Life and Writings of Thomas R. Malthus

by Charles R. Drysdale

“The allowing of the produce of the earth to be absolutely unlimited scarcely removes the weight of a hair from the argument, which depends entirely upon the differently increasing ratios of population and food; and all that the most enlightened governments and the most persevering and best guided efforts of industry can do, is to make the necessary checks to population act more equably, and in a direction to produce the least evil; but to remove them is a task absolutely hopeless.”

We have now arrived at the last part of Malthus’s great essay on population. In Book IV. our author speaks in chapter i. of future prospects of the removal or mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population. He shows that we must submit to the population law as an ultimate law of nature, and that all that remains for us is, how we may check population with the least prejudice to the virtue and happiness of human society. He claims for moral restraint that it is the least harmful of all the checks. “If we be intemperate in eating and drinking (he says) we are disordered; if we indulge the transports of anger, we seldom fail to commit acts of which we afterwards repent; if we multiply too fast, we die miserably of poverty and contagious diseases.... The kind of food, and the mode of preparing it, best suited for the purposes of nutriment and the gratification of the palate, &c., were not pointed out to the attention of man at once, but were the slow and late result of experience, and of the admonitions received by repeated failures.”

Mr. Malthus then, following Hippocrates, points out that in the history of every epidemic, it has almost invariably been observed, that the lower classes of people, whose food was poor and insufficient, and who lived crowded together in small and dirty houses, were the principal victims. “In what other manner can nature point out to us, that if we increase too fast for the means of subsistence, so as to render it necessary for a considerable part of the society to live in this miserable manner, we have offended against one of her laws?” After the desire of food, the most powerful and general of our desires is passion between the sexes, taken in an enlarged sense. Mr. Godwin had said, in one of his works: “Strip the commerce of the sexes of all its attendant circumstances, and it would be generally despised.” To this Mr. Malthus replies, that Godwin might as well say to a man who admired trees: “Strip them of their spreading branches and lovely foliage, and what beauty can you see in a bare pole?” “The evening meal, the warm house, and the comfortable fire-side would lose half of their interest if we were to exclude the idea of some object of affection with whom they were to be shared.”

Few or none, then, of our human passions would admit of being greatly diminished, without narrowing the sources of good more powerfully than the sources of evil. The fecundity of the human species is, in some respects, a distinct consideration from the passion between the sexes. It is strong and general, and apparently would not admit of any very considerable diminution without being inadequate for its object. “It is of the very utmost importance to the happiness of mankind that they should not increase too fast; but it does not appear that the object to be accomplished would admit of any very considerable diminution in the desire for marriage. It is clearly the duty of each individual not to marry until he has a prospect of supporting his children; but it is at the same time to be wished that he should retain undiminished his desire for marriage, in order that he may exert himself to realise this prospect, and be stimulated to make provision for the support of greater numbers.

“Our obligation not to marry till we have a fair prospect being able to support our children will appear to deserve the attention of the moralist, if it can be proved that an attention to these obligations is of more effect in the prevention of misery than all the other virtues combined; and that if, in violation of this duty, it was the general custom to follow the first impulse of nature, and marry at the age of puberty, the universal prevalence of every known virtue in the greatest conceivable degree would fail of rescuing society from the most wretched and deplorable state of want, and all the diseases and famines which usually accompany it.”

In chapter ii. Mr. Malthus speaks of the effects which would result to society from the prevalence of this virtue of moral restraint. “No man whose earnings were only sufficient to maintain two children, would put himself in a situation in which he might have to maintain four or five, however he might be prompted to it by the passion of love. The interval between the age of puberty and the period at which each individual might venture to marry must, according to this view be passed in strict chastity; because the law of chastity cannot be violated without producing evil. The effect of anything like a promiscuous intercourse which prevents the birth of children, is evidently to weaken the best affections of the heart, and in a very marked manner to degrade the female character. And any other intercourse would, without improper arts, bring as many children into society as marriage, with a much greater probability of their becoming a burden to it.”

The phrase, “improper arts,” is the only point on which the so-styled Neo-Malthusians differ from Malthus. To his modern disciples it seems abundantly proved, from the experience of France and elsewhere, that late marriage is not what must be trusted to check population; but a restraint in the size of families. Mr. Malthus, indeed, seems himself to recognise the evils of late marriages, for he writes: “The late marriages at present are, indeed, principally confined to the men; and there are few, however advanced in life they may be, who, if they determine to marry, do not fix their choice on a very young wife. A young woman, without fortune, when she has passed her twenty-fifth year, begins to fear, and with reason, that she may lead a life of celibacy.... If women could look forward with just confidence to marriage at twenty-eight or thirty, I fully believe that, if the matter were left to them for choice, they would clearly prefer waiting till this period, to the being involved in all the cares of a large family at twenty-five.”

Lord Derby, some years ago, truly observed that great emperors did not like their subjects to be too well off. This remark may have been a citation from Malthus, where he says: “The ambition of princes would want instruments of destruction, if the distresses of the lower classes of their subjects did not drive them under their standards. A recruiting sergeant always prays for a bad harvest and want of employment, or in other words, a redundant population.” Mr. Malthus points out that a society with a low birth-rate will be extremely powerful both in war and peace. One of the principal encouragements to an offensive war would be removed, and there would be greater freedom from political dissensions at home. “Indisposed to a war of offence, in a war of defence such a society would be strong as a rock of adamant. Where every family possessed the necessaries of life or plenty, and a decent portion of its comforts and conveniences, there could not exist that hope of change, or at best that melancholy and disheartening indifference to it, which sometimes prompts the lower classes of people to say—Let what will come, we cannot be worse off than we are now.”

In chapter iii. Mr. Malthus speaks rather gloomily as to the prospect of Society adopting his recommendation of late marriages, “I believe (he says) that few of my readers can be less sanguine of expectations of any great change in the general conduct of men on this subject than I am.” He proposes it, it seems, in order chiefly to vindicate the character of the Deity! This is at present known by all scientific inquirers to be a fallacious argument; and we cannot but contrast with our great author’s vacillating doctrine, the clear line of duty laid down by the greatest of his followers, Mr. J. S. Mill, when he says that the happiness of society is quite attainable, if only it becomes a rule of morals that the producing of large families in Europe should be looked upon as a vice.

“Almost everything that has hitherto been done for the poor has tended, as if with solicitous care, to throw a veil of obscurity over this subject, and to hide from them the true cause of their poverty. A man has always been told that to raise up subjects for his king and country is a meritorious act. In an endeavour to raise the proportion of the quantity of provisions to the number of consumers in any country, our attention would naturally be first directed to the increasing of the absolute quantity of provisions, but finding that, as fast as we did this, the numbers of consumers more than kept pace with it, and that with all our exertions we were still as far as ever behind, we should be convinced that our efforts directed in this way would never succeed. It would appear to be setting the tortoise to catch the hare. Finding therefore, that from the laws of nature we could not proportion the food to the population, our next attempt should naturally be to proportion the population to the food. If we can persuade the hare to go to sleep, the tortoise may have some chance of overtaking her.”