Parentage—Early Education—Graves and Wakefield—Course at Cambridge—Correspondence with his Father—Change in Studies—The Crisis and the Curacy—Effect of the Essay on its Author—Early and Late Styles—Life from 1799 to 1834—Ingrata Patria?—East India College—Professor’s Lectures—Hic Jacet.
The few facts that are known of the life of Malthus bring us nearer to him than we can come in his writings, and show us how well, on the whole, his antecedents and surroundings fitted him for his work. Our chief authorities are Bishop Otter’s biographical preface to the second edition of our author’s Political Economy, which was posthumously published in 1836, and Professor Empson’s notice of the book in the Edinburgh Review for January 1837.[943] Otter was the college companion and life-long friend of Malthus; Empson was his colleague at Haileybury. The information they give us, though meagre, is trustworthy; and happily it can be supplemented by hints from other quarters.
His father, Daniel Malthus, was born in 1730, and went to Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1747,[944] the year when Adam Smith went home from Balliol to Scotland. He left without a degree, not because of the Articles, for he subscribed them at matriculation,[945] or from Dr. Johnson’s reason of poverty, for he was a gentleman commoner, but probably from a contempt for the distinction itself.[946] His mind was active and open, and he seems to have formed literary friendships that stood his son in good stead afterwards. He liked to stay up in Oxford in vacation, working hard at his own studies in his own ways, and seeing none but chosen friends. He wrote to his son in later years, “I used to think Oxford none the less pleasant and certainly not the less useful for being disburdened of some of its society; I imagine you will say the same of Cambridge.”[947] On leaving the university he married and went to live in Surrey at a quiet country house on the way from Dorking to Guildford, still known by its old name of the Rookery. Of his eldest son, who took his grandfather’s name of Sydenham,[948] we know little except that in due time he married, and had two sons, Sydenham and Charles, and a daughter Mary. Mary died single in 1881 in her eighty-second year, Charles in 1821 in his fifteenth, their father in 1821 in his sixty-eighth. Sydenham, our author’s nephew, who died in 1869, was proprietor of Dalton Hill, Albury, where members of his family were, till recently, still living; his son, Lieut.-Col. Sydenham Malthus, C.B., of the 94th Regiment, served with distinction in the Zulu war a few years ago.
Daniel’s second son, Thomas Robert, familiarly known as Robert, was born at the Rookery on 14th February, 1766, the year when Rousseau came to England. His mother seems to have died before her husband; she is not mentioned in our meagre biographies.[949] His father, full of the teaching of the Émile, and by no means prejudiced by his Oxford experience in favour of the ordinary conventional training of the English youth, seems to have sent his sons to no public school of any kind, and in all probability brought them up at home under his own eye for the first eight or nine years of their life. We may think of Robert, therefore, as passing his childhood without privation, if without luxury, in the home of an English country gentleman of moderate fortune, who was devoted to books and botany, fireside and hillside philosophizing,[950] and the improvement of his house and grounds,—a man full of life and originality, gifted with vigorous health, and joining in his boys’ walks and games.[951] In his quiet little valley it was easy for Daniel Malthus to picture to himself a Millennial Hall of the future in store for every one else, on the type of his own Rookery, with no worse interruption than the rooks that cawed there nightly on the hill above him. From his son’s description[952] and his own letters, we gather that he was one of the best sort of the Enlightened followers of Nature. He knew Rousseau personally, and became his executor;[953] but they were liker in views than in character; Daniel Malthus had a deeper vein of reverence and a stronger inclination to put theory into practice.[954] The neighbours thought him an amiable and clever man who was an ornament to his parish, but decidedly eccentric, for he made few friends and was fondest of his own and his children’s company.[955] He was versed beyond his compeers in French and German literature, or he would hardly have been credited with having translated Paul et Virginie, D’Ermenonville’s Essay on Landscape, and the Sorrows of Werther. We have Robert’s authority for saying that, although he wrote no translations, he wrote many pieces that were very successful, but always anonymous.[956] With much of his son’s talent, he had no power, like his son’s, of sustained intellectual effort.
He saw the boy’s promise early, and gave him an education which is condemned by Robert’s chief biographer as irregular and desultory, but had a method in it. He believed that sons are always what their fathers were at their age, with the same kind of faults and virtues; and the men whose influence would have been best for himself would, he thought, be the best teachers for Robert. At the same time he believed with the “Émile” that a sort of laissez faire was the best policy in the education of children; they should be left to grow, and use their own eyes and hands and heads for themselves. At the age of nine or ten, say in the year 1776, Robert was accordingly delivered over to Mr. Richard Graves, Rector of Claverton, near Bath, to be taught little but Latin and good behaviour, along with a few other boys, most of them older than himself. Graves, who was Daniel’s senior by some years, had been intimate with the poet Shenstone at Pembroke College, Oxford, “a society which for half a century” (on Johnson’s partial testimony) “was eminent for English poetry and elegant literature.” From his novel, The Spiritual Quixote, or the Summer’s Ramble of Mr. Geoffry Wildgoose,[957] we should not fancy him the best guide for ingenuous youth. The book is a coarse and offensive satire on Whitfield and Wesley;[958] and shows Graves as a clergyman to be liker Laurence Sterne than Dr. Primrose. “Don Roberto,” however, as the tutor nicknamed his pupil, was fonder of fun and fighting than of his books, and at the ripe age of ten is not likely to have been troubled about the universe or about clerical consistency. From Graves he passed[959] into the hands of a much better man, Gilbert Wakefield, a clergyman who had rebelled against the Articles, turned dissenter, and become classical master of an academy at Warrington, founded in 1779 “to provide a course of liberal education for the sons of dissenters, and particularly for dissenting ministers.”[960] About one-third of the boys at the Warrington Academy were sons of members of the Church of England, who were, like Daniel Malthus, liberal in their opinions, and wished their sons to be likewise. Wakefield held decided views on education; and they were in close accordance with Daniel and the Émile. “The greatest service of tuition,” he said, “to any youth, is to teach him the exercise of his own powers, to conduct him to the hill of knowledge by that gradual process in which he sees and secures his own way, and rejoices in a consciousness of his own faculties and his own proficiency. Puppies and sciolists alone can be expected to be formed by any other process.”[961] The tutor’s best service is to point the pupil to the best authors and give him advice (not lectures) when he wants it. There was self-denial as well as wisdom in Wakefield’s view, for in one case at least the pupil showed his proficiency by departing from the opinions of his tutor.
Wakefield, himself a Fellow of Jesus,[962] procured Malthus an entrance to that college, and directed his studies till he matriculated there as a pensioner (or ordinary commoner) on 17th December, 1784, beginning residence in 1785.[963] Robert esteemed him highly. He described him twenty years afterwards[964] as a man “of the strictest and most inflexible integrity,” who gave up not only prospects of preferment, but even opportunities of usefulness, rather than deny the truth and offend his conscience,—a man hot and intemperate in public controversy,[965] but modest and genial in society, never advancing his opinions till challenged, nor trying to make converts to them, but urging others to an independent study of the facts,—finally, a genius cramped by its own learning and good memory, never taking time and pains to do itself justice in its writings. Though a foe to the thirty-nine Articles, Wakefield was a stout believer in Christianity, and attacked Paine’s Age of Reason in a rough style that contrasts strongly with the sober remarks of Malthus on Paine’s Rights of Man.
Up to 1785, therefore, his father and Wakefield had the largest share in the education of Malthus; and their influence was shown in the very fact that the opinions of Malthus were not fixed by them. His opinions were to be of his own forming; and, having never learned the schoolboy’s ambition of prize-taking,[966] he found time at college not only for what would give him the best degree, but for every study that interested him, especially history and poetry and modern languages, as in his later years for Italian literature. Frend, author of a political tract, Peace and Union, which brought him the honour of prosecution,[967] was his college tutor, and spoke highly of him.[968] It says much for his mathematical powers that in spite of his wide general reading he took the ninth place among the wranglers of his year, 1788. If he had been confining himself, as his father supposed, to the beaten track, he might, like Paley, have reached the senior wranglership.[969] After the Tripos he proposed to study at Cambridge and at home on a plan of his own. His father, on the false analogy of his own experience, had warned him against the abstract studying of scientific and mathematical principles apart from their applications; he must not “work curious stitches on a piece of rag”; he must become a practical surveyor, mechanic, and navigator. The son had answered that there would be ample time after the Tripos to make the applications, and there was little enough time in three years to study the principles. But thereafter, “if you will give me leave to proceed in my own plans of reading for the next two years (I speak with submission to your judgment), I promise you at the expiration of that time to be a decent natural philosopher, and not only to know a few principles, but to be able to apply these principles in a variety of useful problems.”[970] In reality, so far from having his father’s tendency to abstract speculation, he was (as he says himself) rather “remarked in college for talking of what actually exists in nature or may be put to real practical use.”[971]
Though the son had the best of this personal controversy, he would have done well to have responded to his father’s letters in the spirit in which they were written; in one instance at least, his father complains that Robert “drove him back into himself.” But this was rare. His father describes him as an admirable companion, sympathetic and generous, and making everybody easy and amused about him.[972] He was a favourite at home. When the family was removing from the Rookery at Dorking to the Cottage[973] at Albury in 1787, he was told: “You must find your way to us over bricks and tiles and meet with five in a bed and some of us under hedges, but everybody says they will make room for Robert.” It was Robert’s own warm heart that led him to give those years of leisure after the Tripos to studies very different from those of his first plan. Social problems were competing for his attention with scientific.
In 1797 he took his Master’s degree. In the same year he got a fellowship at his college; wrote but, on his father’s advice, did not print the Crisis;[974] and took a curacy near Albury. If the Crisis did nothing more, it showed how the attention of the man was fixing itself on the subjects that engrossed him during life, and how his character was changing from gay to grave. It is difficult for a reader of the later Essay or the Political Economy to conceive that the writer could ever have been very merry in heart or light in touch; and there is a still wider distance between the pugnacious Don Roberto, never long without a black eye, and the grave gentle host of Miss Martineau at the East India College. The change in style between his early writings and his later was due to a real change in character, produced by the concentration of his thoughts on the problem of poverty. The success of the first Essay on Population[975] fixed for him the work of his life. He was to set one neglected truth clearly before the world; and he devoted himself wholly to it, pushing his inquiries not only by study of authorities and facts at home,[976] but by his own[977] and his friends’[978] travels, and by conversation and correspondence with all that were likely to give him anything in conference.[979] He sacrificed to it, fortunately or unfortunately, his youthful buoyancy and freshness of style, though in speculation his opinions passed from pessimism to a moderate optimism, and he was never too old in spirit to unlearn a fault.
In his mature writings the composition is less faulty than the diction, which is certainly too Johnsonian. The composition is a little bald and often diffuse; but the meaning of each sentence is always clear, and in economical writing that is the first of virtues. In a work of imagination we may desire to have the greatest number of the greatest ideas put into each sentence; but a scientific treatise is more often concerned with a single truth in its full development; and the perpetual recurrence of the same phrases in different connections is unavoidable, in proportion to the thoroughness of the discussion. Great variety of language would either imply in the writer or cause in the reader some confusion of thought. It is not surprising, then, to find Malthus saying substantially the same thing in nearly the same words, whether he is presenting his views on Population directly in a book on the subject, or placing them in their economical context in a book on Political Economy, or touching them incidentally in a Corn Law pamphlet or Quarterly article, or answering questions about them before a Commons Committee. His abundant metaphors in the first essay[980] had simply led to misunderstanding; and he deliberately renounced fine writing for high thinking, present popularity for permanent usefulness.[981]
The first essay was the turning-point in his literary life. Except the pamphlets on Haileybury College, all his later writings are economical. His personal history, being uneventful, was, like a time of dull annals, presumably happy. The fine portrait of him by Linnell,[982] taken in his old age, gives a pleasing impression, not only of mildness and firmness, but of serene contentment, without any trace of physical suffering or physical defect, though it is certain he had the latter.[983] In person he was tall and “elegantly formed.”[984] 1799 is the year of his first Continental journey.[985] In January 1800 his father died, at the age of seventy. In the same year appeared the tract on The High Price of Provisions. In 1802 Malthus was again on the Continent.[986] In June 1803 he published the second (or quarto) essay, which seems, from a passage in Edward Clarke’s Travels, to have been long expected by his friends. “I am sorry,” writes Clarke to him from Constantinople on 16th March, 1802, “to find you confess your breach of duty in not having written a book. But you have been engaged in the press, because I heard at the Palace that you had published a new edition of your Population, and, moreover, I was there assured so long ago as last year that you had written a work on the Scarcity of Corn. How does this accord with your declaration? Perhaps it is a pamphlet, and therefore strictly not ‘a book.’”[987]
It is not impossible that Clarke had heard this rumour from Lord Elgin, and Lord Elgin from Pitt himself, for Pitt had visited Cambridge on the eve of the dissolution following the Peace of Amiens. On the 16th (December 1801) he was present at the Commemoration dinner in Trinity College Hall.[988] The visit is described by Otter:[989] “It happened that Mr. Pitt was at this time upon a sort of canvassing visit at the university.... At a supper at Jesus Lodge in the company of some young travellers, particularly Mr. Malthus, &c., he was induced to unbend in a very easy conversation respecting Sir Sidney Smith, the massacre at Jaffa, the Pacha of Acre, Clarke, Carlisle,[990] &c.” Though the talk was largely on poetry and foreign politics, it may easily have embraced economics; and the personal meeting may have helped to gain Malthus his appointment as Professor of History and Political Economy at Haileybury College. With or without Pitt, the appointment was made in 1805; and in view of it Malthus was able to carry out, on 13th March 1804, his marriage with Harriet Eckersall (daughter of John Eckersall of Claverton House, St. Catherine’s, near Bath), to whom he had probably been for some years engaged.[991] In 1806 he published the third edition of the essay (in two volumes), in 1807 the fourth edition, and also the letter to Samuel Whitbread on his Bill for amending the Poor Laws. If it is true that he visited Owen at New Lanark, it must have been in the course of the next seven years.[992] There is nothing signed from his pen in that time but a letter to Lord Grenville in defence of the East India College;[993] but in 1814 and 1815 he wrote the Observations on the Corn Laws, the Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of restricting Importation, and The Nature and Progress of Rent. In 1807 he had been with Horner in Wales, impressing Horner, as they went together from Raglan to Abergavenny, with his idea that the people should “live dear”;[994] and in 1817 he visited Kerry and Westmeath. In the same year, 1817, he published the fifth edition of his essay. 1818 would be memorable to him as the year when Mackintosh joined him at Haileybury as Professor of General Polity and Law in succession to Mr. Christian. In 1819 Malthus appears as Fellow of the Royal Society, though the honour did not tempt him back into physical science.[995] In 1820 appeared the first edition of the Political Economy. In 1821, Thomas Tooke, the author of High and Low Prices, founded the Political Economy Club, James Mill drafting the rules. Malthus, Grote, and Ricardo were among its members; and the survivors are said to remember well the “crushing criticisms” by James Mill of Malthus’ speeches.[996]
1823 is the year of the tract on the Measure of Value and the Quarterly article on Tooke; 1824 of the paper on Population in the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, and the article on the New Political Economy in the Quarterly Review.[997] In 1825 he lost a daughter, and went for his own and his wife’s health to the Continent. In that year he contributed his first paper to the Royal Society of Literature, of which he had been made an Associate two years before; and that year saw Empson take the place of Mackintosh at Haileybury. In 1826 was published the sixth edition of the essay, the last published in his lifetime. In 1827 we find him before the Emigration Committee, and we have from his pen the Definitions in Political Economy, and the second paper contributed to the Royal Society of Literature. In 1829 letters passed between him and W. Nassau Senior, which were appended by the latter to his Lectures on Population. In 1830 he wrote the Summary View, which involved no new effort. Indeed his whole time seems to have been spent in revising his Political Economy in the light of his public and private discussions with Ricardo, though he did not live to print the new edition himself. Shortly before his death he said to some one who rebuked him for his delay: “My views are before the public. If I am to alter anything, I can do little more than alter the language, and I don’t know if I should alter it for the better” (Empson, l. c. p. 472). He was one of the first Fellows of the Statistical Society, founded in March 1834, and its first Annual Report contains a high eulogy on him and his work; but he did not live to take much share in its proceedings. He died suddenly of heart disease on Monday, 29th December, 1834, on a visit to Mr. Eckersall at St. Catherine’s, where he was spending Christmas with his wife and family. He is buried in the Abbey Church at Bath, in the north aisle of the nave. Of his three children, two survived him, of whom one, a daughter, is still living.[998]
Brougham, in a letter to Macvey Napier (31st Jan., 1837), denies the truth of an assertion of Empson’s, that Lords Lansdowne and Holland tried to get preferment for Malthus, but failed; on the contrary, he had himself, he says, offered Malthus a living, but Malthus had declined it in favour of his son, Henry,[999] “who got it, and I believe now has it.” Henry, however, did not become vicar of Effingham (near Leatherhead in Surrey) till 1835, the year after his father’s death,—or of Donnington (near Chichester in Sussex) till 1837, the year when Brougham was writing. The second appointment may have been due to Empson’s reproach or Otter’s influence. Henry died in August 1882 at the age of seventy-six. Since, between the two parishes, he kept as many as four curates at a time, the combined salaries of the two, amounting to £672, seem a small income.[1000] His father himself told Gallois, the French publicist, in 1820, that all his works till then had not brought him above £1000. Gallois, repeating this to the poet Moore, slily remarked that in England poetry seemed to be better paid than useful learning.[1001] There is no reason for the belief that Malthus was made rich by the second essay,[1002] or indeed by anything else. He did not go the right way to be rich. He could no doubt have got Church preferment if he had pursued it like Paley. At the end of his days, even if he had desired it, he was too mild a partisan to be a grata persona to the Whigs in office; he had acquiesced in the Reform of 1832, but without enthusiasm,[1003] having a livelier interest in social than in political changes. But the world after all used him kindly. Of worldly comfort, after 1805, he had enough; and he was fully satisfied, as he had reason to be, with his lot in the East India College. It gave him nearly thirty years of the leisure which Godwin had justly counted the true riches of life.
The position had its cares, for the college was an educational experiment. Governor-General Wellesley[1004] had proposed to found a college at Fort William, Calcutta, for the general education of the civil servants of the Company as well as their special instruction in Oriental languages. He pointed out that their functions, judicial, administrative, diplomatic, were now totally unlike their names of writer, factor, and merchant, and they needed something higher than the commercial training which was all that was then required of them. The Directors of the East India Company carried out his wishes so far as to allow Fort William College to do the advanced training in languages; but they thought that the general education should be given before the cadets left England, and at the end of 1805 they passed a scheme for establishing for that purpose a college at Haileybury, near Hertford. On their nomination, instead of going out at once to India, the future civil servants of India were to spend two or three years at Haileybury, and to receive first a General education on the lines of Oxford and Cambridge, and second a Special education to prepare them for their duties in their province.[1005] The Professor of “History and Political Economy” and the Professor of “General Polity and the Laws of England” were regarded as giving both the general and the special kinds of training. “As the study of law and political economy” (so runs the scheme) “is to form an essential part in the general system of education, it will be required that, in the lectures upon these subjects, particular attention be given to the explanation of the political and commercial relations subsisting between India and Great Britain.”[1006] The two professors were required to give “(1) a course of lectures on general history and on the history and statistics of the modern nations of Europe, (2) a course of lectures on political economy, (3) a course of lectures on general polity, on the laws of England and principles of the British Constitution.”[1007] The other subjects were Classics, Oriental Languages, Mathematics, and Natural Philosophy. The college course lasted, as a rule, two years, each year consisting of two terms of about five months each (Feb. to June, Aug. to Dec.); and there were periodical examinations, honour lists, and prizes. The ages of the pupils ranged from as low as fifteen to as high as twenty-two, and about forty joined every year. Malthus would seldom have a class beyond twelve or fourteen, all in the later year of their course.[1008]
The general discipline of the classes and the surveillance or want of surveillance of the pupils in their private rooms were rather on the model of an unreformed Oxford college than of a public school.[1009] Sense of personal responsibility and habits of self-government were to take the place of the schoolboy’s fear of punishment. Unhappily, before learning the new motives, the boys too often abused the absence of the old.[1010]
About half of the professors were in holy orders and did duty in the college chapel. If Malthus took his turn with the rest, we need not suppose with his clerical biographer that he magnified the office. His sermons would always be earnest; they might often perhaps be too long. His week-day lectures, unless he made them liker the first essay with its fine writing than the later books with their plain unvarnished arguments, could not have been very fascinating to immature youths, especially as the lecturer had a slight defect in utterance.[1011] Eight years of teaching convinced him that Political Economy was not, as he once thought, too hard for boys of sixteen or seventeen;—“they could not only understand it,” he said, “but they did not even think it dull.”[1012] We may hope it was so; but in view of the whole case, it is probable that our author’s labours, in the classroom and out of it, were far from light, and that the pleasantness of the life was purchased with a large share of discomfort.
The physical surroundings were all that could be desired. “We are so rural and quiet here, that there can be no greater contrast [to London]. This house is in a cluster of tall shrubs and young trees, with a little bit of smooth lawn sloping to a bright pond, in which old weeping willows are dipping their hair, and rows of young pear trees admiring their blooming faces. Indeed, there never was such a flash of shadowing high-hanging flowers as we have around us; and almost all, as it happens, of that pure, silvery, snowy, bridal tint; and we live, like Campbell’s sweet Gertrude, ‘as if beneath a galaxy of overhanging sweets, with blossoms white.’ There are young horse-chestnuts with flowers half a yard long, fresh, full-clustered white lilacs, tall Guelder roses, broadspreading pear and cherry trees, low thickets of blooming sloe, and crowds of juicy-looking detached thorns, quite covered with their fragrant May-flowers, half open, like ivory filigree, and half shut like Indian pearls, and all so fresh and dewy since the milky showers of yesterday; and resounding with nightingales, and thrushes, and skylarks, shrilling high up, overhead, among the dazzling slow-sailing clouds. Not to be named, I know and feel as much as you can do, with your Trossachs, and Loch Lomonds, and Inverarys; but very sweet, and vernal, and soothing, and fit enough to efface all recollections of hot, swarming, whirling, and bustling London from all good minds.”[1013]
Equally pleasant is a glimpse of the daily life at Haileybury, given by Miss Martineau, who saw it in 1833. Malthus considered her one of his best expositors;—“whereas his friends had done him all manner of mischief by defending him injudiciously, my tales had represented his views precisely as he could have wished;”—and he was at the pains to seek her out in London and bring her down to the college.[1014] “It was a delightful visit, and the well-planted county of Herts was a welcome change from the pavement of London in August.... My room was a large and airy one, with a bay window and a charming view.”[1015] She found desk, books, and everything needed for her work. Her entertainers had guessed from her books that she must be, like Malthus himself,[1016] fond of riding; and she found her riding-habit and whip ready. Exploring the green lanes round Amwell, Ware, and Hertford, on horseback, in parties of five or six, seems to have been the chief amusement. “The subdued jests and external homage and occasional insurrections of the young men, the archery of the young ladies, the curious politeness of the Persian professor [Ibrahim], the fine learning and eager scholarship of Principal[1017] Le Bas, and the somewhat old-fashioned courtesies of the summer evening parties are all over now, except as pleasant pictures in the interior gallery of those who knew the place, of whom I am thankful to have been one.”
When she again visited Haileybury, Malthus was gone; Professor Jones was in his chair, and Empson in his house, probably one of the most comfortable in a building which, if smaller, was much more picturesque than the present school.[1018]
The “occasional insurrections of the young men” were a feature of the college from the beginning. Sydney Smith writes to Lord Holland in June 1810, when there was talk of making Mackintosh professor at Haileybury: “The season for lapidating the professors is now at hand; keep Mackintosh quiet at Holland House till all is over;”[1019] and to Whishaw in January 1818, when the appointment had been made: “His situation at Hertford will suit him very well, peltings and contusions always excepted. He should stipulate for ‘pebble money,’ as it is technically termed, or an annual pension in case he is disabled by the pelting of the students. By the bye, might it not be advisable for the professors to learn the use of the sling (balearia habena)? It would give them a great advantage over the students.”[1020] The lapidations were probably no worse than similar scenes at our English and Scotch Universities that have not yet destroyed the credit of these institutions. But the opponents of the college complained of much more than the insubordination of the students. Lord Grenville had made an attack on it (in April 1813), on the ground that it separated the future Civil servants from the ordinary life of Englishmen, and prevented them from becoming imbued with “English manners, English attachments, English principles, and I am not ashamed to say English prejudices.”[1021] Malthus, who had gone up to London to hear Grenville’s speech in the House of Lords, became champion of the college, and had no difficulty in meeting this assault. The defence of the professors, as set forth by him in 1817,[1022] was that the plan of the college was good in theory and had proved good in practice. The insubordination was due to the dependence of the professorial staff upon the Company’s Directors, who had (till then) withheld from the teachers their best means of discipline, the power of expulsion.
The students were as little likely as army or navy cadets to become un-English; and they were much less likely to form a caste at Haileybury than if they had been sent to an Indian college. The details of this extinct controversy need not detain us. It is enough to say that Malthus discharged his part with great vigour and something of his early vivacity. At the best, it must be confessed, the college was a compromise; and the unavoidable difficulties of the situation were quite enough to try the mettle of the teachers. The cadets of the first year might be fifteen or they might be eighteen, and there was no natural aristocracy of senior boys to check the juniors. Those of the younger age were physically and mentally more like schoolboys than undergraduates, and unfit, as yet, for the quasi-independent life of the latter. Many were unwilling to go to India at all, and it was their parents or guardians who really feared the expulsion of incorrigibles. But it was better that the unfit should be rejected in England, where they could find other openings, than in India, where they could find none; and it was better their training should be carried on where the climate, the expense, and the moral, social, and intellectual advantages were in keeping with their age and their state of pupilage. “Little other change is wanting,” in the system as it then was, “than that an appointment should be considered in spirit and in truth, not in mere words, as a prize to be contended for, not a property already possessed,[1023] which may be lost. If the Directors were to appoint one-fifth every year beyond the number finally to go out, and the four-fifths were to be the beat of the whole body, the appointments would then really be prizes to be contended for, and the effects would be admirable. Each appointment to the college would then be of less value; but they would be more in number, and the patronage would hardly suffer. A Director could not then, indeed, be able to send out an unqualified son. But is it fitting that he should? This is a fair question for the consideration of the Legislature and the British public.”[1024] In these matters, at least, Malthus was no reactionary.
In spite of Joseph Hume and its other enemies, the college lived out its half-century, and does not die out, on the pages of the India Register, till the death of the Company in 1858. Its monopoly was gone some time before then. An Act of 1827 provided, theoretically, for the examination and appointment of India Civil servants who had not studied at Hertford College. In 1833 provision was made for the limited competition which Malthus had recommended.[1025] In 1855 came the end. The Company was “relieved of the obligation to keep up the college;” the reign of open competition, ushered in by Macaulay’s Report (Nov. 1854), brought a new order of things; and the college was only continued till those who had joined it at the time of the change had been able to finish their course.[1026] There are numbers of old officials, like Sir William Muir, who still hold it in affectionate remembrance;[1027] but except in their memory it exists no more.
The work of Malthus was less in the East India College than in his writings. But his connection with the college was perhaps the most important of the external facts of his life; and it has helped to preserve a record of scenes and incidents which reveal the character more clearly than all the adjectives of panegyrists. Otter, Empson, Miss Martineau, Sydney Smith,[1028] and Horner,[1029] may supply the panegyrics; and the eulogy of Mackintosh is remarkable: “I have known Adam Smith slightly, Ricardo well, Malthus intimately. Is it not something to say for a science that its three great masters were about the three best men I ever knew?”[1030]
His epitaph in Bath Abbey, probably from the pen of Otter, is given on the following page.