CHAPTER IV.
THE SAVAGE, BARBARIAN, AND ORIENTAL.
Simile supplanted by Fact—Savage Life—Population dependent not on possible but on actual Food—Indirect Action of Positive Checks—Hunger not a Principle of Progress—Otaheite a Crux for Common Sense—Cycle in the Movement of Population—Pitcairn Island—Barbarian and Oriental—Nomad Shepherds—Abram and Lot—Cimbri and Teutones—Gibbon versus Montesquieu—“At bay on the limits of the Universe”—Misgovernment an indirect Check on Population—Ancient Europe less populous than Modern—Civilization the gradual Victory of the third Check.
The main position of the essay was so incontrovertible, that when the critics despaired to convict Malthus of a paradox, they charged him with a truism. To the friendly Hallam[154] the mathematical basis of the argument appeared as certain as the multiplication table, and the unfriendly Hazlitt “did not see what there was to discover after reading the tables of Noah’s descendants, and knowing that the world is round.”[155] If the essayist had done nothing more than put half-truths together into a whole, he would have “entrenched himself in an impregnable fortress” and given his work a great “air of mastery.”[156] But he would have convinced the understanding without convincing the imagination. Adam Smith himself would have done no more than half his work, if he had been content to prove the reasonableness of free trade without showing, in detail, the effect of it and its opposites. Even the most competent reader has seldom all the relevant facts marshalled in his memory, ready to command; and he will always be thankful for illustrations. The Essay on Population in its second form certainly excelled all economical works, save one, in its pertinent examples from life and history.
Imagination in the narrower sense of the word is to be out of court. Malthus, like Adam Smith, not only leaves little to his reader’s fancy, but makes little use of his own. His own had misled his readers in the first essay, though it had certainly given that little book much of its piquancy; and he resolves for the sake of truth to chain it up, as Coleridge chained up his understanding. The self-denying ordinance is only too fully executed. The style of his essay is truly described by himself[157] as having gradually “lost all pretensions to merit.” Edition follows edition, each with its footnotes, supplements, rearrangements, and corrections, till the reader feels that this writer “would be clearer if he were not so clear.”
But the title-page supplies a guiding thread. From the second edition onwards to the last, “Past” and “Present” appear in large letters, “Future” in small. The entire work may therefore be divided according to the three tenses, with the emphasis on the two former. The first book is devoted to the past, the second to the present, and the third and fourth to the future.
The First deals with the less civilized parts of the world as it now is, and the uncivilized past times; the Second with the different states of modern Europe; the Third criticizes popular schemes of future improvement; while the Fourth gives the author’s own views of the possible progress of humanity.
After explaining his principles, Malthus takes a survey of human progress, if not from brute to savage, at least from savage to citizen. He shows us how the rude and simple positive checks become complicated with the preventive; and he leads us up from barbarism to civilization till we find ourselves in a society where the citizens think less of check than of chief end, and less of self-sacrifice than of self-devotion, to some cause or person, and even the inferior members act, at worst, from mixed motives, containing good as well as evil. These are the two extreme ends of his line. It would be useless to deny that he lingers longest over the less pleasing, and gives Godwin some excuse for questioning his logical right to believe in the more pleasing at all.[158] At the same time it would have been (even logically) impossible for him to have attacked Godwin for taking abstract views of human nature, and then to have persisted in an abstraction of his own, after all his own European travel and historical studies. His fault had lain in defective premises, not in false reasoning; and he remedies the fault.
Let us take his account in his own order. Beginning with present savagery, which with some qualifications is a picture of our own past, he sifts out the descriptions of Cook, Vancouver, and other travellers, to see what checks to population operate in different grades of savage humanity. At the very bottom of the scale comes Tierra del Fuego, by general consent the abode of pure misery, and therefore naturally the home of a sparse population. Next come the natives of the Andaman Islands and of Van Diemen’s Land. “Their whole time is spent in search of food,” which consists of the raw products of the soil and sea; the whole time of every individual is devoted to this one labour, and there is neither room nor inducement for any other industries. Vice is hardly needed; misery in the shape of perpetual scarcity and famine keeps down the people to the food. Third in the scale of human beings are the New Hollanders, the original inhabitants of North-West Australia, among whom can be traced not only the check of misery, but the check of vice. The women are so cruelly treated at all times, and the children have so harsh an upbringing, that there is no difficulty in understanding how population does not even reach the full limit of the scanty food. War and pestilence make the assurance doubly sure. As savages are entirely innocent of sanitary science, the dirt of their persons and their houses deprives them of “the advantage which usually attends a thinly-peopled country,” comparative exemption from pestilence.[159] Even the North American Indians, who are one step higher than the New Hollanders, come under the same condemnation for overcrowding, and for much else besides. The account which Malthus gives of them may be compared with that of De Tocqueville half a century later. Romance has clung to them only because they were the nearest and best known savages of their kind, and their necessary labours were in Europe rich men’s pleasures. But hunting and river-fishing cannot yield much food unless pursued over a wide area. A hunter is so far like the beast of prey which he pursues, that he must go long distances for his food, and must either fly from or overcome every rival. The North American Indian must therefore either go West after his old food, or else he must stay where he is, to beat off the Europeans, or to adopt their food and their habits. “The Indians have only two ways of saving themselves, war and civilization. They must either destroy the Europeans or become their equals.”[160] As the civilization of a nation of hunters is almost impossible, their extinction seems inevitable. The question remains, How is this population cut down to the level of its food?
In Malthus’ answer to the question occur three remarks of great general importance. First, what limits the numbers of a people is not the possible but the actual food.[161] Second, want destroys a population less often directly by starvation than indirectly through the medium of manners and customs.[162] Third, the mere pressure of impending starvation does not lead to progress.[163]
Malthus is never tired of insisting on the first of these remarks; and a proper understanding of it is essential to a fair judgment on his doctrine. He never says that it is the tendency of a population to increase up to the limits of the greatest possible amount of food that can be produced in a given country. The valley of the Mississippi when highly cultivated may possibly support a hundred millions; but the question is not what it would do when highly cultivated, but what it can do when cultivated as it now is and as men now are. “In a general view of the American continent as described by historians, the population seems to have been spread over the surface very nearly in proportion to the quantity of food which the inhabitants of the different parts in the actual state of their industry and improvements could as a matter of fact obtain; and that with few exceptions it pressed hard against this limit, rather than fell short of it, appears from the frequent recurrence of distress for want of food in all parts of America.”[164] What is said here of the Indians a hundred years ago applies to the Colonists now. “The actual state of industry” is of course a much more improved one; but the population the land will bear is still in proportion to it, and the amount could not have been increased till the actual state of the industry had first been bettered. One cause of the decay of the numbers of the Indians was that their method of industry, so far from becoming better, became worse by their contact with Europeans, and therefore the limit of population was actually contracted instead of being extended.[165] This explains how it is that their diminishing numbers do not bring them greater comfort. Whether the numbers in any given case are too great or too small depends always on the quantity of the food that is divided among them; and, where the food decreases faster than the population, a population that has become smaller numerically becomes actually larger in proportion to the food. The statement that England or any other country could bear millions more than it does now is a mere reference to unexplored possibilities, landing us in the infinite. It may be answered in the same way as the Eleatic puzzles about motion; land infinitely improvable does not mean land infinitely improved, as matter infinitely divisible does not mean matter infinitely divided. The position of Malthus is therefore as follows: given a people’s skill, and given its standard of living at any time, its numbers are always tending to be the utmost that can be furnished by that skill with a living up to that standard,—that is to say, with what, according to that standard, are the necessaries of human life. Either a diminution of that skill or an increase in that standard would cause over-population. The question is always a relative one.
The human as distinguished from the animal character of the problem appears not only in that relativity (which affects mainly the preventive checks), but in the indirect way in which the positive checks, if we may say so, prefer to act. It is as if they were always desirous of resolving themselves as far as might be into preventive. The ultimate check, Malthus says, is starvation; but, he adds, it is seldom the immediate one. The higher up we go in the scale, the more it is hidden away out of sight. Starvation is interpreted, by all grades of society above the lowest, to mean the loss of what they conceive to be the necessaries not of a bare living but of endurable life; and even the lowest, instead of apprehending some pain, apprehend some bringer of it. They do not allow famine to kill them; they create manners and customs that do the work for it, keeping the famine itself afar off. “Both theory and experience uniformly instruct us that a less abundant supply of food operates with a gradually increasing pressure for a very long time before its progress is stopped. It is difficult indeed to conceive a more tremendous shock to society than the event of its coming at once to the limits of the means of subsistence, with all the habits of abundance and early marriages, which accompany a largely increasing population. But, happily for mankind, this never is nor ever can be the case. The event is provided for by the concurrent interests and feelings of individuals long before it arrives; and the gradual diminution of the real wages of the labouring classes of society slowly and almost insensibly generates the habits necessary for an order of things in which the funds for the maintenance of labour are stationary.... The causes [of the retardation of population] will be generally felt and [will] generate a change of habits long before the period arrives.”[166] “An insufficient supply of food to any people does not show itself merely in the shape of famine, but in other more permanent forms of distress, and in generating certain customs which operate sometimes with greater force in the prevention of a rising population” than in the destruction of the risen.[167] Robertson the historian truly says, that whether civilization has improved the lot of men may be doubtful, but it has certainly improved the condition of women. Among the Indians and almost all savages, “servitude is a name too mild to describe their wretched state.” The hard life of the men kills their instinctive fondness for the women; the latter are therefore less likely to become mothers, while, if they do, their own hardships and heavy tasks are a great hindrance to nursing. It is not surprising that the surviving children are of good physique; none but the exceptionally strong could weather the cruel discipline of childhood.[168] In South America the difficulty of upbringing actually led to an enforced monogamy, as well as to late marriages and their not unfrequent accompaniment, irregularities before marriage. Such customs diminish numbers. But even the adult savages do not find life easy. They are not the men to think of providing for a rainy day; in the short moments of plenty they do not think of the long days of want. Intemperate living as well as the rigour and the accidents of a hunting life cut off numbers in their prime. They are subject to diseases and invent no remedies. Their acquiescence in dirt leads to pestilences, but they invent no sanitary reforms; and their thinly-peopled country loses its natural exemption from epidemics. Their wars are internecine, for they are largely prompted by sheer self-preservation, and the thought that if the one combatant lives the other cannot. Cannibalism itself was at first due to extreme want, though what occasional hunger had begun, hate perpetuated in a custom. This and the low cunning and mean strategy, due to a resolve to survive at all costs, are the prime inventions of the struggle for existence on these low levels.
Such are the causes by which the numbers of the North American Indians are kept down to a very low figure; but, low as it is, the figure is high enough for the food. Apart from a difference in the standard of living, the proportion of population to food is similar over the inhabited world; and in the same neighbourhood or among cognate races it will be almost identical. A diminution in one Indian tribe, not being voluntary, will not be the cause of plenty to the survivors; it has been the effect of want, and it will simply weaken the collective force of the tribe in the struggle against others.[169]
The supremacy of want as the ultimate check on population is illustrated by the instant expansion of population which is produced in these grades of humanity by an accession of plenty. When a tribe falls upon fertile land, its numbers swell, and its collective might, depending on numbers, becomes greater. The increase of food, however, seems in this case to lead to nothing else than increase of numbers. There is a melancholy equality of suffering between tribe and tribe, as well as between members of the same tribe. There is no distinction of rank, but only of sex and bodily strength, as regards endurance of hardships.
It is in this connection that Malthus throws some light on the question how progress could ever take place at all. His answer is not unlike Adam Smith’s remark about the connection of high wages with good work. He says, that beyond a certain limit, hard fare and great want depress men below the very capacity of improvement; comfort must reach a certain height before the desires of civilized life can come into being at all. If the American tribes, he says, have remained hunters, it is not simply because they have not increased in numbers sufficiently to render the pastoral or agricultural state necessary to them. Reasons which Malthus does not pretend to particularize,[170] and which he allows to be unconnected with mere increase or decrease of numbers, have prevented these tribes from ever trying to raise cattle or grow corn at all. “If hunger alone could have prompted the savage tribes of America to such a change in their habits, I do not conceive that there would have been a single nation of hunters and fishers remaining; but it is evident that some fortunate train of circumstances, in addition to this stimulus, is necessary for this purpose; and it is undoubtedly probable that these arts of obtaining food will be first invented and improved in those spots which are best suited to them, and where the natural fertility of the situation, by allowing a greater number of people to subsist together, would give the fairest chance to the inventive powers of the human mind.” “A certain degree of [political] security is perhaps still more necessary than richness of soil to encourage the change from the pastoral to the agricultural state.”[171] These passages are remarkable because they seem to contradict the general tenor of the author’s writings. We were told with great emphasis in the first edition of the essay that difficulties generate talents,[172] and even the second and later are full of approving commentaries on the proverb, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”[173] The contradiction is soon solved. Malthus has no faith in the civilizing power of competition when it means a struggle among starved men for bare life, but much faith in it when it means the struggle for greater comfort among those who already have the animal necessaries.[174] The significance of his admissions will be noticed later. Meanwhile it must be observed that the passage just quoted is not perfectly precise. The larger the society, the greater might be the division of labour and consequent stimulus to invention; but a tribe might be large and yet have little in it of a society, and still less of a division of labour. Without such favouring circumstances as Malthus mentions the progress cannot take place; but even with them it need not; they are therefore not the real motive power.
The account of the state of population among the South Sea Islanders,[175] which comes next in order to the chapter on the American Indians, is an illustration of these remarks. These savages live in a fertile country and yet they make no progress. As this is not the only point illustrated, it is worth while to look at the chapter in detail.
Malthus begins by observing that population must not be thought more subject to checks on an island than on a continent. The Abbé Raynal, in his book on the Indies, had tried to explain a number of modern customs that retarded population[176] by referring them to an insular origin. He thought that they were caused at first by the over-population of Britain and other islands, and were imported therefrom into the continents, to the perplexity of later ages. But as a matter of fact population on the mainlands is subject to the same laws as on the islands, though the limits are not so obvious to common observation, and the case is not put so neatly in a nutshell. A nation on the continent may be as completely surrounded by its enemies or its rivals, savage or civilized, as any islanders by the sea; and emigration may be as difficult in the one case as in the other. Both continent and island are peopled up to their actual produce. “There is probably no island yet known, the produce of which could not be further increased. This is all that can be said of the whole earth. Both are peopled up to their actual produce. And the whole earth is in this respect like an island.”[177] The earth is indeed more isolated than any island of the sea, for no emigration from it is possible. The question, therefore, to be asked about the whole earth as about any part of it, is, “By what means the inhabitants are reduced to such numbers as it can support?”
This was the question which forced itself on Captain Cook when he visited the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Some of his experiences there, especially in New Zealand, show that the native population was kept down in nearly the same way as the American. Their chief peculiarity is the extreme violence of their local feuds. The people of every village he visited petitioned him to destroy the people of the next, and “if I had listened to them I should have extirpated the whole race.” A sense of human kinship is impossible at so low a level of being; and the internecine wars of the New Zealanders were the chief check to their numbers, which, from the distressing effects of occasional scarcities, would seem always at the best to have been close to the limits of the food.
The first impression of common sense is that distress is natural where food is scanty, and unnatural where it is plentiful. But “if we turn our eyes from the thinly-scattered inhabitants of New Zealand to the crowded shores of Otaheite and the Society Islands” we find no such phenomenon. “All apprehension of death seems at first sight to be banished from a country that is described to be fruitful as the garden of the Hesperides.” But reflection tells us that happiness and plenty are the most powerful causes of increase. We might, therefore, expect a large population in Otaheite; at its first start it might double itself not in twenty-five but in fifteen years. Captain Cook estimated it (on his second voyage in 1773) as 204,000. How could a country about one hundred and twenty miles in circuit support an increase that doubled these numbers in twenty-five years? Emigration is impossible, for the other islands are in the same situation. Further cultivation is inadequate, for scientific invention is quite wanting. The answer is that the increase does not take place, and yet there is no miracle. Licentiousness among the higher classes, and infanticide amongst all classes, are freely practised. The free permission of infanticide no doubt, as Hume remarks,[178] tends as a rule rather to increase than to diminish population, for “by removing the terrors of too numerous a family it would engage many people in marriage,” and such is the force of natural affection, that comparatively few parents would carry out their first intentions. But in Otaheite in its old state custom had made infanticide easy, and it was a real check. War against other islands was a third check, frequently destroying the food as well as the people, thus striking down two generations at once. All these checks notwithstanding, the population was up to the level of the food, and there was as much scarcity and keen distress as on any barren island.
Such at least was the state of things discovered by Captain Cook in his three voyages (the last in 1778) and Captain Vancouver (in 1791). On the other hand, the author of A Missionary Voyage to the South Pacific Ocean in 1796–8 (London, 1799) found a people very scanty as compared with the food. The accuracy of both accounts is borne out by the description of the habits of the people at these two periods. Captain Cook says they were careful to save up every scrap of food, and yet suffered often from famine. The missionaries observe the frequency of famine in the Friendly Islands and the Marquesas, but say of the Otaheitans that they are extremely wasteful, and yet never seem to be in want. Even in the intervals between one of Cook’s voyages and another the state of the island had altered. Malthus sees here an illustration of two facts. The one is that, apart from changes in the standard of living, population fluctuates between great excess and great defect, great numbers with great mortality, and great comfort with rapid multiplication of numbers. The other, which explains the first, is that any cause affecting population, either towards increase or towards decrease, continues to act for some time after the disappearance of the circumstances that first occasioned it. For example, over-populousness would lead to wars,[179] and the enmities of these wars would long survive their first occasion. Again, over-populousness would lead to greater infanticide and vice, which would become habitual. New circumstances would, no doubt, after a time bring new habits, and, to use the author’s words, would “restore the population, which could not long be kept below its natural level without the most extreme violence. How far European contact may operate in Otaheite with this extreme violence and prevent it from recovering its former population is a point which experience only can determine. But, should this be the case, I have no doubt that on tracing the causes of it, we should find them to be aggravated vice and misery.”[180] As a matter of fact either European contact has caused a diminution, or exacter inquiry has made a lower estimate of the population of all Polynesia. The people of the whole Society Islands is reckoned at between 15,000 and 18,000,[181] which is a long way from Cook’s estimate of 204,000 for Otaheite alone. We can hardly believe, however, that the vice and misery of Otaheite are more than ten times as great as they were in 1773; and perhaps we may suppose Malthus to mean that, if the European influences were of the same character at the end as they were at the beginning, and were as pernicious to the Polynesian as to the Red Indian, the language of pessimism would be justified. The passage at least shows how unfair it is to suppose Malthus to desire at all costs a small population; he is careful to say that, while vice in Otaheite by reducing the numbers caused a transient plenty among the survivors, still “a cause which may prevent any particular evil may be beyond comparison worse than the evil itself.”[182] Life itself may be bought too dear.
No good is done, however, by denying that excessive numbers are an evil, or by optimistic assertion that if men are only good they will be happy. There is at least one Polynesian island whose past history gives a picturesque proof of the contrary. Pitcairn, “the lonely isle of the Mutineers,” was a moral contrast to Otaheite. The inhabitants owed nothing good to their parents, who were the mutineers of H.M.S. ‘Bounty,’ and the women of Otaheite that came with them in 1790, when they first took refuge in Pitcairn Island. They owed all to the religious teaching of John Adams, which made them so good, that there were few like them on the earth.[183] But in latitudes just touching the tropics, with a single square mile of poor soil, surrounded by wide ocean, they had no outlet for trade and modern arts. Like the inhabitants of Godwin’s Utopia,[184] they soon peopled the little country to the full extent of the food that could be got by the old methods, and, unlike the Utopians, they had not skill to invent new. If they had not drawn the line for themselves, misery would have done it for them. Their little colony at its first founding consisted of fifteen men and twelve women. Fourteen men and many women died off in the course of the ten years which passed before the time of moral regeneration. But they left many children; and, when the patriarch John Adams was visited by a passing ship in 1814, he was surrounded by a happy circle of devout families. Rapidly outgrowing the resources of the place, these simple folk removed in 1831 to Tahiti, eighty-seven strong. Some remained there; others had no pleasure in their new abode, and came back to suffer affliction with the people of God, believing with Malthus that “a cause which may prevent any particular evil may be beyond all comparison worse than the evil itself.” The evil was real, however, and, in default of celibacy or new ways of bread winning, their only cure seemed emigration. So in 1855, Tahiti seeming ineligible, they journeyed further west to Norfolk Island. Though there are more than four hundred and forty to the square mile in England and Wales, two hundred people of this primitive sort had been certainly too many for the single square mile of Pitcairn Island; and they did not leave a moment too soon. Home sickness brought back two entire families (of seventeen persons) in 1859. One or two stray travellers joined them five years afterwards; but, with allowance for these, we find that the increase of population on Pitcairn Island reaches the highest estimate of Malthus. When the English Admiral D’Horsey visited the place in 1878, the quarter of a hundred had grown in nineteen years, at the moderate cost of twelve deaths, to a population of ninety[185] persons. The primeval virtues will avail little without the modern arts.
Returning to Malthus, we find him following an order of his own, in rough conformity with the orthodox progress from deer to sheep, and from sheep to corn. He takes us from Polynesian savages to the nomad pastoral nations of ancient Europe.[186] The vast migrations and their momentous historical effects he ascribes to the “constant tendency in the human race to increase” beyond its food, and thinks that when history has been rewritten it will contain more of this.[187] “The misfortune of history is, that while the particular motives of a few princes and leaders are sometimes detailed with accuracy, the general causes which crowd their standards with willing followers are totally overlooked.”[188] At first sight the phenomenon of civilized agricultural nations unable to repel the invasion of shepherds seems incredible; a country in pasture cannot possibly support so many inhabitants as a country in tillage. A shepherd, it is true, is nearer to the skilled labourer than a hunter; he does not simply take what nature gives him, where nature puts it; he keeps the desired objects of consumption under his own control, and his life is stronger because more social. Early African colonization, as Adam Smith pointed out, was less successful than early American, because the natives, being shepherds and even farmers rather than fishermen, were stronger in their resources and more united than the American aborigines, so that the European intruders were not able to displace them.[189] We should have expected the Scythian, Cimbrian, and Gothic invaders of ancient times to have had a similar rebuff. “But what renders nations of shepherds so formidable is the power which they possess of moving altogether, and the necessity they frequently feel of exerting this power in search of fresh pasture for their herds.”[190] They have always in their breeding stock a reserve of food for an emergency. The mere consciousness that their mode of life does not bind them to one place gives them less anxiety about providing for a family. Therefore, when they exhaust one region and begin to feel the pinch of want, they make an armed emigration on the scale of whole tribes at once, for the occupation of more fruitful regions, and, as a rule, the conquest of them by force. The law of their life is a series of periodical “struggles for existence”[191] between one nation and another, in which the fittest survive at the cost of a prodigious waste of human life.
The milder initial stage of this process is illustrated by the separation of Abram and Lot in the book of Genesis.[192] Abram “was very rich in cattle.” “Lot also had flocks and herds and tents. And the land was not able to bear them that they might dwell together, for their substance was great, so that they could not dwell together. And there was a strife between the herdmen of Abram’s cattle and the herdmen of Lot’s cattle.” They agreed, therefore, to separate, Lot choosing the fertile valley of the Jordan, Abram going to the left into the land of Canaan. Migrations of the same sort, more or less peaceable, are described by modern writers as extending the Russian people from time to time farther and farther to the south and east.[193] In the instances best known to history the migrations were far from peaceable, and the puzzle has been to account for their recurrence. The slaughter of the German barbarians by Marius, Cæsar, Drusus, Tiberius, Germanicus did not prevent the reappearance of similar hordes of invaders a generation later. Claudius destroyed a quarter of a million of Goths; Aurelian and Probus had the same work to do again. Under Diocletian the barbarians, finding the conquest of Rome too much for them, slaughtered one another in frontier wars. No losses seemed to exhaust the permanent possibilities of population in those quarters. At last in the fourth century “clouds of barbarians seemed to collect from all parts of the northern hemisphere. Gathering fresh darkness and terror as they rolled on, the congregated bodies at length obscured the sun of Italy and sunk the Western world in night.”[194]
Why were the resources of the North so inexhaustible? Simply because the power of increase is inexhaustible. The North was not, it is true, more densely peopled then than now. “The climate of ancient Germany has been mollified and the soil fertilized by the labour of ten centuries from the time of Charlemagne. The same extent of ground which at present maintains in ease and plenty a million of husbandmen and artificers, was unable to supply a hundred thousand lazy warriors with the simple necessaries of life. The Germans abandoned their immense forests to the exercise of hunting, employed in pasturage the most considerable part of their lands, bestowed on the small remainder a rude and careless cultivation, and then accused the scantiness and sterility of a country that refused to maintain the multitude of its inhabitants. When the return of famine severely admonished them of the importance of the arts, the national distress was sometimes alleviated by the emigration of a third, perhaps, or a fourth part of their youth.”[195] In short, the countries were more than fully peopled up to their actual produce; and, though by agriculture the actual produce would have been made greater, yet agriculture was not extended. The passion of the Germans for wine did not lead them to plant vineyards by the Rhine and Danube, but to rob the vintage of Italy. “Pigrum quin immo et iners videtur sudore acquirere quod possis sanguine parare.”[196] Malthus supposes that even the Mark system of land-holding, with its absence of cities and its periodical redistributions of land, may have sprung from a political motive, the fear of accustoming the people to a settled agricultural life, and the desire to make emigration less irksome to them.[197] So long as there were weaker peoples to be plundered, the northern nations might freely double their numbers every twenty-five years, or oftener, and descend again on Italy and the South. Only when the whole was occupied by their own people who were not likely to be less stout for defence than for conquest, were the hordes forced back. Not perhaps till gunpowder was invented was Europe finally safe against them. Long after their last inland invasions, the Norsemen found their way by sea to the shores of England and France.
Gibbon’s account of the matter is, according to Malthus, substantially true. The only flaw is that he thinks it necessary, in denying the greater populousness of North Europe in ancient times, to deny the possibility of a rapid increase of population.[198] The German people were on the whole virtuous and healthy in their manners of living, and, the checks to increase being mainly the positive ones of war and famine, the increase itself was prodigious. But Gibbon is greatly in advance of Montesquieu, who believes with Sir William Temple, Mariana, and Machiavelli, that the northern countries were, as a matter of fact, more densely peopled then than they are now, and that, further, when the Romans repelled them, a huge multitude was driven far north and remained there biding its time. The same (says Montesquieu) happened under Charlemagne, and would happen again if a modern prince were to make the same ravages in Europe; “the nations repulsed to the north, backed against the limits of the universe, would there make a firm stand, till the moment when they would inundate and conquer Europe a third time.”[199] We are to suppose these immense multitudes living “at the limits of the universe” on ice and air for some hundreds of years. If this is to answer to the question-begging question, why the North is less fully peopled than it once was, it involves a miracle. But nothing more supernatural than ordinary laws is really needed to explain the movements of pastoral nations a thousand years ago. They are the same that govern the Tartars and Bedouins now.[200]
In the modern nomads,[201] it is true, the comparative simplicity of the circumstances and the comparative thoroughness of our knowledge about them, enable us to see plainly that the local distribution of the people is in strict accordance with the local distribution of the food, in other words, with “the quantity of food the people can obtain in the actual state of their industry and habits.” We should see the same thing of the rest of the world’s inhabitants, if the complicated commerce of civilized nations did not make it less gross and palpable. The power of the earth to support life may be compared with the power of a horse to carry burdens. He is strong in proportion to the strength of his weakest part, as a chain to the strength of its weakest link; and the earth’s powers of nourishment are great in proportion to their greatness in the worst seasons of the year.[202] Again, owing to imperfect facilities for distribution, one part of a society may suffer want when another is in plenty.[203] Among the Tartars and the Arabs this is plainly seen; and it is clear, too, how the waste of life from war not only acts as a direct check on population, but checks it indirectly by repressing productive industry. Its fruits would have no chance of preservation. “Even the construction of a well requires some funds or labour in advance, and war may destroy in one day the work of many months and the resources of a whole year.”[204] When once warlike habits have become fixed, the two evils, war and scarcity, reproduce and perpetuate one another. The encouragements held out to large families by the Mohammedan religion have a like effect. “The promise of Paradise to every man who had ten children would but little increase their numbers, though it might greatly increase their misery.”[205] It could only increase their numbers if it increased their food, and it could not increase their food without changing their warlike habits into habits of industry. Failing this, it simply creates a constant uneasiness (through want and poverty) that multiplies occasions of war. Fortunately for himself, the Arab often proportions his religious obedience to the extent of his resources,[206] and in hard times, “when there is a pig at hand and no Koran,” he thinks best to eat what God has given him.
Nothing but increase of food will permanently increase population, and where there is food the increase will reach up to it. In those parts of Africa that have furnished the Western slave supplies, there has been no discernible gap from the “hundred years’ exportation of negroes which has blackened half America.”[207] Even in Egypt, where there is a striking contrast between natural fertility and human lethargy, the cause is not any deficiency in the principle of increase. It is that property is insecure, the government being despotic and its exactions indefinite. It is not the want of population that has checked industry, but the want of industry that has checked population; and it is bad government that has occasioned the want of industry. “Ignorance and despotism seem to have no tendency to destroy the passion which prompts to increase, but they effectually destroy the checks to it from reason and forethought.... Industry cannot exist without foresight and security; the indolence of the savage is well known, and the poor Egyptian or Abyssinian farmer without capital, who rents land which is let out yearly to the highest bidder, and who is constantly subject to the demands of his tyrannical masters, to the casual plunder of an enemy, and not unfrequently to the violation of his miserable contract, can have no heart to be industrious, and, if he had, could not exercise that industry with success. Even poverty itself, which appears to be the great spur to industry, when it has once passed certain limits almost ceases to operate. The indigence which is hopeless destroys all vigorous exertion, and confines the efforts to what is sufficient for bare existence.[208] It is the hope of bettering our condition, and the fear of want rather than want itself, that is the best stimulus to industry; and its most constant and best directed efforts will almost invariably be found among a class of people above the class of the wretchedly poor.”[209] This passage repeats an idea expressed in every book of the essay.[210] Government can retard the increase of population both directly and indirectly, but can only advance it indirectly, namely, by encouraging industry, more especially agriculture. For example, industrious agriculture has made China capable of bearing a great population, though other causes of a more equivocal character have made it exceed its great capacities, and its excessive numbers are cut down by famine and child murder.[211] The Roman emperors found it impossible by legislation to promote the increase of the old Roman stock, because they found it impossible to restore the old Roman habits of industry, though believers in the superior populousness of ancient nations used to mistake their intentions for accomplished facts.
In the eighteenth-century dispute about the populousness of ancient nations (one particular skirmish in the general battle of the books) we have seen that Malthus declares for the moderns. He gives his opinion in detached passages; but, putting together the different parts wherever we can find them, we discover his proof to depend on two principles, which are corollaries of the primary doctrine of the essay. The first is, that without the extension of agriculture or the better distribution of its fruits there can be no increase of population;[212] the second is, that whatever is unfavourable to industry is to that extent unfavourable to population.[213]
Now in the early days of Greece and Rome[214] the population ought on these principles to have been a large one, for not only was agriculture actively prosecuted, but property and wealth were more equally divided among the people than in later times. On the other hand, the numbers were always up to the level of the resources; and the smallness of the political divisions made law-givers like Solon, and theorists like Plato and Aristotle, conscious of the risk of over-population and full of plans to provide against it. It is one of Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s Republic that Plato has not sufficiently met this difficulty, or realized that a community of goods or an equal distribution of property is impossible without a limitation of families. If every one may have as many children as he pleases, the result will soon be poverty and sedition. Of the preventive checks actually recommended by the highest wisdom of the Greek world, the mildest is late marriages; the rest include exposure and abortion. Colonization was rather adopted in practice than recommended in theory. Frequent wars and occasional plagues were the chief positive checks.
In Rome even more evidently than in Greece[215] the causes that produced inequality of property led also to thinness of population. In our own days the absorption of small proprietors by large would have this effect in a less degree, because the large would need to employ the labour of the small. In Rome the labour was done by slaves; and the wonder was not that the number of free citizens should decrease, but that any should exist at all, except the proprietors.[216]
Yet the legislation of Augustus in favour of marriage, and the universal lamentation of the later Roman writers over the extinction of the old Roman stock, are no more than a presumption that the population was decreasing, not a proof of its actual smallness, while the prevalence of war and infanticide, so often used to prove the same point, tend really to do the opposite. They are for the time positive encouragements to marriage, for people will not hesitate to bring children into the world, if they are either free to kill off the superfluous or certain to find sad vacancies ready for them.[217] In the former case, as we noticed, parental feeling will often interfere with the infanticide, and save rather too many than too few.[218] Wars, on the other hand, may injure the quality of the population by removing the most stalwart and even the most intelligent men; but there is as much food as before, there is more room, and there are therefore more marriages, till all the gaps are filled, even to overflowing.[219] Livy need not have wondered that in the Volscian wars the more were killed the more seemed to come on. The like is true of plague and famine; epidemics, like the small-pox, have never permanently lessened the population, though they have increased the mortality of the infected countries.[220] To take only one instance (from Süssmilch)—a third of the people in Prussia and Lithuania were destroyed by the plague in 1710, and in 1711 the number of marriages was very nearly double the average.[221] Emigration in like manner may drain off the best blood of a nation, but cannot reduce its numbers for any length of time, unless the nation is learning a new standard of comfort. Greece and Rome were not less populous because they were great colonizers.[222] The known existence of a number of very active checks to population, instead of proving that the population was absolutely small, might more naturally, other things being equal, prove it to have been absolutely large. It might be argued that, if the population had not been great, fewer and less potent checks would have done the work.[223]
But other things were not equal. We know that the gratuitous distribution of foreign corn had ruined Roman husbandry.[224] We know that even the labour of the slaves who had supplanted the free labourers of Italy had not been sufficiently (or sufficiently well) directed to agriculture. Moreover, the increase by marriage in the number of slaves did not even balance the decrease in the number of the free men; else why should the Romans need to import fresh cargoes of slaves every year from all parts of the world?[225]
In short, the Roman habits had become “unfavourable to industry, and therefore to population.” The very necessity for such a law as the Papia Poppæa would indicate a moral depravity inconsistent with habits of industry. This strong argument had escaped even Hume, who thought that the people would increase very fast under the Peace of Trajan and the Antonines, forgetting that the people could not unlearn their habits in so short a time; unlearning is harder than learning, especially for a whole people; and, “if wars do not depopulate much when industry is in vigour, peace does not increase population much when industry is languishing.”[226] Contrariwise, it might be argued that the prevention of child-murder in India will not cause over-population, when it is part of a general policy accustoming the people to European habits.
Allow, then, that general viciousness is inconsistent with general industry, and it follows that those ancient nations in which the first prevailed were less populous than the modern. This seems to be the argument of Malthus brought to a focus. From the absence of censuses,[227] it is strictly deductive; there could not have been so many people as now, and therefore there were not.[228]
Expressed in more technical language, the meaning is, that where there is nothing present but the positive check and the lower kind of preventive, the habits of the people are necessarily such as to hinder an increase of food and thereby of population. When Europe was less civilized, it was not more, but less thickly peopled.[229]
This argument seems to be weakened by one consideration—that the poor in our day put more into their idea of necessaries; they have a higher standard of living than the poor 2000 years ago. It might therefore be said with justice that over-population (a peopling beyond the food) begins much sooner with us than with them, for it begins at a point much farther removed from starvation, and that therefore with the ancients a given amount of food would go farther and feed more. But, if we look only to the poor in each case, the difference between the ancient standard of comfort and the modern is unhappily much smaller than the difference between their meagre industrial resources and our ample ones, for our powers of production have grown far more rapidly than the comfort of our labouring population. Such difference as there is in the standards is only made possible by moral restraint, which has a closer affinity with modern civilization than with ancient or mediæval.[230] The history of modern civilization is largely the history of the gradual victory of the third check over the two others; and, as one of the chief allies of the third has been commercial ambition, the victory of moral restraint, by causing a larger industry, has caused in the end not a smaller, but a larger population.[231] The increase by being deferred has been made only the more certain and permanent.