“Where all are proper and well-behaved,
And all are free from sorrow and pain,”
the increase would be much faster. The “leisure” he talks of would soon disappear, and the old scramble for bread, the old inequality of rank and property, would again become the order of the day. We should have our own kind of society back again, with its masters and servants, landlords and tenants, rich and poor.[[24]]
Therefore (argues the writer of the essay) if Godwin’s society were once made it could not last. But we grant too much in supposing it could ever be made. We cannot believe this and believe in the second postulate at the same time; and the second postulate is so certain that we can predict by it. The same causes, then, that would have destroyed Godwin’s newly-formed society will prevent it from ever being formed at all. “The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same that it may always be considered, in algebraic language, as a given quantity.”[[25]] In spite of the whimpering of old men and roués, “the pleasures of pure love will bear the contemplation of the most improved reason and the most exalted virtue.”[[26]] Godwin views the matter in a dry, intellectual light, and asks us to abstract from all accessories before we form an estimate of the passion in question. One man or one woman will then be as good as another. But he might as well tell us to strip off all the leaves before we estimate our liking for trees. We do not admire the bare pole, but the whole tree, the tree with all the “attendant circumstances” of branches and foliage. As well deprive a magnet of its chief powers of attraction, and then ask us to confess it as weak as other minerals.[[27]] The fact is, that man’s large discourse, which marks him out from the brutes, makes him hide the marriage instinct under a mass of “attendant circumstances” before he lets himself be drawn by it. He will not obey the instinct simply more feræ, or in animal fashion, because he feels it. But it is not destroyed, only disguised. The love is not purely intellectual. Reason, with its calculation of consequences, can save a man from the abuse of a passion, but cannot destroy the passion itself;[[28]] and (he might have added) its “looking before and after” includes fancy as well as thought. Take this passion then as it is, an adoration it may be of an assemblage of accessories; it can never die out of the world.
From this cheerful premise, what conclusion follows? One not altogether cheerful: Wherever Providence sends meat He will send mouths. Wherever the people have room and food, they will marry and multiply their numbers, till they press against the limits of both, and begin a fierce struggle for existence, in which death is the punishment of defeat. Godwin and the whole French school are sadly wrong in attributing all inequality to human institutions; human nature is to blame, and, without any artificial aid, this one passion of human nature will be the standing cause of inequality, the most serious obstacle to the removal of it.[[29]] Dr. Robert Wallace had more wisdom than he wot of.
Examine the meaning of this argument and its conclusion. It involves an answer to Godwin’s first defence against Wallace. Here is something very like a law of nature, a truth past, present, and future, or, in other words, a truth which, being scientific, ought not to be stated in terms of time at all: “Where goods increase, they are increased that eat them.” The “struggle for existence” (Malthus uses the very phrase) is a present fact, as it has been a past fact, and will be a future. No good is gained by rhetorical references to the wideness of the world and the possibilities of the ages.[[30]] In our own day and land we see people multiplying up to the limit of the food, and a “great restrictive law” preventing them, as it prevents all other animals, from multiplying beyond that limit.[[31]] In our own day and country, men marry when they cannot support a family; the children whom they cannot support die of hunger or sickness, if the charity of the public does not interfere;—or else the fear of misery makes men avoid a marriage for which they have not the means, and their celibacy, whether pure or impure, keeps the numbers of the people on a level with the food.[[32]] Godwin himself had written in so many words: “There is a principle in human society by which population is perpetually kept down to the level of the means of subsistence.”[[33]] Why did he not take one step more, and discover what that principle is?[[34]]
The fact is that Godwin was at once intellectually sanguine and emotionally cold. His ideal would have been a man “of large brain and no affections;” and when he wrote the Political Justice he was not aware of his own defect. At a later time he was not only aware of it, but anxious to remove it. In his Memoir of his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft (1798), and in the story of St. Leon (1799), the man who found the philosopher’s stone, and became, to his own sorrow, immortal on earth, he confesses that he has hitherto taken too little thought of feeling as an element in human action. If Mary had been too much of a Werther, her husband had been too little. Like Condorcet (and like Buckle), he had believed civilization to be a purely intellectual movement. He had dogmatized on the omnipotence of truth and reason, and inferred the growth of a perfect society. He had dogmatized on the development of intellect, and inferred an earthly immortality. Moreover, in the Memoir, and in St. Leon, if he had added a little to his doctrines, he had recanted little or nothing, even in regard to immortality.
St. Leon is miserable only because his gift is peculiar to himself; an immortality that is common to all would be acceptable to all. A Methuselah would not be melancholy among antediluvians. Such was probably Godwin’s position. The mere belief in the possibility of earthly immortality was not uncommon; Godwin is careful to number Bacon among its supporters.[[35]] Malthus was probably right in tracing it to the unconscious influence of Christianity,[[36]] though the progress in Godwin’s days of the new science of chemistry had perhaps more to do with it, and Godwin’s religion was never more than a bare Theism.[[37]] It was held by Holcroft, one of Godwin’s most intimate friends,[[38]] and it was an important part of Condorcet’s Sketch of the Progress of the Human Spirit.
In the days of the Terror (1794) Condorcet, from his hiding-place in the Rue Servandoni, had written of the “organic perfectibility of man.” He looked to medicine, and to the arts and sciences in general, to banish disease and prolong human life “indefinitely.”[[39]] Godwin trusted to the inward development of the mind, not to outward appliances.[[40]] But by different ways they arrive at the same terminus, and receive from their great critic very much the same reception there. Malthus points out to Godwin that there is no sign that the body is becoming subjugated to the mind. Even philosophers, said he (and he wrote feelingly, as he had the malady at the time of writing), cannot endure the toothache patiently,[[41]] and even a merry heart will not enable a weak man to walk as fast and as far as a strong man. There is no change in the human body, and little or no change in the relation of the mind to it. To Condorcet he simply points out that, while the arts have made the lengthening of life “indefinite,” that does not mean “infinite.” Gardeners can grow carnations “indefinitely” large; no man can ever say that he has seen the largest carnation that will ever be grown; but this he can say, that a carnation will never be as large as a cabbage. The limit is there, though it is undefined, and there is a limit also to the lengthening of human life, though no one can fix it to a year. Condorcet therefore has proved an earthly immortality only by a misuse of the word “indefinite.” He has shown no organic change in man which would prove the possibility of perfection in this world. Neither has Condorcet repelled the objection which troubled Dr. Wallace. It is true that, like Godwin, he faces the difficulty and admits the importance of it.[[42]] The growth of population will always, he says, cause inequality; there will always be a rich leisured class and a poor industrial class; and to lighten the hardships of the latter there ought to be a State Insurance fund, which will make all the poorest citizens sure of support. But one cannot help thinking, if all are sure of support, all will marry, and if all marry, will not the difficulty be increased?[[43]] Yes, Condorcet grants this; the numbers will soon be too great, and so throughout the ages there will be an “oscillation” between the blessings of progress and the evils of overcrowding, now the one predominating, now the other. In despair he clutches at the old fallacy, “the day is distant,” but he feels it fail him, and must needs add a new and startling solution of his own which Malthus freely denounces.[[44]] This is not the place to discuss the questions associated in our own times with Neo-Malthusianism.[[45]] But it is beyond all doubt that the Neo-Malthusians are the children not of Robert Malthus, but of Robert Owen. Malthus was not Malthus because he said, “The people are too many; thin them down”—any more than Darwin was Darwin because he said, “Species are not made, but grow.” If Darwinians are to be judged by Darwin, Malthusians must be judged by Malthus; and the originality of neither Malthus nor Darwin can be explained by a single phrase. We cannot understand the meaning of an author’s words, far less of his work, till we know the context in which they are set. Once know the context and we understand the text. The devil, citing Scripture for his purpose, only succeeds because he never quotes in full.
It follows that, to understand the full meaning of the essay, we must go beyond its efficient cause, and take a view of its material cause, or the whole circumstances in which it was written. If the text of the sermon was Godwin and Condorcet, the application was to the poor of England and the philanthropists who were trying to relieve them.