CHAPTER VII.
ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND.
Prevailing Checks—Proposed Census of 1753—Brown’s Estimate—Depopulation of England in Eighteenth Century—Opposing Arguments—Census of 1801—Interpretation of Returns—Relative Nature of the Question of Populousness—Scotland to England as Country to Town—Industrial changes since the Union—Ireland under English rule in Eighteenth Century and after—The Wall of Brass—Virtue without Wisdom—The Potato Standard—The Emigration Committee—The New Departure.
In dealing with the question of population in his own country,[353] Malthus tries to answer at least three distinct questions:—What were the checks actually at work in those days? Had the numbers of the people increased, or not, in the eighteenth century? What conclusions on either point may be drawn from the English census?
The first question was answered with comparative fulness in the essay of 1798. It is remarked there that in England the middle and upper classes increase at a slow rate, because they are always anxious to keep their station, and afraid of the expense of marriage.[354] No man, as a rule, would like his wife’s social condition to be out of keeping with her habits and inclinations. Two or three steps of descent will be considered by most people as a real evil. “If society be held desirable, it surely must be free, equal, and reciprocal society, where benefits are conferred as well as received, and not such as the dependant finds with his patron or the poor with the rich.” So it happens that many men, of liberal education and limited income, do not give effect to an early attachment by an early marriage. When their passion is too strong or their judgment too weak for this restraint, no doubt they have blessings that counterbalance the obvious evils; “but I fear it must be owned that the more general consequences of such marriages are rather calculated to justify than to repress the forebodings of the prudent.”[355] What Malthus desires, as we infer from the general tenor of his book, is that all classes without exception should show reluctance to impair their standard of living; and his hatred of the Poor Laws is due to his conviction that they hinder this end. The subject will be more fully discussed by-and-by.[356] In the chapters on England it is little more than mentioned, the author devoting himself chiefly to the statistical data of the census and registers.
In this connection it was impossible for him to avoid the question that had long agitated the minds of politicians. Had the numbers of the English people been decreasing or increasing since the Revolution of 1688, and especially in the course of the eighteenth century? Economists of the present day are overloaded with statistics; but, when Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations, he was unaware of the numbers of his own nation. To estimate population without a census is to study language without a dictionary; there had been no census since the coming of the Armada,[357] and it was not till one hundred years after that event that statistical studies came much into favour. An annual enumeration of the people was proposed in the House of Commons in 1753, as a means of knowing the numbers of our poor.[358] But the proposal was resisted as anti-Scriptural and un-English, exposing our weakness to the foreigner and spending public money to settle the wagers of the learned. There was probably a fear[359] that the tax-gatherer would follow on the heels of the enumerator, as he had done in France. The House of Lords beat off the bill, and left England in darkness about the numbers of its people for another half-century, though something like a census of Scotland was made for Government in 1755.[360] As without the Irish Famine we might not have had the total Repeal of the Corn Laws, so without the worst of all possible harvests in 1799 we might have had no census in 1801, for Parliament, when they passed Mr. Abbot’s Enumeration Bill in 1800, looked to an enumeration of the people to guide them in opening and closing the ports to foreign grain. The practical question about the increase or decline of English numbers was connected, in logic as well as in time, with the controversy about the comparative populousness of ancient and modern nations. The same year (1753) which saw the attempt to settle by census the question of England’s depopulation, saw also the publication of Dr. Robert Wallace’s reply to Hume’s Essay on the Populousness of Ancient Nations, in his Dissertations on the Numbers of Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times. One of Henry Fox’s objections to Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (of 1753) was that it would check population.[361] We are told[362] that the academical discussion roused attention on the Continent, and a French savant, Deslandes, published an estimate of the numbers of modern nations, in which England was made much inferior to France, having only eight millions against twenty. This was too much for English patriotism. Even in our own day a great war and a few reverses usually fill England for a year or two with forebodings of decay. Written in 1757 (at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War), Dr. John Brown’s Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times was only the most popular of a host of gloomy pamphlets too prejudiced to be of much use for statistics.[363] Dr. Adam Anderson[364] sides with the moderns and the optimists. The contributions of Dr. Brackenridge and Richard Forster to the discussion survive by the mention of them in Price’s Observations (pp. 182–3) and in George Chalmers’ Estimate (ch. xi. 193), this last giving on the whole perhaps the most lucid history of the whole depopulation controversy. We know from Goldsmith’s Traveller (1764) and Deserted Village (1770), with its charming illogical preface, that even in peace the subject was not out of men’s thoughts. A similar panic in Switzerland, which owed its beginning to England,[365] seems afterwards to have reacted on England itself. The American War of Independence revived the languishing interest in the controversy. This time it was the English and not the antiquarian topic that fell into powerful hands. Dr. Richard Price, the Radical dissenter, the friend of Dr. Franklin, and the inventor of Pitt’s Sinking Fund, did battle, in his Observations on Reversionary Payments (1769), on behalf of the pessimistic view; Arthur Young, the agriculturist, the traveller and the talker, led the opposition to him,[366] and was supported by Sir Frederick Eden, William Wales, John Howlett, and last but not least by George Chalmers.[367]
Gregory King[368] and Justice Hale[369] in the seventeenth century, Dr. Campbell[370] in the eighteenth, had agreed that the numbers of Norman England must needs have been small, for the government was bad; Dr. Price, on the contrary, had maintained the paradox that, though the Revolution of 1688 brought a “happier government,” the numbers of the people had ever since declined.[371] He reasoned from the decreased number of dwelling-houses assessed to window tax and house duty, as compared with those assessed to hearth (or chimney) money before the Revolution.[372] Opponents denied the accuracy of his data, and thought his estimate of four and a half or five inhabitants to a house too low. He pointed to the evil influence of a “devouring metropolis,” a head too large for the body, and of great cities that were the “graves of mankind.”[373] Here, too, both the data and the inference were doubtful. He argued from the decreasing produce of the Excise duties. Opponents answered that, even if the figures were right, a changed public taste had lessened the consumption of many taxable articles, and many taxed ones were supplied free by smuggling.[374] He laid stress on the difficulty the Government found in raising troops in the middle of the eighteenth century as compared with the end of the seventeenth, though he took this as a symptom, not a cause, and complained at the same time quite consistently that the increase of the army and navy and of military expenditure in three great wars had been a potent cause of diminished population. Opponents answered that the first was really a symptom not of decline but of prosperity; the abundance of other employments kept men from the need of enlisting in the army; and they answered too often, that the second (the war expenditure) was good for trade. They were safer in urging that for the first part of the century the long peace (1727–40) and the good harvests (1731–50) made the presumption of increase very strong.[375] Price made much of the emigrations to America and to the East and West Indies. It was answered that the known possibility of emigration would give men at home the greater courage to have a family. Even the engrossing and consolidation of farms and the enclosure of commons, which he considered to be against population, would, said his opponents, increase the food, and therefore the people, though perhaps not the people on the spot;[376] and the increase of paupers was thought to be a sign of overflowing numbers. He saw a cause of depopulation in the increased luxury and extravagance of the people of England. At the beginning of the century gin-drinking was credited with an evil effect on population.[377] When the opponents of Price did not meet this with Mandeville’s sophism, luxury benefits trade, they answered that what had become greater was not the national vices but the national standard of comfort, the expansion of which implied an increase of general wealth and presumably of population.[378] Beyond doubt too (it was argued) the general health was better, and medical science had won some triumphs.[379] Malthus, however, warns us against this argument; great unhealthiness is no proof of a small population nor healthiness of a large.[380] In the ten years after the American War of Independence (1783–93) the prosperity of the country seems to have advanced by leaps and bounds, only to make the subsequent depression the more observable. Dr. Price, who did not live to see the relapse, seems to have confessed his error. “In allusion to a diminishing population, on which subject it appears that he has so widely erred, he says very candidly that perhaps he may have been insensibly influenced to maintain an opinion once advanced.”[381] Yet public opinion was not fully convinced till 1801, when “the answers to the Population Act at length happily rescued the question of the population of this country from the obscurity in which it had been so long involved.”[382]
There is no good reason to believe that at the end of last century the fear of depopulation had given place to a fear of over-population.[383] Malthus and Arthur Young stood almost alone in their opinion.[384] Alarm was felt by the agricultural interest, not lest there should be an excessive population, but lest the population should get its food from abroad. The population it was feared had grown beyond the English supplies of food; but of over-population, in the wider sense of an excess beyond any existing food, the general public and the squires had learned little or nothing in these years; and we have no reason to attribute to Malthus any share in the merit of passing the Enumeration Bill. It was brought forward in an autumn session of Parliament (Nov. 1800) specially convened because of the scarcity. It was moved by Mr. Abbot,[385] who had made his name more as a financier than as an economist, and was chiefly remarkable afterwards as a vigorous opponent of Catholic Emancipation. The motion was seconded by Mr. Wilberforce; and the combination of finance and philanthropy was irresistible. Malthus, though he is the true interpreter of the census, neither caused it in the first instance nor found it of immediate service in spreading his doctrines.
The first census would hardly have justified him in treating as obsolete the old quarrel about depopulation; it had decided only the absolute numbers in the first year of the nineteenth century, not the progress or relapse during the eighteenth. Besides giving the actual numbers of the people in 1801, the census no doubt gave “a table of the population of England and Wales throughout the last century calculated from the births.” But the births, though a favourite, were an unsafe criterion; and, for the population at the Revolution of 1688, Malthus would depend more on “the old calculations from the number of houses.”[386] He finds no difficulty of principle in admitting with Mr. Rickman, the editor of the census returns and observations thereon, that the rapid increase of the English people since 1780 was due to the decrease of deaths rather than to the increase of births.[387] Such a phenomenon was not only possible but common, for the rate of births out of relation to the rate of deaths could give no sure means of judging the numbers. After a famine[388] or pestilence, for example, the rate of births might be twice as high as usual, and by the standard of births the numbers of the people would be at their maximum, when a comparison with the rate of deaths or an actual enumeration would show them to be at the minimum,[389] whereas a low rate of births, if lives were prolonged by great healthiness, might certainly mean an increase, perhaps a high increase, of numbers. But at the particular time in question the factory system was coming into being, and manufacturing towns were growing great at the expense of the country districts. The conditions of life in towns are at the best inferior to those in the country; new openings for trade would add not only to the marriages but to the deaths and the births.[390] The presumption was not all in favour of healthiness; and the registers at that particular time could not tell the whole truth;—the drain of recruits for foreign service would keep down the lists of burials at home, while allowing an increase of births and marriages.[391] For these and other reasons, Malthus, while he agrees with Rickman that the general health has improved, trusts little to his calculations from registers; and concludes that even the census gives us no clear light on the movement of population in the eighteenth century. We can be certain that population increased during the last twenty years of it, and almost certain that the movement was not downwards but upwards since the Peace of Paris; and we have good ground for believing that it was rather upwards than downwards even in the earliest years of the century, during the good harvests and the long peace of Walpole,[392] and that over the whole country the movement of population was less fluctuating in England than on the Continent.[393] The author’s admission, that the proportions of the births, deaths, and marriages were very different in our country in his time from what they used to be,[394] seems to put the census of 1801 out of court altogether in the question of depopulation, especially as there were no previous enumerations with which to compare it. The figures from the parish registers for the whole of the century, that were included in the “returns pursuant to the Population Act,” in addition to the enumeration, turned out on examination to be unsatisfactory.[395]
Malthus, however, was able to prove some solid conclusions from the census of 1801. It had shown, for example, as regards marriages, that the proportion of them to the whole numbers of the people was, in 1801, as 1 to 123⅕, a smaller proportion than anywhere except in Norway and Switzerland,[396] and the more likely to be true, because Hardwicke’s Marriage Act had made registration of marriages more careful than of burials and baptisms. In the early part of the eighteenth century, the pessimist, Dr. Short, had estimated the proportion (with much probability) as 1 to 115; and it would appear, therefore, that at neither end of the century were the marriages in a high proportion to the numbers, or had population increased at its highest rate. Again, Malthus thinks it proved by the census that, since population has as a matter of fact increased in England in spite of a diminished rate of marriages, the increase has been at cost of the mortality, the fewer marriages being partly a cause, partly a consequence, of the fewer deaths of the later years.[397] Those that married late might have consoled themselves with the reflection that they were lessening not the numbers but the mortality of the nation. It was no doubt difficult to estimate the extent to which such causes operated, or the degree in which the national health had been improved. In any case the census guides us better than the registers,[398] for it carries us beyond the inferred numbers to numbers actually counted out at a given time. Neither the census nor the registers can be rightly interpreted without a knowledge of the social condition, government, and history of the people concerned. In undeveloped countries, like America and Russia, or in any old countries after special mortality, a large proportion of births may be a good sign; “but in the average state of a well-peopled territory there cannot well be a worse sign than a large proportion of births, nor can there well be a better sign than a small proportion.” Sir Francis d’Ivernois had very justly observed that, if the various states of Europe published annually an exact account of their population, noting carefully in a second column the exact age at which the children die, this second column would show the comparative goodness of the governments, and the comparative happiness of their subjects;—a simple arithmetical statement might then be more conclusive than the cleverest argument. Malthus assents, but adds that “we should need to attend less to the column giving the number of children born, than to the one giving the number which reached manhood, and this number will almost invariably be the greatest where the proportion of the births to the whole population is the least.”[399] Tried by this standard, which is much more truly the central doctrine of Malthus than the ratios, our own country was even then better than all, save two, European countries. Tried by it to-day, we have still a good place. Though no great European countries, except Austro-Hungary and Germany, have had more marriages, in the twenty years from 1861 to 1880, not only these, but Holland, Spain, and Italy, have had more births, and all of them except Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have had more deaths, in proportion to their numbers.[400]
One great advantage of the census is, that it enables the registrars to calculate from their own data, with certain sure limits of told-out numbers behind and before them. “When the registers contain all the births and deaths, and there are the means [given by the census] of setting out from a known population, it is obviously the same as an actual enumeration.”[401] Malthus suggested in 1803 that the experiment of 1801 should be repeated every ten years, and that registrars’ reports should be made every year.[402] This has been done; and, if both have been accurate, then the registers of the intervening years, on the basis of the decennial enumeration, ought to make us able to calculate the numbers for any intervening year. Accordingly, the population of England in 1881, as calculated from the births and deaths, was little more than one-sixth of a million different from the numbers as actually counted over on the night of the 4th of April in that year.[403] The growth in the last decade, 1871 to 1881, was higher than in any since 1831–41;[404] the births were more and the deaths fewer than usual. Another London has been added to our numbers in ten years.[405]
This gives no sure ground, however, for prediction. To suppose a country’s rate of increase permanent is hardly less fallacious than to suppose an invariable order of births and deaths over the world generally. Even if we are beyond the time when we need to make any allowance for increasing accuracy and fulness, and if we may assume that no given census has any units to sweep into its net that through their fear or an official’s carelessness escaped its predecessor, still we cannot take the rate of increase from one census to another as a sure indication of the future. With some qualifications the words of Malthus apply to us in 1881 quite as accurately as to our fathers in 1811: “This is a rate of increase which in the nature of things cannot be permanent. It has been occasioned by the stimulus of a greatly increased demand for labour, combined with a greatly increased power of production, both in agriculture and manufactures. These are the two elements which form the most effective encouragement to a rapid increase of population. What has taken place is a striking illustration of the principle of population, and a proof that, in spite of great towns, manufacturing occupations, and the gradually acquired habits of an opulent and luxuriant people, if the resources of a country will admit of a rapid increase, and if these resources are so advantageously distributed as to occasion a constantly increasing demand for labour, the population will not fail to keep pace with them.”[406] It was a rate of increase which he saw would double the population in less than fifty-five years; and this doubling has really happened. The numbers for England in 1801 were 8,892,536; and in 1851 they were 17,927,609. Malthus had not anticipated any greater changes in manufacture and trade than those of his own day; and he clearly expected that the rate of increase would not continue and the numbers would not be doubled. The one thing certain was the impossibility of safe prediction on the strength of any existing rate. A writer at the beginning of this century prophesied the extinction of the Turkish people in one hundred years; Sir William Petty at the end of the seventeenth century predicted that in 1800 London would have 5,359,000 inhabitants. But the Turks are not yet extinct; London in 1800 had less than a million of people, and has taken eighty years more to raise them to the number in the prophecy.[407]
If prediction was difficult in the case of England, it was not less so in the case of the other parts of the United Kingdom. The conditions of society and industry were quite different in the three countries; and to judge of the actual or probable growth of population in Scotland or Ireland, we must first, as with England, clearly understand these conditions. In the early part of this century even more than now, Scotland[408] stood to England as the country districts of England now stand to its great towns. Continual migration from country to town may be said to have been its normal state; and the largest towns were in England. The change from a militant and feudal to an industrial society was nowhere so marked as in Scotland after the Union, and especially after the rebellion of 1745. The hereditary judgeships of highland chiefs were swept away; the relation between chief and clansmen became the unromantic relation of landlord and tenant. The displacement of household work by the factory system, and of hand labour by machinery, crowded the great towns of Scotland at the expense of the country districts; and crowded the great towns and manufacturing districts of England at the expense of Scotland. The flood of North Britons into England was not of Bute’s making; and it was greatest after and not before the Peace of Paris, although under that peace and a stable government the farming, the manufacturing, the banking, and the foreign trading of Scotland itself had grown great enough (it might have seemed) to employ the whole population at home. Cotton manufacture, which on the whole is the typical industry of these latter days, was peculiarly English.[409] Sheep-farming at home and cotton-spinning in England combined to depopulate the Scotch highlands and much of the lowlands. The highlands, with their strongly-marked physical features and strictly limited industrial possibilities, were somewhat in the position of Norway. In the highlands proper there were no mineral riches; there were moorlands, mountains, streams, lochs, heather, bracken, peat, and bog; the patches of cultivable soil would bear a scanty crop of oats, and perhaps clover, barley, or potatoes.[410] This description applied to a large half of entire Scotland; and we must bear it in mind to understand the saying of Malthus in 1803: “Scotland is certainly over-peopled, but not so much as it was a century or half a century ago, when it contained fewer inhabitants.”[411] The highlands are over their whole extent what the lowlands are as regards their hills, fit only for sheep. Sutherland has about thirteen inhabitants to the square mile now, and Midlothian seven hundred and forty-six; but Sutherland and not Midlothian may be over-peopled. Sutherland as compared with her former self, when she had thirty or forty to the square mile, may be more or she may be less over-peopled than she once was; we cannot tell till we know what her wealth was and how it was distributed.
Under the patriarchal government[412] of early times the wealth of the country consisted literally in its men. If a chief were asked the rent of his estate, he would answer that it raised five hundred men; the tenant paid him in military service. Adam Smith remembers that in the Jacobite Rebellion, which disturbed his country at the time he was studying at Oxford, “Mr. Cameron of Lochiel, a gentleman of Lochaber in [the west highlands of] Scotland, whose rent never exceeded £500 [English] a year, carried, in 1745, eight hundred of his own people into the rebellion with him.”[413] Subdivision of land meant more retainers and greater honour; and so the highlands were peopled not to the full extent of the work to be done, but actually to the full extent of the bare food got from the soil.[414] On the establishment of a strong government and the abolition of their hereditary judicial privileges,[415] the chiefs soon became willing to convert the value in men into a value in money, exchanging dignity for profit. They no longer encouraged their tenants to have large families; and yet they made no efforts to remove the habits, which the tenants had formed, of having them.[416] It was this change that gave Sir Walter Scott the materials for his most powerful pictures in Waverley and other novels. But it is the distress of the chiefs that is tragic to him, rather than the misery of the clansmen. The clansmen for their part had under feudalism been brought up to be farmers or cattle-dealers and nothing else; there was as little variety of occupation in the highlands then as in Ireland now. Undoubtedly too they had that customary right of long possession, which law so often construed into a legal title in the case of more influential men. It was true also that, if the native highlanders would not cultivate that poor soil, no strangers would, and, if it was politically desirable that the country should remain peopled, the only way to secure this was to prevent the native exodus.[417] No such attempt was made; but, on the contrary, the highland landlords followed the way that led to the highest rents; they consolidated their farms; they exchanged agriculture for pasture; they substituted deer for sheep. Almost every highland district has sooner or later passed through all these three stages, and with the same result, the employment of fewer and fewer men.[418] The discarded men had two courses before them, migration to the lowlands[419] or emigration to the colonies. The farm labourer would migrate, the farmer emigrate. The landlords incurred and often deserved odium for the manner of their evictions; but they treated the evicted better than the average British capitalist treats his dismissed hands. They usually provided passages and often procured settlements abroad for them. Lord Selkirk, one of the few writers on this subject that preserves a judicial calmness, advised his countrymen to acquiesce in the “depopulation” of the highlands, but to draw the stream of emigration to our own colonies. He himself drew it, so far as he could, to the Red River settlement and Prince Edward Island.
From the middle of last century to the beginning of this, emigration went on except when war made it impossible. The dangerous qualities of the highlanders made them very valuable in the three great wars that prevented them from leaving the country with their families. It may be that this very military consideration induced the English Government to connive at the clearances at first; and interference at any later stage was very difficult. As it is, in the end even the Sutherland evictions[420] seem simply to have shifted the population and not removed it. In spite of emigration Sutherland had as many inhabitants at the last census of 1881, as at the first in 1801, namely, above 23,000. Fishing, an industry new to a great part of the highlands, made this phenomenon possible. Fishing villages have grown at the expense of inland farms. But this is not the whole truth. Till the time when free trade began to distend Glasgow and other great towns of Scotland, the highland counties taken altogether had actually increased in population, as compared with what they were in 1801. The subsequent fall is due not to any great clearances or emigrations, but to another cause that had been acting though not conspicuously for some time before. This was migration to the industrial centres of the lowlands. In the days of the Tudors there were complaints in England of the decay of towns, because a strong government had at last made the protection of walled towns superfluous, and industry had spread itself in peace, where it was wanted. But two centuries later there was decay not of the towns but of the country districts, because industry was taking forms that made concentration necessary. At first, both in England and Scotland, there was a real diminution in the rural population; there had been for the time a real diminution of the work to be done in the country, and a transference of it to the towns. The hand-loom weaver had been supplanted by the power-loom. The little villages, where the workman lived idyllically, half in his farm and half in his workshop, now either sent their whole families to the towns, thus stopping their contributions to the parish registers in the country and swelling those of the town, or, still keeping the parents, sent three-fourths of the children there, thus making the country registers a very untrustworthy reflection of the real state of the population in the country districts. That country villages in every part of Scotland, but especially near the large cities, are “breeding grounds” of this latter description[421] is perfectly well known; and the same is true, in a less degree, of England. This is one reason why even the purely rural districts of Scotland have greatly increased in apparent population since 1801, and most of them are increasing still; the readiness of the Scotch to emigrate has caused the large families quite as much as the large families the emigration. Another reason is, that even in the country districts there is now more work to be done and it is done better. Orthodox economists may count this an example of the self-healing effects of an economical change that causes much suffering at first. It is fair to say that this eventual cure is neither more nor less complete than the cure of the analogous hardships of the newly-introduced factory system, and the temporary inconveniences of sudden free trade. What keen commercial ambition can do it has done, and its success is at least sufficiently complete to justify us in saying of Scotland to-day what Malthus said of it eighty years ago: it was most over-populated when it had fewest inhabitants. Modern improvements, however short of perfection, have at least both in England and in Scotland absolutely put an end to periodical famines. Even the scarcities of 1799 and 1800, though they caused great distress in both countries, were not famines in either of them; and, since the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, even such general distress as was caused in Scotland by the potato blight cannot occur again. That distress itself was as nothing compared with the terrible dearths from which Scotland used to suffer five or six times a century, and which England experienced as late as the seventeenth.[422] The dismal picture[423] which Malthus draws of the condition of the Scottish peasantry reminds us that it is not much more than a century since Scotland took her first steps in civilization and turned her energies from war to commerce. Her population at the ’45 was about one and a quarter millions, in 1801 about one and a half; but in 1861 more than three, and in 1881 three and three-quarters. Population therefore has more than doubled within the century. But even now there are only a hundred and twenty-one inhabitants to the square mile, as compared with four hundred and forty-five in England. The wealth of the country has increased immensely faster than the population; it has multiplied fivefold since the middle of this century, and tenfold since the beginning of it.[424]
The history of population in Ireland would have furnished Malthus with still more striking illustrations of his principles, if his life had lasted a few years longer. He contents himself (till the 6th edition of the Essay[425]) with a single paragraph: “The details of the population of Ireland are but little known. I shall only observe, therefore, that the extended use of potatoes has allowed of a very rapid increase of it during the last century. But the cheapness of this nourishing root, and the small piece of ground which, under this kind of cultivation, will in average years produce the food for a family, joined to the ignorance and depressed state[426] of the people, which have prompted them to follow their inclinations with no other prospect than an immediate bare subsistence, have encouraged marriage to such a degree, that the population is pushed much beyond the industry and present resources of the country; and the consequence naturally is, that the lower classes of people are in the most impoverished[427] and miserable state. The checks to the population are of course chiefly of the positive kind, and arise from the diseases occasioned by squalid poverty, by damp and wretched cabins, by bad and insufficient clothing,[428] and occasional want. To these positive checks have of late years been added the vice and misery of intestine commotion, of civil war, and of martial law.”[429]
In his review of Newenham’s Statistical and Historical Enquiry into the Population of Ireland in 1808,[430] and in his evidence before the Emigration Committee in 1827, Malthus uses even stronger language. We may quote from the latter document as the less known of the two. In 1817 he had spent a college vacation in visiting Westmeath and the lakes of Killarney,[431] and was able to speak from personal knowledge of the country. He was asked:—
Qu. 3306. “With reference to Ireland, what is your opinion as to the habits of the people, as tending to promote a rapid increase of population?”—“Their habits are very unfavourable in regard to their own condition, because they are inclined to be satisfied with the very lowest degree of comfort, and to marry with little other prospect than that of being able to get potatoes for themselves and their children.”[432]
3307. “What are the circumstances which contribute to introduce such habits in a country?”—“The degraded condition of the people, oppression, and ignorance.”
3311. “You have mentioned that oppression contributes to produce those habits to which you have alluded; in what way do you imagine in Ireland there is oppression?”—“I think that the government of Ireland has, upon the whole, been very unfavourable to habits of that kind; it has tended to degrade the general mass of the people, and consequently to prevent them from looking forward and acquiring habits of prudence.”
3312. “Is it your opinion that the minds of the people may be so influenced by the circumstances under which they live, in regard to civil society, that it may contribute very much to counteract that particular habit which leads to the rapid increase of population?”—“I think so.”
3313. “What circumstances in your opinion contribute to produce a taste for comfort and cleanliness among a people?”—“Civil and political liberty and education.”[433]
Then the subject of one acre holdings is introduced, and Malthus is asked:—
3317. “What effect would any change of the moral or religious state of the government of that country produce upon persons occupying such possessions?”—“It could not produce any immediate effect if that system were continued; with that system of occupancy there must always be an excessive redundancy of people, because, from the nature of tolerably good land, it will always produce more than can be employed upon it, and the consequence must be that there will be a great number of people not employed.”
3318. “Is, therefore, not the first step towards improvement in Ireland necessarily to be accomplished by an alteration of the present state of the occupancy of the land?” This was a leading question, but Malthus would not be led. He replied, “I think that such an alteration is of the greatest possible importance, but that the other (the change in the government) should accompany it; it would not have the same force without.” In his answers to later questions he gave his view at greater length on the causes of the difference between English and Irish character.
Answ. to qu. 3411. “At the time of the introduction of the potato into Ireland the Irish people were in a very low and degraded state, and the increased quantity of food was only applied to increase the population. But when our [English] wages of labour in wheat were high in the early part of the last century, it did not appear that they were employed merely in the maintenance of more families, but in improving the condition of the people in their general mode of living.”[434]
3413. “You attribute the difference of the character of the people to the difference of food?”—“In a great measure.”
3414. “What circumstance determines the difference of food in the two countries?”—“The circumstances are partly physical and partly moral.[435] It will depend in a certain degree upon the soil and climate whether the people live on maize, wheat, oats, potatoes, or meat.”[436]
3415. “Is not the selection in some degree dependent on the general state of society?”—“Very much on moral causes, on their being in so respectable a situation that they are in the habit of looking forward, and exercising a certain degree of prudence; and there is no doubt that in different countries this kind of prudence is exercised in very different degrees.”
3416. “Does it depend at all on the government under which they live?”—“Very much on the government, on the strict and equal administration of justice, on the perfect security of property, on civil, religious, and political liberty; for people respect themselves more under favourable circumstances of this kind, and are less inclined to marry, with[out] the prospect of more physical sustenance for their children.”
3417. “On the degree of respect with which they are treated by their superiors?”—“Yes; one of the greatest faults in Ireland is that the labouring classes there are not treated with proper respect by their superiors; they are treated as if they were a degraded people.”
Thereupon he is again asked a leading question of a somewhat cynical character, but he is again cautious in his answer.
3418. “Does not that treatment mainly arise from their existing in such redundancy as to be no object to their superiors?”—“In part it does perhaps; but it appeared to take place before that [redundancy] was the case, to the same degree.”
The questioner, however, begs the question and asks:
3419. “The number being the cause of their treatment, will not their treatment tend to the increase of that number?” and the answer is: “Yes, they act and react on each other.”
Accordingly his opinion in 1827 is, as it was in 1803, that emigration conjoined with other agencies will be good for Ireland, but by itself will leave matters no better than they were.
Alongside of his weighty words in the essay and in the evidence it is worth while to place the words written by Adam Smith half a century earlier:—
“By the union with England, the middling and inferior ranks of people in Scotland gained a complete deliverance from the power of an aristocracy which had always before oppressed them. By a union with Great Britain, the greater part of the people of all ranks in Ireland would gain an equally complete deliverance from a much more oppressive aristocracy, an aristocracy not founded, like that of Scotland, in the natural and respectable distinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices; distinctions which, more than any other, animate both the insolence of the oppressors and the hatred and indignation of the oppressed, and which commonly render the inhabitants of the same country more hostile to one another than those of different countries ever are.”[437]
With such passages before us, we cannot consider the two economists to have been behind their age in their Irish policy. In regard to accurate figures, the later economist was little better off than the earlier. Ireland was not included in the first two censuses of 1801 and 1811. In 1695 its population was estimated by Captain South as little more than one million;[438] in 1731, by inquiry of Irish House of Lords, at two millions; in 1792 by Dr. Beaufort at a little above four millions;[439] in 1805 by Newenham at five and a half millions; in 1812 an imperfect census gave it as nearly six millions; in the census of 1821 it was 6,800,000. It was clear that the population of Ireland was increasing even then faster than that of England.[440] But between these dates and our own times comes an episode striking enough to provide all economical histories with a purpureus pannus.
For about two generations England had perpetrated in Ireland her crowning feats of commercial jealousy, a jealousy not more foolish or wicked against Ireland than it was against the American colonies, or, till 1707, against Scotland, but more easily victorious. Ireland had not begun to be in any sense an industrial country till the reigns of Elizabeth and James I.; and the wars of the succeeding reigns hampered her early efforts. She had fair corn and meadow lands, and perhaps the best pastures in the world for sheep and cattle. The English farming interest became impatient of Irish competition, and a law was passed to forbid the importation of Irish sheep and cattle and dairy produce into England (1665, 1680). By reason of the later Navigation Acts, Ireland could not make amends for this by trading with America, for all such trading must be by way of England and in English ships, nor by trading with France for the same reason. England in her jealousy would have surrounded her with a cordon quite as close as Berkeley’s wall of brass.[441] As soon as a considerable woollen manufacture grew up, England stopped it by legislation, which (in 1699) forbade the exportation of Irish woollens not only to England but to any other country whatever. English interference, if it had done no more, added immensely to the uncertainties[442] and fluctuations of Irish trade. The growth of industries like the woollen manufacture had set on foot a growth of population which did not stop with the arrest of the industries. As often happens,[443] the effects of an impulse to marriage lasted far beyond the industrial progress that gave the impulse. But this means hunger and suffering, if not death. In the case of Ireland, the ruin of all industries but farming over more than three-fourths of the land led to an absolute dependence of the people on the harvest of their own country; and, where it failed them, they were brought face to face with dearth or famine. It led also to the peopling of the country districts at the expense of the towns,[444] instead of (as usual) the towns at the expense of the country. If Goldsmith’s Deserted Village is not English, it is not Irish. By the year 1780, when Lord North from fear of rebellion granted free trade to Ireland with Great Britain, the mischief had been made almost incurable. The great increase in the Irish population, like the great increase in the English, may be said to begin in a free trade movement. In the worst days of legal persecution it might have been said of the Irish Catholic population, the more they were afflicted the more they multiplied and grew. Lavergne[445] thinks their greater increase was due first to the physiological law, that in the case of all animals the means of reproduction are multiplied in proportion to the chances of destruction[?], and second to the instinctively sound tactics of a people otherwise defenceless. The probability is, too, that they remained quiet under their multitudinous industrial, political, and religious disqualifications so long, because they were reduced to that depth of misery that kills the very power of resistance; and poverty at its extreme point is a positive but not a preventive check on population. Where things are so bad, marriage, it is thought, cannot make them worse, and marriage would go on at the expense of a high mortality, general pauperism, or continuous emigration. The pureness of marriage relations in Ireland, though in itself a much greater good than its consequences were evil, acted as it would have done in Godwin’s Utopia;[446] apart from wisdom, virtue itself had its evils. Potatoes by-and-by came into general use; and the bad harvests, which taught even the Scotch and English poor[447] to make frequent use of this substitute for corn, converted it in Ireland from a substitute into a staple. Economists viewed this change with almost unanimous disapproval. In the view of Malthus it was the cheapness of this food that made it dangerous for the labourers; his theory of wages led him to object to cheap corn on the same grounds.[448] On the principle that it needs difficulties to generate energy, the Irish are made indolent by their cheap food, and make no use of it except to increase by it. Living on the cheapest food procurable, they could not in scarcity fall back on anything else. Every man who wished to marry might obtain a cabin and potatoes.[449] At the lowest calculation, an acre of land planted with potatoes will support twice as much as one of the same quality sown with wheat.[450] There are other objections to a potato diet. It is a simple (as opposed to a composite) diet, and it involves a low standard of comfort. The second is not the same as the first, for a people that had no variety in their food might conceivably have a great variety in their other comforts. As a matter of fact, however, it was none of these three supposed disadvantages of the potato that proved the bane of the Irish population, but a fourth one, its liability to blight.[451]
The figures of the census tell their own tale. In 1821 the Irish people numbered 6,801,827; in 1831, 7,767,401; in 1841, 8,199,853; but in 1851, 6,514,473. In each previous decade the increase approached a million; in the last there was not only no increase, but a decrease of more than a million and a half. There had been a disastrous famine followed by great emigrations. What happened on Lord Lansdowne’s estate in Kerry is an example of what took place over Ireland generally.[452] That estate comprehended about 100,000 acres, on which before the famine there was a population of 16,000 souls. When the famine came a fourth part of them perished and another fourth emigrated. In course of time, thanks to money sent by relatives from America and advances made by Lord Lansdowne, the emigration continued with such rapidity that only 2000 souls were left on the estate. The famine taught the people how to emigrate, and gave them some idea of the meaning of over-population. The rural districts of Ireland are probably over-peopled now; but there seems reason to believe that a body of tenants, who are little short of peasant proprietors in security of tenure, and who have been forced into a knowledge of the world outside Ireland, will not retain the habits of the old occupiers.[453] Without a change of habits, peasant proprietorships would have done little for France, and will do little for Ireland.
This would certainly have been the judgment of Malthus on things as they are now in Ireland, after Catholic Emancipation, Disestablishment, and the Land Act. In his own time he was wise enough to see that the first could not be delayed without injustice and danger. The rapid increase of the Catholic population would soon, he foresaw in 1808,[454] bring the question of Emancipation within the range of “practical politics,” and if the measure had been passed, as he urged, in 1808, instead of twenty years later, the labour of conciliating Ireland might have proved easier, and the political change might have helped to produce that change in the habits of the people which Malthus deemed essential to its permanent prosperity.