  and  Progress  of  Rent, 
229  ;  Political  Economy,  210— 
214  ;  Measure  of  Value,  254  ;  De- 
finitions in  Political  Economy, 
211, 265  ;  article  in  Encyclopaedia 
Britannica,  71  ;  Papers  read  be- 
fore Royal  Society  of  Literature, 
263 ;  Evidence  before  Emigration 
Committee,  144  seq.  ;  Summary 
View,  80  ;  Tracts  on  East  India 
College,  423  ;  correspondence 
with  Godwin,  Senior,  Napier, 
Ricardo,  Clarke,  Sinclair,  see 
under  these  names ;  letter  on 
Wakefield,  405  ;  style,  50,  265, 
304,  408,  409  ;  character,  57,  and 
B.  V.  passim 

Man  on  the  earth.  See  Cosmology 
and  Ethics 

Manufacturer,  late  and  early  sense, 
26 

Marat,  404 

M  street,  Mrs.,  272 

Martineau,  Harriet,  3,  57,  58,  85  , 
287,  323,  and  B.  V.  passim 

Marx,  Karl,  84,  257,  268,  388  seq. 

Mean,  golden,  225  and  note,  295, 
320 

Mercantile  theory,  47 

Middle  classes,  225 

Mill,  Jas.,  208,  209,  273,  276,  280, 
281,  293,413,414 
-  John,  209,  239,  244,  71,273,  281 

Millennium,  Godwin's,  16  ;  Social- 
istic and  Christian,  392 

Milne,  Joshua,  71,  72 

Minimum  of  wages,  217,  268,  &c.  ; 
of  prices,  279 

Mivart,  St.  George,  385 

Montesquieu,  32,  108,  109,  138,  &c. 

Moore,  Dr.  John,  311 

—  Thomas,  416 

Moral  impossibility,  &c.,  53 


INDEX. 


431 


.  restraint,  49-53,  118,  119, 
383,  &c.,  &c. 

-  Philosophy  of  lUlthaa,B.  III. 
.  383 

Mu  11  ion,'  297 
SirThos.,  11  n.,  27,  385 
-  leg.,  17-1. 

NAPIER,   Macvey,  6,  43,   71,   314, 
398. 

rial  it  y.  346-7 

nalization  of  land,  236,  382, 
392 
•Nature'   denned,  337;  'Nature's 

hty  fenst,'  305 
Navigation  Act,  228-9 
Necessaries  and  luxuries,  117,  118, 
W 

;ii-l  «.1«1  Malthusians,  24,  375  ; 
cf.  384 

Newenham,  reviewed  by  Malthus, 
93,  : 

•ol  of  Political  Economy,' 
275  seq. 
Norway,  B.  I.  ch.  v. 

ORTES,  G.  M.,  391 
Olaheite,  B.  I.  ch.  iv. 
Otter,     Bi.-hup,    48,    127,    B.    V. 
passim 

Over-population,  117,  145,  164,  &c. 

Ov.  :  11.  ch.  iii.  ;  cf. 

food   not   possible, 

OvtT-pruiit.-s  •  Kent,  esp. 

230 
Own,  H-bcrt,  11  n.,  24,  267,  301, 

377,  380,  382  «eg.,  412 

PAINE,  Thos.,  9,  336,  405 

Pah  :.),  43, 

269,  B.  III.  fximm,  &c. 
Parr.  -3  ;  see  Godwin 

Pea- 

in,   11,  22  ;  «e« 

twin 

W..  IV    I.  ,';.,  ,..  I 
363  &C. 

Plato,  66  n.,  101  n.,  Ll*j    (386 

Poli!;  •  -.      ,SwO<> 

tlm*  ;  M  B.   III.  ; 
198,  225,  298,  Ac. 


'.ill  of  Pitt,  6,  29,43 
Poor  Laws,  English,  6,  27,  29,  215, 
135,  &c.,  B.  II.  ch.  iv. 

—  Foreign,  313 

Population,  B.  I.  passim,  B.  IV. 

passim;  cf.  esp. 
Populou-ness   oi'  ancient   nations, 

31,  32,  113—117 
Pi^tulat.-s  ,,f  IM  H->ay,  16,  47  ;  cf. 

B.  1.  ch.  ii.,  Ti. 
Potatoes,  1U4-198,  203,  204,  217, 

380 
Price,  Dr.  R.,  31,  32,  39,  174  ;  but 

esp.  175,  170,  i-f.  3,  , 
Produ.-tinn  in  ivlatitin  to  ili-tribu- 

tion,   K'»  '.<sim;  in  rela- 

tion to  coii-uinntion,  296 
Productive  labour.  S 
Property,  private,  70,  236  ;  cf.  18 
Prosperity,   criterion  of   national, 

123 

Pr.it--«-ti.iii,  B.  II.  ch.  i. 
Prussia,  B.  I.  ch.  v. 

'QUARTERLY  I\KMKW,'   articles  of 
hut  in,  :M2,  285  seq. 

—  attitude  to  Mai  thus,  3< 
'Querist,'  Berkeley's.     See  Wall  of 

Bra 
de  Quincey,  266,  297,  363 

RATIO,  geometrical  and  arithme- 
tical, 17,  66,  and  generally  B.  I. 
rh.  iii.  ;  15.  IV 

ial,  Abb^,  26,  28,  97,  336,  337 
lutioii,  Imlu-trial,  in  England, 
25,  I 

—  in  France,  7,  11,  27,  154  8tq-> 

&c, 

to  Malthus,  213,  265  note, 
•11  ML    and    Taxation, 

209;    Ijiurh     Pri.v    *.f    Hn!!     _. 
•J".'  ;    I^'W   Tru-t-  of   Corn.   23g: 

_:  ra-l>-«l  with  Malt]|^",  ^«>.'iii. 
Ki.-JTman.  .1  ..  17l»  s.'/ 

23M.  v  &c. 


Mean,  .1   .1    7.  .'7,  135,401 


432 


INDEX. 


Say,  J.  B.,  57,  208,  292  seq. 

Scotland,  B.  I.,  ch.  vii. 

Scrope,  G.  Poulett,  377 

Senior,  W.  N.,  3,  4,  47,  209,  414 

Short,  309 

Siruonin,  376 

Sinclair,  Sir  John,  186,  216,  368, 

369,  370,  426 

Sismondi,  Chas.  do,  209,  296,  415 
Smith,  Adam,  3,  5,  9,  26,  31,  33, 

47,  56,  57,  86,  95,  105,  117  and 

pattim 

Smith,  Sydney,  B.  V.  passim 
Socialism,  214,  252,  312,  382  seq. 
Society,  Royal,  413  ;  of  Literature, 

263,  414  ;  Statistical,  415 
Southey,  Robt.,   4,   11,   338,   374, 

377,  383 

Speenhamland  Act,  30 
Spence,  Wm.,  Great  Britain  Inde- 
pendent of  Commerce,  247,  293 
Spence,  author  of  '  The  Land  the 

People's  Farm,'  382,  385 
Spencer,  Herbert,  393,  396 
Standard  of  Comfort,  117, 120  seq., 

137,    140,    194,    195—198,    269, 

295,  &c.,  &c. 
State  insurance,  24 
Steuart,  Sir  J.,  32 
Stewart,  Dugald,  barrel-organ,  385 
Struggle  for  existence,  20,  47,  119  ; 

not  leading  to  progress,  96,  112 
Styles,  Dr.  E.,  357,  369 
1  Summons  of  Wakening,'  365 
Sumner,  Dr.  J.  B.,  Archbishop  of 

Canterbury,  12,  34,  38,  307 
Sunday  Schools,  298 
Suspension  of  cash  payments,  284 

seq. 
Siissmilch,  J.  P.,  39,  115,  124  seq., 

139,  369 
Sweden,   B.  I.  cb.  v.  ;  cf.  72,  73, 

370 

TAIXE,  121 
Talleyrand,  418 
Teleology,  319  seq.,  326 
Tendency,  B.   I.    ch.   iii.  passim, 
esp.  61,  65,  66 


Theses. .   See  Postulates 

Thompson,  1'erronet,  227,  308 

Thornton,  W.  T.,  130  n.,  210,  273 

de  Tocqneville,  89 

Tooke,  Thos.,  288,  291,  B.  II.  ch. 
iii.,  passim,  412,  &c. 

Torrens,  R.,  contrasts  Malthus  un- 
favourably with  Ricardo,  265 

Town-i-nd.  Joseph,  :-52,  64 

T..ynliec,  A.,  314,  378 

Tucker,  Abraham,  35,  164,  B.  III. 
passim,  esp.  324,  403,  &c. 

Tucker,  Josiah,  33,  324 

Turkey,  112 

UNITED  States.     See  America 
Utilitarianism,  39,  53,  and  B.  III.  ; 
cf.  213,  374-5 

VICE  and  virtue  denned,  81,  327, 

330  ;  cf.  374 
Voltaire,  27,  33 

WAGES,  B.    II.  ch.  ii.  ;   cf.  226  ; 

review  of  wages  for  five  centuries, 

247-8 

Wages  Fund,  270  seq. 
Wakefield,  Gilb.,  tutor  of  Malthus, 

339,  404 

Walker,  F.  A.,  210,  244 
Wall  of  Brass,  201,  250-1 
Wallace,  A.  R.,  46,  47 
Wallace,  Dr.   Eobt.,  8,  9,  20,  31, 

126,  173 
War,    reparable    and    irreparable 

evils  of,  155  seq. 
Watson,   Bishop  of   Llandaff,   11, 

405 
Wealth,  as  subject  of  Pol.  Econ., 

210,  212 

Wcsleyan  movement,  26  ;  cf.  403 
West,  Sir  Edw.,  222,  234-5,  240 
Weylaiid,  J.,  377,  410 
Wh'ishaw,  John,  409 
Whitbread,  Samuel,  29,  31,  &c. 
Wollstonecraft,  Mary,  21 

YOUNG,  Arthur,  69,  159  seq.  178, 
201,  216,  380 


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