First, while population goes on increasing at that tremendous rate described by Mr. Malthus, it shews that there is nothing to restrain it; that there is no need of any thing to restrain it: that it is wanted, that its increase is a thing to be desired, not to be dreaded, and that if it were possible for it to increase ten times faster, it would be so much the better.
Secondly, when it arrives at a certain point, that is, where the population begins to press on the means of subsistence, either from natural or artificial causes, or when it threatens to become an evil from excess, it naturally stops short of its own accord, the checks to it from vice, misery and moral restraint taken all together becoming stronger as the excess becomes greater. It therefore produces its own antidote and produces it in quantities exactly in proportion to its own extent. It is not therefore (as Mr. Malthus would, when he pleases, have us believe) like a stone hanging suspended over a precipice, which if it once loses its balance will be hurled furiously down, rolling and bounding from steep to steep with increased velocity till it reaches the bottom, but like a balance suspended by a check-weight, where you cannot increase the pressure on one side without increasing the resistance proportionably on the other. It may therefore at worst be left very safely to itself, instead of being considered as an evil against whose unforeseen ravages no precautions are sufficient.
Thirdly, as the same quantity of vice and misery co-operating with the same degree of moral restraint, will always keep population at the same (relative) point, so a less degree of actual vice and misery operating on a greater degree of moral restraint, that is, of reason, prudence, virtue, &c. will produce the same effect: and we may always judge of the happiness of a people, and of the beneficial effects of population by the prevalence of moral restraint over vice and misery, instead of supposing that vice and misery are the best pledges of the happiness of a state, and the only possible security against excessive population. Consequently, the object of the philosopher must be to increase the influence of rational motives, and lessen the actual operation of vice and misery. It is only in proportion as he does this, that he does any thing; for not only are vice and misery such cheap commodities that they may be had at any corner merely with asking for (any bungler may contract for them in the gross) but farther though they undoubtedly operate as checks to population, I must be excused from admitting that they remedy the evils of population, unless the disease can be considered as its own remedy, for in the degree in which they generally exist, they are the only evils, that are ever likely to rise from it, and as to those imaginary, unknown and unheard of evils, with which Mr. Malthus is perpetually threatening us in order to reconcile us to those we bear, I deny the possibility of their existence upon any known principles of human society, either in its improved, or unimproved state.
I do not mean to say that there is any thing in the general principles here stated that Mr. Malthus is at present disposed to deny, or that he has not himself expressly insisted on in some part or other of his various work; it is enough for my purpose that there are other parts of his work in which he has contradicted them and himself, and that the uniform tenor of his first work leans directly the opposite way; and it is not my business so much to inquire, how much Mr. Malthus retains of his old philosophy, as how many of their old feelings his readers retain on the subject, on which he will be able to build as many false conclusions as he pleases, and with more safety to himself, than if he still persevered in the direct and unqualified assertion of exploded error. Plain, downright consistent falsehood is not dangerous: it is only that spurious mixture of truth and falsehood, that perpetual oscillation between the two extremes, that wavering and uncertainty that baffles detection by rendering it difficult to know on what ground you are to meet your adversary, that makes the sophist so formidable as he is. In order therefore that Mr. Malthus may not avail himself of his inconsistencies, I shall assume a right to contradict him as often as he contradicts himself, and to consider the peculiar doctrines of his work as its essential and only important doctrines.
LETTER V
WHETHER VICE AND MISERY ARE THE NECESSARY CONSEQUENCES OF, AND THE ONLY CHECKS TO, THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION
Sir—I have in my last letter taken more pains than, I believe, was necessary to shew that the tendency of population to increase is not a dangerous one; or at any rate that the actual increase of population does not increase the danger. The same proportionable quantity of vice and misery would always be sufficient to keep down the excess of population beyond the means of subsistence, whether we suppose those means to be great or small: there is another question, whether the same quantity of vice and misery is always necessary for this purpose; and further, whether all the vice and misery in the world are not only necessary checks to, but the immediate effects of, the principle of population, and of nothing else.
Before I proceed, I must stop to observe that I have just been perusing the corrections, additions, &c. to the third and last edition of the Essay; and I confess I have not much heart to go on. The pen falls from my hand. For to what purpose is it to answer a man, who has answered himself, who has hardly advanced an opinion that he has not retracted, who after all your pains to overturn the extravagant assertions he had brought forward, comes and tells you, Why I have given them up myself; so that you hardly know whether to look upon him in the light of an adversary or an ally. I do not like this shadow-fighting, any more than Sancho liked his master’s fighting with enchanters. When Don Quixote had to encounter the knight of the Prodigious Nose, his valour was inflamed, and he rushed fiercely on his antagonist, but when after having unhorsed him, he found that it was his old friend and neighbour the Batchelor Carrasco, the fury of his arm was suspended, and he knew not what to say or do.[[10]] Till Mr. Malthus lays aside his harlequin’s coat and sword, and ceases to chase opinions through a rapid succession of varying editions, it is not an easy matter to come up with him or give him fair battle. It was thought a work of no small labour and ingenuity to make a harmony of the Evangelists. I would recommend it to some one (who thinks himself equal to the task) to make a harmony of Mr. Malthus’s different performances. Till this is done, it seems impossible to collect the sense of his writings, and consequently to answer them. It should not therefore be the object of any one who would set himself to answer Mr. Malthus, so much to say that such and such are the real and settled opinions of that author, as that such opinions are floating in different parts of his writings, that they are floating or fixed in the minds of his readers, and that those opinions are not so correct as they might be. If Mr. Malthus had chosen to disclaim certain opinions with their consequences, advanced in the first edition, instead of denying that he ever held such opinions, though he may still be detected with the manner, he would have saved me the trouble of writing, and himself the disagreeable task of reading, this rude attack upon them.
Mr. Malthus lays down as the basis of all his reasonings the two following positions, viz. ‘First, that food is necessary to the existence of man.’
‘Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state.’
‘These two laws,’ he adds, ‘ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature; and as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they are now, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe. The best arguments for the perfectibility of man are drawn from a contemplation of the great progress that he has already made from the savage state, and the difficulty of saying where he is to stop. But towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes, no progress whatever has hitherto been made. It appears to exist in as much force at present as it did two thousand, or four thousand years ago. There are individual exceptions now as there always have been. But, as these exceptions do not appear to increase in number, it would surely be a very unphilosophical mode of arguing to infer merely from the existence of an exception, that the exception would in time become the rule, and the rule the exception.’