“Man makes no exception to this law.” [It is surprising that this should shock the Socialists, who have never done telling us that general must take precedence of individual right.] “This much is certain, that God has secured the continuance of the human race by providing it with a great power of reproduction. The numbers of mankind, then, would come naturally, but for prudence and foresight, to exceed what the earth could maintain. But man is endued with foresight, and it is his reason and his will which can alone interpose a check to this fatal progression.”
Setting out from these premises, which you may dispute if you will, but which Malthus regarded as incontestable, he attached necessarily the highest value to the exercise of foresight. For there was no alternative;—man must either restrain voluntarily this excessive multiplication, or else he must become subject, like all the other species of living creatures, to the operation of positive or repressive checks.
Malthus, then, believed that he could never urge men too strongly to the exercise of foresight. His very philanthropy engaged him to exhibit in strong relief the fatal consequences of imprudent reproduction, in order to put men upon their guard. He said to them: If you multiply inconsiderately, you cannot avoid the chastisement which awaits you in some form or other, and always in a hideous form—famine, war, pestilence, etc. Benevolence, charity, poor-laws, and all other expedients are but ineffectual remedies.
In his ardour, Malthus allowed an expression to escape him, which, when separated from the rest of his system, and from the sentiment which dictated it, may appear harsh. It occurred in the first edition of his work, which was then only a brochure, and has since become a book of four volumes. It was represented to him that his meaning in this objectionable passage might give rise to erroneous interpretations. He immediately suppressed it, and it has never since reappeared in any of the numerous editions of his Essay on Population.
But Mr Godwin, one of his opponents, had quoted this suppressed passage, and the consequence was, that M. de Sismondi (a man who, with the best intentions in the world, has done much [p399] mischief) reproduced this unlucky sentence. The Socialists instantly laid hold of it, and on this they proceeded to try, condemn, and execute Malthus. Truly, they were much indebted to Sismondi’s learning, for they had never themselves read either Malthus or Godwin.
The Socialists have thus represented an unguarded passage, which Malthus himself had suppressed, as the basis of his system. They repeat it ad nauseam. In a little 18mo volume, M. Pierre Leroux reproduced it at least forty times, and it forms the stock-in-trade of all our declamatory second-rate reformers.
The most celebrated and the most vigorous of that school of writers having written an article against Malthus, I happened one day to converse with him, and cited some opinions expressed in the Essay on Population. I thought I perceived that he was not acquainted with the work. I remarked to him, “You who have refuted Malthus, have you not read his book from beginning to end?” “I have not read it at all,” he replied. “His whole system is to be found in one page, and is condensed in the famous ‘arithmetical and geometrical progressions’—that is enough for me.” “It seems to me,” I said, “that you are jesting with the public, with Malthus, with truth, with conscience, and with yourself.”
This is the way that opinions obtain currency with us. Fifty ignorant people repeat in chorus something spiteful and absurd, put forward by one more ignorant than themselves, and if it happens to have the least connexion with the fashionable opinions or passions of the hour, it is at once received as an axiom.
Science, however, it must be allowed, cannot enter on the solution of a problem with the settled intention of establishing a foregone conclusion, however consolatory. What should we think of a man who should sit down to the study of physiology, resolved beforehand to demonstrate that God has not willed that mankind should be afflicted with diseases? Were one physiologist to found a system on such a basis as this, and another to controvert it by an appeal to facts, the former would most likely fly into a rage, and tax his opponent with impiety; but it is difficult to believe that he would go the length of accusing his opponent himself of being the author of diseases.
This, however, is what has happened to Malthus. In a work founded on facts and figures, he explained a law which has given great offence to our optimists; and in their anxiety to ignore the existence of this law, they have attacked Malthus with rancorous virulence and flagrant bad faith, as if he had himself deliberately [p400] thrown in the way of mankind those obstacles which flowed, as he thought, from the principle of population. It would surely have been more philosophical to have proved simply that Malthus was mistaken, and that his pretended law had in reality no existence.