BOOK III.
MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Cardinal Doctrines of the Malthusian Ethics—Application to Desire of Marriage—Place of Man on the Earth—Criticism of Moral Philosophy—Teleology and Utility—Benevolence and Self-love—Malthus and Paley—Greatest Happiness—Earthly Paradise—Malthus and the French Revolution—Malthus not a Political Reactionary—Not committed to laissez faire—His Modifications of that Doctrine—Utilitarianism plus Nationality—Experience as much the Riddle as the Interpretation—The State an Organism—Political Ideals before and after 1846.
The moral philosophy of Malthus, like that of Aristotle, starts from a teleology.
Nature makes nothing in vain. Every desire has its proper place and proper gratification, if we can find them. The passions are the materials out of which happiness is made; and they are therefore to be regulated and harmonized; they are not to be extinguished, or even diminished in intensity.[726] There is a way of so gratifying the desires that they produce a general balance of consequences in favour of happiness; and there is an opposite way with opposite effects. The former is evidently the way of nature, for utility is the only guide of conduct we have apart from Scripture.[727] We must not eradicate any impulses; but we must follow none so far “as to trench upon some other law [sic] which equally demands our attention.” What is the golden mean, and what is too much or too little, we can only know by our own and others’ experience of the consequences of actions.[728] Nature shows us the wrongness of an act by bringing from it a train of painful consequences. Diseases, instead of being the “inevitable inflictions of Providence,” are “indications that we have offended against some of the laws of nature. The plague at Constantinople and in other towns of the East is a constant admonition of this kind to the inhabitants. The human constitution cannot support such a state of filth and torpor; and as dirt, squalid poverty, and indolence are in the highest degree unfavourable to happiness and virtue,[729] it seems a benevolent dispensation that such a state should by the laws of nature produce disease and death, as a beacon to others to avoid splitting on the same rock.”[730] As epidemics indicate bad food, unwholesome houses, or bad drainage, and as indigestion follows over-eating, so the misery that follows on too great an increase of numbers is simply the law of nature recoiling on the law-breaker.[731] In this case it has taken a longer experience to teach men the conduct most favourable to happiness, and therefore the conduct right for them. But even the best food, best clothing, and best housing have not been taught all at once; and the principle of the lesson is clearly the same in all the cases.
To say, therefore, that the desire of marriage is to be restrained and regulated is not to treat it exceptionally or to deny its naturalness. There is a lawful and there is an irregular gratification even of hunger and thirst; and the irregular is punished both by nature and, when it takes, for example, the form of theft, by human laws. Society could give such punishment only on the ground that the action punished tended to injure the general happiness. The act of the hungry man who steals a loaf is only distinguishable from the act of the hungry man who takes a loaf of his own, by means of its consequences. If all were to steal loaves there would in the end be fewer loaves for everybody.[732] We must apply the same criterion to the irregular gratification of all other desires.
After the desire for food, the desire of marriage is the most powerful and general of our desires. “When we contemplate the constant and severe toil of the greatest part of mankind, it is impossible not to be forcibly impressed with the reflection that the sources of human happiness would be most cruelly diminished if the prospect of a good meal, a warm house, and a comfortable fireside in the evening were not incitements sufficiently vivid to give interest and cheerfulness to the labours and privations of the day.”[733] This desire gives strength of character to a man in proportion as the animal element in it is hidden away out of sight, and in proportion as the gratification of it is won by exertion and, it may be, by waiting. To do as Jacob did for Rachel, a man must have some strength of character. Most of us, in the opinion of Malthus, owe whatever of definite plan there is in our lives to the existence of such a central object of affection.[734] Malthus himself, it will appear, did not marry till on the eve of becoming a professor at the East India College, nearly a year after these passages were written. Even in 1798 he wrote: “Perhaps there is scarcely a man who has once experienced the genuine delights of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasures may have been, that does not look back to the period as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves to bask, which he recollects and contemplates with the fondest regrets, and which he would most wish to live over again.”[735] Such a passage, though it disappeared, with other flowers of language, in the later editions of the essay, show us that Malthus, though wiser, was not colder than his fellow-men, and drew his facts from experience as well as observation, of the matters concerned.[736]
If we assume the intention of the Creator to replenish the earth, we can see a reason in cosmical polity for the strength of this desire of marriage. If the fertility of fertile soils had been as great as the power of population to increase, there would have been no inducement to men to cultivate the poorer soils or frequent the less attractive parts of the earth’s surface; human industry and ingenuity would have wanted their first stimulus.[737] As it is, the disparity of the two powers leads to an over-spreading of the world; men are led to avoid overcrowding from fear of the evils that spring from it. Man’s duties vary with his situations; and, as these are not uniform, but infinitely various, all his powers are kept in play. This language might make us doubt whether the final cause is the development of man, or simply the replenishment of the earth. If the first essay be allowed in evidence, it is clear that man (with whatever justice) is made the chief end of the earth, though his own chief end is not supposed to be realized there.[738]
The natural theology of Malthus and Paley is the foundation of their ethics. It was the English ethics of last century, not only before Kant, but before Bentham. There are signs that Malthus, in his views of metaphysics and of the “moral sentiments,”[739] preferred where he could to draw rather from Tucker than from Paley. Abraham Tucker[740] (the “Edward Search” who began the Light of Nature in 1756, and finished it, blind, in 1774) lived for nearly fifty years[741] at Betchworth Castle near Dorking. It is possible in these days, when near neighbours knew each other better than they care to do now, that Daniel Malthus, though the younger man, may have known Tucker. They were both of them Oxford men, small proprietors, eccentric, literary, and fond of philosophizing. Whether through his father at home or through Paley at college, it is certain that Malthus at an early date studied the Light of Nature and adopted much of its teaching. Before he appeared in public as an author, he had formed some settled philosophical convictions, which (whatever their value) at least left his mind free for its other work, and kept it at peace with itself as regards the problems of philosophy.
The substantial agreement of his views with the doctrines of the Moral and Political Philosophy no doubt helped to bring Malthus under the common prejudice against “Pigeon Paley,”[742] the defender of things as they are and preacher of contentment to starving labourers. When Paley became an open convert to the Essay on Population, the public would no doubt believe their suspicions confirmed. But Malthus and Paley agree not as disciple and master, but at most as disciples of the same master. Malthus tries to work out his own philosophy for himself.[743]
It is open to many criticisms. In his ethics he seems to have made no distinct analysis or classification of the passions. He takes for granted that the Passions are on one side and Reason on the other, and there is no middle term between the two except the Design of God, which is worked out by the passions of men as by external nature, and which is (we are left to infer) in some way akin to human reason, for human reason can find it out. The impulse of benevolence, for example, is said to be, like all our natural passions, “general” (by which he seems to mean vague), “and in some degree indiscriminate and blind;” and, like the impulses of love, anger, ambition, the desire of eating and drinking, or any other of our “natural propensities,” it must be regulated by experience and frequently brought to the test of utility, or it will defeat its own purpose.[744] In other words, Malthus treats all human impulses as if they were appetites, co-ordinate with each other, primary and irresolvable. All desires are equally natural, and abstractedly considered equally virtuous,[745] though not equally strong, and therefore not equally fit at first sight to carry out their Creator’s purpose.
The Reason of Man, therefore, must assist the Reason of his Maker in carrying out the teleology of his passions, as well as the teleology of nature itself.[746] The “apparent object” (or evident final cause), for example, of the desire of marriage is the continuance of the race and the care of the weak, and not merely the happiness of the two persona most concerned.[747] To take another example, the object of the impulse of benevolence is to increase the sum of human happiness by binding the human race together.[748] Self-love is made a stronger motive than benevolence for a wise and perfectly ascertainable purpose. The ascertainment of the purpose, however, presents a difficulty. Acknowledging that we ought to do the will of God, how are we to discover it?
We are told in answer to this question, that the intention of the Creator to procure the good of His creatures is evident partly from Scripture and partly from experience; and it is that intention, so manifested, which we are bound to promote. What on God’s side is teleology, on man’s is utility; utility is the ruling principle of morals. Not being a passion it cannot itself lead to action; but it regulates passion, and that, so powerfully, that all our most important laws and customs, such as the institution of property and the institution of marriage, are simply disguised forms of it.[749] As animals, we follow the dictates of nature, which would mean unhindered passion; but as reasonable beings we are under the strongest obligations to attend to the consequences of our acts, and, if they be evil to ourselves or others, we may justly infer that such a mode of indulging those passions is “not suited to our state or conformable to the will of God.” As moral agents, therefore, it is clearly our duty to restrain the indulgence of our passions in those particular directions, that by thus carefully examining their consequences, and by frequently bringing them to the test of utility, we may gradually acquire a habit of gratifying them only in the way which, being unattended with evil, will clearly “add to the sum of human happiness, and fulfil the apparent purpose of the Creator.”[750] All the moral codes which have laid down the subjection of the passions to reason have been really (thinks Malthus) built on this foundation, whether their promulgators were aware of it or not. “It is the test alone by which we can know independently of the revealed will of God whether a passion ought or ought not to be indulged, and is therefore the surest criterion of modern rules which can be collected from the light of nature.” In other words, our theological postulates lead us to control our passions so as to secure not merely our own individual happiness, but “the greatest sum of human happiness.” And the tendency of an action to promote or diminish the general happiness is our only criterion of its morality.[751]
From this it directly follows that, because the free and indiscriminate indulgence of benevolence leads to the reverse of general happiness, we ought to practise a discriminating charity which blesses him that gives and him that takes. There is what Bastiat would call a harmony between the two.[752]
In this case, indeed, nature reinforces utility by making the passion of self-love stronger in men than the passion of benevolence. Every man pursues his own happiness first as his primary object, and it is best that he should do so. It is best that every man should, in the first instance, work out his own salvation, and have a sense of his own responsibility. Not only charity but moral reformation must begin at home. Benevolence apart from wisdom is even more mischievous than mere self-love, which is not to be identified with the “odious vice of selfishness,” but simply with personal ambition, the person to whom it is personal including as a rule children and parents, and in fact a whole world besides the single atom or “dividual self.”[753] If the desire of giving to others had been as ardent as the desire of giving to ourselves, the human race would not have been equal to the task of providing for all its possible members. But because it is impossible for it to provide for all, there is a tendency in all to provide for themselves first; and, though we consider that the selfish element in this feeling ought to grow less in a man in proportion as he becomes richer and less embarrassed by his own wants, we must recognize that its existence has been due to a wise provision for the general happiness.[754] Malthus does not deny at the same time that benevolence is always the weaker motive, and needs continually to be strengthened by doctrine, reproof, and correction. It ought always to be thought a “great moral duty” to assist our fellow-creatures in distress.[755]
With these ethical views, it was easy for Malthus to meet the objection that the general adoption of the moral restraint recommended in his Essay on Population would diminish the numbers of the people too far. He (or his spokesman) answers[756] that we might as well fear to teach benevolence lest we should make men too careless of their private interests. “There is in such a case a mean point of perfection, which it is our duty to be constantly aiming at; and the circumstance of this point being surrounded on all sides with dangers is only according to the analogy of all ethical experience.” There is as much danger of making men too generous or too compassionate, as there is of “depopulating the world by making them too much the creatures of reason, and giving prudence too great a mastery over the natural passions and affections. The prevailing error in the game of life is, not that we miss the prizes through excess of timidity, but that we overlook the true state of the chances in our eager and sanguine expectations of winning them.[757] Of all the objections that were ever made to a moralist who offered to arm men against the passions that are everywhere seducing them into misery, the most flattering, but undoubtedly the most chimerical, is that his reasons are so strong that, if he were allowed to diffuse them, passion would be extinguished altogether, and the activity as well as the enjoyments of man annihilated along with his vices.”[758]
In his view of the passions and of the moral sentiments, Malthus is clearly a man of the eighteenth century, and on the whole is more nearly at one with Paley than with any moralist after Tucker. There are points of divergence. He could not, in view of his cosmology, have fully approved Paley’s definition of virtue, “doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness.”[759] He may have seen how it followed that a solitary man had no duties, that a pagan had no power to do right, that the moral imperative was hypothetical, and that it had no force for any who abjured their future bliss. At least he contents himself with agreeing that “the will of God is plainly general happiness, as we discover both by Scripture and the light of nature;”[760] and, “provided we discover it, it matters nothing by what means;”—there are clear marks of design in the world showing that its Maker willed the happiness of His creatures; and what He willed they should will.
In other words, the ethical system of both is a utilitarianism which is narrow and personal in its motive (the private happiness of the individual in another world), but broad and catholic in its end (the general happiness of human beings in the present world). It is as if God induced us to promote other people’s happiness now, by telling us that He would in return promote our own by-and-by. There are signs that Malthus took a larger view, and thought rather of the development of the human faculties[761] than of mere satisfaction of desires, both in this world and in the next; but he nowhere distinctly breaks with Paley, and his division of passions into self-love (or prudence) and benevolence is taken straight from that theologian.[762]
By the vagueness of their phraseology when they spoke of the general sum of happiness, the older utilitarians avoided some of the difficulties that encounter their successors. Apart from the hardness of defining happiness and a sum of happiness,[763] there is a difficulty in fixing the precise extent of the generality. The tendency of utilitarianism in the hands of Bentham was towards equality and the removal of privilege; every one to count as one, no one as more than one. But both with him and with the older members it may be doubted whether the doctrine did not tend to benefit the majority at the expense of the minority.
We find Malthus thinking[764] that, had the Poor Laws never existed, there “might have been a few more instances of very severe distress,” but “the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would have been much greater than it is at present.” In other words, what he wanted was the “greatest amount of happiness” on the whole, whatever an “amount” of happiness may mean. Malthus would probably have refused to use the formula of Bentham, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”; he would have counted the first item, the happiness, out of all proportion more important than the second.[765] He had refused something like it at the hands of Paley. “I cannot agree with Archdeacon Paley, who says that the quantity of happiness in any country is best measured by the number of its people. Increasing population is the most certain possible sign of the happiness and prosperity of a state; but the actual population may be only a sign of the happiness that is past.”[766] Malthus would not, for example, have wished to see the highlands of Scotland brought back to their ancient condition, in which they had greater numbers than now living in rude comfort, but also greater numbers exposed to precarious indigence.[767]
On the other hand, it is certain (in spite of a common prejudice) that Malthus desired the great numbers as well as the great happiness, and was indeed quite naturally led by his theological views to prefer a little happiness for each of many individuals to a great deal for each of a few. He “desires a great actual population and a state of society in which abject poverty and dependence are comparatively but little known,”[768]—two perfectly compatible requirements, which if realized together would lead to what may be called Malthus’ secondary or earthly paradise, which is not above mundane criticism.
This earthly paradise is, even in our author’s opinion, the end most visibly concerned in our schemes of reform. His idea of it as a society where moral restraint is perfect, invites the remark that the chief end of society cannot be the mere removal of evil; it must be the establishment of some good, the former being at the utmost an essential condition sine quâ non of the latter. Moreover, moral restraint is not the removal of every but only of one evil; and it kills only one cause of poverty. A complete reformation must not only remove all the evils, but must positively amend and transform all the three branches of social economy,—the making, the sharing, and the using of wealth,—not one or even two of them alone. Every Utopian scheme should be tested by the question: Does it reform all three, or only one, or two, of the three? Neglect of the third might spoil all. A scheme which affects all three, however, must have something like a Religion in it. With these reservations Malthus’ picture of the good time coming has much value and interest.[769]
Unlike Godwin, he relies on the ordinary motives of men, which he regards as forms of an enlightened self-love. Self-love is the mainspring of the social machine;[770] but self-love, when the self is so expanded as to include other selves, is not a low motive. Commercial ambition, encouraged by political liberty, and unhampered by Poor Laws, leads naturally to prosperity.[771] The happiness of the whole is to result from the happiness of individuals, and to begin first with them. He “sees in all forms of thought and work the life and death struggles of separate human beings.”[772] “No co-operation is required. Every step tells. He who performs his duty faithfully will reap the full fruits of it, whatever may be the number of others who fail. This duty is intelligible to the humblest capacity. It is merely that he is not to bring beings into the world for whom he cannot find the means of support. When once this subject is cleared from the obscurity thrown over it by parochial laws and private benevolence, every man must feel the strongest conviction of such an obligation. If he cannot support his children, they must starve; and, if he marry in the face of a fair probability that he will not be able to support his children, he is guilty of all the evils which he thus brings upon himself, his wife, and his offspring. It is clearly his interest, and will tend greatly to promote his happiness, to deter marrying till by industry and economy he is in a capacity to support the children that he may reasonably expect from his marriage; and, as he cannot in the mean time gratify his passions without violating an express command of God, and running a great risk of injuring himself or some of his fellow-creatures, considerations of his own interest and happiness will dictate to him the strong obligation to a moral conduct while he remains unmarried.”[773] Supposing passion to be thus controlled, we should see a very different scene from the present. “The period of delayed gratification would be passed in saving the earnings which were above the wants of a single man.” Savings Banks and Friendly Societies would have their perfect work; and “in a natural state of society such institutions, with the aid of private charity well directed, would probably be all the means necessary to produce the best practicable effects.”[774] The people’s numbers would be constantly within the limits of the food, though constantly following its increase; the real value of wages would be raised, in the most permanent way possible; “all abject poverty would be removed from society, or would at least be confined to a very few who had fallen into misfortunes against which no prudence or foresight could provide.”[775] It must be brought home to the poor that “they are themselves the cause of their own poverty.”[776] While Malthus insists against Godwin that it is not institutions and laws but ourselves that are to blame, he still shares, with Godwin, the desire to lessen the number of institutions; and, as a first reform, would repeal at least one obnoxious law.
The relation of Malthus to the French Revolution and its English partisans is indeed not to be expressed in a sentence. It has been said that he cannot be justly described as being a reactionary;[777] and, in truth, besides being a critic of Godwin and of Condorcet, he is influenced to some extent by the same ideas that influenced them. The Essay on Population is coloured throughout by a tacit or open reference to the Rights of Man, a watchword borrowed from France by the American Republic, to be restored again at the Revolution. Paine’s book on the Rights of Man, in reply to Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, had been widely read before it was suppressed by the English Government; and Godwin and Mackintosh[778] were not silenced. Malthus himself, as a Whig, does not disparage the rights of man when they meant political freedom and equality, but only when they included the right to be supported by one’s neighbour, as had been asserted by the Abbé Raynal and some other writers of the Revolution.[779] As the same assertion was practically made by the English Poor Law, which had venerable conservative prejudice on its side, our author’s opposition to it was no proof that his politics were reactionary. His economical antecedents and his political views bound him to the French Revolution. In his range of ideas and his habitual categories he could not depart far from the French Economists, who had helped to prepare the way for the Jacobins. Adam Smith himself had felt their influence. Though he had criticized the noble savage and the state of nature,[780] he had himself a lingering preference for agriculture over manufacture; and he himself spoke of a “natural” price, a “natural” progress of opulence, a “natural” rate of wages, and “natural liberty.” To him as to the French writers, Nature[781] meant what would grow of itself if men did not interfere,—the difficulty being that the interference seems also to grow of itself, and it is impossible to separate the necessary protection from the mischievous interference. Malthus retains the phraseology with an even nearer approach to personification. Nature points out to us certain courses of conduct.[782] If we break Nature’s laws, she will punish us. At Nature’s mighty feast there is no cover laid for the superfluous new-comer. The Poor Laws offend against Nature; they interfere with human action in a case where it would spontaneously right itself by ordinary motives of self-interest; if men knew they could not count on parish relief, they would probably help themselves. Be the argument worth much or little, its strength is not the greater because of this figure; and his use of it shows that Malthus had not risen above the metaphysical superstitions of his age. But the charge sometimes made against him is that he was not merely not before his age but positively behind it; and this is certainly false.
In politics he was as little of a reactionary as his opponent, who if “in principle a Republican was in practice a Whig.”[783] He followed Fox rather than Burke, and lost neither his head nor his temper over the Revolution. “Malthus will prove a peace-monger,” wrote Southey in 1808.[784] He was a steady friend of Catholic Emancipation. He saw the folly of attributing with Godwin and Paine all evil to the Government, and with Cobbett all evil to taxation and the funds;[785] but he is one with them all in dislike of standing armies, and is more alarmed at the overbearing measures of the Government against sedition than at the alleged sedition itself. One of the most remarkable chapters in the second edition of the essay[786] is on “the effects of the knowledge of the principal cause of poverty on civil liberty.” Its main argument is, that, where there is much distress and destitution, there will be much discontent and sedition, and, where there is much of the two last, there will be much coercion and despotism. A knowledge of the chief cause of poverty by taking away the distress would leave Government at least no excuse for tyranny. “The pressure of distress on the lower classes of people, together with the habit of attributing this distress to their rulers, appears to me to be the rock of defence, the castle, the guardian spirit of despotism. It affords to the tyrant the fatal and unanswerable plea of necessity. It is the reason why every free Government tends constantly to destruction, and that its appointed guardians become daily less jealous of the encroachments of power.”[787] The French people had been told that their unhappiness was due to their rulers; they overthrew their rulers, and, finding their distress not removed, they sacrificed the new rulers; and this process would have continued indefinitely if despotism had not been found preferable to anarchy. In England “the Government of the last twenty years[788] has shown no great love of peace or liberty,” and the country gentlemen have apparently surrendered themselves to Government on condition of being protected from the mob.[789] A few more scarcities like 1800 might cause such convulsions and lead to such sternness of repression that the British constitution would end as Hume foretold,[790] in “absolute monarchy, the easiest death, the true euthanasia of the British constitution.” The “tendency of mobs to produce tyranny” can only be counteracted by the subversion, not of the tyrants, but of the mobs. The result would be a lean and wiry people, weak for offence, but strong for defence; there would be freedom at home and peace abroad.[791]
Of course the “knowledge of the principal cause of poverty” is not conceived by Malthus as the only lesson worth learning. He shares the growing enthusiasm of all friends of the people for popular education,[792] and thinks the Tory arguments against instructing the poorer classes “not only illiberal, but to the last degree feeble, if not really disingenuous.”[793] “An instructed and well-informed people would be much less likely to be led away by inflammatory writings, and much better able to detect the false declamation of interested and ambitious demagogues than an ignorant people.”[794] These words were written in 1803, four years before Whitbread made his motion on Schools and Savings Banks, and thirteen years before Brougham’s Committee on Education.[795] Malthus in fact was in politics an advanced Whig, ahead of his party in ideas of social reform. This may be seen from the following passage, which is only one out of many, that show his large view of his subject. He says that in most countries among the poor there seems to be something like “a standard of wretchedness, a point below which they will not continue to marry.” “This standard is different in different countries, and is formed by various concurring circumstances of soil, climate, government, degree of knowledge, civilization, &c.” It is raised by liberty, security of property, the diffusion of knowledge, and a taste for the conveniences and the comforts of life. It is lowered by despotism and ignorance. “In an attempt to better the condition of the labouring classes of society, our object should be to raise this standard as high as possible by cultivating a spirit of independence, a decent pride, and a taste for cleanliness and comfort. The effect of a good Government in increasing the prudential habits and personal respectability of the lower classes of society has already been insisted on; but certainly this effect will always be incomplete without a good system of education, and indeed it may be said that no Government can approach to perfection that does not provide for the instruction of the people. The benefits derived from education are among those which may be enjoyed without restriction of numbers; and, as it is in the power of Governments to confer these benefits, it is undoubtedly their duty to do it.”[796]
Our author’s historical sense saved him from Ricardian presumptions in favour of laissez faire. Writers go too far, however, in declaring unlimited competition to be against the spirit of his work, and asserting that he undervalued the influence of institutions, only that he might save his country’s institutions from hasty reform.[797] He knew that society did not grow up on economical principles; instead of beginning with non-interference, and extending interference by degrees where it was found imperative, it began with interference everywhere, and relaxed the interference by degrees where it was found possible and thought desirable. We have begun with status and paternal government, and have made our way towards contract and laissez faire; but we have never reached them, because, as men now are, we cannot go on without damage to the common weal. But it seemed to Malthus that experience had shown the need as clearly as the dangers of natural liberty;—history, for example, had clearly proved that the material relief of the poor, which had never been abandoned by the Government, might best have been left to private action. The extreme view would have been that it was not every one’s duty in general, but every one’s in particular, a responsibility of which no one could divest himself. But, though Malthus often speaks as if the burden ought to lie specially on a man’s relatives and private friends, he does not share Adam Smith’s antipathy to associations, and would probably have recognized division of labour to be as necessary in charity as in industry. Still, even as administered by an organization of men specially fitted for the work by nature and choice, the distribution of material relief never seems to him a case where society can help the poor without in some degree injuring their independence and their strength of character. In the matter of charity he is clearly on the side of natural liberty and individualism.
But, in other directions, he has made admissions which seriously modify the unlimited competition of natural liberty. He admits, first of all, that the struggle for existence when it is the struggle for bare life does not lead to progress;[798] and he admits, therefore, in the second place, that the state should interfere with the “system of natural liberty,” positively, to educate the citizens,[799] and to grant medical aid to the poor,[800] to assist emigration,[801] and even to give direct relief in money to men that have a family of more than six children,[802]—as well as negatively, to restrict foreign trade when it causes more harm to the public than good to the traders,[803] and to restrict the home trade where children’s labour is concerned.[804]
A critic might ask on what principle he justifies these admissions; or might hint that he makes them on no conscious principle at all, but in the spirit of a judge, who is administering a law that he knows to be bad, but prefers to make continual exceptions rather than suggest a new law;—otherwise could any rule stand the test of so many exceptions?
It might be replied that Malthus nowhere writes a treatise on political philosophy, and his views must be inferred from scattered hints, but it does not follow that he was not, consciously or unconsciously, possessed of a guiding principle. His several admissions have a certain logical connection. It is more doubtful whether their connecting principle will seem adequate to a modern reader whose questions in political philosophy have been stated for him by Comte and the latter-day socialists.
The first of the admissions is the more significant, as Malthus, while making it, refuses to approve of the means then actually adopted (by the Poor Law) for raising the level of the weakest citizens, and so fitting them for their struggle. If the absence of provision was an evil, the existing provision was hardly a less one. It was bad for society to give help by giving bread and butter, for that was a gift to full-grown men and women, not really weak, but quite ready to be indolent. A gift of education, on the other hand, is given, he considers, to those who are really incapable of helping themselves and really ignorant of their powers.[805] It makes the weak strong, and tends to remove indolence, not create it.[806] In the same way Factory Acts assist the weak and not the indolent, while the (rare) interference with free trade, the granting of medical relief, the special aid in case of large families, and the aid to Irish peasants, are all of them special remedies in cases where the sufferers could not be expected to foresee and provide against the distress, and were therefore sufferers from circumstances rather than from indolence. Malthus continually takes the view that security is a greater blessing than wealth itself, and insecurity a worse evil than poverty. The circumstances that cause insecurity were therefore in his view the most distressing; they baffled individual effort.
His critics might have answered: “In all the cases mentioned by you as justifying interference, a perfectly enlightened self-interest would have provided against the mishap; and relief of any kind would be in the end equivalent to relief in bread and butter, for, as far as it goes, it allows the more to be left over either to the man or his parents for bread and butter, and thereby it is a relief that fosters indolence.” He could rejoin, however, that (even if we grant the practical possibility of such a perfect enlightenment) direct relief appeals far more to indolence than indirect,[807] and the good of the indirect can often, the good of the direct very seldom, outweigh the evil. He would have added that even the direct relief in bread and butter was not opposed by him on any theory, but on the ground of its known tendency to evil,—and, if it had been possible from the nature of men and things to keep the promises of the Poor Law, he would have given his voice for it. He was committed to free trade itself only because and only so far as experience was in its favour. His only axiom in political philosophy was that the end of politics is the greatest happiness of the great body of the people; and his only rule for securing that end was the observation of what, as a matter of experience, actually did secure it.
On the other hand, nothing is clearer from his own writings than that the language of experience owes much of its meaning to its interpreter; and we ask “What were his principles of interpretation?”
The answer is, that, in spite of the affinity between utilitarianism in morals and individualism in politics, he tried to retain the first without the second. He understood moral goodness to consist in the tendency of actions to produce a balance of pleasures over pains; but his utility when examined turned out, as we have seen, to be much nearer the notion of self-development than simply a sum of pleasures irrespective of their quality. At this point the strong grasp which family life held on his fancy lifted him above the notion that the chief end could be the individual happiness of isolated units, and showed him that the real unit was a group. The state to Malthus, as to Aristotle, is an aggregate of families, though he recognizes very clearly that, besides the connection of householder with householder by the common subjection to the laws, there is the common bond of nationality, a community of feeling, a partnership of past traditions, present privileges, and future hopes.[808] It is one of the plainest facts of experience that men are often led by their attachment to their country and countrymen to run counter to their worldly interests.[809]
The nation is a little world within the great world, and on the analogy of the great world it is the scene where difficulties generate talents and bring out the character.[810] From this point of view it is not far from the truth to parody a well-known description of modern Judaism, and describe the political philosophy of Malthus as Utilitarianism plus a Nationality. The individualism of Malthus is limited by the particular institutions and particular interests of the English nation.[811] In his intellectual history a strong emphasis on the state preceded the emphasis on the individual; and even in his mature view the state is limited in its interference with the citizens only by its powers of doing good to them. But he holds with Adam Smith and the other economists that its powers of doing good to them are very much narrower than on the old conception of the state, as a kind of family. The duties of a state to the citizens are narrower than those of a father to his children, because what the father can and must do for his children the state cannot do for its citizens with equal safety to their independence. It remains, however, true that the relation of state to citizen is not the commercial relation of one contracting party with another; it is a relation prior to the commercial, and gives to all contracts whatever validity they have.
If Malthus himself had been asked to reconcile his departure from the general principle of natural liberty with his general adherence to it, he would have made some such answer as the following: “From the first, when I wrote in 1798, it appeared to me that the action of Government could neither have so uniformly bad an effect as Godwin supposed, nor so uniformly good as Pitt’s Bill implied. If, as Godwin desires, there were no Government, but only a chastened laissez faire, unsophisticated human nature would be quite enough to bring back misery and sin.[812] But the chastening of the laissez faire could not in my opinion take place without the Government, for it is one of the most proper functions of Government, not adequately dischargeable by individuals, to provide for the people the education that is supposed to chasten. Even when that provision has been made, the education will not do its perfect work if it has not included the particular doctrines which it has fallen to me more than any man to bring home to the public mind. With such an education there will be hope for better things. Things as they are and the struggle for existence as it now is among the helpless classes can please me as little as Godwin. It is a struggle which leads to no progress. But, unlike Godwin, I do not regard Government as necessarily creating the distress; and I certainly regard it as the necessary engine for removing the distress by education in the end, and toning down its effects by restrictions for the present. If only as an engine of education, paternal government must be a permanent factor of society. Where a public necessity has been well supplied by individual action, I should leave it in the hands of individuals; but not otherwise. I did not object to the Poor Law on the broad ground that it took the place of private action, but because its own action was mischievous. I should try every case on its merits, and be guided to interfere or not interfere by the known results of the existing policies.”
In so speaking, Malthus would no doubt have justified his own consistency. But the modern reader might justly reply to Malthus, that we have often to judge tendencies as well as results, and experience becomes then an uncertain guide; he might complain that Malthus himself is sometimes led to judge both of them by a half-acknowledged supplementary principle of the balance of classes and safety of the mean, which can be applied in a way very unfavourable to popular rights. He might urge that the apparent success of an institution might have been due to a concurrent cause that cancelled its defects, and we cannot always pronounce on its merits from experience of it. How can experience help us unless we have the key to its interpretation? Without such a key nothing would be so false as facts except figures. In human politics mere survival is seldom the test of fitness.
If we compare the state to an organism and convert our simile into a rule of judgment, we may say that, when each part has its function and contributes to the efficiency of the whole, the body politic is well; when any part does not, there is need of the doctor or surgeon. This figure seems to give us a key for the interpretation of social experience; but unhappily the figure itself needs an interpreter.[813] If we interpret organism as the ideal union of members in one body, it ceases to be a simile, for the body politic is not merely like this union,—it is the best example of it. For in the body politic the general life is the source of all individual energy, and at the same time the individual members are continually paying back the debt, by an active sympathy and conscious union with the commonwealth, to which the commonwealth in its turn owes all its collective energy; the citizen is nothing without his state, or the state without its citizens. This is to make the figure useful, by making it change places with the thing prefigured. So long as the same idea is grasped in both, their relation in rhetoric need not affect us.
Such an idea of the state would lead us beyond the admissions of Malthus to some such demands as the following:—For his every possession, the citizen must be able to show some service rendered to his countrymen, and must be taught and expected to hold his property in trust for the common good, that so the body politic may have no useless member. In proportion as private possession involves monopoly, its use should be jealously restricted in the public interest, which in the extreme cases would lead to the withdrawing of it, with as little friction as might be, from the private owner to the state. Education acts, sanitary laws, and factory acts should be strictly and universally enforced, not for the sake of the parents, guardians, and employers, or even altogether for the sake of the sufferers themselves, but for the sake of the community, in order that in the struggle for existence every competitor should start fair as an efficient citizen, with full possession of his powers of mind and body. For the rest, security and order should be the watchword of the state, free course being allowed to commercial and industrial enterprise, scientific inquiry, and speculative discussion, in order that progress may be made in the surest of all ways, by the moral and intellectual development of the individual citizens, which will soon express itself in their institutions. With these postulates, half from the old economists and half from the new reformers, on the way to be realized, and with industrial co-operation in prospect, we need not despair of the future of man on our part of the earth.
Tried by such a standard Malthus certainly fails to give us a perfect political philosophy, and seems little farther advanced than his master Adam Smith, who taught that the state was profitable only for defence, for justice, and for such public works as could not be so well done by individuals. With all his regard for the nation, Malthus looks at social problems too much from the individual’s point of view. He speaks much, for example, of the good effect, on the individual man, of the domestic ideal, and of the ideals of personal prosperity in the world, both built on security of property and liberty of action. He speaks little of the duty of the citizen to the community, and of the return he owes it for his security and liberty. The citizen in his picture of him seems to have nothing but duties to his family and nothing but claims on the state. The citizen is lost in the householder. He is content to be let alone, and does not positively and actively recognize his identity with the legislative power, and his obligation to repay service with service. Later political philosophy would press the counter-claims of the community on the citizen. It would demand, for example, that he shall neither leave his lands waste nor preserve his game, if either practice is contrary to the public good. It would keep in mind that the holders of large fortunes owe more to the public for protection of them than the holders of small, and should bear a heavier burden of taxes. It would not leave men to do as they willed with their own.[814]
In regard to the lowest classes that are hardly to be called citizens, for they are struggling in hopeless weakness for mere bread, Malthus never seems to see that his own acknowledgment of their powerlessness to rise must justify much more than the mere establishment of compulsory education for their children or even mechanics’ institutes for themselves. It would justify the adoption of such measures as will make their surroundings likely to give and preserve to them a higher standard of living. It would sanction measures of “local option” to keep away from them the infection of dangerous moral diseases; and it would enforce the obligation on the owners of houses to make them habitable and healthy. It would give town and country tenants secure tenure by law, where an insecure tenure of custom had induced them to spend labour on their holdings.
The older economists had the just idea that security in possession was the first condition of industrial progress; but they did not see that this very principle would justify very large restrictions on the use of property, and that the restrictions would increase in largeness as the property approached the nature of a monopoly; they did not see that for the public interest it may be as necessary to prohibit deer forests as to pull down unsanitary dwellings or enforce vaccination.
The reason was that for a long time in England it was a hard enough task for reformers to secure the negative freedom of being let alone, the freedom of trade and of the press and of local government, with the abolition of privileges. Cobden’s attempt to resolve Politics into Economics was well-timed and fruitful in its generation; and the Manchester school has still a part to play in our own time. But the special work of political reform in the future is to achieve the positive freedom, “the maximum of power, for all members of human society alike, to make the best of themselves.”[815] Of this programme neither Malthus nor any writer of his day had any clear conception. He himself had no claim to a seer’s vision; and the horizon of his opponents was never wider than his own.
It is time to go back to the Essay and confront its opponents. We have now a sufficient knowledge of the economics and philosophy of Malthus to be able to sympathize with him under misconception, or at least to understand what appearance an objection would wear to his mind. Not that we have a complete picture of the man, or even a view of his entire mental furniture, which is more than this curta supellex; but we see enough to judge the cause of the Essay on its merits, not prejudiced, favourably or unfavourably, by the life and character of the author.