The early life of Malthus, coinciding, as it largely does, with the latter half of the eighteenth century, coincides with England’s greatest industrial revolution. Malthus was born in 1766, three years after the Peace of Paris. There was an end, for the time, to foreign wars, and trade was making a brave start. The discoveries of coal and iron in Northern England, going hand in hand with the inventions of cotton-spinning and weaving, were beginning to convert the poorest counties into the richest, upsetting the political balance. The new science of chemistry had begun to prove its usefulness. Wedgwood was perfecting his earthenware, Brindley cutting his canals, Telford laying out his roads, Watt building his steam-engines. England in Roman days had been a granary; in later ages she had been a pasture-ground; she was now becoming the land of machinery and manufacture, as well as the centre of foreign trade. In other words, she had begun an industrial change, which was the greatest till then in her history, and rich in the most magical improvements. But in the early stages of the change, the evils of it were nearly as much felt as the blessings. The sufferings of displaced workmen, and the anarchy of the new factory system, supplanting home labour, and making the word “manufacturer” forget its etymology,[[46]] were real evils, however transient. Combined with the general democratic influence of an expansive manufacturing industry, they might easily have caused a social convulsion in these days of no extraordinary virtue; and the country owed its escape in some degree to the evangelical movement under Whitefield and the Wesleys, which was fatal at once to religious torpor and to political excitement.[[47]] The annoyances of a meddlesome tariff and the futile attempts to exclude foreign food were to vanish away before a hundred years had passed; but in the boyhood of Malthus the voice of Adam Smith raised against them in the Wealth of Nations (1776) was a cry in the wilderness. There was a general agreement that, whether the high prices prevailing after the Peace of Paris were caused by the growth of the population, or by the lessened value of silver, or by the troubles in Poland, the remedy was not to lie in a free corn trade. The poor were not to have cheap corn, they were to have large allowances. Legislation had gone backwards in this matter. In 1723 a new law had introduced a wise workhouse test of destitution, which might have prevented wilful poverty by reducing outdoor relief; but the clause was repealed by Gilbert’s Act in 1782; the poor were to be “set on work” at their own houses; and the new stringency gave place to the old laxity, with the usual results. The close of the century saw the troubles of a European war added to the list, and the tide of political reform ebbed for forty years (1792–1832). Because the French reform had gone too far, the English reform was not allowed to take its first steps.
It is a commonplace with historians that the French Revolution would have been very different without Voltaire and Rousseau to prepare the way for it. Hunger and new ideas are two advocates of change which always plead best in each other’s company; hunger makes men willing to act, and the new ideas give them matter for enactment. In France, when the crisis came in 1789, the new ideas were not far to seek. Writers of Utopias, from Plato to More, and from Rousseau to Ruskin, have always adopted one simple plan: they have struck out the salient enormities of their own time and inserted the opposite, as when men imagine heaven they think of their dear native country with its discomforts left out. Inequality at home had made Frenchmen ready to dote on a vision of equality when Rousseau presented it to them, and the state of Nature was the state of France reversed. Philosophically, the theorists of the Revolution traced their descent to Locke, and their ideas were not long in recrossing the Channel to visit their birthplace.
Even if Englishmen had not had in America a visible Utopia, or, at least, Arcadia, there was hunger enough in England to recommend the new ideas to every rank in society. This is the reason why, in 1793, Godwin’s book was so successful. It was not only a good English statement of the French doctrines of equality, and therefore a book for the times, but it had a vigour of its own, and was no mere translation. Rousseau and Raynal had thought it necessary to sacrifice universal improvement to universal equality; they saw (or thought they saw) that the two could not go together, and they counted equality so desirable that they were willing to purchase it at the expense of barbarism. Now, they were perhaps more logical than Godwin; equality may mean barbarism. But Godwin’s ideal was at least higher than theirs; he thought of civilization and equality as quite compatible, for he thought that when all men were truly civilized they would of their own accord restore equality. As he left everything to reason and nothing to force, his book was in theory quite harmless; but the tendency of it seemed dangerous, for it criticized the British constitution in a free way to which the British nation was not accustomed. In England, moreover, the people have always confounded ideas with persons. They were not in love with liberty when it took the form of an American “War of Independence” against England, and, even if equality had pleased them in 1789, they would have nothing of it after the Terror. They forsook Fox for Burke, and went to war for a sentiment. At the time when Malthus wrote, the bulk of the English people had lost their enthusiasm for the new ideas. It needed some fortitude to call oneself a Reformer, or even a Whig, when Napoleon had overrun Italy and was facing us in Egypt. Pitt held all persons seditious who did not believe in the wisdom of the war.
But even Pitt, though he now ignored the need of reform, could not overlook the existence of distress. In 1795 there had been a serious scarcity; war prices had become famine prices. It was the year when “the lower orders” were held down by special coercion acts;[[48]] it was the year when the king’s carriage was stopped by a mob crying “Bread, bread!” Mr. Whitbread and the rest thought Parliament ought to “do something”; and Pitt proposed (1796) to meet the difficulty by amending the Poor Laws. His bill proposed “to restore the original purity of the Poor Laws” by modifying the law of settlement in the direction of greater freedom, and by assisting the working man in other ways. One of these other ways was an attempt of a harmless kind to found schools of industry, another to attach every labourer to a friendly society. But another less innocently proposed to encourage the growth of population by making the poor relief greater where the family was larger. “Let us make relief,” in such cases, “a matter of right and honour, instead of a ground for opprobrium and contempt. This will make a large family a blessing and not a curse; and this will draw a proper line of distinction between those who are to provide for themselves by their labour, and those who, after enriching their country with a number of children, have a claim upon its assistance for their support.”[[49]]
Malthus in 1796 did not doubt the infallibility of Pitt in such a matter; The Crisis gives no hint of objection. But in 1798, with his new light, he could no longer take the recruiting officer’s view of population. If he had had a good case against Godwin and Condorcet, who had simply failed to show how population could be kept from growing too fast, he had still a better case against Pitt, who proposed to make it grow faster. Besides, their schemes were merely on paper; they had no chance of realizing them, whereas Pitt’s majority would carry any measure on which he had set his heart. The danger from this third quarter was therefore the most imminent. But Malthus needed no new argument for it; he needed simply to shift round his old argument, and point the muzzle of it at his new enemy. There is no need, he said, to encourage marriage; there is no need for Government to make population grow faster. Wherever Providence has sent meat, He will soon send mouths to eat it; and, if by your artificial encouragements you increase the mouths without increasing the meat, you will only bring the people one step nearer starvation, you will only multiply the nation without increasing the joy. If stalwart numbers are strength, starving numbers are weakness.[[50]]
These commonplaces were then a paradox. Even at the end of the eighteenth century there was no party in the English House of Commons identified with enlightened views on the position of the British workman. Whitbread had always some measure on hand for helping the labourer out of the rates, or by some other State interference; it was in opposing one of Whitbread’s bills that the Prime Minister promised to introduce his own memorable measure. Fox was free to follow either, not professing to understand the new economical doctrines. Pitt, who admired Adam Smith,—Fox, Condorcet, and Godwin, who owed Smith no allegiance,[[51]]—all were equally purblind in this matter. All Pitt’s study of the fourth book of the Wealth of Nations, chapter fifth, had not shown him the fallacy of a bounty on children. Yet Malthus had got his light from no obscure sources, but from “Hume, Wallace, Adam Smith, and Dr. Price,”[[52]] who were all well-known and widely-read authors of the day. “The populousness of ancient nations” had been a happy hunting-ground for learned antiquarian essay writers over half a century. Montesquieu, Wallace, and Price[[53]] claimed the advantage for the ancients. David Hume, with his usual acute divination, decides for the moderns, though with his usual irony he professes to adopt a sceptical conclusion, and makes several concessions to Wallace.[[54]] This controversy itself might have been expected to bring men nearer to the truth on the subject of population than it actually did. It was left to Malthus to convert Hume’s probability into a certainty from a higher vantage-ground; but the sifting of the arguments by the various writers before him must have simplified his task.[[55]] Other aids and anticipations were not wanting. As early as 1786, Joseph Townsend, the Wiltshire rector, had written a Dissertation on the Poor Laws, which gives an admirable statement of those wise views of charity and poor relief that are only in these latter days becoming current among us. Malthus records his opinion of Townsend’s work in the best of all possible ways. From his careful inquiry (in the second edition of the Essay) into the population of European countries, he omits Spain on the ground that Mr. Townsend’s Travels in Spain has already done the work for him.[[56]]
The Essay on Population was therefore not original in the sense of being a creation out of nothing, but in the same way as the Wealth of Nations. In both cases the author got most of his phrases, and even many of his thoughts, from his predecessors; but he treated them as his predecessors were unable to do; he saw them in their connection, perspective, and wide bearings. We must not assume anticipation where there is mere identity of language or partial identity of thought; the words of an earlier writer are not unfrequently quoted by a later away from their logical context, and therefore not as part of an argument of which the writer sees the consecutive premises. This is true of Adam Smith when he is compared with Sir Dudley North, Abraham Tucker, or the other prophets of free trade[[57]] catalogued by MacCulloch or Blanqui. They talked free trade almost as Mons. Jourdain talked prose, without knowing it. Precisely the same is true of Adam Smith himself in relation to Malthus. Of his own generalizations he is complete master. Having reasoned up to them, he can reason down from them. But, when he says, “Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence,” “The demand for men necessarily regulates the production of men,”[[58]] he has not anticipated Malthus. His phrases are touching a principle of which he does not see the most important bearings; and not having reasoned up to it, he makes hardly any attempt to reason down from it. Malthus, on the other hand, has taken fast hold of a general principle, and is able to solve a number of dependent questions in the way of simple corollaries. Others may have given right answers to the special questions about the Poor Law and the populousness of ancient nations. Malthus is the first to show one comprehensive reason why all these answers must be right.
This was the secret of his success. As Godwin’s Political Justice was successful because systematic, the Essay on Population was successful because it seemed to put chaos in order. The very sadness of his conclusion had a charm for some minds; but the bulk of his readers did not love him for taking their hopes away, they loved him for giving them new light. Pestilence and famine begin to lose their vague terrors when we know whence they come and what they do for the world. Even if the desire of marriage is itself an evil, it is well to know the truth about it. Ignorance can only be blissful where it is total; and wilful ignorance, being of necessity partial, is a perpetual unrest, not even a fool’s paradise.[[59]]
The truth in this case was not all sadness. In the last portion of the essay of 1798 Malthus expounds an argument which he afterwards reproduced in later editions with a more terrestrial application. He uses the style of Paley and the Apologists, and he tries to discover the final cause of the principle of population, on metaphysical lines that were followed by Mr. Sumner nearly twenty years afterwards, when the discussion had taken a new turn.[[60]] The question is how to reconcile the suffering produced by the principle of population with the goodness of God. Malthus answers that the difficulty is only one part of the general problem of evil, the difference between this part and the rest being that in this case we see farther into the causes; and it is therefore the easier for us to justify the ways of God to man. “Evil exists not to create despair but activity.”[[61]] We ought not to reason from God to nature, but from nature to God; to know how God works, let us observe how nature works. We shall then find that nature sends all sentient creatures through a long and painful process, by which they gain new qualities and powers, presumably fitting them for a better place than they have in this world. This world and this life are therefore in all probability “the mighty process of God,” not indeed for the mere “probation” of man (for that would imply that his Maker was suspicious of him, or ignorant of what was in him), but for the “creation and formation” of the human mind out of the torpor and corruption of dead matter,[[62]] “to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul, to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay.” The varied influences of life are the forming hand of the Creator, and they are infinitely diverse, for (in spite of Solomon) there is nothing old under the sun.[[63]] Difficulties generate talents.[[64]] “The first awakeners of the mind are the wants of the body;” it is these that rouse the intellect of the infant and sharpen the wits of the savage. Not leisure but necessity is the mother of invention:
ἁ πενία, Διόφαντε, μόνα τὰς τέχνας ἐγείρες.