No doctrine ever was so much reviled. Imprecations have been showered upon it ever since Godwin’s memorable description of it as “that black and terrible demon that is always ready to stifle the hopes of humanity.”
Critics have declared that all Malthus’s economic predictions have been falsified by the facts, that morally his doctrines have given rise to the most repugnant practices, and not a few French writers are prepared to hold him responsible for the decline in the French birth-rate. What are we to make of these criticisms?
History certainly has not confirmed his fears. No single country has shown that it is suffering from over-population. In some cases—that of France, for example—population has increased only very slightly. In others the increase has been very considerable, but nowhere has it outstripped the increase in wealth.
The following table, based upon the decennial censuses, gives the per capita wealth of the population of the United States, the country from which Malthus obtained many of his data:
| Year | Dollars |
|---|---|
| 1850 | 308 |
| 1860 | 514 |
| 1870 | 780 |
| 1880 | 870 |
| 1890 | 1036 |
| 1900 | 1227 |
| 1905 | 1370 |
In fifty years the wealth of every inhabitant has more than quadrupled, although the population in the same interval also shows a fourfold increase (23 millions to 92 millions).[303]
Great Britain, i.e. England and Scotland, at the time Malthus wrote (1800-5), had a population of 10½ millions. To-day it has a population of 40 millions. Such a figure, had he been able to foresee it, would have terrified Malthus. But the wealth and prosperity of Great Britain have in the meantime probably quadrupled also.
Does this prove the claim that is constantly being made, that Malthus’s laws are not borne out by the facts? We think that it is correct to say that the laws still remain intact, but that the conclusions which he drew from them were unwarranted. No one can deny that living beings of every kind, including the human species, multiply in geometrical progression. Left to itself, with no check, such increase would exceed all limits. The increase of industrial products, on the other hand, must of necessity be limited by the numerous conditions which regulate all production—that is, by the amount of space available, the quantity of raw material, of capital and labour, etc. If the growth of population has not outstripped the increase in wealth, but, as appears from the figures we have given, has actually lagged behind it, it is because population has been voluntarily limited, not only in France, where the preventive check is in full swing, but also in almost every other country. This voluntary limitation which gave Malthus such trouble is one of the commonest phenomena of the present time.
Malthus’s apprehensions appear to involve some biological confusion. The sexual and the reproductive instincts are by no means one and the same;[304] they are governed by entirely different motives. Only to the first can be attributed that character of irresistibility which he wrongly attributes to the second. The first is a mere animal instinct which rouses the most impetuous of passions and is common to all men. The second is frequently social and religious in its origins, assuming different forms according to the exigencies of time and place.
To the religious peoples who adopted the laws of Moses, of Manu, or of Confucius to beget issue was to ensure salvation and to realise true immortality.[305] For the Brahmin, the Chinese, or the Jew not to have children meant not merely a misfortune, but a life branded with failure. Among the Greeks and Romans the rearing of children was a sacred duty laid upon every citizen and patriot. An aristocratic caste demanded that the glories of its ancestors and founders should never be allowed to perish for the want of heirs. Even among the working classes, whose lot is often miserable and always one of economic dependence, there are some who are buoyed up by the hope that the more children they have the larger will be their weekly earnings and the greater their power of enlisting public sympathy. And in every new country there is a demand for labourers to cultivate its virgin soil and to build up a new people.