Arrangement of the Essay—Nature’s Mighty Feast—Tract on High Price of Provisions—I cannot, therefore I ought not—Poor Laws condemned—Frederick the Great’s Army—Mitigation of Bad Effects of Poor Law—Step towards Abolition—New Poor Law.
In the foregoing brief review of the economical doctrines of Malthus, the chapters on commercial policy and the Corn Laws,[688] in the third book of the Essay on Population, have been already noticed. As the First and Second books of the essay were supposed to deal with the state of population in past and in present times, the Third is supposed to deal with the “different systems of expedients which have been proposed or have prevailed in society” for curing the evils arising from the principle of population, while the Fourth relates to the future prospects of society, and the possibility of removing the evils in question. This division of the subject could not be maintained very strictly. The “systems proposed” no doubt were in most cases mere theories and could be considered by themselves; but the “systems that prevailed” included such laws as the Corn Laws and Poor Laws, which directly affected the present habits and wealth of the people, and might fairly have been considered in the second book. The fourth book might quite logically have been part of the third, for it simply adds to the “systems proposed” the proposal of Malthus himself. The arrangement is not in itself so perfect or so closely respected by its author that we need have any remorse for disregarding it. The earliest chapters of the third book (i. and ii.) are substantially the refutation of Godwin, Wallace, Condorcet, as it appeared in 1798, with a postscript (ch. iii.) on Owen and Spence, which will be best considered in another place.[689] In point of style they are probably the best in the book.
After a chapter (iv.) on Emigration[690] come three chapters on the Poor Laws, to be viewed with ch. viii. of the fourth book, which deals with Plans for their Abolition. Of all the applications of the doctrines of Malthus, their application to pauperism was probably, at the time, of the greatest public interest. Even the first essay had distinct bearing on Pitt’s Poor Bill; the next writing of the author was on a question of parish relief; and these three chapters in the later Essay on Population have influenced public opinion and legislation about the destitute poor almost as powerfully as the Wealth of Nations has influenced commercial policy. Malthus is the father not only of the new Poor Law, but of all our latter-day societies for the organization of charity.
The subject is best introduced in the words of a celebrated parable, which Malthus having used once was never afterwards allowed to forget:[691]—“A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents, on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he do not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. If these guests get up and make room for him, other intruders immediately appear demanding the same favour. The report of a provision for all that come, fills the hall with numerous claimants. The order and harmony of the feast is disturbed, the plenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests is destroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence in every part of the hall, and by the clamorous importunity of those, who are justly enraged at not finding the provision which they had been taught to expect. The guests learn too late their error, in counteracting those strict orders to all intruders, issued by the great mistress of the feast, who, wishing that all her guests should have plenty, and knowing that she could not provide for unlimited numbers, humanely refused to admit fresh comers when her table was already full.”[692]
Our neighbours’ misfortunes have seldom been made so picturesque. The figure itself was no new one. Lucretius had written:—
“Cur non, ut plenus vitæ conviva, recedis?”[693]
and Fenton, in Pope’s[694] familiar lines:—
“From Nature’s temperate feast rose satisfied,
Thanked heaven that he had lived and that he died.”
But the new application took hold on the public fancy. Sir William Pulteney and Windham are said to have been, beyond others, delighted with its conservative moral.[695] Malthus may have got the hint of it from a passage in Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy. Paley was criticizing a justification of private property, which founded it on every man’s right to take what he wants of the things God made for the use of all, just as, when an entertainment is given to the freeholders (as the free and independent electors?) of a county, we see them coming in and eating and drinking each what he chooses, without asking the consent of the other guests. The simile, says Paley, is not perfect, for in a freeholder’s feast nobody is allowed to fill his pockets or to throw anything away, “especially if by so doing he pinched the guests at the lower end of the table.”[696]
Even the friends of Malthus thought the passage too gloomy; and, as every one noticed,[697] it was not retained after 1803. It contains, however, at least two positions that were never retracted:—that the poor cannot claim relief as a right, but only as a favour, and that poor relief can only raise one man by depressing another. The latter position may be illustrated from the tract written in 1800 on the High Price of Provisions. The main aim of the tract was to show that the price was too extravagantly high to be due to the deficiency, which was admittedly only one-fourth. But the author throws light on his own general doctrines.[698] He argues, in substance, that to give relief in money is to enable the relieved persons to retain their ordinary rate of consumption at the expense of the rest. To this the reply is obvious:—the sufficiency of the stock is not so finely calculated, neither is the amount of it so fixed that it cannot be increased from home or foreign stores,—and to withdraw money from the rich for the poor, and increase the country’s total expenditure on necessaries, might be simply to divert the stream of importation into the channel of necessaries, and lead to a larger use of food other than bread. Under the conditions of the time, however, the author’s views were not unnatural. On his return from Sweden in 1800 he found scarcity prevailing in England as elsewhere, but with prices much higher than in other countries. These were the days when Chief Justice Kenyon and a jury enforced the antiquated laws against forestalling and regrating.[699] Malthus had not read his Adam Smith to so little purpose that he could approve such proceedings; much of his pamphlet was simply an application, to one particular case, of the principles of the Wealth of Nations (Book IV. chap. v.).[700] Neither could he agree with the notion that the paper currency had done it all.[701] Settling down to his parish work in Surrey, he watched the course of events. What happened, he said, there and presumably elsewhere was as follows:—In progress of the scarcity the poor complained to the justices that their wages were too low to buy bread at present prices; the justices thereupon inquired at what, as the lowest wages, they would have been able to buy it, and then “very humanely, and I am far from saying improperly,” gave parish relief accordingly.[702] But, like the water from the mouth of Tantalus, the corn slipped from the grasp of the poor; prices rose a step further, and the relief had to follow the prices.
The rates accordingly rose in many places from four to fourteen shillings in the pound. By the double burden of dear food and high rates, perhaps five or six millions of the richer classes were certainly made to feel the pinch of the scarcity, which would otherwise have been borne, say by two millions of the poorest, who would have died under it.[703] In this instance the Poor Laws did the country a distinct service. But it was done by taking from the first guests to give to the importunate intruders, and could not justify a general eulogy of the Poor Laws. The whole drift of the Essay on Population had gone against such institutions; and “two years’ reflection,” says the writer of the Essay, “have served strongly to convince me of the truth of the principle there advanced, and of its being the real cause of the continued depression and poverty of the lower classes of society, of the total inadequacy of all the present establishments in their favour to relieve them, and of the [certainty of] periodical returns of such seasons of distress as we have of late experienced.”[704] In the first essay he had spoken strongly not only against Pitt’s new Poor Bill, but against all legal relief, and amongst other reasons precisely on the ground that it caused food to rise in price beyond the point to which scarcity would have raised it apart from interference.[705]
The second was a stronger reason;—in the language of Kant, the claim allowed (with little qualification[706]) by the English Poor Laws was a claim that could not be made universal without contradiction. If every one exercised the supposed right of demanding relief, no community could fulfil the supposed duty of granting it.[707] If it could have been fulfilled, Malthus thinks, the obligation would have held; and, instead of declaring “I cannot, therefore I ought not,” he would have confessed, “I can, therefore I ought.”[708] As the case stands, he agrees with Sir Frederick Eden in thinking the giving of legal relief impracticable, and therefore no duty, and also that, “upon the whole, the sum of good to be expected from a compulsory maintenance of the poor will be far outbalanced by the sum of evil which it will inevitably create.”[709] It relieved individual suffering at the cost of making the suffering general. It created the poor which it maintained, for it led men to marry with the certainty of parish assistance. It thereby increased the population without increasing the food of the country, and it has to a large extent broken down the ancient spirit of independence. “Hard as it may appear in individual instances, dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful.”[710] High wages and independence and moral restraint are better than low wages with a parish supplement and a pauper family. “I feel persuaded that if the Poor Laws had never existed in this country, though there might have been a few more instances of very severe distress, the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would have been much greater than it is at present.”[711] This was his belief to the end.[712]
An allegory of these things may be found in Dr. John Moore’s description of the army of Frederick the Great. Dr. Moore saw a man caned for being a few seconds late in replacing his ramrod; and the officers told him that, since they could not distinguish wilful blunders from accidental, they punished all alike, and the result, they said, was excellent; all the men were on the alert, and fewer blunders were committed on the whole. It used to be common on field-days for dragoons to have their hats blown off and to be thrown from their horses. At last a general gave orders to punish every man to whom either of these accidents happened; since then hardly anybody lost his hat or fell from his horse. Dr. Moore heard of a poor hussar who had fallen from his horse at last review, and was to be punished for it as soon as he could leave the hospital. This seemed hard, but the King of Prussia thought he could only hope to make his army superior to others by improving its discipline, training its officers by honour and disgrace, and its privates by physical punishment; he considered that the occasional suffering of an innocent individual does less harm to an army than the toleration of negligence, which makes the negligence greater.[713] So far as legal relief goes, Malthus would recommend the same martial severity, and try to put men on their guard against poverty by making them bear the discipline of its consequences. There are other points in which the allegory applies to the “simple system of natural liberty;” the discipline of industrial competition is certainly in some respects as severe as the discipline of an army. On the other hand, society does not consist of picked strong men, but includes the weak also, and its privates are supposed not to take their orders from a commander, but to “fend for themselves.” Society under socialism may resemble an army, but not society under individualism. Malthus, therefore, would have repudiated the analogy. He does not reach his conclusions by a preconceived theory of the state, but by observing the ill results of the common preconceived theory that every citizen when destitute has a right to be supported by the state. He finds that, as a matter of fact, where material relief has been given as a duty, and claimed as a right, the effect on the recipient has been clearly bad; the Poor Law stands condemned by experience.
Yet he admits that the badness of the law has been largely counteracted by the remissness of its execution. The attempt to secure a fixed rate of wages to the labourer in all states of trade has not really been made in England as the Elizabethan Poor Law enjoined. The scantiness of the relief actually given, together with the insolence of the officials concerned in the giving of it, has disturbed the sense of complete security, which in the view of Malthus would in such a case have been fatal. “The desire of bettering our condition and the fear of making it worse, like the vis mediatrix naturæ in physics, is the vis mediatrix reipublicæ in politics, and is continually counteracting the disorders arising from narrow human institutions.” The Poor Law has been so imperfectly carried out that it has left some room still for prudential motives among the labourers; they cannot count on complete provision for their families if they marry recklessly, and some few of them still think caution needful. Moreover, from fear of the Poor Law the rich will often refuse to build cottages, lest their occupants become paupers.[714] In the third place, pauper children, like foundlings, do not live long.[715]
In his Letter to Samuel Whitbread, M.P., on his proposed Bill for the amendment of the Poor Laws (1807), Malthus allows that abolition must not come till public opinion is ripe for it; but he recommends legislation in the direction of abolition, to prepare the minds of all classes for the final steps, and to expose to the working classes the delusiveness of the present boon. Poor Laws, he says, are peculiar to England, and their absence in other countries does not seem to have the effects expected from their abolition here. In reply to Malthus, it might be urged that the Poor Laws are not entirely peculiar to England, but occur in Denmark and elsewhere.[716] In the second place, as MacCulloch argues in a letter, aimed at Malthus, to Macvey Napier,[717] Britain is peculiarly subject to fluctuations in trade, due, for example, to the changes in foreign tariffs, and therefore there are more cases of sudden and unavoidable distress, that need such a provision as the Poor Law’s. In the third place, too, it is difficult to see how we can make begging unlawful if we make legal relief inaccessible,[718] any more than we can logically make education compulsory while we insist on the payment of fees. In the fourth place, an indiscriminate private charity is probably more mischievous than a discriminating public relief. Malthus, however, was not against all relief, but only against it when claimed as a right; and he was fully aware that the risks of the English working man were greater than those of his Continental brethren. All he desired was to give the workman scope for that sense of personal responsibility out of which the Poor Law was beguiling him. He knew quite well that no good end would be served by the removal of the Poor Law, unless the public had been educated out of the evil ways of it. He proposed therefore to make a gradual change, the essence of which was to be the disclaimer of any right on the part of a poor man to be supported at the public expense; children have a right to be supported by their parents, but not by the public.[719] Let a law be passed, he said, declaring that no legitimate child born from any marriage taking place a year after the law’s enactment, and no illegitimate born two years thereafter, shall ever be entitled to parish relief. “And to give a more general knowledge of this law, and to enforce it more strongly on the minds of the lower classes of people, the clergyman of each parish should, previously to the solemnization of a marriage, read a short address to the parties, stating the strong obligation on every man to support his own children; the impropriety, and even immorality, of marrying without a fair prospect of being able to do this; the evils which had resulted to the poor themselves, from the attempt which had been made to assist, by public institutions, in a duty which ought to be exclusively appropriated to parents, and the absolute necessity which had at length appeared, of abandoning all such institutions, on account of their producing effects totally opposite to those which were intended. This would operate as a fair, distinct, and precise notice which no man could well mistake, and without pressing hard upon any particular individuals, would at once throw off the rising generation from their miserable and helpless dependence upon the Government and the rich.”[720] Both their irritation against the upper classes and their helplessness in devising expedients in time of want, arise from “the wretched system of governing too much. When the poor were once taught, by the abolition of the Poor Laws, and a proper knowledge of their real situation, to depend more upon themselves, we might rest secure that they would be fruitful enough in resources, and that the evils which were absolutely irremediable they would bear with the fortitude of men and the resignation of Christians.”[721] However comical may be the picture of a clergyman following up the very un-Malthusian marriage service by such a moral lecture as is here recommended, the principle of the recommendation is sober sense, and has largely influenced the benevolence of later philanthropists. Dr. Chalmers applied it in his Parochial System, which would have been an admirable substitute for the Poor Law on the (unfortunately untrue) hypothesis of an absence of sects. The Mendicity Society (dating from 1815) and the Charity Organisation (from 1869) build on the same foundation.
The new Poor Law of 1834 differed from Malthus in that it did not deny the right to relieve, and still kept up the fiction that the law of Elizabeth was good, and we had degenerated from it.[722] But it allowed the right only to the indigent,[723] refusing all relief in aid of wages to the merely poor and the able-bodied; and it carried out the principle that dependent poverty (in the words of Malthus) should be held disgraceful and made disagreeable. “Every penny bestowed that tends to render the condition of a pauper more eligible than that of the independent labourer is a bounty on indolence and vice.” “In proportion as the condition of any pauper class is elevated above the condition of independent labourers, the condition of the independent class is depressed.”[724] If this meant that poor relief should run a race with the average wages of labour, keeping always one stage behind them, it might be argued that in good times a pauper would get too much comfort and in bad times too little food. But the disgrace of dependence and the discomfort of constraint are the deterrents which Malthus himself has most in mind.
Without the discussions raised by the Essay on Population it is very doubtful if public opinion would have been so far advanced in 1834 as to make a bill, drawn on such lines, at all likely to pass into law. The abolition of outdoor relief to the able-bodied was nothing short of a revolution. It had needed a lifetime of economical doctrine, reproof, and correction to convince our public men, and to some extent the nation, that the way of rigour was at once the way of justice, of mercy, and of self-interest. The history of the English Poor Law is ample proof that men do not instinctively follow their own interest. It was the ratepayer’s interest,[725] unless he was an employer, that relief should be sparely given; and it was given lavishly. It was the poor man’s interest to be thrifty and sober; and as a rule he was neither. There was no hope of reform till both rich and poor learned a deeper sense of their personal responsibility for the remoter effects of their own acts, whether unwisely benevolent or heedlessly selfish. The clear consciousness of personal responsibility seems to Malthus to be the soul and centre of every healthy reform. In this sense, at least, he would say that virtue is knowledge.
His thoughts on society are connected at this point with his thoughts on man’s place and duty in the world. His psychology and ethics, slightly as they are sketched, throw light on his sociology and economics, and must be considered before we can estimate his position in social philosophy. This will lead us over the greater portion of the fourth book of the essay, leaving the critical chapters till we come to deal with the Critics as a body.