Life and Writings of Thomas R. Malthus

by Charles R. Drysdale

The Poor-law Act of 1834, which was carried out in accordance with the views of Malthus and Chalmers, unfortunately placed no effectual check on the quantity of out-door relief, and hence the number of out-door paupers in England is often as high as one-eighth of all relieved. This demoralises and pauperises the English poor to an alarming extent. This Poor-law was introduced, with its worst features exaggerated, into Scotland in 1845, when a brand-new Poor-law was brought in with great facilities for out-door relief. Well might Chalmers warn his countrymen against such a Poor-law. It has already pauperised the most interesting peasantry in the British Islands to such a degree that, whilst in England one out of every twenty persons is often a pauper, in Scotland already one in twenty-three are so, whereas in Ireland, with a far lower standard of comfort, but a much more stringent Poor-law, only one in seventy-four persons are in receipt of any parish relief.

“The endemic and epidemic diseases in Scotland,” says Malthus, “fall chiefly, as is usual, on the poor.... To the same causes, in a great measure, are attributed the rheumatisms which are general and the consumptions which are frequent among the common people. Wherever, in any place, from particular circumstances, the condition of the poor has been rendered worse, these disorders, particularly the latter, have been observed to prevail with greater force.” In these observations Mr. Malthus lays the very foundation of the science of health. Health in Europe, he shows, is incompatible with high birth-rates, which cause over-crowding, consumption, and death.

Scotland, says Malthus, writing in 1806, is certainly still over-peopled, but not so much as it was a century ago, when it contained fewer inhabitants. Scotland in 1801, had 1,608,420 inhabitants, and in 1871, 3,360,018, so that its time of doubling has been nearly seventy years, or much slower than that of England and Wales.

With regard to Ireland, there is only one short paragraph in Malthus’ tenth Chapter of Book Second upon that country. We give it in its entirety:—“The details of the population of Ireland are but little known. I shall only observe, therefore, that the extended use of potatoes has allowed of a very rapid increase of it during the last century (18th). But the cheapness of this nourishing root, and the small piece of ground which, under this cultivation, will in average years produce the food for a family, joined to the ignorance and barbarism of the people, which have prompted them to follow their inclinations with no other prospect than an immediate bare subsistence, have encouraged marriage to such a degree that the population is pushed much beyond the industry and present resources of the country; and the consequence naturally is that the lower classes of people are in the most depressed and miserable state. The checks to the population are, of course, chiefly of the positive kind, and arise from the diseases occasioned by squalid poverty, by damp and wretched cabins, by bad and insufficient clothing, by the filth of their persons, and occasional want.”

Malthus here foresaw the famine of 1848, which, aided by emigration, reduced the Irish population from 8,175,124 in 1841 to 6,552,385 in 1851. Doubtless, as shown by Mr. J. S. Mill, Professor Laveleye, and other subsequent writers, the miserable condition of the Irish peasant is due mainly to the intolerable feudal laws of land tenure, which have been so violently put an end to in our happiest of modern European States, France.

CHAPTER VII.
DETACHED ESSAYS.

In Volume II. of the “Essay on the Principle of Population” (edition 1806) there are to be found a number of most interesting remarks on the population question. Book II. contains chapters on the Fruitfulness of Marriage, on the Effects of Epidemics, on Registers of Births, Deaths, and Marriages, and on the General Deductions from the Preceding View of Society.

“There is no absolutely necessary connection,” says Malthus, “between the average age of marriage and the average age of death. In a country the resources of which will allow of a rapid increase of population, the expectation of life or the average age of death may be extremely high, and yet the age of marriage may be very early; and the marriages, then, compared with the contemporary deaths of the registers, would, even after the correction for second and third marriages, be very much too great to represent the true proportion of the born living to marry.”

At the commencement of this century, it appears from the transactions of the Society of Philadelphia, in a paper by Mr. Barton, entitled “Observations on the Probability of Life in the United States,” that the proportion of marriages to births was as 1 to 4½. As, however, this proportion was taken principally from towns, it is probable, according to Malthus, that the births given were too low, and that as many as five might be taken as an average for town and country. According to this author, the mortality at that date was about 1 in 45; and, if the population doubled in twenty-five years, the births would be 1 in 20 (50 per 1,000).

In England at the commencement of this century the proportion of marriages to births appears to have been about 100 to 350. But in those days Mr. Malthus calculated that the annual marriages to the births in England amounted to about 1 in 4. In the East End of London at the present day the writer has found that the average number of children to a marriage among the women of the poorer classes is about 7, whilst the annual births in England and Wales to the marriages are nearly as 4¼ to 1. In France the annual marriages are to the births as 1 to 3.