About half of the professors were in holy orders and did duty in the college chapel. If Malthus took his turn with the rest, we need not suppose with his clerical biographer that he magnified the office. His sermons would always be earnest; they might often perhaps be too long. His week-day lectures, unless he made them liker the first essay with its fine writing than the later books with their plain unvarnished arguments, could not have been very fascinating to immature youths, especially as the lecturer had a slight defect in utterance.[[1011]] Eight years of teaching convinced him that Political Economy was not, as he once thought, too hard for boys of sixteen or seventeen;—“they could not only understand it,” he said, “but they did not even think it dull.”[[1012]] We may hope it was so; but in view of the whole case, it is probable that our author’s labours, in the classroom and out of it, were far from light, and that the pleasantness of the life was purchased with a large share of discomfort.
The physical surroundings were all that could be desired. “We are so rural and quiet here, that there can be no greater contrast [to London]. This house is in a cluster of tall shrubs and young trees, with a little bit of smooth lawn sloping to a bright pond, in which old weeping willows are dipping their hair, and rows of young pear trees admiring their blooming faces. Indeed, there never was such a flash of shadowing high-hanging flowers as we have around us; and almost all, as it happens, of that pure, silvery, snowy, bridal tint; and we live, like Campbell’s sweet Gertrude, ‘as if beneath a galaxy of overhanging sweets, with blossoms white.’ There are young horse-chestnuts with flowers half a yard long, fresh, full-clustered white lilacs, tall Guelder roses, broadspreading pear and cherry trees, low thickets of blooming sloe, and crowds of juicy-looking detached thorns, quite covered with their fragrant May-flowers, half open, like ivory filigree, and half shut like Indian pearls, and all so fresh and dewy since the milky showers of yesterday; and resounding with nightingales, and thrushes, and skylarks, shrilling high up, overhead, among the dazzling slow-sailing clouds. Not to be named, I know and feel as much as you can do, with your Trossachs, and Loch Lomonds, and Inverarys; but very sweet, and vernal, and soothing, and fit enough to efface all recollections of hot, swarming, whirling, and bustling London from all good minds.”[[1013]]
Equally pleasant is a glimpse of the daily life at Haileybury, given by Miss Martineau, who saw it in 1833. Malthus considered her one of his best expositors;—“whereas his friends had done him all manner of mischief by defending him injudiciously, my tales had represented his views precisely as he could have wished;”—and he was at the pains to seek her out in London and bring her down to the college.[[1014]] “It was a delightful visit, and the well-planted county of Herts was a welcome change from the pavement of London in August.... My room was a large and airy one, with a bay window and a charming view.”[[1015]] She found desk, books, and everything needed for her work. Her entertainers had guessed from her books that she must be, like Malthus himself,[[1016]] fond of riding; and she found her riding-habit and whip ready. Exploring the green lanes round Amwell, Ware, and Hertford, on horseback, in parties of five or six, seems to have been the chief amusement. “The subdued jests and external homage and occasional insurrections of the young men, the archery of the young ladies, the curious politeness of the Persian professor [Ibrahim], the fine learning and eager scholarship of Principal[[1017]] Le Bas, and the somewhat old-fashioned courtesies of the summer evening parties are all over now, except as pleasant pictures in the interior gallery of those who knew the place, of whom I am thankful to have been one.”
When she again visited Haileybury, Malthus was gone; Professor Jones was in his chair, and Empson in his house, probably one of the most comfortable in a building which, if smaller, was much more picturesque than the present school.[[1018]]
The “occasional insurrections of the young men” were a feature of the college from the beginning. Sydney Smith writes to Lord Holland in June 1810, when there was talk of making Mackintosh professor at Haileybury: “The season for lapidating the professors is now at hand; keep Mackintosh quiet at Holland House till all is over;”[[1019]] and to Whishaw in January 1818, when the appointment had been made: “His situation at Hertford will suit him very well, peltings and contusions always excepted. He should stipulate for ‘pebble money,’ as it is technically termed, or an annual pension in case he is disabled by the pelting of the students. By the bye, might it not be advisable for the professors to learn the use of the sling (balearia habena)? It would give them a great advantage over the students.”[[1020]] The lapidations were probably no worse than similar scenes at our English and Scotch Universities that have not yet destroyed the credit of these institutions. But the opponents of the college complained of much more than the insubordination of the students. Lord Grenville had made an attack on it (in April 1813), on the ground that it separated the future Civil servants from the ordinary life of Englishmen, and prevented them from becoming imbued with “English manners, English attachments, English principles, and I am not ashamed to say English prejudices.”[[1021]] Malthus, who had gone up to London to hear Grenville’s speech in the House of Lords, became champion of the college, and had no difficulty in meeting this assault. The defence of the professors, as set forth by him in 1817,[[1022]] was that the plan of the college was good in theory and had proved good in practice. The insubordination was due to the dependence of the professorial staff upon the Company’s Directors, who had (till then) withheld from the teachers their best means of discipline, the power of expulsion.
The students were as little likely as army or navy cadets to become un-English; and they were much less likely to form a caste at Haileybury than if they had been sent to an Indian college. The details of this extinct controversy need not detain us. It is enough to say that Malthus discharged his part with great vigour and something of his early vivacity. At the best, it must be confessed, the college was a compromise; and the unavoidable difficulties of the situation were quite enough to try the mettle of the teachers. The cadets of the first year might be fifteen or they might be eighteen, and there was no natural aristocracy of senior boys to check the juniors. Those of the younger age were physically and mentally more like schoolboys than undergraduates, and unfit, as yet, for the quasi-independent life of the latter. Many were unwilling to go to India at all, and it was their parents or guardians who really feared the expulsion of incorrigibles. But it was better that the unfit should be rejected in England, where they could find other openings, than in India, where they could find none; and it was better their training should be carried on where the climate, the expense, and the moral, social, and intellectual advantages were in keeping with their age and their state of pupilage. “Little other change is wanting,” in the system as it then was, “than that an appointment should be considered in spirit and in truth, not in mere words, as a prize to be contended for, not a property already possessed,[[1023]] which may be lost. If the Directors were to appoint one-fifth every year beyond the number finally to go out, and the four-fifths were to be the beat of the whole body, the appointments would then really be prizes to be contended for, and the effects would be admirable. Each appointment to the college would then be of less value; but they would be more in number, and the patronage would hardly suffer. A Director could not then, indeed, be able to send out an unqualified son. But is it fitting that he should? This is a fair question for the consideration of the Legislature and the British public.”[[1024]] In these matters, at least, Malthus was no reactionary.
In spite of Joseph Hume and its other enemies, the college lived out its half-century, and does not die out, on the pages of the India Register, till the death of the Company in 1858. Its monopoly was gone some time before then. An Act of 1827 provided, theoretically, for the examination and appointment of India Civil servants who had not studied at Hertford College. In 1833 provision was made for the limited competition which Malthus had recommended.[[1025]] In 1855 came the end. The Company was “relieved of the obligation to keep up the college;” the reign of open competition, ushered in by Macaulay’s Report (Nov. 1854), brought a new order of things; and the college was only continued till those who had joined it at the time of the change had been able to finish their course.[[1026]] There are numbers of old officials, like Sir William Muir, who still hold it in affectionate remembrance;[[1027]] but except in their memory it exists no more.
The work of Malthus was less in the East India College than in his writings. But his connection with the college was perhaps the most important of the external facts of his life; and it has helped to preserve a record of scenes and incidents which reveal the character more clearly than all the adjectives of panegyrists. Otter, Empson, Miss Martineau, Sydney Smith,[[1028]] and Horner,[[1029]] may supply the panegyrics; and the eulogy of Mackintosh is remarkable: “I have known Adam Smith slightly, Ricardo well, Malthus intimately. Is it not something to say for a science that its three great masters were about the three best men I ever knew?”[[1030]]
His epitaph in Bath Abbey, probably from the pen of Otter, is given on the following page.
SACRED TO THE MEMORY