Moral restraint is a distinct form of preventive check. It is not to be confused with an impure celibacy, which falls under the head of vice; and yet the adjective “moral” does not imply that the motives are the highest possible.[[96]] The adjective is applied not so much to the motive of the action as to the action itself, from whatever motives proceeding; and in the mouth of a Utilitarian this language is not unphilosophical. Moral restraint, in the pages of Malthus, means simply continence; it is an abstinence from marriage followed by no irregularities.[[97]] He speaks of the “moral stimulus” of the bounty on corn, meaning the expectations it produced in the minds of men, as distinguished from the variations it produced in the prices of grain;[[98]] and the word “moral” is often, like “morale,” used in military matters to denote mental disposition, as distinguished from material resources. The vagueness of the word is perhaps not accidental, for nothing is vaguer than the mixed motives which it denotes; but continence, which is unambiguous, would seem the better word.
With the enunciation of the third check the theory of Malthus entered definitively on a new phase; and in sketching the outlines of his work we shall no longer need to treat it as paradoxical and overstrained, but as a sober argument from the ground of accepted facts. The author’s analysis of human nature has been brought into harmony with common sense. He confesses that it had hitherto been too abstract, and had separated the inseparable.
The mind of man cannot be sawed into quantities; and, even if it is possible to distinguish the mixed motives that guide human action, the fact remains that they only operate when together. It is probable that no good man’s motives were ever absolutely noble, and no bad man’s ever absolutely bestial. Even the good man is strongest when he can make his very circumstances war against his power to do evil. Mixed from the first of time, human motives will, in this world, remain mixed unto the last, whether in saint, sage, or savage. But civilization, involving, as it does, a progressive change in the dominant ideas of society, will alter the character of the mixture and the proportion of the elements. The laws of Malthus will be obeyed, though the name of Malthus be not mentioned, and the checks, physical or moral, be never brought to mind. Society, moving all together, if it move at all, cannot cure its evils by one single heroic remedy; but as little can it be content with self-denying ordinances, prohibitions, or refutations. It needs a positive truth, and an ideal, that is to say, a religion, to give new life to the bodily members by giving new hope to the heart. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but the end of wisdom is the love of the Lord and the admiration of moral good.”[[99]] It follows that an economist, if he knows nothing but his economy, does not know even that.
No economists are more reproached with their want of idealism than Malthus and his brethren. As the French Revolutionists were said to believe that the death of their old rulers would of itself bring happiness and good government, so these writers were said to teach that the mere removal of hindrances would lead to the best possible production and distribution of the good things of this life. The ideal state then, as far as wealth was concerned, would be anarchy plus the police constable. Godwin would have dispensed with the constable. “Give a state liberty enough,” he says, “and vice cannot exist in it.”[[100]] But neither he nor the economists desired a merely negative change or removal of hindrances. Their political reformation was to be, like the Protestant, only successful as it went beyond image-breaking. Malthus, it will be seen,[[101]] is far from being an unqualified advocate of laissez faire; and, in all cases where he did desire it, he wished to make the state small only to make public opinion great. Godwin was not far away from him here. If he was wrong in attributing too much evil to institutions, and too little to human nature, he has furnished his own correction. The Political Justice disclaimed all sympathy with violence; it taught that a political reform was worthless unless effected peacefully by reason; and Malthus[[102]] has the same cure for social evils—argument and instruction. The difference between them is, that Malthus takes more into account the unreasonableness as well as the reasonableness of men. In essentials they are agreed. The thorough enlightenment of the people, which includes their moral purification as well as their intellectual instruction, is to complete the work of mending all, in which men are to be fellow-workers with God—so runs the teaching of Malthus and all the greatest economists of the last hundred years. Whether the evils of competition are many or few, serious or trifling, depends largely on the character of the competitors; and the more free we make the competition, the more thoroughly we must educate the competitors. Adam Smith was well aware of this; he recommended school-boards a hundred years before the Acts of 1870 and 1872;[[103]] and Malthus was not behind him.[[104]] They are aware that the more completely we exclude the interference of Government, the more actively we must employ every other moral and social agency. Whether Malthus was prepared to exclude the interference of Government entirely, even under this condition, we shall see by-and-by.
The characters of the two men, Malthus and Godwin, are a striking contrast. Malthus was the student, of quiet settled life, sharing his little wealth with his friends in unobtrusive hospitality, and constantly using his pen for the good, as he believed, of the English poor, that in these wretched times they might have domestic happiness like his own. There never was a more singular delusion than the common belief in the hard-heartedness of Malthus. Besides the unanimous voice of private friends, he has left testimony enough in his own books to absolve him. While Adam Smith and others owe their errors to intellectual fallibility, Malthus owes many of his to his tender heart. His motive for studying political economy was no doubt a mixed motive; it was partly the interest of an intelligent man in abstract questions; but it was chiefly the desire to advance the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In his eyes the elevation of human life was much more important than the solution of a scientific problem. Even when in 1820 he wrote a book on the “Principles of Political Economy,” he took care to add on the title-page, “considered with a view to their practical application,” refusing to consider in abstractness what always exists in the concrete. His keen sympathy for the sufferings of displaced workmen led him to fight a losing battle with Say and Ricardo in favour of something like an embargo on inventions, and in protest against a fancied over-production.[[105]] His private life showed the power of gentleness; Miss Martineau could hear his mild, sonorous vowels without her eartrumpet, and his few sentences were as welcome at her dinner-table as the endless babble of cleverer tongues. He felt the pain of a thousand slanders “only just at first,” and never let them trouble his dreams after the first fortnight, saying, with a higher than stoical calmness, that they passed by him like the idle wind which he respected not.[[106]] He outlived obloquy, and saw the fruit of his labours in a wiser legislation and improved public feeling.
With Godwin all was otherwise. There were fightings within and fears without. With an immovable devotion to ideas he combined a fickleness of affection towards human beings. He heeded emotion too little in his books and too much in his own life, yielding to the fancy of the moment, quarrelling with his best friends twice a week, and quickly knitting up the broken ties again. He loved his wife well, but hardly allowed her to share the same house with him, lest they should weary of one another.[[107]] He was the sworn enemy of superstition, and himself the arch-dreamer of dreams.
Yet when we contrast the haphazard literary life of the one, ending his days ingloriously[[108]] in a Government sinecure, unsuccessful and almost forgotten, with the academical ease of the other, centred in the sphere of common duties, and passing from the world with a fair consciousness of success, we feel a sympathy for Godwin that is of a better sort than the mere liking for a loser. It is a sympathy not sad enough for pity. It is not wholly sad to find Godwin in his old age a lonely man, his friends dropping off one by one into the darkness and leaving him solitary in a world that does not know him. The world that had begun to realize the ideas of Malthus had begun to realize the ideas of Godwin also. It was a world far more in harmony with political justice than that into which Godwin had sent his book forty years before. It was good that Malthus had lived to see the new Poor Law, but still better that both had lived to see the Reform of ’32.
They passed away within two years of each other, Malthus in the winter of 1834, Godwin in the spring of 1836, the year of the first league of the people against the Corn Laws. In their death they were still divided, but, “si quis piorum manibus locus,” they are divided no longer, and they think no hard thoughts of each other any more.
CHAPTER III.
THESES.
Position stated in the Essay—Tendency of Life to increase beyond Food—Problem not the same for Humanity as for the lower forms of Life—Man’s Dilemma—Tendency to increase not predicable of Food in same sense as of Life—The Geometrical and Arithmetical Ratios—Position stated in Encyclopædia Britannica—Milne’s Confirmation of the Geometrical Ratio—Arithmetical Ratio proved differently—Private Property a condition of great Production—Fallacy of confusing possible with actual Production—Laws of Man as well as of Nature responsible for necessity of Checks—Position stated in “Summary View”—The Checks on Population classified (a) objectively and (b) subjectively—Relation to previous Classification—Cycle in the movement of Population.