Malthus and his work

by James Bonar

BOOK II. ECONOMICS.

CHAPTER I.
THE LANDLORDS.

Need of an Economical Digression—The Hegemony of Adam Smith’s School—Cardinal Doctrines of the Malthusian Economy—Scope, Method, Details—Malthus doing Injustice to his Economics—Human Character of his Doctrines—Agricultural Situation in 1794—History of Corn Laws—Malthus on Rent in 1803 and afterwards—Observations on the Corn Laws—Grounds of an Opinion—Nature and Progress of Rent—Ricardo’s Criticisms—Agricultural Improvements—Malthusian Ideal of Commercial Policy—The Wall of Brass—Limits to Commercial Progress.

The Essay on Population deals with the past, the present, and the future. We have tried to follow its account of past and present, and must now consider the author’s view of future prospects and of the various schemes (including his own) for making the future better than the present.

To do justice to this half of the essay, we must take further liberties with its arrangement. For the sake of explaining the historical genesis of the essay, we have already taken first[^[455]] that criticism of Godwin and Condorcet which in the later essay comes in the centre of the work,[^[456]] on the heels of the account of population in the United Kingdom, the point where we have now arrived; and the chapter on emigration has been used before its time. There remain, out of the fourteen chapters of the third book of the essay, eleven still untouched; and in all but one[^[457]] a knowledge of the general economical doctrine of Malthus is indispensable to a clear and just understanding of him. No apology is needed then for a somewhat long digression, in which the chief economical writings of our author are briefly analyzed. It is not wholly a digression, as the substance of seven[^[458]] out of ten chapters will be found incorporated with it, and their logical connection with the author’s economical theories (so far as it exists) will be shown.

As a thoroughly practical man, Malthus knew that philanthropy can do little without sound doctrine; and his economical theories belong to the substance of his work. They were developed, unlike the Essay on Population, in quiet controversy among friends; Ricardo, James Mill, and Jean Baptiste Say, who were critics of the Political Economy, had been converts of the Essay. These were, however, the very men who came nearest to identify orthodox economics with rigorous abstraction. Malthus himself, labouring to build up the neglected pathology of economic science, was not chargeable with this fault. His first work had happily fixed into an intellectual principle his natural inclination to look at speculative questions in their relations to practice, and to look at “things as they are”[^[459]] rather than as they might be. Ricardo’s first work, bearing wholly on finance,[^[460]] had unhappily fixed for him his inclination to treat every social question as a problem in arithmetic. In both cases the excitement of controversy would make the impression deeper.

The two economists both start from Adam Smith,[^[461]] as theologians from the Bible. It was becoming clear that these Scriptures were of doubtful interpretation. Men were to choose between the Calvinism of Ricardo and the Arminianism of Malthus; and, when the two writers turned from their debates with the public to debates with each other, no less a prize was in question than the hegemony of the school.

This was won by Ricardo, whose Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) were accepted by James Mill, MacCulloch, Nassau Senior, to say nothing of others, as the Institutes of their creed. MacCulloch thought it not worth his while to print what Ricardo had thought it worth his while to write, in vindication of his positions against Malthus.[^[462]] The strongest ally of Malthus was Sismondi. It was not till Ricardo had reigned for thirty years that there was serious sign of defection, when the son of James Mill broke with his father’s traditions;[^[463]] and, though in the hands of Thornton, Cliffe Leslie, Walker, and others, the reaction has been carried to the utmost, the eclipse of Ricardo has done nothing to rescue Malthus from obscurity. The very success of the Essay on Population may have deepened the oblivion of the other writings in virtue of the popular fallacy that a man cannot be equally great in general theory and in the advocacy of one particular reform.

The Political Economy of Malthus has its faults; but it contains in outline the main truths which writers of our own time think they have established against Ricardo. First and foremost, he maintains with them that the proper study of the science is not Wealth, but Man, or more definitely, Wealth in relation to Man. The qualities of man and the earth he cultivates are according to Malthus so many and variable in relation to each other that a study of their relations cannot be an exact science like mathematics; it may contain “great general principles” to which there are few exceptions, and “prominent landmarks” that will be safe guides to us in legislation or in life; but “even these when examined will be found to resemble the most general rules in morals and politics founded upon the known passions and propensities of human nature.”[^[464]] Human conduct is characterized by such variation and aberration that we must always be prepared for exceptions to our principles, and for qualifications which spoil the charm of uniformity, but are faithful to facts,[^[465]] like George Eliot’s “analyses in small and subtle characters,” which stimulate no enthusiasm but alone tell the whole truth. In the second place, we are told that the nature of the subject makes a peculiarly cautious Method necessary. Our first business being to account for things as they are,[^[466]] till we are sure that our theories do so we cannot act on them.[^[467]] A good economical definition must conform to the ordinary usage of words. We must take if possible a meaning which would agree with the ordinary use of words “in the conversation of educated persons.”[^[468]] If this does not give sufficient distinctness, we must fall back on the authority of the most celebrated writers on the science, particularly of the founder or founders of it; “in this case, whether the term be a new one born with the science, or an old one used in a new sense, it will not be strange to the generality of readers, or liable to be misunderstood.”[^[469]] If any word must have a different meaning from that adopted by either of these authorities, the new sense must not only be free from the faults of the old, but must have a clear and recognizable positive usefulness. The new definitions should be consistent with the old; and the same terms should be used in the same sense, except where inveterate custom insists on an exception. When all is done, it is still impossible in a social science like political economy to find a definition entirely beyond cavil.[^[470]]

“Wealth” must include all the “material objects that are necessary, useful, or agreeable to mankind;”[^[471]] “productive labour” must be the labour which realizes itself either in such material objects or the increased value of them; or else we wander from common language, and our discussions travel off into indefiniteness. Economical reasoning must be a deduction from observed facts of nature and of human nature verified by general experience. Malthus professes to have used this cautious method throughout, and the theory of population was only the particular instance where circumstances enabled him to make his verification most complete. “I should never have had that steady and unshaken confidence in the theory of population which I have invariably felt, if it had not appeared to me to be confirmed, in the most remarkable manner, by the state of society as it actually exists in every country with which we are acquainted.”[^[472]] On the other hand, Ricardo, legislating for Saturn, gives us little or no verification by experience. It is true that he admits qualifications and exceptions to his own statements; and he would have winced a little at his own biographer’s assertion that “Mr. Ricardo paid comparatively little attention to the practical application of general principles; his is not a practical work.”[^[473]] But he makes no use of the admissions; his illustrations as a rule are not historical, but imaginary cases and the verification is wanting. In a letter to Malthus (written on the 24th November, 1820) he says: “Our differences may in some respects, I think, be ascribed to your considering my book as more practical than I intended it to be. My object was to elucidate principles, and to do this I imagined strong cases, that I might show the operation of these principles.”[^[474]] In Malthus and Adam Smith, imaginary cases are rare exceptions, actual examples from life or history are the rule. Malthus goes so far in this direction that (to use his own phraseology) he is tempted to subordinate science to “utility.” Even Adam Smith, though he had abundance of good-will to his kind, did not write to do good but to expound truth. To Malthus the discovery of truth was less important than the improvement of society. When an economical truth could not be made the means of improvement, he seems to have lost interest in it. His pointed warning to others against this error[^[475]] may be regarded as a confession of his own liability to it; and, if he obeyed his own warning at all, his position was at the best like that of the latter-day utilitarians, who try to reach happiness by making believe not to think of it. If his science had been less biassed by utility, it might have been more thorough; and we might not have had in our own time a Ricardian socialism, appearing like the ghost of the deceased Ricardian orthodoxy sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. He has the virtue of refusing to join the economical Pharisees,[^[476]] who would not admit the elasticity of economical laws, lest they should discredit their science; but he is to blame for not pushing his quarrel against Ricardo with the same energy as against Godwin. His forces, in this campaign, were worse drilled and worse handled. It is justly said by Garnier (Dict. de l’Écon. Pol., art. ‘Malthus’), that in spite of its title, the Political Economy of Malthus is not the exposition of a system, but simply a collection of economical papers on various subjects that had been brought specially under his notice in discussion with his friends, or (we might add) in his college class. This itself would lead him to present a much less solid front to the enemy than he did in the Essay.

To come, in the third place, to Details, we find the human character of the Political Economy of Malthus appearing not only in his view of population, where all is at last made to depend on the personal responsibility of the individual man, and legislation is good or bad according as it strengthens or weakens that responsibility,—but in his view of the Value of goods, as measured by human labour,—in his view of demand and supply, as sharing the inconstancy of the human desires that enter into both of them,—in his view of the Rent of land, as determined by the effects of human industry and skill as well as by the natural qualities of the soil,—in his view of the Wages of labour, as regulated not by an unchangeable but by a progressive minimum,—in his view of luxury, as being equally with parsimony necessary to production, and preventive of over-production,—and in his view of free trade, as a rule to which we must make exceptions if we would not cause sufferings.

These doctrines had a distinct relation to current events. Political and social changes were reacting on political economy. As Godwin and Pitt provoked the essay of 1798, the scarcity of 1799 and 1800 called forth the pamphlet on High Prices (1800). As the latter bears directly on the Poor Law, it will best be considered when the thread of the Essay on Population is taken up again;[^[477]] and the same applies to the letter of Malthus to Whitbread (1807). The distresses of a time when wheat went so high as £6 the quarter instead of its normal 40s. or 50s., would naturally make the relief of the poor a question of the day. The high prices of corn increased the number of enclosures and Enclosure Bills. More than three millions of acres, or about a twelfth part of the entire area of England and Wales, are said to have been taken from waste into cultivation between 1800 and 1820. The average price of wheat, always the staple food of the people when they could get it, had been 55s. 11d. for the years preceding, viz. from 1790 to 1799 inclusive; it was 82s. 2d. from 1800 to 1809 inclusive, and 88s. 8d. from 1810 to 1819 inclusive, after which it fell (for the next decade) to 58s. 5d.[^[478]] In 1883–4 it was 35s. 8d. a quarter, which means a four-pound loaf (of medium quality) at 4½d. or 5d.; but at its lowest during the war (in 1803) it was at 57s. 1d., and the loaf was at 6¾d. or 7d.

Yet agriculture had not been standing still. Arthur Young, whose eccentric energy benefited every one but himself, and fell little short of genius, betted his nineteen volumes of Annals of Agriculture against Sir John Sinclair’s twenty-one volumes of the Statistical Account of Scotland, that the Government of Pitt would not establish a Board of Agriculture. But Farmer George did establish one, in 1793;[^[479]] Young paid his bet and became Secretary; Sinclair gained his nineteen volumes and became President of the new Board; and together they did much to make farmers and landlords aware of the rotations of crops, disuse of fallows, new manures, road-makings, that the Secretary had been preaching in vain for thirty years.[^[480]]

When the great scarcities of 1799–1800 took place, the Board was equal to the occasion. It urged the Government to get supplies of rice from India; it preached earnestly the cultivation of waste lands and the temporary conversion of grass lands into cornfields. The last was done widely enough when the prices of corn were high. The second, except when it meant enclosure of commons, was hardly done at all; and there was a strange impression that the efforts of the Board were at bottom a political movement against ecclesiastical titles and the Established Church. The importation of rice would have been of immense immediate service; but by the time the order had reached India and the rice ships had come back to England,[^[481]] the famine was over, the people preferred wheat, and £350,000 of bounty were thrown away.[^[482]] Nothing shows the insularity of English commercial policy better than the remedies generally proposed in those days for curing the evils of a bad harvest. The House of Commons passed self-denying ordinances[^[483]] and brown-bread bills, and offered a bounty on potatoes.[^[484]]

There was some talk inside the House of enforcing a minimum rate of wages, and outside of enforcing a maximum price of bread. The people were told to eat red herrings instead of bread; philanthropic soup shops were opened; distilleries and starch manufactories were threatened with prohibition. Relief from the poor rates was, however, the favourite way of cutting the knot. Better that our people should depend on each other than on the foreigner. This fear of dependence was the more pardonable then, as there were times, in the war with Napoleon, when England was more completely alone against the world than she is ever likely to be again. It was a much more culpable folly to pretend[^[485]] that the scarcity was due to “forestalling and regrating,”[^[486]] and that England could have provided for herself well enough, even in 1799 and 1800, but for the corn-dealers and the large farms and the enclosures and the new-fashioned husbandry. The new learning, however, went on its way.[^[487]] The benefits of it may have gone to farmer[^[488]] or to landlord,—the question was much debated,—but they did not go to the labourers. The same is true of the improvements in cattle-breeding introduced by Bakewell of Leicester and Chaplin of Lincoln, and encouraged by the Smithfield Club (1798), which has long outlived the Board of Agriculture. The life of the country labourers was little changed. They and their wages could not remain entirely unaffected by the growth of manufacturing towns. But custom still had the chief power over wages, and had no little influence on rents. From the reports sent from the Scotch, English, and Welsh counties to the Board of Agriculture in 1794, it does not appear that wages were at all, or rent very closely, in correspondence with the amount of the produce.[^[489]] Rents were far from being rack rents, and wages were far from varying with the necessary expenses of the labourer. In truth each country district in the days before railways and steamboats was nearly in the same isolation with regard to the rest as all England was with regard to foreign nations. The price of farm produce was indeed tending to be equal over England, as now over the world. Wages were displaying no such tendency. Of all goods a man is the most difficult to move,[^[490]] for you must first persuade him; and human inertia by making men stationary will keep wages low. So it was in 1794. The exertions of landlord and tenant were directed therefore rather to keep up corn than to keep down wages. They were beginning to fear for their monopoly of the corn market. The English Government had done its best to keep their market for them. A law of Charles II. passed in 1670 virtually prohibited importation of foreign wheat till the price of home wheat was over 53s. 4d. a quarter, and made it free only when the home price was 80s. The Revolution of 1688 brought a new phase of commercial policy. The new rulers, to conciliate the agricultural classes and atone for the burdens which had been transferred to them from the industrial classes, granted a bounty of 5s. a quarter on the exportation of wheat so long as the home price was not over 48s. In this way, after exportation in the days of the Romans, and alternate exportation and importation according to the seasons in after times, there was, after the Revolution, exportation encouraged by a bounty, while importation was still hindered by duties. The intention was at once to attract capitalists to agriculture and to reward those already engaged in it. By this means not only would the farmers be attached to the new dynasty, but England would provide all her own food.[^[491]]

But the very increase of tillage kept down prices and gave the landowners little benefit. Whenever a scarcity occurred the laws were suspended, and the bounty and duties were taken off together.[^[492]] Exportation, however, was the rule till a little after the middle of the century, say at the beginning of George III.’s reign, when the tide had fairly turned. Especially after the Peace of Paris (Nov. 1762), commerce was extended and population with it. Canals were made, roads improved, and home trade prospered.[^[493]] We could no longer raise enough corn for our own wants.[^[494]] In 1766, the year of our author’s birth, there were scarcities, Corn Riots, and suspensions of the Corn Laws;[^[495]] but the bounty was kept up in name to the end of the century. In 1795 and 1796 the price of wheat rose to 80s. a quarter, in 1797 and 1798 it sank to 54s.; but, at the end of harvest, 1799, it rose to 92s., in 1800 to 128s., and before the harvest of 1801 to 177s. The quartern loaf (under 6d. in 1885) was once within ½d. of 2s.! Then came a cycle of comparative plenty. Wheat between 1802 and 1807 was at 75s. on an average, and a new Corn Law in 1804 prohibited importation till the home price should rise to 63s. Between 1808 and 1813 it was 108s. on an average; and it was as high as 140s. 9d. in the severe winter (1812–13) of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. But in the spring of 1815 wheat was at 60s. If it should rise to 63s. the ports would be opened, and there was not even the Protection of war. The farmers and landowners were terror-stricken, the political economists divided, and the bill for raising the importation price to 80s. was hurried through the House. The bounty, relaxed in 1773, had been finally repealed, in 1814.[^[496]] As the sliding scale of duties was not introduced till 1827, we are to regard Malthus and Ricardo as writing on rent (in 1815 and 1820) under the severe Corn Law of 1815, as well as when the wisdom of passing that measure was still under debate. All their discussions on rent bear consciously or unconsciously upon the Corn Laws of their own time.

Malthus is rightly considered the first clear expounder in England of the economical doctrine of rent. Dr. James Anderson, a contemporary of Adam Smith, was no doubt before his age in his view of the subject;[^[497]] but, perhaps because he was better known as an agriculturist than as an economist, he does not seem to have made converts. The “simultaneous rediscovery” of the true doctrine by West and Malthus in 1815 may be compared with the simultaneous discovery of the Darwinian theory by Wallace and Darwin in 1859. The times were ripe for it. Malthus gives no certain sound on the subject in the early editions of the Essay on Population. In the second he even says that “one of the principal ingredients in the price of British corn is the high rent of land” (p. 460; cf. p. 444). However, needing to lecture on Rent to his pupils at Haileybury in 1805, he saw the unsoundness of this position, and in 1806, in the third edition of the essay, the passage is dropped, and we are told, “universally it is price that determines rent, not rent that determines price” (vol. ii. p. 266). The passage is repeated in the fourth edition (1807).[^[498]] But when the time came for a fifth edition, in 1817, the whole of the chapters on Corn Laws and bounties, which are the only chapters of the essay that deal much with rent, were recast, to express the clearer views which the author had already expounded elsewhere. In the spring of 1814, in the excitement of debates on the abolition of the bounty and on new laws to keep out foreign grain, Malthus was led for the fourth or fifth time in his life to take the field as a pamphleteer.[^[499]] This time, however, he came forward, he said, not to take a side but to act as arbitrator. His “Observations on the effects of the Corn Laws, and of a rise or fall in the price of corn on the agriculture and general wealth of the country” (1814),[^[500]] professed to balance the arguments for and against the Corn Laws, and did it, he said, so judiciously, that his own friends were in doubt to which opinion he leaned.[^[501]] To later readers the bias is not doubtful. It appears even in such a passage as the following, which, incidentally, shows us his view of rent, nearly matured:—“It is a great mistake to suppose that the effects of a fall in the price of corn on cultivation may be fully compensated by a diminution of rents. Rich land, which yields a large nett rent, may be kept up in its actual state, notwithstanding a fall in the price of its produce, as a diminution of rent may be made entirely to compensate this fall, and all the additional expenses that belong to a rich and highly-taxed country. But in poor land the fund of rent will often be found quite insufficient for this purpose. There is a good deal of land in this country of such a quality, that the expenses of its cultivation, together with the outgoings of poor’s rates, tithes, and taxes, will not allow the farmer to pay more than a fifth or sixth of the value of the whole produce in the shape of rent. If we were to suppose the prices of grain to fall from 75s. to 50s. the quarter, the whole of such a rent would be absorbed, even if the price of the whole produce of the farm did not fall in proportion to the price of grain, and making some allowance for a fall in the price of labour. The regular cultivation of such land for grain would of course be given up, and any sort of pasture, however scanty, would be more beneficial both to the landlord and farmer.”[^[502]] The drift of the pamphlet may be shortly stated. The writer refused to go with Adam Smith in identifying corn with food, and attributing to it in that capacity an unchangeable value, which made any rise of price futile for the encouragement of tillage. He thought that it was perfectly possible to encourage tillage by Corn Laws; but was it good policy? Before he could answer this question, he felt bound to consider several others.[^[503]] Under free trade would Great Britain grow her own corn?—if not, ought Government to interfere to secure this?—if so, would laws to hinder importation be the best kind of interference? The answer to the first is, that other countries have soils more fertile than Britain; Poland can ship corn at Dantzig for England at 32s. a quarter;[^[504]] and, if there were free trade over Europe, the rich lands which are not English would send their plenty to relieve the wants of their neighbours. If Corn Laws have not made us grow our own corn, free trade would not. In answer to the second question, no doubt it is sound economy to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest; and, if we had regard to nothing but the greatest “wealth, population, and power,” the rule would be invariable; foreign imports of food are in every case a good thing for the country, and, if there is evil in the matter, it is not in them but in the bad season which makes them necessary; moreover, a free trade in corn secures a steadier as well as cheaper supply of grain.[^[505]] But, on the other hand, dependence on other nations for the first necessary of life is a source of political insecurity to the nation so depending; and, though the dependence is mutual, identity of commercial interests seldom prevents nations from going to war with each other; “we have latterly seen the most striking instances, in all quarters, of Governments acting from passion rather than interest.”[^[506]] And it might be argued that, if we give up agriculture for manufacture, we change the character of our people; manufacturing industry conduces to mental activity, to an expansion of comforts, to the growth of the middle classes, and to the growth with them of political moderation; but it is more subject than agriculture to the fluctuations of fashion, which lead to chronic destitution and discontent, and the conditions of artizan life are “even in their best state unfavourable to health and virtue.”[^[507]] Virtue and happiness after all are the end; wealth, population, and power are but the means. Malthus himself believes in something like a golden mean, a balance of the two industries, which legislation might possibly preserve.[^[508]] There is another and less plausible argument on the same side. Assuming that wages vary with the price of corn, high money wages, and therefore high prices of corn, are an advantage to working men, who would have more money to buy the goods of the foreign countries where prices of corn were low and goods were cheap. This argument, though our author is inclined to yield to it, is inconsistent with his own views of wages and the facts he cites in support of them.[^[509]] More cogent is the plea that it would be unfair suddenly to withdraw a long-established protection, though (it might be replied) we are no more bound to be gradual in abolishing protection than in concluding peace during war. But the real question is, whether once protected is to mean always protected, and protected in an always increasing degree, for it was this increased protection that was proposed in 1814 and 1815. It may be true that if we protect manufacture we ought to protect agriculture; but, instead of protecting both, why not set both free? Statesmen had no courage, however, to be free-traders, in days when the separate articles protected were as many as the millions in the National Debt, and each article represented a vested interest. Malthus does not seem to expect Parliament to give free trade a moment’s consideration. But the friends of the new Corn Laws, besides using the commonplaces of protectionism, argued from the change in the value of the English currency. When paper were paper prices,[^[510]] the importation price of the law of 1804 could be soon reached, and foreign corn came in much faster than the real or the bullion prices of it would have allowed. There was also the long array of standing arguments for Corn Laws that lay stress on the heavy taxation of the country, and are meant to show that the agricultural classes bear most of it, and are thus handicapped against the foreigner. From Malthus himself the old leaven of protectionism was never wholly purged away. Like Pitt, though in a less degree, he suffered his politics to corrupt his political economy, and drag him back from the “simple system of natural liberty” into “the mazes of the old system.”[^[511]] English people since the Repeal of the Corn Laws will hardly care to thrash the old straw out again. Perronet Thompson’s Catechism of the Corn Laws is the best storehouse of the old arguments and their refutations, set forth with a liveliness to which no other English economical writing has the slightest claim.[^[512]]

The real opinion of Malthus came out in the second Corn Law pamphlet on the Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn (1815). Between the two came the tract on Rent, which is rather an economical book than a political pamphlet, and will be noticed immediately. He now declares himself in favour of a temporary duty on imported corn to countervail the artificially low value of the currency,—“to get rid of that part of our prices which belongs to great wealth, combined with a system of restrictions.”[^[513]]

He warns the Government that they should not take such a step to benefit a particular trade, but only to benefit the public. The motives are those constantly professed by defenders of the Navigation Act—not private interests but public policy. Since he wrote his Observations circumstances had changed. The sudden peace had brought the then unprecedented combination of a bad harvest and low prices; the value of the currency had fallen fast; and last, and not least, France, the best corn country in Europe, had begun to prohibit the exportation of grain[^[514]] in dear years. We must therefore, he says, keep up the high farming which the war taught us, by keeping up the high prices of the war. Eighty shillings might not be too high a price, for the limit of prohibited importation.

It seems extraordinary that, after so clearly recognizing that “wealth does not consist in the dearness or cheapness of the usual measures of value, but in the quantity of produce,” and that exports are not so good a criterion of wealth as the “quantity of produce consumed at home,”[^[515]] Malthus should recommend the increase of abundance by means of artificial dearness. It is a poor consolation to us that he was no worse than Brougham, who voted for the Corn Law in 1815, and for the support of the Navigation Act in 1849,—and little worse than Ricardo, who would allow a temporary restriction for the sake of leaseholders.[^[516]] A better is that he was advocating a policy that was against his private interests as a holder of a fixed salary and owner of three per cents.[^[517]] But at the best the atmosphere of these two tracts is a little depressing.

The tract on Rent is more bracing. It was the first-fruits of the larger work on Political Economy (1820); and its substance had been delivered in the professor’s lectures at Haileybury. It expounds the Nature and Progress of Rent with clearness and intelligibility, if without the liveliness of 1798. Malthus gives us to understand that, to explain this or any other economical notion, we must keep as closely as possible to the usage of ordinary language, the language of clear-thinking ordinary men.[^[518]]

To them, rent does not mean, as by derivation, simply produce or profit; nor, as to a Frenchman now and to Bailie Nicol Jarvie in his days, interest on a debt. It means a certain price paid to a landlord for the use of his land. But such a definition is too wide. It might include the proceeds of a monopoly, or an interest on capital, or a Government tax, or a legal rate, or a toll, or a payment for service rendered. We must define the term a little more clearly.

There is a certain portion of a landlord’s income and of a peasant proprietor’s earnings that has an origin and character distinct from the rest, and demands the economist’s separate attention, whether it alone receives the name of rent or not;—this is, the excess of the produce of land beyond the cost of production and the current rate of profits. Represent these in money; and suppose the current profit five per cent. Suppose that a tenant lays out £500 on his farm, and gets by the harvest and farm produce not only £500 plus £25, but £600; the additional £75, which would if retained by him be over or extra profits as compared with the rate usual among farmers and men of like business, is the value of his rent; and the landlord can take that from him without impoverishing him. Rent is that portion of the produce which remains, after all the outlay of the cultivator has been repaid him together with the current profits. From accidental or temporary causes the money rents of land may be more or less than this; but this is the point to which actual rents will gravitate.[^[519]]

So far as this account goes, it might seem that Malthus’ description is too general; it would include the extra profits, for example, of any monopoly or a royalty for the use of a patent; and Ricardo’s definition, “the price paid for the indestructible powers of the soil,” might seem more definite. But Malthus is rather too specific than too general. He is thinking of agricultural land only, and that mainly as producing food for man. If his description of the Nature of rent adds little to that of Adam Smith,[^[520]] his account of its Causes, which he himself was the first to grasp, is characteristic and peculiar.

First, he says, fertile[^[521]] soils yield a produce that more than feeds the producer. This may be put more generally than Malthus has put it. If rent is to be paid, there must be wherewithal to pay it; and there cannot be so if production does no more than repay cost. There may, however, be a production beyond mere repayment of cost, not only in farming but in all trades. The very principle of the division of labour and the separation of trades implies that devotion to one occupation makes men so dexterous in production that, besides providing for themselves, they have an overplus wherewith to supply their other wants and the wants of others.[^[522]] This overplus, where the facilities for trading were specially good, might be so much above the overplus of an ordinary profit that the granter of the facilities, who is usually the ground landlord, might get the lion’s share of it, and still leave the user of the facilities as thriving as his neighbours. On the other hand, if no such overplus can be earned, no such rent can be paid. Rent, in short, when it is paid by men of business, either in town or in country, means over-profits, and ground-rents mean advantage of situation.

The second cause of rent, according to Malthus, who is considering, be it remembered, the cause of the Progress of rents as well as of their actual volume at any given time,[^[523]] is the peculiarity belonging to agricultural land, that the demand increases with the supply; in other cases the demand is external to the supply, but in this case[^[524]] the supply creates its demand. Where there is food there will be mouths. In the supply of food no over-production is possible.[^[525]]

It is here that the Essay on Rent is connected with the Essay on Population. By the law of population the tendency is that where food enough for six is being produced by two, the other four will soon make their appearance; and so, thinks Malthus, the farmer makes his customers by simply making his wares. Something like this, we might add, would happen in a completely developed co-operative society, where the makers would sell to each other and buy from each other. It is even true, in a sense, of all manufacturers as things now are, in proportion as their articles come near to being necessaries;—if they supply that without which people cannot live, they go far to bring people into being. Malthus, however, regarded it as much more true of agricultural production than of any other. He regarded food as the chief necessary, and thought with Adam Smith, that “when food is provided it is comparatively easy to find the necessary clothing and lodging.”[^[526]] Against this we need only remember, how the Essay on Population showed that it was only in the lower stages of existence that increase of mere food involved increase of population; and so the tendency of the supply to create its own demand was, on the author’s own showing, nothing more than a tendency.[^[527]] His economical reasoning was swayed a little by his circumstances. The insularity of English life in his days prevented him from conceiving how a nation could safely derive half its food from abroad; what Adam Smith had thought too good to be likely,[^[528]] he thought too dangerous to be desirable. Good or bad, it is our position now, and the result is, first, that the supply of food does not, in the same degree or way, produce its own demand as formerly, and, second, that our other productions are, even more truly than the agricultural, the supply that creates its own demand, for they give the power of buying the food that feeds new demanders. The production carried on, on the surface of the land, has come in this way to be a more potent cause of the Progress of rents than production from the soil itself. With this restatement the second of Malthus’ causes of rent becomes perhaps a little more intelligible.

His third cause is that good land is scarce. Lands differ in fertility, and there is not, as in a new country, enough of the most fertile to supply all our wants. When the produce of the inferior begins to be absolutely necessary, the inferior will be cultivated at a price enough to repay cost and give ordinary profits to the farmer. But what is simply enough to do that for him will do much more than that for all the holders of superior lands, and all that is much more can be taken by a landlord as rent without placing the tenant at any disadvantage as compared with his neighbours. As soon as this happens in a country, the extra profits, which are called by economists rent, will appear in it; and the growth of population, by leading to an increased demand for food and to an increased price of it, will cause the cultivation of inferior lands, or else a more expensive cultivation of the old ones; and again, since the necessary new supplies cannot be permanently kept up without one or other of these two resources, the price, and with it the rent, will, in the absence of inventions, remain permanently higher. In other words, this third cause is the “law of diminishing returns.”

It is this law of diminishing returns which bulks most largely in the tract of Sir Edward West, written in the same year as that of Malthus. West’s theory of rent is simply, “that in the progress of the improvement of cultivation the raising of rude produce becomes progressively more expensive, or in other words, the ratio of the net produce of land to the gross produce is continually diminishing.”[^[529]] He sees how near Adam Smith came to it when he said, that in the progress of cultivation the total amount of rent increased, but the proportion of it to the produce diminished, so that from being e. g. half the produce it became one-third.[^[530]] He sees, as even in 1798 Malthus had seen,[^[531]] that but for this law population might increase indefinitely on a few fertile lands instead of spreading over the globe (West, p. 13), whereas because of this law inventions in agriculture are not able to remove “the necessity of having recourse to inferior land, and of bestowing capital with diminished advantage on land already in tillage” (p. 50). He pushes the principle so far as to say broadly that whatever increases agricultural production increases cost, while whatever increases manufacturing production diminishes cost (p. 48), inferring that the former must tend abroad and the latter at home to prevent the displacement of English agriculture by foreign competition. As he had little or no influence on Malthus, his tract need not be noticed in detail; it is enough to say that, while West is superior in style and arrangement, Malthus is the more comprehensive. West is clearer and simpler because he includes less.

Looking at the three causes together, we see that the first and last relate to the statics, and the second to the dynamics of the subject. We need to remember that Malthus is having regard in the first instance not to the value but to the quantity of the produce. Now, apart from questions of value, it is possible there might be, in a country, land yielding to the sower more than he sowed; but it might be an ordinary excess, secured by all producers in that country, for the land might be all equally fertile, and production from land might be the most fertile of industries. In that case, even if the land was a State monopoly and the producer’s gains could be taken from him by a tax, there would be nothing corresponding to rent, in the received sense. But, as soon as there were differences in the fertility, and therefore differences in the quantity produced at the same cost, the farmer who had the difference on his side could be said to have a rent. It is this surplus, conjoined with the institution of private property, that, according to Malthus, makes leisure and mental progress, and even great material prosperity, possible.[^[532]] The rent is properly the extra profits, and not the equivalent paid over for them to a landlord; rent can easily exist without a landlord. “It may be laid down, therefore, as an incontrovertible truth, that, as a nation reaches any considerable degree of wealth, and any considerable fulness of population, which of course cannot take place without a great fall both in the profits of stock and the wages of labour, the separation of rents, as a kind of fixture upon lands of a certain quality, is a law as invariable as the action of the principle of gravity. And that rents are neither a mere nominal value, nor a value unnecessarily and injuriously transferred from one set of people to another, but a most real and essential part of the whole value of the national property, and placed by the laws of nature where they are, on the land, by whomsoever possessed, whether the landlord, the crown, or the actual cultivator.”[^[533]]

It is the second cause that brings the first and third into operation in such a way as to produce the rents that we actually know in an old country. The fertility which secures a produce beyond cost makes extra profits possible; the growing population, which gives the produce a value, makes them actual; and the gradations in fertility, whereby a uniform increase in the value of produce creates far from uniform extra profits to different cultivators, give the extra profits the peculiar graduated character, which is characteristic of rent in the economical sense of the word.

Malthus believed himself to have included, in this theory of rent, what truth there was in the view of the French economists and of Adam Smith, when they spoke of rent as due to the qualities of the soil and not to an ordinary monopoly. His contemporaries admitted him to have been the first clear expounder of the subject. But his most eminent brother economist found general agreement quite consistent with emphatic divergence in details,[^[534]] not wonderful in a writer who regarded every economical question as a particular case of the problem of value rather than of wealth.

Ricardo admits that his own theory of rent is simply a farther development of the Malthusian. In an essay on The Influence of a low price of Corn on the Profits of Stock, showing the inexpediency of Restrictions on Importation (1815),[^[535]] published in answer to the two tracts of Malthus above mentioned, he makes this quite clear, and, unlike his disciples, is warm in praise of his rival’s powers as an economist.[^[536]] He agrees with the definition (of the Tract on Rent) that rent is “that portion of the value of the whole produce which remains to the owner after all the outgoings belonging to its cultivation have been paid,” including an ordinary rate of profits for the employed.[^[537]]

But, whereas Malthus regards rent as increased by whatever lessens the outgoings in any shape or form, Ricardo considers that can happen in one way only, namely, by the increased cost of raising the last part of the necessary supplies. Arithmetically it was clear that, if you had four items making up the total expense of cultivation, whatever reduced any one of the items pro tanto reduced the total.[^[538]] Accordingly, Malthus said that rent could be increased by such an accumulation of capital as will lower the profits of stock,—such an increase of population as will lower the wages of labour,—such agricultural improvements or such increase of the cultivator’s exertions as will diminish the number of labourers needed,—or such an increase in the prices of produce from increased demand as will increase the difference between the expense of production and the price of produce.[^[539]] Ricardo, on the other hand, says that profits can never be reduced by mere accumulation of capital or competition of capitals, but only by the progressively less fruitful character of the investments to be found for capital as accumulation goes on. As long as there is fertile land to be had, yielding a rich return to capital, no one will accept a poor return. “If in the progress of countries in wealth and population new portions of fertile land can be added to such countries with every increase of capital, profits would never fall nor rents rise.”[^[540]] In things as they are, capital soon accumulates beyond the rich investments and has to take the poorer. Sooner or later, even in a new colony, a point is reached where fertile land will not supply food enough for the growing population except at an increased cost.[^[541]] Now, if the supply is absolutely required, the most costly portion of it, whether it be got by an extension of cultivation to poorer lands, or by a more thorough cultivation of the richer, will determine the price of all the rest, for there cannot be two prices in the same market; and the profits of the producer of it will determine the profits of all his fellow-cultivators, for there cannot be two rates of profit in the same business. Furthermore, the agricultural profits will determine the rate in other businesses, for in a full-formed society the rate in the others must bear a fixed relation to the rate in this business, so that the one cannot materially vary without the other.[^[542]] Therefore the greater cost of the last portion of the necessary supply of food will lower profits generally, will thereby increase the range of extra profits from the richer soils, and will thereby raise rents.

The difference between the two men is, that what Malthus makes only one cause, Ricardo makes the only one, the increased cost of cultivation.[^[543]] Ricardo and his friends have certainly put cause for effect.[^[544]] It is of course in the first instance the high prices that lead to the costly cultivation, and not vice versâ, for without the high prices the produce of the costly cultivation would not be profitable.

Malthus was asked by the Committee on Emigration: “Among other effects of resorting to a soil inferior to any now in cultivation, which is involved in the proposition of cultivating waste lands, would not one be to raise the rents of all the landlords throughout Great Britain and Ireland?”—He answered: “I think not. The cultivating of poor lands is not the cause of the rise of rents; the rise of the price of produce compared with the costs of production, which is the cause of the rise of rents, takes place first, and then such rise induces the cultivation of the poorer land. That is the doctrine I originally stated, and I believe it to be true; it was altered by others afterwards.”[^[545]]

On the other hand, what makes the high prices permanent instead of temporary, is the fact that the cultivation essential to the completeness of the supply cannot be other than costly.[^[546]] It is, therefore, not wrong to consider costly cultivation as one cause of the permanence of high prices, and therewith of high rents. But Ricardo goes further, and counts it the only cause.

Through the whole progress of society, he says, profits are regulated by the difficulty or facility of procuring food; and, “if the smallness of profits do not check accumulation, there are hardly any limits to the rise of rent and the fall of profit.” Nothing can increase the general rate of profit but the cheapening of food;[^[547]] as by improvements in agriculture, which, by securing the same production with less labour, for the time increase the profits and lower the rents.[^[548]] The landlord’s interest is therefore at all times opposed to that of every other class in the community,[^[549]] for it means dear food, low profits, and high rents. Still, high rents are not the cause either of the dear food or the low profits, but are, equally with them, the effect of a common cause, more costly cultivation. The effect of a costly cultivation on wages might seem vi terminorum to be a raising of them, for wages depend on the proportion of the supply of labourers to capital’s demand[^[550]] for them, and by assumption there was a greater demand. But since the cause of the rise of price was in the first instance an increase of population, it follows that the increased cost of raising the most costly supplies of corn will be incurred not by higher payment of old labourers, but by employment of new. Wages again will buy less corn, for corn has risen. “While the price of corn rises ten per cent., wages will always rise less than ten per cent., but rent will always rise more; the condition of the labourer will generally decline, and that of the landlord will always be improved.”[^[551]] In his statement of the doctrine of wages, Ricardo is perhaps more careful in 1815 than he is in 1817, saying that, “as experience demonstrates that capital and population alternately take the lead, and wages in consequence are liberal or scanty, nothing can be positively laid down respecting profits as far as wages are concerned.”[^[552]] But even in 1817 his exposition is hardly more rigid than that of Malthus himself. So far is he from recognizing an iron law driving wages down to “the natural price” or bare necessaries, that he thinks the market rate may be constantly above the natural for an indefinite period, and he regards the natural itself as expansive. The whole chapter on wages[^[553]] shows a just understanding of the Essay on Population. Nevertheless, if Ricardo in one sense made too much of the principle of population in relation to Rent, in another sense he made too little of it. He does not see that in a progressive country it counteracts the tendency of improvements in agriculture to cheapen produce, and thereby reduce rents;[^[554]] agricultural rents have risen since 1846 largely because of high farming. He does not grant that high or low wages can affect rent, because he regards them as purely relative to profits, and making with profits a total amount, of which only the proportions vary; but it is difficult to believe that the rise in agricultural wages since 1873 or so can have failed to play a part in keeping down farmers’ rents since that date. As, however, our view of the power or powerlessness of lowered profits or lowered wages to increase rent will be found to depend on our view of the causes of value, and as the difference of the two economists on the relation of wages to profits might have the appearance of a technical subtlety, these two items of the total may be passed by for the present.

In regard to agricultural improvements the issue seemed plainer, and the evidence seemed all for Ricardo and against Malthus. In a country depending chiefly on itself for grain, a general adoption of improvements would seem to make supplies cheaper because less costly, and therefore to lower rents because forcing farmers to lower prices. Even Mr. Mill did not break away from Ricardianism at this point,[^[555]] though he speaks less unreservedly than Ricardo upon it. Malthus, on the other hand, who regards rent as depending largely on the ability of the agricultural supply to create its own demands, regards rent, accordingly, as at all times keeping pace with the increase of grain caused by improvements, unless the improvements outrun population. What cheapness does in other cases is to make an article accessible to a circle of buyers previously excluded from it. Every one is a buyer of agricultural produce and no one is excluded; but the temporary cheapness of grain creates new buyers by making marriage accessible to a wider circle.

The progress of rents in fact results from the conflict of two economical tendencies—the tendency of economical expedients to lower prices, and the tendency of an increasing population to raise them. If Malthus’ ripest view of population be true, then a cheapening of food among a civilized people by no means leads to a corresponding increase of their numbers, and therefore the course of improvement would tend so far towards a diminution of price, and therewith of rent. If rents depended on the price of corn alone, economical expedients (including not only the direct aids to tillage, mechanical and chemical inventions directly applied to it, but the indirect aids, free trade, railways, and steamers) must certainly have lowered rents in the last hundred years. But the reverse is true,[^[556]] chiefly because the produce of a farm is ceasing to mean wheat, and coming more and more to mean cattle and dairy produce, which have not fallen but risen in price in one hundred years, while corn has actually fallen. This variety of productions has proved financially an equivalent to what Malthus (seventy years ago) considered the main cause of greater extra profits to the farmer and greater money rents to the landlord——the increased fertility of the soil in the matter of grain, and an increased price keeping pace with it.

The commercial policy of England has become what Malthus describes in the latter part of the Essay on Population as a combination of the agricultural and the commercial systems. His views on this subject became modified as he grew older. In the second edition he says:[^[557]] “Two nations might increase exactly with the same rapidity in the exchangeable value of the annual produce of their land and labour; yet ... in that which had applied itself chiefly to agriculture, the poor would live in greater plenty, and population would rapidly increase; in that which had applied itself chiefly to commerce, the poor would be comparatively but little benefited, and consequently population would either be stationary or increase very slowly.” “In the history of the world the nations whose wealth has been derived principally from manufactures and commerce have been perfectly ephemeral beings compared with those the basis of whose wealth has been agriculture. It is in the nature of things that a state which subsists upon a revenue furnished by other countries must be infinitely more exposed to all the accidents of time and chance than one which produces its own.”[^[558]] It is not, he thinks, because of her trade, but because of her agriculture that England is so rich in resources; it is not without danger that our commercial policy has diverted capital from agriculture into manufacture and commerce. About the middle of the eighteenth century we were strictly an agricultural nation, and we were safe, for in a country whose commerce and manufacture increase from and with the improvement in agriculture there is no discoverable germ of decay. But all is changed now; and there is reason to fear that our prosperity is temporary, and we have only risen by the depression of other nations.[^[559]] When the nations that now supply us with cheap corn shall have prospered like ourselves and increased their population till corn is dear among them, then we shall be ruined. The evils of scarcity are so dreadful that it is worth our while to give special encouragements to agriculture, and, in order to be certain to have enough, to have in general too much.[^[560]] Otherwise “we shall be laid so bare to the shafts of fortune that nothing but a miracle can save us from being struck.”[^[561]] “If England continues yearly her importations of corn, she cannot ultimately escape that decline which seems to be the natural and necessary consequence of excessive commercial wealth; and the growing prosperity of those countries which supply her with corn must in the end diminish her population, her riches, and her power,”—not indeed in the next twenty or thirty years, but “in the next two hundred or three hundred.”[^[562]] In 1803 Malthus had much in common with the author of Great Britain independent of Commerce, to say nothing of the French economists. He cannot be said to have entirely lost the bias in favour of Agriculture in later years. In the Political Economy, reviewing the last five centuries of English work and wages,[^[563]] he tries to explain away the instances where rising prices of corn and an “influx of bullion” seem to have injured the condition of the labourer; and there can be little doubt he was indirectly answering an objection to Corn Laws. When depreciation of the currency, whether through American discoveries or suspensions of cash payment, has occurred, the rebound from it (he says) has made prices fall much more than wages, and so (we are to infer), when prices are kept high, wages will follow. It may be doubted if he had weighed the full consequences of such a contention in the light of his own principles of free trade. Professor Rogers[^[564]] has had the valuable aid of old College accounts. Malthus had little besides Eden, Arthur Young, and the Reports to the Board of Agriculture; and it is doubtful if he fully understood the effects on the labourer of Henry VII.’s debasement of the currency, or could apply the analogy to the depreciation in his own day.[^[565]] But on the whole, as years went on, he became less physiocratic. He came to acknowledge that, if a purely agricultural country might in some cases, like America, be the best possible for the labourer, it might in other cases, like Poland or Ireland, be the worst possible for him. If we hear that the labourer in one country earns in a year fifteen and in another nine quarters of wheat, we cannot be sure that the former is the better off till we know the value of other things in the country in comparison with wheat. If manufactures were very dear in comparison, then the labourer’s wages except in food would go very little way, unless in a case like America, where the quantity is so great that it makes up for the little value of corn wages. In Poland the value of corn is so low, and there is so little capital in the country, that the high corn wages mean low real wages, and the population is either stationary or very slow in its increase. The prosperity of an agricultural country, then, depends on other causes than the direction of its attention to the one industry of agriculture, and without knowing these we could not infer or predict it.[^[566]]

Malthus in fact reached the point at which he was always glad to arrive, the medium between two extreme views.[^[567]] He would neither approve of a purely agricultural nation, whose danger was want of capital, nor of a purely commercial, whose danger was want of food. In a purely commercial, everything depends on a superiority in industry, machinery, and trade, which from the nature of things cannot last. Not only foreign but domestic competition will bring down profits, and thereby, by discouraging saving and enterprise, diminish the demand for labour and bring the population to a standstill. Christendom has seen Venice, Bruges, Holland lose their trade by their neighbours’ gain.[^[568]] To say that the nations of the world ought to be allowed to develope their trade as freely as the provinces of a single empire, is, in his opinion, to overlook the reality of political obstacles. If England were still separated into the kingdoms of the Heptarchy, London could not be what it is. The interest of a province and the interest of an independent state are never the same.[^[569]] To one who believes political divisions inevitable, there can be little hope for universal free trade. Malthus is unable to rise to the cosmopolitan view of Cobden, and he never seems to see that by ignoring political barriers, free trade may really weaken them. His ideal is a state which combines agriculture and commerce in equal proportions.[^[570]] The prosperity of the latter implies the decay of feudalism and the establishment of secure government; with security comes the spontaneous extension of enterprise and a steady demand for labour. Since the two great classes of producers provide a market for each other, wealth will constantly grow, and without risk of sudden check by a foreign influence. The prosperity of such a country may (he thinks) last practically for ever, and we might answer in the affirmative for our own country the query of Bishop Berkeley about his.[^[571]] “The countries which unite great landed resources with a prosperous state of commerce and manufactures, and in which the commercial part of the population never essentially exceeds the agricultural part, are eminently secure from sudden reverses. Their increasing wealth seems to be out of the reach of all common accidents, and there is no reason to say that they might not go on increasing in riches and population for hundreds, nay almost thousands of years.”[^[572]] They would go on in fact till they reached the extreme practical limits of population, which under the system of private property would mean such a state of the land as would “enable the last employed labourers to produce the maintenance of as many probably as four persons,” the man, his wife, and two children. As soon as the labour ceases to produce more than this, it ceases to be worth the employer’s while to give the wages and employ the labour. These practical limits are far from the limits of the earth’s power to produce food, and a Government which compelled every member of society to devote himself wholly to the raising of food and necessaries, would succeed in coming nearer to those farther limits, though at the expense of everything we mean by civilization.[^[573]] As a matter of fact, even the practical limit is not approached by way of a uniform decline of profits and of population. Various causes, acting at irregular intervals, stave off the event. The decline of general profits, the introduction of long leases and large farming, would bring more capital to the land; improvements in agriculture will increase the produce, inventions in manufacture will lessen the cost of the agriculturist’s comforts, and make his wages and profits go farther; the opening of a foreign market may raise home prices; a temporary rise in the value of agricultural produce may stimulate the investment of capital in farming. So Malthus concludes, for reasons not unlike Cliffe Leslie’s,[^[574]] that, though there is a tendency of profits to fall, yet the tendency is often defeated. Though there is much truth still in many of his statements, the conclusion he draws from them,[^[575]] that we ought by a judicious system of corn duties and corn bounties to keep the price of food steady and secure a large home supply, is quite out of court now. The variations in price have been under free trade very moderate; and the supply from one quarter or another has never failed us. Free trade is no longer among our problems.

It must be added, however, that there is no reason why the “practical limits” should not exist under a paternal or fraternal socialism as well as under the present social system. Even if industry were initiated and directed not by individuals but socialistically by Government, the sole motive need not be to increase the mere numbers of the people, and therefore the mere total quantity of food needed for a bare life. The motive of socialistic government would be to secure a high degree of comfort, not a bare subsistence, for all; and therefore, at the cost of a limitation of numbers, society would still remain at a distance from its greatest possible production of food. Whether such a limitation of numbers is likely to take place in the reconstituted society is discussed elsewhere.[^[576]]

CHAPTER II.
THE WORKING MAN.

Measure of Value, 1823—In what sense Labour a Measure—Difficulties—Arguments of the Tract on Value—Measure in the same Country—Measure in different Countries—Measure at different Periods in the same—Measure as applied to varying Value of Currency—The Royal Literary Society—The Definitions—Wages—The Minimum of Social different from the Minimum of Physical Necessaries—High Wages, how made Permanent—The “Wages Fund,” whose Invention, and how far a Reality—“The New School of Political Economy,” its three Tenets—A General Glut in what Sense possible.

As the Rent and Corn pamphlets deal chiefly with Mother Earth, the tract on the Measure of Value[^[577]] deals chiefly with Father Work. The search for a common measure of value is not, to Malthus, a purely academical problem. He considers such a measure desirable because in any inquiry into the wealth of nations it is important to distinguish between the rise of one commodity and the fall of another. The former is an intrinsic alteration of value which will affect every exchange in which the object is concerned; the latter an extrinsic which affects only the one exchange, of the object in question with the foreign object that has been altered. By value of course is to be understood economic value, or “the power of commanding other objects in exchange,” not value in the (not uncommon) wider sense, of usefulness in supplying wants.[^[578]] The economic value of anything, taken in relation to some object which never changes its value from intrinsic causes, may be called the “natural or absolute value” of that thing, and the object with which it was compared may be called the “measure” of absolute or natural value, in other words, of the value which a thing must fetch if its supply is to be continued. While not only money but any and every object may be such a measure of value for a limited place and time, even money itself is not a good measure for widely different places or for long periods of time; and corn, which is better for long periods, is worse for short.

Labour is better than either, but Labour is ambiguous. We may measure the value of anything either by the labour it has cost us in the making of it, which gives us Ricardo’s sense of natural value, or by the labour it will purchase after it is made. Adam Smith,[^[579]] who preferred labour both to money and corn as the measure of value, wavered between these two meanings of the terms. Malthus declares at once against the first sense. Labour, he says, in the sense of cost does not altogether determine value and therefore cannot measure it, even for similar places and times. In 1820 Malthus had been of opinion that a mean between corn and labour was a better measure of value than labour itself; but since 1823 he recurred to the view of Adam Smith,[^[580]] and held that the amount of the unskilled common day labour of the agricultural labourer, which a thing will purchase or command, is a good measure of the value of it even at widely different places and times. “Agricultural labour is taken for the obvious reasons that it is the commonest species of labour, that it directly produces the food of the labourer, and that it is the most immediately connected with the gradations of soil and the necessary variations of profits. It is also assumed with Adam Smith, Mr. Ricardo, and other political economists, that, on an average, other kinds of labour continue to bear the same proportions to agricultural labour.”[^[581]] The bodily exertion of the labourer does not change; it is the same sweat of the brow, the same sacrifice of physical force. When corn, for example, will command a less amount of labour than it would have done a century before, we may be sure it is because of a change not in the labour but in the corn; and we ought therefore to say not that labour has risen in value, but that corn has fallen. Malthus’ search for a permanent element in the changeable has led him to individual human labour as the economical unit. If the Chinese labourer has lower wages than the English, it is not because his labour is of lower value, but because his necessaries are of higher. Wages are higher in the United States not because labour is of higher value, but because necessaries are of lower.[^[582]] Of course when skill enters into the labour, the unit is not the same; but, when we look only at unskilled, we find confirmation of Malthus’ view in the experience of the elder and the younger Brassey as employers of labour, that quantity for quantity “the cost of the labour [the expense of it to the employer] is the same everywhere” over the world.[^[583]] The measure, however, is by no means out of court as regards skilled labour; the difference in kind may be stated in terms of a difference in degree. If the watchmaker’s labour be paid at the rate of 10s. a day, and the common agricultural labourer’s only at 1s. 8d., the former may be stated as equivalent to six days’ common labour.[^[584]] Malthus has in his mind a scale of compensation such as is drawn out by Adam Smith in the tenth chapter of the first book of the Wealth of Nations.[^[585]] Disagreeableness, difficulty, inconstancy, responsibility, risk of failure, are so many disabilities, for each of which a compensation must be made to the workman in the scale of his wages, as adding in effect so many more hours’ labour; and each higher class of workman must be paid the unit of common labourer’s wages, with the compensations superadded. In practice this means that men will not be found in sufficient numbers to do the higher class work unless the wages are sufficient to make it worth their while to undergo the disabilities. It is assumed that this scale has been adjusted by custom and the “higgling of the market” from generation to generation, till in any given neighbourhood each of the several skilled trades has a definitely recognized place in the series.[^[586]]

This reasoning seems less convincing when we consider that the translation of skill into terms of hours would be different in different localities, and that the common labour, which is the unit, would vary in the same way. The measure of value would hold only for a given place, time, and people. To escape from the difficulty, we must consider the difference between the common labour at one time and place and the common labour at another as itself measurable, and allow for it; or else we must consider it as too small to disturb our conclusions, and so neglect it altogether. To reduce common labour to its theoretically simplest terms is to reduce it to something below our experience; and to reduce it to its actually simplest in the given cases is to reduce it to one thing in England, a second in France, a third in India, a fourth in America. There are differences of quality which cannot be with any certainty resolved into differences of quantity; such are the differences of individuals, the differences of nations, the differences of races. It will be found, also, that the part played by common as opposed to skilled labour, and by agricultural as opposed to manufacturing labour, differs so much between country and country that, in order to use labour as a measure, we should need other measures in addition to it. In short, if we had data enough to apply this measure, we should have data enough to dispense with it.

It was possibly the force of these considerations that led Malthus, as time went on, to approach somewhat nearer to Ricardo, whose measure, so far as he had one, was not the labour purchased but the labour that entered into cost. But he adhered to the substance of his doctrine as expressed in the tract; and his positions, in detail, were as follows:—

The power of one object to command another in exchange is influenced either by a change in the object itself, or by a change in the other. If we found a case where there was never a change in the first object itself, then we should have, in that first, a measure of natural or absolute as opposed to nominal or relative value, i. e. a measure of that value of an article which satisfies the “conditions of the supply” of it, and enables its production to be continued without loss to the producers. By “conditions of supply” is meant Ricardo’s “cost of production” with the addition of ordinary profits. No measure of market or relative values is possible; and to have a measure of natural value itself we must make two postulates,—that natural value depends on “labour and profits” (sic), on rent little if at all, and that the “wages” of labour are also the “value” of labour,—what labour is paid is also what labour will fetch. It is easy to apply the measure where only labour is concerned, for then the labour that the things cost is a sufficient measure; it would be evident, at any change, that the things had become cheaper, not the labour dearer. But in present society value is more complicated; labour is no doubt the chief source of it, but profits are a very considerable one.[^[587]] The natural conditions of supply, however, may be stated in terms of labour, just as if labour had been the sole ingredient. This would give us a measure for the same country at the same place and time. The total quantity of labour that an article cost, with the addition of ordinary profits stated in terms of labour, would be the same as that quantity of labour which an article would purchase in its natural value.

In the case of different countries, at the same time, the difficulties are not quite the same. Exchange is there determined not by labour but by money prices; and money is of very different value in the one country and in the other. But the differences in the value of money in different countries are in proportion to the different prices of agricultural labour—1500 days’ labour at 4d. a day in India, at 2s. in England, meaning £25 and £150 respectively; and, if fixed capital to the value of 300 days’ labour were advanced to each of them, while profits calculated in days’ labour were twenty per cent. in the one case, ten in the other, the result would be an article whose conditions of supply would require in the one case a money price of £31, in the other of £168. The difference is no doubt due to the superior efficiency of English industry and skill which enables England to purchase the precious metals more cheaply,[^[588]] but the cost of getting the money would not tell us the true present value of the money in England or in India. It is not the labour spent on the gold, but the labour purchased by it, that will help us here. In each country within itself we would measure the natural value of money as well as of anything else by what labour it will purchase; know the difference between the value of money in the one and its value in the other by the difference between the amount of labour it will purchase in the one case and the amount it will purchase in the other.[^[589]]

In the case of different periods in the same country, though we have not, as in the case of two different countries, the test of an actual exchange, we can still use labour as the measure. We must allow for the higher profits of the earlier period; and on the (Ricardian) principle that profits and wages vary inversely, though corn wages have risen, profits have in proportion fallen, and the total value of the produce measured by its power of purchasing labour must be the same,[^[590]] the purchased labour then representing the producing labour plus the then rate of profits. From Ricardo’s dogma it seems (to Malthus) to follow directly that the value of labour is constant.[^[591]] Taking the labour they will purchase as the best measure of the value of the precious metals, as of anything else, we have light on one of the pressing questions of the day (in 1823), the causes of the changing value of money. The causes affect not the labour but the money, and they are of two kinds. The first Malthus describes as a primary or necessary cause, namely, the variation in profits depending on the (Ricardian) theory of the interlocking of wages and profits, and the (Malthusian) theory of the relation of profits to rent. Dear corn due to difficult cultivation would lower profits, and would alter the value of money, but only in relation to raw, not in relation to manufactured produce, or at least (from the effects of Ricardo’s principle of the inverse variation of wages and profits) not to the same extent. But the second, which is a “secondary and incidental” class of causes, affects both raw and manufactured goods, and is often enough to completely dwarf the effects of the primary cause;[^[592]]—it is the general commercial situation of a country,—“the fertility and vicinity of the mines, the different efficiency of labour in different countries, the abundance or scarcity of exportable commodities, and the state of the demand and supply of commodities and labour compared with” the precious metals.[^[593]] The efficiency of labour and a prosperous commerce, with a great consequent demand for corn and labour, are often more powerful in making bullion cheap than agricultural productiveness and high profits in making bullion dear and corn cheap. During the war—say from 1790 to 1814—we had an instance of this, and since the war—say from 1814 to 1823—we have had a clear instance, he thinks, of the converse.[^[594]]

Two elaborate papers on the measure of value, written in 1825 and 1827, show that Malthus was becoming inclined to make less of his differences with Ricardo.[^[595]] They were intimate friends; their discussions had no bitterness; and, to use the words of one of them, “both were so anxious for the truth that sooner or later they would have agreed.”[^[596]] These papers are a fulfilment of his duty not (as we might guess) as a fellow of the Royal Society or a member of the Political Economy Club,[^[597]] but as an associate of the Royal Society of Literature.[^[598]] “That branch of literature” [sic] “on which it shall be his duty to communicate with the Society once a year at least” is described as “political economy and statistics.”[^[599]] He does little credit in these papers to his literary faculty. Their composition is laboured and devoid of ornament. The first is On the Measure of the Conditions necessary to the Supply of Commodities; and the thesis is, that “the natural and necessary conditions of the supply of all commodities,” that are not monopolies, are represented and measured by the labour which they will on an average command, and by nothing else. The second is On the Meaning which is most usually and most correctly attached to the term, Value of Commodities; and the thesis is, that, when value is used without a qualifying adjective or reference to any special equivalent in a possible exchange,[^[600]] the term refers to the “conditions of supply.” When we say, for example, anything is sold at a price far above its true value, we mean far above its cost price, including under “cost” the average rate of profits that must go to the maker if he is to live by his trade. The two papers taken together form a sort of indirect proof of the position taken up in the tract on the Measure of Value (1823), and the relevant parts of the second edition of the Political Economy (1836), and may be stated briefly thus:—The labour commanded by an article is generally the measure of that article’s cost;—but that article’s cost is what people generally mean by its value;—therefore the labour commanded by an article is the measure of that article’s value in the ordinary sense of the word.

The second paper was written at the same time as the Definitions in Political Economy, and illustrates the rule laid down there, prescribing adherence, when possible, to the meaning which economical terms bear in the mouths of ordinary folk.[^[601]] The Definitions, for example, repeat from (or with) the second paper, “when no second object is specified, the value of the commodity naturally refers to the causes” which determine “the estimation in which it is held” “and the object which measures it.”[^[602]] “The natural value of a commodity at any place and time” is “the estimation in which it is held when it is in its natural and ordinary state,” as “determined by the elementary costs of its production,” or in other words, by “the conditions of its supply.” And the measure of the natural value of a commodity at any place and time is “the quantity of labour for which it will exchange at that place and time when it is in its natural and ordinary state.”[^[603]]

As a literary production the book written for the public is superior to the papers prepared for the men of letters. Next to the first Essay on Population, the critical parts of the Definitions give the most pleasant examples of the author’s style. The two papers above mentioned are chiefly important as showing the importance which Malthus, unlike Ricardo, attached to the question of a measure of value.[^[604]] A contemporary writer said very happily that the fault of Ricardo was to generalize too much, and of Malthus to generalize too little. Malthus, he added, is a keen observer but poor in analysis; he is “so occupied with particulars that he neglects that inductive process which extends individual experience throughout the infinitude of things,” and converts knowledge into science. “As presented by Mr. Ricardo, political economy possesses a regularity and simplicity beyond what exists in nature; as exhibited by Mr. Malthus, it is a chaos of original but unconnected elements.”[^[605]] On the other hand, the testimony of a recent German writer is very different. Malthus, he tells us, resembles Ricardo in his sombre view of human life and frank statement of unpleasant facts. Their names are often associated, and no doubt both are children of their times. But their leanings were really unlike. Ricardo took up certain ideas of his time in their narrowest, clearest, and harshest form, and applied them wholly in the interest of capital. Malthus is far less narrow. His influence on economics has been much smaller than Ricardo’s; but he will be found “by far the more suggestive and less prejudiced of the two,” and, if he found more opponents, it is because he was less understood and less read.[^[606]] The sprightly Dialogues[^[607]] of De Quincey contribute nothing to the discussion on value; but they show how completely Ricardo had won the ear of the literary world, and how little pains the opponents of Malthus took to do him justice. Malthus reduced the problem to many elements; Ricardo to few; and the latter, as certainly easier to understand, was readily represented as the likelier to be true. Simplicity in such a case is a treacherous virtue; and the apparent chaos may have been much nearer the truth than the apparent cosmos, if there was a hidden flaw in the latter and a latent principle of union in the former. Sound or unsound, such a principle may be traced in the most abstract discussions of Malthus. We shall find this true when we compare his views with Ricardo’s on the nature and causes of value itself, and the movements of prices. We may recognize it even in these discussions on the measure of value. The measurement of all value by individual human labour is of a piece with the author’s final view of population, where all is made to depend on individual responsibility.[^[608]] The main weakness of the position is perhaps that by unskilled labour he means always agricultural, and does not sufficiently recognize how in manufacturing England it has perhaps become easier to measure unskilled by skilled than the latter by the former. The difficulty met Robert Owen, when in his Labour Exchanges[^[609]] he not only tried to reduce all values to a common measure in labour, but to make labour a means of exchange, for which it is certainly worse suited than money.

Labour as something to be rewarded by Wages has a more evident connection with the principles of the Essay on Population than labour as the measure of all values. In this case unskilled agricultural labour is again the unit. The first “condition of the supply” of this labour is the necessaries of life, in such quantities as will enable the labourers to maintain their numbers or to increase them,[^[610]] as the case may be. If the former only, the price of labour is not, as Ricardo says, the “natural,” but really a most unnatural price, for it would mean that the country giving it had arrived at the final limit of its resources.[^[611]] Necessaries, however, are not a simple or even a fixed element. We can of course measure them in corn if we like; but they consist not only of the prime necessary, the staff of life, but of other absolute necessaries, of shelter and clothing, and many “conveniences” which have become necessaries, inasmuch as they are essential to healthy life, such as soap and shoes and candle-light. It has happily become a truism that the necessaries of life are not a fixed but an expanding factor. Even if competition were always to drive wages down to a “minimum of social necessaries,”[^[612]] social are always beyond animal necessaries; our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous; and “the barest social necessaries” seem likely in process of time to mean a high standard of comfort. To raise the minimum of social necessaries is the way to raise wages really, universally, and almost irrevocably.[^[613]] Malthus himself declares that “it is the diffusion of luxury” in this sense of the word, “among the mass of the people, and not an excess of it in a few,” that seems to be advantageous, both for national wealth and national happiness. Paley’s ideal of national prosperity, “a laborious frugal people ministering to the demands of an opulent luxurious nation,” is heartily scouted by him. The luxuries of the few rich, he says, harass the industry of the poor by varying with the fashion; but the luxuries of the poor, when embodied in their general standard of living, are not only the best kind of check to population, but the steadiest encouragement to general trade.[^[614]] He seems to have supposed the elevation in the standard of living to have been effected, like the progress of nations in civilization, by the happy improvement of an accidental advantage, by the retention of high wages, when once secured in a time of brisk trade in the ordinary way of competition; the workmen, in short, succeeded in making permanent and de jure a change once de facto for the time effected.[^[615]] “When our wages of labour in wheat were high in the early part of the last century, it did not appear that they were employed merely in the maintenance of more families, but in improving the condition of the people in their general mode of living.”[^[616]] Malthus, without knowing it, was certainly father of the theory of a Wages Fund. The theory is that the average wages of the labouring classes at any given time are high or low in proportion to the great or small amount of circulating capital devoted to the payment of wages, or, as it is sometimes expressed (more tersely and inexactly), wages depend on “the ratio of population to capital.” This might mean no more than the arithmetical truism that we may always find the average wages by dividing the total sum received by the total number of recipients; and the quotient would be unalterable only in the sense in which all other facts might be said to be so, in retrospect. But it is usually taken to mean that the first total could not at any given time have been greater or less than it actually was, being fixed unalterably by circumstances,[^[617]] and so “devoted” or “determined” to the payment of wages. The simplest test of this theory is the application of it to the case of a single individual capitalist and his payments in wages. Suppose he has a capital of £10,000, £5000 fixed and £5000 circulating; and suppose that the latter means wages only (instead of chiefly), and is paid to one hundred men;—£50 a year will be the average wages of the hundred men; and, by the theory, given the rate of ordinary profits and given the “desire of accumulation” at the time and place, it could not possibly have been either more or less. But, as the profits are not unconditional, neither are the wages; the capitalist might conceivably, to save his business, keep it up in bad times at a loss, and pay wages at the expense of profits and at the expense of his personal pleasures.[^[618]] He has often the choice before him to spend more on fixtures, or more on new hands, or more on further employment of the old hands. In truth, too, though wages, especially in England, are often in the first instance advanced out of capital, they are always meant to be paid out of the gross returns, and in every sound business really are so. The workman and employer make their contract beforehand, and expect each other to abide by it, be the profit much or little; the wages depend, therefore, directly on this contract, and indirectly on that which is the means of fulfilling the contract on the master’s side, the price of the article made. The price of the article is the real wages fund;[^[619]] and therefore the wages fund must be as flexible as market prices, and the actual wages as changeable as are the powers, habits, and desires of the two contracting parties.

The theory of a wages fund was formed from the facts of a perfectly exceptional time, and on the strength of two truths misapplied, the doctrine of Malthus (on Population) in its most unripe form, and of Ricardo (on Value) in its most abstract. J. R. MacCulloch seems to have been the first who put the two together to deduce a rigid law of wages. “The market rate of wages,” he says, “is exclusively dependent on the proportion which the capital of the country, or the means of employing labour, bears to the number of labourers. There is plainly, therefore, only one way of really improving the condition of the great majority of the community or of the labouring class, and that is by increasing the ratio of capital to population,” which the labourers for their part can only do by diminishing the supply of labour.[^[620]]

Even Mrs. Marcet, a docile Ricardian, had put the case more carefully. “Work to be performed is the immediate cause of the demand for labour; but, however great or important is the work which a man may wish to undertake, the execution of it must always be limited by the extent of his capital, i. e. by the funds he possesses for the maintenance or payment of his labourers.”[^[621]] She professes to be expounding the received doctrine of her day. MacCulloch’s exposition is much more rigid. When he speaks of the “funds devoted to the payment of wages,” he means “that portion of the capital or wealth of a country which the employers of labour intend or are willing to lay out in the purchase of labour.” It “may be larger at one time than at another. But, whatever be its magnitude, it obviously forms the only source from which any portion of the wages of labour can be derived. No other fund is in existence from which the labourers as such can draw a single shilling. And hence it follows that the average rate of wages or the share of the national capital appropriated to the employment of labour falling, at an average, to each labourer, must entirely depend on its amount as compared with the number of those amongst whom it has to be divided.”[^[622]] Neither MacCulloch, nor James Mill, nor John Mill in his early writings, nor apparently any of the expounders of the theory, were in the habit of describing the fund as “unconditionally” devoted to the payment of wages, though John Mill, in restating the position after he abandoned it, gives us so to understand.[^[623]] Something like unconditional determination, however, is assumed in all the reasonings of the school. Adam Smith’s frequent use of the words “funds devoted” or “funds determined” to this or that purpose may easily have been misunderstood. Certainly in his pages they mean no inflexible compulsion. He says the demand of those who live by wages can only increase in proportion to the increase of the “funds” which are “destined” for the payment of wages, these funds being (he adds) either the surplus revenue of an idle monied man who will “naturally” use any addition to them in increasing his staff of domestic servants, or the increased capital of the capitalist who will just as “naturally” use them in employing more workmen.[^[624]] The word “destined” is so far, with him, from implying any iron necessity that it means simply “intended”; and the intention is one that can be foiled or altered. He speaks of the “funds destined for the consumption” of the manufacturing class,[^[625]] and of the townsfolk’s “fund of subsistence,”[^[626]] meaning simply their food; he even speaks of the funds destined for the repair of the high roads in France.[^[627]] Even the strong passage in Book I. chap. viii., “the demand for those who live by wages necessarily increases with the increase of the revenue and stock of every country, and cannot possibly increase without it,” stops considerably short of the doctrine of a rigid wages fund. It is never suggested by Adam Smith that the wages fund is inelastic, and that wages could not at any given time have been greater or less than they actually were. The doctrine is seldom traced further back than to Malthus; and Malthus cannot be shown to have held the doctrine. With express reference to the passage last cited from the Wealth of Nations, he says that “it will be found that the funds for the maintenance of labour do not necessarily increase with the increase of wealth, and very rarely increase in proportion to it, and that the condition of the lower classes of society does not depend exclusively upon the increase of the funds for the maintenance of labour or the power of supporting a greater number of labourers” (Essay, 7th ed., III. xiii. 368). The condition of the working classes depended, he thought, partly on the rate at which the “funds for the maintenance of labour,”[^[628]] or, as he expressed it at first, “the resources of the country”[^[629]] and the demand for labour are increasing, and partly on the “habits of the people.” Among their habits we should need to put their education and their power of union among themselves, and consequent strength in a struggle with the masters, to obtain or to raise the market rate of wages. From Ricardo he differed on the subject of wages very much as on the subject of value. Ricardo looked at cost price as the natural value of an article, and mere subsistence as the natural wages of labour. Malthus could do neither.

The issues between the two economists are nowhere so well or so calmly stated as in a paper written by Malthus (a few months after Ricardo’s death) in the Quarterly Review,[^[630]] where he deals with MacCulloch’s treatise on Political Economy.[^[631]] In that article Malthus professes to regard the political economy of Ricardo, James Mill, and most of the economical writers in the Encyclopædia, as a new and wrong departure. It is said to have been regarded by the writer as one of the best economical papers he ever wrote;[^[632]] and, among other virtues, it has the merit of perfect courtesy and respect towards the persons criticized. Their system, he says,[^[633]] is remarkably like that of the French economists. They “were equally men of the most unquestionable genius, of the highest honour and integrity, and of the most simple, modest, and amiable manners. Their systems were equally distinguished for their discordance with common notions, the apparent closeness of their reasonings, and the mathematical precision of their calculations and conclusions founded on their assumed data. These qualities in the systems and their founders, together with the desire so often felt by readers of moderate abilities of being thought to understand what is considered by competent judges as difficult, increased the number of their devoted followers in such a degree, that in France it included almost all the able men who were inclined to attend to such subjects, and in England a very large proportion of them.

“The specific error of the French economists was the having taken so confined a view of wealth and its sources as not to include the results of manufacturing and mercantile industry.

“The specific error of the new school in England is the having taken so confined a view of value as not to include the results of demand and supply, and of the relative abundance and competition of capital.

“Facts and experience have, in the course of some years, gradually converted the economists of France from the erroneous and inapplicable theory of Quesnay to the juster and more practical theory of Adam Smith; and, as we are fully convinced that an error equally fundamental and important is involved in the system of the new school in England as in that of the French economists, we cannot but hope and expect that similar causes will, in time, produce in our own country similar effects in the correction of error and the establishment of truth.”

The new school has, according to Malthus, three main principles. The first is, that what determines value is the quantity of labour that a thing costs to make,—the second, that supply and demand do not as a rule affect values,—and the third, that fertility of soil and not competition regulates the rate of profits. The new school thinks that profits enter so little into the price of an article that they may be neglected altogether in the computation of the causes of value. But (says Malthus) the value of a stone wall would be due, nearly all of it, to labour, and the value of a cask of old wine kept for twenty or thirty years would be largely due to profits. £50 worth of stone wall would have much more labour “worked up in it” than £50 worth of old wine. It is not sufficient to answer that profits are simply accumulated wages. As well say that five is another name for four. Ricardo himself introduced many qualifications into his own statement that value is due to labour. The principle (he confessed) was modified by the use of machinery and by the unequal durability of capital.[^[634]]

Malthus admits the truth of Ricardo’s dogma that profits and wages can only increase at each other’s expense, and he even applies this principle of Ricardo’s in a new way to the facts of the commercial depression that had prevailed since the peace.[^[635]] It was universally allowed there had been a less demand for labour and a great fall in wages, but, it was also allowed, a much greater fall in profits; so that wages while lower in gross amount bore a higher proportion to profits than before. The reason was that, while the competition of labourers was great, the competition of capitalists with capitalists was still greater. The result was a universal fall of prices; the wages, though relatively greater, were absolutely less in amount, and the demand for labour would have been greater if prices had risen and the capitalist had got greater returns to his capital. Malthus would not go farther than this, and the Ricardian doctrine needs to be otherwise applied to yield the doctrine of a wages fund. It was applied in some such way as follows:—Competition drives prices down to the cost of production; this means that at any given time the sum total of profits and wages cannot be more than they actually are, and both are kept down by competition to their minimum; the masters could not give higher wages without cutting down their profits, the men could not get less wages without either starving or being driven to seek other employments. Malthus does not so apply his doctrines. To him, what fixes the sum total of wages and profits is not the cost of production, but the demand for the thing produced; not the labour spent on a thing, but the labour that others are willing to give for it; and the cause of value is not cost, but demand acting with supply. Ricardo, who prefers to confine his theories to natural value, allows that the state of the demand and supply raises market value above or depresses it below cost price; and he does not see how seriously his own qualifications[^[636]] impair the truth of his theory of value even when the value is “natural.”[^[637]] It is true, on the other hand, that the supply at any given time is a supply that will not be kept up unless the cost price be paid back. The cost price would certainly be the minimum below which prices could not permanently pass. But to Ricardo the cost in labour is the formal as well as the material cause of a value; to Malthus it is only the material, and only part of that, a mere sine quâ non, while the efficient is the demand, and the final is the consumption of the article by its last buyer or user.

The third leading tenet of the new school, says Malthus, is that the rate of profits in a country depends on the fertility of the soil there, and not, as Adam Smith thought, on the competition of capital with capital for employment. Against them Malthus maintains that there is no necessary (though there is a frequent) connection between the productiveness of industry and the rate of profits, still less between the latter and the productiveness of any one single industry, such as agriculture. Profits depend on the proportion of the whole produce which “goes to replace the advances of the capitalist”; but this proportion may remain the same when the productiveness of industry is very various. In the previous eight or nine years, say from 1815 to 1824, there had certainly been no costliness in production. Corn had been cheap, and farmers’ losses had led to the discontinuance of high farming, and especially of the forced cultivation of the dear years. The production, therefore, was at the cost of much less labour. But profits, instead of higher, were much lower. Abundance of produce and competition of producers had caused a fall in the value of produce, so that it was possible for the labourer to receive a greater share of what he made, though his labour had not become more productive. Ricardo does not take sufficient account of the influence of prices, both on wages and on profits.

There had in fact been over-production and a general glut. James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy[^[638]] contain a careful demonstration that general gluts are impossible. It was emphatically a controversial passage, and in the pages of John Mill it has the look of an anachronism. All depended on the meaning of “general.” If it meant universal, the case was impossible. It is incredible that all without exception should have something to sell and no wish to buy. To offer anything for sale must of itself imply a desire to buy something else with it, either directly or by means of money. Even a very near approach to universality is not easy to understand; and it would mean simply that a bad organization of the world’s markets had prevented buyers and sellers from reaching each other, and prevented goods from going where they are wanted, at the time when they are wanted; it would mean that not the malady but the scale and degree of it had passed belief.[^[639]]

CHAPTER III.
GENERAL GLUTS.

French War and English Trade—English Currency—Bullion Committee—Restriction not the only Cause of High Prices—Ricardo on Currency—Tooke on Prices—Say on Gluts—English Trade from 1824—High and Low Wages—Some Fallacies of Malthus.

The discussion on General Gluts was simply a phase of the discussions on Value; and the prominence of such discussions in the political economy of sixty years ago was largely due to the peculiar effects on trade and prices of a twenty years’ war with France. The theories of economists were becoming most abstract precisely at the time when the justest generalizations were most severely tested by abnormal conditions. Even if the Industrial Revolution heralded by the Wealth of Nations had been allowed a free course, the new conditions of manufacture would have raised new economical questions; and they could not have failed to turn, to some extent, on the subject of value, which Adam Smith had by no means exhausted. But there was no free course. War was declared against England by France in 1793. In the same year Pitt was forced to offer English merchants a loan of public money, to cure a financial crisis. Then followed, under the long Tory supremacy, heavy taxes, repressive laws, and something more nearly approaching a war of classes than anything known in England before or since.

The effects of the first ten years of the French war (1793 to 1802) were to all appearance rather good than bad. Britain itself, unlike the other belligerent countries, was always intact, and the labours of British manufacturers could go on as if nothing unusual was happening on the Continent. Our command of the sea, to say nothing of the conquest of new countries, gave us trade which others lost, and made amends for the annulment of the French treaty of commerce, and the loss of the Dutch trade. In 1806 the situation became less pleasant. The Berlin and Milan decrees excluding us from almost every country in Europe, the retaliatory Orders in Council and consequent alienation of America did real damage to English commerce. The very expectations they caused of a probable scarcity of particular goods sent up prices; and, with the real scarcity, contributed to an acute disturbance of trade, which lasted about five years for the Continent and three years more for America (1807–12, 1807–15). New markets were opened to us in South America; and the pent-up commercial enterprise of our countrymen vented itself in that direction, with wild disregard of the needs of consumers in that quarter.[^[640]] The same happened, with more reason, in 1814 and 1815. When peace was restored, it was thought that the whole Continent must be eager to have our goods, after being so long without them; and we sent them lavishly everywhere without waiting for orders. Unhappily the rest of Europe was exhausted by the war, which had lessened their production; and such products as they could offer us in exchange for our manufactures we seldom took without taxing. The very food that we most wanted from them we were careful to keep out till the last moment.[^[641]] Anything more unlike the “simple system of natural liberty” could not be conceived; and the result certainly seemed to be an over-production on our part;—it was at any rate a reign of low prices and deep commercial depression. This was not all. Since 1797 we had had a paper currency of uncertain value. In that year the Bank of England, whose department of issue was not then separated from its department of banking, gave advances to Government, in return for which it was relieved of immediate obligation to pay gold to the holders of its notes. As long as the issues were moderate, the notes kept their value; but this was a time when economical substitutes for the currency, cheques and bills and County notes, were lessening the proportion of the Bank’s notes to the total transactions of trade; and the Bank’s power of calculating the public need without the natural safety-valve of convertibility became more and more fallible; the circulation soon contained superfluous paper, which dragged down the whole currency. In these circumstances, discussions on currency gained an interest they could never have had in the abstract; and they led to measures of the most practical and permanent usefulness. Ricardo’s tract The High Price of Gold Bullion a Proof of the Depreciation of Bank-Notes (1809) prepared the way for the Bullion Committee of the House of Commons (1810), and through them for our own Bank Charter Act (1844). Malthus played a more quiet part. His chief writings on the subject of the currency were two magazine articles, one in the Edinburgh Review of February 1811,[^[642]] and another in the Quarterly Review of April 1823.

The first treats of The Depreciation of Paper Currency, and is a review of pamphlets by the leading advocates and assailants of the principles of the Bullion Committee’s Report. The Committee had inquired into three subjects: the high price of gold bullion, the state of the currency, and the state of the foreign Exchanges. As to the first, they found that, while an ounce of standard gold was converted at the Mint into £3 17s. 10½d. (which sum was therefore the Mint price of gold bullion), the said ounce could not in the years 1806–8 be bought by the Mint for less than £4 in bank-notes, or in 1809 for less than £4 10s. The market price had risen to that extent above the Mint price, of gold bullion. As to the second, they found that guineas had gone out of circulation, and were practically replaced by small notes between £1 and £5. Finally, as to the third, they found that from the end of 1808 the Exchanges had become more and more unfavourable to England, till in 1809–10 they were with Hamburg nine, with Amsterdam seven, with Paris more than fourteen per cent. below par. After examination of witnesses and consideration of their evidence, the Committee resolved “that there is at present an excess in the paper circulation of this country, of which the most unequivocal symptom is the very high price of bullion, and next to that the low state of the Continental Exchanges; that this excess is to be ascribed to the want of a sufficient check and control in the issues of paper from the Bank of England, and originally to the suspension of cash payments, which removed the natural and true control.” The effects had been very serious, especially on the wages of common country labour (Report, p. 73); and the Committee recommend a speedy return to the principle of cash payments, whether the nation be at peace or war, though caution demands that this take place gradually, in the space of two years. It took place, not in two years, but in more than ten, namely on 1st May 1821,[^[643]] Parliament not agreeing to the change till 1819.[^[644]] Cobbett’s venture (to be broiled on a gridiron when the Bank paid in gold) seemed a perfectly safe one.

Both Malthus and Ricardo agreed with the Report of the Bullion Committee. Ricardo indeed is in a sense the father of it. Malthus (in the Edin. Review) speaks strongly of the bad policy and injustice of continuing the suspension, and he does not spare the Bank of England and its mischievous monopoly,[^[645]] or the “practical men” and their narrow views.[^[646]] Yet he finds fault with Ricardo here as elsewhere for making his statements too absolute. Malthus’ fault is in the contrary direction; he qualifies too much.[^[647]] He thinks that Ricardo has gone too far in attributing all the movements of the Exchanges to excessive or defective currency; a purely commercial excess of imports over exports might, he thinks, cause the same effects, and even in the high price of bullion it was the commercial difficulty that began what the depreciation of currency continued. Ricardo, who replies in a long appendix,[^[648]] answers, in substance, that in any and every case money goes from where it is cheaper to where it is dearer, and therefore from where the currency has lost value to where it has gained it. But this hardly meets the contention of Malthus, that the efficient cause, though it affects the currency, is not in all cases the currency itself, and in the case of an unequal balance of trade, however temporary, the cause of the exportation of the money is rather the superfluity of the goods in the foreign country than the deficiency of the money there;—it would be otherwise when the first cause was in the currency itself. The rest of the article contains little that is new to readers of the Political Economy, and the reference to a possible over-production is chiefly valuable as a sign of the authorship, and as showing that the views of the author were becoming fixed. The personal acquaintance of Malthus with Ricardo dates probably from the appearance of this article;[^[649]] and they continued to discuss and correspond, in perfect friendship, till the death of Ricardo in Sept. 1823.[^[650]]

His friendship with the Edinburgh Reviewers remained unbroken; and, when he wrote in the Quarterly Review, it was the Review not the writer that had changed. On finance, indeed, the Quarterly Review had been saved from unsoundness by Canning’s influence,[^[651]] and an article on Tooke’s Prices need have no politics.

There can be little doubt that Thomas Tooke[^[652]] was right in holding the difference between the Mint price and the market price of gold bullion to be the full measure of the effect of this depreciation upon prices, the rest of the increase being due to great demand with small supply, being as a rule much exaggerated and in its worst forms purely local. He pointed out that there was, as a matter of fact, no coincidence between the Bank’s contraction or extension of its issues and the fall or rise of prices in the market outside. Prices rose, for example, in 1795 and 1796, when the Bank’s circulation had been not extended but contracted to meet the commercial crisis; and in 1798, when the Bank’s issues were larger, prices actually fell to what they had been in 1793. Moreover, when some prices went up, others went down. When the prices of provisions went up in 1799 and 1800, the prices of colonial wares went down. The ruling cause (Tooke argues) was not the issue of many or few bank-notes, but scarcity and plenty, especially the plenty of a good harvest and the scarcity of a bad one. Wages in the same way fluctuated rather by the harvests than by the currency, but not by either so much as by the changes in general trade; it would not be true to say that the high or low prices produced high or low wages, but what produced the one produced the other. The recoil of the speculation that followed the Peace brought down both together; there was a glut not only of goods but of hands; and there were the discarded men of the army to swell the numbers of the unemployed. The Luddite outbreaks against machines, as taking work away from the hands, had made a notable beginning in 1812 during the war; in 1816, the year after the Peace, they began again with greater violence. The discussions of Say and Malthus on Over-production, and the reasonings in Ricardo (1817) and James Mill (1821) on Wages and the Wages Fund, are as truly commentaries on these events as the Letter of Cobbett to the Luddites[^[653]] or the volumes of Tooke on Prices.

Malthus has adroitly used the work of Tooke to support his own economical positions. In a review in the Quarterly for April 1823[^[654]] (pages 214 seq.) he tries to show that Mr. Tooke’s conclusions as to the high and low prices of the past thirty years prove the following general statements:—First, that values and therefore prices depend on the supply compared with the demand, and are only affected by the labour required to produce goods (i. e. by what Ricardo counts the main cause of value) so far as this labour is the main condition of their supply; second, that the supply and demand are chiefly affected by the seasons, and, of the other causes, war may limit the supply but can hardly cause a demand; third, that when demand outruns supply trade is brisk, when supply outruns demand trade is dull; and that, finally, a long-continued deficiency or a long-continued excess of this kind brings with it a fall or a rise in the value of the precious metals.[^[655]] Malthus, however, goes further than Tooke with the Bullion Committee. Though on the bullion question the opposing parties, Bosanquet and Ricardo, seemed to him to be devoted to a preconceived theory,[^[656]] the Report itself was “more free from this error of preconception than any work that had appeared on the subject;”[^[657]] and he agreed with it that there had been a greater rise of prices and of wages at the end of the period of restriction, than could be explained by the bad seasons, and demand for men, and the difference between paper and gold. He is old-fashioned enough to think that even with convertibility there might be over-issue and depreciation, and speculation on a basis of paper. His reasoning on this point is hardly sound. It depends on a misapplication of the axiom that, in the case of necessaries, a very small deficiency in the supply will cause a very great increase in the price,—e. g. that wheat may rise from 100 to 200 per cent. when the deficiency of the crops is not more than 15 or 30.[^[658]] The profits of English farmers between 1793 and 1815 must therefore have been enormous; and Malthus, though he loves agriculture above manufacture, has taken account of these high gains of individuals in judging the cause of the Agricultural Interest against the public.[^[659]] But in connection with currency he actually speaks as if those gains were a public advantage; be does not see they were a mere transference of public wealth, not an addition to it. The farmer, he says, is obviously “able to set in motion a much greater quantity of industry than before,” at least till wages have risen. “The specific funds destined for the maintenance of labour, though diminished in quantity, are by this happy provision of nature increased in their efficiency;” labourers get more employment, and there is “a burst of prosperity to the producing classes.”[^[660]]

This is a near approach to a worse fallacy than the Wages Fund. The archaic reasoning is the more unhappy, because the reasoner proceeds to use it in a good cause. Jean Baptiste Say[^[661]] had taught that all increased or diminished demand depended on increased or diminished supply, and argued thence, with James Mill and Ricardo, the impossibility of general or rather universal gluts. Goods[^[662]] being always meant to be exchanged with goods, one-half will furnish a market for the other half; and thus, as production (which gives the means of buying) is the sole source of demand (so far as demand is effective), an excess in the supply of one article merely proves a deficiency in the supply of another, and is improperly called over-production. Indeed, whereas consumption takes an article away from the market, production brings one into it, and thereby increases, pro tanto, the demand by increasing the means of buying. James Mill’s neat demonstration of this doctrine[^[663]] would be quite conclusive if we, first of all, defined demand and supply so as to include each other, and, second, supposed general to mean universal. The reply of Malthus himself is that goods are not always exchanged for goods, but frequently, perhaps most frequently, for labour. Say rejoins that he for his part used a term (“products”) which includes both goods and services, and that the latter are always the real object of an exchange.[^[664]] Malthus makes a better point when he accuses his opponents of treating goods as if they were mathematical symbols, instead of objects of human consumption owing their whole character to human wants.[^[665]] But his case could be made convincing even on his opponents’ premises. Division of labour, all admitted, is limited by the extent of the market;[^[666]] allow that the most satisfactory cure for the limitation is to widen the market, not to lessen the division of the labour—still, given the limitation of the market, the extension of the division of the labour will cause an over-production. All that Malthus maintained was that this might happen in a great many cases as well as in a few; Say went as near as he dared to the assertion that it could not happen at all.

The question of a market, again, is not a mere question of numbers but of wants. A carpet factory, for example, among a people who preferred bare floors would have no market, whatever the numbers and even the wealth of the people. Say does not do full justice to Malthus in this connection. He thinks that the author of the Essay on Population cannot consistently believe in the possibility of a great abundance of products together with a stationary number of parsimonious consumers. But Malthus had allowed that in one case, the case of food, there could be no over-production,[^[667]] the want in that case being constant, whereas, curiously enough, Ricardo thinks that food is the one object of which there might be a glut. “If every man were to forego the use of luxuries and be intent only on accumulation, a quantity of necessaries might be produced for which there could not be any immediate consumption. Of commodities so limited in number there might undoubtedly be a universal glut, and consequently there might neither be demand for an additional quantity of such commodities nor profits on the employment of more capital. If men ceased to consume they would cease to produce. This admission does not impugn the general principle,” for there is no likelihood of such a contingency as it supposes;—there is a limit to the desire of food, but there is no limit to the desire of other good things.[^[668]] The insatiableness of human desires is here assumed by Ricardo to be always full-grown, instead of what it is, in perhaps three-fourths of the world, an undeveloped possibility. Till we know that the possibility has become actual, we cannot take for granted that all we produce will be wanted. Malthus did not enter with sympathy or even with full intelligence into the spirit of modern trade. But he sees that large manufacture, with its complement of speculative trading, must succeed or fail precisely as it has judged rightly or judged wrongly of its markets, for it no longer, like the old English small production, waits for orders—it anticipates, woos, and coaxes them. He believes that the awakening of man’s insatiable wants will tend to secure us against both over-population and over-production, by creating a high standard of living. The taste for luxuries, whatever its positive advantages, from the educational or artistic point of view, confers at least this economical benefit.[^[669]]

Malthus gets a similar result by applying to wages his favourite idea of the golden mean. The “funds destined to pay wages” may, he says, be increased either by high prices or by great production at low prices,—increased value without increased quantity, or increased quantity without increased value. The latter is the more secure way, but it lies on the road to “glut.” The most desirable plan is the union of the two. “There is somewhere a happy mean, where, under the actual resources of a country, both the increase of wealth and the demand for labour may be a maximum. A taste for conveniences and comforts not only tends to create a more steady demand for labour than a taste for personal services, but by cheapening manufactures and the products of foreign commerce, including many of the necessaries of the labouring classes, it actually enlarges the limits of the effectual demand for labour, and renders it for a longer time effective.”[^[670]] If any one had urged against this, in the words of Mill, that a demand for goods is not a demand for labour, but simply gives labour a new direction, Malthus would probably have answered that the new direction was all important, because the trade begun in it might be a trade in goods more widely used, and might therefore last longer and more steadily than the old trade.

We see that in his views of this subject, expounded tediously enough, and at unnecessary length, Malthus had constant thought of the relations of production and distribution to consumption as well as to each other, for the condition of the people was always more important to him than the state of the articles concerned. But he never yielded to his feelings so far as to adopt Sismondi’s reactionary ideas on the effects of machinery on the workmen.[^[671]] He never wrote any description of the evils of division of labour at all so strong as Adam Smith’s.[^[672]] He goes little farther than Ricardo, who says in a well-known passage:—“The same cause which may increase the nett revenue of the country may at the same time render the population redundant and deteriorate the condition of the labourer,” for all the increase may possibly be devoted to fixed and not circulating capital, to machinery and buildings instead of wages.[^[673]] Ricardo’s admission, that he was wrong in not recognizing this sooner, makes us wonder (as men were even then doing in Germany over similar confessions of their philosophers) whether his demonstrations are more accurate than ordinary reasonings. His brother economists never claimed infallibility. Adam Smith gave up his defence of Usury Laws.[^[674]] Malthus amended his first views on population, to say nothing of the measure of value.[^[675]] Mill gave up the Wages Fund. It was only the minor economists who proudly remained at the end where they were at the beginning. James Mill refused to follow Ricardo in allowing that food could be over-produced, and MacCulloch refused to go with him in the admission above quoted, that increase of wealth might go to fixed capital instead of wages.[^[676]] Orthodox economy became most abstract when on the death of Ricardo in 1823 its doctrines passed into the hands of the Minor Prophets.

In the last ten years of his life Malthus made no serious change in his economical views, and approached no nearer to the Ricardians. They were years when economists and political reformers had not learned to work together so harmoniously as they were to do after his death. Huskisson’s changes in commercial policy were preparing the way in high quarters for free trade. The sliding scale of corn duties introduced in 1826 pointed on the whole in the same direction. But the agitation of the humbler classes for political freedom, made solid as it was by an appreciable progress in popular education,[^[677]] and kept within bounds of law by the influence of Cobbett,[^[678]] went on in a way apart; and it will be remembered how Chartism stood aloof from the Anti-Corn-Law League. A man might be an advanced economist and social reformer and a reactionary in politics. In 1824, when trades unions were for the first time allowed by law and the Factory Acts were still too imperfect to give the weak a fair chance against the strong, the “natural state of things,” free development of individual and national faculties, did not exist; and Malthus, who missed them keenly, would have been much amazed to hear that his doctrines were, like Ricardo’s, a vindication of things as they are. Not only the notorious fact of his opposition to Ricardo, but his views on commercial policy are against the notion.[^[679]] At the Peace there were many fallacies current about wages. The new Corn Law of 1815 had inaugurated the aggressive policy of the agricultural interest, who frankly endeavoured, by forms of law, to convert an occasional scarcity into a permanent one, and keep prices at 80s. a quarter. Not a few false friends of the working man recommended him to countenance the law and let his bread be made dear, for then, said they, his wages would be made high. Many manufacturers, on the other hand, were declaring the interest of the country to be low wages, and, unto that end, cheap food and a great population. Malthus was with neither. His partial approval of the new Corn Law was no doubt based on erroneous grounds; but he held no such mistaken views of wages. His opinion, if not sufficiently obvious from his general views of population, was laid down explicitly in all his writings. He says, for example: “If a country can only be rich, by running a successful race for low wages, I should be disposed to say at once ‘Perish such riches!’”[^[680]] “It is most desirable that the labouring classes should be well paid, for a much more important reason than any that can relate to wealth, namely, the happiness of the great mass of society.”[^[681]] Being asked, “In a national point of view, even if it were admitted that the low rate of wages was an advantage to the capitalist, do you think it fitting that labour should be kept permanently in a state bordering on distress, to avoid the injury that might accrue to the national wealth from diminishing the rate of profit?” he answered, “I should say, by no means fitting; I consider the labouring classes as forming the largest part of the nation, and therefore that their general condition is the most important of all.”[^[682]]

He thinks, however, that the change from low to high wages might quite possibly so reduce profits as to make trade unprofitable. We might need to sacrifice something of our commercial prosperity. He cannot rise to the conception of a society in which the entire body of workmen as consumers would be a sufficient market for the same body as producers. He cannot rid himself of the idea that a body of unproductive consumers is a social necessity, to give a stimulus to production by developing the wants which the manufactures are to satisfy. It seems easy to answer that those unproductive consumers can only pay for the manufactures by means of other products, whencesoever obtained, and there seems no reason why their producers should not obtain them.[^[683]] If the workmen themselves had the wants and supplied them by their own labour, all the results that Malthus desires would be obtained without invidious distinctions of classes, and with distinct improvement in the condition of the workmen. His aims, at least, were good. The indispensable leisure would be secured if the hours of labour were shortened, as he desired them to be. “I have always thought and felt that many among the labouring classes in this country work too hard for their health, happiness, and intellectual improvement.”[^[684]] The general wealth therefore, if need be, must be sacrificed to the general happiness. Factory Acts that would prevent children from labouring too young or too long[^[685]] he thoroughly approves; though such Factory Acts as would interfere with adult labour he considers an injustice to the work-people themselves, and a hopeless interference with “the principles of competition, one of the most general principles by which the business of society is carried on.”[^[686]] The salvation of the labouring classes must come from themselves, from their own “simultaneous resolution to work fewer hours in the day.” But trades unions, as we now know them, had not then come into being; and he talks of a future improvement of the working classes in knowledge, comfort, and self-restraint,[^[687]] with much hesitation.

We have seen that the economics of Malthus, whether in relation to the landlords, the employers, or the workmen, are by no means identical with the economics of Ricardo and his school, which have been the ruling and orthodox doctrine for the first half of the nineteenth century.

It would be neither complimentary nor true to ascribe the difference to the logic of sentiment; but it is true that the acute sensitiveness of Malthus to the evils of poverty kept constantly before him large classes of facts which Ricardo seemed willing to forget, and the path that he took, though long ago obscured and forgotten, led him in some important points away from laissez faire to doctrines of our own day, in which society acting through its Government is allowed an originative and not merely a regulative action in the matter of industry and wealth.

Resuming the thread of the essay, we shall find that the relation of society to its destitute poor is not to Malthus, as to Ricardo, a question of taxation and finance, but a problem of morals and politics, which could only be solved by a clear view of the relation of the citizen to the commonwealth.

CHAPTER IV.
THE BEGGAR.

Arrangement of the Essay—Nature’s Mighty Feast—Tract on High Price of Provisions—I cannot, therefore I ought not—Poor Laws condemned—Frederick the Great’s Army—Mitigation of Bad Effects of Poor Law—Step towards Abolition—New Poor Law.

In the foregoing brief review of the economical doctrines of Malthus, the chapters on commercial policy and the Corn Laws,[^[688]] in the third book of the Essay on Population, have been already noticed. As the First and Second books of the essay were supposed to deal with the state of population in past and in present times, the Third is supposed to deal with the “different systems of expedients which have been proposed or have prevailed in society” for curing the evils arising from the principle of population, while the Fourth relates to the future prospects of society, and the possibility of removing the evils in question. This division of the subject could not be maintained very strictly. The “systems proposed” no doubt were in most cases mere theories and could be considered by themselves; but the “systems that prevailed” included such laws as the Corn Laws and Poor Laws, which directly affected the present habits and wealth of the people, and might fairly have been considered in the second book. The fourth book might quite logically have been part of the third, for it simply adds to the “systems proposed” the proposal of Malthus himself. The arrangement is not in itself so perfect or so closely respected by its author that we need have any remorse for disregarding it. The earliest chapters of the third book (i. and ii.) are substantially the refutation of Godwin, Wallace, Condorcet, as it appeared in 1798, with a postscript (ch. iii.) on Owen and Spence, which will be best considered in another place.[^[689]] In point of style they are probably the best in the book.

After a chapter (iv.) on Emigration[^[690]] come three chapters on the Poor Laws, to be viewed with ch. viii. of the fourth book, which deals with Plans for their Abolition. Of all the applications of the doctrines of Malthus, their application to pauperism was probably, at the time, of the greatest public interest. Even the first essay had distinct bearing on Pitt’s Poor Bill; the next writing of the author was on a question of parish relief; and these three chapters in the later Essay on Population have influenced public opinion and legislation about the destitute poor almost as powerfully as the Wealth of Nations has influenced commercial policy. Malthus is the father not only of the new Poor Law, but of all our latter-day societies for the organization of charity.

The subject is best introduced in the words of a celebrated parable, which Malthus having used once was never afterwards allowed to forget:[^[691]]—“A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents, on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he do not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. If these guests get up and make room for him, other intruders immediately appear demanding the same favour. The report of a provision for all that come, fills the hall with numerous claimants. The order and harmony of the feast is disturbed, the plenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests is destroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence in every part of the hall, and by the clamorous importunity of those, who are justly enraged at not finding the provision which they had been taught to expect. The guests learn too late their error, in counteracting those strict orders to all intruders, issued by the great mistress of the feast, who, wishing that all her guests should have plenty, and knowing that she could not provide for unlimited numbers, humanely refused to admit fresh comers when her table was already full.”[^[692]]

Our neighbours’ misfortunes have seldom been made so picturesque. The figure itself was no new one. Lucretius had written:—

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

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

“From Nature’s temperate feast rose satisfied,

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

But the new application took hold on the public fancy. Sir William Pulteney and Windham are said to have been, beyond others, delighted with its conservative moral.[^[695]] Malthus may have got the hint of it from a passage in Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy. Paley was criticizing a justification of private property, which founded it on every man’s right to take what he wants of the things God made for the use of all, just as, when an entertainment is given to the freeholders (as the free and independent electors?) of a county, we see them coming in and eating and drinking each what he chooses, without asking the consent of the other guests. The simile, says Paley, is not perfect, for in a freeholder’s feast nobody is allowed to fill his pockets or to throw anything away, “especially if by so doing he pinched the guests at the lower end of the table.”[^[696]]

Even the friends of Malthus thought the passage too gloomy; and, as every one noticed,[^[697]] it was not retained after 1803. It contains, however, at least two positions that were never retracted:—that the poor cannot claim relief as a right, but only as a favour, and that poor relief can only raise one man by depressing another. The latter position may be illustrated from the tract written in 1800 on the High Price of Provisions. The main aim of the tract was to show that the price was too extravagantly high to be due to the deficiency, which was admittedly only one-fourth. But the author throws light on his own general doctrines.[^[698]] He argues, in substance, that to give relief in money is to enable the relieved persons to retain their ordinary rate of consumption at the expense of the rest. To this the reply is obvious:—the sufficiency of the stock is not so finely calculated, neither is the amount of it so fixed that it cannot be increased from home or foreign stores,—and to withdraw money from the rich for the poor, and increase the country’s total expenditure on necessaries, might be simply to divert the stream of importation into the channel of necessaries, and lead to a larger use of food other than bread. Under the conditions of the time, however, the author’s views were not unnatural. On his return from Sweden in 1800 he found scarcity prevailing in England as elsewhere, but with prices much higher than in other countries. These were the days when Chief Justice Kenyon and a jury enforced the antiquated laws against forestalling and regrating.[^[699]] Malthus had not read his Adam Smith to so little purpose that he could approve such proceedings; much of his pamphlet was simply an application, to one particular case, of the principles of the Wealth of Nations (Book IV. chap. v.).[^[700]] Neither could he agree with the notion that the paper currency had done it all.[^[701]] Settling down to his parish work in Surrey, he watched the course of events. What happened, he said, there and presumably elsewhere was as follows:—In progress of the scarcity the poor complained to the justices that their wages were too low to buy bread at present prices; the justices thereupon inquired at what, as the lowest wages, they would have been able to buy it, and then “very humanely, and I am far from saying improperly,” gave parish relief accordingly.[^[702]] But, like the water from the mouth of Tantalus, the corn slipped from the grasp of the poor; prices rose a step further, and the relief had to follow the prices.

The rates accordingly rose in many places from four to fourteen shillings in the pound. By the double burden of dear food and high rates, perhaps five or six millions of the richer classes were certainly made to feel the pinch of the scarcity, which would otherwise have been borne, say by two millions of the poorest, who would have died under it.[^[703]] In this instance the Poor Laws did the country a distinct service. But it was done by taking from the first guests to give to the importunate intruders, and could not justify a general eulogy of the Poor Laws. The whole drift of the Essay on Population had gone against such institutions; and “two years’ reflection,” says the writer of the Essay, “have served strongly to convince me of the truth of the principle there advanced, and of its being the real cause of the continued depression and poverty of the lower classes of society, of the total inadequacy of all the present establishments in their favour to relieve them, and of the [certainty of] periodical returns of such seasons of distress as we have of late experienced.”[^[704]] In the first essay he had spoken strongly not only against Pitt’s new Poor Bill, but against all legal relief, and amongst other reasons precisely on the ground that it caused food to rise in price beyond the point to which scarcity would have raised it apart from interference.[^[705]]

The second was a stronger reason;—in the language of Kant, the claim allowed (with little qualification[^[706]]) by the English Poor Laws was a claim that could not be made universal without contradiction. If every one exercised the supposed right of demanding relief, no community could fulfil the supposed duty of granting it.[^[707]] If it could have been fulfilled, Malthus thinks, the obligation would have held; and, instead of declaring “I cannot, therefore I ought not,” he would have confessed, “I can, therefore I ought.”[^[708]] As the case stands, he agrees with Sir Frederick Eden in thinking the giving of legal relief impracticable, and therefore no duty, and also that, “upon the whole, the sum of good to be expected from a compulsory maintenance of the poor will be far outbalanced by the sum of evil which it will inevitably create.”[^[709]] It relieved individual suffering at the cost of making the suffering general. It created the poor which it maintained, for it led men to marry with the certainty of parish assistance. It thereby increased the population without increasing the food of the country, and it has to a large extent broken down the ancient spirit of independence. “Hard as it may appear in individual instances, dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful.”[^[710]] High wages and independence and moral restraint are better than low wages with a parish supplement and a pauper family. “I feel persuaded that if the Poor Laws had never existed in this country, though there might have been a few more instances of very severe distress, the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would have been much greater than it is at present.”[^[711]] This was his belief to the end.[^[712]]

An allegory of these things may be found in Dr. John Moore’s description of the army of Frederick the Great. Dr. Moore saw a man caned for being a few seconds late in replacing his ramrod; and the officers told him that, since they could not distinguish wilful blunders from accidental, they punished all alike, and the result, they said, was excellent; all the men were on the alert, and fewer blunders were committed on the whole. It used to be common on field-days for dragoons to have their hats blown off and to be thrown from their horses. At last a general gave orders to punish every man to whom either of these accidents happened; since then hardly anybody lost his hat or fell from his horse. Dr. Moore heard of a poor hussar who had fallen from his horse at last review, and was to be punished for it as soon as he could leave the hospital. This seemed hard, but the King of Prussia thought he could only hope to make his army superior to others by improving its discipline, training its officers by honour and disgrace, and its privates by physical punishment; he considered that the occasional suffering of an innocent individual does less harm to an army than the toleration of negligence, which makes the negligence greater.[^[713]] So far as legal relief goes, Malthus would recommend the same martial severity, and try to put men on their guard against poverty by making them bear the discipline of its consequences. There are other points in which the allegory applies to the “simple system of natural liberty;” the discipline of industrial competition is certainly in some respects as severe as the discipline of an army. On the other hand, society does not consist of picked strong men, but includes the weak also, and its privates are supposed not to take their orders from a commander, but to “fend for themselves.” Society under socialism may resemble an army, but not society under individualism. Malthus, therefore, would have repudiated the analogy. He does not reach his conclusions by a preconceived theory of the state, but by observing the ill results of the common preconceived theory that every citizen when destitute has a right to be supported by the state. He finds that, as a matter of fact, where material relief has been given as a duty, and claimed as a right, the effect on the recipient has been clearly bad; the Poor Law stands condemned by experience.

Yet he admits that the badness of the law has been largely counteracted by the remissness of its execution. The attempt to secure a fixed rate of wages to the labourer in all states of trade has not really been made in England as the Elizabethan Poor Law enjoined. The scantiness of the relief actually given, together with the insolence of the officials concerned in the giving of it, has disturbed the sense of complete security, which in the view of Malthus would in such a case have been fatal. “The desire of bettering our condition and the fear of making it worse, like the vis mediatrix naturæ in physics, is the vis mediatrix reipublicæ in politics, and is continually counteracting the disorders arising from narrow human institutions.” The Poor Law has been so imperfectly carried out that it has left some room still for prudential motives among the labourers; they cannot count on complete provision for their families if they marry recklessly, and some few of them still think caution needful. Moreover, from fear of the Poor Law the rich will often refuse to build cottages, lest their occupants become paupers.[^[714]] In the third place, pauper children, like foundlings, do not live long.[^[715]]

In his Letter to Samuel Whitbread, M.P., on his proposed Bill for the amendment of the Poor Laws (1807), Malthus allows that abolition must not come till public opinion is ripe for it; but he recommends legislation in the direction of abolition, to prepare the minds of all classes for the final steps, and to expose to the working classes the delusiveness of the present boon. Poor Laws, he says, are peculiar to England, and their absence in other countries does not seem to have the effects expected from their abolition here. In reply to Malthus, it might be urged that the Poor Laws are not entirely peculiar to England, but occur in Denmark and elsewhere.[^[716]] In the second place, as MacCulloch argues in a letter, aimed at Malthus, to Macvey Napier,[^[717]] Britain is peculiarly subject to fluctuations in trade, due, for example, to the changes in foreign tariffs, and therefore there are more cases of sudden and unavoidable distress, that need such a provision as the Poor Law’s. In the third place, too, it is difficult to see how we can make begging unlawful if we make legal relief inaccessible,[^[718]] any more than we can logically make education compulsory while we insist on the payment of fees. In the fourth place, an indiscriminate private charity is probably more mischievous than a discriminating public relief. Malthus, however, was not against all relief, but only against it when claimed as a right; and he was fully aware that the risks of the English working man were greater than those of his Continental brethren. All he desired was to give the workman scope for that sense of personal responsibility out of which the Poor Law was beguiling him. He knew quite well that no good end would be served by the removal of the Poor Law, unless the public had been educated out of the evil ways of it. He proposed therefore to make a gradual change, the essence of which was to be the disclaimer of any right on the part of a poor man to be supported at the public expense; children have a right to be supported by their parents, but not by the public.[^[719]] Let a law be passed, he said, declaring that no legitimate child born from any marriage taking place a year after the law’s enactment, and no illegitimate born two years thereafter, shall ever be entitled to parish relief. “And to give a more general knowledge of this law, and to enforce it more strongly on the minds of the lower classes of people, the clergyman of each parish should, previously to the solemnization of a marriage, read a short address to the parties, stating the strong obligation on every man to support his own children; the impropriety, and even immorality, of marrying without a fair prospect of being able to do this; the evils which had resulted to the poor themselves, from the attempt which had been made to assist, by public institutions, in a duty which ought to be exclusively appropriated to parents, and the absolute necessity which had at length appeared, of abandoning all such institutions, on account of their producing effects totally opposite to those which were intended. This would operate as a fair, distinct, and precise notice which no man could well mistake, and without pressing hard upon any particular individuals, would at once throw off the rising generation from their miserable and helpless dependence upon the Government and the rich.”[^[720]] Both their irritation against the upper classes and their helplessness in devising expedients in time of want, arise from “the wretched system of governing too much. When the poor were once taught, by the abolition of the Poor Laws, and a proper knowledge of their real situation, to depend more upon themselves, we might rest secure that they would be fruitful enough in resources, and that the evils which were absolutely irremediable they would bear with the fortitude of men and the resignation of Christians.”[^[721]] However comical may be the picture of a clergyman following up the very un-Malthusian marriage service by such a moral lecture as is here recommended, the principle of the recommendation is sober sense, and has largely influenced the benevolence of later philanthropists. Dr. Chalmers applied it in his Parochial System, which would have been an admirable substitute for the Poor Law on the (unfortunately untrue) hypothesis of an absence of sects. The Mendicity Society (dating from 1815) and the Charity Organisation (from 1869) build on the same foundation.

The new Poor Law of 1834 differed from Malthus in that it did not deny the right to relieve, and still kept up the fiction that the law of Elizabeth was good, and we had degenerated from it.[^[722]] But it allowed the right only to the indigent,[^[723]] refusing all relief in aid of wages to the merely poor and the able-bodied; and it carried out the principle that dependent poverty (in the words of Malthus) should be held disgraceful and made disagreeable. “Every penny bestowed that tends to render the condition of a pauper more eligible than that of the independent labourer is a bounty on indolence and vice.” “In proportion as the condition of any pauper class is elevated above the condition of independent labourers, the condition of the independent class is depressed.”[^[724]] If this meant that poor relief should run a race with the average wages of labour, keeping always one stage behind them, it might be argued that in good times a pauper would get too much comfort and in bad times too little food. But the disgrace of dependence and the discomfort of constraint are the deterrents which Malthus himself has most in mind.

Without the discussions raised by the Essay on Population it is very doubtful if public opinion would have been so far advanced in 1834 as to make a bill, drawn on such lines, at all likely to pass into law. The abolition of outdoor relief to the able-bodied was nothing short of a revolution. It had needed a lifetime of economical doctrine, reproof, and correction to convince our public men, and to some extent the nation, that the way of rigour was at once the way of justice, of mercy, and of self-interest. The history of the English Poor Law is ample proof that men do not instinctively follow their own interest. It was the ratepayer’s interest,[^[725]] unless he was an employer, that relief should be sparely given; and it was given lavishly. It was the poor man’s interest to be thrifty and sober; and as a rule he was neither. There was no hope of reform till both rich and poor learned a deeper sense of their personal responsibility for the remoter effects of their own acts, whether unwisely benevolent or heedlessly selfish. The clear consciousness of personal responsibility seems to Malthus to be the soul and centre of every healthy reform. In this sense, at least, he would say that virtue is knowledge.

His thoughts on society are connected at this point with his thoughts on man’s place and duty in the world. His psychology and ethics, slightly as they are sketched, throw light on his sociology and economics, and must be considered before we can estimate his position in social philosophy. This will lead us over the greater portion of the fourth book of the essay, leaving the critical chapters till we come to deal with the Critics as a body.

BOOK III.
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.

Cardinal Doctrines of the Malthusian Ethics—Application to Desire of Marriage—Place of Man on the Earth—Criticism of Moral Philosophy—Teleology and Utility—Benevolence and Self-love—Malthus and Paley—Greatest Happiness—Earthly Paradise—Malthus and the French Revolution—Malthus not a Political Reactionary—Not committed to laissez faire—His Modifications of that Doctrine—Utilitarianism plus Nationality—Experience as much the Riddle as the Interpretation—The State an Organism—Political Ideals before and after 1846.

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

Nature makes nothing in vain. Every desire has its proper place and proper gratification, if we can find them. The passions are the materials out of which happiness is made; and they are therefore to be regulated and harmonized; they are not to be extinguished, or even diminished in intensity.[^[726]] There is a way of so gratifying the desires that they produce a general balance of consequences in favour of happiness; and there is an opposite way with opposite effects. The former is evidently the way of nature, for utility is the only guide of conduct we have apart from Scripture.[^[727]] We must not eradicate any impulses; but we must follow none so far “as to trench upon some other law [sic] which equally demands our attention.” What is the golden mean, and what is too much or too little, we can only know by our own and others’ experience of the consequences of actions.[^[728]] Nature shows us the wrongness of an act by bringing from it a train of painful consequences. Diseases, instead of being the “inevitable inflictions of Providence,” are “indications that we have offended against some of the laws of nature. The plague at Constantinople and in other towns of the East is a constant admonition of this kind to the inhabitants. The human constitution cannot support such a state of filth and torpor; and as dirt, squalid poverty, and indolence are in the highest degree unfavourable to happiness and virtue,[^[729]] it seems a benevolent dispensation that such a state should by the laws of nature produce disease and death, as a beacon to others to avoid splitting on the same rock.”[^[730]] As epidemics indicate bad food, unwholesome houses, or bad drainage, and as indigestion follows over-eating, so the misery that follows on too great an increase of numbers is simply the law of nature recoiling on the law-breaker.[^[731]] In this case it has taken a longer experience to teach men the conduct most favourable to happiness, and therefore the conduct right for them. But even the best food, best clothing, and best housing have not been taught all at once; and the principle of the lesson is clearly the same in all the cases.

To say, therefore, that the desire of marriage is to be restrained and regulated is not to treat it exceptionally or to deny its naturalness. There is a lawful and there is an irregular gratification even of hunger and thirst; and the irregular is punished both by nature and, when it takes, for example, the form of theft, by human laws. Society could give such punishment only on the ground that the action punished tended to injure the general happiness. The act of the hungry man who steals a loaf is only distinguishable from the act of the hungry man who takes a loaf of his own, by means of its consequences. If all were to steal loaves there would in the end be fewer loaves for everybody.[^[732]] We must apply the same criterion to the irregular gratification of all other desires.

After the desire for food, the desire of marriage is the most powerful and general of our desires. “When we contemplate the constant and severe toil of the greatest part of mankind, it is impossible not to be forcibly impressed with the reflection that the sources of human happiness would be most cruelly diminished if the prospect of a good meal, a warm house, and a comfortable fireside in the evening were not incitements sufficiently vivid to give interest and cheerfulness to the labours and privations of the day.”[^[733]] This desire gives strength of character to a man in proportion as the animal element in it is hidden away out of sight, and in proportion as the gratification of it is won by exertion and, it may be, by waiting. To do as Jacob did for Rachel, a man must have some strength of character. Most of us, in the opinion of Malthus, owe whatever of definite plan there is in our lives to the existence of such a central object of affection.[^[734]] Malthus himself, it will appear, did not marry till on the eve of becoming a professor at the East India College, nearly a year after these passages were written. Even in 1798 he wrote: “Perhaps there is scarcely a man who has once experienced the genuine delights of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasures may have been, that does not look back to the period as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves to bask, which he recollects and contemplates with the fondest regrets, and which he would most wish to live over again.”[^[735]] Such a passage, though it disappeared, with other flowers of language, in the later editions of the essay, show us that Malthus, though wiser, was not colder than his fellow-men, and drew his facts from experience as well as observation, of the matters concerned.[^[736]]

If we assume the intention of the Creator to replenish the earth, we can see a reason in cosmical polity for the strength of this desire of marriage. If the fertility of fertile soils had been as great as the power of population to increase, there would have been no inducement to men to cultivate the poorer soils or frequent the less attractive parts of the earth’s surface; human industry and ingenuity would have wanted their first stimulus.[^[737]] As it is, the disparity of the two powers leads to an over-spreading of the world; men are led to avoid overcrowding from fear of the evils that spring from it. Man’s duties vary with his situations; and, as these are not uniform, but infinitely various, all his powers are kept in play. This language might make us doubt whether the final cause is the development of man, or simply the replenishment of the earth. If the first essay be allowed in evidence, it is clear that man (with whatever justice) is made the chief end of the earth, though his own chief end is not supposed to be realized there.[^[738]]

The natural theology of Malthus and Paley is the foundation of their ethics. It was the English ethics of last century, not only before Kant, but before Bentham. There are signs that Malthus, in his views of metaphysics and of the “moral sentiments,”[^[739]] preferred where he could to draw rather from Tucker than from Paley. Abraham Tucker[^[740]] (the “Edward Search” who began the Light of Nature in 1756, and finished it, blind, in 1774) lived for nearly fifty years[^[741]] at Betchworth Castle near Dorking. It is possible in these days, when near neighbours knew each other better than they care to do now, that Daniel Malthus, though the younger man, may have known Tucker. They were both of them Oxford men, small proprietors, eccentric, literary, and fond of philosophizing. Whether through his father at home or through Paley at college, it is certain that Malthus at an early date studied the Light of Nature and adopted much of its teaching. Before he appeared in public as an author, he had formed some settled philosophical convictions, which (whatever their value) at least left his mind free for its other work, and kept it at peace with itself as regards the problems of philosophy.

The substantial agreement of his views with the doctrines of the Moral and Political Philosophy no doubt helped to bring Malthus under the common prejudice against “Pigeon Paley,”[^[742]] the defender of things as they are and preacher of contentment to starving labourers. When Paley became an open convert to the Essay on Population, the public would no doubt believe their suspicions confirmed. But Malthus and Paley agree not as disciple and master, but at most as disciples of the same master. Malthus tries to work out his own philosophy for himself.[^[743]]

It is open to many criticisms. In his ethics he seems to have made no distinct analysis or classification of the passions. He takes for granted that the Passions are on one side and Reason on the other, and there is no middle term between the two except the Design of God, which is worked out by the passions of men as by external nature, and which is (we are left to infer) in some way akin to human reason, for human reason can find it out. The impulse of benevolence, for example, is said to be, like all our natural passions, “general” (by which he seems to mean vague), “and in some degree indiscriminate and blind;” and, like the impulses of love, anger, ambition, the desire of eating and drinking, or any other of our “natural propensities,” it must be regulated by experience and frequently brought to the test of utility, or it will defeat its own purpose.[^[744]] In other words, Malthus treats all human impulses as if they were appetites, co-ordinate with each other, primary and irresolvable. All desires are equally natural, and abstractedly considered equally virtuous,[^[745]] though not equally strong, and therefore not equally fit at first sight to carry out their Creator’s purpose.

The Reason of Man, therefore, must assist the Reason of his Maker in carrying out the teleology of his passions, as well as the teleology of nature itself.[^[746]] The “apparent object” (or evident final cause), for example, of the desire of marriage is the continuance of the race and the care of the weak, and not merely the happiness of the two persona most concerned.[^[747]] To take another example, the object of the impulse of benevolence is to increase the sum of human happiness by binding the human race together.[^[748]] Self-love is made a stronger motive than benevolence for a wise and perfectly ascertainable purpose. The ascertainment of the purpose, however, presents a difficulty. Acknowledging that we ought to do the will of God, how are we to discover it?

We are told in answer to this question, that the intention of the Creator to procure the good of His creatures is evident partly from Scripture and partly from experience; and it is that intention, so manifested, which we are bound to promote. What on God’s side is teleology, on man’s is utility; utility is the ruling principle of morals. Not being a passion it cannot itself lead to action; but it regulates passion, and that, so powerfully, that all our most important laws and customs, such as the institution of property and the institution of marriage, are simply disguised forms of it.[^[749]] As animals, we follow the dictates of nature, which would mean unhindered passion; but as reasonable beings we are under the strongest obligations to attend to the consequences of our acts, and, if they be evil to ourselves or others, we may justly infer that such a mode of indulging those passions is “not suited to our state or conformable to the will of God.” As moral agents, therefore, it is clearly our duty to restrain the indulgence of our passions in those particular directions, that by thus carefully examining their consequences, and by frequently bringing them to the test of utility, we may gradually acquire a habit of gratifying them only in the way which, being unattended with evil, will clearly “add to the sum of human happiness, and fulfil the apparent purpose of the Creator.”[^[750]] All the moral codes which have laid down the subjection of the passions to reason have been really (thinks Malthus) built on this foundation, whether their promulgators were aware of it or not. “It is the test alone by which we can know independently of the revealed will of God whether a passion ought or ought not to be indulged, and is therefore the surest criterion of modern rules which can be collected from the light of nature.” In other words, our theological postulates lead us to control our passions so as to secure not merely our own individual happiness, but “the greatest sum of human happiness.” And the tendency of an action to promote or diminish the general happiness is our only criterion of its morality.[^[751]]

From this it directly follows that, because the free and indiscriminate indulgence of benevolence leads to the reverse of general happiness, we ought to practise a discriminating charity which blesses him that gives and him that takes. There is what Bastiat would call a harmony between the two.[^[752]]

In this case, indeed, nature reinforces utility by making the passion of self-love stronger in men than the passion of benevolence. Every man pursues his own happiness first as his primary object, and it is best that he should do so. It is best that every man should, in the first instance, work out his own salvation, and have a sense of his own responsibility. Not only charity but moral reformation must begin at home. Benevolence apart from wisdom is even more mischievous than mere self-love, which is not to be identified with the “odious vice of selfishness,” but simply with personal ambition, the person to whom it is personal including as a rule children and parents, and in fact a whole world besides the single atom or “dividual self.”[^[753]] If the desire of giving to others had been as ardent as the desire of giving to ourselves, the human race would not have been equal to the task of providing for all its possible members. But because it is impossible for it to provide for all, there is a tendency in all to provide for themselves first; and, though we consider that the selfish element in this feeling ought to grow less in a man in proportion as he becomes richer and less embarrassed by his own wants, we must recognize that its existence has been due to a wise provision for the general happiness.[^[754]] Malthus does not deny at the same time that benevolence is always the weaker motive, and needs continually to be strengthened by doctrine, reproof, and correction. It ought always to be thought a “great moral duty” to assist our fellow-creatures in distress.[^[755]]

With these ethical views, it was easy for Malthus to meet the objection that the general adoption of the moral restraint recommended in his Essay on Population would diminish the numbers of the people too far. He (or his spokesman) answers[^[756]] that we might as well fear to teach benevolence lest we should make men too careless of their private interests. “There is in such a case a mean point of perfection, which it is our duty to be constantly aiming at; and the circumstance of this point being surrounded on all sides with dangers is only according to the analogy of all ethical experience.” There is as much danger of making men too generous or too compassionate, as there is of “depopulating the world by making them too much the creatures of reason, and giving prudence too great a mastery over the natural passions and affections. The prevailing error in the game of life is, not that we miss the prizes through excess of timidity, but that we overlook the true state of the chances in our eager and sanguine expectations of winning them.[^[757]] Of all the objections that were ever made to a moralist who offered to arm men against the passions that are everywhere seducing them into misery, the most flattering, but undoubtedly the most chimerical, is that his reasons are so strong that, if he were allowed to diffuse them, passion would be extinguished altogether, and the activity as well as the enjoyments of man annihilated along with his vices.”[^[758]]

In his view of the passions and of the moral sentiments, Malthus is clearly a man of the eighteenth century, and on the whole is more nearly at one with Paley than with any moralist after Tucker. There are points of divergence. He could not, in view of his cosmology, have fully approved Paley’s definition of virtue, “doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness.”[^[759]] He may have seen how it followed that a solitary man had no duties, that a pagan had no power to do right, that the moral imperative was hypothetical, and that it had no force for any who abjured their future bliss. At least he contents himself with agreeing that “the will of God is plainly general happiness, as we discover both by Scripture and the light of nature;”[^[760]] and, “provided we discover it, it matters nothing by what means;”—there are clear marks of design in the world showing that its Maker willed the happiness of His creatures; and what He willed they should will.

In other words, the ethical system of both is a utilitarianism which is narrow and personal in its motive (the private happiness of the individual in another world), but broad and catholic in its end (the general happiness of human beings in the present world). It is as if God induced us to promote other people’s happiness now, by telling us that He would in return promote our own by-and-by. There are signs that Malthus took a larger view, and thought rather of the development of the human faculties[^[761]] than of mere satisfaction of desires, both in this world and in the next; but he nowhere distinctly breaks with Paley, and his division of passions into self-love (or prudence) and benevolence is taken straight from that theologian.[^[762]]

By the vagueness of their phraseology when they spoke of the general sum of happiness, the older utilitarians avoided some of the difficulties that encounter their successors. Apart from the hardness of defining happiness and a sum of happiness,[^[763]] there is a difficulty in fixing the precise extent of the generality. The tendency of utilitarianism in the hands of Bentham was towards equality and the removal of privilege; every one to count as one, no one as more than one. But both with him and with the older members it may be doubted whether the doctrine did not tend to benefit the majority at the expense of the minority.

We find Malthus thinking[^[764]] that, had the Poor Laws never existed, there “might have been a few more instances of very severe distress,” but “the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would have been much greater than it is at present.” In other words, what he wanted was the “greatest amount of happiness” on the whole, whatever an “amount” of happiness may mean. Malthus would probably have refused to use the formula of Bentham, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”; he would have counted the first item, the happiness, out of all proportion more important than the second.[^[765]] He had refused something like it at the hands of Paley. “I cannot agree with Archdeacon Paley, who says that the quantity of happiness in any country is best measured by the number of its people. Increasing population is the most certain possible sign of the happiness and prosperity of a state; but the actual population may be only a sign of the happiness that is past.”[^[766]] Malthus would not, for example, have wished to see the highlands of Scotland brought back to their ancient condition, in which they had greater numbers than now living in rude comfort, but also greater numbers exposed to precarious indigence.[^[767]]

On the other hand, it is certain (in spite of a common prejudice) that Malthus desired the great numbers as well as the great happiness, and was indeed quite naturally led by his theological views to prefer a little happiness for each of many individuals to a great deal for each of a few. He “desires a great actual population and a state of society in which abject poverty and dependence are comparatively but little known,”[^[768]]—two perfectly compatible requirements, which if realized together would lead to what may be called Malthus’ secondary or earthly paradise, which is not above mundane criticism.

This earthly paradise is, even in our author’s opinion, the end most visibly concerned in our schemes of reform. His idea of it as a society where moral restraint is perfect, invites the remark that the chief end of society cannot be the mere removal of evil; it must be the establishment of some good, the former being at the utmost an essential condition sine quâ non of the latter. Moreover, moral restraint is not the removal of every but only of one evil; and it kills only one cause of poverty. A complete reformation must not only remove all the evils, but must positively amend and transform all the three branches of social economy,—the making, the sharing, and the using of wealth,—not one or even two of them alone. Every Utopian scheme should be tested by the question: Does it reform all three, or only one, or two, of the three? Neglect of the third might spoil all. A scheme which affects all three, however, must have something like a Religion in it. With these reservations Malthus’ picture of the good time coming has much value and interest.[^[769]]

Unlike Godwin, he relies on the ordinary motives of men, which he regards as forms of an enlightened self-love. Self-love is the mainspring of the social machine;[^[770]] but self-love, when the self is so expanded as to include other selves, is not a low motive. Commercial ambition, encouraged by political liberty, and unhampered by Poor Laws, leads naturally to prosperity.[^[771]] The happiness of the whole is to result from the happiness of individuals, and to begin first with them. He “sees in all forms of thought and work the life and death struggles of separate human beings.”[^[772]] “No co-operation is required. Every step tells. He who performs his duty faithfully will reap the full fruits of it, whatever may be the number of others who fail. This duty is intelligible to the humblest capacity. It is merely that he is not to bring beings into the world for whom he cannot find the means of support. When once this subject is cleared from the obscurity thrown over it by parochial laws and private benevolence, every man must feel the strongest conviction of such an obligation. If he cannot support his children, they must starve; and, if he marry in the face of a fair probability that he will not be able to support his children, he is guilty of all the evils which he thus brings upon himself, his wife, and his offspring. It is clearly his interest, and will tend greatly to promote his happiness, to deter marrying till by industry and economy he is in a capacity to support the children that he may reasonably expect from his marriage; and, as he cannot in the mean time gratify his passions without violating an express command of God, and running a great risk of injuring himself or some of his fellow-creatures, considerations of his own interest and happiness will dictate to him the strong obligation to a moral conduct while he remains unmarried.”[^[773]] Supposing passion to be thus controlled, we should see a very different scene from the present. “The period of delayed gratification would be passed in saving the earnings which were above the wants of a single man.” Savings Banks and Friendly Societies would have their perfect work; and “in a natural state of society such institutions, with the aid of private charity well directed, would probably be all the means necessary to produce the best practicable effects.”[^[774]] The people’s numbers would be constantly within the limits of the food, though constantly following its increase; the real value of wages would be raised, in the most permanent way possible; “all abject poverty would be removed from society, or would at least be confined to a very few who had fallen into misfortunes against which no prudence or foresight could provide.”[^[775]] It must be brought home to the poor that “they are themselves the cause of their own poverty.”[^[776]] While Malthus insists against Godwin that it is not institutions and laws but ourselves that are to blame, he still shares, with Godwin, the desire to lessen the number of institutions; and, as a first reform, would repeal at least one obnoxious law.

The relation of Malthus to the French Revolution and its English partisans is indeed not to be expressed in a sentence. It has been said that he cannot be justly described as being a reactionary;[^[777]] and, in truth, besides being a critic of Godwin and of Condorcet, he is influenced to some extent by the same ideas that influenced them. The Essay on Population is coloured throughout by a tacit or open reference to the Rights of Man, a watchword borrowed from France by the American Republic, to be restored again at the Revolution. Paine’s book on the Rights of Man, in reply to Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, had been widely read before it was suppressed by the English Government; and Godwin and Mackintosh[^[778]] were not silenced. Malthus himself, as a Whig, does not disparage the rights of man when they meant political freedom and equality, but only when they included the right to be supported by one’s neighbour, as had been asserted by the Abbé Raynal and some other writers of the Revolution.[^[779]] As the same assertion was practically made by the English Poor Law, which had venerable conservative prejudice on its side, our author’s opposition to it was no proof that his politics were reactionary. His economical antecedents and his political views bound him to the French Revolution. In his range of ideas and his habitual categories he could not depart far from the French Economists, who had helped to prepare the way for the Jacobins. Adam Smith himself had felt their influence. Though he had criticized the noble savage and the state of nature,[^[780]] he had himself a lingering preference for agriculture over manufacture; and he himself spoke of a “natural” price, a “natural” progress of opulence, a “natural” rate of wages, and “natural liberty.” To him as to the French writers, Nature[^[781]] meant what would grow of itself if men did not interfere,—the difficulty being that the interference seems also to grow of itself, and it is impossible to separate the necessary protection from the mischievous interference. Malthus retains the phraseology with an even nearer approach to personification. Nature points out to us certain courses of conduct.[^[782]] If we break Nature’s laws, she will punish us. At Nature’s mighty feast there is no cover laid for the superfluous new-comer. The Poor Laws offend against Nature; they interfere with human action in a case where it would spontaneously right itself by ordinary motives of self-interest; if men knew they could not count on parish relief, they would probably help themselves. Be the argument worth much or little, its strength is not the greater because of this figure; and his use of it shows that Malthus had not risen above the metaphysical superstitions of his age. But the charge sometimes made against him is that he was not merely not before his age but positively behind it; and this is certainly false.

In politics he was as little of a reactionary as his opponent, who if “in principle a Republican was in practice a Whig.”[^[783]] He followed Fox rather than Burke, and lost neither his head nor his temper over the Revolution. “Malthus will prove a peace-monger,” wrote Southey in 1808.[^[784]] He was a steady friend of Catholic Emancipation. He saw the folly of attributing with Godwin and Paine all evil to the Government, and with Cobbett all evil to taxation and the funds;[^[785]] but he is one with them all in dislike of standing armies, and is more alarmed at the overbearing measures of the Government against sedition than at the alleged sedition itself. One of the most remarkable chapters in the second edition of the essay[^[786]] is on “the effects of the knowledge of the principal cause of poverty on civil liberty.” Its main argument is, that, where there is much distress and destitution, there will be much discontent and sedition, and, where there is much of the two last, there will be much coercion and despotism. A knowledge of the chief cause of poverty by taking away the distress would leave Government at least no excuse for tyranny. “The pressure of distress on the lower classes of people, together with the habit of attributing this distress to their rulers, appears to me to be the rock of defence, the castle, the guardian spirit of despotism. It affords to the tyrant the fatal and unanswerable plea of necessity. It is the reason why every free Government tends constantly to destruction, and that its appointed guardians become daily less jealous of the encroachments of power.”[^[787]] The French people had been told that their unhappiness was due to their rulers; they overthrew their rulers, and, finding their distress not removed, they sacrificed the new rulers; and this process would have continued indefinitely if despotism had not been found preferable to anarchy. In England “the Government of the last twenty years[^[788]] has shown no great love of peace or liberty,” and the country gentlemen have apparently surrendered themselves to Government on condition of being protected from the mob.[^[789]] A few more scarcities like 1800 might cause such convulsions and lead to such sternness of repression that the British constitution would end as Hume foretold,[^[790]] in “absolute monarchy, the easiest death, the true euthanasia of the British constitution.” The “tendency of mobs to produce tyranny” can only be counteracted by the subversion, not of the tyrants, but of the mobs. The result would be a lean and wiry people, weak for offence, but strong for defence; there would be freedom at home and peace abroad.[^[791]]

Of course the “knowledge of the principal cause of poverty” is not conceived by Malthus as the only lesson worth learning. He shares the growing enthusiasm of all friends of the people for popular education,[^[792]] and thinks the Tory arguments against instructing the poorer classes “not only illiberal, but to the last degree feeble, if not really disingenuous.”[^[793]] “An instructed and well-informed people would be much less likely to be led away by inflammatory writings, and much better able to detect the false declamation of interested and ambitious demagogues than an ignorant people.”[^[794]] These words were written in 1803, four years before Whitbread made his motion on Schools and Savings Banks, and thirteen years before Brougham’s Committee on Education.[^[795]] Malthus in fact was in politics an advanced Whig, ahead of his party in ideas of social reform. This may be seen from the following passage, which is only one out of many, that show his large view of his subject. He says that in most countries among the poor there seems to be something like “a standard of wretchedness, a point below which they will not continue to marry.” “This standard is different in different countries, and is formed by various concurring circumstances of soil, climate, government, degree of knowledge, civilization, &c.” It is raised by liberty, security of property, the diffusion of knowledge, and a taste for the conveniences and the comforts of life. It is lowered by despotism and ignorance. “In an attempt to better the condition of the labouring classes of society, our object should be to raise this standard as high as possible by cultivating a spirit of independence, a decent pride, and a taste for cleanliness and comfort. The effect of a good Government in increasing the prudential habits and personal respectability of the lower classes of society has already been insisted on; but certainly this effect will always be incomplete without a good system of education, and indeed it may be said that no Government can approach to perfection that does not provide for the instruction of the people. The benefits derived from education are among those which may be enjoyed without restriction of numbers; and, as it is in the power of Governments to confer these benefits, it is undoubtedly their duty to do it.”[^[796]]

Our author’s historical sense saved him from Ricardian presumptions in favour of laissez faire. Writers go too far, however, in declaring unlimited competition to be against the spirit of his work, and asserting that he undervalued the influence of institutions, only that he might save his country’s institutions from hasty reform.[^[797]] He knew that society did not grow up on economical principles; instead of beginning with non-interference, and extending interference by degrees where it was found imperative, it began with interference everywhere, and relaxed the interference by degrees where it was found possible and thought desirable. We have begun with status and paternal government, and have made our way towards contract and laissez faire; but we have never reached them, because, as men now are, we cannot go on without damage to the common weal. But it seemed to Malthus that experience had shown the need as clearly as the dangers of natural liberty;—history, for example, had clearly proved that the material relief of the poor, which had never been abandoned by the Government, might best have been left to private action. The extreme view would have been that it was not every one’s duty in general, but every one’s in particular, a responsibility of which no one could divest himself. But, though Malthus often speaks as if the burden ought to lie specially on a man’s relatives and private friends, he does not share Adam Smith’s antipathy to associations, and would probably have recognized division of labour to be as necessary in charity as in industry. Still, even as administered by an organization of men specially fitted for the work by nature and choice, the distribution of material relief never seems to him a case where society can help the poor without in some degree injuring their independence and their strength of character. In the matter of charity he is clearly on the side of natural liberty and individualism.

But, in other directions, he has made admissions which seriously modify the unlimited competition of natural liberty. He admits, first of all, that the struggle for existence when it is the struggle for bare life does not lead to progress;[^[798]] and he admits, therefore, in the second place, that the state should interfere with the “system of natural liberty,” positively, to educate the citizens,[^[799]] and to grant medical aid to the poor,[^[800]] to assist emigration,[^[801]] and even to give direct relief in money to men that have a family of more than six children,[^[802]]—as well as negatively, to restrict foreign trade when it causes more harm to the public than good to the traders,[^[803]] and to restrict the home trade where children’s labour is concerned.[^[804]]

A critic might ask on what principle he justifies these admissions; or might hint that he makes them on no conscious principle at all, but in the spirit of a judge, who is administering a law that he knows to be bad, but prefers to make continual exceptions rather than suggest a new law;—otherwise could any rule stand the test of so many exceptions?

It might be replied that Malthus nowhere writes a treatise on political philosophy, and his views must be inferred from scattered hints, but it does not follow that he was not, consciously or unconsciously, possessed of a guiding principle. His several admissions have a certain logical connection. It is more doubtful whether their connecting principle will seem adequate to a modern reader whose questions in political philosophy have been stated for him by Comte and the latter-day socialists.

The first of the admissions is the more significant, as Malthus, while making it, refuses to approve of the means then actually adopted (by the Poor Law) for raising the level of the weakest citizens, and so fitting them for their struggle. If the absence of provision was an evil, the existing provision was hardly a less one. It was bad for society to give help by giving bread and butter, for that was a gift to full-grown men and women, not really weak, but quite ready to be indolent. A gift of education, on the other hand, is given, he considers, to those who are really incapable of helping themselves and really ignorant of their powers.[^[805]] It makes the weak strong, and tends to remove indolence, not create it.[^[806]] In the same way Factory Acts assist the weak and not the indolent, while the (rare) interference with free trade, the granting of medical relief, the special aid in case of large families, and the aid to Irish peasants, are all of them special remedies in cases where the sufferers could not be expected to foresee and provide against the distress, and were therefore sufferers from circumstances rather than from indolence. Malthus continually takes the view that security is a greater blessing than wealth itself, and insecurity a worse evil than poverty. The circumstances that cause insecurity were therefore in his view the most distressing; they baffled individual effort.

His critics might have answered: “In all the cases mentioned by you as justifying interference, a perfectly enlightened self-interest would have provided against the mishap; and relief of any kind would be in the end equivalent to relief in bread and butter, for, as far as it goes, it allows the more to be left over either to the man or his parents for bread and butter, and thereby it is a relief that fosters indolence.” He could rejoin, however, that (even if we grant the practical possibility of such a perfect enlightenment) direct relief appeals far more to indolence than indirect,[^[807]] and the good of the indirect can often, the good of the direct very seldom, outweigh the evil. He would have added that even the direct relief in bread and butter was not opposed by him on any theory, but on the ground of its known tendency to evil,—and, if it had been possible from the nature of men and things to keep the promises of the Poor Law, he would have given his voice for it. He was committed to free trade itself only because and only so far as experience was in its favour. His only axiom in political philosophy was that the end of politics is the greatest happiness of the great body of the people; and his only rule for securing that end was the observation of what, as a matter of experience, actually did secure it.

On the other hand, nothing is clearer from his own writings than that the language of experience owes much of its meaning to its interpreter; and we ask “What were his principles of interpretation?”

The answer is, that, in spite of the affinity between utilitarianism in morals and individualism in politics, he tried to retain the first without the second. He understood moral goodness to consist in the tendency of actions to produce a balance of pleasures over pains; but his utility when examined turned out, as we have seen, to be much nearer the notion of self-development than simply a sum of pleasures irrespective of their quality. At this point the strong grasp which family life held on his fancy lifted him above the notion that the chief end could be the individual happiness of isolated units, and showed him that the real unit was a group. The state to Malthus, as to Aristotle, is an aggregate of families, though he recognizes very clearly that, besides the connection of householder with householder by the common subjection to the laws, there is the common bond of nationality, a community of feeling, a partnership of past traditions, present privileges, and future hopes.[^[808]] It is one of the plainest facts of experience that men are often led by their attachment to their country and countrymen to run counter to their worldly interests.[^[809]]

The nation is a little world within the great world, and on the analogy of the great world it is the scene where difficulties generate talents and bring out the character.[^[810]] From this point of view it is not far from the truth to parody a well-known description of modern Judaism, and describe the political philosophy of Malthus as Utilitarianism plus a Nationality. The individualism of Malthus is limited by the particular institutions and particular interests of the English nation.[^[811]] In his intellectual history a strong emphasis on the state preceded the emphasis on the individual; and even in his mature view the state is limited in its interference with the citizens only by its powers of doing good to them. But he holds with Adam Smith and the other economists that its powers of doing good to them are very much narrower than on the old conception of the state, as a kind of family. The duties of a state to the citizens are narrower than those of a father to his children, because what the father can and must do for his children the state cannot do for its citizens with equal safety to their independence. It remains, however, true that the relation of state to citizen is not the commercial relation of one contracting party with another; it is a relation prior to the commercial, and gives to all contracts whatever validity they have.

If Malthus himself had been asked to reconcile his departure from the general principle of natural liberty with his general adherence to it, he would have made some such answer as the following: “From the first, when I wrote in 1798, it appeared to me that the action of Government could neither have so uniformly bad an effect as Godwin supposed, nor so uniformly good as Pitt’s Bill implied. If, as Godwin desires, there were no Government, but only a chastened laissez faire, unsophisticated human nature would be quite enough to bring back misery and sin.[^[812]] But the chastening of the laissez faire could not in my opinion take place without the Government, for it is one of the most proper functions of Government, not adequately dischargeable by individuals, to provide for the people the education that is supposed to chasten. Even when that provision has been made, the education will not do its perfect work if it has not included the particular doctrines which it has fallen to me more than any man to bring home to the public mind. With such an education there will be hope for better things. Things as they are and the struggle for existence as it now is among the helpless classes can please me as little as Godwin. It is a struggle which leads to no progress. But, unlike Godwin, I do not regard Government as necessarily creating the distress; and I certainly regard it as the necessary engine for removing the distress by education in the end, and toning down its effects by restrictions for the present. If only as an engine of education, paternal government must be a permanent factor of society. Where a public necessity has been well supplied by individual action, I should leave it in the hands of individuals; but not otherwise. I did not object to the Poor Law on the broad ground that it took the place of private action, but because its own action was mischievous. I should try every case on its merits, and be guided to interfere or not interfere by the known results of the existing policies.”

In so speaking, Malthus would no doubt have justified his own consistency. But the modern reader might justly reply to Malthus, that we have often to judge tendencies as well as results, and experience becomes then an uncertain guide; he might complain that Malthus himself is sometimes led to judge both of them by a half-acknowledged supplementary principle of the balance of classes and safety of the mean, which can be applied in a way very unfavourable to popular rights. He might urge that the apparent success of an institution might have been due to a concurrent cause that cancelled its defects, and we cannot always pronounce on its merits from experience of it. How can experience help us unless we have the key to its interpretation? Without such a key nothing would be so false as facts except figures. In human politics mere survival is seldom the test of fitness.

If we compare the state to an organism and convert our simile into a rule of judgment, we may say that, when each part has its function and contributes to the efficiency of the whole, the body politic is well; when any part does not, there is need of the doctor or surgeon. This figure seems to give us a key for the interpretation of social experience; but unhappily the figure itself needs an interpreter.[^[813]] If we interpret organism as the ideal union of members in one body, it ceases to be a simile, for the body politic is not merely like this union,—it is the best example of it. For in the body politic the general life is the source of all individual energy, and at the same time the individual members are continually paying back the debt, by an active sympathy and conscious union with the commonwealth, to which the commonwealth in its turn owes all its collective energy; the citizen is nothing without his state, or the state without its citizens. This is to make the figure useful, by making it change places with the thing prefigured. So long as the same idea is grasped in both, their relation in rhetoric need not affect us.

Such an idea of the state would lead us beyond the admissions of Malthus to some such demands as the following:—For his every possession, the citizen must be able to show some service rendered to his countrymen, and must be taught and expected to hold his property in trust for the common good, that so the body politic may have no useless member. In proportion as private possession involves monopoly, its use should be jealously restricted in the public interest, which in the extreme cases would lead to the withdrawing of it, with as little friction as might be, from the private owner to the state. Education acts, sanitary laws, and factory acts should be strictly and universally enforced, not for the sake of the parents, guardians, and employers, or even altogether for the sake of the sufferers themselves, but for the sake of the community, in order that in the struggle for existence every competitor should start fair as an efficient citizen, with full possession of his powers of mind and body. For the rest, security and order should be the watchword of the state, free course being allowed to commercial and industrial enterprise, scientific inquiry, and speculative discussion, in order that progress may be made in the surest of all ways, by the moral and intellectual development of the individual citizens, which will soon express itself in their institutions. With these postulates, half from the old economists and half from the new reformers, on the way to be realized, and with industrial co-operation in prospect, we need not despair of the future of man on our part of the earth.

Tried by such a standard Malthus certainly fails to give us a perfect political philosophy, and seems little farther advanced than his master Adam Smith, who taught that the state was profitable only for defence, for justice, and for such public works as could not be so well done by individuals. With all his regard for the nation, Malthus looks at social problems too much from the individual’s point of view. He speaks much, for example, of the good effect, on the individual man, of the domestic ideal, and of the ideals of personal prosperity in the world, both built on security of property and liberty of action. He speaks little of the duty of the citizen to the community, and of the return he owes it for his security and liberty. The citizen in his picture of him seems to have nothing but duties to his family and nothing but claims on the state. The citizen is lost in the householder. He is content to be let alone, and does not positively and actively recognize his identity with the legislative power, and his obligation to repay service with service. Later political philosophy would press the counter-claims of the community on the citizen. It would demand, for example, that he shall neither leave his lands waste nor preserve his game, if either practice is contrary to the public good. It would keep in mind that the holders of large fortunes owe more to the public for protection of them than the holders of small, and should bear a heavier burden of taxes. It would not leave men to do as they willed with their own.[^[814]]

In regard to the lowest classes that are hardly to be called citizens, for they are struggling in hopeless weakness for mere bread, Malthus never seems to see that his own acknowledgment of their powerlessness to rise must justify much more than the mere establishment of compulsory education for their children or even mechanics’ institutes for themselves. It would justify the adoption of such measures as will make their surroundings likely to give and preserve to them a higher standard of living. It would sanction measures of “local option” to keep away from them the infection of dangerous moral diseases; and it would enforce the obligation on the owners of houses to make them habitable and healthy. It would give town and country tenants secure tenure by law, where an insecure tenure of custom had induced them to spend labour on their holdings.

The older economists had the just idea that security in possession was the first condition of industrial progress; but they did not see that this very principle would justify very large restrictions on the use of property, and that the restrictions would increase in largeness as the property approached the nature of a monopoly; they did not see that for the public interest it may be as necessary to prohibit deer forests as to pull down unsanitary dwellings or enforce vaccination.

The reason was that for a long time in England it was a hard enough task for reformers to secure the negative freedom of being let alone, the freedom of trade and of the press and of local government, with the abolition of privileges. Cobden’s attempt to resolve Politics into Economics was well-timed and fruitful in its generation; and the Manchester school has still a part to play in our own time. But the special work of political reform in the future is to achieve the positive freedom, “the maximum of power, for all members of human society alike, to make the best of themselves.”[^[815]] Of this programme neither Malthus nor any writer of his day had any clear conception. He himself had no claim to a seer’s vision; and the horizon of his opponents was never wider than his own.

It is time to go back to the Essay and confront its opponents. We have now a sufficient knowledge of the economics and philosophy of Malthus to be able to sympathize with him under misconception, or at least to understand what appearance an objection would wear to his mind. Not that we have a complete picture of the man, or even a view of his entire mental furniture, which is more than this curta supellex; but we see enough to judge the cause of the Essay on its merits, not prejudiced, favourably or unfavourably, by the life and character of the author.

BOOK IV.
THE CRITICS.

Three Questions for the Critics—Parr and Thoughts on Parr—Pulpit Philosophy—Godwin’s Blessing in 1801—The Cursing in 1820—Theology—The Command to Noah—The Ratios—Population “fitful”—S. T. Coleridge among the Economists—James Grahame—Empson’s Classification of Critics—Weyland and Arthur Young—“Cannot, therefore ought not”—Spence’s Plan and Owen’s—Progress and Poverty—Das Kapital—Herbert Spencer—Classification of Critics—Ethics of the Hearth and of the World—End and Means of Malthus.

The critics of Malthus had three questions before them: Do the conclusions of Malthus follow from his premises? Does he himself draw them? Are they true as a matter of fact? The answers will be best given by a short survey of the principal critics with whom Malthus contended in his lifetime, and those who have most formidably contended with his followers since his death.

There is a sense in which the Essay on Population begins and ends with Godwin, for it begins and ends with the question of human perfectibility. The relations of Malthus and Godwin are as it were the tale on which the play is founded.

Godwin’s Political Justice was written in 1793, his Enquirer in 1797, and Malthus’ Essay in 1798. Others kept the ball a-rolling. On the Easter Tuesday of 1800 Dr. Samuel Parr preached an anniversary sermon in Christ’s Hospital before the Corporation of London. He chose his text from Galatians vi. 10: “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.” Like Butler’s sermons in the Rolls Chapel, the discourse was really a treatise on moral philosophy. It began by contrasting the selfish and the benevolent system of ethics, pronouncing both of them faulty. If the one has done less harm, the other has done less good than might have been expected, for it has been connected with the new doctrine of universal philanthropy. The new doctrine is false because local neighbourhood of all men is impossible, vi terminorum, and a widening out of the feelings that usually prevail between local neighbours would only make those feelings thin and watery.[^[816]] Man’s obligations cannot be stretched beyond his powers; he has no powers, and therefore no obligation to do good unto all men.[^[817]] Love of the universe, in the intense sense of the word love, can only belong to the omnipotent Being who has the care of the universe upon Him. We, being men, must only see to it that our benevolence is of His quality, extending, like His, to the unthankful and to the evil. But a universal philanthropist exaggerates and pampers this one particular form of the duty of benevolence at the expense of the rest, and forgets duties that lie near to him, towards kindred and friends and neighbours; he neglects common duties of life in favour of the uncommon and fanciful. Very different is “the calm desire of general happiness,” which draws those that are near still nearer, and makes us value and assist the benevolent institutions, like Christ’s Hospital, which are at our own doors.

The hearers of the sermon could have no doubt at whom it was aimed; and the footnotes of the published version of it contained large quotations from the Essay on Population and large direct commendations of its author, which made the sermon’s oblique censure of Godwin the more stinging.

Pulpit philosophizing was not rare in those times; it had been practised since Butler’s days by Dr. Ezra Styles[^[818]] in 1761; and Dr. Richard Price had used a dissenter’s pulpit to utter his enthusiastic views on the future improvement of mankind (1787) and the love of our country (1789).[^[819]] Burke had denounced him for this in his Reflections;[^[820]] but, if Parr could do the same thing on the other side a few years afterwards, it cannot have been any great singularity. Parr’s sermon was the subject of Sydney Smith’s first paper in the Edinburgh Review (Oct 1802); but its economical interest is due to its effect on Godwin. Godwin had been assailed shortly before by Sir James Mackintosh, a former friend and political ally, in his Discourse on the Law of Nature and Nations, delivered in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, 1799; but Dr. Parr’s censures were more severe. Parr may have been alienated by an offensive description in the Enquirer[^[821]] of the clergy, as characterized by “a perennial stationariness of understanding, abortive learning, artificial manners, infantine prejudices, and arrogant infallibility.” As all the other professions were equally well abused, the censure need not have been taken to heart. The letter of Malthus to Godwin, written after the publication of the Enquirer, is full of courtesy. At that time, and indeed for a few years afterwards, there was nothing but good-will between the two writers. When Godwin in 1801 made his letters to his three critics into a book,[^[822]] under the title, Thoughts on Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon, with remarks on Mackintosh and the writer of the Essay on Population, he was bitter only against the two former. He was surprised at the “overbearing scornfulness” of Mackintosh, and at the “venom” of Dr. Parr. If he had changed some of his views it was not in deference to their criticism. Of the Essay on Population, “and the spirit in which it is written,” he “can never speak but with unfeigned respect;” contending only that it is meant to attack his conclusions and not his premises.[^[823]] Parr had hailed it as a complete demonstration that Godwin’s scheme of equality would not work, and many better men had felt their mouths shut, and had begged Godwin to speak for them. Godwin consents in these Thoughts. If he was sincere in saying, “I confess I could not see that the essay had any very practical bearing on my own hopes” (p. 55), he must have been in the state which the Enquirer ascribes to the clergyman: “He lives in the midst of evidence and is insensible to it. He is in daily contemplation of contradictions and finds them consistent. He listens to arguments that would impress conviction upon every impartial hearer and is astonished at their futility. He never dares trust himself to one unprejudiced contemplation. He starts with impatience and terror from its possible result.” Malthus, on the other hand, though in orders, has behaved very unlike the clergyman of the Enquirer, for we are told by Godwin himself, “he has neither laboured to excite hatred nor contempt against me and my tenets; he has argued the questions between us just as if they had never been made a theme for political party and the intrigues of faction; he has argued just as if he had no end in view but the investigation of evidence and the development of truth” (p. 55 ft.). Moreover, he has “made as unquestionable an addition to the theory of political economy as any writer for a century past. The grand propositions and outlines of his work will, I believe, be found not less conclusive and certain than they are new. For myself, I cannot refuse to take some pride in so far as by my writings I gave the occasion and furnished an incentive to the producing so valuable a treatise” (p. 56). Surely concession could no further go. Godwin even admits the arithmetical and geometrical ratios.[^[824]] His criticisms are all on the checks, which (be it remembered) were only the checks of the first essay, vice, misery, and the fear of them. Are Governments henceforward to prevent the evils of an excessive population by encouraging these unsightly counter-agents? and is every scheme for the amelioration of man’s lot foredoomed? No, the “author of the essay” has too small an idea of the resources of the human mind; it is no conclusive argument against a scheme to say that when it is realized it will probably not last.[^[825]] He does not attach sufficient weight to the fact that in England, for example, “prudence and pride” prevent early marriages, and from late ones come smaller families. In a state of universal improvement there would be not less but more of these feelings, and a similar effect would follow in a greater degree.[^[826]]

That there was force in this reasoning appears from the way in which Malthus received it when stated to him by letter a few months after the publication of the essay. He replied that the “prudence” in question, if existing in Godwin’s new society, would mean an eye to the main chance; it would mean that one man is strengthening his position and getting to himself more than the minimum of necessaries; if you prevent this, what becomes of your freedom? if you do not, what becomes of your equality and wealth? Secondly, the effect of the prudence would be that the population would not be the greatest possible, but considerably within the limits of the food; and yet you object to present society, that its arrangements prevent the “greatest practicable population.” In all our political theories, if we would trace to particular institutions the evil that is really due to them, we must deduct the evil that is known to be due to other causes. “The very admission of the necessity of prudence to prevent the misery from an overcharged population, removes the blame from public institutions to the conduct of individuals. And certain it is, that almost under the worst form of government, where there was any tolerable freedom of competition, the race of labourers, by not marrying, and consequently decreasing their numbers, might immediately better their condition, and under the very best form of government, by marrying and greatly increasing their numbers they would immediately make their condition worse.”[^[827]]

This was no doubt a point against Godwin, but it was also a point against Malthus himself. The essay in its first form had not made sufficient allowance for “prudence”; and the introduction of moral restraint in the second edition might very plausibly have been ascribed by Godwin’s friends to Godwin himself, in spite of the elaborate reply to the Thoughts in a chapter afterwards dropped.[^[828]] Godwin said to him afterwards that he had no right to introduce a new element into his solution of the problem, and pretend that it was the same solution as before;[^[829]] if he altered his premises he ought to alter his conclusion. To which Malthus might have answered, that, though his conclusion is altered, it retains its value as an argument against Godwin. At first the tendency of numbers to increase up to the food was described as an obstacle fatal to progress; now it is indeed an obstacle which must be faced and overcome, but it is fatal not to progress, but only to equality. Godwin himself had at first considered it an entirely imaginary obstacle which might be ignored for the present by reformers; and his very doctrine of prudence amounts to an admission that his view of it had changed.

Godwin himself was not conscious of his change of front; as the seventh of thirteen children he may have thought the matter personal; and whatever concessions he had made in 1801 he withdrew in 1820. In that year, with David Booth, the patient author of the English Analytical Dictionary, to arrange his statistics and vouch for his calculations, he published an elaborate reply to the Essay on Population. The politicians, the political economists, the bulk of the press, and the public had accepted the Malthusian doctrines, though the conversion of the public was no deeper than it was on Free Trade, and the statesmen with a few exceptions were not sorry to make capital out of the “odiousness” of the doctrines whenever the “acknowledged truth” of them would not serve their turn. Still it seemed true that time had declared for Malthus, and Godwin had fallen out of notice. Sydney Smith’s assertion,[^[830]] “Malthus took the trouble of refuting him, and we hear no more of Mr. Godwin,” is not very far from the truth. Malthus had survived his refutation, and Godwin his reputation. Pitt, Paley, and Copleston were with Malthus; he had gained over Hallam among historians, James Mill, Senior, and Ricardo among economists, Brougham, Mackintosh, and even Whitbread among politicians. Southey, Hazlitt, and Cobbett were not a sufficient make-weight. Hazlitt in his Reply to the Essay on Population (in letters of which some appeared in Cobbett’s Pol. Register, 1807) acknowledges the popularity, though he predicts its decay.[^[831]] It seems clear that in educated circles at least the view of Malthus was as early as 1820 what it was in 1829, “the popular view,”[^[832]] which is quite compatible, as Darwin long experienced, with great unpopularity in particular quarters. No better evidence could be given of this popularity than the unwilling testimony given by Godwin himself in his new book.[^[833]] At the end of 1819 Brougham had referred in the House of Commons to the principle of Malthus as “one of the soundest principles of political economy,” and said it was melancholy to observe how the press scouted it and abused its defenders.[^[834]] The press, however, was divided. The Edinburgh Review from the first had sided with Malthus. The Quarterly had begun by strong hostility (Dec. 1812, pp. 320 seq.); had softened its tone as time went on (Dec. 1813, pp. 157 seq., and Oct. 1814, pp. 154–5); had spoken with hesitation and doubtfulness (Oct. 1816, pp. 50 seq.); and had at last completely surrendered (July 1817, pp. 369 seq.), confessing it to be “much easier to disbelieve Mr. Malthus than to refute him” (p. 396), thereafter utilizing his doctrine for the support of things as they are, only regretting that Malthus himself would not do the same a little more stoutly (pp. 402–3). Finally, as we have seen, Malthus, after having contributed to the Edinburgh, became a contributor to the Quarterly. The change of public opinion, illustrated by the conversion of the Quarterly, gave greater bitterness to the attacks of the enemies that remained unconverted. But it gave them no new arguments.

In Godwin’s Enquiry concerning Population (when we neglect mere epigrams such as “a man is surer that he has ancestors than that he will have posterity”) there are substantially four arguments:—Malthus has changed his position; the world is not peopled; the ratios are not as he represents; and experience is against him. We have already discussed the first. The use of the second implies a misunderstanding of the Malthusian position, for it ignores distinction between actual and possible supplies of food, and does not allow that a man is “confined” by four walls unless he touches them.[^[835]] Godwin does not mend the argument by comparing it to the objection brought against Christianity—“the world is not yet Christianized”; still less by appealing to Christianity itself, and taunting Malthus with the texts, “Increase and multiply,” “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them,” “made a little lower than the angels,” “forty sons and thirty grandsons, which rode on threescore and ten ass colts,” “In the last days some shall depart from the faith, forbidding to marry.”[^[836]] Malthus had been attacked in 1807 by a Puritan or Covenanting pamphlet entitled, ‘A summons of Wakening, or the evil tendency and danger of Speculative Philosophy, exemplified in Mr. [Sir John] Leslie’s Enquiry into the Nature of Heat, and Mr. Malthus’ Essay on Population, and in that speculative system of common law which is at present administered in these kingdoms.’[^[837]] The body of this book had been even more remarkable than its title, for it had proved Malthus guilty not merely of heterodoxy, but of atheism. “It is evident to any one who attentively reads the Essay on Population that its author does not believe in the existence of God, but substitutes for Him sometimes the principle of Population, sometimes that of Necessity.” Sadler many years later declared in the same spirit that “the insults the theory of Malthus levels at God, and the injuries it meditates inflicting upon man, will be endured by neither.”[^[838]]

Once for all, let Parson Malthus explain his consistency with the religious text-book of his Church. Prior to the injunction given to men to increase and multiply, come, says Malthus, all the moral and physical laws without which they cannot increase or multiply. Suppose the command had been to increase and multiply not men but vegetables; this could not mean, “Sow the seed broadcast, in the air, over the sea, on stony ground,” but, “Take all the means made necessary, by pre-existing laws, to secure the best growth of vegetables.” That man would best obey the command, who should prepare the soil, and provide for the watering and tilling of it, where those things were wanting before. So he will best obey the command to increase and multiply Men, who prepares food for men where there was none before, and not he who brings them recklessly into the world without any such provision. “I believe it is the intention of the Creator that the earth should be replenished, but certainly with a healthy, virtuous, and happy population, not an unhealthy, vicious, and miserable one. And, if, in endeavouring to obey the command to increase and multiply, we people it only with beings of the latter description and suffer accordingly, we have no right to impeach the justice of the command, but our irrational mode of executing it.”[^[839]] He might have added, that to give any other interpretation of the passage in Genesis is to forget the circumstances in which the words were spoken. The Deluge had just swept away all the earth’s inhabitants except one family, expressly on the score of wickedness; and, if a wicked replenishing were not desirable, an unhappy or a poor one would be at the best only one degree less so. Regarding the question then purely from the outside, we cannot find anything in the writings of Parson Malthus inconsistent with his ecclesiastical orthodoxy; and we can hardly believe that free-thinking Godwin was very serious in the objection.

Malthus himself replies to it as a charge commonly brought against him by others, with no reference to Godwin in particular. For the most part he ignores Godwin’s book on Population, as mere rhetoric and scurrility.[^[840]] Godwin, however, had given more than two years of hard labour to the writing of it;[^[841]] and his biographer regards it as the last work of his best days. He employed his son William and his friend Henry Blanch Rosser to help him, in addition to Booth. His whole mind was occupied with Booth’s calculations and his own deductions from them. He himself “could not pursue a calculation for an hour without being sick to the lowest ebb.”[^[842]] If Booth lagged behind him he was miserable. He rose in early morning to note down an idea and was ill for the rest of the day after it. He is satisfied, however, with the result of his labours. He thinks his chapter on the Geometrical Ratio will delight his friends and astonish his foes. In any case his comfort is that “truth” will prevail, and, whether through him or another, “the system of Malthus can never rise again, and the world is delivered from this accursed apology in favour of vice and misery and hard-heartedness and oppression,”[^[843]] and the world will see that there is “no need of any remedies,” for the numbers of mankind never did and never can increase in the ways described by Malthus.[^[844]] A few of his younger friends[^[845]] believed him successful; and the book was mentioned in the House of Commons as a conclusive refutation of Malthus, especially in regard to the ratios.[^[846]] But the fact remains not only that poor Godwin made no bread and butter by it,[^[847]] but that he converted no one whose opinion in such a matter was of any weight. Mackintosh, though at peace again with his old friend, when he writes to him in September 1821,[^[848]] cannot praise his work; even thinks its tone intolerant; and will only say that he sees nothing in the Malthusian doctrines inconsistent with perfectibility. He takes pains at the same time to disclaim the authorship of the notice in the Edinburgh Review for July 1821, which was lacking in the courtesy due to Godwin, though it did not reproduce the scurrility of the earliest review of him.[^[849]] The inconclusiveness of the book, even in the view of Malthus’ opponents, appears from the stream of new refutations, which made no pause.

Even the question of the ratios was not settled. Godwin had counted his discussion of them the most important part of his book. It gives us his third substantial argument against Malthus. Godwin takes up,[^[850]] what seems to have been a common charge, that the essayist had written a quarto volume to prove that population increases in a geometrical and food in an arithmetical ratio. The essayist had answered, as long ago as 1806,[^[851]] that the first proposition was proved as soon as the facts about America were authenticated, and the second was self-evident; his book was meant less to prove the ratios than to trace their effects. His authorities, as he told Godwin afterwards,[^[852]] were Dr. Price, Styles, Benjamin Franklin, Euler, and Sir William Petty, supplemented, for figures, by Short and Süssmilch and the censuses of the United States and England, and, for principles, by Adam Smith and Hume. We have already seen[^[853]] how far the simile of geometrical and arithmetical ratios was meant to be pressed. Godwin thinks he exposes it by arguing that the increase of population can never be quite exactly geometrical[^[854]] (which Malthus would admit),—that America was an exception[^[855]] (in face of the maxim that the exception tests the rule),—that, in order to suppose population doubling itself in the United States, we must suppose it, as regards births, doing the same in the Old World (in other words, fact is the same as tendency),—that the normal increase is not that of America but that of Sweden,[^[856]] in which case (Malthus would answer) the normal increase must be one that takes place in face of very severe restrictions. To the charge of damaging the borrowed kettle the old Irishwoman had three answers:—It was cracked when I got it; it was whole when I returned it; I never had it. So Godwin’s views of the American colonies vacillated between three inconsistent propositions: the great increase of the numbers is natural (or spontaneous), but that of the food is greater still;[^[857]] the great increase is not natural, but due to immigration;[^[858]] there has been no great increase at all.[^[859]] The reader has three alternative arguments presented to him, and it matters little whereby he is convinced, if only in the end he is persuaded to believe with Godwin, that population requires no checks at all,[^[860]] and is a fitful principle.[^[861]] In history, says Godwin, it seems to operate by fits and starts; and such irregular effects cannot have a uniform cause. It might be replied that in the same sense gravitation is fitful, for we seem to break it by walking upstairs as well as down, by using a siphon as well as a water-jug, or by drying up a drop of ink with blotting-paper instead of letting it sink down into the paper. Yet in these cases the fitfulness is never imputed to the absence of a cause, but to the presence of more causes than one. To believe, as Godwin seems to do, in occult laws which vary with the circumstances is to believe in no laws at all. The only constancy would be the constant probability of miracles.[^[862]] Freethinkers had not as yet identified themselves with the party of order in physics; and perhaps Godwin was simply carrying out his dislike of law one step farther. Having applied it to politics (1793) and to style (1797), he now applied it to nature (1820). He deliberately placed a whole army of facts out of the range of science. It was fortunate for himself that he appeared no more in the character of an economist, but left Booth the task of replying to the Edinburgh reviewer.[^[863]]

If economical criticism was weak with Godwin, the political philosopher, it was still weaker with Coleridge, the philosophizing poet. The main criticisms of Coleridge[^[864]] are contained in manuscript marginal comments with pen and pencil written on his copy of the second (quarto) edition of the Essay (1803), now in the British Museum. When Malthus writes (in Preface, p. vi) that if he had confined himself to general views, his main principle was so incontrovertible that he could have entrenched himself in an impregnable fortress, Coleridge breaks in: “If by the main principle the author means both the Fact[^[865]] (i. e. that population unrestrained should infinitely outrun food) and the deduction from the fact, i. e. that the human race is therefore not indefinitely improvable, a pop-gun would batter down the impregnable Fortress. If only the Fact be meant, the assertion is quite nugatory, in the former case vapouring, in the latter a vapour.” (And on p. vii:) “Are we now to have a quarto to teach us that great misery and great vice arise from poverty, and that there must be poverty in its worst shape wherever there are more mouths than loaves and more Heads than Brains?”

This may be taken as simply the argument of Hazlitt, who “did not see what there was to be proved;”—the principle of Malthus is a truism. Even when commenting on the statement of the Ratios (on p. 8), after some denunciation of the “verbiage and senseless repetition” of the essay, Coleridge goes on to agree with it. He would restate the whole so as to substitute “a proportion which no one in his senses would consider as other than axiomatic, viz.: Suppose that the human race amount to a thousand millions. Divide the square acres of food-producing surface by 500,000,000, that is to say, so much to each married couple. Estimate this quotum as high as you like, and, if you will, even at a thousand or even at ten thousand acres to each family. Suppose population without check, and take the average increase from two families at five (which is irrationally small, supposing the human race healthy, and each man married at twenty-one to a woman of eighteen), and in twelve generations the increase would be 48,828,125. Now as to any conceivable increase in the production or improvement in the productiveness of the thousand or ten thousand acres, it is ridiculous even to think of production at all, inasmuch as it is demonstrable that either already in this twelfth generation, or certainly in a few generations more (I leave the exact statement to schoolboys, not having Cocker’s Arithmetic by me, and having forgotten the number of square feet in an acre), the quotum of land would not furnish standing room to the descendants of the first agrarian proprietors. Best do the sum at once. Find out the number of square acres on the globe (of land), and divide the number by 500,000. I have myself been uselessly prolix, and in grappling with the man have caught his itch of verbiage.” He goes on to say that if every man were to marry and have a family, and each of his children were to do the same, their posterity would soon want standing room, and, if all checks were removed, this would of course happen much faster. “Any schoolboy who has learned arithmetic as far as compound interest may astonish his younger sister both by the fact and by the exact number of years in which it would take place. On the other hand, let the productiveness of the earth be increased beyond the hopes of the most visionary agriculturist, still the productions take up room. If the present crop of turnips occupy one-fifth of the space of the turnip field, the increase can never be more than quintupled, and, if you suppose two planted for one, the increase still cannot exceed ten; so that, supposing a little island of a single acre, and its productions occupying one-fifth of its absolute space, and sufficient to maintain two men and two women, four generations would outrun its possible power of furnishing them with food; and we may boldly affirm that a truth so self-evident as this was never overlooked or even by implication contradicted. What proof has Mr. Malthus brought? What proof can he bring that any writer or theorist has overlooked this fact, which would not apply (with reverence be it spoken) to the Almighty Himself when He pronounced the awful command, ‘Increase and multiply’?”

From some of the phrases dropped in the course of these comments, we should infer they were the preparation for a formal review of the book by Coleridge himself. It is therefore extremely puzzling to find the whole comments printed almost word for word and letter for letter in a review[^[866]] hitherto considered by every one (Southey included) to be Southey’s. This applies to the subsequent MS. notes, which are happily briefer. Coleridge finds fault with Malthus (p. 11) for using the words virtue and vice without defining them, apparently overlooking the footnote under his very eyes (p. 11 n.) which says, “The general consequence of vice is misery, and this consequence is the precise reason why an action is termed vicious.”[^[867]] Coleridge says, in relation to the list of irregularities given in the last paragraph but one of the page (11): “That these and all these are vices in the present state of society, who doubt? So was Celibacy in the patriarchal ages. Vice and Virtue subsist in the agreement of the habits of a man with his reason and conscience, and these can have but one moral guide, Utility, or the Virtue[^[868]] and Happiness of Rational beings. We mention this not under the miserable notion that any state of society will render those actions capable of being performed with conscience and virtue, but to expose the utter unguardedness of this speculation.” Then after some remarks on New Malthusians (as they would be now called) he goes on: “All that follows to the three hundred and fifty-fifth page[^[869]] may be an entertaining farrago of quotations from books of travels, &c., but surely very impertinent in a philosophical work. Bless me, three hundred and forty pages—for what purpose! A philosophical work can have no legitimate purpose but proof and illustration, and three hundred and fifty pages to prove an axiom! to illustrate a self-evident truth! It is neither more nor less than bookmaking!” He thinks, however, that what Malthus wrote of Condorcet applies to himself;—though his paradox is very absurd, it must be refuted, or he will think the toleration of his contemporaries due to their mental inferiority and his own sublimity of intellect.[^[870]] The remaining marginal notes are chiefly of an interjectional character,[^[871]] many of them not very refined. Malthus himself never falls into coarseness; but his opponents seldom avoid it, and Coleridge (or Southey) is no exception to the rule.[^[872]] Except for the interest attaching even to the foolish words of a great man, it would not have been worth while to revive his obiter scripta on a matter beyond his ken.

A few words are necessary in regard to Grahame and Weyland, who form the chief subject of the long second appendix of later editions of the essay. Grahame’s charges were such as owed all their force to the general ignorance of the actual writings of Malthus himself.[^[873]] Mr. Malthus regards famine as nature’s benevolent remedy for want of food; Mr. Malthus believes that nature teaches men to invent (p. 100) diseases in order to prevent over-population; Mr. Malthus, regarding vice and misery generally as benevolent remedies for over-population, thinks that they are rather to be encouraged than otherwise (p. 100). Malthus, for his part, deploring the fact that this last charge has been current “in various quarters for fourteen years” (or since his quarto essay of 1803), thinks he may well pass it by. “Vice and Misery, and these alone, are the evils which it has been my great object to contend against. I have expressly proposed moral restraint as their rational and proper remedy,” a sufficient proof that he regarded them as the disease.[^[874]] Grahame himself does not deny the tendency to increase beyond food (p. 102), but thinks emigration a sufficient remedy (p. 104).

Empson,[^[875]] playfully classifying the opponents of Malthus, says there are some who will not comprehend “out of sheer stupidity, like Mr. Grahame,” or out of sentimental horror, like Southey,[^[876]] Coleridge, and Bishop Huntingford;[^[877]] or because, like Sadler[^[878]] and Godwin, who followed Price and Muret,[^[879]] they imagine the law of population to vary with the circumstances; or else because they invent laws of their own, like Anderson, Owen, and Poulett Scrope;[^[880]] or because, like Weyland,[^[881]] they deny the premises of Malthus as well as the conclusion. Weyland, like Grahame, has the honour of a special refutation from Malthus. He allows that Malthus in his essay has raised his subject from the level of desultory academical discussion to that of scientific inquiry, and his book is the point from which every later investigation must start. He allows that his order is lucid and his reasoning fair, and that he enables an opponent at once to discuss the question on its merits. Granting his premises, says Weyland, we cannot deny his conclusion; but that premise of his is false which assumes that the highest known rate of increase in a particular state of society is the natural or spontaneous rate in all;[^[882]] we cannot take the height of Chang or of the Hale Child as the natural standard of the height of all. To this Malthus answers, that, if we had observed in any country that all the people who were short carried weights upon their heads, and the people who were tall did not, we should infer that the weights had something to do with the height,—and so, when we find that the increase of a people is fast or slow in proportion as the pressure of certain checks on increase is heavy or light, we cannot but believe that the rate would be at its fastest if there were no checks at all. To say with Weyland, in the terms of his first cardinal proposition,[^[883]] that “population has a natural tendency to keep within the powers of the soil to afford it subsistence in every gradation through which society passes,” is to say “that every man has a natural tendency to remain in prison who is necessarily confined to it by four strong walls.” One might as well infer that the pine of the crowded Norwegian forest has no tendency to have lateral branches, because as a matter of fact there is no room for it to have any.[^[884]]

Weyland thinks that, without any moral restraint, population will keep within limits of the food, in proportion as it reaches a high state of morality, religion, and political liberty.[^[885]] Malthus, on the contrary, would say that, without moral restraint, even morality, religion, and political liberty will not save a people from wretchedness;[^[886]] and, for his part, the design always uppermost in his mind when writing has been “to improve the condition and increase the happiness of the lower classes of society.”[^[887]]

One argument of Weyland’s[^[888]] has some weight in it. With a rich soil, high farming, and abundant food, the bulk of the people of a country might by the natural division of labour be employed in manufacture, and their unhealthy manner of life in towns might so check population that it might be far from keeping up to the level of the food. Malthus replies that this case is rare, for our town populations have increased rapidly,—but, such as it is, he has allowed for it in the second clause of his second proposition: “Population invariably increases where the means of subsistence increase, unless prevented by some very powerful and obvious checks.”[^[889]]

There are two other critics to whom Malthus replies in some detail, one the visionary Owen, who is embraced in Empson’s classification, the other the practical man Arthur Young, who cannot so easily be classified. “I mean,” says the latter, “to deal in facts alone, happy when I can discover them pure and unalloyed with prejudice.”[^[890]] As this was his practice as well as his profession, it may easily be believed that in his voluminous records of fifty years’ travelling and experimenting[^[891]] he has spun rope enough to hang himself. It ought to be added that, like Godwin, he claims the privilege of being inconsistent. Nothing could be more clear than his recognition in his Travels in France of the evils of over-population.[^[892]] Yet in 1800, in his Question of Scarcity plainly stated and Remedies considered, he recommends as his remedy that each country labourer who has three children be provided with a cow and half an acre of potato ground.[^[893]] In other words, he would reduce the English standard of living to the common Irish one, milk and potatoes. Malthus replies by giving reasons why people should “live dear,” and by reminding Arthur Young of his own comments on the proceedings of the National Assembly. Recognizing their duty to grant relief, but wishing to avoid an English Poor Law, the National Assembly set aside fifty millions of francs a year for support of the poor. If it had been really a duty, wrote Arthur Young (in his Travels), necessity might have occasioned them to extend the relief to one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred millions, and so on, “in the same miserable progression that has taken place in England.”[^[894]] Malthus hardly needed to go back to the Travels, as Young himself confessed in his later writings that his plan did not apply to large cities, and though he still held by the claim of right, he confessed that his faith must be without works; in other words, he claimed the right to be inconsistent. But he continued to question Malthus’ axiom that what cannot be ought not to be; and he thinks that, if a man marries without the means to keep a family, he may justly blame society for not providing him with the means. He argues, too, that Malthus for the success of his scheme assumes perfect chastity in the unmarried. Malthus really assumed only that the evils, which on an average in a civilized country attend the prudential check, are less than the evils of premature mortality and other miseries entailed by the opposite course; he declares himself not against but in favour of schemes that improve the condition of the poor even on a limited scale; and he only asks that every such scheme be tested not by its first success, for hardly any scheme of the kind is unsuccessful at first, but by its effect on a new generation.[^[895]]

This test might be applied to schemes like Owen’s and later ones on the same model. Malthus perhaps deals too peremptorily with them. Speaking of Owen’s system of the community of labour and goods, and of Spence’s Plan for Parochial Partnerships in the Land[^[896]] (“the only remedy for the distresses and oppressions of the people,” the land to be “the people’s farm”), he answers that there are two “decisive arguments against systems of equality”: first, the inability of a state of equality to furnish adequate motives for exertion, the goad of necessity being absent,—and, second, the tendency of population to increase faster than subsistence. In reply it must be said that there might be socialism without communism; there might even be communism without an absolute equality, such as would put idle and industrious on the same footing; there might be an approximation of the social extremes, bringing poor and rich nearer, and giving the former not weaker but stronger motives to exertion; finally, it is not at all inconceivable that at least one-half of this result might come, as Godwin wished, by the act of the rich themselves, which means also as Malthus wished, for it would come from a strong sense of personal obligation. It cannot be denied that Malthus, in using the argument in question, seems to forget his own admission, that the goad of necessity does not act with effect either on the lowest or on the highest classes.[^[897]] Moreover, he allows, there have been cases, e. g. among the Moravian communities, where industry and community of goods have existed side by side. “It may be said that, allowing the stimulus of inequality of conditions to have been necessary in order to raise man from the indolence and apathy of the savage to the activity and intelligence of civilized life, it does not follow that the continuance of the same stimulus should be necessary when this activity and energy of mind has been once gained.”[^[898]]

The second of his arguments against Owen is of course his more cogent and characteristic one. As we have seen, it is not deprived of its point by the inclusion of moral restraint among the checks to population. It was argued against him that his own ideal of a society where moral restraint universally prevailed would involve precisely what is necessary to make such systems as Godwin’s and Owen’s permanently possible.[^[899]] There is an air of conclusiveness in the remark that, in proportion as moral restraint prevails in the world, Malthus approximates to Godwin. But Malthus believes that equality and community would destroy the motive for moral restraint. The passions would still be present, and no man would be in a position where there seemed any need to restrain them; the restraint would be the interest of the whole society, but not of the individual himself, for the effects were to be borne not by himself, but by the whole society. No doubt the good of the whole society ought to be a sufficient reason; but it would be so in a very few men now; and, unless it were in all men then, the result would be an expansion of population, with the results Malthus described. Owen is aware of this, and suggests artificial checks, allowing men to gratify desire without the usual consequences, and dispensing with any effort of will. Malthus, on the other hand, would throw all the responsibility and burden on the individual, which he thinks it impossible to do without allowing the individual his private property.[^[900]] No further justification of things as they are is to be found in Malthus; and, so far from being reactionary, his principles (with all their qualifications) were probably the most advanced individualism that was ever preached in these days. They are adopted in full view of the facts that have been again vividly brought before the public mind in our day by writers who are to our generation what Godwin, Spence, and Owen were to theirs.

Malthus seems to believe, with Dugald Stewart, that Utopian schemes are like the tunes of a barrel-organ, recurring at melancholy intervals from age to age with damnable iteration.[^[901]] But, unless society itself has moved in a circle, the Utopias will resemble each other no more and no less than do the states of society which they would replace. Our own socialists, therefore, can hardly be dismissed by the stroke of the pen, that classifies them with people so curiously unlike them and each other as Plato, Ball, More, the Fifth Monarchy men, the Levellers, Godwin and Spence and Owen. Malthus does not, in fact, so dismiss them. Besides bringing forward his own argument, he examines Owen’s attempt to deal with it.[^[902]]

Since Malthus, every complete reform has needed to face in some way or other the question which he treated; but he left little for others to do. Of the two most prominent schemes of our own day for the reconstruction of society, one, that of Mr. Henry George, involves an unconscious recourse to the old weapons of Godwin, Sadler, and other opponents of Malthus; Progress and Poverty does not contain any argument not to be found in these writers. The conjecture about a “fixed quantity of human life on the earth” (ed. 1881, p. 97) is hardly an argument. It may be compared with what is stated by St. G. Mivart[^[903]] to be the basis of Darwinism. “Every individual has to endure a very severe struggle for existence owing to the tendency to geometrical increase of all kinds of animals and plants, while the total animal and vegetable population (man and his agency excepted) remains almost stationary.” Mr. Mivart’s reason for excepting man seems to be Mr. George’s reason for including him. The latter’s more direct arguments against Malthus are as follows:—first, the difficulty is in the future (p. 85);—second, Malthus shifts the responsibility from man to the Creator (p. 87);—third, Malthus justifies the status quo and parries the demand for reform (p. 88);—fourth, Malthus ascribes excessive increase of numbers to a general tendency of human nature, while it is really due to the badness of our institutions in old countries, as in India and Ireland (pp. 101–114), or the very thinness of population in new (p. 92);—fifth, Malthus does not distinguish between tendency to increase and actual increase, and is therefore refuted by the fact that the world is not yet peopled (p. 94). In the sixth place, we are told, if there had been such a law as the Malthusian, it would have been sooner and more widely recognized (p. 98);—that families often become extinct (p. 99), and it is more certain that we have ancestors than that we shall have descendants;[^[904]]—that better industry would keep a larger population (p. 107);—Malthus says that vice and misery are necessary (p. 109);—Malthus does not see that vegetables and animals increase faster than population (p. 115),—or that the increase of man involves the increase of his food (p. 116), for a division of labour makes man produce more than he consumes (p. 126), and so the most populous countries are always the most wealthy (p. 128);—Malthus forgets that the world is wide (p. 119),—and that the tendency to increase is checked by development of intellect,[^[905]]—and by the elevation of the standard of comfort (pp. 121, 123);—he forgets that “the power of population to produce the necessaries of life is not to be measured by the necessaries of life” it actually produces, but by its powers to produce wealth in all forms (p. 127);—Malthus will not see that twenty men where nature is niggardly (e. g. on a bare rock?) will produce more than twenty times what one man will where nature is bountiful (p. 134);—and the Malthusian theory “attributes want to the decrease of productive power” (p. 134);—finally Malthus does not know “the real law of population,” which is that “the tendency to increase, instead of being always uniform, is strong where a greater population would give increased comfort, and where the perpetuity of the race is threatened by the mortality induced by adverse conditions, but weakens just as the higher development of the individual becomes possible, and the perpetuity of the race is assured” (p. 123). What is right in this view of the real law of population is common to Mr. George with Mr. Herbert Spencer;[^[906]] what is wrong is common to him with Godwin.[^[907]]

The view of Karl Marx,[^[908]] the prophet of the International and of modern economic Socialism, is built on much more solid foundations. It is a corollary of his view of capital. The general law of the accumulation of capital, in these days of large manufactories and machinery, involves not only a progressive addition to the quantity of capital, which is all that Adam Smith contemplated, but a qualitative change in the proportion between fixed capital, such as machinery, and the circulating which is paid in wages. To use the author’s words, the progress of accumulation brings with it a relative decrease of the variable component of capital and a relative increase of its constant component. New machinery is constantly supplanting labour without any real compensation in increased demand, either at once or in the long run. The constant element increases at the cost of the variable; and this can only result in the progressive production of a population which, in relation to capital, is a surplus or superfluity, an over-population;—the cause which increases the net revenue of the country at the same time renders the population redundant and deteriorates the condition of the labourer.[^[909]] So far from deploring the existence of this redundant class, the capitalists depend on it,[^[910]] as the reserve of their army. They trust to its cheap labour to save them from the depression which in our days (though never before) appears with unfailing regularity after brisk trade and a crisis. If the hands were not always there for them to employ, they would not at once be able to seize the happy moment of a reviving demand for their goods. “Malthus with his narrow views understands the surplus population to be superfluous absolutely in itself, and not merely in relation to capital; but even he recognizes that over-population is a necessity of modern industry.”[^[911]] In proof of these statements he quotes the words of Malthus (Pol. Econ., ed. 1836, pp. 215,[^[912]] 319, 320):—“Prudential habits with regard to marriage carried to a considerable extent among the labouring classes, of a country mainly depending upon manufactures and commerce, might injure it.”... “From the nature of a population, an increase of labourers cannot be brought into [the] market, in consequence of a particular demand, till after the lapse of sixteen or eighteen years; and the conversion of revenue into capital, by saving, may take place much more rapidly; a country is always liable to an increase in the quantity of the funds for the maintenance of labour faster than the increase of population.”

To these charges the answer is, first, that Malthus always recognized that over-population was relative, relative to the actual food;[^[913]] second, that he did not recognize the over-population as necessary; it took place as a matter of fact, but he believed that, if working men did as he wished them, it would disappear;[^[914]]—and in the third place, the first sentence quoted by Marx, from the Political Economy is explained by the second, which he does not quote: “In a country of fertile land such habits would be the greatest of all conceivable blessings.” Malthus is comparing Commercial with Agricultural countries, not pronouncing on the general question of wages; and other passages in his writings[^[915]] show that he regarded the high wages, resulting from prudential habits, as a public gain, more than compensating the capitalists’ loss of profits. Even Marx himself grudgingly allows that Malthus was more humane than Ricardo in regard to the hours of labour desirable for the workmen.[^[916]] In the fourth place, the latter half of the quotation (beginning with the words, “From the nature of a population”) first states an obvious fact which a child could have pointed out, and then a disputable proposition which predicts not an over-population but the reverse of it.

Marx is seeking to demonstrate the hopelessness of the labourer’s position; and he is too acute not to know that his demonstration would be seriously weakened if he admitted the truth of the Malthusian doctrine and the bare possibility of the adoption of prudential habits by the labourers. This is the real reason of his bitter attacks on the Essay. He says of it:[^[917]] “When I say Eden’s work on the Poor was the only important writing by a disciple of Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, I may be reminded of the essay of Malthus. But this book in its first form (and the later editions did nothing but add and adapt borrowed materials) is nothing but a plagiarism from Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, full of schoolboy superficiality and clerical declamation, and not containing a single original sentence. By the way, although Malthus was a clergyman of the Church of England, he had taken the monastic oath of celibacy[!], for this is one of the conditions of a fellowship at the Protestant University of Cambridge. ‘Socios collegiorum maritos esse non permittimus, sed statim postquam quis uxorem duxerit, socius collegii desinat esse’ (Reports of Cambridge University Commission, p. 172). By this circumstance Malthus is favourably distinguished from the other Protestant clergy, who have cast off the Catholic rule of celibacy....[^[918]] With exception of Ortes[^[919]] the Venetian monk, an original and clever writer, most of the writers on Population are Protestant clergymen,” a contrast, he goes on, to the days when political economists were all philosophers. Marx adopts[^[920]] the common view that Malthus being a clergyman was the bond-slave of Toryism and the ruling classes, and therefore ready to adopt a principle that attributed over-population to the eternal laws of nature rather than to the historical laws (also natural) of the capitalists’ production. Marx does not see that the “eternal laws” in question do not lead to over-population except when the precepts of Malthus are neglected; and never shows how, apart from these precepts, over-population will be prevented in the renovated society itself, which has nationalized not only the land but all the instruments of production. Would the habits of men be so changed by this stroke of nationalization that the want of ordinary commercial motives would not be felt?[^[921]] Would not the millennium of the Socialist, like that of the Christian, postulate a religious conversion on the largest scale for its first introduction, to say nothing of its continuance? Productive Co-operation, depending on the spontaneous action of the labourers for its creation, and on their intelligence and prudence for its success, would nationalize capital more surely; and it would not make the impossible postulate of Socialism, that a passionless unselfishness, which not one in a hundred thousand in our day exhibits at any time, shall at once become the invariable daily rule of all without exception. But Co-operation, if it neglects Malthus, will find its work no sooner done than undone.

It may be thought that there are causes at work which will remove over-population among the working classes even under the present system of separated capital and labour. It is a doctrine of the “finer wits,” founded on striking biological analogies, that the general development of intellect in the race will weaken the passion for marriage and supersede the necessity for any checks on it;[^[922]]—the exercise of the energies of concentration or “individuation” developes these energies at the expense of those of diffusion or “genesis;”—the individual is made strong in himself, at the expense of his power of creating new individuals. Quite apart from the disagreeable fact that this principle would lessen the pressure most in those classes where lessening is at present least needed, and least where it is most needed, Malthus would probably have pointed out, first, that unless the appetite is absolutely killed, no physiological check can supersede some control of the will over the passion,—and, second, that intellectual development will more certainly check population by making men alive to their responsibilities and strengthening their power of restraint than by weakening the passion to be restrained. The expounder of the theory is of all people the least likely to teach men that they may become civilized by the progress of their race without the trouble of civilizing themselves individually. But his theory admits the misapplication; and, if it be said by the misappliers that we ought to tell the truth without fear of consequences, we must answer that in this case the consequences are part of the truth. On the other hand, to theorists like W. R. Greg, who suggest unknown physiological laws that may act as a spontaneous check, Malthus would have replied as to Condorcet:[^[923]]

“What can we reason but from what we know?”

This brief survey of typical critics and commentators may be completed by a classification of the former, which, among other advantages, will give a bird’s-eye view of the chief points in discussion. Empson classified the opponents of Malthus by their motives,[^[924]] a proceeding hardly fair either to them or to the essay itself. It is not fair to them, for as a rule the critics appeal to argument, and must be judged by what they adduce, not by their good or ill will, wisdom or folly, in adducing it; and not fair to the essay, because few books have owed so much to their reviewers.

The positions of the critics may be classified as follows:—

I. Some say the doctrine of the essay is a truism.[^[925]]

II. Others admit that it is unanswerable, but retain a philosophical faith in the future discovery of some contrary principle.[^[926]]

III. Others find fault with the details of the doctrine, either (a) in regard to the ratios of increase, asserting that no tendency to a geometrical increase of population has been proved, but something much less rapid, even (a few say) a decreasing ratio,[^[927]]—and that no mere arithmetical increase of food has been proved, but something much more rapid,[^[928]]—or (b) in regard to the checks on population, asserting that no checks are necessary,[^[929]]—that vice and misery sometimes add to population instead of checking it,[^[930]]—that to include moral restraint is to stultify the original doctrine,[^[931]]—that moral restraint sometimes involves as great evil as excessive numbers, both from the personal practice of it and from the preaching of it to others,[^[932]]—that important checks have been omitted, the chief being misgovernment,[^[933]] bad laws,[^[934]] high feeding,[^[935]] intellectual development,[^[936]] and those of Owen.[^[937]]

There is, besides, an a priori criticism, which is either (I.) ecclesiastical,[^[938]] alleging that Malthus contradicts the Bible or some other authority,—(II.) theological,[^[939]] that he denies Providence,—or (III.) doctrinaire,[^[940]] that he denies natural rights and the pre-established harmony of moral and economical laws, and the instinct of equality,—or (IV.) ethical and popular,[^[941]] that he runs counter to the moral sense and the natural benevolence of men and cosmopolitan morality. These arguments have been already considered. The fourth of them has, in its last branch, an appearance of truth, because Malthus has certainly pled less for the cosmopolitan than for the domestic and civic virtues. He wishes to lay the foundations solidly and leave the building to others. Cosmopolitan morality can rarely be the foundation. In the Empire, Christianity may have raised the people, and Stoicism the philosophers, to the wider morality without the training of the narrower, so that the converts were made better members of their own small communities by becoming members of the commonwealth of the saints and citizens of the great world. But it seems to Malthus that, in the world of to-day, the many conditions of a steady moral progress are best secured if the domestic and civic virtues precede the cosmopolitan. We must not legislate for a world of heroes, but for men as we know them to be; and a comfortable domestic life (βίος τέλειος) must be the common highway to goodness in a society of ordinary men. If poverty were no evil, churlishness would be no vice. But extreme poverty[^[942]] is a real hindrance to goodness. In the apparent exceptions, as in the voluntary poverty of St. Francis, the greatest evil is absent, for there is no struggle for bare life. To abolish that struggle, and help men to comfort, is in some degree to help men to goodness; and it was the end for which Malthus laboured. The most sure and solid way of reaching it lay, as he thought, in impressing every man with a strong sense of his responsibility for his acts and of his power over his own destiny. To reform a nation, we must reform the members of it, who, if they are good at first in spite of their institutions, will at last conform their institutions to the model of their own goodness. To hold men the creatures of society, and make society responsible for their character, was, he thought, to mistake the order of nature. Society can feel its responsibility only in its individual members; and no member of it can free his own soul by the purity of a collective or representative conscience.

The doctrine of Malthus is, therefore, a strong appeal to personal responsibility. He would make men strong in will, to subdue their animal wants to their notion of personal good and personal goodness, which, he believed, could never fail to develope into the common good and goodness of all. Believers in the omnipotence of outward circumstances and the powerlessness of the human will, to alter them or the human character, may put Malthus beyond the pale of sympathy. But all can enter into the mind of Malthus and understand his work, who know the hardness of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit, and yet believe in the power of ideas to change the lives of men, and have faith not only in the rigour of natural laws, but in man’s power to conquer nature by obeying her.

BOOK V.
BIOGRAPHY.

Parentage—Early Education—Graves and Wakefield—Course at Cambridge—Correspondence with his Father—Change in Studies—The Crisis and the Curacy—Effect of the Essay on its Author—Early and Late Styles—Life from 1799 to 1834—Ingrata Patria?—East India College—Professor’s Lectures—Hic Jacet.

The few facts that are known of the life of Malthus bring us nearer to him than we can come in his writings, and show us how well, on the whole, his antecedents and surroundings fitted him for his work. Our chief authorities are Bishop Otter’s biographical preface to the second edition of our author’s Political Economy, which was posthumously published in 1836, and Professor Empson’s notice of the book in the Edinburgh Review for January 1837.[^[943]] Otter was the college companion and life-long friend of Malthus; Empson was his colleague at Haileybury. The information they give us, though meagre, is trustworthy; and happily it can be supplemented by hints from other quarters.

His father, Daniel Malthus, was born in 1730, and went to Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1747,[^[944]] the year when Adam Smith went home from Balliol to Scotland. He left without a degree, not because of the Articles, for he subscribed them at matriculation,[^[945]] or from Dr. Johnson’s reason of poverty, for he was a gentleman commoner, but probably from a contempt for the distinction itself.[^[946]] His mind was active and open, and he seems to have formed literary friendships that stood his son in good stead afterwards. He liked to stay up in Oxford in vacation, working hard at his own studies in his own ways, and seeing none but chosen friends. He wrote to his son in later years, “I used to think Oxford none the less pleasant and certainly not the less useful for being disburdened of some of its society; I imagine you will say the same of Cambridge.”[^[947]] On leaving the university he married and went to live in Surrey at a quiet country house on the way from Dorking to Guildford, still known by its old name of the Rookery. Of his eldest son, who took his grandfather’s name of Sydenham,[^[948]] we know little except that in due time he married, and had two sons, Sydenham and Charles, and a daughter Mary. Mary died single in 1881 in her eighty-second year, Charles in 1821 in his fifteenth, their father in 1821 in his sixty-eighth. Sydenham, our author’s nephew, who died in 1869, was proprietor of Dalton Hill, Albury, where members of his family were, till recently, still living; his son, Lieut.-Col. Sydenham Malthus, C.B., of the 94th Regiment, served with distinction in the Zulu war a few years ago.

Daniel’s second son, Thomas Robert, familiarly known as Robert, was born at the Rookery on 14th February, 1766, the year when Rousseau came to England. His mother seems to have died before her husband; she is not mentioned in our meagre biographies.[^[949]] His father, full of the teaching of the Émile, and by no means prejudiced by his Oxford experience in favour of the ordinary conventional training of the English youth, seems to have sent his sons to no public school of any kind, and in all probability brought them up at home under his own eye for the first eight or nine years of their life. We may think of Robert, therefore, as passing his childhood without privation, if without luxury, in the home of an English country gentleman of moderate fortune, who was devoted to books and botany, fireside and hillside philosophizing,[^[950]] and the improvement of his house and grounds,—a man full of life and originality, gifted with vigorous health, and joining in his boys’ walks and games.[^[951]] In his quiet little valley it was easy for Daniel Malthus to picture to himself a Millennial Hall of the future in store for every one else, on the type of his own Rookery, with no worse interruption than the rooks that cawed there nightly on the hill above him. From his son’s description[^[952]] and his own letters, we gather that he was one of the best sort of the Enlightened followers of Nature. He knew Rousseau personally, and became his executor;[^[953]] but they were liker in views than in character; Daniel Malthus had a deeper vein of reverence and a stronger inclination to put theory into practice.[^[954]] The neighbours thought him an amiable and clever man who was an ornament to his parish, but decidedly eccentric, for he made few friends and was fondest of his own and his children’s company.[^[955]] He was versed beyond his compeers in French and German literature, or he would hardly have been credited with having translated Paul et Virginie, D’Ermenonville’s Essay on Landscape, and the Sorrows of Werther. We have Robert’s authority for saying that, although he wrote no translations, he wrote many pieces that were very successful, but always anonymous.[^[956]] With much of his son’s talent, he had no power, like his son’s, of sustained intellectual effort.

He saw the boy’s promise early, and gave him an education which is condemned by Robert’s chief biographer as irregular and desultory, but had a method in it. He believed that sons are always what their fathers were at their age, with the same kind of faults and virtues; and the men whose influence would have been best for himself would, he thought, be the best teachers for Robert. At the same time he believed with the “Émile” that a sort of laissez faire was the best policy in the education of children; they should be left to grow, and use their own eyes and hands and heads for themselves. At the age of nine or ten, say in the year 1776, Robert was accordingly delivered over to Mr. Richard Graves, Rector of Claverton, near Bath, to be taught little but Latin and good behaviour, along with a few other boys, most of them older than himself. Graves, who was Daniel’s senior by some years, had been intimate with the poet Shenstone at Pembroke College, Oxford, “a society which for half a century” (on Johnson’s partial testimony) “was eminent for English poetry and elegant literature.” From his novel, The Spiritual Quixote, or the Summer’s Ramble of Mr. Geoffry Wildgoose,[^[957]] we should not fancy him the best guide for ingenuous youth. The book is a coarse and offensive satire on Whitfield and Wesley;[^[958]] and shows Graves as a clergyman to be liker Laurence Sterne than Dr. Primrose. “Don Roberto,” however, as the tutor nicknamed his pupil, was fonder of fun and fighting than of his books, and at the ripe age of ten is not likely to have been troubled about the universe or about clerical consistency. From Graves he passed[^[959]] into the hands of a much better man, Gilbert Wakefield, a clergyman who had rebelled against the Articles, turned dissenter, and become classical master of an academy at Warrington, founded in 1779 “to provide a course of liberal education for the sons of dissenters, and particularly for dissenting ministers.”[^[960]] About one-third of the boys at the Warrington Academy were sons of members of the Church of England, who were, like Daniel Malthus, liberal in their opinions, and wished their sons to be likewise. Wakefield held decided views on education; and they were in close accordance with Daniel and the Émile. “The greatest service of tuition,” he said, “to any youth, is to teach him the exercise of his own powers, to conduct him to the hill of knowledge by that gradual process in which he sees and secures his own way, and rejoices in a consciousness of his own faculties and his own proficiency. Puppies and sciolists alone can be expected to be formed by any other process.”[^[961]] The tutor’s best service is to point the pupil to the best authors and give him advice (not lectures) when he wants it. There was self-denial as well as wisdom in Wakefield’s view, for in one case at least the pupil showed his proficiency by departing from the opinions of his tutor.

Wakefield, himself a Fellow of Jesus,[^[962]] procured Malthus an entrance to that college, and directed his studies till he matriculated there as a pensioner (or ordinary commoner) on 17th December, 1784, beginning residence in 1785.[^[963]] Robert esteemed him highly. He described him twenty years afterwards[^[964]] as a man “of the strictest and most inflexible integrity,” who gave up not only prospects of preferment, but even opportunities of usefulness, rather than deny the truth and offend his conscience,—a man hot and intemperate in public controversy,[^[965]] but modest and genial in society, never advancing his opinions till challenged, nor trying to make converts to them, but urging others to an independent study of the facts,—finally, a genius cramped by its own learning and good memory, never taking time and pains to do itself justice in its writings. Though a foe to the thirty-nine Articles, Wakefield was a stout believer in Christianity, and attacked Paine’s Age of Reason in a rough style that contrasts strongly with the sober remarks of Malthus on Paine’s Rights of Man.

Up to 1785, therefore, his father and Wakefield had the largest share in the education of Malthus; and their influence was shown in the very fact that the opinions of Malthus were not fixed by them. His opinions were to be of his own forming; and, having never learned the schoolboy’s ambition of prize-taking,[^[966]] he found time at college not only for what would give him the best degree, but for every study that interested him, especially history and poetry and modern languages, as in his later years for Italian literature. Frend, author of a political tract, Peace and Union, which brought him the honour of prosecution,[^[967]] was his college tutor, and spoke highly of him.[^[968]] It says much for his mathematical powers that in spite of his wide general reading he took the ninth place among the wranglers of his year, 1788. If he had been confining himself, as his father supposed, to the beaten track, he might, like Paley, have reached the senior wranglership.[^[969]] After the Tripos he proposed to study at Cambridge and at home on a plan of his own. His father, on the false analogy of his own experience, had warned him against the abstract studying of scientific and mathematical principles apart from their applications; he must not “work curious stitches on a piece of rag”; he must become a practical surveyor, mechanic, and navigator. The son had answered that there would be ample time after the Tripos to make the applications, and there was little enough time in three years to study the principles. But thereafter, “if you will give me leave to proceed in my own plans of reading for the next two years (I speak with submission to your judgment), I promise you at the expiration of that time to be a decent natural philosopher, and not only to know a few principles, but to be able to apply these principles in a variety of useful problems.”[^[970]] In reality, so far from having his father’s tendency to abstract speculation, he was (as he says himself) rather “remarked in college for talking of what actually exists in nature or may be put to real practical use.”[^[971]]

Though the son had the best of this personal controversy, he would have done well to have responded to his father’s letters in the spirit in which they were written; in one instance at least, his father complains that Robert “drove him back into himself.” But this was rare. His father describes him as an admirable companion, sympathetic and generous, and making everybody easy and amused about him.[^[972]] He was a favourite at home. When the family was removing from the Rookery at Dorking to the Cottage[^[973]] at Albury in 1787, he was told: “You must find your way to us over bricks and tiles and meet with five in a bed and some of us under hedges, but everybody says they will make room for Robert.” It was Robert’s own warm heart that led him to give those years of leisure after the Tripos to studies very different from those of his first plan. Social problems were competing for his attention with scientific.

In 1797 he took his Master’s degree. In the same year he got a fellowship at his college; wrote but, on his father’s advice, did not print the Crisis;[^[974]] and took a curacy near Albury. If the Crisis did nothing more, it showed how the attention of the man was fixing itself on the subjects that engrossed him during life, and how his character was changing from gay to grave. It is difficult for a reader of the later Essay or the Political Economy to conceive that the writer could ever have been very merry in heart or light in touch; and there is a still wider distance between the pugnacious Don Roberto, never long without a black eye, and the grave gentle host of Miss Martineau at the East India College. The change in style between his early writings and his later was due to a real change in character, produced by the concentration of his thoughts on the problem of poverty. The success of the first Essay on Population[^[975]] fixed for him the work of his life. He was to set one neglected truth clearly before the world; and he devoted himself wholly to it, pushing his inquiries not only by study of authorities and facts at home,[^[976]] but by his own[^[977]] and his friends’[^[978]] travels, and by conversation and correspondence with all that were likely to give him anything in conference.[^[979]] He sacrificed to it, fortunately or unfortunately, his youthful buoyancy and freshness of style, though in speculation his opinions passed from pessimism to a moderate optimism, and he was never too old in spirit to unlearn a fault.

In his mature writings the composition is less faulty than the diction, which is certainly too Johnsonian. The composition is a little bald and often diffuse; but the meaning of each sentence is always clear, and in economical writing that is the first of virtues. In a work of imagination we may desire to have the greatest number of the greatest ideas put into each sentence; but a scientific treatise is more often concerned with a single truth in its full development; and the perpetual recurrence of the same phrases in different connections is unavoidable, in proportion to the thoroughness of the discussion. Great variety of language would either imply in the writer or cause in the reader some confusion of thought. It is not surprising, then, to find Malthus saying substantially the same thing in nearly the same words, whether he is presenting his views on Population directly in a book on the subject, or placing them in their economical context in a book on Political Economy, or touching them incidentally in a Corn Law pamphlet or Quarterly article, or answering questions about them before a Commons Committee. His abundant metaphors in the first essay[^[980]] had simply led to misunderstanding; and he deliberately renounced fine writing for high thinking, present popularity for permanent usefulness.[^[981]]

The first essay was the turning-point in his literary life. Except the pamphlets on Haileybury College, all his later writings are economical. His personal history, being uneventful, was, like a time of dull annals, presumably happy. The fine portrait of him by Linnell,[^[982]] taken in his old age, gives a pleasing impression, not only of mildness and firmness, but of serene contentment, without any trace of physical suffering or physical defect, though it is certain he had the latter.[^[983]] In person he was tall and “elegantly formed.”[^[984]] 1799 is the year of his first Continental journey.[^[985]] In January 1800 his father died, at the age of seventy. In the same year appeared the tract on The High Price of Provisions. In 1802 Malthus was again on the Continent.[^[986]] In June 1803 he published the second (or quarto) essay, which seems, from a passage in Edward Clarke’s Travels, to have been long expected by his friends. “I am sorry,” writes Clarke to him from Constantinople on 16th March, 1802, “to find you confess your breach of duty in not having written a book. But you have been engaged in the press, because I heard at the Palace that you had published a new edition of your Population, and, moreover, I was there assured so long ago as last year that you had written a work on the Scarcity of Corn. How does this accord with your declaration? Perhaps it is a pamphlet, and therefore strictly not ‘a book.’”[^[987]]

It is not impossible that Clarke had heard this rumour from Lord Elgin, and Lord Elgin from Pitt himself, for Pitt had visited Cambridge on the eve of the dissolution following the Peace of Amiens. On the 16th (December 1801) he was present at the Commemoration dinner in Trinity College Hall.[^[988]] The visit is described by Otter:[^[989]] “It happened that Mr. Pitt was at this time upon a sort of canvassing visit at the university.... At a supper at Jesus Lodge in the company of some young travellers, particularly Mr. Malthus, &c., he was induced to unbend in a very easy conversation respecting Sir Sidney Smith, the massacre at Jaffa, the Pacha of Acre, Clarke, Carlisle,[^[990]] &c.” Though the talk was largely on poetry and foreign politics, it may easily have embraced economics; and the personal meeting may have helped to gain Malthus his appointment as Professor of History and Political Economy at Haileybury College. With or without Pitt, the appointment was made in 1805; and in view of it Malthus was able to carry out, on 13th March 1804, his marriage with Harriet Eckersall (daughter of John Eckersall of Claverton House, St. Catherine’s, near Bath), to whom he had probably been for some years engaged.[^[991]] In 1806 he published the third edition of the essay (in two volumes), in 1807 the fourth edition, and also the letter to Samuel Whitbread on his Bill for amending the Poor Laws. If it is true that he visited Owen at New Lanark, it must have been in the course of the next seven years.[^[992]] There is nothing signed from his pen in that time but a letter to Lord Grenville in defence of the East India College;[^[993]] but in 1814 and 1815 he wrote the Observations on the Corn Laws, the Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of restricting Importation, and The Nature and Progress of Rent. In 1807 he had been with Horner in Wales, impressing Horner, as they went together from Raglan to Abergavenny, with his idea that the people should “live dear”;[^[994]] and in 1817 he visited Kerry and Westmeath. In the same year, 1817, he published the fifth edition of his essay. 1818 would be memorable to him as the year when Mackintosh joined him at Haileybury as Professor of General Polity and Law in succession to Mr. Christian. In 1819 Malthus appears as Fellow of the Royal Society, though the honour did not tempt him back into physical science.[^[995]] In 1820 appeared the first edition of the Political Economy. In 1821, Thomas Tooke, the author of High and Low Prices, founded the Political Economy Club, James Mill drafting the rules. Malthus, Grote, and Ricardo were among its members; and the survivors are said to remember well the “crushing criticisms” by James Mill of Malthus’ speeches.[^[996]]

1823 is the year of the tract on the Measure of Value and the Quarterly article on Tooke; 1824 of the paper on Population in the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, and the article on the New Political Economy in the Quarterly Review.[^[997]] In 1825 he lost a daughter, and went for his own and his wife’s health to the Continent. In that year he contributed his first paper to the Royal Society of Literature, of which he had been made an Associate two years before; and that year saw Empson take the place of Mackintosh at Haileybury. In 1826 was published the sixth edition of the essay, the last published in his lifetime. In 1827 we find him before the Emigration Committee, and we have from his pen the Definitions in Political Economy, and the second paper contributed to the Royal Society of Literature. In 1829 letters passed between him and W. Nassau Senior, which were appended by the latter to his Lectures on Population. In 1830 he wrote the Summary View, which involved no new effort. Indeed his whole time seems to have been spent in revising his Political Economy in the light of his public and private discussions with Ricardo, though he did not live to print the new edition himself. Shortly before his death he said to some one who rebuked him for his delay: “My views are before the public. If I am to alter anything, I can do little more than alter the language, and I don’t know if I should alter it for the better” (Empson, l. c. p. 472). He was one of the first Fellows of the Statistical Society, founded in March 1834, and its first Annual Report contains a high eulogy on him and his work; but he did not live to take much share in its proceedings. He died suddenly of heart disease on Monday, 29th December, 1834, on a visit to Mr. Eckersall at St. Catherine’s, where he was spending Christmas with his wife and family. He is buried in the Abbey Church at Bath, in the north aisle of the nave. Of his three children, two survived him, of whom one, a daughter, is still living.[^[998]]

Brougham, in a letter to Macvey Napier (31st Jan., 1837), denies the truth of an assertion of Empson’s, that Lords Lansdowne and Holland tried to get preferment for Malthus, but failed; on the contrary, he had himself, he says, offered Malthus a living, but Malthus had declined it in favour of his son, Henry,[^[999]] “who got it, and I believe now has it.” Henry, however, did not become vicar of Effingham (near Leatherhead in Surrey) till 1835, the year after his father’s death,—or of Donnington (near Chichester in Sussex) till 1837, the year when Brougham was writing. The second appointment may have been due to Empson’s reproach or Otter’s influence. Henry died in August 1882 at the age of seventy-six. Since, between the two parishes, he kept as many as four curates at a time, the combined salaries of the two, amounting to £672, seem a small income.[^[1000]] His father himself told Gallois, the French publicist, in 1820, that all his works till then had not brought him above £1000. Gallois, repeating this to the poet Moore, slily remarked that in England poetry seemed to be better paid than useful learning.[^[1001]] There is no reason for the belief that Malthus was made rich by the second essay,[^[1002]] or indeed by anything else. He did not go the right way to be rich. He could no doubt have got Church preferment if he had pursued it like Paley. At the end of his days, even if he had desired it, he was too mild a partisan to be a grata persona to the Whigs in office; he had acquiesced in the Reform of 1832, but without enthusiasm,[^[1003]] having a livelier interest in social than in political changes. But the world after all used him kindly. Of worldly comfort, after 1805, he had enough; and he was fully satisfied, as he had reason to be, with his lot in the East India College. It gave him nearly thirty years of the leisure which Godwin had justly counted the true riches of life.

The position had its cares, for the college was an educational experiment. Governor-General Wellesley[^[1004]] had proposed to found a college at Fort William, Calcutta, for the general education of the civil servants of the Company as well as their special instruction in Oriental languages. He pointed out that their functions, judicial, administrative, diplomatic, were now totally unlike their names of writer, factor, and merchant, and they needed something higher than the commercial training which was all that was then required of them. The Directors of the East India Company carried out his wishes so far as to allow Fort William College to do the advanced training in languages; but they thought that the general education should be given before the cadets left England, and at the end of 1805 they passed a scheme for establishing for that purpose a college at Haileybury, near Hertford. On their nomination, instead of going out at once to India, the future civil servants of India were to spend two or three years at Haileybury, and to receive first a General education on the lines of Oxford and Cambridge, and second a Special education to prepare them for their duties in their province.[^[1005]] The Professor of “History and Political Economy” and the Professor of “General Polity and the Laws of England” were regarded as giving both the general and the special kinds of training. “As the study of law and political economy” (so runs the scheme) “is to form an essential part in the general system of education, it will be required that, in the lectures upon these subjects, particular attention be given to the explanation of the political and commercial relations subsisting between India and Great Britain.”[^[1006]] The two professors were required to give “(1) a course of lectures on general history and on the history and statistics of the modern nations of Europe, (2) a course of lectures on political economy, (3) a course of lectures on general polity, on the laws of England and principles of the British Constitution.”[^[1007]] The other subjects were Classics, Oriental Languages, Mathematics, and Natural Philosophy. The college course lasted, as a rule, two years, each year consisting of two terms of about five months each (Feb. to June, Aug. to Dec.); and there were periodical examinations, honour lists, and prizes. The ages of the pupils ranged from as low as fifteen to as high as twenty-two, and about forty joined every year. Malthus would seldom have a class beyond twelve or fourteen, all in the later year of their course.[^[1008]]

The general discipline of the classes and the surveillance or want of surveillance of the pupils in their private rooms were rather on the model of an unreformed Oxford college than of a public school.[^[1009]] Sense of personal responsibility and habits of self-government were to take the place of the schoolboy’s fear of punishment. Unhappily, before learning the new motives, the boys too often abused the absence of the old.[^[1010]]

About half of the professors were in holy orders and did duty in the college chapel. If Malthus took his turn with the rest, we need not suppose with his clerical biographer that he magnified the office. His sermons would always be earnest; they might often perhaps be too long. His week-day lectures, unless he made them liker the first essay with its fine writing than the later books with their plain unvarnished arguments, could not have been very fascinating to immature youths, especially as the lecturer had a slight defect in utterance.[^[1011]] Eight years of teaching convinced him that Political Economy was not, as he once thought, too hard for boys of sixteen or seventeen;—“they could not only understand it,” he said, “but they did not even think it dull.”[^[1012]] We may hope it was so; but in view of the whole case, it is probable that our author’s labours, in the classroom and out of it, were far from light, and that the pleasantness of the life was purchased with a large share of discomfort.

The physical surroundings were all that could be desired. “We are so rural and quiet here, that there can be no greater contrast [to London]. This house is in a cluster of tall shrubs and young trees, with a little bit of smooth lawn sloping to a bright pond, in which old weeping willows are dipping their hair, and rows of young pear trees admiring their blooming faces. Indeed, there never was such a flash of shadowing high-hanging flowers as we have around us; and almost all, as it happens, of that pure, silvery, snowy, bridal tint; and we live, like Campbell’s sweet Gertrude, ‘as if beneath a galaxy of overhanging sweets, with blossoms white.’ There are young horse-chestnuts with flowers half a yard long, fresh, full-clustered white lilacs, tall Guelder roses, broadspreading pear and cherry trees, low thickets of blooming sloe, and crowds of juicy-looking detached thorns, quite covered with their fragrant May-flowers, half open, like ivory filigree, and half shut like Indian pearls, and all so fresh and dewy since the milky showers of yesterday; and resounding with nightingales, and thrushes, and skylarks, shrilling high up, overhead, among the dazzling slow-sailing clouds. Not to be named, I know and feel as much as you can do, with your Trossachs, and Loch Lomonds, and Inverarys; but very sweet, and vernal, and soothing, and fit enough to efface all recollections of hot, swarming, whirling, and bustling London from all good minds.”[^[1013]]

Equally pleasant is a glimpse of the daily life at Haileybury, given by Miss Martineau, who saw it in 1833. Malthus considered her one of his best expositors;—“whereas his friends had done him all manner of mischief by defending him injudiciously, my tales had represented his views precisely as he could have wished;”—and he was at the pains to seek her out in London and bring her down to the college.[^[1014]] “It was a delightful visit, and the well-planted county of Herts was a welcome change from the pavement of London in August.... My room was a large and airy one, with a bay window and a charming view.”[^[1015]] She found desk, books, and everything needed for her work. Her entertainers had guessed from her books that she must be, like Malthus himself,[^[1016]] fond of riding; and she found her riding-habit and whip ready. Exploring the green lanes round Amwell, Ware, and Hertford, on horseback, in parties of five or six, seems to have been the chief amusement. “The subdued jests and external homage and occasional insurrections of the young men, the archery of the young ladies, the curious politeness of the Persian professor [Ibrahim], the fine learning and eager scholarship of Principal[^[1017]] Le Bas, and the somewhat old-fashioned courtesies of the summer evening parties are all over now, except as pleasant pictures in the interior gallery of those who knew the place, of whom I am thankful to have been one.”

When she again visited Haileybury, Malthus was gone; Professor Jones was in his chair, and Empson in his house, probably one of the most comfortable in a building which, if smaller, was much more picturesque than the present school.[^[1018]]

The “occasional insurrections of the young men” were a feature of the college from the beginning. Sydney Smith writes to Lord Holland in June 1810, when there was talk of making Mackintosh professor at Haileybury: “The season for lapidating the professors is now at hand; keep Mackintosh quiet at Holland House till all is over;”[^[1019]] and to Whishaw in January 1818, when the appointment had been made: “His situation at Hertford will suit him very well, peltings and contusions always excepted. He should stipulate for ‘pebble money,’ as it is technically termed, or an annual pension in case he is disabled by the pelting of the students. By the bye, might it not be advisable for the professors to learn the use of the sling (balearia habena)? It would give them a great advantage over the students.”[^[1020]] The lapidations were probably no worse than similar scenes at our English and Scotch Universities that have not yet destroyed the credit of these institutions. But the opponents of the college complained of much more than the insubordination of the students. Lord Grenville had made an attack on it (in April 1813), on the ground that it separated the future Civil servants from the ordinary life of Englishmen, and prevented them from becoming imbued with “English manners, English attachments, English principles, and I am not ashamed to say English prejudices.”[^[1021]] Malthus, who had gone up to London to hear Grenville’s speech in the House of Lords, became champion of the college, and had no difficulty in meeting this assault. The defence of the professors, as set forth by him in 1817,[^[1022]] was that the plan of the college was good in theory and had proved good in practice. The insubordination was due to the dependence of the professorial staff upon the Company’s Directors, who had (till then) withheld from the teachers their best means of discipline, the power of expulsion.

The students were as little likely as army or navy cadets to become un-English; and they were much less likely to form a caste at Haileybury than if they had been sent to an Indian college. The details of this extinct controversy need not detain us. It is enough to say that Malthus discharged his part with great vigour and something of his early vivacity. At the best, it must be confessed, the college was a compromise; and the unavoidable difficulties of the situation were quite enough to try the mettle of the teachers. The cadets of the first year might be fifteen or they might be eighteen, and there was no natural aristocracy of senior boys to check the juniors. Those of the younger age were physically and mentally more like schoolboys than undergraduates, and unfit, as yet, for the quasi-independent life of the latter. Many were unwilling to go to India at all, and it was their parents or guardians who really feared the expulsion of incorrigibles. But it was better that the unfit should be rejected in England, where they could find other openings, than in India, where they could find none; and it was better their training should be carried on where the climate, the expense, and the moral, social, and intellectual advantages were in keeping with their age and their state of pupilage. “Little other change is wanting,” in the system as it then was, “than that an appointment should be considered in spirit and in truth, not in mere words, as a prize to be contended for, not a property already possessed,[^[1023]] which may be lost. If the Directors were to appoint one-fifth every year beyond the number finally to go out, and the four-fifths were to be the beat of the whole body, the appointments would then really be prizes to be contended for, and the effects would be admirable. Each appointment to the college would then be of less value; but they would be more in number, and the patronage would hardly suffer. A Director could not then, indeed, be able to send out an unqualified son. But is it fitting that he should? This is a fair question for the consideration of the Legislature and the British public.”[^[1024]] In these matters, at least, Malthus was no reactionary.

In spite of Joseph Hume and its other enemies, the college lived out its half-century, and does not die out, on the pages of the India Register, till the death of the Company in 1858. Its monopoly was gone some time before then. An Act of 1827 provided, theoretically, for the examination and appointment of India Civil servants who had not studied at Hertford College. In 1833 provision was made for the limited competition which Malthus had recommended.[^[1025]] In 1855 came the end. The Company was “relieved of the obligation to keep up the college;” the reign of open competition, ushered in by Macaulay’s Report (Nov. 1854), brought a new order of things; and the college was only continued till those who had joined it at the time of the change had been able to finish their course.[^[1026]] There are numbers of old officials, like Sir William Muir, who still hold it in affectionate remembrance;[^[1027]] but except in their memory it exists no more.

The work of Malthus was less in the East India College than in his writings. But his connection with the college was perhaps the most important of the external facts of his life; and it has helped to preserve a record of scenes and incidents which reveal the character more clearly than all the adjectives of panegyrists. Otter, Empson, Miss Martineau, Sydney Smith,[^[1028]] and Horner,[^[1029]] may supply the panegyrics; and the eulogy of Mackintosh is remarkable: “I have known Adam Smith slightly, Ricardo well, Malthus intimately. Is it not something to say for a science that its three great masters were about the three best men I ever knew?”[^[1030]]

His epitaph in Bath Abbey, probably from the pen of Otter, is given on the following page.

SACRED TO THE MEMORY

of

The Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus,

LONG KNOWN TO THE LETTERED WORLD

BY HIS ADMIRABLE WRITINGS ON THE SOCIAL BRANCHES OF

POLITICAL ECONOMY,

PARTICULARLY BY HIS “ESSAY ON POPULATION.”

ONE OF THE BEST MEN AND TRUEST PHILOSOPHERS

OF ANY AGE OR COUNTRY,

RAISED BY NATIVE DIGNITY OF MIND

ABOVE THE MISREPRESENTATIONS OF THE IGNORANT

AND THE NEGLECT OF THE GREAT,

HE LIVED A SERENE AND HAPPY LIFE,

DEVOTED TO THE PURSUIT AND COMMUNICATION

OF TRUTH,

SUPPORTED BY A CALM BUT FIRM CONVICTION OF THE

USEFULNESS OF HIS LABOURS,

CONTENT WITH THE APPROBATION OF THE WISE AND GOOD.

HIS WRITINGS WILL BE A LASTING MONUMENT

OF THE EXTENT AND CORRECTNESS OF HIS UNDERSTANDING.

THE SPOTLESS INTEGRITY OF HIS PRINCIPLES,

THE EQUITY AND CANDOUR OF HIS NATURE,

HIS SWEETNESS OF TEMPER, URBANITY OF MANNERS,

AND TENDERNESS OF HEART,

HIS BENEVOLENCE AND HIS PIETY,

ARE THE STILL DEARER RECOLLECTIONS OF HIS FAMILY

AND FRIENDS.

Born Feb. 14, 1766. Died Dec. 29, 1834.