Life and Writings of Thomas R. Malthus

by Charles R. Drysdale

M. Muret, a Swiss clergyman of Vevey, in the eighteenth century, mentions the case of a village called Leyzin, with a population of 400 persons, where there were only eight births a year. The probability of life in this model parish appeared to be so extraordinarily high as to reach 61 years. And the average number of the births having been for 30 years almost accurately equal to the number of deaths, clearly proved that the habits of the people had not led them to emigrate, and that the resources of the parish for the support of the population had remained nearly stationary. As the marriages in this parish would, with few exceptions, be very late, it is evident that a very large proportion of the subsisting marriages would be among persons so far advanced in life that the women had ceased to bear. The births were only about 1 in 49 of the population or much fewer than in France of modern days (1 in 40). In England they are 1 in 28 of the population at present.

M. Muret made some calculations at Vevey respecting the fecundity of marriages. He found that 375 mothers had produced 2,093 children: i.e., about six children each: and he also found that there were 20 sterile women out of 478, or about 1 in 23 wives. Taking this into account, the average number of children to a family at Vevey was 5⅓. In modern France it is about 3, in Prussia 4·68, and in England about 4¼. In those days, the proportion of annual marriages to population was lower in the Canton de Vaud than even in Norway, being only 1 in 140. In the model village of Leyzin only one-fifth of the total mortality was among persons under fifteen. Such were the results of what Mr. Malthus considered as the only true “moral restraint,” late marriages. All these calculations of M. Muret imply the operation of the preventive check to population in a very great degree in the Canton de Vaud. In the town of Berne, the proportion of unmarried persons, including widows and widowers, was considerably above the half of the adults, and the proportion of the living below sixteen to those above was nearly as 1 to 3 in the beginning of this century. The peasants in Berne were noted for comfort and wealth, doubtless owing to the low birth-rate in that country. A law there prevented those who had no means from marrying.

Mr. Malthus gives an amusing account of a conversation he had with a peasant who went with him from the Lac de Joux to the sources of the river Orbe. This man said that the habit if early marriage might be really said to be the vice of the country: and he was so strongly impressed with the necessary and unavoidable wretchedness that must result from it, that he thought a law ought to be made restricting men from entering into the married state before they were forty years of age, and then allowing it only with old maids, who might bear them two or three children instead of six or eight. That peasant would have been, we doubt not, one of the most zealous advocates of the two children system, so wonderfully carried out in many of the most flourishing districts of France, and probably would have abandoned all desire to keep prudent couples like those in these French districts from marrying. We hold with that simple peasant of the Jura, who had learnt the truths he expounded by sad and cruel experience, he having married himself when very young, and with his family, suffered much from poverty, that governments are culpable when they do not attempt to lessen high birth-rates. To forbid early marriage, indeed, is to encourage prostitution and cause many other evils; but to affix a stigma on those who produce large families is, as far as we can see, a plan which can only produce good and need produce no evil results. It is an utter misunderstanding of the rights of the individual to suppose that each man and woman ought to have the right to cause misery to their unfortunate children, and at the same time produce a pressure upon the powers of the soil and lessen the productive powers of past and present labour. That this will ere long be seen to be the truth arising out of the discoveries of the great English professor we cannot for a moment doubt.

CHAPTER V.
OF THE CHECKS TO POPULATION IN FRANCE.

In the sixth chapter of Book II., Mr. Malthus gives us some account of the checks to population which existed in France at the end of last century, which might convince the most sceptical of modern pessimists of the vast strides which a nation may take in a short period towards the attainment of comfort and well-being.

The population of France, before the beginning of the war, says Malthus, was estimated by the Constituent Assembly at 26¼ millions. Necker estimated the yearly births, in 1780, to be above a million, and it is curious, as we shall soon see, that France, in 1874, had not a million of births with a population of 36 millions. Malthus estimated that, out of that million, 600,000 would attain the age of 18; and, considering that nearly as many persons are to be found in a given society, unmarried as married, he amply accounts for the seeming paradox that, whilst France was supposed to have lost 2½ millions by actual war and its consequences, at the time of the Revolution, the population was found to have increased, in 1800, as compared with 1790.

“At all times,” says Malthus, “the number of small farmers and proprietors in France was great: and though such a state of things is by no means favourable to the clear surplus produce or disposable wealth of a nation, yet sometimes it is not unfavourable to the absolute produce, and it has always a tendency to encourage population.” This last remark of Mr. Malthus has not been verified. In no country does the population tend to increase so slowly as in modern France—the land par excellence of peasant proprietors. In all probability, the rapid increase of population at the time of the French Revolution arose from the lower death-rate which always follows a sudden amelioration of the position of the humbler classes, such as that which took place where landed property came into their possession.

The average proportion of births to population in all France, before the Revolution was, according to Necker, 39 per 1000. It has singularly altered since that time, and is now only 26 per 1,000, or the lowest birth-rate in Europe. The death-rate then was 33 per 1,000, and has fallen of late to 21 per 1,000, or nearly the lowest death-rate in Europe.

Sir Francis d’Ivernois, in a work entitled Tableau des Pertes, has the following remark: “Those have yet to learn the first principles of political arithmetic, who imagine that it is in the field of battle and the hospitals, that an account can be taken of the lives which a revolution or a war has cost. The number of men it has killed is of much less importance than the number of children which it has prevented, and will still prevent, from coming into the world.” To this Mr. Malthus replies: “And yet if the circumstances on which the foregoing reasonings are founded should turn out to be true, it will appear that France has not lost a single birth by the revolution. She has the most just reason to mourn the two millions and a half of individuals which she may have lost, but not their posterity: because, if those individuals had remained in the country, a proportionate number of children born of other parents, which are now living in France, would not have come into existence. If in the best governed country in Europe we were to mourn the posterity which is prevented from coming into being, we should always wear the habit of grief.”