Malthus and his work

by James Bonar

It might be replied that Malthus nowhere writes a treatise on political philosophy, and his views must be inferred from scattered hints, but it does not follow that he was not, consciously or unconsciously, possessed of a guiding principle. His several admissions have a certain logical connection. It is more doubtful whether their connecting principle will seem adequate to a modern reader whose questions in political philosophy have been stated for him by Comte and the latter-day socialists.

The first of the admissions is the more significant, as Malthus, while making it, refuses to approve of the means then actually adopted (by the Poor Law) for raising the level of the weakest citizens, and so fitting them for their struggle. If the absence of provision was an evil, the existing provision was hardly a less one. It was bad for society to give help by giving bread and butter, for that was a gift to full-grown men and women, not really weak, but quite ready to be indolent. A gift of education, on the other hand, is given, he considers, to those who are really incapable of helping themselves and really ignorant of their powers.[^[805]] It makes the weak strong, and tends to remove indolence, not create it.[^[806]] In the same way Factory Acts assist the weak and not the indolent, while the (rare) interference with free trade, the granting of medical relief, the special aid in case of large families, and the aid to Irish peasants, are all of them special remedies in cases where the sufferers could not be expected to foresee and provide against the distress, and were therefore sufferers from circumstances rather than from indolence. Malthus continually takes the view that security is a greater blessing than wealth itself, and insecurity a worse evil than poverty. The circumstances that cause insecurity were therefore in his view the most distressing; they baffled individual effort.

His critics might have answered: “In all the cases mentioned by you as justifying interference, a perfectly enlightened self-interest would have provided against the mishap; and relief of any kind would be in the end equivalent to relief in bread and butter, for, as far as it goes, it allows the more to be left over either to the man or his parents for bread and butter, and thereby it is a relief that fosters indolence.” He could rejoin, however, that (even if we grant the practical possibility of such a perfect enlightenment) direct relief appeals far more to indolence than indirect,[^[807]] and the good of the indirect can often, the good of the direct very seldom, outweigh the evil. He would have added that even the direct relief in bread and butter was not opposed by him on any theory, but on the ground of its known tendency to evil,—and, if it had been possible from the nature of men and things to keep the promises of the Poor Law, he would have given his voice for it. He was committed to free trade itself only because and only so far as experience was in its favour. His only axiom in political philosophy was that the end of politics is the greatest happiness of the great body of the people; and his only rule for securing that end was the observation of what, as a matter of experience, actually did secure it.

On the other hand, nothing is clearer from his own writings than that the language of experience owes much of its meaning to its interpreter; and we ask “What were his principles of interpretation?”

The answer is, that, in spite of the affinity between utilitarianism in morals and individualism in politics, he tried to retain the first without the second. He understood moral goodness to consist in the tendency of actions to produce a balance of pleasures over pains; but his utility when examined turned out, as we have seen, to be much nearer the notion of self-development than simply a sum of pleasures irrespective of their quality. At this point the strong grasp which family life held on his fancy lifted him above the notion that the chief end could be the individual happiness of isolated units, and showed him that the real unit was a group. The state to Malthus, as to Aristotle, is an aggregate of families, though he recognizes very clearly that, besides the connection of householder with householder by the common subjection to the laws, there is the common bond of nationality, a community of feeling, a partnership of past traditions, present privileges, and future hopes.[^[808]] It is one of the plainest facts of experience that men are often led by their attachment to their country and countrymen to run counter to their worldly interests.[^[809]]

The nation is a little world within the great world, and on the analogy of the great world it is the scene where difficulties generate talents and bring out the character.[^[810]] From this point of view it is not far from the truth to parody a well-known description of modern Judaism, and describe the political philosophy of Malthus as Utilitarianism plus a Nationality. The individualism of Malthus is limited by the particular institutions and particular interests of the English nation.[^[811]] In his intellectual history a strong emphasis on the state preceded the emphasis on the individual; and even in his mature view the state is limited in its interference with the citizens only by its powers of doing good to them. But he holds with Adam Smith and the other economists that its powers of doing good to them are very much narrower than on the old conception of the state, as a kind of family. The duties of a state to the citizens are narrower than those of a father to his children, because what the father can and must do for his children the state cannot do for its citizens with equal safety to their independence. It remains, however, true that the relation of state to citizen is not the commercial relation of one contracting party with another; it is a relation prior to the commercial, and gives to all contracts whatever validity they have.

If Malthus himself had been asked to reconcile his departure from the general principle of natural liberty with his general adherence to it, he would have made some such answer as the following: “From the first, when I wrote in 1798, it appeared to me that the action of Government could neither have so uniformly bad an effect as Godwin supposed, nor so uniformly good as Pitt’s Bill implied. If, as Godwin desires, there were no Government, but only a chastened laissez faire, unsophisticated human nature would be quite enough to bring back misery and sin.[^[812]] But the chastening of the laissez faire could not in my opinion take place without the Government, for it is one of the most proper functions of Government, not adequately dischargeable by individuals, to provide for the people the education that is supposed to chasten. Even when that provision has been made, the education will not do its perfect work if it has not included the particular doctrines which it has fallen to me more than any man to bring home to the public mind. With such an education there will be hope for better things. Things as they are and the struggle for existence as it now is among the helpless classes can please me as little as Godwin. It is a struggle which leads to no progress. But, unlike Godwin, I do not regard Government as necessarily creating the distress; and I certainly regard it as the necessary engine for removing the distress by education in the end, and toning down its effects by restrictions for the present. If only as an engine of education, paternal government must be a permanent factor of society. Where a public necessity has been well supplied by individual action, I should leave it in the hands of individuals; but not otherwise. I did not object to the Poor Law on the broad ground that it took the place of private action, but because its own action was mischievous. I should try every case on its merits, and be guided to interfere or not interfere by the known results of the existing policies.”

In so speaking, Malthus would no doubt have justified his own consistency. But the modern reader might justly reply to Malthus, that we have often to judge tendencies as well as results, and experience becomes then an uncertain guide; he might complain that Malthus himself is sometimes led to judge both of them by a half-acknowledged supplementary principle of the balance of classes and safety of the mean, which can be applied in a way very unfavourable to popular rights. He might urge that the apparent success of an institution might have been due to a concurrent cause that cancelled its defects, and we cannot always pronounce on its merits from experience of it. How can experience help us unless we have the key to its interpretation? Without such a key nothing would be so false as facts except figures. In human politics mere survival is seldom the test of fitness.

If we compare the state to an organism and convert our simile into a rule of judgment, we may say that, when each part has its function and contributes to the efficiency of the whole, the body politic is well; when any part does not, there is need of the doctor or surgeon. This figure seems to give us a key for the interpretation of social experience; but unhappily the figure itself needs an interpreter.[^[813]] If we interpret organism as the ideal union of members in one body, it ceases to be a simile, for the body politic is not merely like this union,—it is the best example of it. For in the body politic the general life is the source of all individual energy, and at the same time the individual members are continually paying back the debt, by an active sympathy and conscious union with the commonwealth, to which the commonwealth in its turn owes all its collective energy; the citizen is nothing without his state, or the state without its citizens. This is to make the figure useful, by making it change places with the thing prefigured. So long as the same idea is grasped in both, their relation in rhetoric need not affect us.

Such an idea of the state would lead us beyond the admissions of Malthus to some such demands as the following:—For his every possession, the citizen must be able to show some service rendered to his countrymen, and must be taught and expected to hold his property in trust for the common good, that so the body politic may have no useless member. In proportion as private possession involves monopoly, its use should be jealously restricted in the public interest, which in the extreme cases would lead to the withdrawing of it, with as little friction as might be, from the private owner to the state. Education acts, sanitary laws, and factory acts should be strictly and universally enforced, not for the sake of the parents, guardians, and employers, or even altogether for the sake of the sufferers themselves, but for the sake of the community, in order that in the struggle for existence every competitor should start fair as an efficient citizen, with full possession of his powers of mind and body. For the rest, security and order should be the watchword of the state, free course being allowed to commercial and industrial enterprise, scientific inquiry, and speculative discussion, in order that progress may be made in the surest of all ways, by the moral and intellectual development of the individual citizens, which will soon express itself in their institutions. With these postulates, half from the old economists and half from the new reformers, on the way to be realized, and with industrial co-operation in prospect, we need not despair of the future of man on our part of the earth.