We find Malthus thinking[[764]] that, had the Poor Laws never existed, there “might have been a few more instances of very severe distress,” but “the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would have been much greater than it is at present.” In other words, what he wanted was the “greatest amount of happiness” on the whole, whatever an “amount” of happiness may mean. Malthus would probably have refused to use the formula of Bentham, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”; he would have counted the first item, the happiness, out of all proportion more important than the second.[[765]] He had refused something like it at the hands of Paley. “I cannot agree with Archdeacon Paley, who says that the quantity of happiness in any country is best measured by the number of its people. Increasing population is the most certain possible sign of the happiness and prosperity of a state; but the actual population may be only a sign of the happiness that is past.”[[766]] Malthus would not, for example, have wished to see the highlands of Scotland brought back to their ancient condition, in which they had greater numbers than now living in rude comfort, but also greater numbers exposed to precarious indigence.[[767]]
On the other hand, it is certain (in spite of a common prejudice) that Malthus desired the great numbers as well as the great happiness, and was indeed quite naturally led by his theological views to prefer a little happiness for each of many individuals to a great deal for each of a few. He “desires a great actual population and a state of society in which abject poverty and dependence are comparatively but little known,”[[768]]—two perfectly compatible requirements, which if realized together would lead to what may be called Malthus’ secondary or earthly paradise, which is not above mundane criticism.
This earthly paradise is, even in our author’s opinion, the end most visibly concerned in our schemes of reform. His idea of it as a society where moral restraint is perfect, invites the remark that the chief end of society cannot be the mere removal of evil; it must be the establishment of some good, the former being at the utmost an essential condition sine quâ non of the latter. Moreover, moral restraint is not the removal of every but only of one evil; and it kills only one cause of poverty. A complete reformation must not only remove all the evils, but must positively amend and transform all the three branches of social economy,—the making, the sharing, and the using of wealth,—not one or even two of them alone. Every Utopian scheme should be tested by the question: Does it reform all three, or only one, or two, of the three? Neglect of the third might spoil all. A scheme which affects all three, however, must have something like a Religion in it. With these reservations Malthus’ picture of the good time coming has much value and interest.[[769]]
Unlike Godwin, he relies on the ordinary motives of men, which he regards as forms of an enlightened self-love. Self-love is the mainspring of the social machine;[[770]] but self-love, when the self is so expanded as to include other selves, is not a low motive. Commercial ambition, encouraged by political liberty, and unhampered by Poor Laws, leads naturally to prosperity.[[771]] The happiness of the whole is to result from the happiness of individuals, and to begin first with them. He “sees in all forms of thought and work the life and death struggles of separate human beings.”[[772]] “No co-operation is required. Every step tells. He who performs his duty faithfully will reap the full fruits of it, whatever may be the number of others who fail. This duty is intelligible to the humblest capacity. It is merely that he is not to bring beings into the world for whom he cannot find the means of support. When once this subject is cleared from the obscurity thrown over it by parochial laws and private benevolence, every man must feel the strongest conviction of such an obligation. If he cannot support his children, they must starve; and, if he marry in the face of a fair probability that he will not be able to support his children, he is guilty of all the evils which he thus brings upon himself, his wife, and his offspring. It is clearly his interest, and will tend greatly to promote his happiness, to deter marrying till by industry and economy he is in a capacity to support the children that he may reasonably expect from his marriage; and, as he cannot in the mean time gratify his passions without violating an express command of God, and running a great risk of injuring himself or some of his fellow-creatures, considerations of his own interest and happiness will dictate to him the strong obligation to a moral conduct while he remains unmarried.”[[773]] Supposing passion to be thus controlled, we should see a very different scene from the present. “The period of delayed gratification would be passed in saving the earnings which were above the wants of a single man.” Savings Banks and Friendly Societies would have their perfect work; and “in a natural state of society such institutions, with the aid of private charity well directed, would probably be all the means necessary to produce the best practicable effects.”[[774]] The people’s numbers would be constantly within the limits of the food, though constantly following its increase; the real value of wages would be raised, in the most permanent way possible; “all abject poverty would be removed from society, or would at least be confined to a very few who had fallen into misfortunes against which no prudence or foresight could provide.”[[775]] It must be brought home to the poor that “they are themselves the cause of their own poverty.”[[776]] While Malthus insists against Godwin that it is not institutions and laws but ourselves that are to blame, he still shares, with Godwin, the desire to lessen the number of institutions; and, as a first reform, would repeal at least one obnoxious law.
The relation of Malthus to the French Revolution and its English partisans is indeed not to be expressed in a sentence. It has been said that he cannot be justly described as being a reactionary;[[777]] and, in truth, besides being a critic of Godwin and of Condorcet, he is influenced to some extent by the same ideas that influenced them. The Essay on Population is coloured throughout by a tacit or open reference to the Rights of Man, a watchword borrowed from France by the American Republic, to be restored again at the Revolution. Paine’s book on the Rights of Man, in reply to Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, had been widely read before it was suppressed by the English Government; and Godwin and Mackintosh[[778]] were not silenced. Malthus himself, as a Whig, does not disparage the rights of man when they meant political freedom and equality, but only when they included the right to be supported by one’s neighbour, as had been asserted by the Abbé Raynal and some other writers of the Revolution.[[779]] As the same assertion was practically made by the English Poor Law, which had venerable conservative prejudice on its side, our author’s opposition to it was no proof that his politics were reactionary. His economical antecedents and his political views bound him to the French Revolution. In his range of ideas and his habitual categories he could not depart far from the French Economists, who had helped to prepare the way for the Jacobins. Adam Smith himself had felt their influence. Though he had criticized the noble savage and the state of nature,[[780]] he had himself a lingering preference for agriculture over manufacture; and he himself spoke of a “natural” price, a “natural” progress of opulence, a “natural” rate of wages, and “natural liberty.” To him as to the French writers, Nature[[781]] meant what would grow of itself if men did not interfere,—the difficulty being that the interference seems also to grow of itself, and it is impossible to separate the necessary protection from the mischievous interference. Malthus retains the phraseology with an even nearer approach to personification. Nature points out to us certain courses of conduct.[[782]] If we break Nature’s laws, she will punish us. At Nature’s mighty feast there is no cover laid for the superfluous new-comer. The Poor Laws offend against Nature; they interfere with human action in a case where it would spontaneously right itself by ordinary motives of self-interest; if men knew they could not count on parish relief, they would probably help themselves. Be the argument worth much or little, its strength is not the greater because of this figure; and his use of it shows that Malthus had not risen above the metaphysical superstitions of his age. But the charge sometimes made against him is that he was not merely not before his age but positively behind it; and this is certainly false.
In politics he was as little of a reactionary as his opponent, who if “in principle a Republican was in practice a Whig.”[[783]] He followed Fox rather than Burke, and lost neither his head nor his temper over the Revolution. “Malthus will prove a peace-monger,” wrote Southey in 1808.[[784]] He was a steady friend of Catholic Emancipation. He saw the folly of attributing with Godwin and Paine all evil to the Government, and with Cobbett all evil to taxation and the funds;[[785]] but he is one with them all in dislike of standing armies, and is more alarmed at the overbearing measures of the Government against sedition than at the alleged sedition itself. One of the most remarkable chapters in the second edition of the essay[[786]] is on “the effects of the knowledge of the principal cause of poverty on civil liberty.” Its main argument is, that, where there is much distress and destitution, there will be much discontent and sedition, and, where there is much of the two last, there will be much coercion and despotism. A knowledge of the chief cause of poverty by taking away the distress would leave Government at least no excuse for tyranny. “The pressure of distress on the lower classes of people, together with the habit of attributing this distress to their rulers, appears to me to be the rock of defence, the castle, the guardian spirit of despotism. It affords to the tyrant the fatal and unanswerable plea of necessity. It is the reason why every free Government tends constantly to destruction, and that its appointed guardians become daily less jealous of the encroachments of power.”[[787]] The French people had been told that their unhappiness was due to their rulers; they overthrew their rulers, and, finding their distress not removed, they sacrificed the new rulers; and this process would have continued indefinitely if despotism had not been found preferable to anarchy. In England “the Government of the last twenty years[[788]] has shown no great love of peace or liberty,” and the country gentlemen have apparently surrendered themselves to Government on condition of being protected from the mob.[[789]] A few more scarcities like 1800 might cause such convulsions and lead to such sternness of repression that the British constitution would end as Hume foretold,[[790]] in “absolute monarchy, the easiest death, the true euthanasia of the British constitution.” The “tendency of mobs to produce tyranny” can only be counteracted by the subversion, not of the tyrants, but of the mobs. The result would be a lean and wiry people, weak for offence, but strong for defence; there would be freedom at home and peace abroad.[[791]]
Of course the “knowledge of the principal cause of poverty” is not conceived by Malthus as the only lesson worth learning. He shares the growing enthusiasm of all friends of the people for popular education,[[792]] and thinks the Tory arguments against instructing the poorer classes “not only illiberal, but to the last degree feeble, if not really disingenuous.”[[793]] “An instructed and well-informed people would be much less likely to be led away by inflammatory writings, and much better able to detect the false declamation of interested and ambitious demagogues than an ignorant people.”[[794]] These words were written in 1803, four years before Whitbread made his motion on Schools and Savings Banks, and thirteen years before Brougham’s Committee on Education.[[795]] Malthus in fact was in politics an advanced Whig, ahead of his party in ideas of social reform. This may be seen from the following passage, which is only one out of many, that show his large view of his subject. He says that in most countries among the poor there seems to be something like “a standard of wretchedness, a point below which they will not continue to marry.” “This standard is different in different countries, and is formed by various concurring circumstances of soil, climate, government, degree of knowledge, civilization, &c.” It is raised by liberty, security of property, the diffusion of knowledge, and a taste for the conveniences and the comforts of life. It is lowered by despotism and ignorance. “In an attempt to better the condition of the labouring classes of society, our object should be to raise this standard as high as possible by cultivating a spirit of independence, a decent pride, and a taste for cleanliness and comfort. The effect of a good Government in increasing the prudential habits and personal respectability of the lower classes of society has already been insisted on; but certainly this effect will always be incomplete without a good system of education, and indeed it may be said that no Government can approach to perfection that does not provide for the instruction of the people. The benefits derived from education are among those which may be enjoyed without restriction of numbers; and, as it is in the power of Governments to confer these benefits, it is undoubtedly their duty to do it.”[[796]]
Our author’s historical sense saved him from Ricardian presumptions in favour of laissez faire. Writers go too far, however, in declaring unlimited competition to be against the spirit of his work, and asserting that he undervalued the influence of institutions, only that he might save his country’s institutions from hasty reform.[[797]] He knew that society did not grow up on economical principles; instead of beginning with non-interference, and extending interference by degrees where it was found imperative, it began with interference everywhere, and relaxed the interference by degrees where it was found possible and thought desirable. We have begun with status and paternal government, and have made our way towards contract and laissez faire; but we have never reached them, because, as men now are, we cannot go on without damage to the common weal. But it seemed to Malthus that experience had shown the need as clearly as the dangers of natural liberty;—history, for example, had clearly proved that the material relief of the poor, which had never been abandoned by the Government, might best have been left to private action. The extreme view would have been that it was not every one’s duty in general, but every one’s in particular, a responsibility of which no one could divest himself. But, though Malthus often speaks as if the burden ought to lie specially on a man’s relatives and private friends, he does not share Adam Smith’s antipathy to associations, and would probably have recognized division of labour to be as necessary in charity as in industry. Still, even as administered by an organization of men specially fitted for the work by nature and choice, the distribution of material relief never seems to him a case where society can help the poor without in some degree injuring their independence and their strength of character. In the matter of charity he is clearly on the side of natural liberty and individualism.
But, in other directions, he has made admissions which seriously modify the unlimited competition of natural liberty. He admits, first of all, that the struggle for existence when it is the struggle for bare life does not lead to progress;[[798]] and he admits, therefore, in the second place, that the state should interfere with the “system of natural liberty,” positively, to educate the citizens,[[799]] and to grant medical aid to the poor,[[800]] to assist emigration,[[801]] and even to give direct relief in money to men that have a family of more than six children,[[802]]—as well as negatively, to restrict foreign trade when it causes more harm to the public than good to the traders,[[803]] and to restrict the home trade where children’s labour is concerned.[[804]]
A critic might ask on what principle he justifies these admissions; or might hint that he makes them on no conscious principle at all, but in the spirit of a judge, who is administering a law that he knows to be bad, but prefers to make continual exceptions rather than suggest a new law;—otherwise could any rule stand the test of so many exceptions?