This vis mediatrix reipublicæ, the desire of rising in the world, so glorified in the Wealth of Nations[[233]] and in the Essay on Population,[[234]] is really not easy to define. It is a very composite motive; and the same differences of race (whatever their origin), which lead to differences of intellect and language also affect a nation’s standard of comfort, as soon as it can be said to have one. By the influence of good climate and much intercourse with foreigners, along with advantages of upbringing, and perhaps of race, a nation of Southern Europe comes to put into its notion of happiness a great many more elements than a northern nation, which has to hew its model out of much poorer materials. The Norwegian standard will be simpler than the Parisian. But there is more behind. The question is not simply one of like and unlike elements, or of many and few elements, but of the treatment of them by the human subject. The English notion of comfort differs from the French in its elements, which are probably more in number as well as other in quality, and have a third peculiarity quite distinct from the other two, their effect on the habits of the persons concerned.
French writers have noticed that the English farmer works hard for such an income as will give him the innumerable little luxuries of toilet, dinner-table, and drawing-room, that make up the English idea of comfort, while the French farmer works hard that he may be able to buy another farm.[[235]] The one lives up to his income; and in his efforts to preserve it he is enterprising and persevering; he is always striving to rise to the class above him. The other, on the contrary, is more content with his position in society; and simply wishes to make it stronger, by gaining more property. His willing privations in time of plenty are rewarded by his secure provision in time of want; he has always his land to sell.
Both are moved by the civilizing “desire to better one’s own condition”; but it leads in the one case to simple saving, the old stocking, the piece of land, or the rentes, in the other to active using, the steam-plough first, that the piano and pony-carriage may follow afterwards. There is some truth in M. Taine’s paradox, “The Englishman provides for the future not by his savings but by his expenses.”[[236]] If capitalizing means using as well as saving, there is a sense in which the French and English divide the two functions between them.
This is what prevents the economist from making any exact predictions about the effect of the vis mediatrix reipublicæ. He may, like Adam Smith, find it doing good work in the undermining of feudalism,[[237]] and he may point out that at any rate it would make a better guide to the world than military glory, which means unhappiness to one-half the world, and a very mingled happiness to the other half. But he cannot predict its effect on men whose characters are unknown to him. He cannot even tell whether a man is wealthy or not, till he knows what his wants are, for wealth exists to satisfy wants, wants change with human progress, the notion of wealth expands with civilization, and the luxuries of one age and one man are the necessaries of another. It is impossible to treat this relative question as if its conditions were absolute, and to deal with men as we would with figures on a slate. Two and two do not always make four in such a case, but sometimes five, and frequently only three. A new vista of comfort spread before different men may stimulate one, spoil another, and leave a third unmoved.
It is not surprising then that the question, “By what various modes is population kept to the level of the food in the states of modern Europe?” is not a simple one. On some grounds it would seem comparatively easy to get the answer. There are figures to be had, and in many cases a census; there is a general similarity of circumstances which produces a general similarity of habits, and, therewith, of the movements of population. But there is no invariable order of mortality and generation. The rates of births and deaths are not the same for all nations; they depend on the conduct of human beings, and may differ not only in different countries, but in different parts of the same country. In the same way, we have no single statistical criterion of the healthy state of a population, just as it might be said we have no single criterion of the commercial prosperity of a country, still less of its happiness. The two former stand to the last as the parts to the whole. A healthy population and a prosperous trade are parts of the happiness of a nation, though they do not constitute the whole of it. To ascertain whether a nation is happy or not, we have to take into account these two parts of happiness along with many others. The parts in their turn consist of many parts. We measure the state of trade not only by imports and exports, railway, banking and Clearing House returns, and the gains of the public revenue, but by subscriptions to churches, charities, and schools, by savings banks and benefit societies, sales of books, pictures, and luxuries of all kinds, by the state of workmen’s wages, by the poor-law returns, by the number of marriages, emigrants, and recruits for the army; and we could make little use of most of these figures without the census returns and the reports of the Registrar General. In the same way, to measure the healthiness of a population and ascertain whether it is safely under the level of its food, tending to pass beyond it, or simply rising up to it, and to ascertain by what ways and means the process is going on, we need instead of one single general criterion a whole array of particular tests. It is in the infancy of statistical science that men yield to appearances and “suppose a greater uniformity in things than is actually found there.”[[238]]
This was, for example, the failing of Johann Peter Süssmilch, one of the earliest inquirers into the movements of population. A book like Süssmilch’s had the same relation to the Essay on Population as astrology to astronomy, or alchemy to chemistry; it prepared the way for the more accurate study. Süssmilch first published his researches in 1761, while the Seven Years’ War was still in progress. He dedicated it to Frederick the Great, as became a patriot and Church dignitary; and entitled it, The Divine Plan in the Changes through which the Human Race passes in Birth, Death, and Marriage. The Divine plan is the one set forth in the exhortation to Noah in Genesis—the peopling of the earth;[[239]] and the book tries to show the particular arrangements by which the plan is carried out. One condition is, he says, that fertility be greater than mortality; the births must exceed the deaths. On an average at present each marriage produces four children; and “the present law of death” is on an average, taking town and country together, 1 in 36; out of 36 men now living, 1 must die every year. In the country it is from 1 in 40 to 1 in 45; in the town, from 1 in 38 to 1 in 32. There is a yearly excess of births represented by 1 in 10 and 5 in 10. The increase must have been faster at first than it is now; and the means God took to effect His end in each case was the lengthening and shortening of human life. In the times of Methuselah there must have been a very different law of mortality, perhaps one death in a hundred; the length of life was greater; and probably the power of parentage lasted longer. The average number of children might be about twenty in a family instead of four; and the doubling of population would take place in ten or twenty years, instead of as now in seventy or eighty. Antediluvians were long-lived because their long lives were needed for the replenishment of the earth; and the extreme length was shortened so soon as the time came when the same end could be reached in other ways. When we observe the remarkable adaptiveness of man which enables him alone among the creatures[[240]] to live in any latitude, and when we observe how he has been preserved while many animals have become extinct, we need have no doubt that the replenishment of the earth was really the Divine purpose. It is remarkable too that, though more sons are born than daughters, death equalizes their numbers before mature life. The “system” which prevails in the increase of man is like the march of a military regiment, in which all the men have their places, actions, and accoutrements determined for them. The proportion of sons to daughters, and deaths to births, Süssmilch regards as a tolerably fixed one; the discovery of unexpected uniformities overjoys him greatly, and he regards the man who first used the London bill of mortality to detect these uniformities as a sort of statistical Columbus. In short, his book is an economical Théodicée, a long piece of pious deductive reasoning; and it is curious to find Germany producing two such optimistic books at a time when it was even further from the millennium than its neighbours.
The facts of Süssmilch, ill-sifted as they were, gave Malthus a much firmer ground of reasoning than the scanty patches of evidence about the population of ancient and barbarous nations. He is at last in the region of statistics as opposed to conjecture, and in the region of the personal observation and travel of men who were at least asking his own questions. But the fate of the bills of mortality and other records, in the hands of Price and Wallace, to say nothing of Petty and Süssmilch, shows how important was Malthus’ work as an interpreter of statistics. Statistics were a novelty in his day. As Adam Smith wrote on the Wealth of Nations without any full statistics of the wealth, and none at all of the population, of his own country, Malthus wrote his first essay when there was no census; and, for some time afterwards, so comparatively isolated were the nations of Europe, that to be at all certain of his facts, an author needed to verify and collect them by journeying in person, and seeing the scenes with his own eyes. This essential work of an investigator Malthus did not leave undone; and his chapters on the state of population in modern European nations are to a large extent a record of his own observations. He went for a summer trip in 1799 with three college friends, Dr. Edward Clarke, Mr. Cripps, and Mr. Otter, afterwards Bishop of Chichester. They went by Hamburg to Sweden, and there the party broke up into two, Clarke and his pupil Cripps going farther north, Otter and Malthus going on through Norway to visit Finland and St. Petersburg.[[241]] These were the only European countries where English travellers could easily make their way in those years.[[242]] In 1802 he saw France and Switzerland,[[243]] but seems not to have left the kingdom again till 1825, when the journey was taken for the sake of his wife’s health, on the death of one of his children, and he was little in the mood for investigations. The tours of 1799 and 1802 are the only ones that have left substantial traces on his economical work.[[244]]
In all his travels he found the foreigner as ignorant as the Englishman on the subject of population. Only twice did he hear the truth expounded to him; in Norway during his first tour, and in Switzerland during his second. In the latter case the enlightenment was confined to one individual; but in the former the whole nation was wise. While the Swedish Government was continually crying for more people, and trying to “encourage population,” the Norwegian Government and people seemed to have understood that the first question must be, “Are there means to feed more people?” If not, then we multiply the nation without increasing the joy. Of course there are cases where we might thin down the nation and still less increase the joy. Mere scantiness of numbers is no advantage to a nation, any more than fewness of wants to an individual; it may mean a low state of civilization, in both cases. It is not by any means so good for a country to be wasted by a pestilence as to be opened up by a new trade. The denser the population, the better;—so says Malthus himself;—but, he adds, let it be a population of strong, comfortable citizens, or let us stand by the small numbers and the slow increase.
Look now at Norway.[[245]] If we were dealing with uncivilized times under the reign of positive checks, we should expect an overflowing population, a large body of poor, and in times of scarcity a great deal of distress. There had been no wars for half a century, the cold climate kept away epidemics, and what else was left but famine to keep down the population to the limits of the food? Vice was not taken into the service, and emigration was seldom practised then in these regions. But Malthus visited the country in one of the hardest years ever known in Europe, 1799, and found the Norwegians “wearing a face of plenty and content, while their neighbours the Swedes appeared to be starving.”[[246]] He found the death-rate lower in Norway than in any country in Europe.[[247]] The population, however, was hardly increasing at all; and the proportion of marriages to the whole numbers of the people was smaller than in any country except Switzerland.[[248]] The positive check was largely superseded by the preventive. The virtue of foresight, he says, is elsewhere forced upon the upper classes by the smallness of their circle and the fewness of openings in business or professions; in Norway it is forced upon all classes alike by the evident smallness of the country’s resources, and by the peculiarities of the national industry. There is almost no variety of occupation or division of labour. The humbler classes are almost all “housemen” (husmänd), labourers, who receive from a farmer in quasi-feudal fashion a small house and a little piece of land in return for occasional labour on his fields. In other countries men may easily fall into the fallacy of crediting the whole of the land with a greater power of supporting people than the power possessed by the sum of its parts. In the great towns of Central Europe a man has perhaps some excuse for trusting to the chapter of accidents; in the great variety of occupations he may have some excuse for thinking there will surely be a vacancy for him, and he may “e’en take Peggie.” Norway, however, is to manufacturing countries what the country districts elsewhere are to the towns elsewhere. In the country districts an excess of population cannot be hidden, and the superfluities must go to the towns. Those who marry, therefore, when there is no vacancy for them, do so with the alternatives of poverty or migration clearly before their eyes. In Norway every peasant, not to say every farmer, knows quite certainly whether there is an opening for him or not, and, if there is not, he cannot marry.[[249]]
The conditions of the problem were in this way simplified, and the problem itself was satisfactorily answered. The only districts where Malthus saw signs of poverty were on the coast, where the people live by fishing; the openings for a fisherman are not so distinctly limited in their numbers as the openings for a farmer.