This may be taken as simply the argument of Hazlitt, who “did not see what there was to be proved;”—the principle of Malthus is a truism. Even when commenting on the statement of the Ratios (on p. 8), after some denunciation of the “verbiage and senseless repetition” of the essay, Coleridge goes on to agree with it. He would restate the whole so as to substitute “a proportion which no one in his senses would consider as other than axiomatic, viz.: Suppose that the human race amount to a thousand millions. Divide the square acres of food-producing surface by 500,000,000, that is to say, so much to each married couple. Estimate this quotum as high as you like, and, if you will, even at a thousand or even at ten thousand acres to each family. Suppose population without check, and take the average increase from two families at five (which is irrationally small, supposing the human race healthy, and each man married at twenty-one to a woman of eighteen), and in twelve generations the increase would be 48,828,125. Now as to any conceivable increase in the production or improvement in the productiveness of the thousand or ten thousand acres, it is ridiculous even to think of production at all, inasmuch as it is demonstrable that either already in this twelfth generation, or certainly in a few generations more (I leave the exact statement to schoolboys, not having Cocker’s Arithmetic by me, and having forgotten the number of square feet in an acre), the quotum of land would not furnish standing room to the descendants of the first agrarian proprietors. Best do the sum at once. Find out the number of square acres on the globe (of land), and divide the number by 500,000. I have myself been uselessly prolix, and in grappling with the man have caught his itch of verbiage.” He goes on to say that if every man were to marry and have a family, and each of his children were to do the same, their posterity would soon want standing room, and, if all checks were removed, this would of course happen much faster. “Any schoolboy who has learned arithmetic as far as compound interest may astonish his younger sister both by the fact and by the exact number of years in which it would take place. On the other hand, let the productiveness of the earth be increased beyond the hopes of the most visionary agriculturist, still the productions take up room. If the present crop of turnips occupy one-fifth of the space of the turnip field, the increase can never be more than quintupled, and, if you suppose two planted for one, the increase still cannot exceed ten; so that, supposing a little island of a single acre, and its productions occupying one-fifth of its absolute space, and sufficient to maintain two men and two women, four generations would outrun its possible power of furnishing them with food; and we may boldly affirm that a truth so self-evident as this was never overlooked or even by implication contradicted. What proof has Mr. Malthus brought? What proof can he bring that any writer or theorist has overlooked this fact, which would not apply (with reverence be it spoken) to the Almighty Himself when He pronounced the awful command, ‘Increase and multiply’?”
From some of the phrases dropped in the course of these comments, we should infer they were the preparation for a formal review of the book by Coleridge himself. It is therefore extremely puzzling to find the whole comments printed almost word for word and letter for letter in a review[[866]] hitherto considered by every one (Southey included) to be Southey’s. This applies to the subsequent MS. notes, which are happily briefer. Coleridge finds fault with Malthus (p. 11) for using the words virtue and vice without defining them, apparently overlooking the footnote under his very eyes (p. 11 n.) which says, “The general consequence of vice is misery, and this consequence is the precise reason why an action is termed vicious.”[[867]] Coleridge says, in relation to the list of irregularities given in the last paragraph but one of the page (11): “That these and all these are vices in the present state of society, who doubt? So was Celibacy in the patriarchal ages. Vice and Virtue subsist in the agreement of the habits of a man with his reason and conscience, and these can have but one moral guide, Utility, or the Virtue[[868]] and Happiness of Rational beings. We mention this not under the miserable notion that any state of society will render those actions capable of being performed with conscience and virtue, but to expose the utter unguardedness of this speculation.” Then after some remarks on New Malthusians (as they would be now called) he goes on: “All that follows to the three hundred and fifty-fifth page[[869]] may be an entertaining farrago of quotations from books of travels, &c., but surely very impertinent in a philosophical work. Bless me, three hundred and forty pages—for what purpose! A philosophical work can have no legitimate purpose but proof and illustration, and three hundred and fifty pages to prove an axiom! to illustrate a self-evident truth! It is neither more nor less than bookmaking!” He thinks, however, that what Malthus wrote of Condorcet applies to himself;—though his paradox is very absurd, it must be refuted, or he will think the toleration of his contemporaries due to their mental inferiority and his own sublimity of intellect.[[870]] The remaining marginal notes are chiefly of an interjectional character,[[871]] many of them not very refined. Malthus himself never falls into coarseness; but his opponents seldom avoid it, and Coleridge (or Southey) is no exception to the rule.[[872]] Except for the interest attaching even to the foolish words of a great man, it would not have been worth while to revive his obiter scripta on a matter beyond his ken.
A few words are necessary in regard to Grahame and Weyland, who form the chief subject of the long second appendix of later editions of the essay. Grahame’s charges were such as owed all their force to the general ignorance of the actual writings of Malthus himself.[[873]] Mr. Malthus regards famine as nature’s benevolent remedy for want of food; Mr. Malthus believes that nature teaches men to invent (p. 100) diseases in order to prevent over-population; Mr. Malthus, regarding vice and misery generally as benevolent remedies for over-population, thinks that they are rather to be encouraged than otherwise (p. 100). Malthus, for his part, deploring the fact that this last charge has been current “in various quarters for fourteen years” (or since his quarto essay of 1803), thinks he may well pass it by. “Vice and Misery, and these alone, are the evils which it has been my great object to contend against. I have expressly proposed moral restraint as their rational and proper remedy,” a sufficient proof that he regarded them as the disease.[[874]] Grahame himself does not deny the tendency to increase beyond food (p. 102), but thinks emigration a sufficient remedy (p. 104).
Empson,[[875]] playfully classifying the opponents of Malthus, says there are some who will not comprehend “out of sheer stupidity, like Mr. Grahame,” or out of sentimental horror, like Southey,[[876]] Coleridge, and Bishop Huntingford;[[877]] or because, like Sadler[[878]] and Godwin, who followed Price and Muret,[[879]] they imagine the law of population to vary with the circumstances; or else because they invent laws of their own, like Anderson, Owen, and Poulett Scrope;[[880]] or because, like Weyland,[[881]] they deny the premises of Malthus as well as the conclusion. Weyland, like Grahame, has the honour of a special refutation from Malthus. He allows that Malthus in his essay has raised his subject from the level of desultory academical discussion to that of scientific inquiry, and his book is the point from which every later investigation must start. He allows that his order is lucid and his reasoning fair, and that he enables an opponent at once to discuss the question on its merits. Granting his premises, says Weyland, we cannot deny his conclusion; but that premise of his is false which assumes that the highest known rate of increase in a particular state of society is the natural or spontaneous rate in all;[[882]] we cannot take the height of Chang or of the Hale Child as the natural standard of the height of all. To this Malthus answers, that, if we had observed in any country that all the people who were short carried weights upon their heads, and the people who were tall did not, we should infer that the weights had something to do with the height,—and so, when we find that the increase of a people is fast or slow in proportion as the pressure of certain checks on increase is heavy or light, we cannot but believe that the rate would be at its fastest if there were no checks at all. To say with Weyland, in the terms of his first cardinal proposition,[[883]] that “population has a natural tendency to keep within the powers of the soil to afford it subsistence in every gradation through which society passes,” is to say “that every man has a natural tendency to remain in prison who is necessarily confined to it by four strong walls.” One might as well infer that the pine of the crowded Norwegian forest has no tendency to have lateral branches, because as a matter of fact there is no room for it to have any.[[884]]
Weyland thinks that, without any moral restraint, population will keep within limits of the food, in proportion as it reaches a high state of morality, religion, and political liberty.[[885]] Malthus, on the contrary, would say that, without moral restraint, even morality, religion, and political liberty will not save a people from wretchedness;[[886]] and, for his part, the design always uppermost in his mind when writing has been “to improve the condition and increase the happiness of the lower classes of society.”[[887]]
One argument of Weyland’s[[888]] has some weight in it. With a rich soil, high farming, and abundant food, the bulk of the people of a country might by the natural division of labour be employed in manufacture, and their unhealthy manner of life in towns might so check population that it might be far from keeping up to the level of the food. Malthus replies that this case is rare, for our town populations have increased rapidly,—but, such as it is, he has allowed for it in the second clause of his second proposition: “Population invariably increases where the means of subsistence increase, unless prevented by some very powerful and obvious checks.”[[889]]
There are two other critics to whom Malthus replies in some detail, one the visionary Owen, who is embraced in Empson’s classification, the other the practical man Arthur Young, who cannot so easily be classified. “I mean,” says the latter, “to deal in facts alone, happy when I can discover them pure and unalloyed with prejudice.”[[890]] As this was his practice as well as his profession, it may easily be believed that in his voluminous records of fifty years’ travelling and experimenting[[891]] he has spun rope enough to hang himself. It ought to be added that, like Godwin, he claims the privilege of being inconsistent. Nothing could be more clear than his recognition in his Travels in France of the evils of over-population.[[892]] Yet in 1800, in his Question of Scarcity plainly stated and Remedies considered, he recommends as his remedy that each country labourer who has three children be provided with a cow and half an acre of potato ground.[[893]] In other words, he would reduce the English standard of living to the common Irish one, milk and potatoes. Malthus replies by giving reasons why people should “live dear,” and by reminding Arthur Young of his own comments on the proceedings of the National Assembly. Recognizing their duty to grant relief, but wishing to avoid an English Poor Law, the National Assembly set aside fifty millions of francs a year for support of the poor. If it had been really a duty, wrote Arthur Young (in his Travels), necessity might have occasioned them to extend the relief to one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred millions, and so on, “in the same miserable progression that has taken place in England.”[[894]] Malthus hardly needed to go back to the Travels, as Young himself confessed in his later writings that his plan did not apply to large cities, and though he still held by the claim of right, he confessed that his faith must be without works; in other words, he claimed the right to be inconsistent. But he continued to question Malthus’ axiom that what cannot be ought not to be; and he thinks that, if a man marries without the means to keep a family, he may justly blame society for not providing him with the means. He argues, too, that Malthus for the success of his scheme assumes perfect chastity in the unmarried. Malthus really assumed only that the evils, which on an average in a civilized country attend the prudential check, are less than the evils of premature mortality and other miseries entailed by the opposite course; he declares himself not against but in favour of schemes that improve the condition of the poor even on a limited scale; and he only asks that every such scheme be tested not by its first success, for hardly any scheme of the kind is unsuccessful at first, but by its effect on a new generation.[[895]]
This test might be applied to schemes like Owen’s and later ones on the same model. Malthus perhaps deals too peremptorily with them. Speaking of Owen’s system of the community of labour and goods, and of Spence’s Plan for Parochial Partnerships in the Land[[896]] (“the only remedy for the distresses and oppressions of the people,” the land to be “the people’s farm”), he answers that there are two “decisive arguments against systems of equality”: first, the inability of a state of equality to furnish adequate motives for exertion, the goad of necessity being absent,—and, second, the tendency of population to increase faster than subsistence. In reply it must be said that there might be socialism without communism; there might even be communism without an absolute equality, such as would put idle and industrious on the same footing; there might be an approximation of the social extremes, bringing poor and rich nearer, and giving the former not weaker but stronger motives to exertion; finally, it is not at all inconceivable that at least one-half of this result might come, as Godwin wished, by the act of the rich themselves, which means also as Malthus wished, for it would come from a strong sense of personal obligation. It cannot be denied that Malthus, in using the argument in question, seems to forget his own admission, that the goad of necessity does not act with effect either on the lowest or on the highest classes.[[897]] Moreover, he allows, there have been cases, e. g. among the Moravian communities, where industry and community of goods have existed side by side. “It may be said that, allowing the stimulus of inequality of conditions to have been necessary in order to raise man from the indolence and apathy of the savage to the activity and intelligence of civilized life, it does not follow that the continuance of the same stimulus should be necessary when this activity and energy of mind has been once gained.”[[898]]
The second of his arguments against Owen is of course his more cogent and characteristic one. As we have seen, it is not deprived of its point by the inclusion of moral restraint among the checks to population. It was argued against him that his own ideal of a society where moral restraint universally prevailed would involve precisely what is necessary to make such systems as Godwin’s and Owen’s permanently possible.[[899]] There is an air of conclusiveness in the remark that, in proportion as moral restraint prevails in the world, Malthus approximates to Godwin. But Malthus believes that equality and community would destroy the motive for moral restraint. The passions would still be present, and no man would be in a position where there seemed any need to restrain them; the restraint would be the interest of the whole society, but not of the individual himself, for the effects were to be borne not by himself, but by the whole society. No doubt the good of the whole society ought to be a sufficient reason; but it would be so in a very few men now; and, unless it were in all men then, the result would be an expansion of population, with the results Malthus described. Owen is aware of this, and suggests artificial checks, allowing men to gratify desire without the usual consequences, and dispensing with any effort of will. Malthus, on the other hand, would throw all the responsibility and burden on the individual, which he thinks it impossible to do without allowing the individual his private property.[[900]] No further justification of things as they are is to be found in Malthus; and, so far from being reactionary, his principles (with all their qualifications) were probably the most advanced individualism that was ever preached in these days. They are adopted in full view of the facts that have been again vividly brought before the public mind in our day by writers who are to our generation what Godwin, Spence, and Owen were to theirs.
Malthus seems to believe, with Dugald Stewart, that Utopian schemes are like the tunes of a barrel-organ, recurring at melancholy intervals from age to age with damnable iteration.[[901]] But, unless society itself has moved in a circle, the Utopias will resemble each other no more and no less than do the states of society which they would replace. Our own socialists, therefore, can hardly be dismissed by the stroke of the pen, that classifies them with people so curiously unlike them and each other as Plato, Ball, More, the Fifth Monarchy men, the Levellers, Godwin and Spence and Owen. Malthus does not, in fact, so dismiss them. Besides bringing forward his own argument, he examines Owen’s attempt to deal with it.[[902]]