Three Questions for the Critics—Parr and Thoughts on Parr—Pulpit Philosophy—Godwin’s Blessing in 1801—The Cursing in 1820—Theology—The Command to Noah—The Ratios—Population “fitful”—S. T. Coleridge among the Economists—James Grahame—Empson’s Classification of Critics—Weyland and Arthur Young—“Cannot, therefore ought not”—Spence’s Plan and Owen’s—Progress and Poverty—Das Kapital—Herbert Spencer—Classification of Critics—Ethics of the Hearth and of the World—End and Means of Malthus.
The critics of Malthus had three questions before them: Do the conclusions of Malthus follow from his premises? Does he himself draw them? Are they true as a matter of fact? The answers will be best given by a short survey of the principal critics with whom Malthus contended in his lifetime, and those who have most formidably contended with his followers since his death.
There is a sense in which the Essay on Population begins and ends with Godwin, for it begins and ends with the question of human perfectibility. The relations of Malthus and Godwin are as it were the tale on which the play is founded.
Godwin’s Political Justice was written in 1793, his Enquirer in 1797, and Malthus’ Essay in 1798. Others kept the ball a-rolling. On the Easter Tuesday of 1800 Dr. Samuel Parr preached an anniversary sermon in Christ’s Hospital before the Corporation of London. He chose his text from Galatians vi. 10: “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.” Like Butler’s sermons in the Rolls Chapel, the discourse was really a treatise on moral philosophy. It began by contrasting the selfish and the benevolent system of ethics, pronouncing both of them faulty. If the one has done less harm, the other has done less good than might have been expected, for it has been connected with the new doctrine of universal philanthropy. The new doctrine is false because local neighbourhood of all men is impossible, vi terminorum, and a widening out of the feelings that usually prevail between local neighbours would only make those feelings thin and watery.[816] Man’s obligations cannot be stretched beyond his powers; he has no powers, and therefore no obligation to do good unto all men.[817] Love of the universe, in the intense sense of the word love, can only belong to the omnipotent Being who has the care of the universe upon Him. We, being men, must only see to it that our benevolence is of His quality, extending, like His, to the unthankful and to the evil. But a universal philanthropist exaggerates and pampers this one particular form of the duty of benevolence at the expense of the rest, and forgets duties that lie near to him, towards kindred and friends and neighbours; he neglects common duties of life in favour of the uncommon and fanciful. Very different is “the calm desire of general happiness,” which draws those that are near still nearer, and makes us value and assist the benevolent institutions, like Christ’s Hospital, which are at our own doors.
The hearers of the sermon could have no doubt at whom it was aimed; and the footnotes of the published version of it contained large quotations from the Essay on Population and large direct commendations of its author, which made the sermon’s oblique censure of Godwin the more stinging.
Pulpit philosophizing was not rare in those times; it had been practised since Butler’s days by Dr. Ezra Styles[818] in 1761; and Dr. Richard Price had used a dissenter’s pulpit to utter his enthusiastic views on the future improvement of mankind (1787) and the love of our country (1789).[819] Burke had denounced him for this in his Reflections;[820] but, if Parr could do the same thing on the other side a few years afterwards, it cannot have been any great singularity. Parr’s sermon was the subject of Sydney Smith’s first paper in the Edinburgh Review (Oct 1802); but its economical interest is due to its effect on Godwin. Godwin had been assailed shortly before by Sir James Mackintosh, a former friend and political ally, in his Discourse on the Law of Nature and Nations, delivered in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, 1799; but Dr. Parr’s censures were more severe. Parr may have been alienated by an offensive description in the Enquirer[821] of the clergy, as characterized by “a perennial stationariness of understanding, abortive learning, artificial manners, infantine prejudices, and arrogant infallibility.” As all the other professions were equally well abused, the censure need not have been taken to heart. The letter of Malthus to Godwin, written after the publication of the Enquirer, is full of courtesy. At that time, and indeed for a few years afterwards, there was nothing but good-will between the two writers. When Godwin in 1801 made his letters to his three critics into a book,[822] under the title, Thoughts on Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon, with remarks on Mackintosh and the writer of the Essay on Population, he was bitter only against the two former. He was surprised at the “overbearing scornfulness” of Mackintosh, and at the “venom” of Dr. Parr. If he had changed some of his views it was not in deference to their criticism. Of the Essay on Population, “and the spirit in which it is written,” he “can never speak but with unfeigned respect;” contending only that it is meant to attack his conclusions and not his premises.[823] Parr had hailed it as a complete demonstration that Godwin’s scheme of equality would not work, and many better men had felt their mouths shut, and had begged Godwin to speak for them. Godwin consents in these Thoughts. If he was sincere in saying, “I confess I could not see that the essay had any very practical bearing on my own hopes” (p. 55), he must have been in the state which the Enquirer ascribes to the clergyman: “He lives in the midst of evidence and is insensible to it. He is in daily contemplation of contradictions and finds them consistent. He listens to arguments that would impress conviction upon every impartial hearer and is astonished at their futility. He never dares trust himself to one unprejudiced contemplation. He starts with impatience and terror from its possible result.” Malthus, on the other hand, though in orders, has behaved very unlike the clergyman of the Enquirer, for we are told by Godwin himself, “he has neither laboured to excite hatred nor contempt against me and my tenets; he has argued the questions between us just as if they had never been made a theme for political party and the intrigues of faction; he has argued just as if he had no end in view but the investigation of evidence and the development of truth” (p. 55 ft.). Moreover, he has “made as unquestionable an addition to the theory of political economy as any writer for a century past. The grand propositions and outlines of his work will, I believe, be found not less conclusive and certain than they are new. For myself, I cannot refuse to take some pride in so far as by my writings I gave the occasion and furnished an incentive to the producing so valuable a treatise” (p. 56). Surely concession could no further go. Godwin even admits the arithmetical and geometrical ratios.[824] His criticisms are all on the checks, which (be it remembered) were only the checks of the first essay, vice, misery, and the fear of them. Are Governments henceforward to prevent the evils of an excessive population by encouraging these unsightly counter-agents? and is every scheme for the amelioration of man’s lot foredoomed? No, the “author of the essay” has too small an idea of the resources of the human mind; it is no conclusive argument against a scheme to say that when it is realized it will probably not last.[825] He does not attach sufficient weight to the fact that in England, for example, “prudence and pride” prevent early marriages, and from late ones come smaller families. In a state of universal improvement there would be not less but more of these feelings, and a similar effect would follow in a greater degree.[826]
That there was force in this reasoning appears from the way in which Malthus received it when stated to him by letter a few months after the publication of the essay. He replied that the “prudence” in question, if existing in Godwin’s new society, would mean an eye to the main chance; it would mean that one man is strengthening his position and getting to himself more than the minimum of necessaries; if you prevent this, what becomes of your freedom? if you do not, what becomes of your equality and wealth? Secondly, the effect of the prudence would be that the population would not be the greatest possible, but considerably within the limits of the food; and yet you object to present society, that its arrangements prevent the “greatest practicable population.” In all our political theories, if we would trace to particular institutions the evil that is really due to them, we must deduct the evil that is known to be due to other causes. “The very admission of the necessity of prudence to prevent the misery from an overcharged population, removes the blame from public institutions to the conduct of individuals. And certain it is, that almost under the worst form of government, where there was any tolerable freedom of competition, the race of labourers, by not marrying, and consequently decreasing their numbers, might immediately better their condition, and under the very best form of government, by marrying and greatly increasing their numbers they would immediately make their condition worse.”[827]
This was no doubt a point against Godwin, but it was also a point against Malthus himself. The essay in its first form had not made sufficient allowance for “prudence”; and the introduction of moral restraint in the second edition might very plausibly have been ascribed by Godwin’s friends to Godwin himself, in spite of the elaborate reply to the Thoughts in a chapter afterwards dropped.[828] Godwin said to him afterwards that he had no right to introduce a new element into his solution of the problem, and pretend that it was the same solution as before;[829] if he altered his premises he ought to alter his conclusion. To which Malthus might have answered, that, though his conclusion is altered, it retains its value as an argument against Godwin. At first the tendency of numbers to increase up to the food was described as an obstacle fatal to progress; now it is indeed an obstacle which must be faced and overcome, but it is fatal not to progress, but only to equality. Godwin himself had at first considered it an entirely imaginary obstacle which might be ignored for the present by reformers; and his very doctrine of prudence amounts to an admission that his view of it had changed.
Godwin himself was not conscious of his change of front; as the seventh of thirteen children he may have thought the matter personal; and whatever concessions he had made in 1801 he withdrew in 1820. In that year, with David Booth, the patient author of the English Analytical Dictionary, to arrange his statistics and vouch for his calculations, he published an elaborate reply to the Essay on Population. The politicians, the political economists, the bulk of the press, and the public had accepted the Malthusian doctrines, though the conversion of the public was no deeper than it was on Free Trade, and the statesmen with a few exceptions were not sorry to make capital out of the “odiousness” of the doctrines whenever the “acknowledged truth” of them would not serve their turn. Still it seemed true that time had declared for Malthus, and Godwin had fallen out of notice. Sydney Smith’s assertion,[830] “Malthus took the trouble of refuting him, and we hear no more of Mr. Godwin,” is not very far from the truth. Malthus had survived his refutation, and Godwin his reputation. Pitt, Paley, and Copleston were with Malthus; he had gained over Hallam among historians, James Mill, Senior, and Ricardo among economists, Brougham, Mackintosh, and even Whitbread among politicians. Southey, Hazlitt, and Cobbett were not a sufficient make-weight. Hazlitt in his Reply to the Essay on Population (in letters of which some appeared in Cobbett’s Pol. Register, 1807) acknowledges the popularity, though he predicts its decay.[831] It seems clear that in educated circles at least the view of Malthus was as early as 1820 what it was in 1829, “the popular view,”[832] which is quite compatible, as Darwin long experienced, with great unpopularity in particular quarters. No better evidence could be given of this popularity than the unwilling testimony given by Godwin himself in his new book.[833] At the end of 1819 Brougham had referred in the House of Commons to the principle of Malthus as “one of the soundest principles of political economy,” and said it was melancholy to observe how the press scouted it and abused its defenders.[834] The press, however, was divided. The Edinburgh Review from the first had sided with Malthus. The Quarterly had begun by strong hostility (Dec. 1812, pp. 320 seq.); had softened its tone as time went on (Dec. 1813, pp. 157 seq., and Oct. 1814, pp. 154–5); had spoken with hesitation and doubtfulness (Oct. 1816, pp. 50 seq.); and had at last completely surrendered (July 1817, pp. 369 seq.), confessing it to be “much easier to disbelieve Mr. Malthus than to refute him” (p. 396), thereafter utilizing his doctrine for the support of things as they are, only regretting that Malthus himself would not do the same a little more stoutly (pp. 402–3). Finally, as we have seen, Malthus, after having contributed to the Edinburgh, became a contributor to the Quarterly. The change of public opinion, illustrated by the conversion of the Quarterly, gave greater bitterness to the attacks of the enemies that remained unconverted. But it gave them no new arguments.
In Godwin’s Enquiry concerning Population (when we neglect mere epigrams such as “a man is surer that he has ancestors than that he will have posterity”) there are substantially four arguments:—Malthus has changed his position; the world is not peopled; the ratios are not as he represents; and experience is against him. We have already discussed the first. The use of the second implies a misunderstanding of the Malthusian position, for it ignores distinction between actual and possible supplies of food, and does not allow that a man is “confined” by four walls unless he touches them.[835] Godwin does not mend the argument by comparing it to the objection brought against Christianity—“the world is not yet Christianized”; still less by appealing to Christianity itself, and taunting Malthus with the texts, “Increase and multiply,” “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them,” “made a little lower than the angels,” “forty sons and thirty grandsons, which rode on threescore and ten ass colts,” “In the last days some shall depart from the faith, forbidding to marry.”[836] Malthus had been attacked in 1807 by a Puritan or Covenanting pamphlet entitled, ‘A summons of Wakening, or the evil tendency and danger of Speculative Philosophy, exemplified in Mr. [Sir John] Leslie’s Enquiry into the Nature of Heat, and Mr. Malthus’ Essay on Population, and in that speculative system of common law which is at present administered in these kingdoms.’[837] The body of this book had been even more remarkable than its title, for it had proved Malthus guilty not merely of heterodoxy, but of atheism. “It is evident to any one who attentively reads the Essay on Population that its author does not believe in the existence of God, but substitutes for Him sometimes the principle of Population, sometimes that of Necessity.” Sadler many years later declared in the same spirit that “the insults the theory of Malthus levels at God, and the injuries it meditates inflicting upon man, will be endured by neither.”[838]
Once for all, let Parson Malthus explain his consistency with the religious text-book of his Church. Prior to the injunction given to men to increase and multiply, come, says Malthus, all the moral and physical laws without which they cannot increase or multiply. Suppose the command had been to increase and multiply not men but vegetables; this could not mean, “Sow the seed broadcast, in the air, over the sea, on stony ground,” but, “Take all the means made necessary, by pre-existing laws, to secure the best growth of vegetables.” That man would best obey the command, who should prepare the soil, and provide for the watering and tilling of it, where those things were wanting before. So he will best obey the command to increase and multiply Men, who prepares food for men where there was none before, and not he who brings them recklessly into the world without any such provision. “I believe it is the intention of the Creator that the earth should be replenished, but certainly with a healthy, virtuous, and happy population, not an unhealthy, vicious, and miserable one. And, if, in endeavouring to obey the command to increase and multiply, we people it only with beings of the latter description and suffer accordingly, we have no right to impeach the justice of the command, but our irrational mode of executing it.”[839] He might have added, that to give any other interpretation of the passage in Genesis is to forget the circumstances in which the words were spoken. The Deluge had just swept away all the earth’s inhabitants except one family, expressly on the score of wickedness; and, if a wicked replenishing were not desirable, an unhappy or a poor one would be at the best only one degree less so. Regarding the question then purely from the outside, we cannot find anything in the writings of Parson Malthus inconsistent with his ecclesiastical orthodoxy; and we can hardly believe that free-thinking Godwin was very serious in the objection.
Malthus himself replies to it as a charge commonly brought against him by others, with no reference to Godwin in particular. For the most part he ignores Godwin’s book on Population, as mere rhetoric and scurrility.[840] Godwin, however, had given more than two years of hard labour to the writing of it;[841] and his biographer regards it as the last work of his best days. He employed his son William and his friend Henry Blanch Rosser to help him, in addition to Booth. His whole mind was occupied with Booth’s calculations and his own deductions from them. He himself “could not pursue a calculation for an hour without being sick to the lowest ebb.”[842] If Booth lagged behind him he was miserable. He rose in early morning to note down an idea and was ill for the rest of the day after it. He is satisfied, however, with the result of his labours. He thinks his chapter on the Geometrical Ratio will delight his friends and astonish his foes. In any case his comfort is that “truth” will prevail, and, whether through him or another, “the system of Malthus can never rise again, and the world is delivered from this accursed apology in favour of vice and misery and hard-heartedness and oppression,”[843] and the world will see that there is “no need of any remedies,” for the numbers of mankind never did and never can increase in the ways described by Malthus.[844] A few of his younger friends[845] believed him successful; and the book was mentioned in the House of Commons as a conclusive refutation of Malthus, especially in regard to the ratios.[846] But the fact remains not only that poor Godwin made no bread and butter by it,[847] but that he converted no one whose opinion in such a matter was of any weight. Mackintosh, though at peace again with his old friend, when he writes to him in September 1821,[848] cannot praise his work; even thinks its tone intolerant; and will only say that he sees nothing in the Malthusian doctrines inconsistent with perfectibility. He takes pains at the same time to disclaim the authorship of the notice in the Edinburgh Review for July 1821, which was lacking in the courtesy due to Godwin, though it did not reproduce the scurrility of the earliest review of him.[849] The inconclusiveness of the book, even in the view of Malthus’ opponents, appears from the stream of new refutations, which made no pause.
Even the question of the ratios was not settled. Godwin had counted his discussion of them the most important part of his book. It gives us his third substantial argument against Malthus. Godwin takes up,[850] what seems to have been a common charge, that the essayist had written a quarto volume to prove that population increases in a geometrical and food in an arithmetical ratio. The essayist had answered, as long ago as 1806,[851] that the first proposition was proved as soon as the facts about America were authenticated, and the second was self-evident; his book was meant less to prove the ratios than to trace their effects. His authorities, as he told Godwin afterwards,[852] were Dr. Price, Styles, Benjamin Franklin, Euler, and Sir William Petty, supplemented, for figures, by Short and Süssmilch and the censuses of the United States and England, and, for principles, by Adam Smith and Hume. We have already seen[853] how far the simile of geometrical and arithmetical ratios was meant to be pressed. Godwin thinks he exposes it by arguing that the increase of population can never be quite exactly geometrical[854] (which Malthus would admit),—that America was an exception[855] (in face of the maxim that the exception tests the rule),—that, in order to suppose population doubling itself in the United States, we must suppose it, as regards births, doing the same in the Old World (in other words, fact is the same as tendency),—that the normal increase is not that of America but that of Sweden,[856] in which case (Malthus would answer) the normal increase must be one that takes place in face of very severe restrictions. To the charge of damaging the borrowed kettle the old Irishwoman had three answers:—It was cracked when I got it; it was whole when I returned it; I never had it. So Godwin’s views of the American colonies vacillated between three inconsistent propositions: the great increase of the numbers is natural (or spontaneous), but that of the food is greater still;[857] the great increase is not natural, but due to immigration;[858] there has been no great increase at all.[859] The reader has three alternative arguments presented to him, and it matters little whereby he is convinced, if only in the end he is persuaded to believe with Godwin, that population requires no checks at all,[860] and is a fitful principle.[861] In history, says Godwin, it seems to operate by fits and starts; and such irregular effects cannot have a uniform cause. It might be replied that in the same sense gravitation is fitful, for we seem to break it by walking upstairs as well as down, by using a siphon as well as a water-jug, or by drying up a drop of ink with blotting-paper instead of letting it sink down into the paper. Yet in these cases the fitfulness is never imputed to the absence of a cause, but to the presence of more causes than one. To believe, as Godwin seems to do, in occult laws which vary with the circumstances is to believe in no laws at all. The only constancy would be the constant probability of miracles.[862] Freethinkers had not as yet identified themselves with the party of order in physics; and perhaps Godwin was simply carrying out his dislike of law one step farther. Having applied it to politics (1793) and to style (1797), he now applied it to nature (1820). He deliberately placed a whole army of facts out of the range of science. It was fortunate for himself that he appeared no more in the character of an economist, but left Booth the task of replying to the Edinburgh reviewer.[863]
If economical criticism was weak with Godwin, the political philosopher, it was still weaker with Coleridge, the philosophizing poet. The main criticisms of Coleridge[864] are contained in manuscript marginal comments with pen and pencil written on his copy of the second (quarto) edition of the Essay (1803), now in the British Museum. When Malthus writes (in Preface, p. vi) that if he had confined himself to general views, his main principle was so incontrovertible that he could have entrenched himself in an impregnable fortress, Coleridge breaks in: “If by the main principle the author means both the Fact[865] (i. e. that population unrestrained should infinitely outrun food) and the deduction from the fact, i. e. that the human race is therefore not indefinitely improvable, a pop-gun would batter down the impregnable Fortress. If only the Fact be meant, the assertion is quite nugatory, in the former case vapouring, in the latter a vapour.” (And on p. vii:) “Are we now to have a quarto to teach us that great misery and great vice arise from poverty, and that there must be poverty in its worst shape wherever there are more mouths than loaves and more Heads than Brains?”
This may be taken as simply the argument of Hazlitt, who “did not see what there was to be proved;”—the principle of Malthus is a truism. Even when commenting on the statement of the Ratios (on p. 8), after some denunciation of the “verbiage and senseless repetition” of the essay, Coleridge goes on to agree with it. He would restate the whole so as to substitute “a proportion which no one in his senses would consider as other than axiomatic, viz.: Suppose that the human race amount to a thousand millions. Divide the square acres of food-producing surface by 500,000,000, that is to say, so much to each married couple. Estimate this quotum as high as you like, and, if you will, even at a thousand or even at ten thousand acres to each family. Suppose population without check, and take the average increase from two families at five (which is irrationally small, supposing the human race healthy, and each man married at twenty-one to a woman of eighteen), and in twelve generations the increase would be 48,828,125. Now as to any conceivable increase in the production or improvement in the productiveness of the thousand or ten thousand acres, it is ridiculous even to think of production at all, inasmuch as it is demonstrable that either already in this twelfth generation, or certainly in a few generations more (I leave the exact statement to schoolboys, not having Cocker’s Arithmetic by me, and having forgotten the number of square feet in an acre), the quotum of land would not furnish standing room to the descendants of the first agrarian proprietors. Best do the sum at once. Find out the number of square acres on the globe (of land), and divide the number by 500,000. I have myself been uselessly prolix, and in grappling with the man have caught his itch of verbiage.” He goes on to say that if every man were to marry and have a family, and each of his children were to do the same, their posterity would soon want standing room, and, if all checks were removed, this would of course happen much faster. “Any schoolboy who has learned arithmetic as far as compound interest may astonish his younger sister both by the fact and by the exact number of years in which it would take place. On the other hand, let the productiveness of the earth be increased beyond the hopes of the most visionary agriculturist, still the productions take up room. If the present crop of turnips occupy one-fifth of the space of the turnip field, the increase can never be more than quintupled, and, if you suppose two planted for one, the increase still cannot exceed ten; so that, supposing a little island of a single acre, and its productions occupying one-fifth of its absolute space, and sufficient to maintain two men and two women, four generations would outrun its possible power of furnishing them with food; and we may boldly affirm that a truth so self-evident as this was never overlooked or even by implication contradicted. What proof has Mr. Malthus brought? What proof can he bring that any writer or theorist has overlooked this fact, which would not apply (with reverence be it spoken) to the Almighty Himself when He pronounced the awful command, ‘Increase and multiply’?”
From some of the phrases dropped in the course of these comments, we should infer they were the preparation for a formal review of the book by Coleridge himself. It is therefore extremely puzzling to find the whole comments printed almost word for word and letter for letter in a review[866] hitherto considered by every one (Southey included) to be Southey’s. This applies to the subsequent MS. notes, which are happily briefer. Coleridge finds fault with Malthus (p. 11) for using the words virtue and vice without defining them, apparently overlooking the footnote under his very eyes (p. 11 n.) which says, “The general consequence of vice is misery, and this consequence is the precise reason why an action is termed vicious.”[867] Coleridge says, in relation to the list of irregularities given in the last paragraph but one of the page (11): “That these and all these are vices in the present state of society, who doubt? So was Celibacy in the patriarchal ages. Vice and Virtue subsist in the agreement of the habits of a man with his reason and conscience, and these can have but one moral guide, Utility, or the Virtue[868] and Happiness of Rational beings. We mention this not under the miserable notion that any state of society will render those actions capable of being performed with conscience and virtue, but to expose the utter unguardedness of this speculation.” Then after some remarks on New Malthusians (as they would be now called) he goes on: “All that follows to the three hundred and fifty-fifth page[869] may be an entertaining farrago of quotations from books of travels, &c., but surely very impertinent in a philosophical work. Bless me, three hundred and forty pages—for what purpose! A philosophical work can have no legitimate purpose but proof and illustration, and three hundred and fifty pages to prove an axiom! to illustrate a self-evident truth! It is neither more nor less than bookmaking!” He thinks, however, that what Malthus wrote of Condorcet applies to himself;—though his paradox is very absurd, it must be refuted, or he will think the toleration of his contemporaries due to their mental inferiority and his own sublimity of intellect.[870] The remaining marginal notes are chiefly of an interjectional character,[871] many of them not very refined. Malthus himself never falls into coarseness; but his opponents seldom avoid it, and Coleridge (or Southey) is no exception to the rule.[872] Except for the interest attaching even to the foolish words of a great man, it would not have been worth while to revive his obiter scripta on a matter beyond his ken.
A few words are necessary in regard to Grahame and Weyland, who form the chief subject of the long second appendix of later editions of the essay. Grahame’s charges were such as owed all their force to the general ignorance of the actual writings of Malthus himself.[873] Mr. Malthus regards famine as nature’s benevolent remedy for want of food; Mr. Malthus believes that nature teaches men to invent (p. 100) diseases in order to prevent over-population; Mr. Malthus, regarding vice and misery generally as benevolent remedies for over-population, thinks that they are rather to be encouraged than otherwise (p. 100). Malthus, for his part, deploring the fact that this last charge has been current “in various quarters for fourteen years” (or since his quarto essay of 1803), thinks he may well pass it by. “Vice and Misery, and these alone, are the evils which it has been my great object to contend against. I have expressly proposed moral restraint as their rational and proper remedy,” a sufficient proof that he regarded them as the disease.[874] Grahame himself does not deny the tendency to increase beyond food (p. 102), but thinks emigration a sufficient remedy (p. 104).
Empson,[875] playfully classifying the opponents of Malthus, says there are some who will not comprehend “out of sheer stupidity, like Mr. Grahame,” or out of sentimental horror, like Southey,[876] Coleridge, and Bishop Huntingford;[877] or because, like Sadler[878] and Godwin, who followed Price and Muret,[879] they imagine the law of population to vary with the circumstances; or else because they invent laws of their own, like Anderson, Owen, and Poulett Scrope;[880] or because, like Weyland,[881] they deny the premises of Malthus as well as the conclusion. Weyland, like Grahame, has the honour of a special refutation from Malthus. He allows that Malthus in his essay has raised his subject from the level of desultory academical discussion to that of scientific inquiry, and his book is the point from which every later investigation must start. He allows that his order is lucid and his reasoning fair, and that he enables an opponent at once to discuss the question on its merits. Granting his premises, says Weyland, we cannot deny his conclusion; but that premise of his is false which assumes that the highest known rate of increase in a particular state of society is the natural or spontaneous rate in all;[882] we cannot take the height of Chang or of the Hale Child as the natural standard of the height of all. To this Malthus answers, that, if we had observed in any country that all the people who were short carried weights upon their heads, and the people who were tall did not, we should infer that the weights had something to do with the height,—and so, when we find that the increase of a people is fast or slow in proportion as the pressure of certain checks on increase is heavy or light, we cannot but believe that the rate would be at its fastest if there were no checks at all. To say with Weyland, in the terms of his first cardinal proposition,[883] that “population has a natural tendency to keep within the powers of the soil to afford it subsistence in every gradation through which society passes,” is to say “that every man has a natural tendency to remain in prison who is necessarily confined to it by four strong walls.” One might as well infer that the pine of the crowded Norwegian forest has no tendency to have lateral branches, because as a matter of fact there is no room for it to have any.[884]
Weyland thinks that, without any moral restraint, population will keep within limits of the food, in proportion as it reaches a high state of morality, religion, and political liberty.[885] Malthus, on the contrary, would say that, without moral restraint, even morality, religion, and political liberty will not save a people from wretchedness;[886] and, for his part, the design always uppermost in his mind when writing has been “to improve the condition and increase the happiness of the lower classes of society.”[887]
One argument of Weyland’s[888] has some weight in it. With a rich soil, high farming, and abundant food, the bulk of the people of a country might by the natural division of labour be employed in manufacture, and their unhealthy manner of life in towns might so check population that it might be far from keeping up to the level of the food. Malthus replies that this case is rare, for our town populations have increased rapidly,—but, such as it is, he has allowed for it in the second clause of his second proposition: “Population invariably increases where the means of subsistence increase, unless prevented by some very powerful and obvious checks.”[889]
There are two other critics to whom Malthus replies in some detail, one the visionary Owen, who is embraced in Empson’s classification, the other the practical man Arthur Young, who cannot so easily be classified. “I mean,” says the latter, “to deal in facts alone, happy when I can discover them pure and unalloyed with prejudice.”[890] As this was his practice as well as his profession, it may easily be believed that in his voluminous records of fifty years’ travelling and experimenting[891] he has spun rope enough to hang himself. It ought to be added that, like Godwin, he claims the privilege of being inconsistent. Nothing could be more clear than his recognition in his Travels in France of the evils of over-population.[892] Yet in 1800, in his Question of Scarcity plainly stated and Remedies considered, he recommends as his remedy that each country labourer who has three children be provided with a cow and half an acre of potato ground.[893] In other words, he would reduce the English standard of living to the common Irish one, milk and potatoes. Malthus replies by giving reasons why people should “live dear,” and by reminding Arthur Young of his own comments on the proceedings of the National Assembly. Recognizing their duty to grant relief, but wishing to avoid an English Poor Law, the National Assembly set aside fifty millions of francs a year for support of the poor. If it had been really a duty, wrote Arthur Young (in his Travels), necessity might have occasioned them to extend the relief to one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred millions, and so on, “in the same miserable progression that has taken place in England.”[894] Malthus hardly needed to go back to the Travels, as Young himself confessed in his later writings that his plan did not apply to large cities, and though he still held by the claim of right, he confessed that his faith must be without works; in other words, he claimed the right to be inconsistent. But he continued to question Malthus’ axiom that what cannot be ought not to be; and he thinks that, if a man marries without the means to keep a family, he may justly blame society for not providing him with the means. He argues, too, that Malthus for the success of his scheme assumes perfect chastity in the unmarried. Malthus really assumed only that the evils, which on an average in a civilized country attend the prudential check, are less than the evils of premature mortality and other miseries entailed by the opposite course; he declares himself not against but in favour of schemes that improve the condition of the poor even on a limited scale; and he only asks that every such scheme be tested not by its first success, for hardly any scheme of the kind is unsuccessful at first, but by its effect on a new generation.[895]
This test might be applied to schemes like Owen’s and later ones on the same model. Malthus perhaps deals too peremptorily with them. Speaking of Owen’s system of the community of labour and goods, and of Spence’s Plan for Parochial Partnerships in the Land[896] (“the only remedy for the distresses and oppressions of the people,” the land to be “the people’s farm”), he answers that there are two “decisive arguments against systems of equality”: first, the inability of a state of equality to furnish adequate motives for exertion, the goad of necessity being absent,—and, second, the tendency of population to increase faster than subsistence. In reply it must be said that there might be socialism without communism; there might even be communism without an absolute equality, such as would put idle and industrious on the same footing; there might be an approximation of the social extremes, bringing poor and rich nearer, and giving the former not weaker but stronger motives to exertion; finally, it is not at all inconceivable that at least one-half of this result might come, as Godwin wished, by the act of the rich themselves, which means also as Malthus wished, for it would come from a strong sense of personal obligation. It cannot be denied that Malthus, in using the argument in question, seems to forget his own admission, that the goad of necessity does not act with effect either on the lowest or on the highest classes.[897] Moreover, he allows, there have been cases, e. g. among the Moravian communities, where industry and community of goods have existed side by side. “It may be said that, allowing the stimulus of inequality of conditions to have been necessary in order to raise man from the indolence and apathy of the savage to the activity and intelligence of civilized life, it does not follow that the continuance of the same stimulus should be necessary when this activity and energy of mind has been once gained.”[898]
The second of his arguments against Owen is of course his more cogent and characteristic one. As we have seen, it is not deprived of its point by the inclusion of moral restraint among the checks to population. It was argued against him that his own ideal of a society where moral restraint universally prevailed would involve precisely what is necessary to make such systems as Godwin’s and Owen’s permanently possible.[899] There is an air of conclusiveness in the remark that, in proportion as moral restraint prevails in the world, Malthus approximates to Godwin. But Malthus believes that equality and community would destroy the motive for moral restraint. The passions would still be present, and no man would be in a position where there seemed any need to restrain them; the restraint would be the interest of the whole society, but not of the individual himself, for the effects were to be borne not by himself, but by the whole society. No doubt the good of the whole society ought to be a sufficient reason; but it would be so in a very few men now; and, unless it were in all men then, the result would be an expansion of population, with the results Malthus described. Owen is aware of this, and suggests artificial checks, allowing men to gratify desire without the usual consequences, and dispensing with any effort of will. Malthus, on the other hand, would throw all the responsibility and burden on the individual, which he thinks it impossible to do without allowing the individual his private property.[900] No further justification of things as they are is to be found in Malthus; and, so far from being reactionary, his principles (with all their qualifications) were probably the most advanced individualism that was ever preached in these days. They are adopted in full view of the facts that have been again vividly brought before the public mind in our day by writers who are to our generation what Godwin, Spence, and Owen were to theirs.
Malthus seems to believe, with Dugald Stewart, that Utopian schemes are like the tunes of a barrel-organ, recurring at melancholy intervals from age to age with damnable iteration.[901] But, unless society itself has moved in a circle, the Utopias will resemble each other no more and no less than do the states of society which they would replace. Our own socialists, therefore, can hardly be dismissed by the stroke of the pen, that classifies them with people so curiously unlike them and each other as Plato, Ball, More, the Fifth Monarchy men, the Levellers, Godwin and Spence and Owen. Malthus does not, in fact, so dismiss them. Besides bringing forward his own argument, he examines Owen’s attempt to deal with it.[902]
Since Malthus, every complete reform has needed to face in some way or other the question which he treated; but he left little for others to do. Of the two most prominent schemes of our own day for the reconstruction of society, one, that of Mr. Henry George, involves an unconscious recourse to the old weapons of Godwin, Sadler, and other opponents of Malthus; Progress and Poverty does not contain any argument not to be found in these writers. The conjecture about a “fixed quantity of human life on the earth” (ed. 1881, p. 97) is hardly an argument. It may be compared with what is stated by St. G. Mivart[903] to be the basis of Darwinism. “Every individual has to endure a very severe struggle for existence owing to the tendency to geometrical increase of all kinds of animals and plants, while the total animal and vegetable population (man and his agency excepted) remains almost stationary.” Mr. Mivart’s reason for excepting man seems to be Mr. George’s reason for including him. The latter’s more direct arguments against Malthus are as follows:—first, the difficulty is in the future (p. 85);—second, Malthus shifts the responsibility from man to the Creator (p. 87);—third, Malthus justifies the status quo and parries the demand for reform (p. 88);—fourth, Malthus ascribes excessive increase of numbers to a general tendency of human nature, while it is really due to the badness of our institutions in old countries, as in India and Ireland (pp. 101–114), or the very thinness of population in new (p. 92);—fifth, Malthus does not distinguish between tendency to increase and actual increase, and is therefore refuted by the fact that the world is not yet peopled (p. 94). In the sixth place, we are told, if there had been such a law as the Malthusian, it would have been sooner and more widely recognized (p. 98);—that families often become extinct (p. 99), and it is more certain that we have ancestors than that we shall have descendants;[904]—that better industry would keep a larger population (p. 107);—Malthus says that vice and misery are necessary (p. 109);—Malthus does not see that vegetables and animals increase faster than population (p. 115),—or that the increase of man involves the increase of his food (p. 116), for a division of labour makes man produce more than he consumes (p. 126), and so the most populous countries are always the most wealthy (p. 128);—Malthus forgets that the world is wide (p. 119),—and that the tendency to increase is checked by development of intellect,[905]—and by the elevation of the standard of comfort (pp. 121, 123);—he forgets that “the power of population to produce the necessaries of life is not to be measured by the necessaries of life” it actually produces, but by its powers to produce wealth in all forms (p. 127);—Malthus will not see that twenty men where nature is niggardly (e. g. on a bare rock?) will produce more than twenty times what one man will where nature is bountiful (p. 134);—and the Malthusian theory “attributes want to the decrease of productive power” (p. 134);—finally Malthus does not know “the real law of population,” which is that “the tendency to increase, instead of being always uniform, is strong where a greater population would give increased comfort, and where the perpetuity of the race is threatened by the mortality induced by adverse conditions, but weakens just as the higher development of the individual becomes possible, and the perpetuity of the race is assured” (p. 123). What is right in this view of the real law of population is common to Mr. George with Mr. Herbert Spencer;[906] what is wrong is common to him with Godwin.[907]
The view of Karl Marx,[908] the prophet of the International and of modern economic Socialism, is built on much more solid foundations. It is a corollary of his view of capital. The general law of the accumulation of capital, in these days of large manufactories and machinery, involves not only a progressive addition to the quantity of capital, which is all that Adam Smith contemplated, but a qualitative change in the proportion between fixed capital, such as machinery, and the circulating which is paid in wages. To use the author’s words, the progress of accumulation brings with it a relative decrease of the variable component of capital and a relative increase of its constant component. New machinery is constantly supplanting labour without any real compensation in increased demand, either at once or in the long run. The constant element increases at the cost of the variable; and this can only result in the progressive production of a population which, in relation to capital, is a surplus or superfluity, an over-population;—the cause which increases the net revenue of the country at the same time renders the population redundant and deteriorates the condition of the labourer.[909] So far from deploring the existence of this redundant class, the capitalists depend on it,[910] as the reserve of their army. They trust to its cheap labour to save them from the depression which in our days (though never before) appears with unfailing regularity after brisk trade and a crisis. If the hands were not always there for them to employ, they would not at once be able to seize the happy moment of a reviving demand for their goods. “Malthus with his narrow views understands the surplus population to be superfluous absolutely in itself, and not merely in relation to capital; but even he recognizes that over-population is a necessity of modern industry.”[911] In proof of these statements he quotes the words of Malthus (Pol. Econ., ed. 1836, pp. 215,[912] 319, 320):—“Prudential habits with regard to marriage carried to a considerable extent among the labouring classes, of a country mainly depending upon manufactures and commerce, might injure it.”... “From the nature of a population, an increase of labourers cannot be brought into [the] market, in consequence of a particular demand, till after the lapse of sixteen or eighteen years; and the conversion of revenue into capital, by saving, may take place much more rapidly; a country is always liable to an increase in the quantity of the funds for the maintenance of labour faster than the increase of population.”
To these charges the answer is, first, that Malthus always recognized that over-population was relative, relative to the actual food;[913] second, that he did not recognize the over-population as necessary; it took place as a matter of fact, but he believed that, if working men did as he wished them, it would disappear;[914]—and in the third place, the first sentence quoted by Marx, from the Political Economy is explained by the second, which he does not quote: “In a country of fertile land such habits would be the greatest of all conceivable blessings.” Malthus is comparing Commercial with Agricultural countries, not pronouncing on the general question of wages; and other passages in his writings[915] show that he regarded the high wages, resulting from prudential habits, as a public gain, more than compensating the capitalists’ loss of profits. Even Marx himself grudgingly allows that Malthus was more humane than Ricardo in regard to the hours of labour desirable for the workmen.[916] In the fourth place, the latter half of the quotation (beginning with the words, “From the nature of a population”) first states an obvious fact which a child could have pointed out, and then a disputable proposition which predicts not an over-population but the reverse of it.
Marx is seeking to demonstrate the hopelessness of the labourer’s position; and he is too acute not to know that his demonstration would be seriously weakened if he admitted the truth of the Malthusian doctrine and the bare possibility of the adoption of prudential habits by the labourers. This is the real reason of his bitter attacks on the Essay. He says of it:[917] “When I say Eden’s work on the Poor was the only important writing by a disciple of Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, I may be reminded of the essay of Malthus. But this book in its first form (and the later editions did nothing but add and adapt borrowed materials) is nothing but a plagiarism from Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, full of schoolboy superficiality and clerical declamation, and not containing a single original sentence. By the way, although Malthus was a clergyman of the Church of England, he had taken the monastic oath of celibacy[!], for this is one of the conditions of a fellowship at the Protestant University of Cambridge. ‘Socios collegiorum maritos esse non permittimus, sed statim postquam quis uxorem duxerit, socius collegii desinat esse’ (Reports of Cambridge University Commission, p. 172). By this circumstance Malthus is favourably distinguished from the other Protestant clergy, who have cast off the Catholic rule of celibacy....[918] With exception of Ortes[919] the Venetian monk, an original and clever writer, most of the writers on Population are Protestant clergymen,” a contrast, he goes on, to the days when political economists were all philosophers. Marx adopts[920] the common view that Malthus being a clergyman was the bond-slave of Toryism and the ruling classes, and therefore ready to adopt a principle that attributed over-population to the eternal laws of nature rather than to the historical laws (also natural) of the capitalists’ production. Marx does not see that the “eternal laws” in question do not lead to over-population except when the precepts of Malthus are neglected; and never shows how, apart from these precepts, over-population will be prevented in the renovated society itself, which has nationalized not only the land but all the instruments of production. Would the habits of men be so changed by this stroke of nationalization that the want of ordinary commercial motives would not be felt?[921] Would not the millennium of the Socialist, like that of the Christian, postulate a religious conversion on the largest scale for its first introduction, to say nothing of its continuance? Productive Co-operation, depending on the spontaneous action of the labourers for its creation, and on their intelligence and prudence for its success, would nationalize capital more surely; and it would not make the impossible postulate of Socialism, that a passionless unselfishness, which not one in a hundred thousand in our day exhibits at any time, shall at once become the invariable daily rule of all without exception. But Co-operation, if it neglects Malthus, will find its work no sooner done than undone.
It may be thought that there are causes at work which will remove over-population among the working classes even under the present system of separated capital and labour. It is a doctrine of the “finer wits,” founded on striking biological analogies, that the general development of intellect in the race will weaken the passion for marriage and supersede the necessity for any checks on it;[922]—the exercise of the energies of concentration or “individuation” developes these energies at the expense of those of diffusion or “genesis;”—the individual is made strong in himself, at the expense of his power of creating new individuals. Quite apart from the disagreeable fact that this principle would lessen the pressure most in those classes where lessening is at present least needed, and least where it is most needed, Malthus would probably have pointed out, first, that unless the appetite is absolutely killed, no physiological check can supersede some control of the will over the passion,—and, second, that intellectual development will more certainly check population by making men alive to their responsibilities and strengthening their power of restraint than by weakening the passion to be restrained. The expounder of the theory is of all people the least likely to teach men that they may become civilized by the progress of their race without the trouble of civilizing themselves individually. But his theory admits the misapplication; and, if it be said by the misappliers that we ought to tell the truth without fear of consequences, we must answer that in this case the consequences are part of the truth. On the other hand, to theorists like W. R. Greg, who suggest unknown physiological laws that may act as a spontaneous check, Malthus would have replied as to Condorcet:[923]
“What can we reason but from what we know?”
This brief survey of typical critics and commentators may be completed by a classification of the former, which, among other advantages, will give a bird’s-eye view of the chief points in discussion. Empson classified the opponents of Malthus by their motives,[924] a proceeding hardly fair either to them or to the essay itself. It is not fair to them, for as a rule the critics appeal to argument, and must be judged by what they adduce, not by their good or ill will, wisdom or folly, in adducing it; and not fair to the essay, because few books have owed so much to their reviewers.
The positions of the critics may be classified as follows:—
I. Some say the doctrine of the essay is a truism.[925]
II. Others admit that it is unanswerable, but retain a philosophical faith in the future discovery of some contrary principle.[926]
III. Others find fault with the details of the doctrine, either (a) in regard to the ratios of increase, asserting that no tendency to a geometrical increase of population has been proved, but something much less rapid, even (a few say) a decreasing ratio,[927]—and that no mere arithmetical increase of food has been proved, but something much more rapid,[928]—or (b) in regard to the checks on population, asserting that no checks are necessary,[929]—that vice and misery sometimes add to population instead of checking it,[930]—that to include moral restraint is to stultify the original doctrine,[931]—that moral restraint sometimes involves as great evil as excessive numbers, both from the personal practice of it and from the preaching of it to others,[932]—that important checks have been omitted, the chief being misgovernment,[933] bad laws,[934] high feeding,[935] intellectual development,[936] and those of Owen.[937]
There is, besides, an a priori criticism, which is either (I.) ecclesiastical,[938] alleging that Malthus contradicts the Bible or some other authority,—(II.) theological,[939] that he denies Providence,—or (III.) doctrinaire,[940] that he denies natural rights and the pre-established harmony of moral and economical laws, and the instinct of equality,—or (IV.) ethical and popular,[941] that he runs counter to the moral sense and the natural benevolence of men and cosmopolitan morality. These arguments have been already considered. The fourth of them has, in its last branch, an appearance of truth, because Malthus has certainly pled less for the cosmopolitan than for the domestic and civic virtues. He wishes to lay the foundations solidly and leave the building to others. Cosmopolitan morality can rarely be the foundation. In the Empire, Christianity may have raised the people, and Stoicism the philosophers, to the wider morality without the training of the narrower, so that the converts were made better members of their own small communities by becoming members of the commonwealth of the saints and citizens of the great world. But it seems to Malthus that, in the world of to-day, the many conditions of a steady moral progress are best secured if the domestic and civic virtues precede the cosmopolitan. We must not legislate for a world of heroes, but for men as we know them to be; and a comfortable domestic life (βίος τέλειος) must be the common highway to goodness in a society of ordinary men. If poverty were no evil, churlishness would be no vice. But extreme poverty[942] is a real hindrance to goodness. In the apparent exceptions, as in the voluntary poverty of St. Francis, the greatest evil is absent, for there is no struggle for bare life. To abolish that struggle, and help men to comfort, is in some degree to help men to goodness; and it was the end for which Malthus laboured. The most sure and solid way of reaching it lay, as he thought, in impressing every man with a strong sense of his responsibility for his acts and of his power over his own destiny. To reform a nation, we must reform the members of it, who, if they are good at first in spite of their institutions, will at last conform their institutions to the model of their own goodness. To hold men the creatures of society, and make society responsible for their character, was, he thought, to mistake the order of nature. Society can feel its responsibility only in its individual members; and no member of it can free his own soul by the purity of a collective or representative conscience.
The doctrine of Malthus is, therefore, a strong appeal to personal responsibility. He would make men strong in will, to subdue their animal wants to their notion of personal good and personal goodness, which, he believed, could never fail to develope into the common good and goodness of all. Believers in the omnipotence of outward circumstances and the powerlessness of the human will, to alter them or the human character, may put Malthus beyond the pale of sympathy. But all can enter into the mind of Malthus and understand his work, who know the hardness of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit, and yet believe in the power of ideas to change the lives of men, and have faith not only in the rigour of natural laws, but in man’s power to conquer nature by obeying her.