Malthus and his work

by James Bonar

BOOK I. THE ESSAY.

CHAPTER I.
FIRST THOUGHTS, 1798.

The Common Caricature—The Essay an Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations—Godwin’s Political Justice and Enquirer—The Two Postulates and Conclusions from them—Condorcet’s Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind—Organic Perfectibility of Man and its Obstacles—Historical Context of the Essay—The Crisis—Pitt’s Poor Bill—Malthus and his Teachers—Success explained—Theology and Metaphysics—Faults of the Essay—Immediate aim secured.

He was the “best-abused man of the age.” Bonaparte himself was not a greater enemy of his species. Here was a man who defended small-pox, slavery, and child-murder; who denounced soup-kitchens, early marriage, and parish allowances; who “had the impudence to marry after preaching against the evils of a family;” who thought the world so badly governed that the best actions do the most harm; who, in short, took all romance out of life and preached a dull sermon on the threadbare text—“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Such was the character of Malthus as described by his opponents.

If an angry man is probably in the wrong, an abusive man is certainly so; and, when not one or two, but one or two thousand are engaged in the abuse, the certainty amounts to a demonstration. We may measure the soundness of the victim’s logic by the violence of the personal attacks made upon him. For most worldly purposes, to be ignored and to be refuted are the same thing.

Malthus from the first was not ignored. For thirty years it rained refutations. The question, as he stated it, was thoroughly threshed out. The Essay on Population passed in the author’s lifetime through six editions (1798, 1803, 1806, 1807, 1817, and 1826); even between the first edition, in 1798, and the second, in 1803, there were more than a score of ‘Replies’; and the discussion was carried on in private correspondence, as well as in public journals and parliamentary speeches. The case was fully argued; and no one who fairly considers the extent of the discussion, and the ability of the disputants, can fail to believe that we have, in the records of this controversy, ample materials for forming our own judgment on the whole question in dispute.

Such a privilege is seldom used. The world has no time to consult authorities, though it likes them to be within reach of consultation. When an author becomes an authority, he too often ceases to be read, and his doctrines, like current coin, are worn by use till they lose the clear image and superscription of the issuer. In this way an author’s name may come to suggest, not his own book, but the current version of his doctrines. Malthus becomes Malthusianism,—Darwin, Darwinism; 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, fortunately, 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 Martineau, 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 read his book, but scores who could “make great argument about it and about,” or write sentimental pamphlets on supposed Malthusian subjects. This carelessness was not confined to the general public; it infected the savants. Nothing more clearly shows how political economy, or at least one question of it, had descended into the streets and become a common recreation. Even Nassau William Senior, perhaps the most distinguished professor of political economy in his day, confessed with penitence that he had trusted more to his ears than to his eyes for a knowledge of Malthusian doctrine, and had written a learned criticism, not of the opinion of Mr. Malthus, but of that which “the multitudes who have followed and the few who have endeavoured to oppose” Mr. Malthus, have assumed to be his opinion.[^[3]]

The “opinion” so imagined by Senior and the multitude is still the current Malthusianism. A Malthusian is supposed to forbid all marriage. Mr. Malthus 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.”[^[4]] 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 affirmation as compared with the necessary qualifications of a scientific statement. The truth must be told, however, that Malthus and the rest of the learned world 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 mere supplement to the other. He did not approach the subject from a purely scientific side. He had not devoted long years of travel and reflection to the preparation of an economical treatise. Adam Smith had written his Moral Sentiments seventeen years before his greater work. When he wrote the latter he had behind 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 expressed (1776). Malthus, on the contrary, gained his reputation by a bold and sudden stroke, well followed 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 essay contained over and above politics, and however far afield the author eventually travelled in the later editions, there is no doubt about the first origin of the essay itself. It was not, as we are sometimes told, that, being a kind-hearted clergyman, he set himself to work to inquire whether after all it was right to increase the numbers of the population without caring for the quality of it. In 1798 Malthus was no doubt in holy orders and held a curacy at Albury; but he seems 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;[^[5]] 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 rôle and Cobbett’s immortal nickname is very unhappy.[^[6]] He had hardly more of the parson than Condillac of the abbé. 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 Cambridge as ninth wrangler in the year 1788, in the twenty-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 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 tract, which he called The Crisis, in the year of Pitt’s new loan and Napoleon’s Italian campaign (1796); but he did not publish it, and his views were 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 slinger, 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 wanting in respect, is shown by an indignant letter, written in February, 1800, on his father’s death, in reply to the supposed slight of a newspaper paragraph.[^[7]]

The fireside debates had in that year (1797) received new matter. William Godwin, quondam parson, journalist, politician, and novelist, whose Political Justice was avowedly a “child of the Revolution,”[^[8]] had written a new book, the Enquirer, in which many of his old positions were set in a new light. The father made it a point of honour to defend the Enquirer; the son played devil’s advocate, partly from conviction, partly for the sake of 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 Crisis knows nothing. In calmer moments he followed them up to their conclusions. “The discussion,” he tells us,[^[9]] “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 Théorie du Système Animal, in 1767;[^[10]] and a few years earlier (in 1761) Dr. Robert Wallace, writing of the Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and Providence, had talked of community of goods as a cure for the ills of humanity, and then had found, very reluctantly, one fatal objection—the excessive population that would ensue. Men are always inclined to marry and 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 be answered 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 Wealth of Nations altered the standing presumption in favour of interference to one in favour of liberty in matters of trade, so the Essay on Population altered the presumption in favour of the advocates of progress to a presumption against them. This may not describe the final result of the essay, but it is a true account of its immediate effect. People had heard of the objection before; it was only now that they began to look on it as conclusive.

How had Godwin tried to meet it, when it was still in the hands of weaker men, and therefore not at all conclusive? He could not ignore it. In his Political 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 received Jacobin motto, “Society is produced by our wants, government by our wickedness.”[^[11]] He says, with the ruling philosophy, that man is born a blank, and his outward circumstances make him good or evil. 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 Williams (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 production 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.[^[12]] Each of them will, therefore, have leisure, which is the true riches, and he 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 Terror made even Sir James Mackintosh (not to say Bishop Watson, Southey, and Wordsworth) a lukewarm 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, it is very like devotion; and perhaps the only author who shows an equal constancy is Condorcet, the 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 the Species. Nothing but intense sincerity and sheer depth of conviction could have enabled these men to continue the defence of a dishonoured cause. They had not the martyr’s greatest trial, the doubt whether he is right. The great impression made by their works was a sign that, as they felt strongly, they wrote powerfully. Malthus, who refuted both of them, apologized for giving serious criticism to Condorcet’s palpable extravagances by saying that Condorcet has many followers who will hold him unanswerable unless he is specially answered.[^[13]] 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.[^[14]] 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.[^[15]] Few writers of our own day have so good an excuse for making themselves inaccessible to the poor. Godwin, however, 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, long before he had a poetic son-in-law to give him reflected glory. If a species is to be judged by its best individual, then Godwin represents better than Paine the class of political writers to which they both belong; and many fell down with Godwin when he fell down before Malthus.

The Enquirer was less popular than the Political Justice. 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 building was 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 systematic treatise on society, and he would now confine himself to detached essays, wholly experimental, 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.”[^[16]] The contrast between these two styles is the contrast between a whole oratorio and a miscellaneous concert, or between a complete poem and a volume of extracts.

The thoughts were the same, though they had lost their attractive expression. The essay on Avarice and Profusion[^[17]] tells us, among other things, that “a state of cultivated equality is that state which, in speculation and theory, appears most consonant to the nature of man, and most conducive to the extensive diffusion of felicity.” This was the essay which led Malthus and his father into their fruitful argument. The essay on Riches and Poverty, and the one on Beggars,[^[18]] 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. Robert Wallace; he thinks he has removed all objections.

He meets them[^[19]] 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.[^[20]] 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;”[^[21]] why 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;

Your sad tires in a mile, O!”

The time may come when we shall be so full of liveliness that we shall not sleep, and so full of life that we shall not die. The need for marriage will be superseded by earthly immortality, and the desire for it by the development of intellect. On the renewed earth of the future there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage, but we shall be as the angels. “The whole will be a people of men, 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 those of health and longevity. There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no government. Besides this, there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment. Every man will seek with ineffable ardour the good of all.”[^[22]]

This sweet strain had been enchanting the public for four or five years, when Malthus ventured to interrupt it with his modest anonymous Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society. The writer claims to be as hearty a philanthropist as Mr. Godwin, but he cannot allow the wish to be father to the thought, and believe in future perfection against evidence. To prove a theory true, he says, it is not enough to show that you cannot prove its contradiction, or that you can prove its usefulness. It would be very useful to have eyes in both sides of our head; but that does not prove that we are going to have them. If you told me that man was becoming a winged creature like the ostrich, I should not doubt that he would find wings very useful, but I could hardly believe your prophecy without some kind of proof beyond the mere praises of flying. I should ask you to show palpable signs in his body and habits that such a change was going on, that his neck has been lengthening, his lips hardening, and his hair becoming feathery. In the same way, when you tell me that man is becoming a purely intellectual being, content with plain living and high thinking, I see there might be advantage in the change, but I ask for signs that it is in progress. I see none; but, on the contrary, I see strong reasons for believing in its impossibility. Grant me two postulates, and I disprove your millennium. The first is, that food is necessary; the second, that the instinct for marriage is permanent. No one denies the first, and Godwin’s denial of the second is purely dogmatic. He has given us no proofs. Men have no doubt made progress in other respects; they have passed from barbarism to civilization. But in respect of the second postulate they are the same now as they were 4000 years ago. Individual exceptions are individual exceptions still. I am bound, therefore, to believe in the truth of my postulates, and I infer from them the impossibility of your millennium.

You speak of a society, he continues, where the members are all equally comfortable and at leisure. Suppose it established, it could not last; it would go to pieces through the principle of population alone. The seven years of plenty would be at once devoured by seven years of want. The proof of this is short and decisive:—Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio; subsistence only in an arithmetical. “A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.”[^[23]] “The race of plants and animals shrinks under this great restrictive law, and the race of man cannot by any efforts of reason escape from it. Among plants and animals its effects are waste of seed, sickness, and premature death, among men misery and vice,” the former necessary, the latter probable. Now, in the old countries of Europe, population never is unchecked. It is checked by want of room and food. Vice and misery, and the fear of them, are always “equalizing” the numbers of the people with the food of the people. In the New World, “the cynosure of neighbouring eyes,” there are fewer hindrances to early marriage; there is more room and there is more food; hard work is the only condition of a happy life. But, even there, population is not entirely unchecked; the hard work will at least interfere with the rearing of children; and the 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 assumption, 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.[^[24]]

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 algebraic language, as a given quantity.”[^[25]] In spite of the whimpering of old men and roués, “the pleasures of pure love will bear the contemplation of the most improved reason and the most exalted virtue.”[^[26]] Godwin views the matter in a dry, intellectual light, and asks us to abstract from all accessories before we form an estimate of the passion in question. 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 circumstances” 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.[^[27]] The fact is, that man’s large discourse, which marks him out from the brutes, makes him hide the marriage instinct under a mass of “attendant circumstances” before he lets himself be drawn by it. He will not obey the instinct simply more feræ, or in animal fashion, because he feels it. But it is not destroyed, only disguised. The love is not purely intellectual. Reason, with its calculation of consequences, can save a man from the abuse of a passion, but cannot destroy the passion itself;[^[28]] and (he might have added) its “looking before and after” includes fancy as well as thought. Take this passion then as it is, an adoration it may be of an assemblage of accessories; it can never die out of the world.

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 marry 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 nature is 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.[^[29]] Dr. Robert Wallace had more wisdom than he wot of.

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.[^[30]] In our own day and land we see people multiplying up to the limit of the food, and a “great restrictive law” preventing them, as it prevents all other animals, from multiplying beyond that limit.[^[31]] In our own day and country, men 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 marriage for 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.[^[32]] 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.”[^[33]] Why did he not take one step more, and discover what that principle is?[^[34]]

The fact is that Godwin was at once intellectually sanguine and emotionally cold. His ideal would have been a man “of large brain and no affections;” and when he wrote the Political Justice he was not aware of 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 Wollstonecraft (1798), and in the story of St. Leon (1799), the man who found the philosopher’s stone, and became, to his own sorrow, immortal on earth, he confesses that he has hitherto taken too little thought of feeling as an element in human action. If Mary had been too much of a Werther, her husband had been too little. Like Condorcet (and like Buckle), he 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. Moreover, 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.[^[35]] Malthus was probably right in tracing it to the unconscious influence of Christianity,[^[36]] 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.[^[37]] It was held by Holcroft, one of Godwin’s most intimate friends,[^[38]] and it was an important part of Condorcet’s Sketch of the Progress of the Human Spirit.

In the days of the Terror (1794) Condorcet, from his hiding-place in the Rue Servandoni, had written of the “organic perfectibility of man.” He looked to medicine, and to the arts and sciences in general, to banish disease and prolong human life “indefinitely.”[^[39]] Godwin trusted to the inward development of the mind, not to outward appliances.[^[40]] But by different ways they arrive at the same terminus, and receive 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,[^[41]] 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 Condorcet 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 grown; but this he can say, that a carnation will never be as large as a cabbage. The limit is there, though it is undefined, and there is a limit also to the lengthening of human life, though no one can fix it to a year. Condorcet therefore has proved an earthly immortality only by a misuse of the word “indefinite.” He has shown no organic change in man which would prove the possibility of perfection in 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.[^[42]] 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?[^[43]] 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 old fallacy, “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.[^[44]] This is not the place to discuss the questions associated in our own times with Neo-Malthusianism.[^[45]] 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 are not made, but grow.” If Darwinians are 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. We cannot 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 understand 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 application was to the poor of England and the philanthropists who were trying to relieve them.

The early life of Malthus, coinciding, as it largely does, with the latter half of the eighteenth century, coincides with England’s greatest industrial revolution. Malthus was born in 1766, three years after the Peace of Paris. There was an end, for the time, to foreign wars, and trade was making a brave start. The discoveries of coal and iron in Northern England, going hand in hand with the inventions of cotton-spinning and weaving, were beginning to convert the poorest counties into the richest, upsetting the political balance. The new science of chemistry had begun to prove its usefulness. Wedgwood was perfecting his earthenware, Brindley cutting his canals, Telford laying out his roads, Watt building his steam-engines. England in Roman days had been a granary; in later 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, supplanting home labour, and making the word “manufacturer” forget its etymology,[^[46]] 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.[^[47]] 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 Wealth 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 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 prevented wilful poverty by reducing outdoor 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 the tide of political reform ebbed for forty years (1792–1832). Because the French reform had gone too far, the English reform was not allowed to take its 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. Hunger and new ideas are two advocates of change which always plead best in each other’s company; hunger makes men willing to act, and the new ideas give them matter for enactment. In France, when the crisis came in 1789, the new ideas were not far to seek. Writers of Utopias, from Plato to More, and from Rousseau to Ruskin, have always adopted one simple plan: they have struck out the salient enormities of their own time and inserted the opposite, as when men imagine heaven they think of their dear native country with its discomforts left out. Inequality at home had made Frenchmen ready to dote on a vision of equality when Rousseau 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 were 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 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 translation. Rousseau 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 barbarism. 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 harmless; 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 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 facing 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 distress. 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 coercion acts;[^[48]] it was the year when the king’s carriage was stopped by a mob crying “Bread, bread!” Mr. Whitbread and the rest thought Parliament ought to “do something”; and Pitt proposed (1796) to meet the 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 the 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 schools of industry, another to attach every labourer to a friendly society. But another less innocently proposed to encourage the growth of population by making the poor relief greater where the family was 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 for their support.”[^[49]]

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 population. If he had had a good case against Godwin and Condorcet, who had simply failed to show how population 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. Wherever Providence has sent meat, He will soon send mouths to eat it; and, if by your artificial encouragements you increase the mouths without increasing the meat, you will only bring the people one step nearer starvation, you will only multiply the nation without increasing the joy. If stalwart numbers are strength, starving numbers are weakness.[^[50]]

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 understand the new economical doctrines. Pitt, who admired Adam Smith,—Fox, Condorcet, and Godwin, who owed Smith no allegiance,[^[51]]—all were equally purblind in this matter. All Pitt’s study of the fourth book of the Wealth of Nations, 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. Price,”[^[52]] who were all well-known and widely-read authors of the day. “The populousness of ancient nations” had been a happy hunting-ground for learned antiquarian essay writers over half a century. Montesquieu, Wallace, and Price[^[53]] 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.[^[54]] 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.[^[55]] 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.[^[56]]

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 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 anticipation 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 consecutive premises. This is true of Adam Smith when he is compared with Sir Dudley North, Abraham Tucker, or the other prophets of free trade[^[57]] catalogued by MacCulloch or Blanqui. They talked free trade almost as Mons. Jourdain talked prose, without knowing it. Precisely the same is true of Adam Smith himself in relation to Malthus. Of his own generalizations he is complete master. Having reasoned up to them, he can reason down from them. But, when he says, “Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence,” “The demand for men necessarily regulates the production of men,”[^[58]] he has not anticipated Malthus. His phrases are touching a principle of which he does not see the most important bearings; and not having reasoned up to it, he makes hardly any attempt to reason down from it. Malthus, on the other hand, has 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.[^[59]]

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 principle of population, on metaphysical lines that were followed by Mr. Sumner nearly twenty years afterwards, when the discussion had taken a new turn.[^[60]] The question is how to reconcile the suffering produced by the principle of population with the goodness of God. Malthus answers that the difficulty is only one part of the general problem of evil, the difference between this part and the rest being that in this case we see farther into the causes; and it is therefore the easier for us to justify the ways of God to man. “Evil exists not to create despair but activity.”[^[61]] We ought not to reason from God to nature, but from nature to God; to know how God works, 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 “the mighty process of God,” not indeed for the mere “probation” of man (for that would imply that his Maker was suspicious of him, or ignorant of what was in him), but for the “creation and formation” of the human mind out of the torpor and corruption of dead matter,[^[62]] “to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul, to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay.” The varied influences of life are the forming hand of the Creator, and they are infinitely diverse, for (in spite of Solomon) there is nothing old under the sun.[^[63]] Difficulties generate talents.[^[64]] “The first 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:

ἁ πενία, Διόφαντε, μόνα τὰς τέχνας ἐγείρες.

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 over-peopled, 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 development of intellect and civilization goes on indefinitely.[^[65]] 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 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 are 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 we owe 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 increase, a few such careers as Alexander’s or Tamerlain’s might unpeople the whole world; but the law exists, and the gaps made by any conqueror, or by any pestilence, are soon filled to overflowing, while the overflowing flood passes on to reclaim new countries.[^[66]]

This is the cosmology of Malthus. “Life is, generally speaking, a blessing independent of a future state.”[^[67]] “The impressions and excitements of this world are the instruments with which the Supreme Being forms matter into mind.” The necessity of constant 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.[^[68]]

Perhaps the great economist went beyond his province 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; and yet the second of his two learned volumes is simply an expansion of its ideas.[^[69]] The metaphysic itself might be deep or shallow; it would be impossible to tell till we heard the sense in which the metaphysical phrases were used, and that we have hardly any means of doing. They point at least to the “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 utilitarian, he separates himself from Paley by refusing to allow moral value to action done from either fear of punishment or hope of reward.[^[70]] There is no indication that he was a metaphysical genius. His researches in the heavier German literature did not perhaps extend much farther than to the quaint optimist Johann Peter Süssmilch,[^[71]] from whose Göttliche Ordnung he freely drew his statistics.

Malthus at one time intended to expound his metaphysical views at greater length.[^[72]] In other words, he meant to write a book in the manner of Price’s essays, half economical and half literary. We need not deeply regret the “particular business,” whatever it was, that nipped this intention in the bud, besides delaying the publication of the essay as we now have it.[^[73]] The metaphysical and theological passages, as they stand, have the look of an episode, though the thought of them is logically enough connected 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 theological opinion (on the Atonement) that had appeared in the first edition,[^[74]] 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[^[75]] by editing his chief work, and honoured the other economists by tabulating their conclusions in an historical introduction. He extends this favour to Malthus. The reasonings of Malthus 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.[^[76]] This charge is refuted by the essay even in its later form; but, placed alongside of the cosmology of the first edition, it seems merely grotesque. Malthus is accused of ignoring the very phenomena which Malthus glorifies as the “final cause” of the principle of population. He 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 power of poverty as a cause of labour. No doubt the mistake was a common one; and (to say nothing of the encyclopædias and biographical dictionaries) there are few economical text-books which do justice to Malthus in this matter.[^[77]] But one who speaks with authority should not be content with a borrowed knowledge. The same authority tells us that “the work of Mr. Malthus is valuable rather for having awakened public attention to the subject than for its giving anything like a complete view of the department of the science of which it treats.”[^[78]] Malthus for his part lays no claim to infallibility; like most pioneers, he is sure of little beyond his leading principles, and he is never ashamed to change his views.[^[79]] But, if his Essay on Population, gradually amended and expanded as it was, to keep pace with the searching criticisms of thirty years, has not reached the heart of the matter, surely there is no profit in discussion.

The fact is, that though the anonymous small 8vo of 1798 was a mere draught of the completed work of later years, its main fault was not incompleteness, but wrongness 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 neglected 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-eminence, 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 first. 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 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 often 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 relieving the poor.

The success of the essay, so far, had been very remarkable. It had provoked replies by the dozen, and an unwilling witness tells us it had converted friends of progress by the hundred.[^[80]] We find Godwin writing to the author in August 1798,[^[81]] and we may conclude that the veil of anonymousness was not very thick, though Malthus used it again in 1800 in the tract on High Prices. In a debate in the House of Commons on the 11th February, 1800, Pitt took occasion to say that, though he still believed his new Poor Bill a good one, he had dropped it in deference to the objections of “those whose opinions he was bound to respect.”[^[82]] He meant Bentham and Malthus. We cannot tell which had the greater share of the credit, but we know that Malthus regarded Pitt and Paley as his most brilliant converts.[^[83]] Pitt’s declaration that he still believed his bill to be a good 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 Malthus, but the jocose “Observations” of Bentham,[^[84]] which threshed the chaff out of the bill clause by clause, had turned his favourite science against himself.

CHAPTER II.
SECOND THOUGHTS, 1803.

Exaggerations of the First Essay—Its two Postulates not co-ordinate—Distinctive feature of the Second Essay—Its moderate Optimism—Rough Classification of Checks—Moral Restraint and Mixed Motives—Freedom as understood by Godwin and by Malthus—The two men contrasted.

While Malthus was making such converts as Pitt, Paley, and Parr, and when even Godwin acknowledged the “writer of the essay” to have made a “valuable addition to political economy,”[^[85]] 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 sides. To use the language of philosophy, he had not been sufficiently concrete; he had gone far to commit 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 prospects of civilized society in our own day depend on a combination of political, intellectual, physical, and moral causes, of which the growth or decrease of population may be only an effect. If we are part man, 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 generalization which Malthus had known and named, though he did not pursue it beyond man.[^[86]] 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 civilization, the struggle in the lowest stages is abolished; the weakest are often saved, and the lowest raised, in spite of unfitness.[^[87]] View man not as an animal, but as a citizen; view the principle of population as checked not only by vice, misery, and the fear 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 reason, Malthus the power of passion. “It is probable,” he 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.”[^[88]] 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.[^[89]]

It could hardly be otherwise, if we began, like Malthus, by setting down the desire of food and the desire of marriage as two co-ordinate principles.[^[90]] They are not really co-ordinate. It is true not merely 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 qualifications. 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.[^[91]] 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.”[^[92]]

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,[^[93]] 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 published his tract on the High Price of Provisions (1800),[^[94]] 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 argument inapplicable to the present state of society,” because it contradicts preconceived opinions; but two years of reflection have strengthened his conviction 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 attention, 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 pleasure-seekers on the Continent, Malthus went to France and Switzerland on no errand of mere pleasure; and he was luckily at home again, and passing his proof-sheets through the press, before Napoleon’s unpleasant interference with English travellers.

It was a happy coincidence that in the dark fighting days of 1798, Malthus should write only of vice and misery, while in the short gleam of peace in 1802 and 1803, when the tramp of armed men had ceased for the moment, he should recollect himself, and write of a less ghastly restraint on 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 imperfection 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 contributed 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 author to interpret his thoughts to us from many various 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 rewriting 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 the 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 Happiness. The dreams of the future are now in the background, and the facts of the present in the foreground. In 1798 Malthus had given Godwin the lie:—

“Colouring he, dilating, magniloquent, glorying in picture,

He to a matter of fact still softening, paring, abating,

He to the great might-have-been upsoaring, sublime and ideal,

He to the merest it—was restricting, diminishing, dwarfing.”

He must do more now, or his political economy is a dismal science. He must show how we can cling to the matter of fact without losing our ideal. It is not enough to refer us to the other world. How far may we have hope in this world? Let Malthus answer.

The second essay is his answer; and if second thoughts are the best, then we may rejoice over the second essay, for it lifts the cloud from the first. It tells us that on the whole the power of civilization is greater than the power of population; the pressure of 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.[^[95]] 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) preventive, when it keeps a new population from growing 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 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, preventively 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 forbidding vice and misery to check the growth of population, and by thereby permitting the people to increase to excess. There is, however, a third check, which Malthus knows under the title of moral restraint.

Moral 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.[^[96]] 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 abstinence from marriage followed by no irregularities.[^[97]] He speaks 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 produced in the prices of grain;[^[98]] and the word “moral” is often, like “morale,” used in military matters to denote mental disposition, as distinguished from material resources. The vagueness of the word is perhaps not accidental, for nothing is vaguer than the mixed motives which it denotes; but continence, which is unambiguous, would seem the better word.

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 quantities; 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 character 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 ordinances, prohibitions, or refutations. It needs a positive truth, and an ideal, that is to say, a religion, to give 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 Lord and the admiration of moral good.”[^[99]] 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 were said to teach that the mere removal of hindrances would lead to the best possible production and distribution 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 liberty enough,” he says, “and vice cannot exist in it.”[^[100]] But neither he nor the economists desired a merely negative change or removal of hindrances. Their political reformation was to be, like the Protestant, only successful as it went beyond image-breaking. Malthus, it will be seen,[^[101]] is far from being an unqualified advocate of laissez faire; and, in all cases where he did desire it, he wished to make the state small only to make public opinion great. Godwin was not far away from him here. If he was wrong in attributing too much evil to institutions, and too little to human nature, he 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[^[102]] 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;[^[103]] and Malthus was not behind him.[^[104]] They are aware that the more completely 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.

The characters of the two men, Malthus and Godwin, 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 have domestic happiness like his own. There never was 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 to 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 questions; but it was chiefly the desire to advance the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In his eyes 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 the “Principles of Political Economy,” he took care to add on the title-page, “considered with a view to their practical application,” refusing to consider in abstractness what always exists in the concrete. His keen sympathy for the sufferings of displaced workmen led him to fight a losing battle with Say and Ricardo in favour of something like an embargo on inventions, and in protest against a fancied over-production.[^[105]] His private life showed the power of gentleness; Miss Martineau could hear his mild, sonorous vowels without her eartrumpet, 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.[^[106]] 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 fightings 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.[^[107]] 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[^[108]] in a Government sinecure, unsuccessful and almost forgotten, with the academical ease of the other, centred in 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 mere 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 1836, the year of the first league of the people against the Corn Laws. In their death they were still divided, but, “si quis piorum manibus locus,” they are divided no longer, and they think no hard thoughts of each other any more.

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 Encyclopædia Britannica—Milne’s Confirmation 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 (b) subjectively—Relation to previous Classification—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;[^[109]] it frequently hinders the moral goodness and general happiness of a nation as well as the equal 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][^[110]] 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 certainly true of all of them that the seeds of their life, whencesoever at first derived, are now infinitely numerous on our planet, while the means of rearing them are strictly limited. In the case of plants and animals the strong instinct of reproduction is “interrupted by no reasoning or doubts about providing for offspring,”[^[111]] and they crowd fresh lives into the world only to have them at once shorn away by starvation. With the exception of certain plants which ape their superiors, like the drosera, and certain men who ape their inferiors, like the cannibals, the lines of difference between the three classes of living things are tolerably distinct. The first class, in the struggle for room and food, can only forestall each other and leave each other to die; the second deliberately prey on the first and on each other; while the third prey on both the rest. But with man this “tendency to increase beyond the food” differs from the same instinct in the other two cases by more than the fact that man has larger resources and is longer in reaching his limit. The instinct is equally strong in him, but 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.[^[112]] 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 economical 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 population in uncivilized 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 postulates[^[113]]—(a) food is necessary, (b) 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 the ideally rapid increase would take place where all obstacles (whether material or moral) to the getting of food and rearing of a family were removed, so that nature never needed to remonstrate with instinct. “In no state that we have yet known has the power of population been left to exert itself with perfect freedom.”[^[114]] We can guess what it would be from the animal and vegetable world, where reason does not as a matter of fact interfere with instinct in any circumstances, so far as we can judge. Benjamin Franklin, in a passage quoted by Malthus in this connection,[^[115]] supposes that if the earth were bared of other plants it might be replenished in a few years 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.[^[116]] Juan Fernando, the first discoverer, had covered the island with goats from one pair.[^[117]] 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 interfere. 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 absolute plenty combined with moral goodness, that is to 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 early 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.”[^[118]] From this near approach to an unchecked increase, we infer that the unchecked would mean a doubling in less than twenty-five years (say twenty, or perhaps fifteen), and that all population, in proportion as it is 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 people, 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;[^[119]] very often it might only be used late after the rest, through political insecurity, imperfect agriculture, incomplete explorations, or the want of capital; but, when it is once occupied, the question is, will it supply new food to new-comers without any limit at all? This would be an ideally fertile land corresponding to the ideally expanding population. And on some such inexhaustible increase 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,[^[120]] 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 population. Population is increased by itself; food is increased 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;[^[121]] but, with the natural liking of a Cambridge man for a mathematical simile,[^[122]] he 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 will double itself in twenty-five years; the ten will become twenty in the first twenty-five years, forty in the 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 the later stages of the growth of population as in the earlier, the laboriousness of the labour is greater in the later stages of the increase of food than in the earlier. It is the plain truth, says Malthus, that nature is niggardly in her gifts to man, and by no means keeps pace with his desires. If men would satisfy their desire of food at the old rate of speed, they must exert their mind or their body much more than at first.[^[123]] An obvious objection presents itself. Since man’s food consists after all of the lower forms of life, animal and vegetable, and since these admittedly tend to increase, unchecked by themselves, in a geometrical ratio, it might be thought that the increase of human population and the increase of its food could proceed together, with equal ease. But the answer is that this unchecked geometrical increase of the first could go on only so long as there was room for it. It could only be true, for example, of wheat in the corn-field at the time when the seed of it was sown, and the field was all before it. The equality of the two ratios would only be true of the first crop.[^[124]] 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,[^[125]] with few trustworthy statistics, had supposed ten years; Euler, with somewhat better, twelve and four-fifths; but Malthus 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 spontaneous); 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 agricultural 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 forced agricultural production. Yet we ourselves, long after this stimulus, and after much high farming unknown to our fathers, have reached only an average produce of twenty-eight bushels per acre of arable land as compared with twenty-three in 1770,[^[126]] while the population has risen from about six millions to thirty-five. It may be said that applies only to wheat. But until lately wheat-growing was the chief object of all our scientific agriculture; and this is the result of a century’s improvements. It is far from an arithmetical increase; and, even had the produce been multiplied sevenfold, along with the population, this would not overthrow the contention 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.[^[127]] 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.[^[128]] Objectors 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 contradicted 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.[^[129]]

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 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 whatsoever, and arithmetical to all food, as such.

In Macvey Napier’s Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica (1824) Malthus has left his mature statement 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 (1) 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 increase is extremely slow, while the power of increase is prodigious. (3) Physically man is as the rest; and if we ask what is the factor of his geometrical increase, we can only tell it, as in the case of wheat and sheep, by experience. (4) In the case of other living beings, where there are most room and food there is greatest increase. These conditions are best 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 22⅓, 22½, and 23⁷⁄₁₂ 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 Malthus[^[130]] 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 Swedish 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.[^[131]] The United States themselves are not the very healthiest and wealthiest and happiest country conceivable; and their increase is therefore not the fastest conceivable. 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 increase 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 appears 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 healthiness 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 circumstances favourable to increase, bear no comparison with those of the United States,—and adverting particularly to the actual increase of population which has taken place in this country during the last twenty years[^[132]] under the formidable obstacles which must press themselves upon the attention of the most careless observer, it must appear that the assumption of a rate of increase such as would double the population 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.”[^[133]]

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 encouragement to marriage and the same habits of life, together 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 lands 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 years would probably be less and less. In practice, the inequalities of distribution may check the increase of food with precisely the same efficacy as an 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.”[^[134]] But the main point is, that, inequalities or no inequalities, there is a tendency to diminished productiveness. Under either 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 times what it does now, or, in five hundred years, twenty times as much; and even this is incredible, though it would be only an arithmetical progression. No doubt almost all parts of the earth are now more thinly peopled than their capacities might allow; but the difficulty is to use the capacities. That this view of Malthus need not imply any ignorance or any disregard of the resources of high farming may be judged from the fact that our highest agricultural authority, who recognizes the power of English farming to provide on emergency even for our entire annual wants, admits at the same time that, “where full employment and the means of subsistence are abundant, 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.”[^[135]] “It follows necessarily” (sums up Malthus) “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.[^[136]]

This is the argument of the Encyclopædia so far as it relates to the theses of the essay. Malthus 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 observation 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 been successful, historically; and the widest extension of popular education would not make men the fitter for 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 for mere living, would not, like the present, stop at the point where production ceased to be a good investment. But this would mean[^[137]] that the whole energies of the society were directed to the mere getting of food; neither the whole society nor any part of it would have leisure, for intellectual labour or enjoyment. Whereas private property not only secures the leisure, but, by stopping at the point of profitableness, it keeps an unused reserve, on which society may fall back in case of need. Malthus therefore would stand 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.[^[138]]

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.

It is chiefly the contrast between the actual and the possible supplies that makes men incredulous about the necessity of checks; and we may grant that 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.[^[139]] 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 are responsible for the necessity of checks to population,[^[140]] “a vast mass of responsibility remains behind, on man and the institutions 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 remove the necessity of checks, or even make them press much more lightly in any given place,[^[141]] 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 least 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 the individual citizens.

The rest of the article contains little that is not in the Essay on Population (5th ed., 1817) and the treatise 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 the 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 their final form. It was not his last work. From the fact that he undertook the paper in Sept. 1821,[^[142]] we may perhaps infer that he placed it in Macvey Napier’s hands in the year 1822.[^[143]] But it was his last attempt to restate the subject of the essay in an independent form with anything approaching to fulness of detail, and it shows he had made no change in his position. The Summary View of the Principle of Population (1830) was avowedly an abridgment of the article in the Encyclopædia, 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.”[^[144]] What some people would count the more interesting question remained to be considered——the question that touches individuals and familiar circumstances 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,[^[145]] this is effected in two kinds of ways—(1) 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 need to be cut down, and being, so far as it is voluntary, 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; and 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 himself or herself is called moral restraint. Any restraint 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.[^[146]] We find, therefore, that the positive and the preventive checks are all resolvable into vice, misery, and moral restraint, or sin, pain, and self-control, a threefold division that makes the second essay “differ in principle” from the first.[^[147]]

We have here a twofold alongside of a threefold division of the checks to population. The one is made from an objective, the other from a subjective point of view. The division of checks (1) into positive and preventive has regard simply to the outward facts; a population is in those two ways kept down to the food. The division of them (2) into vice, misery, and moral restraint has regard to the human agent and his inward condition, the state of his feelings and of his will. For example, the positive check 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 unhappiness, but evidently slight compared with the evils which result from any of the other checks to population,”[^[148]] and “merely[^[149]] 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 given time,[^[150]] and his endeavour will be to show in what relative proportions and in what degree they prevail 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 preventive check will be small; and, where the preventive check prevails much, the positive check, or in brief the mortality, will be small.[^[151]]

In society, as it was in the first years of the nineteenth century, Malthus 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 because “the histories of mankind which we possess are in general only of the higher classes,”[^[152]] and it is the labouring classes to which the observation applies. Their painful experience of the ruder checks has not prevented a “constant effort” in the labouring population to have larger families than they can well support. The consequence is that their numbers are 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 distress will so check population that in process of time the numbers will be almost at a standstill, while at the same time, since the demand for food has been greater 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 historian, 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.[^[153]] 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.

CHAPTER IV.
THE SAVAGE, BARBARIAN, AND ORIENTAL.

Simile supplanted by Fact—Savage Life—Population dependent not on possible but on actual Food—Indirect Action of Positive Checks—Hunger not a Principle of Progress—Otaheite a Crux for Common Sense—Cycle in the Movement of Population—Pitcairn Island—Barbarian and Oriental—Nomad Shepherds—Abram and Lot—Cimbri and Teutones—Gibbon versus Montesquieu—“At bay on the limits of the Universe”—Misgovernment an indirect Check on Population—Ancient Europe less populous than Modern—Civilization the gradual Victory of the third Check.

The main position of the essay was so incontrovertible, that when the critics despaired to convict Malthus of a paradox, they charged him with a truism. To the friendly Hallam[^[154]] the mathematical basis of the argument appeared as certain as the multiplication table, and the unfriendly Hazlitt “did not see what there was to discover after reading the tables of Noah’s descendants, and knowing that the world is round.”[^[155]] If the essayist had done nothing more than put half-truths together into a whole, he would have “entrenched himself in an impregnable fortress” and given his work a great “air of mastery.”[^[156]] But he would have convinced the understanding without convincing the imagination. Adam Smith himself would have done no more than half his work, if he had been content to prove the reasonableness of free trade without showing, in detail, the effect of it and its opposites. Even the most competent reader has seldom all the relevant facts marshalled in his memory, ready to command; and he will always be thankful for illustrations. The Essay on Population in its second form certainly excelled all economical works, save one, in its pertinent examples from life and history.

Imagination in the narrower sense of the word is to be out of court. Malthus, like Adam Smith, not only leaves little to his reader’s fancy, but makes little use of his own. His own had misled his readers in the first essay, though it had certainly given that little book much of its piquancy; and he resolves for the sake of truth to chain it up, as Coleridge chained up his understanding. The self-denying ordinance is only too fully executed. The style of his essay is truly described by himself[^[157]] as having gradually “lost all pretensions to merit.” Edition follows edition, each with its footnotes, supplements, rearrangements, and corrections, till the reader feels that this writer “would be clearer if he were not so clear.”

But the title-page supplies a guiding thread. From the second edition onwards to the last, “Past” and “Present” appear in large letters, “Future” in small. The entire work may therefore be divided according to the three tenses, with the emphasis on the two former. The first book is devoted to the past, the second to the present, and the third and fourth to the future.

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

After explaining his principles, Malthus takes a survey of human progress, if not from brute to savage, at least from savage to citizen. He shows us how the rude and simple positive checks become complicated with the preventive; and he leads us up from barbarism to civilization till we find ourselves in a society where the citizens think less of check than of chief end, and less of self-sacrifice than of self-devotion, to some cause or person, and even the inferior members act, at worst, from mixed motives, containing good as well as evil. These are the two extreme ends of his line. It would be useless to deny that he lingers longest over the less pleasing, and gives Godwin some excuse for questioning his logical right to believe in the more pleasing at all.[^[158]] At the same time it would have been (even logically) impossible for him to have attacked Godwin for taking abstract views of human nature, and then to have persisted in an abstraction of his own, after all his own European travel and historical studies. His fault had lain in defective premises, not in false reasoning; and he remedies the fault.

Let us take his account in his own order. Beginning with present savagery, which with some qualifications is a picture of our own past, he sifts out the descriptions of Cook, Vancouver, and other travellers, to see what checks to population operate in different grades of savage humanity. At the very bottom of the scale comes Tierra del Fuego, by general consent the abode of pure misery, and therefore naturally the home of a sparse population. Next come the natives of the Andaman Islands and of Van Diemen’s Land. “Their whole time is spent in search of food,” which consists of the raw products of the soil and sea; the whole time of every individual is devoted to this one labour, and there is neither room nor inducement for any other industries. Vice is hardly needed; misery in the shape of perpetual scarcity and famine keeps down the people to the food. Third in the scale of human beings are the New Hollanders, the original inhabitants of North-West Australia, among whom can be traced not only the check of misery, but the check of vice. The women are so cruelly treated at all times, and the children have so harsh an upbringing, that there is no difficulty in understanding how population does not even reach the full limit of the scanty food. War and pestilence make the assurance doubly sure. As savages are entirely innocent of sanitary science, the dirt of their persons and their houses deprives them of “the advantage which usually attends a thinly-peopled country,” comparative exemption from pestilence.[^[159]] Even the North American Indians, who are one step higher than the New Hollanders, come under the same condemnation for overcrowding, and for much else besides. The account which Malthus gives of them may be compared with that of De Tocqueville half a century later. Romance has clung to them only because they were the nearest and best known savages of their kind, and their necessary labours were in Europe rich men’s pleasures. But hunting and river-fishing cannot yield much food unless pursued over a wide area. A hunter is so far like the beast of prey which he pursues, that he must go long distances for his food, and must either fly from or overcome every rival. The North American Indian must therefore either go West after his old food, or else he must stay where he is, to beat off the Europeans, or to adopt their food and their habits. “The Indians have only two ways of saving themselves, war and civilization. They must either destroy the Europeans or become their equals.”[^[160]] As the civilization of a nation of hunters is almost impossible, their extinction seems inevitable. The question remains, How is this population cut down to the level of its food?

In Malthus’ answer to the question occur three remarks of great general importance. First, what limits the numbers of a people is not the possible but the actual food.[^[161]] Second, want destroys a population less often directly by starvation than indirectly through the medium of manners and customs.[^[162]] Third, the mere pressure of impending starvation does not lead to progress.[^[163]]

Malthus is never tired of insisting on the first of these remarks; and a proper understanding of it is essential to a fair judgment on his doctrine. He never says that it is the tendency of a population to increase up to the limits of the greatest possible amount of food that can be produced in a given country. The valley of the Mississippi when highly cultivated may possibly support a hundred millions; but the question is not what it would do when highly cultivated, but what it can do when cultivated as it now is and as men now are. “In a general view of the American continent as described by historians, the population seems to have been spread over the surface very nearly in proportion to the quantity of food which the inhabitants of the different parts in the actual state of their industry and improvements could as a matter of fact obtain; and that with few exceptions it pressed hard against this limit, rather than fell short of it, appears from the frequent recurrence of distress for want of food in all parts of America.”[^[164]] What is said here of the Indians a hundred years ago applies to the Colonists now. “The actual state of industry” is of course a much more improved one; but the population the land will bear is still in proportion to it, and the amount could not have been increased till the actual state of the industry had first been bettered. One cause of the decay of the numbers of the Indians was that their method of industry, so far from becoming better, became worse by their contact with Europeans, and therefore the limit of population was actually contracted instead of being extended.[^[165]] This explains how it is that their diminishing numbers do not bring them greater comfort. Whether the numbers in any given case are too great or too small depends always on the quantity of the food that is divided among them; and, where the food decreases faster than the population, a population that has become smaller numerically becomes actually larger in proportion to the food. The statement that England or any other country could bear millions more than it does now is a mere reference to unexplored possibilities, landing us in the infinite. It may be answered in the same way as the Eleatic puzzles about motion; land infinitely improvable does not mean land infinitely improved, as matter infinitely divisible does not mean matter infinitely divided. The position of Malthus is therefore as follows: given a people’s skill, and given its standard of living at any time, its numbers are always tending to be the utmost that can be furnished by that skill with a living up to that standard,—that is to say, with what, according to that standard, are the necessaries of human life. Either a diminution of that skill or an increase in that standard would cause over-population. The question is always a relative one.

The human as distinguished from the animal character of the problem appears not only in that relativity (which affects mainly the preventive checks), but in the indirect way in which the positive checks, if we may say so, prefer to act. It is as if they were always desirous of resolving themselves as far as might be into preventive. The ultimate check, Malthus says, is starvation; but, he adds, it is seldom the immediate one. The higher up we go in the scale, the more it is hidden away out of sight. Starvation is interpreted, by all grades of society above the lowest, to mean the loss of what they conceive to be the necessaries not of a bare living but of endurable life; and even the lowest, instead of apprehending some pain, apprehend some bringer of it. They do not allow famine to kill them; they create manners and customs that do the work for it, keeping the famine itself afar off. “Both theory and experience uniformly instruct us that a less abundant supply of food operates with a gradually increasing pressure for a very long time before its progress is stopped. It is difficult indeed to conceive a more tremendous shock to society than the event of its coming at once to the limits of the means of subsistence, with all the habits of abundance and early marriages, which accompany a largely increasing population. But, happily for mankind, this never is nor ever can be the case. The event is provided for by the concurrent interests and feelings of individuals long before it arrives; and the gradual diminution of the real wages of the labouring classes of society slowly and almost insensibly generates the habits necessary for an order of things in which the funds for the maintenance of labour are stationary.... The causes [of the retardation of population] will be generally felt and [will] generate a change of habits long before the period arrives.”[^[166]] “An insufficient supply of food to any people does not show itself merely in the shape of famine, but in other more permanent forms of distress, and in generating certain customs which operate sometimes with greater force in the prevention of a rising population” than in the destruction of the risen.[^[167]] Robertson the historian truly says, that whether civilization has improved the lot of men may be doubtful, but it has certainly improved the condition of women. Among the Indians and almost all savages, “servitude is a name too mild to describe their wretched state.” The hard life of the men kills their instinctive fondness for the women; the latter are therefore less likely to become mothers, while, if they do, their own hardships and heavy tasks are a great hindrance to nursing. It is not surprising that the surviving children are of good physique; none but the exceptionally strong could weather the cruel discipline of childhood.[^[168]] In South America the difficulty of upbringing actually led to an enforced monogamy, as well as to late marriages and their not unfrequent accompaniment, irregularities before marriage. Such customs diminish numbers. But even the adult savages do not find life easy. They are not the men to think of providing for a rainy day; in the short moments of plenty they do not think of the long days of want. Intemperate living as well as the rigour and the accidents of a hunting life cut off numbers in their prime. They are subject to diseases and invent no remedies. Their acquiescence in dirt leads to pestilences, but they invent no sanitary reforms; and their thinly-peopled country loses its natural exemption from epidemics. Their wars are internecine, for they are largely prompted by sheer self-preservation, and the thought that if the one combatant lives the other cannot. Cannibalism itself was at first due to extreme want, though what occasional hunger had begun, hate perpetuated in a custom. This and the low cunning and mean strategy, due to a resolve to survive at all costs, are the prime inventions of the struggle for existence on these low levels.

Such are the causes by which the numbers of the North American Indians are kept down to a very low figure; but, low as it is, the figure is high enough for the food. Apart from a difference in the standard of living, the proportion of population to food is similar over the inhabited world; and in the same neighbourhood or among cognate races it will be almost identical. A diminution in one Indian tribe, not being voluntary, will not be the cause of plenty to the survivors; it has been the effect of want, and it will simply weaken the collective force of the tribe in the struggle against others.[^[169]]

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

It is in this connection that Malthus throws some light on the question how progress could ever take place at all. His answer is not unlike Adam Smith’s remark about the connection of high wages with good work. He says, that beyond a certain limit, hard fare and great want depress men below the very capacity of improvement; comfort must reach a certain height before the desires of civilized life can come into being at all. If the American tribes, he says, have remained hunters, it is not simply because they have not increased in numbers sufficiently to render the pastoral or agricultural state necessary to them. Reasons which Malthus does not pretend to particularize,[^[170]] and which he allows to be unconnected with mere increase or decrease of numbers, have prevented these tribes from ever trying to raise cattle or grow corn at all. “If hunger alone could have prompted the savage tribes of America to such a change in their habits, I do not conceive that there would have been a single nation of hunters and fishers remaining; but it is evident that some fortunate train of circumstances, in addition to this stimulus, is necessary for this purpose; and it is undoubtedly probable that these arts of obtaining food will be first invented and improved in those spots which are best suited to them, and where the natural fertility of the situation, by allowing a greater number of people to subsist together, would give the fairest chance to the inventive powers of the human mind.” “A certain degree of [political] security is perhaps still more necessary than richness of soil to encourage the change from the pastoral to the agricultural state.”[^[171]] These passages are remarkable because they seem to contradict the general tenor of the author’s writings. We were told with great emphasis in the first edition of the essay that difficulties generate talents,[^[172]] and even the second and later are full of approving commentaries on the proverb, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”[^[173]] The contradiction is soon solved. Malthus has no faith in the civilizing power of competition when it means a struggle among starved men for bare life, but much faith in it when it means the struggle for greater comfort among those who already have the animal necessaries.[^[174]] The significance of his admissions will be noticed later. Meanwhile it must be observed that the passage just quoted is not perfectly precise. The larger the society, the greater might be the division of labour and consequent stimulus to invention; but a tribe might be large and yet have little in it of a society, and still less of a division of labour. Without such favouring circumstances as Malthus mentions the progress cannot take place; but even with them it need not; they are therefore not the real motive power.

The account of the state of population among the South Sea Islanders,[^[175]] which comes next in order to the chapter on the American Indians, is an illustration of these remarks. These savages live in a fertile country and yet they make no progress. As this is not the only point illustrated, it is worth while to look at the chapter in detail.

Malthus begins by observing that population must not be thought more subject to checks on an island than on a continent. The Abbé Raynal, in his book on the Indies, had tried to explain a number of modern customs that retarded population[^[176]] by referring them to an insular origin. He thought that they were caused at first by the over-population of Britain and other islands, and were imported therefrom into the continents, to the perplexity of later ages. But as a matter of fact population on the mainlands is subject to the same laws as on the islands, though the limits are not so obvious to common observation, and the case is not put so neatly in a nutshell. A nation on the continent may be as completely surrounded by its enemies or its rivals, savage or civilized, as any islanders by the sea; and emigration may be as difficult in the one case as in the other. Both continent and island are peopled up to their actual produce. “There is probably no island yet known, the produce of which could not be further increased. This is all that can be said of the whole earth. Both are peopled up to their actual produce. And the whole earth is in this respect like an island.”[^[177]] The earth is indeed more isolated than any island of the sea, for no emigration from it is possible. The question, therefore, to be asked about the whole earth as about any part of it, is, “By what means the inhabitants are reduced to such numbers as it can support?”

This was the question which forced itself on Captain Cook when he visited the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Some of his experiences there, especially in New Zealand, show that the native population was kept down in nearly the same way as the American. Their chief peculiarity is the extreme violence of their local feuds. The people of every village he visited petitioned him to destroy the people of the next, and “if I had listened to them I should have extirpated the whole race.” A sense of human kinship is impossible at so low a level of being; and the internecine wars of the New Zealanders were the chief check to their numbers, which, from the distressing effects of occasional scarcities, would seem always at the best to have been close to the limits of the food.

The first impression of common sense is that distress is natural where food is scanty, and unnatural where it is plentiful. But “if we turn our eyes from the thinly-scattered inhabitants of New Zealand to the crowded shores of Otaheite and the Society Islands” we find no such phenomenon. “All apprehension of death seems at first sight to be banished from a country that is described to be fruitful as the garden of the Hesperides.” But reflection tells us that happiness and plenty are the most powerful causes of increase. We might, therefore, expect a large population in Otaheite; at its first start it might double itself not in twenty-five but in fifteen years. Captain Cook estimated it (on his second voyage in 1773) as 204,000. How could a country about one hundred and twenty miles in circuit support an increase that doubled these numbers in twenty-five years? Emigration is impossible, for the other islands are in the same situation. Further cultivation is inadequate, for scientific invention is quite wanting. The answer is that the increase does not take place, and yet there is no miracle. Licentiousness among the higher classes, and infanticide amongst all classes, are freely practised. The free permission of infanticide no doubt, as Hume remarks,[^[178]] tends as a rule rather to increase than to diminish population, for “by removing the terrors of too numerous a family it would engage many people in marriage,” and such is the force of natural affection, that comparatively few parents would carry out their first intentions. But in Otaheite in its old state custom had made infanticide easy, and it was a real check. War against other islands was a third check, frequently destroying the food as well as the people, thus striking down two generations at once. All these checks notwithstanding, the population was up to the level of the food, and there was as much scarcity and keen distress as on any barren island.

Such at least was the state of things discovered by Captain Cook in his three voyages (the last in 1778) and Captain Vancouver (in 1791). On the other hand, the author of A Missionary Voyage to the South Pacific Ocean in 1796–8 (London, 1799) found a people very scanty as compared with the food. The accuracy of both accounts is borne out by the description of the habits of the people at these two periods. Captain Cook says they were careful to save up every scrap of food, and yet suffered often from famine. The missionaries observe the frequency of famine in the Friendly Islands and the Marquesas, but say of the Otaheitans that they are extremely wasteful, and yet never seem to be in want. Even in the intervals between one of Cook’s voyages and another the state of the island had altered. Malthus sees here an illustration of two facts. The one is that, apart from changes in the standard of living, population fluctuates between great excess and great defect, great numbers with great mortality, and great comfort with rapid multiplication of numbers. The other, which explains the first, is that any cause affecting population, either towards increase or towards decrease, continues to act for some time after the disappearance of the circumstances that first occasioned it. For example, over-populousness would lead to wars,[^[179]] and the enmities of these wars would long survive their first occasion. Again, over-populousness would lead to greater infanticide and vice, which would become habitual. New circumstances would, no doubt, after a time bring new habits, and, to use the author’s words, would “restore the population, which could not long be kept below its natural level without the most extreme violence. How far European contact may operate in Otaheite with this extreme violence and prevent it from recovering its former population is a point which experience only can determine. But, should this be the case, I have no doubt that on tracing the causes of it, we should find them to be aggravated vice and misery.”[^[180]] As a matter of fact either European contact has caused a diminution, or exacter inquiry has made a lower estimate of the population of all Polynesia. The people of the whole Society Islands is reckoned at between 15,000 and 18,000,[^[181]] which is a long way from Cook’s estimate of 204,000 for Otaheite alone. We can hardly believe, however, that the vice and misery of Otaheite are more than ten times as great as they were in 1773; and perhaps we may suppose Malthus to mean that, if the European influences were of the same character at the end as they were at the beginning, and were as pernicious to the Polynesian as to the Red Indian, the language of pessimism would be justified. The passage at least shows how unfair it is to suppose Malthus to desire at all costs a small population; he is careful to say that, while vice in Otaheite by reducing the numbers caused a transient plenty among the survivors, still “a cause which may prevent any particular evil may be beyond comparison worse than the evil itself.”[^[182]] Life itself may be bought too dear.

No good is done, however, by denying that excessive numbers are an evil, or by optimistic assertion that if men are only good they will be happy. There is at least one Polynesian island whose past history gives a picturesque proof of the contrary. Pitcairn, “the lonely isle of the Mutineers,” was a moral contrast to Otaheite. The inhabitants owed nothing good to their parents, who were the mutineers of H.M.S. ‘Bounty,’ and the women of Otaheite that came with them in 1790, when they first took refuge in Pitcairn Island. They owed all to the religious teaching of John Adams, which made them so good, that there were few like them on the earth.[^[183]] But in latitudes just touching the tropics, with a single square mile of poor soil, surrounded by wide ocean, they had no outlet for trade and modern arts. Like the inhabitants of Godwin’s Utopia,[^[184]] they soon peopled the little country to the full extent of the food that could be got by the old methods, and, unlike the Utopians, they had not skill to invent new. If they had not drawn the line for themselves, misery would have done it for them. Their little colony at its first founding consisted of fifteen men and twelve women. Fourteen men and many women died off in the course of the ten years which passed before the time of moral regeneration. But they left many children; and, when the patriarch John Adams was visited by a passing ship in 1814, he was surrounded by a happy circle of devout families. Rapidly outgrowing the resources of the place, these simple folk removed in 1831 to Tahiti, eighty-seven strong. Some remained there; others had no pleasure in their new abode, and came back to suffer affliction with the people of God, believing with Malthus that “a cause which may prevent any particular evil may be beyond all comparison worse than the evil itself.” The evil was real, however, and, in default of celibacy or new ways of bread winning, their only cure seemed emigration. So in 1855, Tahiti seeming ineligible, they journeyed further west to Norfolk Island. Though there are more than four hundred and forty to the square mile in England and Wales, two hundred people of this primitive sort had been certainly too many for the single square mile of Pitcairn Island; and they did not leave a moment too soon. Home sickness brought back two entire families (of seventeen persons) in 1859. One or two stray travellers joined them five years afterwards; but, with allowance for these, we find that the increase of population on Pitcairn Island reaches the highest estimate of Malthus. When the English Admiral D’Horsey visited the place in 1878, the quarter of a hundred had grown in nineteen years, at the moderate cost of twelve deaths, to a population of ninety[^[185]] persons. The primeval virtues will avail little without the modern arts.

Returning to Malthus, we find him following an order of his own, in rough conformity with the orthodox progress from deer to sheep, and from sheep to corn. He takes us from Polynesian savages to the nomad pastoral nations of ancient Europe.[^[186]] The vast migrations and their momentous historical effects he ascribes to the “constant tendency in the human race to increase” beyond its food, and thinks that when history has been rewritten it will contain more of this.[^[187]] “The misfortune of history is, that while the particular motives of a few princes and leaders are sometimes detailed with accuracy, the general causes which crowd their standards with willing followers are totally overlooked.”[^[188]] At first sight the phenomenon of civilized agricultural nations unable to repel the invasion of shepherds seems incredible; a country in pasture cannot possibly support so many inhabitants as a country in tillage. A shepherd, it is true, is nearer to the skilled labourer than a hunter; he does not simply take what nature gives him, where nature puts it; he keeps the desired objects of consumption under his own control, and his life is stronger because more social. Early African colonization, as Adam Smith pointed out, was less successful than early American, because the natives, being shepherds and even farmers rather than fishermen, were stronger in their resources and more united than the American aborigines, so that the European intruders were not able to displace them.[^[189]] We should have expected the Scythian, Cimbrian, and Gothic invaders of ancient times to have had a similar rebuff. “But what renders nations of shepherds so formidable is the power which they possess of moving altogether, and the necessity they frequently feel of exerting this power in search of fresh pasture for their herds.”[^[190]] They have always in their breeding stock a reserve of food for an emergency. The mere consciousness that their mode of life does not bind them to one place gives them less anxiety about providing for a family. Therefore, when they exhaust one region and begin to feel the pinch of want, they make an armed emigration on the scale of whole tribes at once, for the occupation of more fruitful regions, and, as a rule, the conquest of them by force. The law of their life is a series of periodical “struggles for existence”[^[191]] between one nation and another, in which the fittest survive at the cost of a prodigious waste of human life.

The milder initial stage of this process is illustrated by the separation of Abram and Lot in the book of Genesis.[^[192]] Abram “was very rich in cattle.” “Lot also had flocks and herds and tents. And the land was not able to bear them that they might dwell together, for their substance was great, so that they could not dwell together. And there was a strife between the herdmen of Abram’s cattle and the herdmen of Lot’s cattle.” They agreed, therefore, to separate, Lot choosing the fertile valley of the Jordan, Abram going to the left into the land of Canaan. Migrations of the same sort, more or less peaceable, are described by modern writers as extending the Russian people from time to time farther and farther to the south and east.[^[193]] In the instances best known to history the migrations were far from peaceable, and the puzzle has been to account for their recurrence. The slaughter of the German barbarians by Marius, Cæsar, Drusus, Tiberius, Germanicus did not prevent the reappearance of similar hordes of invaders a generation later. Claudius destroyed a quarter of a million of Goths; Aurelian and Probus had the same work to do again. Under Diocletian the barbarians, finding the conquest of Rome too much for them, slaughtered one another in frontier wars. No losses seemed to exhaust the permanent possibilities of population in those quarters. At last in the fourth century “clouds of barbarians seemed to collect from all parts of the northern hemisphere. Gathering fresh darkness and terror as they rolled on, the congregated bodies at length obscured the sun of Italy and sunk the Western world in night.”[^[194]]

Why were the resources of the North so inexhaustible? Simply because the power of increase is inexhaustible. The North was not, it is true, more densely peopled then than now. “The climate of ancient Germany has been mollified and the soil fertilized by the labour of ten centuries from the time of Charlemagne. The same extent of ground which at present maintains in ease and plenty a million of husbandmen and artificers, was unable to supply a hundred thousand lazy warriors with the simple necessaries of life. The Germans abandoned their immense forests to the exercise of hunting, employed in pasturage the most considerable part of their lands, bestowed on the small remainder a rude and careless cultivation, and then accused the scantiness and sterility of a country that refused to maintain the multitude of its inhabitants. When the return of famine severely admonished them of the importance of the arts, the national distress was sometimes alleviated by the emigration of a third, perhaps, or a fourth part of their youth.”[^[195]] In short, the countries were more than fully peopled up to their actual produce; and, though by agriculture the actual produce would have been made greater, yet agriculture was not extended. The passion of the Germans for wine did not lead them to plant vineyards by the Rhine and Danube, but to rob the vintage of Italy. “Pigrum quin immo et iners videtur sudore acquirere quod possis sanguine parare.”[^[196]] Malthus supposes that even the Mark system of land-holding, with its absence of cities and its periodical redistributions of land, may have sprung from a political motive, the fear of accustoming the people to a settled agricultural life, and the desire to make emigration less irksome to them.[^[197]] So long as there were weaker peoples to be plundered, the northern nations might freely double their numbers every twenty-five years, or oftener, and descend again on Italy and the South. Only when the whole was occupied by their own people who were not likely to be less stout for defence than for conquest, were the hordes forced back. Not perhaps till gunpowder was invented was Europe finally safe against them. Long after their last inland invasions, the Norsemen found their way by sea to the shores of England and France.

Gibbon’s account of the matter is, according to Malthus, substantially true. The only flaw is that he thinks it necessary, in denying the greater populousness of North Europe in ancient times, to deny the possibility of a rapid increase of population.[^[198]] The German people were on the whole virtuous and healthy in their manners of living, and, the checks to increase being mainly the positive ones of war and famine, the increase itself was prodigious. But Gibbon is greatly in advance of Montesquieu, who believes with Sir William Temple, Mariana, and Machiavelli, that the northern countries were, as a matter of fact, more densely peopled then than they are now, and that, further, when the Romans repelled them, a huge multitude was driven far north and remained there biding its time. The same (says Montesquieu) happened under Charlemagne, and would happen again if a modern prince were to make the same ravages in Europe; “the nations repulsed to the north, backed against the limits of the universe, would there make a firm stand, till the moment when they would inundate and conquer Europe a third time.”[^[199]] We are to suppose these immense multitudes living “at the limits of the universe” on ice and air for some hundreds of years. If this is to answer to the question-begging question, why the North is less fully peopled than it once was, it involves a miracle. But nothing more supernatural than ordinary laws is really needed to explain the movements of pastoral nations a thousand years ago. They are the same that govern the Tartars and Bedouins now.[^[200]]

In the modern nomads,[^[201]] it is true, the comparative simplicity of the circumstances and the comparative thoroughness of our knowledge about them, enable us to see plainly that the local distribution of the people is in strict accordance with the local distribution of the food, in other words, with “the quantity of food the people can obtain in the actual state of their industry and habits.” We should see the same thing of the rest of the world’s inhabitants, if the complicated commerce of civilized nations did not make it less gross and palpable. The power of the earth to support life may be compared with the power of a horse to carry burdens. He is strong in proportion to the strength of his weakest part, as a chain to the strength of its weakest link; and the earth’s powers of nourishment are great in proportion to their greatness in the worst seasons of the year.[^[202]] Again, owing to imperfect facilities for distribution, one part of a society may suffer want when another is in plenty.[^[203]] Among the Tartars and the Arabs this is plainly seen; and it is clear, too, how the waste of life from war not only acts as a direct check on population, but checks it indirectly by repressing productive industry. Its fruits would have no chance of preservation. “Even the construction of a well requires some funds or labour in advance, and war may destroy in one day the work of many months and the resources of a whole year.”[^[204]] When once warlike habits have become fixed, the two evils, war and scarcity, reproduce and perpetuate one another. The encouragements held out to large families by the Mohammedan religion have a like effect. “The promise of Paradise to every man who had ten children would but little increase their numbers, though it might greatly increase their misery.”[^[205]] It could only increase their numbers if it increased their food, and it could not increase their food without changing their warlike habits into habits of industry. Failing this, it simply creates a constant uneasiness (through want and poverty) that multiplies occasions of war. Fortunately for himself, the Arab often proportions his religious obedience to the extent of his resources,[^[206]] and in hard times, “when there is a pig at hand and no Koran,” he thinks best to eat what God has given him.

Nothing but increase of food will permanently increase population, and where there is food the increase will reach up to it. In those parts of Africa that have furnished the Western slave supplies, there has been no discernible gap from the “hundred years’ exportation of negroes which has blackened half America.”[^[207]] Even in Egypt, where there is a striking contrast between natural fertility and human lethargy, the cause is not any deficiency in the principle of increase. It is that property is insecure, the government being despotic and its exactions indefinite. It is not the want of population that has checked industry, but the want of industry that has checked population; and it is bad government that has occasioned the want of industry. “Ignorance and despotism seem to have no tendency to destroy the passion which prompts to increase, but they effectually destroy the checks to it from reason and forethought.... Industry cannot exist without foresight and security; the indolence of the savage is well known, and the poor Egyptian or Abyssinian farmer without capital, who rents land which is let out yearly to the highest bidder, and who is constantly subject to the demands of his tyrannical masters, to the casual plunder of an enemy, and not unfrequently to the violation of his miserable contract, can have no heart to be industrious, and, if he had, could not exercise that industry with success. Even poverty itself, which appears to be the great spur to industry, when it has once passed certain limits almost ceases to operate. The indigence which is hopeless destroys all vigorous exertion, and confines the efforts to what is sufficient for bare existence.[^[208]] It is the hope of bettering our condition, and the fear of want rather than want itself, that is the best stimulus to industry; and its most constant and best directed efforts will almost invariably be found among a class of people above the class of the wretchedly poor.”[^[209]] This passage repeats an idea expressed in every book of the essay.[^[210]] Government can retard the increase of population both directly and indirectly, but can only advance it indirectly, namely, by encouraging industry, more especially agriculture. For example, industrious agriculture has made China capable of bearing a great population, though other causes of a more equivocal character have made it exceed its great capacities, and its excessive numbers are cut down by famine and child murder.[^[211]] The Roman emperors found it impossible by legislation to promote the increase of the old Roman stock, because they found it impossible to restore the old Roman habits of industry, though believers in the superior populousness of ancient nations used to mistake their intentions for accomplished facts.

In the eighteenth-century dispute about the populousness of ancient nations (one particular skirmish in the general battle of the books) we have seen that Malthus declares for the moderns. He gives his opinion in detached passages; but, putting together the different parts wherever we can find them, we discover his proof to depend on two principles, which are corollaries of the primary doctrine of the essay. The first is, that without the extension of agriculture or the better distribution of its fruits there can be no increase of population;[^[212]] the second is, that whatever is unfavourable to industry is to that extent unfavourable to population.[^[213]]

Now in the early days of Greece and Rome[^[214]] the population ought on these principles to have been a large one, for not only was agriculture actively prosecuted, but property and wealth were more equally divided among the people than in later times. On the other hand, the numbers were always up to the level of the resources; and the smallness of the political divisions made law-givers like Solon, and theorists like Plato and Aristotle, conscious of the risk of over-population and full of plans to provide against it. It is one of Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s Republic that Plato has not sufficiently met this difficulty, or realized that a community of goods or an equal distribution of property is impossible without a limitation of families. If every one may have as many children as he pleases, the result will soon be poverty and sedition. Of the preventive checks actually recommended by the highest wisdom of the Greek world, the mildest is late marriages; the rest include exposure and abortion. Colonization was rather adopted in practice than recommended in theory. Frequent wars and occasional plagues were the chief positive checks.

In Rome even more evidently than in Greece[^[215]] the causes that produced inequality of property led also to thinness of population. In our own days the absorption of small proprietors by large would have this effect in a less degree, because the large would need to employ the labour of the small. In Rome the labour was done by slaves; and the wonder was not that the number of free citizens should decrease, but that any should exist at all, except the proprietors.[^[216]]

Yet the legislation of Augustus in favour of marriage, and the universal lamentation of the later Roman writers over the extinction of the old Roman stock, are no more than a presumption that the population was decreasing, not a proof of its actual smallness, while the prevalence of war and infanticide, so often used to prove the same point, tend really to do the opposite. They are for the time positive encouragements to marriage, for people will not hesitate to bring children into the world, if they are either free to kill off the superfluous or certain to find sad vacancies ready for them.[^[217]] In the former case, as we noticed, parental feeling will often interfere with the infanticide, and save rather too many than too few.[^[218]] Wars, on the other hand, may injure the quality of the population by removing the most stalwart and even the most intelligent men; but there is as much food as before, there is more room, and there are therefore more marriages, till all the gaps are filled, even to overflowing.[^[219]] Livy need not have wondered that in the Volscian wars the more were killed the more seemed to come on. The like is true of plague and famine; epidemics, like the small-pox, have never permanently lessened the population, though they have increased the mortality of the infected countries.[^[220]] To take only one instance (from Süssmilch)—a third of the people in Prussia and Lithuania were destroyed by the plague in 1710, and in 1711 the number of marriages was very nearly double the average.[^[221]] Emigration in like manner may drain off the best blood of a nation, but cannot reduce its numbers for any length of time, unless the nation is learning a new standard of comfort. Greece and Rome were not less populous because they were great colonizers.[^[222]] The known existence of a number of very active checks to population, instead of proving that the population was absolutely small, might more naturally, other things being equal, prove it to have been absolutely large. It might be argued that, if the population had not been great, fewer and less potent checks would have done the work.[^[223]]

But other things were not equal. We know that the gratuitous distribution of foreign corn had ruined Roman husbandry.[^[224]] We know that even the labour of the slaves who had supplanted the free labourers of Italy had not been sufficiently (or sufficiently well) directed to agriculture. Moreover, the increase by marriage in the number of slaves did not even balance the decrease in the number of the free men; else why should the Romans need to import fresh cargoes of slaves every year from all parts of the world?[^[225]]

In short, the Roman habits had become “unfavourable to industry, and therefore to population.” The very necessity for such a law as the Papia Poppæa would indicate a moral depravity inconsistent with habits of industry. This strong argument had escaped even Hume, who thought that the people would increase very fast under the Peace of Trajan and the Antonines, forgetting that the people could not unlearn their habits in so short a time; unlearning is harder than learning, especially for a whole people; and, “if wars do not depopulate much when industry is in vigour, peace does not increase population much when industry is languishing.”[^[226]] Contrariwise, it might be argued that the prevention of child-murder in India will not cause over-population, when it is part of a general policy accustoming the people to European habits.

Allow, then, that general viciousness is inconsistent with general industry, and it follows that those ancient nations in which the first prevailed were less populous than the modern. This seems to be the argument of Malthus brought to a focus. From the absence of censuses,[^[227]] it is strictly deductive; there could not have been so many people as now, and therefore there were not.[^[228]]

Expressed in more technical language, the meaning is, that where there is nothing present but the positive check and the lower kind of preventive, the habits of the people are necessarily such as to hinder an increase of food and thereby of population. When Europe was less civilized, it was not more, but less thickly peopled.[^[229]]

This argument seems to be weakened by one consideration—that the poor in our day put more into their idea of necessaries; they have a higher standard of living than the poor 2000 years ago. It might therefore be said with justice that over-population (a peopling beyond the food) begins much sooner with us than with them, for it begins at a point much farther removed from starvation, and that therefore with the ancients a given amount of food would go farther and feed more. But, if we look only to the poor in each case, the difference between the ancient standard of comfort and the modern is unhappily much smaller than the difference between their meagre industrial resources and our ample ones, for our powers of production have grown far more rapidly than the comfort of our labouring population. Such difference as there is in the standards is only made possible by moral restraint, which has a closer affinity with modern civilization than with ancient or mediæval.[^[230]] The history of modern civilization is largely the history of the gradual victory of the third check over the two others; and, as one of the chief allies of the third has been commercial ambition, the victory of moral restraint, by causing a larger industry, has caused in the end not a smaller, but a larger population.[^[231]] The increase by being deferred has been made only the more certain and permanent.

CHAPTER V.
NORTH AND MID EUROPE.

Different Effects of Commercial Ambition in different Countries—No single safe Criterion of National Prosperity—Süssmilch’s “Divine Plan”—Malthus in the Region of Statistics—His Northern Tour—In Norway the truth brought home by the very nature of Place and Industries—In Sweden less obvious—In Russia quite ignored—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 patriæ—Emigration in various Aspects—Evidence of the Author before Emigration Committee—Switzerland, St. Cergues and Leysin—The pons asinorum of the subject.

The broad difference between a savage and a civilized population is, that the positive checks prevail in the one, the preventive in the other,—and between ancient and modern civilizations, that vice and misery prevail in the one, moral restraint in the other.[^[232]] Yet every civilized nation in modern times has not only passed through these 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 endeavour after independence or bare life, its later history an endeavour after full development; but there are strata in it to which civilization has not descended, and in which the struggle for bare existence prevails, alongside of strata in which the struggle is towards ideals of commercial ambition and social perfection.

The view which Malthus takes of commercial ambition 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 reipublicæ, the desire of rising in the world, so glorified in the Wealth of Nations[^[233]] and in the Essay on Population,[^[234]] 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 unlike elements, or of many and few elements, but of the treatment of them by the human subject. The 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 peculiarity quite distinct from the other two, their effect on the habits of the persons concerned.

French writers have noticed that the English farmer works hard for such an income as will give him the innumerable little luxuries of toilet, dinner-table, and drawing-room, that make up the English idea of comfort, while the French farmer works hard that he may be able to buy another farm.[^[235]] The one lives up to his income; and in his efforts to preserve it he is enterprising and persevering; he is always striving 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 gaining 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 civilizing “desire to better one’s own condition”; but it leads in the one case to simple saving, the old stocking, the piece of land, or the rentes, in the other to active using, the steam-plough first, that the piano and pony-carriage may follow afterwards. There is some truth in M. Taine’s paradox, “The Englishman provides for the future not by his savings but by his expenses.”[^[236]] If capitalizing means using as well as saving, there is a sense 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 mediatrix reipublicæ. He may, like Adam Smith, find it doing good work in the undermining of feudalism,[^[237]] 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 impossible 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 sometimes 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 comparatively easy to get the answer. There are figures to be had, and in many cases a census; there is a general similarity of circumstances which produces a general similarity of habits, and, therewith, of the movements of population. But there is no invariable order 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 population, just as it might be said we have no single criterion of 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 take 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 marriages, emigrants, and recruits for the army; and we could make little use of most of these figures without the census returns and the reports of the Registrar General. In the same way, to measure the healthiness of a population and ascertain whether it is safely under the level of its food, tending to pass 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.”[^[238]]

This was, for example, the failing of Johann Peter Süssmilch, one of the earliest inquirers into the movements of population. A book like Süssmilch’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. Süssmilch 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, Death, and Marriage. The Divine plan is the one set forth in the exhortation to Noah in Genesis—the peopling of the earth;[^[239]] 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 to 1 in 32. There is a yearly excess of births represented by 1 in 10 and 5 in 10. The increase must have been faster at first than it is now; and the means 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 probably 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. Antediluvians were long-lived because their long lives were needed 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. When we observe the remarkable adaptiveness of man which enables him alone among the creatures[^[240]] to live in any latitude, and when we observe how he has been preserved while many animals have become extinct, we need have no doubt that the replenishment of the earth was really the Divine 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 regiment, in which all the men have their places, actions, and accoutrements determined for them. The proportion of sons to daughters, and deaths to births, Süssmilch 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 Théodicée, 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 Süssmilch, ill-sifted as they were, gave Malthus 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 Süssmilch, shows how important was Malthus’ 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, Malthus wrote his first essay when there was no census; and, for some time afterwards, so comparatively 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 essential work of an investigator Malthus 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 friends, 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.[^[241]] These were the only European countries where English travellers could easily make their way in those years.[^[242]] In 1802 he saw France and Switzerland,[^[243]] 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 children, 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 work.[^[244]]

In all his travels he found the foreigner as ignorant 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 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 increasing 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 advantage to a nation, any more than fewness of wants to an individual; it may mean a low state of civilization, 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.[^[245]] 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 the country in one of the hardest years ever known in Europe, 1799, and found the Norwegians “wearing a face of plenty and content, while their neighbours the Swedes appeared to be starving.”[^[246]] He found the death-rate lower in Norway than in any country in Europe.[^[247]] The population, however, was hardly increasing at all; and the proportion of marriages to the whole numbers of the people was smaller than in any country except Switzerland.[^[248]] The positive 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 smallness 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” (husmänd), labourers, who receive from a farmer in quasi-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 crediting the whole of the land with a greater power of supporting people than the power possessed by the 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 there will surely be a vacancy for him, and he may “e’en take Peggie.” Norway, however, is to manufacturing countries what the country districts elsewhere 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.[^[249]]

The conditions of the problem were in this way simplified, and the problem itself was satisfactorily answered. The only districts where Malthus 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 unfavourable contrast with Norway. Even in 1825 Malthus wrote[^[250]] that the progress of agriculture and 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 continues. The paupers were about one per cent. of the population in 1869 (when they were nearly five per cent. in England), which seems to have meant a decrease from previous years;[^[251]] but between 1865 and 1875 the population had increased fourteen per cent. in spite of considerable emigration.[^[252]] Malthus would have recognized with satisfaction that the nation had been “either increasing the quantity or facilitating the distribution” of its food,[^[253]] that is to say, improving either its agriculture or its manufactures. It has really done both. Though the growth of the population has been greater in the centres of manufacture, there has been progress also in the country districts. Many of the old customs and laws that hampered agriculture have ceased to exist.[^[254]] Malthus himself says that, if Government would remove hindrances to agriculture, and spread sound knowledge about it, it would do more for the population of the country than by establishing five hundred foundling hospitals.[^[255]] He need not have confined his recommendation to agriculture; and elsewhere he states the truth in broader terms: “The true encouragement to marriage is the high price of labour, and an increase of employments which require to be supplied with proper hands.”[^[256]] Remove hindrances to trade and spread sound knowledge of it—that (in his view) is the way to increase the quantity and facilitate the distribution of the products of agriculture; and, to judge by results, the Norwegian Government has followed it.

Sweden,[^[257]] as it then was, furnished a striking contrast to Norway. Malthus 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 deliberate 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 moderately 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,[^[258]] 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 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 excessive increase. In both cases we have something different 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 not surprising that the statistics available in the days of Malthus were open to grave suspicion. The death-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 were no smaller than elsewhere.[^[259]] These facts by themselves would simply suggest a great rate of increase going on in the country concerned; and Malthus allows that there is great scope for such in Russia. But there was one other fact that strengthened his doubts about the vital statistics of that country; contrary to the experience of all other countries, it was said that in Russia more women were born than men. In others, more men are born 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.[^[260]] 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,”[^[261]] 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 much greater proportion of them would have reached the age of manhood and have become useful members of the state.”[^[262]] But, besides increasing the mortality of children, they injure the very “mainspring of population”[^[263]] by discouraging marriage and encouraging irregularities. In his talks with his father, Malthus had 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 existence of such an institution teaches to the poor. To relieve parents of the care of their children is bad for the parents,[^[264]] 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 rather the worst than the poorest) at the expense of all the rest, and finds a career for pauper apprentices to the prejudice of independent workmen and their children.[^[265]] In the third place, like the Poor Laws, it promises an impossibility—to relieve all that come. If children are to be received without limit, the resources for maintaining them should be without limit; otherwise an excessive mortality is quite unavoidable.[^[266]] 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 therefore 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.[^[267]]

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 fourteenth 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.”[^[268]]

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 define food itself very widely. In the first case “tendency” will mean the abstract possibility depending on the one physiological condition; in the others it is the concrete nett possibility depending on all the various conditions together. In a general preface to his chapters on Central Europe, Malthus quite recognizes these distinctions and warns us against exact statements. “It seldom happens,” he says, “that the increase of food and of population is uniform; and when the circumstances of a country are 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 true 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.”[^[269]]

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.”[^[270]] It would be at best a negative criterion and sine quâ non,—there can be no increase of numbers without increase of food,—though even then it is not true of a “forced population,” living down to a lower food.[^[271]] But there clearly may be an increase of food without an increase of numbers, unless the character of the people is such that they do nothing with the food except increase by it. Therefore, though, within certain wide limits fixed for us by invariable qualities of human nature, predictions are justifiable on the ground of the law of population[^[272]] or any other economical laws, none that specify a particular course of action as a result of a particular event are trustworthy, till we know the character of the people concerned.[^[273]] Malthus 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,[^[274]] 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.[^[275]] Montesquieu says that wherever there is room for two persons to live comfortably a marriage will certainly take place.[^[276]] 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 number of annual deaths. “Death is the most powerful of all the encouragements to marriage,”[^[277]] 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 as it 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. Süssmilch explained 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 labour is the real encouragement to marriage.”[^[278]] 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 openings for the living; and the high number of deaths was caused by the unhealthiness of the region and of its prevailing industries, which were manufacturing rather than agricultural. The choice in every large population is between having 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 marriage; 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 proportion for all old countries, simply because the habits and standards of living are different, to say nothing of healthiness or unhealthiness of climate and occupation. For similar reasons it is not the same for towns as for country districts.[^[279]] “A general measure of mortality for all countries taken together” would be useless if procurable; but it cannot be procured.[^[280]]

Habits, however, are sufficiently fixed to make us certain that “any direct encouragements to marriage must be accompanied by an increased mortality.”[^[281]] They spur a willing horse. Montesquieu and Süssmilch, 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 might more justly be called the destroyers than the fathers of their people.[^[282]]

If Malthus had been asked how a prince could best become a real pater patriæ, he would have named two or three ways. The prince might direct his mind to the improvement of industry, especially of agriculture.[^[283]] He might circulate news and knowledge on these subjects;[^[284]] or, as we should say now, he might institute agricultural exhibitions, and regular agricultural statistics of home and foreign production. He would in this way increase the population by helping to increase the food.

In the second place, he might benefit trade everywhere 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. Malthus 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.[^[285]]), 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.[^[286]] “These passions enabled the first adventurers to triumph” over obstacles that would have deterred 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 character of the Spanish inhabitants of Mexico and Peru 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. They seemed to expect that “the moral and mechanical habits” which suited the old country would suit the new,[^[287]] and everything would go on as it did at home. At first therefore there would be a redundant population[^[288]] 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 economically a far and a near place are alike, they are very different to the sentiments of men. Patriotism is no fault, and the breaking 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 the uncertain prospects of success, but from that vis inertiæ in man which is always counteracting the vis mediatriæ of commercial ambition. In addition, therefore, to the mere uneasiness of poverty and the desire of getting a living, there is need of some spirit of enterprise, to make men willing and successful emigrants.[^[289]] Those who felt distress most would often have been the most helpless in a new 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 themselves that they should go. “There are no fears so totally ill-grounded as the fears of depopulation from emigration.”[^[290]] 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 new 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.[^[291]]

Towards the end of his life, Malthus had an opportunity of explaining his views on this subject to an audience of statesmen. He appeared as a witness before the Select Committee[^[292]] of the House of Commons “to inquire into the expediency of encouraging emigration from the United Kingdom,” and his influence is traceable in their Reports. They reported[^[293]] that there had been in the United Kingdom a “redundant population,” in Ireland agricultural, in Scotland and England manufacturing; that one cause of it had been the unavoidable displacement of hand labour by machinery;[^[294]] 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.[^[295]] “The testimony” (said the Committee in their third Report[^[296]]) “which was uniformly given by the practical witnesses has been confirmed in the most absolute manner by that of Mr. Malthus, and your Committee cannot but express their satisfaction at finding that the experience of facts is thus strengthened throughout by general reasoning and scientific principles.” They were more disposed than their witness himself to a priori reasoning, and in many of their leading questions he declined to follow them.[^[297]] But he agreed with their main conclusions, allowing that under certain conditions it would be even a financial advantage 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 pauperism, still more would he be against it when the pauper had before him the alternative of assisted emigration.[^[298]] His 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 spontaneously adopted by the people[^[299]] than when pressed on them by their Government. Under the torture of the question he conceded no more.[^[300]]

As a temporary expedient, the essay tells us,[^[301]] “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 encouraged, 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, and helps to heal the mischief caused by fluctuations in trade.

We 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 uninterrupted) course of trade. A movement in favour of emigration in 1806 and 1807 led him to insert a paragraph in the fourth edition of his essay which explains the relation of emigration to these changes. He accepts the statement of Adam Smith, that “the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men;”[^[302]] but he adds (as Cairnes added later) that it takes some little time to bring more labour into the market when there is demand for it, and some little time to check the supply when once it has begun to flow.[^[303]] A family may be reared to catch high wages, and the high 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 foreign wars and the foreign trade of the years before Waterloo. In the normal case we must submit to the inevitable; in the exceptional we may find an outlet in emigration. No doubt, even if there be no emigration, in the long run the labour market will 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,[^[304]] there would seem to be no need for Government to teach the people to emigrate. Circumstances 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 enterprise to a whole village, and three or four unsuccessful ones a contrary spirit.”[^[305]] This is illustrated by the contrast of two parishes, both in the Canton de Vaud, St. Cergues in the Jura, and Leysin[^[306]] 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 there 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 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.”[^[307]] 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.[^[308]] 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 1.[^[309]] 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 (instead 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 proportion 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 equal in number, and St. Cergues had a smaller proportion of adults 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 conceivably (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 comparison 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 living inhabitants (1 to 140) was lower than in Norway 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,[^[310]] and the unemployed must look for employment elsewhere. 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 themselves as soldiers, or emigrate in some other way, as the only chance to enable them to marry.”[^[311]] Malthus was a little disappointed with the condition of the Swiss peasantry when he saw them in 1803. Perhaps, 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 Government in the previous century to “encourage” what they then thought was a declining population.[^[312]] The peasant who guided Malthus to the sources of the Orbe[^[313]] talked freely to him on the poverty of the 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 he was forty, and a woman till she was elderly. He said that at one time the introduction of stone polishing had given the people high wages and led them to expect constant employment; changes of fashion[^[314]] 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 Malthus 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.

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 Production sometimes inseparable—The Stationary State—Malthus and the French Revolution.

In the order of his writing Malthus follows the order of his travels, and takes France[^[315]] after Switzerland. France presents us with facts of an almost unique 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.[^[316]]

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. He 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 had not supposed them to be strictly true. “It will be but 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.”[^[317]] This is not a wary admission. Nevertheless, 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 circumstances.”[^[318]] 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.[^[319]]

He spends most pains in illustrating the contrast between the France before the Revolution and the France at the Peace of Amiens. In many ways it was fortunate that he confined himself to the Republican 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 exemplified 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 statistics 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 diminished 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 the war, was 26,000,000. In 1801 it seems, from the returns of the Prefects, to have been about 28,000,000.[^[320]] In ten years the increase had been 2,000,000, or 200,000 a year. Yet at a medium calculation France, in addition to the ordinary deaths, had lost by the war about 1,000,000 of men up to that time,[^[321]] or 100,000 a year. How, on the principles of Malthus, were the two facts to be reconciled?

To reconcile them he shows, first, how, according to the figures given by Frenchmen themselves, the numbers of the unmarried survivors at home were 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 Revolution 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 “accumulation” 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[^[322]] a certain birth and death-rate, and assuming from the same authorities that the unmarried men for the period before the Revolution 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 age, of whom (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 new annual surplus of 80,000 youths above eighteen might be taken for military service without any diminution in the number of marriages.[^[323]] 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. It would not be miraculous then if the French population 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 recruits would probably be taken from the 300,000 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,[^[324]] 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 Revolution. 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 proportion 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 we are at present, but as a nation we should be extremely poor. We should be almost without disposable revenue, and should be under a total inability of maintaining the same number of manufactures or collecting the same taxes as at present.”[^[325]] But the division 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.[^[326]] 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 Revolution (according to Necker 1 in 30) was caused by an over-population which the changes at the Revolution tended to remove. The probability is, therefore, that the births increased and the deaths decreased during the ten years after the Revolution; and there could be no difficulty in understanding the increase of population in spite of the war. In the later editions of the essay[^[327]] 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 Revolution, 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 probably 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.[^[328]]

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.[^[329]] Their wages were 10d. a day (as compared with 1s. 5d.), while the price of corn was about the same; but their condition and their remuneration had been decidedly improved by the Revolution and the division of the national domains. Wages in money (since Young wrote) had risen to 1s. 3d. a day; and, according to some authorities, the real wages had become even higher than in England.[^[330]] The new distribution of wealth had been followed by an immense increase in the production of it, shared by the producers themselves, and making France immensely stronger as a nation either for offence or defence.[^[331]] 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 the 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 at a very slow rate. “There is perhaps no proposition more incontrovertible than this, that in two countries, in which the rate of increase, the natural healthiness of climate, and the state of towns and manufactures are supposed to be nearly the same, the one in which the pressure of poverty is the greatest will have the greatest proportion of births, deaths, and marriages,” and vice versâ.[^[332]]

Malthus’ survey of population in France applies 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 mischiefs 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”[^[333]] 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.[^[334]] Till that point is reached, war may alter the units and spoil the quality of the population, but will not lessen its total volume. Sir Francis Ivernois, from whom Malthus took some of his figures, went too far in the 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 had been married, they would have needed to have had six children each in order that a number of children equal 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 which Malthus wisely answers that the slain, 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 is prevented from coming into being, we should always wear the habit of grief.”[^[335]]

If Sir Francis Ivernois could have foreseen the history of French population for seventy years after the time when he wrote, he would have had more reason to utter his curious lament.

“The effect of the Revolution,” wrote Malthus 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.”[^[336]] The country districts which took the least active part in the Revolution have been the most resolute in conserving 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.[^[337]] 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.[^[338]] In 1776 their numbers were about twenty-four millions,[^[339]] at the Revolution of 1789 about twenty-six millions,[^[340]] in 1831 thirty-two and a half, and in 1866 thirty-eight. At the present time, from loss of territory and from 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 population of Great Britain, a country neither so large nor so fertile. Even in 1815 Malthus spoke of France as having a more stationary and less crowded population than Britain, though it was richer in corn.[^[341]] The population of 1881 showed an increase of 766,260 over that of 1876, and was in all 37,672,048.[^[342]] 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 France has not even doubled itself in a century and a half, with every allowance for a varying frontier. The fears which Malthus expressed,[^[343]] that the law of inheritance and compulsory division of property would lead to an excessive and impoverished country population, have not been realized. The industrial progress of the country has been very great. Fifty years ago the production of wheat was only the half of what it is to-day, of meat less than the 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 necessaries) 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 distribution. 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 (without 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 saying 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.[^[344]] The “average wealth of each person” is not there, as often elsewhere, a mere arithmetical entity, but a very near approach to the ordinary state of the great majority of the people; and this average wealth is thought by good authorities[^[345]] to have more than doubled since the beginning of the 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 Chateauneuf’s (1826) quoted by MacCulloch,[^[346]] 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,[^[347]] 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 lowest in Europe,[^[348]] being 1 in 37, as opposed to 1 in 27 for 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.[^[349]]

There 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 movement.

At present most Frenchmen remain during life in the same Department in which they were born;[^[350]] and recent observers tell us[^[351]] 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 deferring 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-instructed, 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 come when the lower classes would be as the middle classes, or, in his own words, when the lower would be diminished and the middle increased, and when, mainly through the action of the labourers themselves, inventions would become a real benefit, because accompanied by lighter labour and shorter hours for the labourers.[^[352]] 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.

CHAPTER VII.
ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND.

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

In dealing with the question of population in his own country,[^[353]] Malthus tries to answer at least three distinct questions:—What were the checks actually at work in those days? Had the numbers of the people increased, or not, in the eighteenth century? What conclusions on either point may be drawn from the English census?

The first question was answered with comparative fulness in the essay of 1798. It is remarked there that in England the middle and upper classes increase at a slow rate, because they are always anxious to keep their station, and afraid of the expense of marriage.[^[354]] No man, as a rule, would like his wife’s social condition to be out of keeping with her habits and inclinations. Two or three steps of descent will be considered by most people as a real evil. “If society be held desirable, it surely must be free, equal, and reciprocal society, where benefits are conferred as well as received, and not such as the dependant finds with his patron or the poor with the rich.” So it happens that many men, of liberal education and limited income, do not give effect to an early attachment by an early marriage. When their passion is too strong or their judgment too weak for this restraint, no doubt they have blessings that counterbalance the obvious evils; “but I fear it must be owned that the more general consequences of such marriages are rather calculated to justify than to repress the forebodings of the prudent.”[^[355]] What Malthus desires, as we infer from the general tenor of his book, is that all classes without exception should show reluctance to impair their standard of living; and his hatred of the Poor Laws is due to his conviction that they hinder this end. The subject will be more fully discussed by-and-by.[^[356]] In the chapters on England it is little more than mentioned, the author devoting himself chiefly to the statistical data of the census and registers.

In this connection it was impossible for him to avoid the question that had long agitated the minds of politicians. Had the numbers of the English people been decreasing or increasing since the Revolution of 1688, and especially in the course of the eighteenth century? Economists of the present day are overloaded with statistics; but, when Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations, he was unaware of the numbers of his own nation. To estimate population without a census is to study language without a dictionary; there had been no census since the coming of the Armada,[^[357]] and it was not till one hundred years after that event that statistical studies came much into favour. An annual enumeration of the people was proposed in the House of Commons in 1753, as a means of knowing the numbers of our poor.[^[358]] But the proposal was resisted as anti-Scriptural and un-English, exposing our weakness to the foreigner and spending public money to settle the wagers of the learned. There was probably a fear[^[359]] that the tax-gatherer would follow on the heels of the enumerator, as he had done in France. The House of Lords beat off the bill, and left England in darkness about the numbers of its people for another half-century, though something like a census of Scotland was made for Government in 1755.[^[360]] As without the Irish Famine we might not have had the total Repeal of the Corn Laws, so without the worst of all possible harvests in 1799 we might have had no census in 1801, for Parliament, when they passed Mr. Abbot’s Enumeration Bill in 1800, looked to an enumeration of the people to guide them in opening and closing the ports to foreign grain. The practical question about the increase or decline of English numbers was connected, in logic as well as in time, with the controversy about the comparative populousness of ancient and modern nations. The same year (1753) which saw the attempt to settle by census the question of England’s depopulation, saw also the publication of Dr. Robert Wallace’s reply to Hume’s Essay on the Populousness of Ancient Nations, in his Dissertations on the Numbers of Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times. One of Henry Fox’s objections to Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (of 1753) was that it would check population.[^[361]] We are told[^[362]] that the academical discussion roused attention on the Continent, and a French savant, Deslandes, published an estimate of the numbers of modern nations, in which England was made much inferior to France, having only eight millions against twenty. This was too much for English patriotism. Even in our own day a great war and a few reverses usually fill England for a year or two with forebodings of decay. Written in 1757 (at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War), Dr. John Brown’s Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times was only the most popular of a host of gloomy pamphlets too prejudiced to be of much use for statistics.[^[363]] Dr. Adam Anderson[^[364]] sides with the moderns and the optimists. The contributions of Dr. Brackenridge and Richard Forster to the discussion survive by the mention of them in Price’s Observations (pp. 182–3) and in George Chalmers’ Estimate (ch. xi. 193), this last giving on the whole perhaps the most lucid history of the whole depopulation controversy. We know from Goldsmith’s Traveller (1764) and Deserted Village (1770), with its charming illogical preface, that even in peace the subject was not out of men’s thoughts. A similar panic in Switzerland, which owed its beginning to England,[^[365]] seems afterwards to have reacted on England itself. The American War of Independence revived the languishing interest in the controversy. This time it was the English and not the antiquarian topic that fell into powerful hands. Dr. Richard Price, the Radical dissenter, the friend of Dr. Franklin, and the inventor of Pitt’s Sinking Fund, did battle, in his Observations on Reversionary Payments (1769), on behalf of the pessimistic view; Arthur Young, the agriculturist, the traveller and the talker, led the opposition to him,[^[366]] and was supported by Sir Frederick Eden, William Wales, John Howlett, and last but not least by George Chalmers.[^[367]]

Gregory King[^[368]] and Justice Hale[^[369]] in the seventeenth century, Dr. Campbell[^[370]] in the eighteenth, had agreed that the numbers of Norman England must needs have been small, for the government was bad; Dr. Price, on the contrary, had maintained the paradox that, though the Revolution of 1688 brought a “happier government,” the numbers of the people had ever since declined.[^[371]] He reasoned from the decreased number of dwelling-houses assessed to window tax and house duty, as compared with those assessed to hearth (or chimney) money before the Revolution.[^[372]] Opponents denied the accuracy of his data, and thought his estimate of four and a half or five inhabitants to a house too low. He pointed to the evil influence of a “devouring metropolis,” a head too large for the body, and of great cities that were the “graves of mankind.”[^[373]] Here, too, both the data and the inference were doubtful. He argued from the decreasing produce of the Excise duties. Opponents answered that, even if the figures were right, a changed public taste had lessened the consumption of many taxable articles, and many taxed ones were supplied free by smuggling.[^[374]] He laid stress on the difficulty the Government found in raising troops in the middle of the eighteenth century as compared with the end of the seventeenth, though he took this as a symptom, not a cause, and complained at the same time quite consistently that the increase of the army and navy and of military expenditure in three great wars had been a potent cause of diminished population. Opponents answered that the first was really a symptom not of decline but of prosperity; the abundance of other employments kept men from the need of enlisting in the army; and they answered too often, that the second (the war expenditure) was good for trade. They were safer in urging that for the first part of the century the long peace (1727–40) and the good harvests (1731–50) made the presumption of increase very strong.[^[375]] Price made much of the emigrations to America and to the East and West Indies. It was answered that the known possibility of emigration would give men at home the greater courage to have a family. Even the engrossing and consolidation of farms and the enclosure of commons, which he considered to be against population, would, said his opponents, increase the food, and therefore the people, though perhaps not the people on the spot;[^[376]] and the increase of paupers was thought to be a sign of overflowing numbers. He saw a cause of depopulation in the increased luxury and extravagance of the people of England. At the beginning of the century gin-drinking was credited with an evil effect on population.[^[377]] When the opponents of Price did not meet this with Mandeville’s sophism, luxury benefits trade, they answered that what had become greater was not the national vices but the national standard of comfort, the expansion of which implied an increase of general wealth and presumably of population.[^[378]] Beyond doubt too (it was argued) the general health was better, and medical science had won some triumphs.[^[379]] Malthus, however, warns us against this argument; great unhealthiness is no proof of a small population nor healthiness of a large.[^[380]] In the ten years after the American War of Independence (1783–93) the prosperity of the country seems to have advanced by leaps and bounds, only to make the subsequent depression the more observable. Dr. Price, who did not live to see the relapse, seems to have confessed his error. “In allusion to a diminishing population, on which subject it appears that he has so widely erred, he says very candidly that perhaps he may have been insensibly influenced to maintain an opinion once advanced.”[^[381]] Yet public opinion was not fully convinced till 1801, when “the answers to the Population Act at length happily rescued the question of the population of this country from the obscurity in which it had been so long involved.”[^[382]]

There is no good reason to believe that at the end of last century the fear of depopulation had given place to a fear of over-population.[^[383]] Malthus and Arthur Young stood almost alone in their opinion.[^[384]] Alarm was felt by the agricultural interest, not lest there should be an excessive population, but lest the population should get its food from abroad. The population it was feared had grown beyond the English supplies of food; but of over-population, in the wider sense of an excess beyond any existing food, the general public and the squires had learned little or nothing in these years; and we have no reason to attribute to Malthus any share in the merit of passing the Enumeration Bill. It was brought forward in an autumn session of Parliament (Nov. 1800) specially convened because of the scarcity. It was moved by Mr. Abbot,[^[385]] who had made his name more as a financier than as an economist, and was chiefly remarkable afterwards as a vigorous opponent of Catholic Emancipation. The motion was seconded by Mr. Wilberforce; and the combination of finance and philanthropy was irresistible. Malthus, though he is the true interpreter of the census, neither caused it in the first instance nor found it of immediate service in spreading his doctrines.

The first census would hardly have justified him in treating as obsolete the old quarrel about depopulation; it had decided only the absolute numbers in the first year of the nineteenth century, not the progress or relapse during the eighteenth. Besides giving the actual numbers of the people in 1801, the census no doubt gave “a table of the population of England and Wales throughout the last century calculated from the births.” But the births, though a favourite, were an unsafe criterion; and, for the population at the Revolution of 1688, Malthus would depend more on “the old calculations from the number of houses.”[^[386]] He finds no difficulty of principle in admitting with Mr. Rickman, the editor of the census returns and observations thereon, that the rapid increase of the English people since 1780 was due to the decrease of deaths rather than to the increase of births.[^[387]] Such a phenomenon was not only possible but common, for the rate of births out of relation to the rate of deaths could give no sure means of judging the numbers. After a famine[^[388]] or pestilence, for example, the rate of births might be twice as high as usual, and by the standard of births the numbers of the people would be at their maximum, when a comparison with the rate of deaths or an actual enumeration would show them to be at the minimum,[^[389]] whereas a low rate of births, if lives were prolonged by great healthiness, might certainly mean an increase, perhaps a high increase, of numbers. But at the particular time in question the factory system was coming into being, and manufacturing towns were growing great at the expense of the country districts. The conditions of life in towns are at the best inferior to those in the country; new openings for trade would add not only to the marriages but to the deaths and the births.[^[390]] The presumption was not all in favour of healthiness; and the registers at that particular time could not tell the whole truth;—the drain of recruits for foreign service would keep down the lists of burials at home, while allowing an increase of births and marriages.[^[391]] For these and other reasons, Malthus, while he agrees with Rickman that the general health has improved, trusts little to his calculations from registers; and concludes that even the census gives us no clear light on the movement of population in the eighteenth century. We can be certain that population increased during the last twenty years of it, and almost certain that the movement was not downwards but upwards since the Peace of Paris; and we have good ground for believing that it was rather upwards than downwards even in the earliest years of the century, during the good harvests and the long peace of Walpole,[^[392]] and that over the whole country the movement of population was less fluctuating in England than on the Continent.[^[393]] The author’s admission, that the proportions of the births, deaths, and marriages were very different in our country in his time from what they used to be,[^[394]] seems to put the census of 1801 out of court altogether in the question of depopulation, especially as there were no previous enumerations with which to compare it. The figures from the parish registers for the whole of the century, that were included in the “returns pursuant to the Population Act,” in addition to the enumeration, turned out on examination to be unsatisfactory.[^[395]]

Malthus, however, was able to prove some solid conclusions from the census of 1801. It had shown, for example, as regards marriages, that the proportion of them to the whole numbers of the people was, in 1801, as 1 to 123⅕, a smaller proportion than anywhere except in Norway and Switzerland,[^[396]] and the more likely to be true, because Hardwicke’s Marriage Act had made registration of marriages more careful than of burials and baptisms. In the early part of the eighteenth century, the pessimist, Dr. Short, had estimated the proportion (with much probability) as 1 to 115; and it would appear, therefore, that at neither end of the century were the marriages in a high proportion to the numbers, or had population increased at its highest rate. Again, Malthus thinks it proved by the census that, since population has as a matter of fact increased in England in spite of a diminished rate of marriages, the increase has been at cost of the mortality, the fewer marriages being partly a cause, partly a consequence, of the fewer deaths of the later years.[^[397]] Those that married late might have consoled themselves with the reflection that they were lessening not the numbers but the mortality of the nation. It was no doubt difficult to estimate the extent to which such causes operated, or the degree in which the national health had been improved. In any case the census guides us better than the registers,[^[398]] for it carries us beyond the inferred numbers to numbers actually counted out at a given time. Neither the census nor the registers can be rightly interpreted without a knowledge of the social condition, government, and history of the people concerned. In undeveloped countries, like America and Russia, or in any old countries after special mortality, a large proportion of births may be a good sign; “but in the average state of a well-peopled territory there cannot well be a worse sign than a large proportion of births, nor can there well be a better sign than a small proportion.” Sir Francis d’Ivernois had very justly observed that, if the various states of Europe published annually an exact account of their population, noting carefully in a second column the exact age at which the children die, this second column would show the comparative goodness of the governments, and the comparative happiness of their subjects;—a simple arithmetical statement might then be more conclusive than the cleverest argument. Malthus assents, but adds that “we should need to attend less to the column giving the number of children born, than to the one giving the number which reached manhood, and this number will almost invariably be the greatest where the proportion of the births to the whole population is the least.”[^[399]] Tried by this standard, which is much more truly the central doctrine of Malthus than the ratios, our own country was even then better than all, save two, European countries. Tried by it to-day, we have still a good place. Though no great European countries, except Austro-Hungary and Germany, have had more marriages, in the twenty years from 1861 to 1880, not only these, but Holland, Spain, and Italy, have had more births, and all of them except Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have had more deaths, in proportion to their numbers.[^[400]]

One great advantage of the census is, that it enables the registrars to calculate from their own data, with certain sure limits of told-out numbers behind and before them. “When the registers contain all the births and deaths, and there are the means [given by the census] of setting out from a known population, it is obviously the same as an actual enumeration.”[^[401]] Malthus suggested in 1803 that the experiment of 1801 should be repeated every ten years, and that registrars’ reports should be made every year.[^[402]] This has been done; and, if both have been accurate, then the registers of the intervening years, on the basis of the decennial enumeration, ought to make us able to calculate the numbers for any intervening year. Accordingly, the population of England in 1881, as calculated from the births and deaths, was little more than one-sixth of a million different from the numbers as actually counted over on the night of the 4th of April in that year.[^[403]] The growth in the last decade, 1871 to 1881, was higher than in any since 1831–41;[^[404]] the births were more and the deaths fewer than usual. Another London has been added to our numbers in ten years.[^[405]]

This gives no sure ground, however, for prediction. To suppose a country’s rate of increase permanent is hardly less fallacious than to suppose an invariable order of births and deaths over the world generally. Even if we are beyond the time when we need to make any allowance for increasing accuracy and fulness, and if we may assume that no given census has any units to sweep into its net that through their fear or an official’s carelessness escaped its predecessor, still we cannot take the rate of increase from one census to another as a sure indication of the future. With some qualifications the words of Malthus apply to us in 1881 quite as accurately as to our fathers in 1811: “This is a rate of increase which in the nature of things cannot be permanent. It has been occasioned by the stimulus of a greatly increased demand for labour, combined with a greatly increased power of production, both in agriculture and manufactures. These are the two elements which form the most effective encouragement to a rapid increase of population. What has taken place is a striking illustration of the principle of population, and a proof that, in spite of great towns, manufacturing occupations, and the gradually acquired habits of an opulent and luxuriant people, if the resources of a country will admit of a rapid increase, and if these resources are so advantageously distributed as to occasion a constantly increasing demand for labour, the population will not fail to keep pace with them.”[^[406]] It was a rate of increase which he saw would double the population in less than fifty-five years; and this doubling has really happened. The numbers for England in 1801 were 8,892,536; and in 1851 they were 17,927,609. Malthus had not anticipated any greater changes in manufacture and trade than those of his own day; and he clearly expected that the rate of increase would not continue and the numbers would not be doubled. The one thing certain was the impossibility of safe prediction on the strength of any existing rate. A writer at the beginning of this century prophesied the extinction of the Turkish people in one hundred years; Sir William Petty at the end of the seventeenth century predicted that in 1800 London would have 5,359,000 inhabitants. But the Turks are not yet extinct; London in 1800 had less than a million of people, and has taken eighty years more to raise them to the number in the prophecy.[^[407]]

If prediction was difficult in the case of England, it was not less so in the case of the other parts of the United Kingdom. The conditions of society and industry were quite different in the three countries; and to judge of the actual or probable growth of population in Scotland or Ireland, we must first, as with England, clearly understand these conditions. In the early part of this century even more than now, Scotland[^[408]] stood to England as the country districts of England now stand to its great towns. Continual migration from country to town may be said to have been its normal state; and the largest towns were in England. The change from a militant and feudal to an industrial society was nowhere so marked as in Scotland after the Union, and especially after the rebellion of 1745. The hereditary judgeships of highland chiefs were swept away; the relation between chief and clansmen became the unromantic relation of landlord and tenant. The displacement of household work by the factory system, and of hand labour by machinery, crowded the great towns of Scotland at the expense of the country districts; and crowded the great towns and manufacturing districts of England at the expense of Scotland. The flood of North Britons into England was not of Bute’s making; and it was greatest after and not before the Peace of Paris, although under that peace and a stable government the farming, the manufacturing, the banking, and the foreign trading of Scotland itself had grown great enough (it might have seemed) to employ the whole population at home. Cotton manufacture, which on the whole is the typical industry of these latter days, was peculiarly English.[^[409]] Sheep-farming at home and cotton-spinning in England combined to depopulate the Scotch highlands and much of the lowlands. The highlands, with their strongly-marked physical features and strictly limited industrial possibilities, were somewhat in the position of Norway. In the highlands proper there were no mineral riches; there were moorlands, mountains, streams, lochs, heather, bracken, peat, and bog; the patches of cultivable soil would bear a scanty crop of oats, and perhaps clover, barley, or potatoes.[^[410]] This description applied to a large half of entire Scotland; and we must bear it in mind to understand the saying of Malthus in 1803: “Scotland is certainly over-peopled, but not so much as it was a century or half a century ago, when it contained fewer inhabitants.”[^[411]] The highlands are over their whole extent what the lowlands are as regards their hills, fit only for sheep. Sutherland has about thirteen inhabitants to the square mile now, and Midlothian seven hundred and forty-six; but Sutherland and not Midlothian may be over-peopled. Sutherland as compared with her former self, when she had thirty or forty to the square mile, may be more or she may be less over-peopled than she once was; we cannot tell till we know what her wealth was and how it was distributed.

Under the patriarchal government[^[412]] of early times the wealth of the country consisted literally in its men. If a chief were asked the rent of his estate, he would answer that it raised five hundred men; the tenant paid him in military service. Adam Smith remembers that in the Jacobite Rebellion, which disturbed his country at the time he was studying at Oxford, “Mr. Cameron of Lochiel, a gentleman of Lochaber in [the west highlands of] Scotland, whose rent never exceeded £500 [English] a year, carried, in 1745, eight hundred of his own people into the rebellion with him.”[^[413]] Subdivision of land meant more retainers and greater honour; and so the highlands were peopled not to the full extent of the work to be done, but actually to the full extent of the bare food got from the soil.[^[414]] On the establishment of a strong government and the abolition of their hereditary judicial privileges,[^[415]] the chiefs soon became willing to convert the value in men into a value in money, exchanging dignity for profit. They no longer encouraged their tenants to have large families; and yet they made no efforts to remove the habits, which the tenants had formed, of having them.[^[416]] It was this change that gave Sir Walter Scott the materials for his most powerful pictures in Waverley and other novels. But it is the distress of the chiefs that is tragic to him, rather than the misery of the clansmen. The clansmen for their part had under feudalism been brought up to be farmers or cattle-dealers and nothing else; there was as little variety of occupation in the highlands then as in Ireland now. Undoubtedly too they had that customary right of long possession, which law so often construed into a legal title in the case of more influential men. It was true also that, if the native highlanders would not cultivate that poor soil, no strangers would, and, if it was politically desirable that the country should remain peopled, the only way to secure this was to prevent the native exodus.[^[417]] No such attempt was made; but, on the contrary, the highland landlords followed the way that led to the highest rents; they consolidated their farms; they exchanged agriculture for pasture; they substituted deer for sheep. Almost every highland district has sooner or later passed through all these three stages, and with the same result, the employment of fewer and fewer men.[^[418]] The discarded men had two courses before them, migration to the lowlands[^[419]] or emigration to the colonies. The farm labourer would migrate, the farmer emigrate. The landlords incurred and often deserved odium for the manner of their evictions; but they treated the evicted better than the average British capitalist treats his dismissed hands. They usually provided passages and often procured settlements abroad for them. Lord Selkirk, one of the few writers on this subject that preserves a judicial calmness, advised his countrymen to acquiesce in the “depopulation” of the highlands, but to draw the stream of emigration to our own colonies. He himself drew it, so far as he could, to the Red River settlement and Prince Edward Island.

From the middle of last century to the beginning of this, emigration went on except when war made it impossible. The dangerous qualities of the highlanders made them very valuable in the three great wars that prevented them from leaving the country with their families. It may be that this very military consideration induced the English Government to connive at the clearances at first; and interference at any later stage was very difficult. As it is, in the end even the Sutherland evictions[^[420]] seem simply to have shifted the population and not removed it. In spite of emigration Sutherland had as many inhabitants at the last census of 1881, as at the first in 1801, namely, above 23,000. Fishing, an industry new to a great part of the highlands, made this phenomenon possible. Fishing villages have grown at the expense of inland farms. But this is not the whole truth. Till the time when free trade began to distend Glasgow and other great towns of Scotland, the highland counties taken altogether had actually increased in population, as compared with what they were in 1801. The subsequent fall is due not to any great clearances or emigrations, but to another cause that had been acting though not conspicuously for some time before. This was migration to the industrial centres of the lowlands. In the days of the Tudors there were complaints in England of the decay of towns, because a strong government had at last made the protection of walled towns superfluous, and industry had spread itself in peace, where it was wanted. But two centuries later there was decay not of the towns but of the country districts, because industry was taking forms that made concentration necessary. At first, both in England and Scotland, there was a real diminution in the rural population; there had been for the time a real diminution of the work to be done in the country, and a transference of it to the towns. The hand-loom weaver had been supplanted by the power-loom. The little villages, where the workman lived idyllically, half in his farm and half in his workshop, now either sent their whole families to the towns, thus stopping their contributions to the parish registers in the country and swelling those of the town, or, still keeping the parents, sent three-fourths of the children there, thus making the country registers a very untrustworthy reflection of the real state of the population in the country districts. That country villages in every part of Scotland, but especially near the large cities, are “breeding grounds” of this latter description[^[421]] is perfectly well known; and the same is true, in a less degree, of England. This is one reason why even the purely rural districts of Scotland have greatly increased in apparent population since 1801, and most of them are increasing still; the readiness of the Scotch to emigrate has caused the large families quite as much as the large families the emigration. Another reason is, that even in the country districts there is now more work to be done and it is done better. Orthodox economists may count this an example of the self-healing effects of an economical change that causes much suffering at first. It is fair to say that this eventual cure is neither more nor less complete than the cure of the analogous hardships of the newly-introduced factory system, and the temporary inconveniences of sudden free trade. What keen commercial ambition can do it has done, and its success is at least sufficiently complete to justify us in saying of Scotland to-day what Malthus said of it eighty years ago: it was most over-populated when it had fewest inhabitants. Modern improvements, however short of perfection, have at least both in England and in Scotland absolutely put an end to periodical famines. Even the scarcities of 1799 and 1800, though they caused great distress in both countries, were not famines in either of them; and, since the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, even such general distress as was caused in Scotland by the potato blight cannot occur again. That distress itself was as nothing compared with the terrible dearths from which Scotland used to suffer five or six times a century, and which England experienced as late as the seventeenth.[^[422]] The dismal picture[^[423]] which Malthus draws of the condition of the Scottish peasantry reminds us that it is not much more than a century since Scotland took her first steps in civilization and turned her energies from war to commerce. Her population at the ’45 was about one and a quarter millions, in 1801 about one and a half; but in 1861 more than three, and in 1881 three and three-quarters. Population therefore has more than doubled within the century. But even now there are only a hundred and twenty-one inhabitants to the square mile, as compared with four hundred and forty-five in England. The wealth of the country has increased immensely faster than the population; it has multiplied fivefold since the middle of this century, and tenfold since the beginning of it.[^[424]]

The history of population in Ireland would have furnished Malthus with still more striking illustrations of his principles, if his life had lasted a few years longer. He contents himself (till the 6th edition of the Essay[^[425]]) with a single paragraph: “The details of the population of Ireland are but little known. I shall only observe, therefore, that the extended use of potatoes has allowed of a very rapid increase of it during the last century. But the cheapness of this nourishing root, and the small piece of ground which, under this kind of cultivation, will in average years produce the food for a family, joined to the ignorance and depressed state[^[426]] of the people, which have prompted them to follow their inclinations with no other prospect than an immediate bare subsistence, have encouraged marriage to such a degree, that the population is pushed much beyond the industry and present resources of the country; and the consequence naturally is, that the lower classes of people are in the most impoverished[^[427]] and miserable state. The checks to the population are of course chiefly of the positive kind, and arise from the diseases occasioned by squalid poverty, by damp and wretched cabins, by bad and insufficient clothing,[^[428]] and occasional want. To these positive checks have of late years been added the vice and misery of intestine commotion, of civil war, and of martial law.”[^[429]]

In his review of Newenham’s Statistical and Historical Enquiry into the Population of Ireland in 1808,[^[430]] and in his evidence before the Emigration Committee in 1827, Malthus uses even stronger language. We may quote from the latter document as the less known of the two. In 1817 he had spent a college vacation in visiting Westmeath and the lakes of Killarney,[^[431]] and was able to speak from personal knowledge of the country. He was asked:—

Qu. 3306. “With reference to Ireland, what is your opinion as to the habits of the people, as tending to promote a rapid increase of population?”—“Their habits are very unfavourable in regard to their own condition, because they are inclined to be satisfied with the very lowest degree of comfort, and to marry with little other prospect than that of being able to get potatoes for themselves and their children.”[^[432]]

3307. “What are the circumstances which contribute to introduce such habits in a country?”—“The degraded condition of the people, oppression, and ignorance.”

3311. “You have mentioned that oppression contributes to produce those habits to which you have alluded; in what way do you imagine in Ireland there is oppression?”—“I think that the government of Ireland has, upon the whole, been very unfavourable to habits of that kind; it has tended to degrade the general mass of the people, and consequently to prevent them from looking forward and acquiring habits of prudence.”

3312. “Is it your opinion that the minds of the people may be so influenced by the circumstances under which they live, in regard to civil society, that it may contribute very much to counteract that particular habit which leads to the rapid increase of population?”—“I think so.”

3313. “What circumstances in your opinion contribute to produce a taste for comfort and cleanliness among a people?”—“Civil and political liberty and education.”[^[433]]

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

3317. “What effect would any change of the moral or religious state of the government of that country produce upon persons occupying such possessions?”—“It could not produce any immediate effect if that system were continued; with that system of occupancy there must always be an excessive redundancy of people, because, from the nature of tolerably good land, it will always produce more than can be employed upon it, and the consequence must be that there will be a great number of people not employed.”

3318. “Is, therefore, not the first step towards improvement in Ireland necessarily to be accomplished by an alteration of the present state of the occupancy of the land?” This was a leading question, but Malthus would not be led. He replied, “I think that such an alteration is of the greatest possible importance, but that the other (the change in the government) should accompany it; it would not have the same force without.” In his answers to later questions he gave his view at greater length on the causes of the difference between English and Irish character.

Answ. to qu. 3411. “At the time of the introduction of the potato into Ireland the Irish people were in a very low and degraded state, and the increased quantity of food was only applied to increase the population. But when our [English] wages of labour in wheat were high in the early part of the last century, it did not appear that they were employed merely in the maintenance of more families, but in improving the condition of the people in their general mode of living.”[^[434]]

3413. “You attribute the difference of the character of the people to the difference of food?”—“In a great measure.”

3414. “What circumstance determines the difference of food in the two countries?”—“The circumstances are partly physical and partly moral.[^[435]] It will depend in a certain degree upon the soil and climate whether the people live on maize, wheat, oats, potatoes, or meat.”[^[436]]

3415. “Is not the selection in some degree dependent on the general state of society?”—“Very much on moral causes, on their being in so respectable a situation that they are in the habit of looking forward, and exercising a certain degree of prudence; and there is no doubt that in different countries this kind of prudence is exercised in very different degrees.”

3416. “Does it depend at all on the government under which they live?”—“Very much on the government, on the strict and equal administration of justice, on the perfect security of property, on civil, religious, and political liberty; for people respect themselves more under favourable circumstances of this kind, and are less inclined to marry, with[out] the prospect of more physical sustenance for their children.”

3417. “On the degree of respect with which they are treated by their superiors?”—“Yes; one of the greatest faults in Ireland is that the labouring classes there are not treated with proper respect by their superiors; they are treated as if they were a degraded people.”

Thereupon he is again asked a leading question of a somewhat cynical character, but he is again cautious in his answer.

3418. “Does not that treatment mainly arise from their existing in such redundancy as to be no object to their superiors?”—“In part it does perhaps; but it appeared to take place before that [redundancy] was the case, to the same degree.”

The questioner, however, begs the question and asks:

3419. “The number being the cause of their treatment, will not their treatment tend to the increase of that number?” and the answer is: “Yes, they act and react on each other.”

Accordingly his opinion in 1827 is, as it was in 1803, that emigration conjoined with other agencies will be good for Ireland, but by itself will leave matters no better than they were.

Alongside of his weighty words in the essay and in the evidence it is worth while to place the words written by Adam Smith half a century earlier:—

“By the union with England, the middling and inferior ranks of people in Scotland gained a complete deliverance from the power of an aristocracy which had always before oppressed them. By a union with Great Britain, the greater part of the people of all ranks in Ireland would gain an equally complete deliverance from a much more oppressive aristocracy, an aristocracy not founded, like that of Scotland, in the natural and respectable distinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices; distinctions which, more than any other, animate both the insolence of the oppressors and the hatred and indignation of the oppressed, and which commonly render the inhabitants of the same country more hostile to one another than those of different countries ever are.”[^[437]]

With such passages before us, we cannot consider the two economists to have been behind their age in their Irish policy. In regard to accurate figures, the later economist was little better off than the earlier. Ireland was not included in the first two censuses of 1801 and 1811. In 1695 its population was estimated by Captain South as little more than one million;[^[438]] in 1731, by inquiry of Irish House of Lords, at two millions; in 1792 by Dr. Beaufort at a little above four millions;[^[439]] in 1805 by Newenham at five and a half millions; in 1812 an imperfect census gave it as nearly six millions; in the census of 1821 it was 6,800,000. It was clear that the population of Ireland was increasing even then faster than that of England.[^[440]] But between these dates and our own times comes an episode striking enough to provide all economical histories with a purpureus pannus.

For about two generations England had perpetrated in Ireland her crowning feats of commercial jealousy, a jealousy not more foolish or wicked against Ireland than it was against the American colonies, or, till 1707, against Scotland, but more easily victorious. Ireland had not begun to be in any sense an industrial country till the reigns of Elizabeth and James I.; and the wars of the succeeding reigns hampered her early efforts. She had fair corn and meadow lands, and perhaps the best pastures in the world for sheep and cattle. The English farming interest became impatient of Irish competition, and a law was passed to forbid the importation of Irish sheep and cattle and dairy produce into England (1665, 1680). By reason of the later Navigation Acts, Ireland could not make amends for this by trading with America, for all such trading must be by way of England and in English ships, nor by trading with France for the same reason. England in her jealousy would have surrounded her with a cordon quite as close as Berkeley’s wall of brass.[^[441]] As soon as a considerable woollen manufacture grew up, England stopped it by legislation, which (in 1699) forbade the exportation of Irish woollens not only to England but to any other country whatever. English interference, if it had done no more, added immensely to the uncertainties[^[442]] and fluctuations of Irish trade. The growth of industries like the woollen manufacture had set on foot a growth of population which did not stop with the arrest of the industries. As often happens,[^[443]] the effects of an impulse to marriage lasted far beyond the industrial progress that gave the impulse. But this means hunger and suffering, if not death. In the case of Ireland, the ruin of all industries but farming over more than three-fourths of the land led to an absolute dependence of the people on the harvest of their own country; and, where it failed them, they were brought face to face with dearth or famine. It led also to the peopling of the country districts at the expense of the towns,[^[444]] instead of (as usual) the towns at the expense of the country. If Goldsmith’s Deserted Village is not English, it is not Irish. By the year 1780, when Lord North from fear of rebellion granted free trade to Ireland with Great Britain, the mischief had been made almost incurable. The great increase in the Irish population, like the great increase in the English, may be said to begin in a free trade movement. In the worst days of legal persecution it might have been said of the Irish Catholic population, the more they were afflicted the more they multiplied and grew. Lavergne[^[445]] thinks their greater increase was due first to the physiological law, that in the case of all animals the means of reproduction are multiplied in proportion to the chances of destruction[?], and second to the instinctively sound tactics of a people otherwise defenceless. The probability is, too, that they remained quiet under their multitudinous industrial, political, and religious disqualifications so long, because they were reduced to that depth of misery that kills the very power of resistance; and poverty at its extreme point is a positive but not a preventive check on population. Where things are so bad, marriage, it is thought, cannot make them worse, and marriage would go on at the expense of a high mortality, general pauperism, or continuous emigration. The pureness of marriage relations in Ireland, though in itself a much greater good than its consequences were evil, acted as it would have done in Godwin’s Utopia;[^[446]] apart from wisdom, virtue itself had its evils. Potatoes by-and-by came into general use; and the bad harvests, which taught even the Scotch and English poor[^[447]] to make frequent use of this substitute for corn, converted it in Ireland from a substitute into a staple. Economists viewed this change with almost unanimous disapproval. In the view of Malthus it was the cheapness of this food that made it dangerous for the labourers; his theory of wages led him to object to cheap corn on the same grounds.[^[448]] On the principle that it needs difficulties to generate energy, the Irish are made indolent by their cheap food, and make no use of it except to increase by it. Living on the cheapest food procurable, they could not in scarcity fall back on anything else. Every man who wished to marry might obtain a cabin and potatoes.[^[449]] At the lowest calculation, an acre of land planted with potatoes will support twice as much as one of the same quality sown with wheat.[^[450]] There are other objections to a potato diet. It is a simple (as opposed to a composite) diet, and it involves a low standard of comfort. The second is not the same as the first, for a people that had no variety in their food might conceivably have a great variety in their other comforts. As a matter of fact, however, it was none of these three supposed disadvantages of the potato that proved the bane of the Irish population, but a fourth one, its liability to blight.[^[451]]

The figures of the census tell their own tale. In 1821 the Irish people numbered 6,801,827; in 1831, 7,767,401; in 1841, 8,199,853; but in 1851, 6,514,473. In each previous decade the increase approached a million; in the last there was not only no increase, but a decrease of more than a million and a half. There had been a disastrous famine followed by great emigrations. What happened on Lord Lansdowne’s estate in Kerry is an example of what took place over Ireland generally.[^[452]] That estate comprehended about 100,000 acres, on which before the famine there was a population of 16,000 souls. When the famine came a fourth part of them perished and another fourth emigrated. In course of time, thanks to money sent by relatives from America and advances made by Lord Lansdowne, the emigration continued with such rapidity that only 2000 souls were left on the estate. The famine taught the people how to emigrate, and gave them some idea of the meaning of over-population. The rural districts of Ireland are probably over-peopled now; but there seems reason to believe that a body of tenants, who are little short of peasant proprietors in security of tenure, and who have been forced into a knowledge of the world outside Ireland, will not retain the habits of the old occupiers.[^[453]] Without a change of habits, peasant proprietorships would have done little for France, and will do little for Ireland.

This would certainly have been the judgment of Malthus on things as they are now in Ireland, after Catholic Emancipation, Disestablishment, and the Land Act. In his own time he was wise enough to see that the first could not be delayed without injustice and danger. The rapid increase of the Catholic population would soon, he foresaw in 1808,[^[454]] bring the question of Emancipation within the range of “practical politics,” and if the measure had been passed, as he urged, in 1808, instead of twenty years later, the labour of conciliating Ireland might have proved easier, and the political change might have helped to produce that change in the habits of the people which Malthus deemed essential to its permanent prosperity.