Malthus saw that he had been hasty, and he did not republish the essay till he had given it five years of revision, and added to it the results of foreign travel and wider reading. In 1799 he went abroad with some college friends, Otter, Clarke the antiquarian and naturalist, and Clarke’s pupil Cripps,[[93]] and visited Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and part of Russia, these being the only countries at that time open to English travellers. After his return he published his tract on the High Price of Provisions (1800),[[94]] and at the conclusion of it he promised a new edition of the Essay on Population. Some people, he says, have thought the essay “a specious argument inapplicable to the present state of society,” because it contradicts preconceived opinions; but two years of reflection have strengthened his conviction that he has discovered “the real cause of the continued depression and poverty of the lower classes;” and he will not recant his essay: “I have deferred giving another edition of it in the hope of being able to make it more worthy of the public attention, by applying the principle directly and exclusively to the existing state of society, and endeavouring to illustrate the power and universality of its operation from the best authenticated accounts that we have of the state of other countries.” But he was not satisfied with the accounts of other people. When the Peace of Amiens let loose thousands of pleasure-seekers on the Continent, Malthus went to France and Switzerland on no errand of mere pleasure; and he was luckily at home again, and passing his proof-sheets through the press, before Napoleon’s unpleasant interference with English travellers.
It was a happy coincidence that in the dark fighting days of 1798, Malthus should write only of vice and misery, while in the short gleam of peace in 1802 and 1803, when the tramp of armed men had ceased for the moment, he should recollect himself, and write of a less ghastly restraint on population, a restraint which might perhaps, like the truce of Amiens, hold out some faint hope for the future. For the sake of the world let us hope that the parallel goes no further. The wonder is not that he forgot there was such a thing as civilization, but that amidst wars and rumours of wars he should ever have remembered it.
In the preface to the new edition (June 1803), he says he has “so far differed in principle” from the old edition “as to suppose the action of another check to population which does not come under the head either of vice or misery,” and he has “tried to soften some of the harshest conclusions of the first essay.” There was really more change than this. The first essay contained much of the imperfection of the sudden magazine-article; and if the writer had lived half a century later he would probably, instead of writing a small book, have contributed a long article to a monthly or quarterly magazine, giving a review of Godwin’s political writings, with incidental remarks on the Poor Bill of Mr. Pitt. This was evidently the light in which he himself regarded his first work, or he would not have handled it so freely in republication. The new edition had new facts, new arrangement, and new emphasis. He had not written a book once for all, leaving the world to fight over it after his death. He took the public into partnership with him, and made every discussion a means of improving his book. This gives the Essay on Population a unique character among economical writings. It leads the author to interpret his thoughts to us from many various points of view, leaving us, unhappily, often in doubt whether an alteration of language is or is not an alteration of thought. Malthus adds to the difficulty by omitting and inserting instead of rewriting in full. His chapters cease to be old without becoming new.
The very face of the book revealed a change. In 1798 it was An Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society; in 1803, An Essay on the Principle of Population, or a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness. The dreams of the future are now in the background, and the facts of the present in the foreground. In 1798 Malthus had given Godwin the lie:—
“Colouring he, dilating, magniloquent, glorying in picture,
He to a matter of fact still softening, paring, abating,
He to the great might-have-been upsoaring, sublime and ideal,
He to the merest it—was restricting, diminishing, dwarfing.”
He must do more now, or his political economy is a dismal science. He must show how we can cling to the matter of fact without losing our ideal. It is not enough to refer us to the other world. How far may we have hope in this world? Let Malthus answer.
The second essay is his answer; and if second thoughts are the best, then we may rejoice over the second essay, for it lifts the cloud from the first. It tells us that on the whole the power of civilization is greater than the power of population; the pressure of the people on the food is therefore less in modern than it was in ancient times or the middle ages; there are now less disorder, more knowledge, and more temperance.[[95]] The merely physical checks are falling into a subordinate position. There are two kinds of checks on population. A check is (a) positive, when it cuts down an existing population, (b) preventive, when it keeps a new population from growing up. Among animals the check is only misery, among savage men vice as well as misery, and, in civilized society, moral restraint as well as, till now, both vice and misery. Even in civilized society there are strata which moral restraint hardly reaches, for there are strata which are not civilized. On the whole, however, it is true that among animals there is no sign of any other check than the positive, while among men the positive is gradually subordinated to the preventive. Among men misery may act both positively and preventively. In the form of war or disease it may slay its tens of thousands, and cut down an existing population. By the fear of its own coming it may prevent many a marriage, and keep a new population from growing up. Vice may also act in both ways: positively as in child-murder, preventively as in the scheme of Condorcet. But in civilized society the forces of both order and progress are arrayed against their two common enemies; and, if we recognized no third check, surely the argument that was used against Godwin’s society holds against all society; its very purification will ruin it, by forbidding vice and misery to check the growth of population, and by thereby permitting the people to increase to excess. There is, however, a third check, which Malthus knows under the title of moral restraint.