CHAPTER I.
FIRST THOUGHTS, 1798.
The Common Caricature—The Essay an Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations—Godwin’s Political Justice and Enquirer—The Two Postulates and Conclusions from them—Condorcet’s Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind—Organic Perfectibility of Man and its Obstacles—Historical Context of the Essay—The Crisis—Pitt’s Poor Bill—Malthus and his Teachers—Success explained—Theology and Metaphysics—Faults of the Essay—Immediate aim secured.
He was the “best-abused man of the age.” Bonaparte himself was not a greater enemy of his species. Here was a man who defended small-pox, slavery, and child-murder; who denounced soup-kitchens, early marriage, and parish allowances; who “had the impudence to marry after preaching against the evils of a family;” who thought the world so badly governed that the best actions do the most harm; who, in short, took all romance out of life and preached a dull sermon on the threadbare text—“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Such was the character of Malthus as described by his opponents.
If an angry man is probably in the wrong, an abusive man is certainly so; and, when not one or two, but one or two thousand are engaged in the abuse, the certainty amounts to a demonstration. We may measure the soundness of the victim’s logic by the violence of the personal attacks made upon him. For most worldly purposes, to be ignored and to be refuted are the same thing.
Malthus from the first was not ignored. For thirty years it rained refutations. The question, as he stated it, was thoroughly threshed out. The Essay on Population passed in the author’s lifetime through six editions (1798, 1803, 1806, 1807, 1817, and 1826); even between the first edition, in 1798, and the second, in 1803, there were more than a score of ‘Replies’; and the discussion was carried on in private correspondence, as well as in public journals and parliamentary speeches. The case was fully argued; and no one who fairly considers the extent of the discussion, and the ability of the disputants, can fail to believe that we have, in the records of this controversy, ample materials for forming our own judgment on the whole question in dispute.
Such a privilege is seldom used. The world has no time to consult authorities, though it likes them to be within reach of consultation. When an author becomes an authority, he too often ceases to be read, and his doctrines, like current coin, are worn by use till they lose the clear image and superscription of the issuer. In this way an author’s name may come to suggest, not his own book, but the current version of his doctrines. Malthus becomes Malthusianism,—Darwin, Darwinism; and if Adam Smith’s name were more flexible he too would become an epithet.[1] As it is, Adam Smith has left a book which “every one praises and nobody reads,” Malthus a book which no one reads and all abuse. The abuse is, fortunately, not quite unanimous; but it is certain that Malthus for a long time had an experience worse than Cassandra’s, for his warnings were disbelieved without being heard or understood. Miss Martineau, in her girlhood, heard him denounced “very eloquently and forcibly by persons who never saw so much as the outside”[2] of his book. This was in 1816; and when at a later time she inquired about him for herself, she could never find any one who had read his book, but scores who could “make great argument about it and about,” or write sentimental pamphlets on supposed Malthusian subjects. This carelessness was not confined to the general public; it infected the savants. Nothing more clearly shows how political economy, or at least one question of it, had descended into the streets and become a common recreation. Even Nassau William Senior, perhaps the most distinguished professor of political economy in his day, confessed with penitence that he had trusted more to his ears than to his eyes for a knowledge of Malthusian doctrine, and had written a learned criticism, not of the opinion of Mr. Malthus, but of that which “the multitudes who have followed and the few who have endeavoured to oppose” Mr. Malthus, have assumed to be his opinion.[3]
The “opinion” so imagined by Senior and the multitude is still the current Malthusianism. A Malthusian is supposed to forbid all marriage. Mr. Malthus was supposed to believe that “the desire of marriage, which tends to increase population, is a stronger principle than the desire of bettering our condition, which tends to increase subsistence.”[4] This meant, as Southey said, that “God makes men and women faster than He can feed them.” The old adage was wrong then: Providence does not send meat where He sends mouths; on the contrary, He sends mouths wherever He sends meat, so that the poor can never cease out of the land, for, however abundant the food, marriage will soon make the people equally abundant. It is a question of simple division. A fortune that is wealth for one will not give comfort to ten, or bare life to twenty. The moral is, for all about to marry, “Don’t,” and for all statesmen, “Don’t encourage them.”
This caricature had enough truth in it to save it from instant detection, and its vitality is due to the superior ease in understanding, and therefore greater pleasure in hearing, a blank denial or a blank affirmation as compared with the necessary qualifications of a scientific statement. The truth must be told, however, that Malthus and the rest of the learned world were by no means at utter discord. He always treated a hostile economist as a possible ally. He was carrying on the work of their common Founder. In the Essay on Population he was inquiring into the nature and causes of poverty, as Adam Smith had inquired into the nature and causes of wealth. But Malthus himself did not intend the one to be a mere supplement to the other. He did not approach the subject from a purely scientific side. He had not devoted long years of travel and reflection to the preparation of an economical treatise. Adam Smith had written his Moral Sentiments seventeen years before his greater work. When he wrote the latter he had behind him an academical and literary reputation; and he satisfied the just expectations of the public by giving them, in the two quarto volumes of the Wealth of Nations, his full-formed and completely digested conclusions and reasonings definitively expressed (1776). Malthus, on the contrary, gained his reputation by a bold and sudden stroke, well followed up. His Essay was an anonymous pamphlet in a political controversy, and was meant to turn the light of political economy upon the political philosophy of the day. Whatever the essay contained over and above politics, and however far afield the author eventually travelled in the later editions, there is no doubt about the first origin of the essay itself. It was not, as we are sometimes told, that, being a kind-hearted clergyman, he set himself to work to inquire whether after all it was right to increase the numbers of the population without caring for the quality of it. In 1798 Malthus was no doubt in holy orders and held a curacy at Albury; but he seems never to have been more than a curate. The Whigs offered him a living in his later years, but he passed it to his son;[5] and we should be far astray if we supposed his book no more than the “recreations of a country parson.” “Parson” was in his case a title without a rôle and Cobbett’s immortal nickname is very unhappy.[6] He had hardly more of the parson than Condillac of the abbé. In 1798 Pitt’s Bill for extending relief to large families, and thereby encouraging population, was no doubt before the country; but we owe the essay not to William Pitt, but to William Godwin. The changed aspect of the book in its later editions need not blind us to the efficient cause of its first appearance.
Thomas Robert Malthus had graduated at Cambridge as ninth wrangler in the year 1788, in the twenty-second year of his age. In 1797, after gaining a fellowship at Jesus College, he happened to spend some time at his father’s house at Albury in Surrey. Father and son discussed the questions of the day, the younger man attacking Jacobinism, the elder defending it. Daniel Malthus had been a friend and executor of Rousseau, and was an ardent believer in human progress. Robert had written a Whig tract, which he called The Crisis, in the year of Pitt’s new loan and Napoleon’s Italian campaign (1796); but he did not publish it, and his views were yet in solution. We may be sure the two men did not spare each other in debate. In the words of the elder Malthus, Robert then, if at no other time, “threw little stones” into his garden. An old man must have the patience of Job if he can look with calmness on a young man breaking his ideals. But in this case he at least recognized the strength of the slinger, and he bore him no grudge, though he did not live to be won by the concessions of the second essay (1803). That Robert, on his part, was not wanting in respect, is shown by an indignant letter, written in February, 1800, on his father’s death, in reply to the supposed slight of a newspaper paragraph.[7]
The fireside debates had in that year (1797) received new matter. William Godwin, quondam parson, journalist, politician, and novelist, whose Political Justice was avowedly a “child of the Revolution,”[8] had written a new book, the Enquirer, in which many of his old positions were set in a new light. The father made it a point of honour to defend the Enquirer; the son played devil’s advocate, partly from conviction, partly for the sake of argument; and, as often happens in such a case, Robert found his case stronger than he had thought. Hard pressed by an able opponent, he was led, on the spur of the moment, to use arguments which had not occurred to him before, and of which The Crisis knows nothing. In calmer moments he followed them up to their conclusions. “The discussion,” he tells us,[9] “started the general question of the future improvement of society, and the author at first sat down with an intention of merely stating his thoughts to his friend upon paper in a clearer manner than he thought he could do in conversation.” But the subject opened upon him, and he determined to publish. This is the plain story of the publication of the Essay on Population, reduced to its simplest terms. At the very time when the best men in both worlds were talking only of progress, Malthus saw rocks ahead. French and English reformers were looking forward to a golden age of perfect equality and happiness; Malthus saw an irremovable difficulty in the way, and he refused to put the telescope to his blind eye.
There had been Cassandras before Malthus, and even in the same century. Dr. John Bruckner of Norwich had written in the same strain in his Théorie du Système Animal, in 1767;[10] and a few years earlier (in 1761) Dr. Robert Wallace, writing of the Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and Providence, had talked of community of goods as a cure for the ills of humanity, and then had found, very reluctantly, one fatal objection—the excessive population that would ensue. Men are always inclined to marry and multiply their numbers till the food is barely enough to support them all. This objection had since Wallace’s time become a stock objection, to be answered by every maker of Utopias. It was left for Malthus to show the near approach which this difficulty makes to absolute hopelessness, and to throw the burden of proof on the other side. As the Wealth of Nations altered the standing presumption in favour of interference to one in favour of liberty in matters of trade, so the Essay on Population altered the presumption in favour of the advocates of progress to a presumption against them. This may not describe the final result of the essay, but it is a true account of its immediate effect. People had heard of the objection before; it was only now that they began to look on it as conclusive.
How had Godwin tried to meet it, when it was still in the hands of weaker men, and therefore not at all conclusive? He could not ignore it. In his Political Justice (1793) he had given the outlines of a “simple form of society, without government,” on the principle of Tom Paine, which was also a received Jacobin motto, “Society is produced by our wants, government by our wickedness.”[11] He says, with the ruling philosophy, that man is born a blank, and his outward circumstances make him good or evil. Thanks to human institutions, especially lawyers, sovereigns, and statesmen, the outward circumstances, he says, are as bad as they can be. Everywhere there is inequality. There is great poverty alongside of great riches, and great tyranny with great slavery. In the same way the best of his novels, Caleb Williams (1794), tells us how “things as they are” enable the rich sinner to persecute the poor righteous man. But he is no pessimist. The Political Justice does not end with a statement of evils. It goes on to show that in the end truth will conquer; men will listen to reason, they will abandon their present laws, and they will form a society without law or government or any kind of force; no such things will be needed when every man listens to reason, and contents himself with plain living and high thinking. There will be no king in Israel; every man will do that which is right in his own eyes. In our present society, says Godwin, it is distribution and not production that is at fault. There is more than enough of wealth for all, but it is not shared amongst all. One man has too much, another little or nothing. In the new society reason will change all that. Reason tells us that, if we make an equal division, not only of the good things of this life, but of the labour of making them, then we shall secure a production quite sufficient for the needs of plain livers, at the cost of perhaps half-an-hour’s labour in a day from each of them.[12] Each of them will, therefore, have leisure, which is the true riches, and he will use the time for his own moral and intellectual improvement. In this way, by the omnipotence of truth and the power of persuasion, not by any violence or power of the sword, perfection and happiness will in time be established on the earth.
Godwin made no essential change in these views in the later editions of the Political Justice (1796 and 1798), or in the Enquirer (1797). “Among the faithless, faithful only he,” when the excesses of the Terror made even Sir James Mackintosh (not to say Bishop Watson, Southey, and Wordsworth) a lukewarm reformer. Nothing in Godwin’s life is more admirable than the perfect confidence with which he holds fast to his old faith in democratic principles and the perfectibility of man. If it is obstinacy, it is very like devotion; and perhaps the only author who shows an equal constancy is Condorcet, the Girondist, marked out for death, and writing in his hiding-place, almost under the eyes of the Convention, his eager book on the Progress of the Species. Nothing but intense sincerity and sheer depth of conviction could have enabled these men to continue the defence of a dishonoured cause. They had not the martyr’s greatest trial, the doubt whether he is right. The great impression made by their works was a sign that, as they felt strongly, they wrote powerfully. Malthus, who refuted both of them, apologized for giving serious criticism to Condorcet’s palpable extravagances by saying that Condorcet has many followers who will hold him unanswerable unless he is specially answered.[13] Of Godwin, Mr. Sumner, writing in 1816, says that though his book (the Political Justice) was becoming out of date, it was still “the ablest and best known statement” of the doctrines of equality that had ever appeared in England.[14] It has been justly called the “first text-book of the philosophical radicals.” The actual effect of it cannot be measured by the number of copies sold on its first appearance. Godwin had placed it far beyond the reach of ordinary democrats by fixing the price at three guineas. In 1793 many who would have been his keenest readers could not have paid three shillings for it. But the event proved him wise in his generation. The Privy Council decided they might safely tolerate so dear a book; and a small audience even of the rich was better to Godwin than prosecution, which might mean exile and no audience at all.[15] Few writers of our own day have so good an excuse for making themselves inaccessible to the poor. Godwin, however, like Ruskin, reached the poor in spite of his arrangements for avoiding them. He filtered down among the masses; and his writings became a political as well as a literary power in England, long before he had a poetic son-in-law to give him reflected glory. If a species is to be judged by its best individual, then Godwin represents better than Paine the class of political writers to which they both belong; and many fell down with Godwin when he fell down before Malthus.
The Enquirer was less popular than the Political Justice. Part of the charm of the latter undoubtedly lay in the elaborate completeness and systematic order of the whole discussion. The foundations were laid in the psychology of Locke; and then the building was raised, stone by stone, until the whole was finished. But in the Enquirer Godwin’s dislike of law had extended even to the form of composition. He had been wrong, he said, in trying to write a systematic treatise on society, and he would now confine himself to detached essays, wholly experimental, and not necessarily in harmony with one another. “He (the author) has carried this principle so far that he has not been severely anxious relative to inconsistency that may be discovered between the speculations of one essay and the speculations of another.”[16] The contrast between these two styles is the contrast between a whole oratorio and a miscellaneous concert, or between a complete poem and a volume of extracts.
The thoughts were the same, though they had lost their attractive expression. The essay on Avarice and Profusion[17] tells us, among other things, that “a state of cultivated equality is that state which, in speculation and theory, appears most consonant to the nature of man, and most conducive to the extensive diffusion of felicity.” This was the essay which led Malthus and his father into their fruitful argument. The essay on Riches and Poverty, and the one on Beggars,[18] contain other applications of the same idea, with many moralizing digressions. Godwin has not lost his sweet Utopian vision; he has not yielded to the objections that baffled Dr. Robert Wallace; he thinks he has removed all objections.
He meets them[19] by saying first of all: “There is a principle in the nature of human society by means of which everything seems to tend to its level,” when not interfered with; and the population of a country when left to itself does not seem to increase beyond the food. But in the second place, supposing things not to find their level in this way, the earth is wide and the evil day is far off. It may take myriads of centuries to till the untilled acres and to replenish the empty earth with people, and much may happen before then. In fact, he views the subject as many of us view the question of our coal supply. Before it is exhausted we may be beyond the need of it.[20] The earth itself may have collapsed with all its inhabitants. Don’t let us refuse a present blessing from fear of a remote future danger. Besides, it is not very hard to imagine a safeguard. Franklin says that “mind will one day become omnipotent over matter;”[21] why not over the matter of our own bodies? Does not the bodily health depend largely on the mind?
“A merry heart goes all the day;
Your sad tires in a mile, O!”
The time may come when we shall be so full of liveliness that we shall not sleep, and so full of life that we shall not die. The need for marriage will be superseded by earthly immortality, and the desire for it by the development of intellect. On the renewed earth of the future there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage, but we shall be as the angels. “The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have, in a certain degree, to recommence her career every thirty years. Other improvements may be expected to keep pace with those of health and longevity. There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no government. Besides this, there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment. Every man will seek with ineffable ardour the good of all.”[22]
This sweet strain had been enchanting the public for four or five years, when Malthus ventured to interrupt it with his modest anonymous Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society. The writer claims to be as hearty a philanthropist as Mr. Godwin, but he cannot allow the wish to be father to the thought, and believe in future perfection against evidence. To prove a theory true, he says, it is not enough to show that you cannot prove its contradiction, or that you can prove its usefulness. It would be very useful to have eyes in both sides of our head; but that does not prove that we are going to have them. If you told me that man was becoming a winged creature like the ostrich, I should not doubt that he would find wings very useful, but I could hardly believe your prophecy without some kind of proof beyond the mere praises of flying. I should ask you to show palpable signs in his body and habits that such a change was going on, that his neck has been lengthening, his lips hardening, and his hair becoming feathery. In the same way, when you tell me that man is becoming a purely intellectual being, content with plain living and high thinking, I see there might be advantage in the change, but I ask for signs that it is in progress. I see none; but, on the contrary, I see strong reasons for believing in its impossibility. Grant me two postulates, and I disprove your millennium. The first is, that food is necessary; the second, that the instinct for marriage is permanent. No one denies the first, and Godwin’s denial of the second is purely dogmatic. He has given us no proofs. Men have no doubt made progress in other respects; they have passed from barbarism to civilization. But in respect of the second postulate they are the same now as they were 4000 years ago. Individual exceptions are individual exceptions still. I am bound, therefore, to believe in the truth of my postulates, and I infer from them the impossibility of your millennium.
You speak of a society, he continues, where the members are all equally comfortable and at leisure. Suppose it established, it could not last; it would go to pieces through the principle of population alone. The seven years of plenty would be at once devoured by seven years of want. The proof of this is short and decisive:—Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio; subsistence only in an arithmetical. “A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.”[23] “The race of plants and animals shrinks under this great restrictive law, and the race of man cannot by any efforts of reason escape from it. Among plants and animals its effects are waste of seed, sickness, and premature death, among men misery and vice,” the former necessary, the latter probable. Now, in the old countries of Europe, population never is unchecked. It is checked by want of room and food. Vice and misery, and the fear of them, are always “equalizing” the numbers of the people with the food of the people. In the New World, “the cynosure of neighbouring eyes,” there are fewer hindrances to early marriage; there is more room and there is more food; hard work is the only condition of a happy life. But, even there, population is not entirely unchecked; the hard work will at least interfere with the rearing of children; and the people, however comfortable, are not at the very highest pitch of comfort, or at the highest pitch of purity and simplicity of life; whereas, by assumption, Godwin’s imaginary society is all these. If, therefore, the people of old Europe double their numbers once a century, and the people of new America (at least in the United States) once in twenty-five years, we may be sure that in the millennial society of Godwin,
“Where all are proper and well-behaved,
And all are free from sorrow and pain,”
the increase would be much faster. The “leisure” he talks of would soon disappear, and the old scramble for bread, the old inequality of rank and property, would again become the order of the day. We should have our own kind of society back again, with its masters and servants, landlords and tenants, rich and poor.[24]
Therefore (argues the writer of the essay) if Godwin’s society were once made it could not last. But we grant too much in supposing it could ever be made. We cannot believe this and believe in the second postulate at the same time; and the second postulate is so certain that we can predict by it. The same causes, then, that would have destroyed Godwin’s newly-formed society will prevent it from ever being formed at all. “The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same that it may always be considered, in algebraic language, as a given quantity.”[25] In spite of the whimpering of old men and roués, “the pleasures of pure love will bear the contemplation of the most improved reason and the most exalted virtue.”[26] Godwin views the matter in a dry, intellectual light, and asks us to abstract from all accessories before we form an estimate of the passion in question. One man or one woman will then be as good as another. But he might as well tell us to strip off all the leaves before we estimate our liking for trees. We do not admire the bare pole, but the whole tree, the tree with all the “attendant circumstances” of branches and foliage. As well deprive a magnet of its chief powers of attraction, and then ask us to confess it as weak as other minerals.[27] The fact is, that man’s large discourse, which marks him out from the brutes, makes him hide the marriage instinct under a mass of “attendant circumstances” before he lets himself be drawn by it. He will not obey the instinct simply more feræ, or in animal fashion, because he feels it. But it is not destroyed, only disguised. The love is not purely intellectual. Reason, with its calculation of consequences, can save a man from the abuse of a passion, but cannot destroy the passion itself;[28] and (he might have added) its “looking before and after” includes fancy as well as thought. Take this passion then as it is, an adoration it may be of an assemblage of accessories; it can never die out of the world.
From this cheerful premise, what conclusion follows? One not altogether cheerful: Wherever Providence sends meat He will send mouths. Wherever the people have room and food, they will marry and multiply their numbers, till they press against the limits of both, and begin a fierce struggle for existence, in which death is the punishment of defeat. Godwin and the whole French school are sadly wrong in attributing all inequality to human institutions; human nature is to blame, and, without any artificial aid, this one passion of human nature will be the standing cause of inequality, the most serious obstacle to the removal of it.[29] Dr. Robert Wallace had more wisdom than he wot of.
Examine the meaning of this argument and its conclusion. It involves an answer to Godwin’s first defence against Wallace. Here is something very like a law of nature, a truth past, present, and future, or, in other words, a truth which, being scientific, ought not to be stated in terms of time at all: “Where goods increase, they are increased that eat them.” The “struggle for existence” (Malthus uses the very phrase) is a present fact, as it has been a past fact, and will be a future. No good is gained by rhetorical references to the wideness of the world and the possibilities of the ages.[30] In our own day and land we see people multiplying up to the limit of the food, and a “great restrictive law” preventing them, as it prevents all other animals, from multiplying beyond that limit.[31] In our own day and country, men marry when they cannot support a family; the children whom they cannot support die of hunger or sickness, if the charity of the public does not interfere;—or else the fear of misery makes men avoid a marriage for which they have not the means, and their celibacy, whether pure or impure, keeps the numbers of the people on a level with the food.[32] Godwin himself had written in so many words: “There is a principle in human society by which population is perpetually kept down to the level of the means of subsistence.”[33] Why did he not take one step more, and discover what that principle is?[34]
The fact is that Godwin was at once intellectually sanguine and emotionally cold. His ideal would have been a man “of large brain and no affections;” and when he wrote the Political Justice he was not aware of his own defect. At a later time he was not only aware of it, but anxious to remove it. In his Memoir of his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft (1798), and in the story of St. Leon (1799), the man who found the philosopher’s stone, and became, to his own sorrow, immortal on earth, he confesses that he has hitherto taken too little thought of feeling as an element in human action. If Mary had been too much of a Werther, her husband had been too little. Like Condorcet (and like Buckle), he had believed civilization to be a purely intellectual movement. He had dogmatized on the omnipotence of truth and reason, and inferred the growth of a perfect society. He had dogmatized on the development of intellect, and inferred an earthly immortality. Moreover, in the Memoir, and in St. Leon, if he had added a little to his doctrines, he had recanted little or nothing, even in regard to immortality.
St. Leon is miserable only because his gift is peculiar to himself; an immortality that is common to all would be acceptable to all. A Methuselah would not be melancholy among antediluvians. Such was probably Godwin’s position. The mere belief in the possibility of earthly immortality was not uncommon; Godwin is careful to number Bacon among its supporters.[35] Malthus was probably right in tracing it to the unconscious influence of Christianity,[36] though the progress in Godwin’s days of the new science of chemistry had perhaps more to do with it, and Godwin’s religion was never more than a bare Theism.[37] It was held by Holcroft, one of Godwin’s most intimate friends,[38] and it was an important part of Condorcet’s Sketch of the Progress of the Human Spirit.
In the days of the Terror (1794) Condorcet, from his hiding-place in the Rue Servandoni, had written of the “organic perfectibility of man.” He looked to medicine, and to the arts and sciences in general, to banish disease and prolong human life “indefinitely.”[39] Godwin trusted to the inward development of the mind, not to outward appliances.[40] But by different ways they arrive at the same terminus, and receive from their great critic very much the same reception there. Malthus points out to Godwin that there is no sign that the body is becoming subjugated to the mind. Even philosophers, said he (and he wrote feelingly, as he had the malady at the time of writing), cannot endure the toothache patiently,[41] and even a merry heart will not enable a weak man to walk as fast and as far as a strong man. There is no change in the human body, and little or no change in the relation of the mind to it. To Condorcet he simply points out that, while the arts have made the lengthening of life “indefinite,” that does not mean “infinite.” Gardeners can grow carnations “indefinitely” large; no man can ever say that he has seen the largest carnation that will ever be grown; but this he can say, that a carnation will never be as large as a cabbage. The limit is there, though it is undefined, and there is a limit also to the lengthening of human life, though no one can fix it to a year. Condorcet therefore has proved an earthly immortality only by a misuse of the word “indefinite.” He has shown no organic change in man which would prove the possibility of perfection in this world. Neither has Condorcet repelled the objection which troubled Dr. Wallace. It is true that, like Godwin, he faces the difficulty and admits the importance of it.[42] The growth of population will always, he says, cause inequality; there will always be a rich leisured class and a poor industrial class; and to lighten the hardships of the latter there ought to be a State Insurance fund, which will make all the poorest citizens sure of support. But one cannot help thinking, if all are sure of support, all will marry, and if all marry, will not the difficulty be increased?[43] Yes, Condorcet grants this; the numbers will soon be too great, and so throughout the ages there will be an “oscillation” between the blessings of progress and the evils of overcrowding, now the one predominating, now the other. In despair he clutches at the old fallacy, “the day is distant,” but he feels it fail him, and must needs add a new and startling solution of his own which Malthus freely denounces.[44] This is not the place to discuss the questions associated in our own times with Neo-Malthusianism.[45] But it is beyond all doubt that the Neo-Malthusians are the children not of Robert Malthus, but of Robert Owen. Malthus was not Malthus because he said, “The people are too many; thin them down”—any more than Darwin was Darwin because he said, “Species are not made, but grow.” If Darwinians are to be judged by Darwin, Malthusians must be judged by Malthus; and the originality of neither Malthus nor Darwin can be explained by a single phrase. We cannot understand the meaning of an author’s words, far less of his work, till we know the context in which they are set. Once know the context and we understand the text. The devil, citing Scripture for his purpose, only succeeds because he never quotes in full.
It follows that, to understand the full meaning of the essay, we must go beyond its efficient cause, and take a view of its material cause, or the whole circumstances in which it was written. If the text of the sermon was Godwin and Condorcet, the application was to the poor of England and the philanthropists who were trying to relieve them.
The early life of Malthus, coinciding, as it largely does, with the latter half of the eighteenth century, coincides with England’s greatest industrial revolution. Malthus was born in 1766, three years after the Peace of Paris. There was an end, for the time, to foreign wars, and trade was making a brave start. The discoveries of coal and iron in Northern England, going hand in hand with the inventions of cotton-spinning and weaving, were beginning to convert the poorest counties into the richest, upsetting the political balance. The new science of chemistry had begun to prove its usefulness. Wedgwood was perfecting his earthenware, Brindley cutting his canals, Telford laying out his roads, Watt building his steam-engines. England in Roman days had been a granary; in later ages she had been a pasture-ground; she was now becoming the land of machinery and manufacture, as well as the centre of foreign trade. In other words, she had begun an industrial change, which was the greatest till then in her history, and rich in the most magical improvements. But in the early stages of the change, the evils of it were nearly as much felt as the blessings. The sufferings of displaced workmen, and the anarchy of the new factory system, supplanting home labour, and making the word “manufacturer” forget its etymology,[46] were real evils, however transient. Combined with the general democratic influence of an expansive manufacturing industry, they might easily have caused a social convulsion in these days of no extraordinary virtue; and the country owed its escape in some degree to the evangelical movement under Whitefield and the Wesleys, which was fatal at once to religious torpor and to political excitement.[47] The annoyances of a meddlesome tariff and the futile attempts to exclude foreign food were to vanish away before a hundred years had passed; but in the boyhood of Malthus the voice of Adam Smith raised against them in the Wealth of Nations (1776) was a cry in the wilderness. There was a general agreement that, whether the high prices prevailing after the Peace of Paris were caused by the growth of the population, or by the lessened value of silver, or by the troubles in Poland, the remedy was not to lie in a free corn trade. The poor were not to have cheap corn, they were to have large allowances. Legislation had gone backwards in this matter. In 1723 a new law had introduced a wise workhouse test of destitution, which might have prevented wilful poverty by reducing outdoor relief; but the clause was repealed by Gilbert’s Act in 1782; the poor were to be “set on work” at their own houses; and the new stringency gave place to the old laxity, with the usual results. The close of the century saw the troubles of a European war added to the list, and the tide of political reform ebbed for forty years (1792–1832). Because the French reform had gone too far, the English reform was not allowed to take its first steps.
It is a commonplace with historians that the French Revolution would have been very different without Voltaire and Rousseau to prepare the way for it. Hunger and new ideas are two advocates of change which always plead best in each other’s company; hunger makes men willing to act, and the new ideas give them matter for enactment. In France, when the crisis came in 1789, the new ideas were not far to seek. Writers of Utopias, from Plato to More, and from Rousseau to Ruskin, have always adopted one simple plan: they have struck out the salient enormities of their own time and inserted the opposite, as when men imagine heaven they think of their dear native country with its discomforts left out. Inequality at home had made Frenchmen ready to dote on a vision of equality when Rousseau presented it to them, and the state of Nature was the state of France reversed. Philosophically, the theorists of the Revolution traced their descent to Locke, and their ideas were not long in recrossing the Channel to visit their birthplace.
Even if Englishmen had not had in America a visible Utopia, or, at least, Arcadia, there was hunger enough in England to recommend the new ideas to every rank in society. This is the reason why, in 1793, Godwin’s book was so successful. It was not only a good English statement of the French doctrines of equality, and therefore a book for the times, but it had a vigour of its own, and was no mere translation. Rousseau and Raynal had thought it necessary to sacrifice universal improvement to universal equality; they saw (or thought they saw) that the two could not go together, and they counted equality so desirable that they were willing to purchase it at the expense of barbarism. Now, they were perhaps more logical than Godwin; equality may mean barbarism. But Godwin’s ideal was at least higher than theirs; he thought of civilization and equality as quite compatible, for he thought that when all men were truly civilized they would of their own accord restore equality. As he left everything to reason and nothing to force, his book was in theory quite harmless; but the tendency of it seemed dangerous, for it criticized the British constitution in a free way to which the British nation was not accustomed. In England, moreover, the people have always confounded ideas with persons. They were not in love with liberty when it took the form of an American “War of Independence” against England, and, even if equality had pleased them in 1789, they would have nothing of it after the Terror. They forsook Fox for Burke, and went to war for a sentiment. At the time when Malthus wrote, the bulk of the English people had lost their enthusiasm for the new ideas. It needed some fortitude to call oneself a Reformer, or even a Whig, when Napoleon had overrun Italy and was facing us in Egypt. Pitt held all persons seditious who did not believe in the wisdom of the war.
But even Pitt, though he now ignored the need of reform, could not overlook the existence of distress. In 1795 there had been a serious scarcity; war prices had become famine prices. It was the year when “the lower orders” were held down by special coercion acts;[48] it was the year when the king’s carriage was stopped by a mob crying “Bread, bread!” Mr. Whitbread and the rest thought Parliament ought to “do something”; and Pitt proposed (1796) to meet the difficulty by amending the Poor Laws. His bill proposed “to restore the original purity of the Poor Laws” by modifying the law of settlement in the direction of greater freedom, and by assisting the working man in other ways. One of these other ways was an attempt of a harmless kind to found schools of industry, another to attach every labourer to a friendly society. But another less innocently proposed to encourage the growth of population by making the poor relief greater where the family was larger. “Let us make relief,” in such cases, “a matter of right and honour, instead of a ground for opprobrium and contempt. This will make a large family a blessing and not a curse; and this will draw a proper line of distinction between those who are to provide for themselves by their labour, and those who, after enriching their country with a number of children, have a claim upon its assistance for their support.”[49]
Malthus in 1796 did not doubt the infallibility of Pitt in such a matter; The Crisis gives no hint of objection. But in 1798, with his new light, he could no longer take the recruiting officer’s view of population. If he had had a good case against Godwin and Condorcet, who had simply failed to show how population could be kept from growing too fast, he had still a better case against Pitt, who proposed to make it grow faster. Besides, their schemes were merely on paper; they had no chance of realizing them, whereas Pitt’s majority would carry any measure on which he had set his heart. The danger from this third quarter was therefore the most imminent. But Malthus needed no new argument for it; he needed simply to shift round his old argument, and point the muzzle of it at his new enemy. There is no need, he said, to encourage marriage; there is no need for Government to make population grow faster. Wherever Providence has sent meat, He will soon send mouths to eat it; and, if by your artificial encouragements you increase the mouths without increasing the meat, you will only bring the people one step nearer starvation, you will only multiply the nation without increasing the joy. If stalwart numbers are strength, starving numbers are weakness.[50]
These commonplaces were then a paradox. Even at the end of the eighteenth century there was no party in the English House of Commons identified with enlightened views on the position of the British workman. Whitbread had always some measure on hand for helping the labourer out of the rates, or by some other State interference; it was in opposing one of Whitbread’s bills that the Prime Minister promised to introduce his own memorable measure. Fox was free to follow either, not professing to understand the new economical doctrines. Pitt, who admired Adam Smith,—Fox, Condorcet, and Godwin, who owed Smith no allegiance,[51]—all were equally purblind in this matter. All Pitt’s study of the fourth book of the Wealth of Nations, chapter fifth, had not shown him the fallacy of a bounty on children. Yet Malthus had got his light from no obscure sources, but from “Hume, Wallace, Adam Smith, and Dr. Price,”[52] who were all well-known and widely-read authors of the day. “The populousness of ancient nations” had been a happy hunting-ground for learned antiquarian essay writers over half a century. Montesquieu, Wallace, and Price[53] claimed the advantage for the ancients. David Hume, with his usual acute divination, decides for the moderns, though with his usual irony he professes to adopt a sceptical conclusion, and makes several concessions to Wallace.[54] This controversy itself might have been expected to bring men nearer to the truth on the subject of population than it actually did. It was left to Malthus to convert Hume’s probability into a certainty from a higher vantage-ground; but the sifting of the arguments by the various writers before him must have simplified his task.[55] Other aids and anticipations were not wanting. As early as 1786, Joseph Townsend, the Wiltshire rector, had written a Dissertation on the Poor Laws, which gives an admirable statement of those wise views of charity and poor relief that are only in these latter days becoming current among us. Malthus records his opinion of Townsend’s work in the best of all possible ways. From his careful inquiry (in the second edition of the Essay) into the population of European countries, he omits Spain on the ground that Mr. Townsend’s Travels in Spain has already done the work for him.[56]
The Essay on Population was therefore not original in the sense of being a creation out of nothing, but in the same way as the Wealth of Nations. In both cases the author got most of his phrases, and even many of his thoughts, from his predecessors; but he treated them as his predecessors were unable to do; he saw them in their connection, perspective, and wide bearings. We must not assume anticipation where there is mere identity of language or partial identity of thought; the words of an earlier writer are not unfrequently quoted by a later away from their logical context, and therefore not as part of an argument of which the writer sees the consecutive premises. This is true of Adam Smith when he is compared with Sir Dudley North, Abraham Tucker, or the other prophets of free trade[57] catalogued by MacCulloch or Blanqui. They talked free trade almost as Mons. Jourdain talked prose, without knowing it. Precisely the same is true of Adam Smith himself in relation to Malthus. Of his own generalizations he is complete master. Having reasoned up to them, he can reason down from them. But, when he says, “Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence,” “The demand for men necessarily regulates the production of men,”[58] he has not anticipated Malthus. His phrases are touching a principle of which he does not see the most important bearings; and not having reasoned up to it, he makes hardly any attempt to reason down from it. Malthus, on the other hand, has taken fast hold of a general principle, and is able to solve a number of dependent questions in the way of simple corollaries. Others may have given right answers to the special questions about the Poor Law and the populousness of ancient nations. Malthus is the first to show one comprehensive reason why all these answers must be right.
This was the secret of his success. As Godwin’s Political Justice was successful because systematic, the Essay on Population was successful because it seemed to put chaos in order. The very sadness of his conclusion had a charm for some minds; but the bulk of his readers did not love him for taking their hopes away, they loved him for giving them new light. Pestilence and famine begin to lose their vague terrors when we know whence they come and what they do for the world. Even if the desire of marriage is itself an evil, it is well to know the truth about it. Ignorance can only be blissful where it is total; and wilful ignorance, being of necessity partial, is a perpetual unrest, not even a fool’s paradise.[59]
The truth in this case was not all sadness. In the last portion of the essay of 1798 Malthus expounds an argument which he afterwards reproduced in later editions with a more terrestrial application. He uses the style of Paley and the Apologists, and he tries to discover the final cause of the principle of population, on metaphysical lines that were followed by Mr. Sumner nearly twenty years afterwards, when the discussion had taken a new turn.[60] The question is how to reconcile the suffering produced by the principle of population with the goodness of God. Malthus answers that the difficulty is only one part of the general problem of evil, the difference between this part and the rest being that in this case we see farther into the causes; and it is therefore the easier for us to justify the ways of God to man. “Evil exists not to create despair but activity.”[61] We ought not to reason from God to nature, but from nature to God; to know how God works, let us observe how nature works. We shall then find that nature sends all sentient creatures through a long and painful process, by which they gain new qualities and powers, presumably fitting them for a better place than they have in this world. This world and this life are therefore in all probability “the mighty process of God,” not indeed for the mere “probation” of man (for that would imply that his Maker was suspicious of him, or ignorant of what was in him), but for the “creation and formation” of the human mind out of the torpor and corruption of dead matter,[62] “to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul, to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay.” The varied influences of life are the forming hand of the Creator, and they are infinitely diverse, for (in spite of Solomon) there is nothing old under the sun.[63] Difficulties generate talents.[64] “The first awakeners of the mind are the wants of the body;” it is these that rouse the intellect of the infant and sharpen the wits of the savage. Not leisure but necessity is the mother of invention:
ἁ πενία, Διόφαντε, μόνα τὰς τέχνας ἐγείρες.
Locke was right; the desire to avoid pain is even stronger than the desire to find pleasure. In this way evil leads to good; for pain, which is a kind of evil, creates effort, and effort creates mind. This is the general rule. A particular example of it is, that want of food, which is one of the most serious of evils, leads to good. By contriving that the earth shall produce food only in small quantities, and in reward of labour, God has provided a perpetual spur to human progress. This is the key to the puzzle of population. By nature man is a lotos-eater till hunger makes him a Ulysses. Why should he toil, the roof and crown of things? Mainly because, if he does not toil, neither can he live; the lotos country will soon be over-peopled, and he must push off his bark again. “The first awakeners of the mind are the wants of the body,” though, once awakened, the mind soon finds out wants beyond the body, and the development of intellect and civilization goes on indefinitely.[65] The people “tend to increase” more quickly than their food, not in order that men may suffer, but in order that they may be roused to save themselves from suffering. The partial ill of all such general laws is swallowed up in the general good; and the general good is secured in two ways: humanity is developed; the resources of the world are developed. In the first place, the intellect of individual men is developed, for the constancy of nature is the foundation of reasoning, and human reason would never be drawn out unless men were absolutely unable to depend on miracles, and were obliged as well as able to make calculations on the basis of a constant law. To this constancy of nature we owe the immortal mind of a Newton. In the second place, the world must be peopled. If savages could have got all their food from one central spot of fertile ground, the earth at large would have remained a wilderness; but, as it is, no one settlement can support an indefinite increase of numbers; the numbers must spread out over the earth till they find room and food. If there were no law of increase, a few such careers as Alexander’s or Tamerlain’s might unpeople the whole world; but the law exists, and the gaps made by any conqueror, or by any pestilence, are soon filled to overflowing, while the overflowing flood passes on to reclaim new countries.[66]
This is the cosmology of Malthus. “Life is, generally speaking, a blessing independent of a future state.”[67] “The impressions and excitements of this world are the instruments with which the Supreme Being forms matter into mind.” The necessity of constant exertion, to avoid evil and pursue good, is the principal spring of these impressions, and is therefore a sufficient reason for the existence of natural and moral evil, including the difficulties which arise from the principle of population. All these are present difficulties, but they are not beyond remedy. They do not serve their purpose unless human exertion succeeds in diminishing them. Absolute removal Malthus does not promise; but, while believing in science and reason as strongly as Condorcet or Godwin, declines to regard an earthly immortality as a reasonable hope, and points us instead to a future life and to another world for perfection and happiness.[68]
Perhaps the great economist went beyond his province in attacking the problem of evil. In the controversy that followed the essay there are few references to this part of it, and after the appearance of the second edition, where this part is omitted altogether, people forgot the existence of the first edition. From the way in which Sumner speaks of the difference between his point of view and that of Malthus, it might fairly be suspected that he knew nothing of the first edition; and yet the second of his two learned volumes is simply an expansion of its ideas.[69] The metaphysic itself might be deep or shallow; it would be impossible to tell till we heard the sense in which the metaphysical phrases were used, and that we have hardly any means of doing. They point at least to the “monistic” view, that there is no gulf between mind and matter. We might believe them idealistic in a German sense; but we cannot forget how closely the ethical views of Malthus are connected with those of the English moralists of his century. He cannot be said to have a place in the history of philosophy; and it is mainly of a curious personal interest to discover that, although he is nominally a utilitarian, he separates himself from Paley by refusing to allow moral value to action done from either fear of punishment or hope of reward.[70] There is no indication that he was a metaphysical genius. His researches in the heavier German literature did not perhaps extend much farther than to the quaint optimist Johann Peter Süssmilch,[71] from whose Göttliche Ordnung he freely drew his statistics.
Malthus at one time intended to expound his metaphysical views at greater length.[72] In other words, he meant to write a book in the manner of Price’s essays, half economical and half literary. We need not deeply regret the “particular business,” whatever it was, that nipped this intention in the bud, besides delaying the publication of the essay as we now have it.[73] The metaphysical and theological passages, as they stand, have the look of an episode, though the thought of them is logically enough connected with the tenor of the book. The views of the author on the other world, the punishment of the wicked, and the use of miracles, have, like the philosophy, mainly a personal interest. Adam Smith, in the later edition of his Moral Sentiments, had omitted at least one very marked expression of theological opinion (on the Atonement) that had appeared in the first edition,[74] and perhaps his disciple did well to follow suit. At the same time, omission is not recantation, and we get light on an author’s mind and character by discovering any views in which he once professed to believe. A writer who reached absolute truth at a very early stage of study, has patronized Adam Smith[75] by editing his chief work, and honoured the other economists by tabulating their conclusions in an historical introduction. He extends this favour to Malthus. The reasonings of Malthus he finds, though valuable, are not free from error; he has “all but entirely overlooked” the beneficial effects of the principle of population as a stimulus to invention and progress.[76] This charge is refuted by the essay even in its later form; but, placed alongside of the cosmology of the first edition, it seems merely grotesque. Malthus is accused of ignoring the very phenomena which Malthus glorifies as the “final cause” of the principle of population. He thought he had explained not only one of the chief causes of poverty, but one of the chief effects; if Adam Smith had shown the power of labour as a cause of wealth, Malthus thought he had shown the power of poverty as a cause of labour. No doubt the mistake was a common one; and (to say nothing of the encyclopædias and biographical dictionaries) there are few economical text-books which do justice to Malthus in this matter.[77] But one who speaks with authority should not be content with a borrowed knowledge. The same authority tells us that “the work of Mr. Malthus is valuable rather for having awakened public attention to the subject than for its giving anything like a complete view of the department of the science of which it treats.”[78] Malthus for his part lays no claim to infallibility; like most pioneers, he is sure of little beyond his leading principles, and he is never ashamed to change his views.[79] But, if his Essay on Population, gradually amended and expanded as it was, to keep pace with the searching criticisms of thirty years, has not reached the heart of the matter, surely there is no profit in discussion.
The fact is, that though the anonymous small 8vo of 1798 was a mere draught of the completed work of later years, its main fault was not incompleteness, but wrongness of emphasis. When a man is writing a controversial pamphlet, he does not try to bring all truths into the front equally; he sets the neglected ones in the foreground, and allows the familiar to fall behind, not as denied or ignored, but simply as not emphasized. It is always possible, in such cases, that the neglected truths, though unworthy of the old neglect, did not deserve the new pre-eminence, and must not be allowed to retain it. Science, seeking answers to its own questions, and not to questions of the eighteenth century, has no toleration for the false emphasis of passing controversy. It puts the real beginning first, the middle next, and the end last, not the end in the middle, or the last first. Accordingly it takes up the first essay of Malthus on population, and requires the author to amend it. He must be less critical and more creative, if he is to give a satisfactory answer to the general problem which he has chosen to take in hand. The times and the subject, both, demand a change of attitude,——the times, because political theories have now become less important than social difficulties, and the subject, because he has hitherto, while clearly explaining the difficulties, done little more than hint at the expedients for overcoming them. True, no critic or iconoclast can ever fully vanquish an opponent except by a truth of his own which goes beyond the opponent’s falsity; and it is to this he owes the enthusiasm of his followers. But he does not always expound the truth so fully as the error; and so, beyond the point of negation, his friends often follow him rather by faith than by sight. This, then, was what Malthus had yet to do; to state what were the trustworthy as well as the delusive methods of raising modern society, and what were the right as well as the wrong ways of relieving the poor.
The success of the essay, so far, had been very remarkable. It had provoked replies by the dozen, and an unwilling witness tells us it had converted friends of progress by the hundred.[80] We find Godwin writing to the author in August 1798,[81] and we may conclude that the veil of anonymousness was not very thick, though Malthus used it again in 1800 in the tract on High Prices. In a debate in the House of Commons on the 11th February, 1800, Pitt took occasion to say that, though he still believed his new Poor Bill a good one, he had dropped it in deference to the objections of “those whose opinions he was bound to respect.”[82] He meant Bentham and Malthus. We cannot tell which had the greater share of the credit, but we know that Malthus regarded Pitt and Paley as his most brilliant converts.[83] Pitt’s declaration that he still believed his bill to be a good one could only mean that he still wished to believe it so. It must have been peculiarly galling to a statesman who affected the political economist to find that not only the solemn criticisms of Malthus, but the jocose “Observations” of Bentham,[84] which threshed the chaff out of the bill clause by clause, had turned his favourite science against himself.