Need of an Economical Digression—The Hegemony of Adam Smith’s School—Cardinal Doctrines of the Malthusian Economy—Scope, Method, Details—Malthus doing Injustice to his Economics—Human Character of his Doctrines—Agricultural Situation in 1794—History of Corn Laws—Malthus on Rent in 1803 and afterwards—Observations on the Corn Laws—Grounds of an Opinion—Nature and Progress of Rent—Ricardo’s Criticisms—Agricultural Improvements—Malthusian Ideal of Commercial Policy—The Wall of Brass—Limits to Commercial Progress.
The Essay on Population deals with the past, the present, and the future. We have tried to follow its account of past and present, and must now consider the author’s view of future prospects and of the various schemes (including his own) for making the future better than the present.
To do justice to this half of the essay, we must take further liberties with its arrangement. For the sake of explaining the historical genesis of the essay, we have already taken first[[455]] that criticism of Godwin and Condorcet which in the later essay comes in the centre of the work,[[456]] on the heels of the account of population in the United Kingdom, the point where we have now arrived; and the chapter on emigration has been used before its time. There remain, out of the fourteen chapters of the third book of the essay, eleven still untouched; and in all but one[[457]] a knowledge of the general economical doctrine of Malthus is indispensable to a clear and just understanding of him. No apology is needed then for a somewhat long digression, in which the chief economical writings of our author are briefly analyzed. It is not wholly a digression, as the substance of seven[[458]] out of ten chapters will be found incorporated with it, and their logical connection with the author’s economical theories (so far as it exists) will be shown.
As a thoroughly practical man, Malthus knew that philanthropy can do little without sound doctrine; and his economical theories belong to the substance of his work. They were developed, unlike the Essay on Population, in quiet controversy among friends; Ricardo, James Mill, and Jean Baptiste Say, who were critics of the Political Economy, had been converts of the Essay. These were, however, the very men who came nearest to identify orthodox economics with rigorous abstraction. Malthus himself, labouring to build up the neglected pathology of economic science, was not chargeable with this fault. His first work had happily fixed into an intellectual principle his natural inclination to look at speculative questions in their relations to practice, and to look at “things as they are”[[459]] rather than as they might be. Ricardo’s first work, bearing wholly on finance,[[460]] had unhappily fixed for him his inclination to treat every social question as a problem in arithmetic. In both cases the excitement of controversy would make the impression deeper.
The two economists both start from Adam Smith,[[461]] as theologians from the Bible. It was becoming clear that these Scriptures were of doubtful interpretation. Men were to choose between the Calvinism of Ricardo and the Arminianism of Malthus; and, when the two writers turned from their debates with the public to debates with each other, no less a prize was in question than the hegemony of the school.
This was won by Ricardo, whose Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) were accepted by James Mill, MacCulloch, Nassau Senior, to say nothing of others, as the Institutes of their creed. MacCulloch thought it not worth his while to print what Ricardo had thought it worth his while to write, in vindication of his positions against Malthus.[[462]] The strongest ally of Malthus was Sismondi. It was not till Ricardo had reigned for thirty years that there was serious sign of defection, when the son of James Mill broke with his father’s traditions;[[463]] and, though in the hands of Thornton, Cliffe Leslie, Walker, and others, the reaction has been carried to the utmost, the eclipse of Ricardo has done nothing to rescue Malthus from obscurity. The very success of the Essay on Population may have deepened the oblivion of the other writings in virtue of the popular fallacy that a man cannot be equally great in general theory and in the advocacy of one particular reform.
The Political Economy of Malthus has its faults; but it contains in outline the main truths which writers of our own time think they have established against Ricardo. First and foremost, he maintains with them that the proper study of the science is not Wealth, but Man, or more definitely, Wealth in relation to Man. The qualities of man and the earth he cultivates are according to Malthus so many and variable in relation to each other that a study of their relations cannot be an exact science like mathematics; it may contain “great general principles” to which there are few exceptions, and “prominent landmarks” that will be safe guides to us in legislation or in life; but “even these when examined will be found to resemble the most general rules in morals and politics founded upon the known passions and propensities of human nature.”[[464]] Human conduct is characterized by such variation and aberration that we must always be prepared for exceptions to our principles, and for qualifications which spoil the charm of uniformity, but are faithful to facts,[[465]] like George Eliot’s “analyses in small and subtle characters,” which stimulate no enthusiasm but alone tell the whole truth. In the second place, we are told that the nature of the subject makes a peculiarly cautious Method necessary. Our first business being to account for things as they are,[[466]] till we are sure that our theories do so we cannot act on them.[[467]] A good economical definition must conform to the ordinary usage of words. We must take if possible a meaning which would agree with the ordinary use of words “in the conversation of educated persons.”[[468]] If this does not give sufficient distinctness, we must fall back on the authority of the most celebrated writers on the science, particularly of the founder or founders of it; “in this case, whether the term be a new one born with the science, or an old one used in a new sense, it will not be strange to the generality of readers, or liable to be misunderstood.”[[469]] If any word must have a different meaning from that adopted by either of these authorities, the new sense must not only be free from the faults of the old, but must have a clear and recognizable positive usefulness. The new definitions should be consistent with the old; and the same terms should be used in the same sense, except where inveterate custom insists on an exception. When all is done, it is still impossible in a social science like political economy to find a definition entirely beyond cavil.[[470]]
“Wealth” must include all the “material objects that are necessary, useful, or agreeable to mankind;”[[471]] “productive labour” must be the labour which realizes itself either in such material objects or the increased value of them; or else we wander from common language, and our discussions travel off into indefiniteness. Economical reasoning must be a deduction from observed facts of nature and of human nature verified by general experience. Malthus professes to have used this cautious method throughout, and the theory of population was only the particular instance where circumstances enabled him to make his verification most complete. “I should never have had that steady and unshaken confidence in the theory of population which I have invariably felt, if it had not appeared to me to be confirmed, in the most remarkable manner, by the state of society as it actually exists in every country with which we are acquainted.”[[472]] On the other hand, Ricardo, legislating for Saturn, gives us little or no verification by experience. It is true that he admits qualifications and exceptions to his own statements; and he would have winced a little at his own biographer’s assertion that “Mr. Ricardo paid comparatively little attention to the practical application of general principles; his is not a practical work.”[[473]] But he makes no use of the admissions; his illustrations as a rule are not historical, but imaginary cases and the verification is wanting. In a letter to Malthus (written on the 24th November, 1820) he says: “Our differences may in some respects, I think, be ascribed to your considering my book as more practical than I intended it to be. My object was to elucidate principles, and to do this I imagined strong cases, that I might show the operation of these principles.”[[474]] In Malthus and Adam Smith, imaginary cases are rare exceptions, actual examples from life or history are the rule. Malthus goes so far in this direction that (to use his own phraseology) he is tempted to subordinate science to “utility.” Even Adam Smith, though he had abundance of good-will to his kind, did not write to do good but to expound truth. To Malthus the discovery of truth was less important than the improvement of society. When an economical truth could not be made the means of improvement, he seems to have lost interest in it. His pointed warning to others against this error[[475]] may be regarded as a confession of his own liability to it; and, if he obeyed his own warning at all, his position was at the best like that of the latter-day utilitarians, who try to reach happiness by making believe not to think of it. If his science had been less biassed by utility, it might have been more thorough; and we might not have had in our own time a Ricardian socialism, appearing like the ghost of the deceased Ricardian orthodoxy sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. He has the virtue of refusing to join the economical Pharisees,[[476]] who would not admit the elasticity of economical laws, lest they should discredit their science; but he is to blame for not pushing his quarrel against Ricardo with the same energy as against Godwin. His forces, in this campaign, were worse drilled and worse handled. It is justly said by Garnier (Dict. de l’Écon. Pol., art. ‘Malthus’), that in spite of its title, the Political Economy of Malthus is not the exposition of a system, but simply a collection of economical papers on various subjects that had been brought specially under his notice in discussion with his friends, or (we might add) in his college class. This itself would lead him to present a much less solid front to the enemy than he did in the Essay.
To come, in the third place, to Details, we find the human character of the Political Economy of Malthus appearing not only in his view of population, where all is at last made to depend on the personal responsibility of the individual man, and legislation is good or bad according as it strengthens or weakens that responsibility,—but in his view of the Value of goods, as measured by human labour,—in his view of demand and supply, as sharing the inconstancy of the human desires that enter into both of them,—in his view of the Rent of land, as determined by the effects of human industry and skill as well as by the natural qualities of the soil,—in his view of the Wages of labour, as regulated not by an unchangeable but by a progressive minimum,—in his view of luxury, as being equally with parsimony necessary to production, and preventive of over-production,—and in his view of free trade, as a rule to which we must make exceptions if we would not cause sufferings.
These doctrines had a distinct relation to current events. Political and social changes were reacting on political economy. As Godwin and Pitt provoked the essay of 1798, the scarcity of 1799 and 1800 called forth the pamphlet on High Prices (1800). As the latter bears directly on the Poor Law, it will best be considered when the thread of the Essay on Population is taken up again;[[477]] and the same applies to the letter of Malthus to Whitbread (1807). The distresses of a time when wheat went so high as £6 the quarter instead of its normal 40s. or 50s., would naturally make the relief of the poor a question of the day. The high prices of corn increased the number of enclosures and Enclosure Bills. More than three millions of acres, or about a twelfth part of the entire area of England and Wales, are said to have been taken from waste into cultivation between 1800 and 1820. The average price of wheat, always the staple food of the people when they could get it, had been 55s. 11d. for the years preceding, viz. from 1790 to 1799 inclusive; it was 82s. 2d. from 1800 to 1809 inclusive, and 88s. 8d. from 1810 to 1819 inclusive, after which it fell (for the next decade) to 58s. 5d.[[478]] In 1883–4 it was 35s. 8d. a quarter, which means a four-pound loaf (of medium quality) at 4½d. or 5d.; but at its lowest during the war (in 1803) it was at 57s. 1d., and the loaf was at 6¾d. or 7d.