POPULATION and OVER-POPULATION
POPULATION AND OVER-POPULATION
It has become quite fashionable with people who occupy themselves with the social question to consider the question of population as the most important and burning of all. They claim that we are threatened with "over-population;" aye, that the danger is upon us. This, more than any other division of the Social Question, must be treated from an international standpoint. The feeding and the distribution of the people have pre-eminently become international issues of fact. Since Malthus, the law underlying the increase of population has been the subject of extensive dispute. In his celebrated and now notorious "Essay on the Principles of Population," which Marx has characterized as a "school-boyish, superficial and pulpiteer piece of declamatory plagiarism on Sir James Stewart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace and others" and which "contains not one original sentence," Malthus lays down the proposition that mankind has the tendency to increase in geometric progression (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.), while food could increase only in arithmetic progression (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.); and that the consequence is a rapid disproportion between the numbers of the population and the supply of food, that inevitably leads to want and starvation. The final conclusion was the necessity of "abstinence" in the procreation of children, and abstinence from marriage without sufficient means for the support of a family, contrariwise there would be no place at "the banquet table of Nature" for the descendants.
The fear of over-population is very old. It was touched upon in this work in connection with the social conditions of the Greeks and Romans, and at the close of the Middle Ages. Plato and Aristotle, the Romans, the small bourgeois of the Middle Ages were all swayed by it, and it even swayed Voltaire, who, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, published a treatise on the subject. The fear ever turns up again—this circumstance must be emphasized—at periods when the existing social conditions are disintegrating and breaking down. Seeing on all sides privation and discontent at such periods, the privation and discontent are forthwith ascribed to the shortness of the supply of food, instead of to the manner in which the existing supply is distributed.
All advanced social stages have hitherto rested upon class-rule, and the principal means of class-rule was the appropriation of the land. The land gradually slips from the hands of a large number of proprietors into those of a small number that utilize and cultivate it only partially. The large majority are rendered propertyless and are stripped of the means of existence; their share of food then depends upon the good will of their masters, for whom they now have to work. According to the social condition of things, the struggle for the land takes its form from period to period; the end, however, was that the land continued steadily to concentrate in the hands of the ruling class. If undeveloped means of transportation or political isolation impede the intercourse abroad of a community and interfere with the importation of food when the crops fail and provisions are dear, forthwith the belief springs up that there are too many people. Under such circumstances, every increase in the family is felt as a burden; the specter of over-population rises; and the terror that it spreads is in direct proportion to the concentration of the land in few hands, together with its train of evils—the partial cultivation of the soil, and its being turned to purposes of pleasure for its owners. Rome and Italy were poorest off for food at the time when the whole soil of Italy was held by about 3,000 latifundia owners. Hence the cry: "The latifundia are ruining Rome!" The soil was converted into vast hunting-grounds and wonderful pleasure-gardens; not infrequently it was allowed to be idle, seeing that its cultivation, even by slaves, came out dearer to the magnates than the grain imported from Sicily and Africa. It was a state of things that opened wide the doors for usury in grain, a practice in which the rich nobility likewise led. In consideration of this usury of grain the domestic soil was kept from cultivation. Thereupon the impoverished Roman citizen and the impoverished aristocracy resolved to renounce marriage and the begetting of children; hence the laws placing premiums on marriage and children in order to check the steady decrease of the ruling classes.
The same phenomenon appeared towards the close of the Middle Ages, after the nobility and clergy had, in the course of centuries and with the aid of all the crafty and violent means at their command, robbed unnumbered peasants of their property and appropriated the common lands to themselves. When, thereupon, the peasants revolted and were beaten down, the robber-trade gained new impetus, and it was then also practiced upon the Church estates by the Princes of the Reformation. The number of thieves, beggars and vagabonds was never larger than immediately before and after the Reformation. The expropriated rural population rushed to the cities; but there, due to causes that have been described in previous pages, the conditions of life were likewise deteriorating,—hence "over-population" was felt all around.
The appearance of Malthus coincides with that period of English industry when, due to the inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright and Watt, powerful changes set in both in mechanism and technique, changes that affected, first of all, the cotton and linen industries, and rendered breadless the workingmen engaged in them. The concentration of capital and land assumed at the time large proportions in England: along with the rapid increase of wealth, on the one hand, there went the deepening misery of the masses, on the other. At such a juncture, the ruling classes, who have every reason to consider the existing world the "best of all possible worlds," were bound to seek an explanation for so contradictory a phenomenon as the pauperization of the masses in the midst of swelling wealth and flourishing industry. Nothing was easier than to throw the blame upon the too-rapid procreation of the workingmen, and not upon their having been rendered superfluous through the capitalist process of production, and the accumulation of the soil in the hands of landlords. With such circumstances for its setting, the "school-boyish, superficial and pulpiteer piece of declamatory plagiarism," that Malthus published, was a work that gave drastic utterance to the secret thoughts and wishes of the ruling class, and justified their misdeeds to the world. Hence the loud applause that it met from one side, and violent opposition from another. Malthus had spoken the right word at the right time for the English bourgeoisie; hence, although his essay "contained not one original sentence," he became a great and celebrated man, and his name a synonym for the doctrine.[229]
Now, then, the conditions that caused Malthus thus to give his signal of alarm and proclaim his brutal doctrine—he addressed it to the working class, thus adding insult to injury—have since grown worse from decade to decade. They have grown worse, not alone in the fatherland of Malthus, Great Britain, but in all the countries of the world run by the capitalist system of production, whose consequences ever are the robbery of the soil and the dependence and subjugation of the masses through machinery and the factory. This system consists, as has been shown, in the separation of the workingman from his means of production—be these land or tools—and in the transfer of the latter to the capitalist class. That system produces ever new branches of industry, develops and concentrates them, and thereby throws ever larger masses of the people upon the street as "superfluous." On the field of agriculture it promotes, as the Rome of old, the latifundia ownership with all its sequences. Ireland, in this respect the classic land of Europe, and afflicted worst of all by the English system of land-grabbing, had in 1887 an area of 884.4 square miles of meadow and pasture land, but only 263.3 square miles of agricultural fields and the conversion of agricultural fields into meadows and pastures for sheep and cattle and into hunting grounds for the landlords makes every year further strides.[230]