The hearers of the sermon could have no doubt at whom it was aimed; and the footnotes of the published version of it contained large quotations from the Essay on Population and large direct commendations of its author, which made the sermon’s oblique censure of Godwin the more stinging.
Pulpit philosophizing was not rare in those times; it had been practised since Butler’s days by Dr. Ezra Styles[[818]] in 1761; and Dr. Richard Price had used a dissenter’s pulpit to utter his enthusiastic views on the future improvement of mankind (1787) and the love of our country (1789).[[819]] Burke had denounced him for this in his Reflections;[[820]] but, if Parr could do the same thing on the other side a few years afterwards, it cannot have been any great singularity. Parr’s sermon was the subject of Sydney Smith’s first paper in the Edinburgh Review (Oct 1802); but its economical interest is due to its effect on Godwin. Godwin had been assailed shortly before by Sir James Mackintosh, a former friend and political ally, in his Discourse on the Law of Nature and Nations, delivered in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, 1799; but Dr. Parr’s censures were more severe. Parr may have been alienated by an offensive description in the Enquirer[[821]] of the clergy, as characterized by “a perennial stationariness of understanding, abortive learning, artificial manners, infantine prejudices, and arrogant infallibility.” As all the other professions were equally well abused, the censure need not have been taken to heart. The letter of Malthus to Godwin, written after the publication of the Enquirer, is full of courtesy. At that time, and indeed for a few years afterwards, there was nothing but good-will between the two writers. When Godwin in 1801 made his letters to his three critics into a book,[[822]] under the title, Thoughts on Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon, with remarks on Mackintosh and the writer of the Essay on Population, he was bitter only against the two former. He was surprised at the “overbearing scornfulness” of Mackintosh, and at the “venom” of Dr. Parr. If he had changed some of his views it was not in deference to their criticism. Of the Essay on Population, “and the spirit in which it is written,” he “can never speak but with unfeigned respect;” contending only that it is meant to attack his conclusions and not his premises.[[823]] Parr had hailed it as a complete demonstration that Godwin’s scheme of equality would not work, and many better men had felt their mouths shut, and had begged Godwin to speak for them. Godwin consents in these Thoughts. If he was sincere in saying, “I confess I could not see that the essay had any very practical bearing on my own hopes” (p. 55), he must have been in the state which the Enquirer ascribes to the clergyman: “He lives in the midst of evidence and is insensible to it. He is in daily contemplation of contradictions and finds them consistent. He listens to arguments that would impress conviction upon every impartial hearer and is astonished at their futility. He never dares trust himself to one unprejudiced contemplation. He starts with impatience and terror from its possible result.” Malthus, on the other hand, though in orders, has behaved very unlike the clergyman of the Enquirer, for we are told by Godwin himself, “he has neither laboured to excite hatred nor contempt against me and my tenets; he has argued the questions between us just as if they had never been made a theme for political party and the intrigues of faction; he has argued just as if he had no end in view but the investigation of evidence and the development of truth” (p. 55 ft.). Moreover, he has “made as unquestionable an addition to the theory of political economy as any writer for a century past. The grand propositions and outlines of his work will, I believe, be found not less conclusive and certain than they are new. For myself, I cannot refuse to take some pride in so far as by my writings I gave the occasion and furnished an incentive to the producing so valuable a treatise” (p. 56). Surely concession could no further go. Godwin even admits the arithmetical and geometrical ratios.[[824]] His criticisms are all on the checks, which (be it remembered) were only the checks of the first essay, vice, misery, and the fear of them. Are Governments henceforward to prevent the evils of an excessive population by encouraging these unsightly counter-agents? and is every scheme for the amelioration of man’s lot foredoomed? No, the “author of the essay” has too small an idea of the resources of the human mind; it is no conclusive argument against a scheme to say that when it is realized it will probably not last.[[825]] He does not attach sufficient weight to the fact that in England, for example, “prudence and pride” prevent early marriages, and from late ones come smaller families. In a state of universal improvement there would be not less but more of these feelings, and a similar effect would follow in a greater degree.[[826]]
That there was force in this reasoning appears from the way in which Malthus received it when stated to him by letter a few months after the publication of the essay. He replied that the “prudence” in question, if existing in Godwin’s new society, would mean an eye to the main chance; it would mean that one man is strengthening his position and getting to himself more than the minimum of necessaries; if you prevent this, what becomes of your freedom? if you do not, what becomes of your equality and wealth? Secondly, the effect of the prudence would be that the population would not be the greatest possible, but considerably within the limits of the food; and yet you object to present society, that its arrangements prevent the “greatest practicable population.” In all our political theories, if we would trace to particular institutions the evil that is really due to them, we must deduct the evil that is known to be due to other causes. “The very admission of the necessity of prudence to prevent the misery from an overcharged population, removes the blame from public institutions to the conduct of individuals. And certain it is, that almost under the worst form of government, where there was any tolerable freedom of competition, the race of labourers, by not marrying, and consequently decreasing their numbers, might immediately better their condition, and under the very best form of government, by marrying and greatly increasing their numbers they would immediately make their condition worse.”[[827]]
This was no doubt a point against Godwin, but it was also a point against Malthus himself. The essay in its first form had not made sufficient allowance for “prudence”; and the introduction of moral restraint in the second edition might very plausibly have been ascribed by Godwin’s friends to Godwin himself, in spite of the elaborate reply to the Thoughts in a chapter afterwards dropped.[[828]] Godwin said to him afterwards that he had no right to introduce a new element into his solution of the problem, and pretend that it was the same solution as before;[[829]] if he altered his premises he ought to alter his conclusion. To which Malthus might have answered, that, though his conclusion is altered, it retains its value as an argument against Godwin. At first the tendency of numbers to increase up to the food was described as an obstacle fatal to progress; now it is indeed an obstacle which must be faced and overcome, but it is fatal not to progress, but only to equality. Godwin himself had at first considered it an entirely imaginary obstacle which might be ignored for the present by reformers; and his very doctrine of prudence amounts to an admission that his view of it had changed.
Godwin himself was not conscious of his change of front; as the seventh of thirteen children he may have thought the matter personal; and whatever concessions he had made in 1801 he withdrew in 1820. In that year, with David Booth, the patient author of the English Analytical Dictionary, to arrange his statistics and vouch for his calculations, he published an elaborate reply to the Essay on Population. The politicians, the political economists, the bulk of the press, and the public had accepted the Malthusian doctrines, though the conversion of the public was no deeper than it was on Free Trade, and the statesmen with a few exceptions were not sorry to make capital out of the “odiousness” of the doctrines whenever the “acknowledged truth” of them would not serve their turn. Still it seemed true that time had declared for Malthus, and Godwin had fallen out of notice. Sydney Smith’s assertion,[[830]] “Malthus took the trouble of refuting him, and we hear no more of Mr. Godwin,” is not very far from the truth. Malthus had survived his refutation, and Godwin his reputation. Pitt, Paley, and Copleston were with Malthus; he had gained over Hallam among historians, James Mill, Senior, and Ricardo among economists, Brougham, Mackintosh, and even Whitbread among politicians. Southey, Hazlitt, and Cobbett were not a sufficient make-weight. Hazlitt in his Reply to the Essay on Population (in letters of which some appeared in Cobbett’s Pol. Register, 1807) acknowledges the popularity, though he predicts its decay.[[831]] It seems clear that in educated circles at least the view of Malthus was as early as 1820 what it was in 1829, “the popular view,”[[832]] which is quite compatible, as Darwin long experienced, with great unpopularity in particular quarters. No better evidence could be given of this popularity than the unwilling testimony given by Godwin himself in his new book.[[833]] At the end of 1819 Brougham had referred in the House of Commons to the principle of Malthus as “one of the soundest principles of political economy,” and said it was melancholy to observe how the press scouted it and abused its defenders.[[834]] The press, however, was divided. The Edinburgh Review from the first had sided with Malthus. The Quarterly had begun by strong hostility (Dec. 1812, pp. 320 seq.); had softened its tone as time went on (Dec. 1813, pp. 157 seq., and Oct. 1814, pp. 154–5); had spoken with hesitation and doubtfulness (Oct. 1816, pp. 50 seq.); and had at last completely surrendered (July 1817, pp. 369 seq.), confessing it to be “much easier to disbelieve Mr. Malthus than to refute him” (p. 396), thereafter utilizing his doctrine for the support of things as they are, only regretting that Malthus himself would not do the same a little more stoutly (pp. 402–3). Finally, as we have seen, Malthus, after having contributed to the Edinburgh, became a contributor to the Quarterly. The change of public opinion, illustrated by the conversion of the Quarterly, gave greater bitterness to the attacks of the enemies that remained unconverted. But it gave them no new arguments.
In Godwin’s Enquiry concerning Population (when we neglect mere epigrams such as “a man is surer that he has ancestors than that he will have posterity”) there are substantially four arguments:—Malthus has changed his position; the world is not peopled; the ratios are not as he represents; and experience is against him. We have already discussed the first. The use of the second implies a misunderstanding of the Malthusian position, for it ignores distinction between actual and possible supplies of food, and does not allow that a man is “confined” by four walls unless he touches them.[[835]] Godwin does not mend the argument by comparing it to the objection brought against Christianity—“the world is not yet Christianized”; still less by appealing to Christianity itself, and taunting Malthus with the texts, “Increase and multiply,” “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them,” “made a little lower than the angels,” “forty sons and thirty grandsons, which rode on threescore and ten ass colts,” “In the last days some shall depart from the faith, forbidding to marry.”[[836]] Malthus had been attacked in 1807 by a Puritan or Covenanting pamphlet entitled, ‘A summons of Wakening, or the evil tendency and danger of Speculative Philosophy, exemplified in Mr. [Sir John] Leslie’s Enquiry into the Nature of Heat, and Mr. Malthus’ Essay on Population, and in that speculative system of common law which is at present administered in these kingdoms.’[[837]] The body of this book had been even more remarkable than its title, for it had proved Malthus guilty not merely of heterodoxy, but of atheism. “It is evident to any one who attentively reads the Essay on Population that its author does not believe in the existence of God, but substitutes for Him sometimes the principle of Population, sometimes that of Necessity.” Sadler many years later declared in the same spirit that “the insults the theory of Malthus levels at God, and the injuries it meditates inflicting upon man, will be endured by neither.”[[838]]
Once for all, let Parson Malthus explain his consistency with the religious text-book of his Church. Prior to the injunction given to men to increase and multiply, come, says Malthus, all the moral and physical laws without which they cannot increase or multiply. Suppose the command had been to increase and multiply not men but vegetables; this could not mean, “Sow the seed broadcast, in the air, over the sea, on stony ground,” but, “Take all the means made necessary, by pre-existing laws, to secure the best growth of vegetables.” That man would best obey the command, who should prepare the soil, and provide for the watering and tilling of it, where those things were wanting before. So he will best obey the command to increase and multiply Men, who prepares food for men where there was none before, and not he who brings them recklessly into the world without any such provision. “I believe it is the intention of the Creator that the earth should be replenished, but certainly with a healthy, virtuous, and happy population, not an unhealthy, vicious, and miserable one. And, if, in endeavouring to obey the command to increase and multiply, we people it only with beings of the latter description and suffer accordingly, we have no right to impeach the justice of the command, but our irrational mode of executing it.”[[839]] He might have added, that to give any other interpretation of the passage in Genesis is to forget the circumstances in which the words were spoken. The Deluge had just swept away all the earth’s inhabitants except one family, expressly on the score of wickedness; and, if a wicked replenishing were not desirable, an unhappy or a poor one would be at the best only one degree less so. Regarding the question then purely from the outside, we cannot find anything in the writings of Parson Malthus inconsistent with his ecclesiastical orthodoxy; and we can hardly believe that free-thinking Godwin was very serious in the objection.
Malthus himself replies to it as a charge commonly brought against him by others, with no reference to Godwin in particular. For the most part he ignores Godwin’s book on Population, as mere rhetoric and scurrility.[[840]] Godwin, however, had given more than two years of hard labour to the writing of it;[[841]] and his biographer regards it as the last work of his best days. He employed his son William and his friend Henry Blanch Rosser to help him, in addition to Booth. His whole mind was occupied with Booth’s calculations and his own deductions from them. He himself “could not pursue a calculation for an hour without being sick to the lowest ebb.”[[842]] If Booth lagged behind him he was miserable. He rose in early morning to note down an idea and was ill for the rest of the day after it. He is satisfied, however, with the result of his labours. He thinks his chapter on the Geometrical Ratio will delight his friends and astonish his foes. In any case his comfort is that “truth” will prevail, and, whether through him or another, “the system of Malthus can never rise again, and the world is delivered from this accursed apology in favour of vice and misery and hard-heartedness and oppression,”[[843]] and the world will see that there is “no need of any remedies,” for the numbers of mankind never did and never can increase in the ways described by Malthus.[[844]] A few of his younger friends[[845]] believed him successful; and the book was mentioned in the House of Commons as a conclusive refutation of Malthus, especially in regard to the ratios.[[846]] But the fact remains not only that poor Godwin made no bread and butter by it,[[847]] but that he converted no one whose opinion in such a matter was of any weight. Mackintosh, though at peace again with his old friend, when he writes to him in September 1821,[[848]] cannot praise his work; even thinks its tone intolerant; and will only say that he sees nothing in the Malthusian doctrines inconsistent with perfectibility. He takes pains at the same time to disclaim the authorship of the notice in the Edinburgh Review for July 1821, which was lacking in the courtesy due to Godwin, though it did not reproduce the scurrility of the earliest review of him.[[849]] The inconclusiveness of the book, even in the view of Malthus’ opponents, appears from the stream of new refutations, which made no pause.
Even the question of the ratios was not settled. Godwin had counted his discussion of them the most important part of his book. It gives us his third substantial argument against Malthus. Godwin takes up,[[850]] what seems to have been a common charge, that the essayist had written a quarto volume to prove that population increases in a geometrical and food in an arithmetical ratio. The essayist had answered, as long ago as 1806,[[851]] that the first proposition was proved as soon as the facts about America were authenticated, and the second was self-evident; his book was meant less to prove the ratios than to trace their effects. His authorities, as he told Godwin afterwards,[[852]] were Dr. Price, Styles, Benjamin Franklin, Euler, and Sir William Petty, supplemented, for figures, by Short and Süssmilch and the censuses of the United States and England, and, for principles, by Adam Smith and Hume. We have already seen[[853]] how far the simile of geometrical and arithmetical ratios was meant to be pressed. Godwin thinks he exposes it by arguing that the increase of population can never be quite exactly geometrical[[854]] (which Malthus would admit),—that America was an exception[[855]] (in face of the maxim that the exception tests the rule),—that, in order to suppose population doubling itself in the United States, we must suppose it, as regards births, doing the same in the Old World (in other words, fact is the same as tendency),—that the normal increase is not that of America but that of Sweden,[[856]] in which case (Malthus would answer) the normal increase must be one that takes place in face of very severe restrictions. To the charge of damaging the borrowed kettle the old Irishwoman had three answers:—It was cracked when I got it; it was whole when I returned it; I never had it. So Godwin’s views of the American colonies vacillated between three inconsistent propositions: the great increase of the numbers is natural (or spontaneous), but that of the food is greater still;[[857]] the great increase is not natural, but due to immigration;[[858]] there has been no great increase at all.[[859]] The reader has three alternative arguments presented to him, and it matters little whereby he is convinced, if only in the end he is persuaded to believe with Godwin, that population requires no checks at all,[[860]] and is a fitful principle.[[861]] In history, says Godwin, it seems to operate by fits and starts; and such irregular effects cannot have a uniform cause. It might be replied that in the same sense gravitation is fitful, for we seem to break it by walking upstairs as well as down, by using a siphon as well as a water-jug, or by drying up a drop of ink with blotting-paper instead of letting it sink down into the paper. Yet in these cases the fitfulness is never imputed to the absence of a cause, but to the presence of more causes than one. To believe, as Godwin seems to do, in occult laws which vary with the circumstances is to believe in no laws at all. The only constancy would be the constant probability of miracles.[[862]] Freethinkers had not as yet identified themselves with the party of order in physics; and perhaps Godwin was simply carrying out his dislike of law one step farther. Having applied it to politics (1793) and to style (1797), he now applied it to nature (1820). He deliberately placed a whole army of facts out of the range of science. It was fortunate for himself that he appeared no more in the character of an economist, but left Booth the task of replying to the Edinburgh reviewer.[[863]]
If economical criticism was weak with Godwin, the political philosopher, it was still weaker with Coleridge, the philosophizing poet. The main criticisms of Coleridge[[864]] are contained in manuscript marginal comments with pen and pencil written on his copy of the second (quarto) edition of the Essay (1803), now in the British Museum. When Malthus writes (in Preface, p. vi) that if he had confined himself to general views, his main principle was so incontrovertible that he could have entrenched himself in an impregnable fortress, Coleridge breaks in: “If by the main principle the author means both the Fact[[865]] (i. e. that population unrestrained should infinitely outrun food) and the deduction from the fact, i. e. that the human race is therefore not indefinitely improvable, a pop-gun would batter down the impregnable Fortress. If only the Fact be meant, the assertion is quite nugatory, in the former case vapouring, in the latter a vapour.” (And on p. vii:) “Are we now to have a quarto to teach us that great misery and great vice arise from poverty, and that there must be poverty in its worst shape wherever there are more mouths than loaves and more Heads than Brains?”