Let those, then, who cry out against this little treatise, be told, that though they may postpone the question, no human power can evade it. It must come up. Had the friends of reform been left to choose their own time, it might, perhaps with advantage, have been postponed. And it is an imaginable case, that prejudice might delay it until a general famine or a universal civil war became the frightful checks. But will any man of common sense argue the propriety of suffering such a crisis to approach?
Malthus saw this. He saw that some check must exist; and, whatever some of his disciples might permit themselves to say, he did not choose to be considered the apologist of vice and misery. His theory, indeed, supplied specious arguments to those who asserted, with the ingenious author of the Fable of the Bees,[[10]] that “private vices are public benefits;” and in consequence, its tendency appears to be essentially aristocratic and demoralizing, as tending to produce supine contentment with a vicious and degrading order of things. But Malthus himself declares the only proper check to be, the general practice of celibacy to a late age. He employs all his eloquence to persuade men and women that they ought not to marry till they are twenty-eight or thirty; and that if they do, they are contributing to the misery of the world.[[11]]
Now, Mr. Malthus may preach for ever on this subject. Individuals may indeed be found, who will look to distant consequences, and sacrifice present enjoyment; even as individuals are found to become and remain Shaking Quakers: but to believe that the mass of mankind will abjure, through the ten fairest years of life, the nearest and dearest of social relations; and during the very holiday of existence, will live the life of monks and nuns—all to avert a catastrophe which is confessedly some hundreds of years distant—to believe this, requires a faith which no accurate observer of mankind possesses.
This weak point the aristocratic expounders of Malthus’ doctrines were not slow to discover. They broadly asserted, that such “moral restraint” would never be generally practiced. They asked, whether a young woman, to whom a comfortable home and a pleasant companion were offered, would refuse to accept them, on this theory of population; whether a young man who had a fair (or even but a very indifferent) prospect of maintaining a family, would doom himself to celibacy lest the world should be over-peopled. And they put it to the advocates of late marriages, whether, in one sex at least, the recommendation, if even nominally followed, would not almost certainly lead to vicious excess and degrading associations; thus resolving the check into vice and misery at last. If experience answered these questions in the negative, was it not clear, (they would exultingly ask,) that vice and misery are the natural lot of man; and that it is quixotic, if not impious, to plague ourselves about them, or to attempt, by their suppression, to controvert the decrees of God?
It was very easy for generous feelings to reply to so heartless an argument. It was easy to ask, whether even the apparent hopelessness of the case formed any legitimate apology for supine indifference; or whether, where we cannot cure, we are absolved from the duty of alleviating. But it was not very easy fully and fairly to meet the question. It was idle to deny that preaching would not put off marriage for ten years: and if no other species of moral restraint than ten years Shakerism could be proposed, it did appear evident enough, that moral restraint would be by the mass neglected, and that the physical checks of vice and misery must come into play at last.
I pray my readers, then, distinctly, to observe how the matter stands. Population, unrestrained, must increase beyond the possibility of the earth and its produce to support. At present it is restrained by vice and misery. The only remedy which the orthodoxy of the English clergyman permits him to propose, is, late marriages. The most enlightened observers of mankind are agreed, that nothing contributes so positively and immediately to demoralize a nation, as when its youth refrain, until a late period, from forming disinterested connections with those of the other sex. The frightful increase of prostitutes, the destruction of health, the rapid spread of intemperance, the ruin of moral feelings, are to the mass, the certain consequences. Individuals there are who escape the contagion; individuals whose better feelings revolt, under any temptation, from the mercenary embrace, or the Circean cup of intoxication; but these are exceptions only. The mass must have their pleasures; the pleasures of intellectual intercourse, of unbought affection, and of good taste and good feeling, if they can; but if they cannot, then such pleasure (alas! that language should be perverted to entitle them to the name!) as the sacrifice of money and the ruin of body and mind can purchase.[[12]]
But this is not all. Not only is Malthus’ proposition fraught with immorality, in that it discountenances to a late age those disinterested sexual connexions which can alone save youth from vice; but it is impracticable. Men and women will scarcely pause to calculate the chances they have of affording support to their children ere they become parents: how, then, should they stop to calculate the chances of the world’s being over-peopled? Malthus may say what he pleases, they never will make any such calculation; and it is folly to expect they should.
Let us observe, then: unless some less ascetic and more practicable species of “moral restraint” be introduced, vice and misery will ultimately become the inevitable lot of man upon earth. He can no more escape them, than he can the light of the sun, or the stroke of death.
What an incitement, this, to the prosecution of our enquiry! Here is a principle set up, which is all but an apology for the apathy that prevails among the rich and the powerful—among governors and legislators—in regard to human improvement. How important, how essential for the interests of virtue, that it should be refuted! How beneficent that knowledge, which discloses to us some moral, practicable check to population, and relieves us from the despairing conclusion, that the irrevocable doom of man is misery, without remedy and without end! In the absence of such knowledge, truly the prospects of the world were dark and cheerless. The modern doctrine of population has weighed like a spell on the exertions of benevolence, and chilled, almost to inaction, even the warm heart of charity. Philanthropy herself pauses, when she begins to fear that all her exertions are to result in hopeless disappointment. And yet—such is this world—even the ablest opponents of Malthus stop short when they come to the question, and leave an argument unanswered, which a dozen pages might suffice for ever to set at rest.
Let one of the most intelligent of these opponents, a man of splendid and sterling talent—let Mill, the celebrated political economist and talented author of “British India,” speak for himself.