Since Malthus, every complete reform has needed to face in some way or other the question which he treated; but he left little for others to do. Of the two most prominent schemes of our own day for the reconstruction of society, one, that of Mr. Henry George, involves an unconscious recourse to the old weapons of Godwin, Sadler, and other opponents of Malthus; Progress and Poverty does not contain any argument not to be found in these writers. The conjecture about a “fixed quantity of human life on the earth” (ed. 1881, p. 97) is hardly an argument. It may be compared with what is stated by St. G. Mivart[[903]] to be the basis of Darwinism. “Every individual has to endure a very severe struggle for existence owing to the tendency to geometrical increase of all kinds of animals and plants, while the total animal and vegetable population (man and his agency excepted) remains almost stationary.” Mr. Mivart’s reason for excepting man seems to be Mr. George’s reason for including him. The latter’s more direct arguments against Malthus are as follows:—first, the difficulty is in the future (p. 85);—second, Malthus shifts the responsibility from man to the Creator (p. 87);—third, Malthus justifies the status quo and parries the demand for reform (p. 88);—fourth, Malthus ascribes excessive increase of numbers to a general tendency of human nature, while it is really due to the badness of our institutions in old countries, as in India and Ireland (pp. 101–114), or the very thinness of population in new (p. 92);—fifth, Malthus does not distinguish between tendency to increase and actual increase, and is therefore refuted by the fact that the world is not yet peopled (p. 94). In the sixth place, we are told, if there had been such a law as the Malthusian, it would have been sooner and more widely recognized (p. 98);—that families often become extinct (p. 99), and it is more certain that we have ancestors than that we shall have descendants;[[904]]—that better industry would keep a larger population (p. 107);—Malthus says that vice and misery are necessary (p. 109);—Malthus does not see that vegetables and animals increase faster than population (p. 115),—or that the increase of man involves the increase of his food (p. 116), for a division of labour makes man produce more than he consumes (p. 126), and so the most populous countries are always the most wealthy (p. 128);—Malthus forgets that the world is wide (p. 119),—and that the tendency to increase is checked by development of intellect,[[905]]—and by the elevation of the standard of comfort (pp. 121, 123);—he forgets that “the power of population to produce the necessaries of life is not to be measured by the necessaries of life” it actually produces, but by its powers to produce wealth in all forms (p. 127);—Malthus will not see that twenty men where nature is niggardly (e. g. on a bare rock?) will produce more than twenty times what one man will where nature is bountiful (p. 134);—and the Malthusian theory “attributes want to the decrease of productive power” (p. 134);—finally Malthus does not know “the real law of population,” which is that “the tendency to increase, instead of being always uniform, is strong where a greater population would give increased comfort, and where the perpetuity of the race is threatened by the mortality induced by adverse conditions, but weakens just as the higher development of the individual becomes possible, and the perpetuity of the race is assured” (p. 123). What is right in this view of the real law of population is common to Mr. George with Mr. Herbert Spencer;[[906]] what is wrong is common to him with Godwin.[[907]]
The view of Karl Marx,[[908]] the prophet of the International and of modern economic Socialism, is built on much more solid foundations. It is a corollary of his view of capital. The general law of the accumulation of capital, in these days of large manufactories and machinery, involves not only a progressive addition to the quantity of capital, which is all that Adam Smith contemplated, but a qualitative change in the proportion between fixed capital, such as machinery, and the circulating which is paid in wages. To use the author’s words, the progress of accumulation brings with it a relative decrease of the variable component of capital and a relative increase of its constant component. New machinery is constantly supplanting labour without any real compensation in increased demand, either at once or in the long run. The constant element increases at the cost of the variable; and this can only result in the progressive production of a population which, in relation to capital, is a surplus or superfluity, an over-population;—the cause which increases the net revenue of the country at the same time renders the population redundant and deteriorates the condition of the labourer.[[909]] So far from deploring the existence of this redundant class, the capitalists depend on it,[[910]] as the reserve of their army. They trust to its cheap labour to save them from the depression which in our days (though never before) appears with unfailing regularity after brisk trade and a crisis. If the hands were not always there for them to employ, they would not at once be able to seize the happy moment of a reviving demand for their goods. “Malthus with his narrow views understands the surplus population to be superfluous absolutely in itself, and not merely in relation to capital; but even he recognizes that over-population is a necessity of modern industry.”[[911]] In proof of these statements he quotes the words of Malthus (Pol. Econ., ed. 1836, pp. 215,[[912]] 319, 320):—“Prudential habits with regard to marriage carried to a considerable extent among the labouring classes, of a country mainly depending upon manufactures and commerce, might injure it.”... “From the nature of a population, an increase of labourers cannot be brought into [the] market, in consequence of a particular demand, till after the lapse of sixteen or eighteen years; and the conversion of revenue into capital, by saving, may take place much more rapidly; a country is always liable to an increase in the quantity of the funds for the maintenance of labour faster than the increase of population.”
To these charges the answer is, first, that Malthus always recognized that over-population was relative, relative to the actual food;[[913]] second, that he did not recognize the over-population as necessary; it took place as a matter of fact, but he believed that, if working men did as he wished them, it would disappear;[[914]]—and in the third place, the first sentence quoted by Marx, from the Political Economy is explained by the second, which he does not quote: “In a country of fertile land such habits would be the greatest of all conceivable blessings.” Malthus is comparing Commercial with Agricultural countries, not pronouncing on the general question of wages; and other passages in his writings[[915]] show that he regarded the high wages, resulting from prudential habits, as a public gain, more than compensating the capitalists’ loss of profits. Even Marx himself grudgingly allows that Malthus was more humane than Ricardo in regard to the hours of labour desirable for the workmen.[[916]] In the fourth place, the latter half of the quotation (beginning with the words, “From the nature of a population”) first states an obvious fact which a child could have pointed out, and then a disputable proposition which predicts not an over-population but the reverse of it.
Marx is seeking to demonstrate the hopelessness of the labourer’s position; and he is too acute not to know that his demonstration would be seriously weakened if he admitted the truth of the Malthusian doctrine and the bare possibility of the adoption of prudential habits by the labourers. This is the real reason of his bitter attacks on the Essay. He says of it:[[917]] “When I say Eden’s work on the Poor was the only important writing by a disciple of Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, I may be reminded of the essay of Malthus. But this book in its first form (and the later editions did nothing but add and adapt borrowed materials) is nothing but a plagiarism from Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, full of schoolboy superficiality and clerical declamation, and not containing a single original sentence. By the way, although Malthus was a clergyman of the Church of England, he had taken the monastic oath of celibacy[!], for this is one of the conditions of a fellowship at the Protestant University of Cambridge. ‘Socios collegiorum maritos esse non permittimus, sed statim postquam quis uxorem duxerit, socius collegii desinat esse’ (Reports of Cambridge University Commission, p. 172). By this circumstance Malthus is favourably distinguished from the other Protestant clergy, who have cast off the Catholic rule of celibacy....[[918]] With exception of Ortes[[919]] the Venetian monk, an original and clever writer, most of the writers on Population are Protestant clergymen,” a contrast, he goes on, to the days when political economists were all philosophers. Marx adopts[[920]] the common view that Malthus being a clergyman was the bond-slave of Toryism and the ruling classes, and therefore ready to adopt a principle that attributed over-population to the eternal laws of nature rather than to the historical laws (also natural) of the capitalists’ production. Marx does not see that the “eternal laws” in question do not lead to over-population except when the precepts of Malthus are neglected; and never shows how, apart from these precepts, over-population will be prevented in the renovated society itself, which has nationalized not only the land but all the instruments of production. Would the habits of men be so changed by this stroke of nationalization that the want of ordinary commercial motives would not be felt?[[921]] Would not the millennium of the Socialist, like that of the Christian, postulate a religious conversion on the largest scale for its first introduction, to say nothing of its continuance? Productive Co-operation, depending on the spontaneous action of the labourers for its creation, and on their intelligence and prudence for its success, would nationalize capital more surely; and it would not make the impossible postulate of Socialism, that a passionless unselfishness, which not one in a hundred thousand in our day exhibits at any time, shall at once become the invariable daily rule of all without exception. But Co-operation, if it neglects Malthus, will find its work no sooner done than undone.
It may be thought that there are causes at work which will remove over-population among the working classes even under the present system of separated capital and labour. It is a doctrine of the “finer wits,” founded on striking biological analogies, that the general development of intellect in the race will weaken the passion for marriage and supersede the necessity for any checks on it;[[922]]—the exercise of the energies of concentration or “individuation” developes these energies at the expense of those of diffusion or “genesis;”—the individual is made strong in himself, at the expense of his power of creating new individuals. Quite apart from the disagreeable fact that this principle would lessen the pressure most in those classes where lessening is at present least needed, and least where it is most needed, Malthus would probably have pointed out, first, that unless the appetite is absolutely killed, no physiological check can supersede some control of the will over the passion,—and, second, that intellectual development will more certainly check population by making men alive to their responsibilities and strengthening their power of restraint than by weakening the passion to be restrained. The expounder of the theory is of all people the least likely to teach men that they may become civilized by the progress of their race without the trouble of civilizing themselves individually. But his theory admits the misapplication; and, if it be said by the misappliers that we ought to tell the truth without fear of consequences, we must answer that in this case the consequences are part of the truth. On the other hand, to theorists like W. R. Greg, who suggest unknown physiological laws that may act as a spontaneous check, Malthus would have replied as to Condorcet:[[923]]
“What can we reason but from what we know?”
This brief survey of typical critics and commentators may be completed by a classification of the former, which, among other advantages, will give a bird’s-eye view of the chief points in discussion. Empson classified the opponents of Malthus by their motives,[[924]] a proceeding hardly fair either to them or to the essay itself. It is not fair to them, for as a rule the critics appeal to argument, and must be judged by what they adduce, not by their good or ill will, wisdom or folly, in adducing it; and not fair to the essay, because few books have owed so much to their reviewers.
The positions of the critics may be classified as follows:—
I. Some say the doctrine of the essay is a truism.[[925]]
II. Others admit that it is unanswerable, but retain a philosophical faith in the future discovery of some contrary principle.[[926]]