CHAPTER II.
SECOND THOUGHTS, 1803.
Exaggerations of the First Essay—Its two Postulates not co-ordinate—Distinctive feature of the Second Essay—Its moderate Optimism—Rough Classification of Checks—Moral Restraint and Mixed Motives—Freedom as understood by Godwin and by Malthus—The two men contrasted.
While Malthus was making such converts as Pitt, Paley, and Parr, and when even Godwin acknowledged the “writer of the essay” to have made a “valuable addition to political economy,”[85] the essay was not beyond criticism. There were some familiar facts of which the writer had taken too little account, and they were impressed on him by his critics from all sides. To use the language of philosophy, he had not been sufficiently concrete; he had gone far to commit Godwin’s fault, and consider one feature of human nature apart by itself, instead of seeing it in its place with the rest. The position and prospects of civilized society in our own day depend on a combination of political, intellectual, physical, and moral causes, of which the growth or decrease of population may be only an effect. If we are part man, part lion, and part hog, it is not fair to assume the predominance of the hog any more than the predominance of the man. In a herd of animals, as distinguished from a society of men, the units are simply the fittest who have survived in the struggle for existence. The principle of population is in the foreground there; there is no check to it but famine, disease, and death. We can therefore understand how the study of the Essay on Population led Charles Darwin to explain the origin of species by a generalization which Malthus had known and named, though he did not pursue it beyond man.[86] The “general struggle” among animals “for room and food” means among civilized men something very like free trade, the old orthodox economical panacea for economic evils; and the essayist agrees with Adam Smith in a general resistance to legislative interference. Bad as are the effects of the irremovable causes of poverty, interference makes them still worse. But at least, when we come to man, the struggle is not so cruel. “Plague take the hindmost” is not the only or the supreme rule. If the fear of starvation, the most earthly and least intellectual of all motives, is needed to force us to work at first, it need not therefore be necessary ever afterwards. The baser considerations are by their definition the lowest layers of our pile; we rise by means of them, but we tread them down, and the higher the pile the less their importance. Within civilized countries, in proportion to their civilization, the struggle in the lowest stages is abolished; the weakest are often saved, and the lowest raised, in spite of unfitness.[87] View man not as an animal, but as a citizen; view the principle of population as checked not only by vice, misery, and the fear of them, but by all the mixed motives of human society, and we recognize that Malthus, with the best intentions, had treated the matter too abstractly. Godwin had over-rated the power of reason, Malthus the power of passion. “It is probable,” he wrote at a later time, “that, having found the bow bent too much one way, I was induced to bend it too much the other, in order to make it straight.”[88] The abstract principle of increase getting more, and concrete humanity less, than justice, the next step was, naturally, to deny the possibility of permanent improvement in this world, and to regard every partial improvement as a labour of Sisyphus.[89]
It could hardly be otherwise, if we began, like Malthus, by setting down the desire of food and the desire of marriage as two co-ordinate principles.[90] They are not really co-ordinate. It is true not merely of most men, but of all men without a single exception, that they cannot live without food. Even if a man survive an abstinence from solid food for forty days, he cannot deny himself water, and he is for all useful purposes dead to the world during his fast. The second postulate of the first essay is, on the contrary, true only of most men, and even then under qualifications. It is not true of any till manhood, and it is not true of all men equally. Some are beyond its scope by an accident of birth, and a still larger number, whether priests or laymen, put themselves beyond its scope for moral reasons.[91] Coleridge puts the case pertinently enough: “The whole case is this: Are they both alike passions of physical necessity, and the one equally with the other independent of the reason and the will? Shame upon our race that there lives the individual who dares even ask the question.”[92]
Malthus saw that he had been hasty, and he did not republish the essay till he had given it five years of revision, and added to it the results of foreign travel and wider reading. In 1799 he went abroad with some college friends, Otter, Clarke the antiquarian and naturalist, and Clarke’s pupil Cripps,[93] and visited Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and part of Russia, these being the only countries at that time open to English travellers. After his return he published his tract on the High Price of Provisions (1800),[94] and at the conclusion of it he promised a new edition of the Essay on Population. Some people, he says, have thought the essay “a specious argument inapplicable to the present state of society,” because it contradicts preconceived opinions; but two years of reflection have strengthened his conviction that he has discovered “the real cause of the continued depression and poverty of the lower classes;” and he will not recant his essay: “I have deferred giving another edition of it in the hope of being able to make it more worthy of the public attention, by applying the principle directly and exclusively to the existing state of society, and endeavouring to illustrate the power and universality of its operation from the best authenticated accounts that we have of the state of other countries.” But he was not satisfied with the accounts of other people. When the Peace of Amiens let loose thousands of pleasure-seekers on the Continent, Malthus went to France and Switzerland on no errand of mere pleasure; and he was luckily at home again, and passing his proof-sheets through the press, before Napoleon’s unpleasant interference with English travellers.
It was a happy coincidence that in the dark fighting days of 1798, Malthus should write only of vice and misery, while in the short gleam of peace in 1802 and 1803, when the tramp of armed men had ceased for the moment, he should recollect himself, and write of a less ghastly restraint on population, a restraint which might perhaps, like the truce of Amiens, hold out some faint hope for the future. For the sake of the world let us hope that the parallel goes no further. The wonder is not that he forgot there was such a thing as civilization, but that amidst wars and rumours of wars he should ever have remembered it.
In the preface to the new edition (June 1803), he says he has “so far differed in principle” from the old edition “as to suppose the action of another check to population which does not come under the head either of vice or misery,” and he has “tried to soften some of the harshest conclusions of the first essay.” There was really more change than this. The first essay contained much of the imperfection of the sudden magazine-article; and if the writer had lived half a century later he would probably, instead of writing a small book, have contributed a long article to a monthly or quarterly magazine, giving a review of Godwin’s political writings, with incidental remarks on the Poor Bill of Mr. Pitt. This was evidently the light in which he himself regarded his first work, or he would not have handled it so freely in republication. The new edition had new facts, new arrangement, and new emphasis. He had not written a book once for all, leaving the world to fight over it after his death. He took the public into partnership with him, and made every discussion a means of improving his book. This gives the Essay on Population a unique character among economical writings. It leads the author to interpret his thoughts to us from many various points of view, leaving us, unhappily, often in doubt whether an alteration of language is or is not an alteration of thought. Malthus adds to the difficulty by omitting and inserting instead of rewriting in full. His chapters cease to be old without becoming new.
The very face of the book revealed a change. In 1798 it was An Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society; in 1803, An Essay on the Principle of Population, or a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness. The dreams of the future are now in the background, and the facts of the present in the foreground. In 1798 Malthus had given Godwin the lie:—
“Colouring he, dilating, magniloquent, glorying in picture,
He to a matter of fact still softening, paring, abating,
He to the great might-have-been upsoaring, sublime and ideal,
He to the merest it—was restricting, diminishing, dwarfing.”
He must do more now, or his political economy is a dismal science. He must show how we can cling to the matter of fact without losing our ideal. It is not enough to refer us to the other world. How far may we have hope in this world? Let Malthus answer.
The second essay is his answer; and if second thoughts are the best, then we may rejoice over the second essay, for it lifts the cloud from the first. It tells us that on the whole the power of civilization is greater than the power of population; the pressure of the people on the food is therefore less in modern than it was in ancient times or the middle ages; there are now less disorder, more knowledge, and more temperance.[95] The merely physical checks are falling into a subordinate position. There are two kinds of checks on population. A check is (a) positive, when it cuts down an existing population, (b) preventive, when it keeps a new population from growing up. Among animals the check is only misery, among savage men vice as well as misery, and, in civilized society, moral restraint as well as, till now, both vice and misery. Even in civilized society there are strata which moral restraint hardly reaches, for there are strata which are not civilized. On the whole, however, it is true that among animals there is no sign of any other check than the positive, while among men the positive is gradually subordinated to the preventive. Among men misery may act both positively and preventively. In the form of war or disease it may slay its tens of thousands, and cut down an existing population. By the fear of its own coming it may prevent many a marriage, and keep a new population from growing up. Vice may also act in both ways: positively as in child-murder, preventively as in the scheme of Condorcet. But in civilized society the forces of both order and progress are arrayed against their two common enemies; and, if we recognized no third check, surely the argument that was used against Godwin’s society holds against all society; its very purification will ruin it, by forbidding vice and misery to check the growth of population, and by thereby permitting the people to increase to excess. There is, however, a third check, which Malthus knows under the title of moral restraint.
Moral restraint is a distinct form of preventive check. It is not to be confused with an impure celibacy, which falls under the head of vice; and yet the adjective “moral” does not imply that the motives are the highest possible.[96] The adjective is applied not so much to the motive of the action as to the action itself, from whatever motives proceeding; and in the mouth of a Utilitarian this language is not unphilosophical. Moral restraint, in the pages of Malthus, means simply continence; it is an abstinence from marriage followed by no irregularities.[97] He speaks of the “moral stimulus” of the bounty on corn, meaning the expectations it produced in the minds of men, as distinguished from the variations it produced in the prices of grain;[98] and the word “moral” is often, like “morale,” used in military matters to denote mental disposition, as distinguished from material resources. The vagueness of the word is perhaps not accidental, for nothing is vaguer than the mixed motives which it denotes; but continence, which is unambiguous, would seem the better word.
With the enunciation of the third check the theory of Malthus entered definitively on a new phase; and in sketching the outlines of his work we shall no longer need to treat it as paradoxical and overstrained, but as a sober argument from the ground of accepted facts. The author’s analysis of human nature has been brought into harmony with common sense. He confesses that it had hitherto been too abstract, and had separated the inseparable.
The mind of man cannot be sawed into quantities; and, even if it is possible to distinguish the mixed motives that guide human action, the fact remains that they only operate when together. It is probable that no good man’s motives were ever absolutely noble, and no bad man’s ever absolutely bestial. Even the good man is strongest when he can make his very circumstances war against his power to do evil. Mixed from the first of time, human motives will, in this world, remain mixed unto the last, whether in saint, sage, or savage. But civilization, involving, as it does, a progressive change in the dominant ideas of society, will alter the character of the mixture and the proportion of the elements. The laws of Malthus will be obeyed, though the name of Malthus be not mentioned, and the checks, physical or moral, be never brought to mind. Society, moving all together, if it move at all, cannot cure its evils by one single heroic remedy; but as little can it be content with self-denying ordinances, prohibitions, or refutations. It needs a positive truth, and an ideal, that is to say, a religion, to give new life to the bodily members by giving new hope to the heart. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but the end of wisdom is the love of the Lord and the admiration of moral good.”[99] It follows that an economist, if he knows nothing but his economy, does not know even that.
No economists are more reproached with their want of idealism than Malthus and his brethren. As the French Revolutionists were said to believe that the death of their old rulers would of itself bring happiness and good government, so these writers were said to teach that the mere removal of hindrances would lead to the best possible production and distribution of the good things of this life. The ideal state then, as far as wealth was concerned, would be anarchy plus the police constable. Godwin would have dispensed with the constable. “Give a state liberty enough,” he says, “and vice cannot exist in it.”[100] But neither he nor the economists desired a merely negative change or removal of hindrances. Their political reformation was to be, like the Protestant, only successful as it went beyond image-breaking. Malthus, it will be seen,[101] is far from being an unqualified advocate of laissez faire; and, in all cases where he did desire it, he wished to make the state small only to make public opinion great. Godwin was not far away from him here. If he was wrong in attributing too much evil to institutions, and too little to human nature, he has furnished his own correction. The Political Justice disclaimed all sympathy with violence; it taught that a political reform was worthless unless effected peacefully by reason; and Malthus[102] has the same cure for social evils—argument and instruction. The difference between them is, that Malthus takes more into account the unreasonableness as well as the reasonableness of men. In essentials they are agreed. The thorough enlightenment of the people, which includes their moral purification as well as their intellectual instruction, is to complete the work of mending all, in which men are to be fellow-workers with God—so runs the teaching of Malthus and all the greatest economists of the last hundred years. Whether the evils of competition are many or few, serious or trifling, depends largely on the character of the competitors; and the more free we make the competition, the more thoroughly we must educate the competitors. Adam Smith was well aware of this; he recommended school-boards a hundred years before the Acts of 1870 and 1872;[103] and Malthus was not behind him.[104] They are aware that the more completely we exclude the interference of Government, the more actively we must employ every other moral and social agency. Whether Malthus was prepared to exclude the interference of Government entirely, even under this condition, we shall see by-and-by.
The characters of the two men, Malthus and Godwin, are a striking contrast. Malthus was the student, of quiet settled life, sharing his little wealth with his friends in unobtrusive hospitality, and constantly using his pen for the good, as he believed, of the English poor, that in these wretched times they might have domestic happiness like his own. There never was a more singular delusion than the common belief in the hard-heartedness of Malthus. Besides the unanimous voice of private friends, he has left testimony enough in his own books to absolve him. While Adam Smith and others owe their errors to intellectual fallibility, Malthus owes many of his to his tender heart. His motive for studying political economy was no doubt a mixed motive; it was partly the interest of an intelligent man in abstract questions; but it was chiefly the desire to advance the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In his eyes the elevation of human life was much more important than the solution of a scientific problem. Even when in 1820 he wrote a book on the “Principles of Political Economy,” he took care to add on the title-page, “considered with a view to their practical application,” refusing to consider in abstractness what always exists in the concrete. His keen sympathy for the sufferings of displaced workmen led him to fight a losing battle with Say and Ricardo in favour of something like an embargo on inventions, and in protest against a fancied over-production.[105] His private life showed the power of gentleness; Miss Martineau could hear his mild, sonorous vowels without her eartrumpet, and his few sentences were as welcome at her dinner-table as the endless babble of cleverer tongues. He felt the pain of a thousand slanders “only just at first,” and never let them trouble his dreams after the first fortnight, saying, with a higher than stoical calmness, that they passed by him like the idle wind which he respected not.[106] He outlived obloquy, and saw the fruit of his labours in a wiser legislation and improved public feeling.
With Godwin all was otherwise. There were fightings within and fears without. With an immovable devotion to ideas he combined a fickleness of affection towards human beings. He heeded emotion too little in his books and too much in his own life, yielding to the fancy of the moment, quarrelling with his best friends twice a week, and quickly knitting up the broken ties again. He loved his wife well, but hardly allowed her to share the same house with him, lest they should weary of one another.[107] He was the sworn enemy of superstition, and himself the arch-dreamer of dreams.
Yet when we contrast the haphazard literary life of the one, ending his days ingloriously[108] in a Government sinecure, unsuccessful and almost forgotten, with the academical ease of the other, centred in the sphere of common duties, and passing from the world with a fair consciousness of success, we feel a sympathy for Godwin that is of a better sort than the mere liking for a loser. It is a sympathy not sad enough for pity. It is not wholly sad to find Godwin in his old age a lonely man, his friends dropping off one by one into the darkness and leaving him solitary in a world that does not know him. The world that had begun to realize the ideas of Malthus had begun to realize the ideas of Godwin also. It was a world far more in harmony with political justice than that into which Godwin had sent his book forty years before. It was good that Malthus had lived to see the new Poor Law, but still better that both had lived to see the Reform of ’32.
They passed away within two years of each other, Malthus in the winter of 1834, Godwin in the spring of 1836, the year of the first league of the people against the Corn Laws. In their death they were still divided, but, “si quis piorum manibus locus,” they are divided no longer, and they think no hard thoughts of each other any more.