In the third place, he might, together with all these, encourage Emigration. Malthus devotes a special chapter of the essay to this subject; and, though the chapter is in a later part of his work (Bk. III. ch. iv.[[285]]), this seems the best place to touch on the subject. Emigration, he says, is, apart from political distinctions, the same thing as migration; and, if it is economically good for a man to go from a poor land at his door to a rich in the next county, it cannot be economically bad for him to go from a poor district of his own country to a rich across the sea. The mere length of the journey or the difference of latitude does not affect the economical nature of the change.

Economical motives, however, have come very late in all the great European emigrations. It was not the desire of finding room for the over-crowded families at home, but desire of the metal gold, or else it was the simple love of adventure, or ambition of conquest, that first sent the Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Dutch to the far East and far West.[[286]] “These passions enabled the first adventurers to triumph” over obstacles that would have deterred quiet industrial emigrants, “but in many instances in a way to make humanity shudder, and to defeat the very end of emigration. Whatever may be the character of the Spanish inhabitants of Mexico and Peru at the present moment, we cannot read the accounts of the first conquests of these countries without feeling strongly that the race destroyed was, in moral worth as well as numbers, superior to the race of their destroyers.” The settlers that followed on the heels of these pioneers, though they were more like real emigrants, went unskilfully to work. They seemed to expect that “the moral and mechanical habits” which suited the old country would suit the new,[[287]] and everything would go on as it did at home. At first therefore there would be a redundant population[[288]] in the new country rather than in the old, for, however great the possible produce of the colony, the actual produce would be less than the wants of the new-comers on their first arrival. To all this must be added the fact that, though economically a far and a near place are alike, they are very different to the sentiments of men. Patriotism is no fault, and the breaking of home ties is a real evil to the individuals, however beneficial the emigration may be to the nation. Men are slow to move, not only from the uncertain prospects of success, but from that vis inertiæ in man which is always counteracting the vis mediatriæ of commercial ambition. In addition, therefore, to the mere uneasiness of poverty and the desire of getting a living, there is need of some spirit of enterprise, to make men willing and successful emigrants.[[289]] Those who felt distress most would often have been the most helpless in a new country; they needed leaders who were “urged by the spirit of avarice or enterprise, or of religious or political discontent, or were furnished with means and support by Government;” otherwise, “whatever degree of misery they might suffer in their own country from the scarcity of subsistence, they would be absolutely unable to take possession of any of those uncultivated regions of which there is such an extent on the earth.” Emigration then (according to Malthus) is not likely to happen unless political discontent and extreme poverty have brought the emigrants to such a plight that it is better for their country as well as for themselves that they should go. “There are no fears so totally ill-grounded as the fears of depopulation from emigration.”[[290]] Emigration is not even a cure for an over-population; and is much recommended only because little adopted. Gaps made in the population of old countries are soon filled up; room found in the new is soon occupied. If emigration is proposed as a means of securing an absolutely unrestricted increase of population by placing old countries in the position of new colonies, the hope will be soon and for ever cut off.[[291]]

Towards the end of his life, Malthus had an opportunity of explaining his views on this subject to an audience of statesmen. He appeared as a witness before the Select Committee[[292]] of the House of Commons “to inquire into the expediency of encouraging emigration from the United Kingdom,” and his influence is traceable in their Reports. They reported[[293]] that there had been in the United Kingdom a “redundant population,” in Ireland agricultural, in Scotland and England manufacturing; that one cause of it had been the unavoidable displacement of hand labour by machinery;[[294]] that meanwhile the British colonies in America, Africa, and Australia had few men and plenty of land, and that it would benefit the whole empire if parishes could convert their probable or actual paupers into emigrants, always provided that the remaining population could be induced not to grow so fast as to fill the whole gap thus created.[[295]] “The testimony” (said the Committee in their third Report[[296]]) “which was uniformly given by the practical witnesses has been confirmed in the most absolute manner by that of Mr. Malthus, and your Committee cannot but express their satisfaction at finding that the experience of facts is thus strengthened throughout by general reasoning and scientific principles.” They were more disposed than their witness himself to a priori reasoning, and in many of their leading questions he declined to follow them.[[297]] But he agreed with their main conclusions, allowing that under certain conditions it would be even a financial advantage to remove unemployed workmen to the colonies rather than suffer them to become paupers at home, and adding, that, if he was against the admission of any legal claim to relief in ordinary cases of pauperism, still more would he be against it when the pauper had before him the alternative of assisted emigration.[[298]] His own view of emigration had not changed since he wrote in 1803. It was to him a partial remedy; and it is more useful when spontaneously adopted by the people[[299]] than when pressed on them by their Government. Under the torture of the question he conceded no more.[[300]]

As a temporary expedient, the essay tells us,[[301]] “with a view to the more general cultivation of the earth and the wider extension of civilization, it seems to be both useful and proper,” and is to be encouraged, or at least not prevented, by Governments. All depends on the rate of wages. If wages were high enough to enable people to live with what they counted reasonable comfort at home, we may be sure their domestic and patriotic ties would be strong enough to keep them there. The complaint that emigration raises wages is most unreasonable. At the utmost it prevents wages from falling too low, and helps to heal the mischief caused by fluctuations in trade.

We shall find at a later stage that Malthus is keenly aware of the unhappiness caused in modern industrial societies by changes in the demand for goods, occurring even in the natural (or uninterrupted) course of trade. A movement in favour of emigration in 1806 and 1807 led him to insert a paragraph in the fourth edition of his essay which explains the relation of emigration to these changes. He accepts the statement of Adam Smith, that “the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men;”[[302]] but he adds (as Cairnes added later) that it takes some little time to bring more labour into the market when there is demand for it, and some little time to check the supply when once it has begun to flow.[[303]] A family may be reared to catch high wages, and the high wages may have gone before the family has arrived at maturity. Malthus distinguishes between a normal or slight “oscillation” of this kind, and an excessive redundancy caused by an unusual stimulus to production—the stimulus, for example, of the foreign wars and the foreign trade of the years before Waterloo. In the normal case we must submit to the inevitable; in the exceptional we may find an outlet in emigration. No doubt, even if there be no emigration, in the long run the labour market will right itself; but the process will be a very painful one to the workmen concerned. Emigration is the humane and politic remedy.

In some cases, such as Norway and the uplands of Switzerland,[[304]] there would seem to be no need for Government to teach the people to emigrate. Circumstances should do it for them; but human beings are influenced by habit and “chance” as much as by any deliberate motive, commercial or otherwise. In the Swiss uplands, as Malthus knew them, “a habit of emigration depended not only on situation but often on accident.” Three or four successful emigrations “have frequently given a spirit of enterprise to a whole village, and three or four unsuccessful ones a contrary spirit.”[[305]] This is illustrated by the contrast of two parishes, both in the Canton de Vaud, St. Cergues in the Jura, and Leysin[[306]] in the Bernese Alps near Aigle. The movements of population in Leysin puzzled M. Muret, the Swiss economist, who drew up a paper on the depopulation of Switzerland for the Economical Society of Berne in the year 1766. He found that in this parish of four hundred people there were born every year on an average only eight children, whereas, elsewhere in Canton de Vaud, to the same number of people eleven (in Lyonnais sixteen) children were a common proportion. The difference, he observed, disappeared by the age of twenty, when, if we may say so, the difference died off, the eight in Leysin being healthier than the eleven (or sixteen) elsewhere. Muret infers from this, that “in order to maintain in all places the proper equilibrium of population, God has wisely ordered things in such a manner as that the force of life in each country should be in the inverse ratio of its fecundity.”[[307]] There is, however, no need to suppose a miracle. The fact was simply that the place and the employments were healthy, that the people had not formed habits of emigration, that their resources were stationary, that, therefore, they married late, had few children, and were long-lived.[[308]] The subsisting marriages were to the annual births as 12 to 1; the births were to the living population as 1 to 49; and the number of persons above sixteen were to those below as 3 to 1.[[309]] This would show that mere number of births is no criterion of the size of a population, for it took only about half of the ordinary number of births to keep up a population of four hundred in the parish of Leysin. In St. Cergues the subsisting marriages were to the annual births as 4 to 1 (instead of 12 to 1 as at Leysin), the births were to the living population as 1 to 26, and the number of persons above and below sixteen just equal. That is to say, St. Cergues had nearly twice as many births a year in proportion to the population, and more than twice as many marriages; but, instead of three-fourths of its living population being above sixteen (as at Leysin), those above and those below were equal in number, and St. Cergues had a smaller proportion of adults than Leysin. On the other hand, the death-rate was nearly the same; the healthiness was nearly as great. How came it then that the population of St. Cergues was only one hundred and seventy-one, as against the four hundred and five of Leysin? What became of the children born? Seeing that they did not die, and did not appear on the registers of the living, we infer that they left their native village; that is all. The situation of the parish of St. Cergues, on the high road from Paris to Geneva, suggested emigration; and, as a matter of fact, the place had become, like most highland hamlets, a breeding-place for the lowlands and the manufacturing towns. The annual drain of adults made room for the favoured remnant to marry and have large families. Even Leysin, though it lay on no high road, might conceivably (says Malthus) have exchanged its stay-at-home character for a habit of emigration, and might then have doubled its birth-rate without raising the death-rate. It is one of the fallacies of old statisticians to infer a large population from a high birth-rate; in an old country, if the rate of births is high in comparison with the number of living inhabitants, it means either many deaths or much emigration.

The people of an old country, if they cannot or will not emigrate, must, according to Malthus, either look for a high death-rate or accustom themselves to late marriages. M. Muret’s figures showed that many cantons of Switzerland had adopted this last course in the eighteenth century. In the Canton de Vaud, for example, the proportion of marriages to living inhabitants (1 to 140) was lower than in Norway itself. In a pastoral country the limits of human resources are so obvious that the people cannot fail to be impressed with the need of limiting their numbers. Pastoral industry, again, feeds more than it employs,[[310]] and the unemployed must look for employment elsewhere. This was one reason why there were so many Swiss in foreign service. “When a father has more than one son, those who are not wanted on the farm are powerfully tempted to enrol themselves as soldiers, or emigrate in some other way, as the only chance to enable them to marry.”[[311]] Malthus was a little disappointed with the condition of the Swiss peasantry when he saw them in 1803. Perhaps, he says, they were still suffering from the wars in which the “Helvetic Republic” had been involved by its French allies; but more probably they were suffering from the unwise attempts of their Government in the previous century to “encourage” what they then thought was a declining population.[[312]] The peasant who guided Malthus to the sources of the Orbe[[313]] talked freely to him on the poverty of the district, which he ascribed to early and imprudent marriages, “le vice du pays”; he would have a law passed to prevent a man marrying till he was forty, and a woman till she was elderly. He said that at one time the introduction of stone polishing had given the people high wages and led them to expect constant employment; changes of fashion[[314]] had helped to drive the industry away, but the habits taught by it had remained so fast rooted in the people that emigration itself brought no relief to their overflowing numbers. But this self-taught Malthusian had not learned his lesson perfectly. He fancied that the fertile lands of the low countries, with their abundance of corn and employments, could never experience the evil of over-population. This was true only in the unhappy sense that they had greater unhealthiness and a greater mortality, providing room for early marriages and many births.

It is easy to see that Malthus over-valued his prize. The pons asinorum of the subject is the doctrine that over-population is not a question of absolute numbers or absolute quantity of food and fertility of soil, but of the numbers in relation to the food, in whatever place or time; and the young peasant had not crossed it.

CHAPTER VI.
FRANCE.

French Numbers a Problem to Europe in 1802, because Law of Increase not understood—Effects of War—Lament for the unborn millions eighty years ago—More fitting now—Good Distribution and Production sometimes inseparable—The Stationary State—Malthus and the French Revolution.