III. Others find fault with the details of the doctrine, either (a) in regard to the ratios of increase, asserting that no tendency to a geometrical increase of population has been proved, but something much less rapid, even (a few say) a decreasing ratio,[[927]]—and that no mere arithmetical increase of food has been proved, but something much more rapid,[[928]]—or (b) in regard to the checks on population, asserting that no checks are necessary,[[929]]—that vice and misery sometimes add to population instead of checking it,[[930]]—that to include moral restraint is to stultify the original doctrine,[[931]]—that moral restraint sometimes involves as great evil as excessive numbers, both from the personal practice of it and from the preaching of it to others,[[932]]—that important checks have been omitted, the chief being misgovernment,[[933]] bad laws,[[934]] high feeding,[[935]] intellectual development,[[936]] and those of Owen.[[937]]
There is, besides, an a priori criticism, which is either (I.) ecclesiastical,[[938]] alleging that Malthus contradicts the Bible or some other authority,—(II.) theological,[[939]] that he denies Providence,—or (III.) doctrinaire,[[940]] that he denies natural rights and the pre-established harmony of moral and economical laws, and the instinct of equality,—or (IV.) ethical and popular,[[941]] that he runs counter to the moral sense and the natural benevolence of men and cosmopolitan morality. These arguments have been already considered. The fourth of them has, in its last branch, an appearance of truth, because Malthus has certainly pled less for the cosmopolitan than for the domestic and civic virtues. He wishes to lay the foundations solidly and leave the building to others. Cosmopolitan morality can rarely be the foundation. In the Empire, Christianity may have raised the people, and Stoicism the philosophers, to the wider morality without the training of the narrower, so that the converts were made better members of their own small communities by becoming members of the commonwealth of the saints and citizens of the great world. But it seems to Malthus that, in the world of to-day, the many conditions of a steady moral progress are best secured if the domestic and civic virtues precede the cosmopolitan. We must not legislate for a world of heroes, but for men as we know them to be; and a comfortable domestic life (βίος τέλειος) must be the common highway to goodness in a society of ordinary men. If poverty were no evil, churlishness would be no vice. But extreme poverty[[942]] is a real hindrance to goodness. In the apparent exceptions, as in the voluntary poverty of St. Francis, the greatest evil is absent, for there is no struggle for bare life. To abolish that struggle, and help men to comfort, is in some degree to help men to goodness; and it was the end for which Malthus laboured. The most sure and solid way of reaching it lay, as he thought, in impressing every man with a strong sense of his responsibility for his acts and of his power over his own destiny. To reform a nation, we must reform the members of it, who, if they are good at first in spite of their institutions, will at last conform their institutions to the model of their own goodness. To hold men the creatures of society, and make society responsible for their character, was, he thought, to mistake the order of nature. Society can feel its responsibility only in its individual members; and no member of it can free his own soul by the purity of a collective or representative conscience.
The doctrine of Malthus is, therefore, a strong appeal to personal responsibility. He would make men strong in will, to subdue their animal wants to their notion of personal good and personal goodness, which, he believed, could never fail to develope into the common good and goodness of all. Believers in the omnipotence of outward circumstances and the powerlessness of the human will, to alter them or the human character, may put Malthus beyond the pale of sympathy. But all can enter into the mind of Malthus and understand his work, who know the hardness of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit, and yet believe in the power of ideas to change the lives of men, and have faith not only in the rigour of natural laws, but in man’s power to conquer nature by obeying her.
BOOK V.
BIOGRAPHY.
Parentage—Early Education—Graves and Wakefield—Course at Cambridge—Correspondence with his Father—Change in Studies—The Crisis and the Curacy—Effect of the Essay on its Author—Early and Late Styles—Life from 1799 to 1834—Ingrata Patria?—East India College—Professor’s Lectures—Hic Jacet.
The few facts that are known of the life of Malthus bring us nearer to him than we can come in his writings, and show us how well, on the whole, his antecedents and surroundings fitted him for his work. Our chief authorities are Bishop Otter’s biographical preface to the second edition of our author’s Political Economy, which was posthumously published in 1836, and Professor Empson’s notice of the book in the Edinburgh Review for January 1837.[[943]] Otter was the college companion and life-long friend of Malthus; Empson was his colleague at Haileybury. The information they give us, though meagre, is trustworthy; and happily it can be supplemented by hints from other quarters.
His father, Daniel Malthus, was born in 1730, and went to Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1747,[[944]] the year when Adam Smith went home from Balliol to Scotland. He left without a degree, not because of the Articles, for he subscribed them at matriculation,[[945]] or from Dr. Johnson’s reason of poverty, for he was a gentleman commoner, but probably from a contempt for the distinction itself.[[946]] His mind was active and open, and he seems to have formed literary friendships that stood his son in good stead afterwards. He liked to stay up in Oxford in vacation, working hard at his own studies in his own ways, and seeing none but chosen friends. He wrote to his son in later years, “I used to think Oxford none the less pleasant and certainly not the less useful for being disburdened of some of its society; I imagine you will say the same of Cambridge.”[[947]] On leaving the university he married and went to live in Surrey at a quiet country house on the way from Dorking to Guildford, still known by its old name of the Rookery. Of his eldest son, who took his grandfather’s name of Sydenham,[[948]] we know little except that in due time he married, and had two sons, Sydenham and Charles, and a daughter Mary. Mary died single in 1881 in her eighty-second year, Charles in 1821 in his fifteenth, their father in 1821 in his sixty-eighth. Sydenham, our author’s nephew, who died in 1869, was proprietor of Dalton Hill, Albury, where members of his family were, till recently, still living; his son, Lieut.-Col. Sydenham Malthus, C.B., of the 94th Regiment, served with distinction in the Zulu war a few years ago.
Daniel’s second son, Thomas Robert, familiarly known as Robert, was born at the Rookery on 14th February, 1766, the year when Rousseau came to England. His mother seems to have died before her husband; she is not mentioned in our meagre biographies.[[949]] His father, full of the teaching of the Émile, and by no means prejudiced by his Oxford experience in favour of the ordinary conventional training of the English youth, seems to have sent his sons to no public school of any kind, and in all probability brought them up at home under his own eye for the first eight or nine years of their life. We may think of Robert, therefore, as passing his childhood without privation, if without luxury, in the home of an English country gentleman of moderate fortune, who was devoted to books and botany, fireside and hillside philosophizing,[[950]] and the improvement of his house and grounds,—a man full of life and originality, gifted with vigorous health, and joining in his boys’ walks and games.[[951]] In his quiet little valley it was easy for Daniel Malthus to picture to himself a Millennial Hall of the future in store for every one else, on the type of his own Rookery, with no worse interruption than the rooks that cawed there nightly on the hill above him. From his son’s description[[952]] and his own letters, we gather that he was one of the best sort of the Enlightened followers of Nature. He knew Rousseau personally, and became his executor;[[953]] but they were liker in views than in character; Daniel Malthus had a deeper vein of reverence and a stronger inclination to put theory into practice.[[954]] The neighbours thought him an amiable and clever man who was an ornament to his parish, but decidedly eccentric, for he made few friends and was fondest of his own and his children’s company.[[955]] He was versed beyond his compeers in French and German literature, or he would hardly have been credited with having translated Paul et Virginie, D’Ermenonville’s Essay on Landscape, and the Sorrows of Werther. We have Robert’s authority for saying that, although he wrote no translations, he wrote many pieces that were very successful, but always anonymous.[[956]] With much of his son’s talent, he had no power, like his son’s, of sustained intellectual effort.
He saw the boy’s promise early, and gave him an education which is condemned by Robert’s chief biographer as irregular and desultory, but had a method in it. He believed that sons are always what their fathers were at their age, with the same kind of faults and virtues; and the men whose influence would have been best for himself would, he thought, be the best teachers for Robert. At the same time he believed with the “Émile” that a sort of laissez faire was the best policy in the education of children; they should be left to grow, and use their own eyes and hands and heads for themselves. At the age of nine or ten, say in the year 1776, Robert was accordingly delivered over to Mr. Richard Graves, Rector of Claverton, near Bath, to be taught little but Latin and good behaviour, along with a few other boys, most of them older than himself. Graves, who was Daniel’s senior by some years, had been intimate with the poet Shenstone at Pembroke College, Oxford, “a society which for half a century” (on Johnson’s partial testimony) “was eminent for English poetry and elegant literature.” From his novel, The Spiritual Quixote, or the Summer’s Ramble of Mr. Geoffry Wildgoose,[[957]] we should not fancy him the best guide for ingenuous youth. The book is a coarse and offensive satire on Whitfield and Wesley;[[958]] and shows Graves as a clergyman to be liker Laurence Sterne than Dr. Primrose. “Don Roberto,” however, as the tutor nicknamed his pupil, was fonder of fun and fighting than of his books, and at the ripe age of ten is not likely to have been troubled about the universe or about clerical consistency. From Graves he passed[[959]] into the hands of a much better man, Gilbert Wakefield, a clergyman who had rebelled against the Articles, turned dissenter, and become classical master of an academy at Warrington, founded in 1779 “to provide a course of liberal education for the sons of dissenters, and particularly for dissenting ministers.”[[960]] About one-third of the boys at the Warrington Academy were sons of members of the Church of England, who were, like Daniel Malthus, liberal in their opinions, and wished their sons to be likewise. Wakefield held decided views on education; and they were in close accordance with Daniel and the Émile. “The greatest service of tuition,” he said, “to any youth, is to teach him the exercise of his own powers, to conduct him to the hill of knowledge by that gradual process in which he sees and secures his own way, and rejoices in a consciousness of his own faculties and his own proficiency. Puppies and sciolists alone can be expected to be formed by any other process.”[[961]] The tutor’s best service is to point the pupil to the best authors and give him advice (not lectures) when he wants it. There was self-denial as well as wisdom in Wakefield’s view, for in one case at least the pupil showed his proficiency by departing from the opinions of his tutor.
Wakefield, himself a Fellow of Jesus,[[962]] procured Malthus an entrance to that college, and directed his studies till he matriculated there as a pensioner (or ordinary commoner) on 17th December, 1784, beginning residence in 1785.[[963]] Robert esteemed him highly. He described him twenty years afterwards[[964]] as a man “of the strictest and most inflexible integrity,” who gave up not only prospects of preferment, but even opportunities of usefulness, rather than deny the truth and offend his conscience,—a man hot and intemperate in public controversy,[[965]] but modest and genial in society, never advancing his opinions till challenged, nor trying to make converts to them, but urging others to an independent study of the facts,—finally, a genius cramped by its own learning and good memory, never taking time and pains to do itself justice in its writings. Though a foe to the thirty-nine Articles, Wakefield was a stout believer in Christianity, and attacked Paine’s Age of Reason in a rough style that contrasts strongly with the sober remarks of Malthus on Paine’s Rights of Man.