Without the discussions raised by the Essay on Population it is very doubtful if public opinion would have been so far advanced in 1834 as to make a bill, drawn on such lines, at all likely to pass into law. The abolition of outdoor relief to the able-bodied was nothing short of a revolution. It had needed a lifetime of economical doctrine, reproof, and correction to convince our public men, and to some extent the nation, that the way of rigour was at once the way of justice, of mercy, and of self-interest. The history of the English Poor Law is ample proof that men do not instinctively follow their own interest. It was the ratepayer’s interest,[[725]] unless he was an employer, that relief should be sparely given; and it was given lavishly. It was the poor man’s interest to be thrifty and sober; and as a rule he was neither. There was no hope of reform till both rich and poor learned a deeper sense of their personal responsibility for the remoter effects of their own acts, whether unwisely benevolent or heedlessly selfish. The clear consciousness of personal responsibility seems to Malthus to be the soul and centre of every healthy reform. In this sense, at least, he would say that virtue is knowledge.
His thoughts on society are connected at this point with his thoughts on man’s place and duty in the world. His psychology and ethics, slightly as they are sketched, throw light on his sociology and economics, and must be considered before we can estimate his position in social philosophy. This will lead us over the greater portion of the fourth book of the essay, leaving the critical chapters till we come to deal with the Critics as a body.
BOOK III.
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Cardinal Doctrines of the Malthusian Ethics—Application to Desire of Marriage—Place of Man on the Earth—Criticism of Moral Philosophy—Teleology and Utility—Benevolence and Self-love—Malthus and Paley—Greatest Happiness—Earthly Paradise—Malthus and the French Revolution—Malthus not a Political Reactionary—Not committed to laissez faire—His Modifications of that Doctrine—Utilitarianism plus Nationality—Experience as much the Riddle as the Interpretation—The State an Organism—Political Ideals before and after 1846.
The moral philosophy of Malthus, like that of Aristotle, starts from a teleology.
Nature makes nothing in vain. Every desire has its proper place and proper gratification, if we can find them. The passions are the materials out of which happiness is made; and they are therefore to be regulated and harmonized; they are not to be extinguished, or even diminished in intensity.[[726]] There is a way of so gratifying the desires that they produce a general balance of consequences in favour of happiness; and there is an opposite way with opposite effects. The former is evidently the way of nature, for utility is the only guide of conduct we have apart from Scripture.[[727]] We must not eradicate any impulses; but we must follow none so far “as to trench upon some other law [sic] which equally demands our attention.” What is the golden mean, and what is too much or too little, we can only know by our own and others’ experience of the consequences of actions.[[728]] Nature shows us the wrongness of an act by bringing from it a train of painful consequences. Diseases, instead of being the “inevitable inflictions of Providence,” are “indications that we have offended against some of the laws of nature. The plague at Constantinople and in other towns of the East is a constant admonition of this kind to the inhabitants. The human constitution cannot support such a state of filth and torpor; and as dirt, squalid poverty, and indolence are in the highest degree unfavourable to happiness and virtue,[[729]] it seems a benevolent dispensation that such a state should by the laws of nature produce disease and death, as a beacon to others to avoid splitting on the same rock.”[[730]] As epidemics indicate bad food, unwholesome houses, or bad drainage, and as indigestion follows over-eating, so the misery that follows on too great an increase of numbers is simply the law of nature recoiling on the law-breaker.[[731]] In this case it has taken a longer experience to teach men the conduct most favourable to happiness, and therefore the conduct right for them. But even the best food, best clothing, and best housing have not been taught all at once; and the principle of the lesson is clearly the same in all the cases.
To say, therefore, that the desire of marriage is to be restrained and regulated is not to treat it exceptionally or to deny its naturalness. There is a lawful and there is an irregular gratification even of hunger and thirst; and the irregular is punished both by nature and, when it takes, for example, the form of theft, by human laws. Society could give such punishment only on the ground that the action punished tended to injure the general happiness. The act of the hungry man who steals a loaf is only distinguishable from the act of the hungry man who takes a loaf of his own, by means of its consequences. If all were to steal loaves there would in the end be fewer loaves for everybody.[[732]] We must apply the same criterion to the irregular gratification of all other desires.
After the desire for food, the desire of marriage is the most powerful and general of our desires. “When we contemplate the constant and severe toil of the greatest part of mankind, it is impossible not to be forcibly impressed with the reflection that the sources of human happiness would be most cruelly diminished if the prospect of a good meal, a warm house, and a comfortable fireside in the evening were not incitements sufficiently vivid to give interest and cheerfulness to the labours and privations of the day.”[[733]] This desire gives strength of character to a man in proportion as the animal element in it is hidden away out of sight, and in proportion as the gratification of it is won by exertion and, it may be, by waiting. To do as Jacob did for Rachel, a man must have some strength of character. Most of us, in the opinion of Malthus, owe whatever of definite plan there is in our lives to the existence of such a central object of affection.[[734]] Malthus himself, it will appear, did not marry till on the eve of becoming a professor at the East India College, nearly a year after these passages were written. Even in 1798 he wrote: “Perhaps there is scarcely a man who has once experienced the genuine delights of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasures may have been, that does not look back to the period as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves to bask, which he recollects and contemplates with the fondest regrets, and which he would most wish to live over again.”[[735]] Such a passage, though it disappeared, with other flowers of language, in the later editions of the essay, show us that Malthus, though wiser, was not colder than his fellow-men, and drew his facts from experience as well as observation, of the matters concerned.[[736]]
If we assume the intention of the Creator to replenish the earth, we can see a reason in cosmical polity for the strength of this desire of marriage. If the fertility of fertile soils had been as great as the power of population to increase, there would have been no inducement to men to cultivate the poorer soils or frequent the less attractive parts of the earth’s surface; human industry and ingenuity would have wanted their first stimulus.[[737]] As it is, the disparity of the two powers leads to an over-spreading of the world; men are led to avoid overcrowding from fear of the evils that spring from it. Man’s duties vary with his situations; and, as these are not uniform, but infinitely various, all his powers are kept in play. This language might make us doubt whether the final cause is the development of man, or simply the replenishment of the earth. If the first essay be allowed in evidence, it is clear that man (with whatever justice) is made the chief end of the earth, though his own chief end is not supposed to be realized there.[[738]]
The natural theology of Malthus and Paley is the foundation of their ethics. It was the English ethics of last century, not only before Kant, but before Bentham. There are signs that Malthus, in his views of metaphysics and of the “moral sentiments,”[[739]] preferred where he could to draw rather from Tucker than from Paley. Abraham Tucker[[740]] (the “Edward Search” who began the Light of Nature in 1756, and finished it, blind, in 1774) lived for nearly fifty years[[741]] at Betchworth Castle near Dorking. It is possible in these days, when near neighbours knew each other better than they care to do now, that Daniel Malthus, though the younger man, may have known Tucker. They were both of them Oxford men, small proprietors, eccentric, literary, and fond of philosophizing. Whether through his father at home or through Paley at college, it is certain that Malthus at an early date studied the Light of Nature and adopted much of its teaching. Before he appeared in public as an author, he had formed some settled philosophical convictions, which (whatever their value) at least left his mind free for its other work, and kept it at peace with itself as regards the problems of philosophy.