A striking indirect confirmation of this view of the American increase was supplied to Malthus[[130]] by Joshua Milne, the author of the Treatise on Annuities. His calculations were founded on the new Swedish table of mortality. This table had been drawn up from the registers of the first five years of the century, years of unusual healthiness; and might therefore be presumed to represent the normal condition of a new and healthy country like the United States better than the old table drawn up from the years before sanitary reform and vaccination. Milne took the Swedish table as his guide, and one million of people as his unit of measurement; he calculated in what proportions the component individuals of the million must belong to childhood, youth, mature life, and old age, in order that by the principles of the Swedish table the million might double itself by natural increase in twenty-five years; and he arrived at a distribution so like that given by the American census, that he was bound to conclude the American rate of increase to be at the least very like one that doubles a population in twenty-five years. But the Swedish law of mortality could not be exactly true of the United States, which are healthier as a whole than Sweden even in Sweden’s best years.[[131]] The United States themselves are not the very healthiest and wealthiest and happiest country conceivable; and their increase is therefore not the fastest conceivable. If the observed fact of increase is the best proof of the capacity for increase, the observed presence of checks leads to an a fortiori reasoning, whereby we infer the capacity for a greater increase than any actually observed. To sum up the whole of this first branch of the argument,—“taking into consideration the actual rate of increase which appears from the best documents to have taken place over a very large extent of country in the United States of America, very variously circumstanced as to healthiness and rapidity of progress,—considering further the rate of increase which has taken place in New Spain and also in many countries of Europe, where the means of supporting a family, and other circumstances favourable to increase, bear no comparison with those of the United States,—and adverting particularly to the actual increase of population which has taken place in this country during the last twenty years[[132]] under the formidable obstacles which must press themselves upon the attention of the most careless observer, it must appear that the assumption of a rate of increase such as would double the population in twenty-five years, as representing the natural progress of population when not checked by the difficulty of procuring the means of subsistence or other peculiar causes of premature mortality, must be decidedly within the truth. It may be safely asserted, therefore, that population when unchecked increases in a geometrical ratio of such a nature as to double itself every twenty-five years.”[[133]]
The problem is only half stated; it is still to be shown what is the rate of the increase of Food. The case does not admit the same kind of proof. We can suppose an unchecked increase of men going on without any change in human nature; we have only to suppose for the future the same encouragement to marriage and the same habits of life, together with the same law of mortality. But with the increase of food the causes do not remain the same. If good land could be got in abundance, the increase of food from it would be in a geometrical ratio far greater than that of the men; that of wheat, for example, would be sixfold, as we have seen. But good lands are comparatively few; they will in the nature of things soon be occupied; and then the increase of the food will be a laborious process at a rate rather resembling a decreasing than an increasing geometrical ratio. “The yearly increment of food, at least, would have a constant tendency to diminish;” and the amount of the increase in each successive ten years would probably be less and less. In practice, the inequalities of distribution may check the increase of food with precisely the same efficacy as an actual arrival at the physical limits to the getting of the food. “A man who is locked up in a room may fairly be said to be confined by the walls of it, though he may never touch them.”[[134]] But the main point is, that, inequalities or no inequalities, there is a tendency to diminished productiveness. Under either condition the quantity yielded this year will not be doubled or trebled for an indefinite period with the same ease as it was yielded this year. In a tolerably well-peopled country such as England or Germany the utmost might be an increase every twenty-five years equal to the present produce. But the continuance of this would mean that in the next two hundred years every farm should produce eight times what it does now, or, in five hundred years, twenty times as much; and even this is incredible, though it would be only an arithmetical progression. No doubt almost all parts of the earth are now more thinly peopled than their capacities might allow; but the difficulty is to use the capacities. That this view of Malthus need not imply any ignorance or any disregard of the resources of high farming may be judged from the fact that our highest agricultural authority, who recognizes the power of English farming to provide on emergency even for our entire annual wants, admits at the same time that, “where full employment and the means of subsistence are abundant, population increases in geometrical progression, and therefore in a far more rapid proportion than the increased productiveness of the soil, which after a certain point is stationary.”[[135]] “It follows necessarily” (sums up Malthus) “that the average rate of the actual increase of population over the greatest part of the globe, obeying the same law as the increase of food, must be totally of a different character from the rate at which it would increase if unchecked.” On no single farm could the produce be so increased as to keep pace with the geometrical increase of population; and what is true of a single farm is true in this case of the whole earth. Machinery and invention can do less in agriculture than in manufacture, and they can never do so much as to make preventive checks unnecessary.[[136]]
This is the argument of the Encyclopædia so far as it relates to the theses of the essay. Malthus follows it up by a remark on the institution of property. The alternatives to his mind are always private property as we now have it, and common property as desired by Godwin. He upholds the first because, “according to all past experience and the best observation which can be made on the motives which operate upon the human mind,” the largest produce from the soil is got by that system, and because (what is socially much more important), by making a man feel his responsibility and his dependence on his own efforts, it tends to cause prudence in marriage as well as industry in work. Common property has not been successful, historically; and the widest extension of popular education would not make men the fitter for it. There is indeed a sense in which common property might tend to carry production farther than private property; cultivation, not being for profit but for mere living, would not, like the present, stop at the point where production ceased to be a good investment. But this would mean[[137]] that the whole energies of the society were directed to the mere getting of food; neither the whole society nor any part of it would have leisure, for intellectual labour or enjoyment. Whereas private property not only secures the leisure, but, by stopping at the point of profitableness, it keeps an unused reserve, on which society may fall back in case of need. Malthus therefore would stand by private property, though he thinks that private proprietors may damage the national wealth by game-preserving, and injure the poorer classes by not spending enough on what they make.[[138]]
The actual increase of population (he goes on) and the necessity of checks to it depend on the difficulty of getting food, from whatever cause, whether the exhaustion of the earth or the bad structure of society; and the difficulty is not for the remote future but for the present.
It is chiefly the contrast between the actual and the possible supplies that makes men incredulous about the necessity of checks; and we may grant that under an ideal government, a perfect people, and faultless social system the produce would at first be so great that the necessity for checks on population would be very much reduced; but, as the earth’s productiveness does not expand with population, it would be a very short time before the pressure of the checks would reassert itself—this time from no fault of man, but from the mere nature of the soil.[[139]] The bad government of our ancestors left much produce unused, and in consequence we have for the present a large margin to draw on. But, “if merely since the time of William the Conqueror all the nations of the earth had been well governed, and if the distribution of property and the habits both of the rich and the poor had been the most favourable to the demand for produce and labour, though the amount of food and population would have been prodigiously greater than at present, the means of diminishing the checks to population would unquestionably be less.”
But, though the laws of nature are responsible for the necessity of checks to population,[[140]] “a vast mass of responsibility remains behind, on man and the institutions of society.” To them in the first place is due the scantiness of the present population of the earth, there being few parts of it that would not with better government and better morals support twice, ten times, or even one hundred times as many inhabitants as now. In the second place, though man cannot remove the necessity of checks, or even make them press much more lightly in any given place,[[141]] he is responsible for their precise character and particular mode of operation. A good government and good institutions can so direct them that they shall be least hurtful to the general virtue and happiness, vice and misery disappearing before moral restraint, though after all the influence of government and institutions is indirect, and everything depends on the conduct of the individual citizens.
The rest of the article contains little that is not in the Essay on Population (5th ed., 1817) and the treatise on Political Economy (1st ed., 1820). It gives the historical sketches of the former, some small part of the economical discussions (e. g. on wages) of the latter, and a short answer to current objections, together with some tables of mortality and other figures, of more special interest to the professional actuary than to the general reader. The article is an authoritative summary of the author’s doctrines in their final form. It was not his last work. From the fact that he undertook the paper in Sept. 1821,[[142]] we may perhaps infer that he placed it in Macvey Napier’s hands in the year 1822.[[143]] But it was his last attempt to restate the subject of the essay in an independent form with anything approaching to fulness of detail, and it shows he had made no change in his position. The Summary View of the Principle of Population (1830) was avowedly an abridgment of the article in the Encyclopædia, and is in fact that article with a few paragraphs omitted and a few pronouns altered.
The clear statement of the two tendencies was, in his own eyes, the least original part of his work. It had been often perceived distinctly by other writers that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence. “Yet few inquiries have been made into the various modes by which this level is effected, and the principle has never been sufficiently pursued to its consequences, nor those practical inferences drawn from it which a strict examination of its effects on society appears to suggest.”[[144]] What some people would count the more interesting question remained to be considered——the question that touches individuals and familiar circumstances more nearly, and is not to be answered by a generality, from which we easily in thought except our own individual selves. Since, at any given time, in any given place, among any given people, there is (1) a tendency of population to outrun subsistence, and there is (2) no such excess as a matter of fact, in what way or ways is the tendency prevented from carrying itself out? As was said above,[[145]] this is effected in two kinds of ways—(1) by the way of a positive, (2) by the way of a preventive check, the former cutting down an actual population to the level of its food, the second forbidding a population to need to be cut down, and being, so far as it is voluntary, peculiar to man among living creatures. Of the positive, all those that come from the laws of nature may be called misery pure and simple; and all those that men bring on themselves by wars, excesses, and avoidable troubles of all kinds are of a mixed character, their causes being vice and their consequences misery. Of the preventive, that restraint from marriage which is not accompanied by any immoral conduct on the part of the person restraining himself or herself is called moral restraint. Any restraint which is prudential and preventive, but immoral, comes under the head of vice, for every action may be so called which has “a general tendency to produce misery,” however innocuous its immediate effects.[[146]] We find, therefore, that the positive and the preventive checks are all resolvable into vice, misery, and moral restraint, or sin, pain, and self-control, a threefold division that makes the second essay “differ in principle” from the first.[[147]]
We have here a twofold alongside of a threefold division of the checks to population. The one is made from an objective, the other from a subjective point of view. The division of checks (1) into positive and preventive has regard simply to the outward facts; a population is in those two ways kept down to the food. The division of them (2) into vice, misery, and moral restraint has regard to the human agent and his inward condition, the state of his feelings and of his will. For example, the positive check viewed subjectively, or from the human being’s point of view, is the feeling of pain; the will is not directly concerned with it. The preventive, from the same point of view, is of a less simple character. First of all, moral restraint involves a temporary misery or pain in the thwarting of a desire; “considered as a restraint upon an inclination otherwise innocent and always natural, it must be allowed to produce a certain degree of temporary unhappiness, but evidently slight compared with the evils which result from any of the other checks to population,”[[148]] and “merely[[149]] of the same nature as many other sacrifices of temporary to permanent gratification which it is the business of a moral agent continually to make.” The reverse is true of vicious excesses and passions; in their immediate gratification they are pleasant, but their permanent effects are misery. From the point of view of the will the case is clear, for the state of the will would be described by Malthus, if he ever used such terms, as in the one case good, and in the other case evil, pure and simple. Of course in treating the matter historically we may neglect the subjective point of view, not because it is not necessary for proper knowledge of the facts, but because it leads to a psychological inquiry, the results of which are independent of dates.
Malthus goes on to say that, in all cases where there is the need for checks at all, it is the sum total of all the preventive and positive checks that forms the check to population in any given country at any given time,[[150]] and his endeavour will be to show in what relative proportions and in what degree they prevail in various countries known to us. He assumes further that the preventive and the positive checks will “vary inversely as each other.” In countries where the mortality is great the influence of the preventive check will be small; and, where the preventive check prevails much, the positive check, or in brief the mortality, will be small.[[151]]