I. MALTHUS’S STARTING-POINT

The political movement represented the confluence of many different streams of agitation.  Enormous social changes had generated multifarious discontent.  New wants and the new strains and stresses between the various parts of the political mechanism required new adaptations.  But, if it were inquired what was the precise nature of the evils, and how the reform of parliament was to operate, the most various answers might be given.  A most important line of division did not coincide with the line between the recognised parties.  One wing of the Radicals agreed with many Conservatives in attributing the great evils of the day to the industrial movement and the growth of competition.  The middle-class Whigs and the Utilitarians were, on the contrary, in thorough sympathy with the industrial movement, and desired to limit the functions of government, and trust to self-help and free competition.  The Socialistic movement appeared for the present to be confined to a few dreamers and demagogues.  The Utilitarians might approve the spirit of the Owenites, but held their schemes to be chimerical.  Beneath the political controversies there was therefore a set of problems to be answered; and the Utilitarian answer defines their distinction from Radicals of a different and, as they would have said, unphilosophical school.

What, then, was the view really taken by the Utilitarians of these underlying problems?  They not only had a very definite theory in regard to them, but in working it out achieved perhaps their most important contribution to speculation.  Beneath a political theory lies, or ought to lie, what we now call a ’sociology’ a theory of that structure of society which really determines the character and the working of political institutions.  The Utilitarian theory was embodied in their political economy.  I must try to define as well as I can what were the essential first principles implied, without going into the special problems which would be relevant in a history of political economy.

The two leading names in the literature of political economy during the first quarter of this century were undoubtedly Malthus and Ricardo.  Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was not one of the Utilitarian band.  As a clergyman, he could not share their opinion of the Thirty-nine Articles.  Moreover, he was a Whig, not a Radical; and he was even tainted with some economic heresy.  Still, he became one of the prophets, if not the leading prophet, of the Utilitarians.  Belief in the Malthusian theory of population was the most essential article of their faith, and marked the line of cleavage between the two wings of the Radical party.

Malthus was the son of a country gentleman in Surrey.  His father was a man of studious habits, and one of the enthusiastic admirers of Rousseau.  His study of Emile probably led to the rather desultory education of his son.  The boy, after being taught at home, was for a time a pupil of R. Graves (1715-1804), author of the Spiritual Quixote, a Whig clergyman who was at least orthodox enough to ridicule Methodism.  Malthus was next sent to attend Gilbert Wakefield’s lectures at the Warrington ‘Academy,’ the Unitarian place of education, and in 1784 went to Jesus College, Cambridge, of which Wakefield had been a fellow.  For Wakefield, who had become a Unitarian, and who was afterwards a martyr to political Radicalism, he appears to have retained a strong respect.  At Jesus, again, Malthus was under Frend, who also was to join the Unitarians.  Malthus was thus brought up under the influences of the modified rationalism which was represented by the Unitarians outside the establishment and by Paley within.  Coleridge was at Jesus while Malthus was still a fellow, and there became an ardent admirer of Priestley, Malthus remained within the borders of the church.  Its yoke was light enough, and he was essentially predisposed to moderate views.  He took his degree as ninth wrangler in 1788, became a fellow of his college in 1793, took orders, and in 1798 was curate of Albury, near his father’s house in Surrey.  Malthus’s home was within a walk of Farnham, where Cobbett had been born and passed his childhood.  He had, therefore, before his eyes the same agricultural labourer whose degradation excited Cobbett to Radicalism.  Very different views were suggested to Malthus.  The revolutionary doctrine was represented in England by the writings of Godwin, whose Political Justice appeared in 1793 and Enquirer in 1797.  These books naturally afforded topics for discussion between Malthus and his father.  The usual relations between senior and junior were inverted; the elder Malthus, as became a follower of Rousseau, was an enthusiast; and the younger took the part of suggesting doubts and difficulties.  He resolved to put down his arguments upon paper, in order to clear his mind; and the result was the Essay upon Population, of which the first edition appeared anonymously in 1798.

The argument upon which Malthus relied was already prepared for him.  The dreams of the revolutionary enthusiasts supposed either a neglect of the actual conditions of human life or a belief that those conditions could be radically altered by the proposed political changes.  The cooler reasoner was entitled to remind them that they were living upon solid earth, not in dreamland.  The difficulty of realising Utopia may be presented in various ways.  Malthus took a point which had been noticed by Godwin.  In the conclusion of his Political Justice, while taking a final glance at the coming millennium, Godwin refers to a difficulty suggested by Robert Wallace.  Wallace had said that all the evils under which mankind suffers might be removed by a community of property, were it not that such a state of things would lead to an ‘excessive population.’  Godwin makes light of the difficulty.  He thinks that there is some ’principle in human society by means of which everything tends to find its own level and proceed in the most auspicious way, when least interfered with by the mode of regulation.’  Anyhow, there is plenty of room on the earth, at present.  Population may increase for ‘myriads of centuries.’  Mind, as Franklin has said, may become ’omnipotent over matter’; life may be indefinitely prolonged; our remote descendants who have filled the earth ’will probably cease to propagate’; they will not have the trouble of making a fresh start at every generation; and in those days there will be ‘no war, no crimes, no administration of justice’; and moreover, ‘no disease, anguish, melancholy, or resentment.’  Briefly, we shall be like the angels, only without the needless addition of a supreme ruler.  Similar ideas were expressed in Condorcet’s famous Tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, written while he was in daily fear of death by the guillotine, and so giving the most striking instance on record of the invincibility of an idealist conviction under the hardest pressure of facts.

The argument of Malthus is a product of the whole previous course of speculation.  The question of population had occupied the French economists.  The profound social evils of France gave the starting-point of their speculations; and one of the gravest symptoms had been the decay of population under the last years of Louis XIV.  Their great aim was to meet this evil by encouraging agriculture.  It could not escape the notice of the simplest observer that if you would have more mouths you must provide more food, unless, as some pious people assumed, that task might be left to Providence.  Quesnay had laid it down as one of his axioms that the statesman should aim at providing sustenance before aiming simply at stimulating population.  It follows, according to Gulliver’s famous maxim, that the man who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before deserves better of his country than the ‘whole race of politicians put together.’  Other writers, in developing this thesis, had dwelt upon the elasticity of population.  The elder Mirabeau, for example, published his Ami des hommes où traite de la population in 1756.  He observes that, given the means of subsistence, men will multiply like rats in a barn. The great axiom, he says, is ’la mesure de la subsistance est celle de la population.’  Cultivate your fields, and you will raise men.  Mirabeau replies to Hume’s essay upon the ‘Populousness of ancient nations’ (1752), of which Wallace’s first treatise was a criticism.  The problem discussed by Hume and Wallace had been comparatively academical; but by Malthus’s time the question had taken a more practical shape.  The sentimentalists denounced luxury as leading to a decay of the population.  Their prevailing doctrine is embodied in Goldsmith’s famous passage in the Deserted Village (1770): 

    ’Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
    Where wealth accumulates and men decay.’

The poetical version only reflected the serious belief of Radical politicians.  Although, as we are now aware, the population was in fact increasing rapidly, the belief prevailed among political writers that it was actually declining.  Trustworthy statistics did not exist.  In 1753 John Potter, son of the archbishop, proposed to the House of Commons a plan for a census.  A violent discussion arose, in the course of which it was pointed out that the plan would inevitably lead to the adoption of the ‘canvas frock and wooden shoes.’  Englishmen would lose their liberty, become French slaves, and, when counted, would no doubt be taxed and forcibly enlisted.  The bill passed the House of Commons in spite of such reasoning, but was thrown out by the House of Lords.  Till the first census was taken in 1801 a period at which the absolute necessity of such knowledge had become obvious the most elementary facts remained uncertain.  Was population increasing or decreasing?  That surely might be ascertainable.

Richard Price (1723-1791) was not only a distinguished moralist and a leading politician, but perhaps the best known writer of his time upon statistical questions.  He had the credit of suggesting Pitt’s sinking fund, and spoke with the highest authority upon facts and figures.  Price argued in 1780 that the population of England had diminished by one-fourth since the revolution of 1688.  A sharp controversy followed upon the few ascertainable data.  The vagueness of the results shows curiously how much economists had to argue in the dark.  Malthus observes in his first edition that he had been convinced by reading Price that population was restrained by ’vice and misery,’ as results, not of political institutions, but of ’our own creation.’ This gives the essential point of difference.  Mirabeau had declared that the population of all Europe was decaying.  Hume’s essay, which he criticises, had been in answer to a similar statement of Montesquieu.  Price had learned that other countries were increasing in number, though England, he held, was still declining.  What, then, was the cause?  The cause, replied both Price and Mirabeau, was ‘luxury,’ to which Price adds the specially English evils of the ‘engrossment of farms’ and the enclosure of open fields.  Price had to admit that the English towns had increased; but this was an additional evil.  The towns increased simply by draining the country; and in the towns themselves the deaths exceeded the births.  The great cities were the graves of mankind.  This opinion was strongly held, too, by Arthur Young, who ridiculed the general fear of depopulation, and declared that if money were provided, you could always get labour, but who looked upon the towns as destructive cancers in the body politic.

The prevalence of this view explains Malthus’s position.  To attribute depopulation to luxury was to say that it was caused by the inequality of property.  The rich man wasted the substance of the country, became demoralised himself, and both corrupted and plundered his neighbours.  The return to a ‘state of nature,’ in Rousseau’s phrase, meant the return to a state of things in which this misappropriation should become impossible.  The whole industry of the nation would then be devoted to supporting millions of honest, simple peasants and labourers, whereas it now went to increasing the splendour of the great at the expense of the poor.  Price enlarges upon this theme, which was, in fact, the contemporary version of the later formula that the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer.  The immediate effect of equalising property, then, would be an increase of population.  It was the natural retort, adopted by Malthus, that such an increase would soon make everybody poor, instead of making every one comfortable.  Population, the French economists had said, follows subsistence.  Will it not multiply indefinitely?  The rapid growth of population in America was noticed by Price and Godwin; and the theory had been long before expanded by Franklin, in a paper which Malthus quotes in his later editions.  ‘There is no bound,’ said Franklin in 1751, ’to the prolific nature of plants and animals but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each other’s means of subsistence.’  The whole earth, he infers, might be overspread with fennel, for example, or, if empty of men, replenished in a few ages with Englishmen.  There were supposed to be already one million of Englishmen in North America.  If they doubled once in twenty-five years, they would in a century exceed the number of Englishmen at home.  This is identical with Mirabeau’s principle of the multiplying of rats in a barn.  Population treads closely on the heels of subsistence.  Work out your figures and see the results.

Malthus’s essay in the first edition was mainly an application of this retort, and though the logic was effective as against Godwin, he made no elaborate appeal to facts.  Malthus soon came to see that a more precise application was desirable.  It was clearly desirable to know whether population was or was not actually increasing, and under what conditions.  I have spoken of the contemporary labours of Sinclair, Young, Sir F. Eden, and others.  To collect statistics was plainly one of the essential conditions of settling the controversy.  Malthus in 1799 travelled on the continent to gather information, and visited Sweden, Norway, Russia, and Germany.  The peace of Amiens enabled him in 1802 to visit France and Switzerland.  He inquired everywhere into the condition of the people, collected such statistical knowledge as was then possible, and returned to digest it into a elaborate treatise.  Meanwhile, the condition of England was giving a fresh significance to the argument.  The first edition had been published at the critical time when the poor-law was being relaxed, and disastrous results were following war and famine.  The old complaint that the poor-law was causing depopulation was being changed for the complaint that it was stimulating pauperism.  The first edition already discussed this subject, which was occupying all serious thinkers; it was now to receive a fuller treatment.  The second edition, greatly altered, appeared in 1803, and made Malthus a man of authority.  His merits were recognised by his appointment in 1805 to the professorship of history and political economy at the newly founded East India College at Haileybury.  There he remained till the end of his life, which was placid, uneventful, and happy.  He made a happy marriage in 1804; and his calm temperament enabled him to bear an amount of abuse which might have broken the health of a more irritable man.  Cobbett’s epithet, ‘parson Malthus,’ strikes the keynote.  He was pictured as a Christian priest denouncing charity, and proclaiming the necessity of vice and misery.  He had the ill luck to be the centre upon which the antipathies of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin converged.  Cobbett’s language was rougher than Southey’s; but the poet-laureate and the author of ‘two-penny trash’ were equally vehement in sentiment.  Malthus, on the other hand, was accepted by the political economists, both Whig and Utilitarian.  Horner and Mackintosh, lights of the Whigs, were his warm friends as well as his disciples.  He became intimate with Ricardo, and he was one of the original members of the Political Economy Club.  He took abuse imperturbably; was never vexed ‘after the first fortnight’ by the most unfair attack; and went on developing his theories, lecturing his students, and improving later editions of his treatise.  Malthus died on 23rd December 1834.

II.  THE RATIOS

The doctrine marks a critical point in political economy.  Malthus’s opponents, as Mr. Bonar remarks, attacked him alternately for propounding a truism and for maintaining a paradox.  A ‘truism’ is not useless so long as its truth is not admitted.  It would be the greatest of achievements to enunciate a law self-evident as soon as formulated, and yet previously ignored or denied.  Was this the case of Malthus?  Or did he really startle the world by clothing a commonplace in paradox, and then explain away the paradox till nothing but the commonplace was left?

Malthus laid down in his first edition a proposition which continued to be worried by all his assailants.  Population, he said, when unchecked, increases in the geometrical ratio; the means of subsistence increase only in an arithmetical ratio.  Geometrical ratios were just then in fashion. Price had appealed to their wonderful ways in his arguments about the sinking fund; and had pointed out that a penny put out to 5 per cent. compound interest at the birth of Christ would, in the days of Pitt, have been worth some millions of globes of solid gold, each as big as the earth.  Both Price and Malthus lay down a proposition which can easily be verified by the multiplication-table.  If, as Malthus said, population doubles in twenty-five years, the number in two centuries would be to the present number as 256 to 1, and in three as 4096 to 1.  If, meanwhile, the quantity of subsistence increased in ‘arithmetical progression,’ the multipliers for it would be only 9 and 13.  It follows that, in the year 2003, two hundred and fifty-six persons will have to live upon what now supports nine.  So far, the case is clear.  But how does the argument apply to facts?  For obvious reasons, Price’s penny could not become even one solid planet of gold.  Malthus’s population is also clearly impossible.  That is just his case.  The population of British North America was actually, when he wrote, multiplying at the assigned rate.  What he pointed out was that such a rate must somehow be stopped; and his question was, how precisely will it be stopped?  The first proposition, he says (that is, that population increased geometrically), ’I considered as proved the moment that the American increase was related; and the second as soon as enunciated.’  To say that a population increases geometrically, in fact, is simply to say that it increases at a fixed rate.  The arithmetical increase corresponds to a statement which Malthus, at any rate, might regard as undeniable; namely, that in a country already fully occupied, the possibility of increasing produce is restricted within much narrower limits.  In a ‘new country,’ as in the American colonies, the increase of food might proceed as rapidly as the increase of population.  Improved methods of cultivation, or the virtual addition of vast tracts of fertile territory by improved means of communication, may of course add indefinitely to the resources of a population.  But Malthus was contemplating a state of things in which the actual conditions limited the people to an extraction of greater supplies from a strictly limited area.  Whether Malthus assumed too easily that this represented the normal case may be questionable.  At any rate, it was not only possible but actual in the England of the time.  His problem was very much to the purpose.  His aim was to trace the way in which the population of a limited region is prevented from increasing geometrically.  If the descendants of Englishmen increase at a certain rate in America, why do they not increase equally in England?  That, it must be admitted, is a fair scientific problem.  Finding that two races of similar origin, and presumably like qualities, increase at different rates, we have to investigate the causes of the difference.

Malthus answered the problem in the simplest and most consistent way in his first edition.  What are the checks?  The ultimate check would clearly be starvation.  A population might multiply till it had not food.  But before this limit is actually reached, it will suffer in various ways from scarcity.  Briefly, the checks may be distinguished into the positive, that is, actual distress, and the preventive, or ‘foresight.’  We shall actually suffer unless we are restrained by the anticipation of suffering.  As a fact, however, he thinks that men are but little influenced by the prudence which foresees sufferings.  They go on multiplying till the consequences are realised.  You may be confined in a room, to use one of his illustrations, though the walls do not touch you; but human beings are seldom satisfied till they have actually knocked their heads against the wall.  He sums up his argument in the first edition in three propositions. Population is limited by the means of subsistence; that is obvious; population invariably increases when the means of subsistence are increased; that is shown by experience to be practically true; and therefore, finally, the proportion is maintained by ’misery and vice.’  That is the main conclusion which not unnaturally startled the world.  Malthus always adhered in some sense to the main doctrine, though he stated explicitly some reserves already implicitly involved.  A writer must not be surprised if popular readers remember the unguarded and dogmatic utterances which give piquancy to a theory, and overlook the latent qualifications which, when fully expressed, make it approximate to a commonplace.  The political bearing of his reasoning is significant.  The application of Godwin’s theories of equality would necessarily, as he urges, stimulate an excessive population.  To meet the consequent evils, two measures would be obviously necessary; private property must be instituted in order to stimulate prudence; and marriage must be instituted to make men responsible for the increase of the population.  These institutions are necessary, and they make equality impossible.  Weak, then, as foresight may be with most men, the essential social institutions have been developed by the necessity of enabling foresight to exercise some influence; and thus indirectly societies have in fact grown in wealth and numbers through arrangements which have by one and the same action strengthened prudence and created inequality.  Although this is clearly implied, the main impression produced upon Malthus’s readers was that he held ‘vice and misery’ to be essential to society; nay, that in some sense he regarded them as blessings.  He was accused, as he tells us, of objecting to vaccination, because it tended to prevent deaths from small-pox, and has to protest against some one who had declared his principles to be favourable to the slave trade. He was represented, that is, as holding depopulation to be good in itself.  These perversions were grotesque, but partly explain the horror with which Malthus was constantly regarded; and we must consider what made them plausible.

I must first notice the maturer form of his doctrine.  In the second edition he turns to account the result of his later reading, his personal observations, and the statistical results which were beginning to accumulate.  The remodelled book opens with a survey of the observed action of the checks; and it concludes with a discussion of the ‘moral restraint’ which is now added to ‘vice and misery.’  Although considerable fragments of the old treatise remained to the last, the whole book was altered both in style and character.  The style certainly suffers, for Malthus was not a master of the literary art; he inserts his additions with little care for the general effect.  He tones down some of the more vivid phrases which had given offence, though he does not retract the substance.  A famous passage in the second edition, in which he speaks of ‘nature’s mighty feast,’ where, unluckily, the ‘table is already full,’ and therefore unbidden guests are left to starve, was suppressed in the later editions.  Yet the principle that no man has a claim to subsistence as of right remains unaltered.  The omission injures the literary effect without altering the logic; and I think that, where the argument is amended, the new element is scarcely worked into the old so as to gain thorough consistency.

Malthus’s survey of different countries showed how various are the ‘checks’ by which population is limited in various countries.  We take a glance at all nations through all epochs of history.  In the South Sea we find a delicious climate and a fertile soil, where population is mainly limited by vice, infanticide, and war; and where, in spite of these influences, the population multiplies at intervals till it is killed off by famine.  In China, a vast and fertile territory, inhabited by an industrious race, in which agriculture has always been encouraged, marriage stimulated, and property widely diffused, has facilitated the production of a vast population in the most abject state of poverty, driven to expose children by want, and liable at intervals to destructive famines.  In modern Europe, the checks appear in the most various forms; in Switzerland and Norway a frugal population in small villages sometimes instinctively understands the principle of population, and exhibits the ‘moral restraint,’ while in England the poor-laws are producing a mass of hopeless and inert pauperism.  Consideration of these various cases, and a comparison of such records as are obtainable of the old savage races, of the classical states of antiquity, of the Northern barbarians and of the modern European nations, suggests a natural doubt.  Malthus abundantly proves what can hardly be denied, that population has everywhere been found to press upon the means of subsistence, and that vice and misery are painfully abundant.  But does he establish or abandon his main proposition?  He now asserts the ‘tendency’ of population to outrun the means of subsistence.  Yet he holds unequivocally that the increase of population has been accompanied by an increased comfort; that want has diminished although population has increased; and that the ‘preventive’ check is stronger than of old in proportion to the positive check.  Scotland, he says, is ’still overpeopled, but not so much as when it contained fewer inhabitants.’  Many nations, as he points out in general terms, have been most prosperous when most populous. They could export food when crowded, and have ceased to import it when thinned.  This, indeed, expresses his permanent views, though the facts were often alleged by his critics as a disproof of them.  Was not the disproof real?  Does not a real evasion lurk under the phrase ‘tendency’?  You may say that the earth has a tendency to fall into the sun, and another ‘tendency’ to move away from the sun.  But it would be absurd to argue that we were therefore in danger of being burnt or of being frozen.  To explain the law of a vital process, we may have to analyse it, and therefore to regard it as due to conflicting forces; but the forces do not really exist separately, and in considering the whole concrete phenomenon we must take them as mutually implied.  A man has a ‘tendency’ to grow too fat; and another ‘tendency’ to grow too thin.  That surely means that on the whole he has a ‘tendency’ to preserve the desirable mean.  The phrase, then, can only have a distinct meaning when the conflicting forces represent two independent or really separable forces.  To use an illustration given by Malthus, we might say that a man had a ‘tendency’ to grow upwards; but was restrained by a weight on his head.  The man has the ‘tendency,’ because we may regard the weight as a separable accident.  When both forces are of the essence, the separate ‘tendencies’ correspond merely to our way of analysing the fact.  But if one can be properly regarded as relatively accidental, the ‘tendency’ means the way in which the other will manifest itself in actual cases.

In 1829, Senior put this point to Malthus. What, he asked, do you understand by a ‘tendency’ when you admit that the tendency is normally overbalanced by others?  Malthus explains his meaning to be that every nation suffers from evils ’specifically arising from the pressure of population against food.’  The wages of the labourer in old countries have never been sufficient to enable him to maintain a large family at ease.  There is overcrowding, we may say, in England now as there was in England at the Conquest; though food has increased in a greater proportion than population; and the pressure has therefore taken a milder form.  This, again, is proved by the fact that, whenever a relaxation of the pressure has occurred, when plagues have diminished population, or improvements in agriculture increased their supply of food, the gap has been at once filled up.  The people have not taken advantage of the temporary relaxation of the check to preserve the new equilibrium, but have taken out the improvement by a multiplication of numbers.  The statement then appears to be that at any given time the population is in excess.  Men would be better off if they were less numerous.  But, on the other hand, the tendency to multiply does not represent a constant force, an irresistible instinct which will always bring men down to the same level, but something which, in fact, may vary materially.  Malthus admits, in fact, that the ‘elasticity’ is continually changing; and therefore repudiates the interpretation which seemed to make all improvement hopeless.  Why, then, distinguish the ‘check’ as something apart from the instinct?  If, in any case, we accept this explanation, does not the theory become a ‘truism,’ or at least a commonplace, inoffensive but hardly instructive?  Does it amount to more than the obvious statement that prudence and foresight are desirable and are unfortunately scarce?

III.  MORAL RESTRAINT

The change in the theory of ‘checks’ raises another important question.  Malthus now introduced a modification upon which his supporters laid great stress.  In the new version the ‘checks’ which proportion population to means of subsistence are not simply ’vice and misery,’ but ’moral restraint, vice, and misery.’ How, precisely, does this modify the theory?  How are the different ‘checks’ related?  What especially is meant by ‘moral’ in this connection?  Malthus takes his ethical philosophy pretty much for granted, but is clearly a Utilitarian according to the version of Paley. He agrees with Paley that ’virtue evidently consists in educing from the materials which the Creator has placed under our guidance the greatest sum of human happiness.’ He adds to this that our ’natural impulses are, abstractedly considered, good, and only to be distinguished by their consequences.’  Hunger, he says, as Bentham had said, is the same in itself, whether it leads to stealing a loaf or to eating your own loaf.  He agrees with Godwin that morality means the ’calculation of consequences,’ or, as he says with Paley, implies the discovery of the will of God by observing the effect of actions upon happiness.  Reason then regulates certain innate and practically unalterable instincts by enabling us to foretell their consequences.  The reasonable man is influenced not simply by the immediate gratification, but by a forecast of all the results which it will entail.  In these matters Malthus was entirely at one with the Utilitarians proper, and seems to regard their doctrine as self-evident.

He notices briefly one logical difficulty thus introduced.  The ‘checks’ are vice, misery, and moral restraint.  But why distinguish vice from misery?  Is not conduct vicious which causes misery, and precisely because it causes misery?  He replies that to omit ‘vice’ would confuse our language.  Vicious conduct may cause happiness in particular cases; though its general tendency would be pernicious.  The answer is not very clear; and Malthus, I think, would have been more logical if he had stuck to his first theory, and regarded vice as simply one form of imprudence.  Misery, that is, or the fear of misery, and the indulgence in conduct which produces misery are the ‘checks’ which limit population; and the whole problem is to make the ultimate sanction more operative upon the immediate conduct.  Man becomes more virtuous simply as he becomes more prudent, and is therefore governed in his conduct by recognising the wider and more remote series of consequences.  There is, indeed, the essential difference that the virtuous man acts (on whatever motives) from a regard to the ’greatest happiness of the greatest number,’ and not simply from self-regard.  Still the ultimate and decisive criterion is the tendency of conduct to produce misery; and if Malthus had carried this through as rigorously as Bentham, he would have been more consistent.  The ’moral check’ would then have been simply a department of the prudential; including prudence for others as well as for ourselves.  One reason for the change is obvious.  His assumption enables him to avoid coming into conflict with the accepted morality of the time.  On his exposition ‘vice’ occasionally seems not to be productive of misery but an alternative to misery; and yet something bad in itself.  Is this consistent with his Utilitarianism?  The vices of the South Sea Islanders, according to him, made famine less necessary; and, if they gave pleasure at the moment, were they not on the whole beneficial?  Malthus again reckons among vices practices which limit the population without causing ‘misery’ directly. Could he logically call them vicious?  He wishes to avoid the imputation of sanctioning such practices, and therefore condemns them by his moral check; but it would be hard to prove that he was consistent in condemning them.  Or, again, there is another familiar difficulty.  The Catholic church encourages marriage as a remedy for vice; and thereby stimulates both population and poverty.  How would Malthus solve the problem:  is it better to encourage chastity and a superabundance of people, or to restrict marriage at the cost of increasing temptation to vice?  He seems to evade the point by saying that he recommends both chastity and abstinence from marriage.  By ‘moral restraint,’ as he explains, he means ’restraint from marriage from prudential motives, with a conduct strictly moral during the period of this restraint.’  ‘I have never,’ he adds, ’intentionally deviated from this sense.’ A man, that is, should postpone taking a wife, and should not console himself by taking a mistress.  He is to refrain from increasing the illegitimate as well as from increasing the legitimate population.  It is not surprising that Malthus admits that this check has ’in past ages operated with inconsiderable force.’ In fact Malthus, as a thoroughly respectable and decent clergyman, manages by talking about the ‘moral restraint’ rather to evade than to answer some awkward problems of conduct; but at the cost of some inconsequence.

But another result of this mode of patching up his argument is more important.  The ‘vices of mankind,’ he says in an unusually rhetorical summary of his historical inquiry, ’are active and able ministers of depopulation.  They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves.  But should they fail in the war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands.  Should success still be incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and at one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.’  The life of the race, then, is a struggle with misery; its expansion is constantly forcing it upon this array of evils; and in proportion to the elasticity is the severity of the evils which follow.  This is not only a ‘gloomy view,’ but again seems to suggest that ‘vice’ is an alternative to ‘misery.’  Vices are bad, it would seem, but at least they obviate the necessity for disease and famine.  Malthus probably suppressed the passage because he thought it liable to this interpretation.  It indicates, however, a real awkwardness, if not something more, in his exposition.  He here speaks as if there was room for a fixed number of guests at his banquet.  Whatever, therefore, keeps the population to that limit must be so far good.  If he had considered his ‘moral check’ more thoroughly, he might have seen that this does not correspond to his real meaning.  The ‘moral’ and the prudential checks are not really to be contrasted as alternative, but co-operative.  Every population, vicious or virtuous, must of course proportion its numbers to its means of support.  That gives the prudential check.  But the moral check operates by altering the character of the population itself.  From the purely economic point of view, vice is bad because it lowers efficiency.  A lazy, drunken, and profligate people would starve where an industrious, sober, and honest people would thrive.  The check of vice thus brings the check of misery into play at an earlier stage.  It limits by lowering the vitality and substituting degeneration for progress.  The check, therefore, is essentially mischievous.  Though it does not make the fields barren, it lowers the power of cultivation.  Malthus had recognised this when he pointed out, as we have seen, that emergence from the savage state meant the institution of marriage and property and, we may infer, the correlative virtues of chastity, industry, and honesty.  If men can form large societies, and millions can be supported where once a few thousands were at starvation point, it is due to the civilisation which at every stage implies ‘moral restraint’ in a wider sense than Malthus used the phrase.  An increase of population by such means was, of course, to be desired.  If Malthus emphasises this inadequately, it is partly, no doubt, because the Utilitarian view of morality tended to emphasise the external consequences rather than the alteration of the man himself.  Yet the wider and sounder view is logically implied in his reasoning so much so that he might have expressed his real aim more clearly if he had altered the order of his argument.  He might have consistently taken the same line as earlier writers and declared that he desired, above all things, the increase of population.  He would have had indeed to explain that he desired the increase of a sound and virtuous population; and that hasty and imprudent increase led to misery and to a demoralisation which would ultimately limit numbers in the worst way.  We shall see directly how nearly he accepts this view.  Meanwhile, by insisting upon the need of limitation, he was led to speak often as if limitation by any means was good and the one thing needful, and the polemic against Godwin in the first edition had given prominence to this side of the question.  Had he put his views in a different shape, he would perhaps have been so edifying that he would have been disregarded.  He certainly avoided that risk, and had whatever advantage is gained by stating sound doctrine paradoxically.

We shall, I think, appreciate his real position better by considering his approximation to the theory which, as we know, was suggested to Darwin by a perusal of Malthus. There is a closer resemblance than appears at first.  The first edition concludes by two chapters afterwards omitted, giving the philosophical application of his theory.  He there says that the ’world is a mighty process of God not for the trial but for the creation and formation of the mind.’ It is not, as Butler thought, a place of ‘probation,’ but a scene in which the higher qualities are gradually developed.  Godwin had quoted Franklin’s view that ‘mind’ would become ‘omnipotent over matter.’  Malthus holds that, as he puts it, ‘God is making matter into mind.’  The difference is that Malthus regards evil in general not as a sort of accident of which we can get rid by reason; but as the essential stimulus which becomes the efficient cause of intellectual activity.  The evils from which men suffer raise savage tribes from their indolence, and by degrees give rise to the growth of civilisation.  The argument, though these chapters were dropped by Malthus, was taken up by J. B. Sumner, to whom he refers in later editions. It is, in fact, an imperfect way of stating a theory of evolution.  This appears in his opening chapters upon the ’moral restraint.’ He explains that moral and physical evils are ‘instruments employed by the Deity’ to admonish us against such conduct as is destructive of happiness.  Diseases are indications that we have broken a law of nature.  The plague of London was properly interpreted by our ancestors as a hint to improve the sanitary conditions of the town.  Similarly, we have to consider the consequences of obeying our instincts.  The desire of food and necessaries is the most powerful of these instincts, and next to it the passion between the sexes.  They are both good, for they are both natural; but they have to be properly correlated.  To ’virtuous love’ in particular we owe the ‘sunny spots’ in our lives, where the imagination loves to bask.  Desire of necessaries gives us the stimulus of the comfortable fireside; and love adds the wife and children, without whom the fireside would lose half its charm.  Now, as a rule, the sexual passion is apt to be in excess.  The final cause of this excess is itself obvious.  We cannot but conceive that it is an object of ’the Creator that the earth should be replenished.’ To secure that object, it is necessary that ’there should be a tendency in the population to increase faster than food.’  If the two instincts were differently balanced, men would be content though the population of a fertile region were limited to the most trifling numbers.  Hence the instinct has mercifully been made so powerful as to stimulate population, and thus indirectly and eventually to produce a population at once larger and more comfortable.  On the one hand, it is of the very utmost importance to the happiness of mankind that they should not increase too fast, but, on the other hand, if the passion were weakened, the motives which make a man industrious and capable of progress would be diminished also.  It would, of course, be simpler to omit the ‘teleology’; to say that sanitary regulations are made necessary by the plague, not that the plague is divinely appointed to encourage sanitary regulations.  Malthus is at the point of view of Paley which becomes Darwinism when inverted; but the conclusion is much the same.  He reaches elsewhere, in fact, a more precise view of the value of the ‘moral restraint.’  In a chapter devoted for once to an ideal state of things, he shows how a race thoroughly imbued with that doctrine would reconcile the demands of the two instincts.  Population would in that case increase, but, instead of beginning by an increase, it would begin by providing the means of supporting.  No man would become a father until he had seen his way to provide for a family.  The instinct which leads to increasing the population would thus be intrinsically as powerful as it now is; but when regulated by prudence it would impel mankind to begin at the right end.  Food would be ready before mouths to eat it.

IV.  SOCIAL REMEDIES

This final solution appears in Malthus’s proposed remedies for the evils of the time.  Malthus declares that ’an increase of population when it follows in its natural order is both a great positive good in itself, and absolutely necessary’ to an increase of wealth.  This natural order falls in, as he observes, with the view to which Mirabeau had been converted, that ’revenue was the source of population,’ and not population of revenue. Malthus holds specifically that, ‘in the course of some centuries,’ the population of England might be doubled or trebled, and yet every man be ’much better fed and clothed than he is at present.’ He parts company with Paley, who had considered the ideal state to be ’that of a laborious frugal people ministering to the demands of an opulent luxurious nation.’ That, says Malthus, is ’not an inviting prospect.’  Nothing but a conviction of absolute necessity could reconcile us to the ’thought of ten millions of people condemned to incessant toil, and to the privation of everything but absolute necessaries, in order to minister to the excessive luxuries of the other million.’  But he denies that any such necessity exists.  He wishes precisely to see luxury spread among the poorer classes.  A desire for such luxury is the best of all checks to population, and one of the best means of raising the standard.  It would, in fact, contribute to his ‘moral restraint.’  So, too, he heartily condemns the hypocrisy of the rich, who professed a benevolent desire to better the poor, and yet complained of high wages. If, he says elsewhere, a country can ’only be rich by running a successful race for low wages, I should be disposed to say, Perish such riches!’ No one, in fact, could see more distinctly than Malthus the demoralising influence of poverty, and the surpassing importance of raising the people from the terrible gulf of pauperism.  He refers to Colquhoun’s account of the twenty thousand people who rose every morning in London without knowing how they were to be supported; and observes that ’when indigence does not produce overt acts of vice, it palsies every virtue.’ The temptations to which the poor man is exposed, and the sense of injustice due to an ignorance of the true cause of misery, tend to ’sour the disposition, to harden the heart, and deaden the moral sense.’  Unfortunately, the means which have been adopted to lessen the evil have tended to increase it.  In the first place, there was the master-evil of the poor-laws.  Malthus points out the demoralising effects of these laws in chapters full of admirable common sense, which he was unfortunately able to enforce by fresh illustrations in successive editions.  He attends simply to the stimulus to population.  He thinks that if the laws had never existed, the poor would now have been much better off. If the laws had been fully carried out, every labourer might have been certain that all his children would be supported, or, in other words, every check to population would have been removed. Happily, the becoming pride of the English peasantry was not quite extinct; and the poor-law had to some extent counteracted itself, or taken away with one hand what it gave with the other, by placing the burthen upon the parishes. Thus landlords have been more disposed to pull down than to build cottages, and marriage has been checked.  On the whole, however, Malthus could see in the poor-laws nothing but a vast agency for demoralising the poor, tempered by a system of petty tyrannical interference.  He proposes, therefore, that the poor-law should be abolished.  Notice should be given that no children born after a certain day should be entitled to parish help; and, as he quaintly suggests, the clergyman might explain to every couple, after publishing the banns, the immorality of reckless marriage, and the reasons for abolishing a system which had been proved to frustrate the intentions of the founders. Private charity, he thinks, would meet the distress which might afterwards arise, though humanity imperiously requires that it should be ‘sparingly administered.’  Upon this duty he writes a sensible chapter. To his negative proposals Malthus adds a few of the positive kind.  He is strongly in favour of a national system of education, and speaks with contempt of the ‘illiberal and feeble’ arguments opposed to it.  The schools, he observes, might confer ‘an almost incalculable benefit’ upon society, if they taught ’a few of the simplest principles of political economy.’ He had been disheartened by the prejudices of the ignorant labourer, and felt the incompatibility of a free government with such ignorance.  A real education, such as was given in Scotland, would make the poor not, as alarmists had suggested, more inflammable, but better able to detect the sophistry of demagogues. He is, of course, in favour of savings banks, and approves friendly societies, though he is strongly opposed to making them compulsory, as they would then be the poor-law in a new form. The value of every improvement turns upon its effect in encouraging the ’moral restraint.’  Malthus’s ultimate criterion is always, Will the measure make people averse to premature marriage?  He reaches the apparently inconsistent result that it might be desirable to make an allowance for every child beyond six. But this is on the hypothesis that the ‘moral restraint’ has come to be so habitual that no man marries until he has a fair prospect of maintaining a family of six.  If this were the practical code, the allowance in cases where the expectation was disappointed would not act as an encouragement to marriage, but as a relief under a burthen which could not have been anticipated.  Thus all Malthus’s teaching may be said to converge upon this practical point.  Add to the Ten Commandments the new law, ’Thou shalt not marry until there is a fair prospect of supporting six children.’  Then population will increase, but sufficient means for subsistence will always be provided beforehand.  We shall make sure that there is a provision for additional numbers before, not after, we add to our numbers.  Food first and population afterwards gives the rule; thus we achieve the good end without the incidental evils.

Malthus’s views of the appropriate remedy for social evils undoubtedly show an imperfect appreciation of the great problems involved.  Reckless propagation is an evil; but Malthus regards it as an evil which can be isolated and suppressed by simply adding a new article to the moral code.  He is dealing with a central problem of human nature and social order.  Any modification of the sexual instincts or of the constitution of the family involves a profound modification of the whole social order and of the dominant religious and moral creeds.  Malthus tacitly assumes that conduct is determined by the play of two instincts, unalterable in themselves, but capable of modification in their results by a more extensive view of consequences.  To change men’s ruling motives in regard to the most important part of their lives is to alter their whole aims and conceptions of the world, and of happiness in every other relation.  It supposes, therefore, not a mere addition of knowledge, but a transformation of character and an altered view of all the theories which have been embodied in religious and ethical philosophy.  He overlooks, too, considerations which would be essential to a complete statement.  A population which is too prudent may suffer itself to be crowded out by more prolific races in the general struggle for existence; and cases may be suggested such as that of the American colonies, in which an increase of numbers might be actually an advantage by facilitating a more efficient organisation of labour.

The absence of a distinct appreciation of such difficulties gives to his speculation that one-sided character which alienated his more sentimental contemporaries.  It was natural enough in a man who was constantly confronted by the terrible development of pauperism in England, and was too much tempted to assume that the tendency to reckless propagation was not only a very grave evil, but the ultimate source of every evil.  The doctrine taken up in this unqualified fashion by some of his disciples, and preached by them with the utmost fervour as the one secret of prosperity, shocked both the conservative and orthodox whose prejudices were trampled upon, and such Radicals as inherited Godwin’s or Condorcet’s theory of perfectibility.  Harsh and one-sided as it might be, however, we may still hold that it was of value, not only in regard to the most pressing difficulty of the day, but also as calling attention to a vitally important condition of social welfare.  The question, however, recurs whether, when the doctrine is so qualified as to be admissible, it does not also become a mere truism.

An answer to this question should begin by recognising one specific resemblance between his speculations and Darwin’s.  Facts, which appear from an older point of view to be proofs of a miraculous interposition, become with Malthus, as with Darwin, the normal results of admitted conditions.  Godwin had admitted that there was some ‘principle which kept population on a level with subsistence.’  ’The sole question is,’ says Malthus, ’what is this principle?  Is it some obscure and occult cause? a mysterious interference of heaven,’ inflicting barrenness at certain periods? or ’a cause open to our researches and within our view?’ Other writers had had recourse to the miraculous.  One of Malthus’s early authorities was Suessmilch, who had published his Goettliche Ordnung in 1761, to show how Providence had taken care that the trees should not grow into the sky.  The antediluvians had been made long-lived in order that they might have large families and people an empty earth, while life was divinely shortened as the world filled up.  Suessmilch, however, regarded population as still in need of stimulus.  Kings might help Providence.  A new Trajan would deserve to be called the father of his people, if he increased the marriage-rate.  Malthus replies that the statistics which the worthy man himself produced showed conclusively that the marriages depended upon the deaths.  The births fill up the vacancies, and the prince who increased the population before vacancies arose would simply increase the rate of mortality. If you want to increase your birth-rate without absolutely producing famine, as he remarks afterwards, make your towns unhealthy, and encourage settlement by marshes.  You might thus double the mortality, and we might all marry prematurely without being absolutely starved.  His own aim is not to secure the greatest number of births, but to be sure that the greatest number of those born may be supported. The ingenious M. Muret, again, had found a Swiss parish in which the mean life was the highest and the fecundity smallest known.  He piously conjectures that it may be a law of God that ’the force of life in each country should be in the inverse ratio of its fecundity.’  He needs not betake himself to a miracle, says Malthus. The case is simply that in a small and healthy village, where people had become aware of the importance of the ‘preventive check,’ the young people put off marriage till there was room for them, and consequently both lowered the birth-rate and raised the average duration of life.

Nothing, says Malthus very forcibly, has caused more errors than the confusion between ’relative and positive, and between cause and effect.’ He is here answering the argument that because the poor who had cows were the most industrious, the way to make them industrious was to give them cows.  Malthus thinks it more probable that industry got the cow than that the cow produced industry.  This is a trifling instance of a very general truth.  People had been content to notice the deaths caused by war and disease, and to infer at once that what caused death must diminish population.  Malthus shows the necessity of observing other collateral results.  The gap may be made so great as to diminish population; but it may be compensated by a more rapid reproduction; or, the rapidity of reproduction may itself be the cause of the disease; so that to remove one kind of mortality may be on some occasion to introduce others.  The stream is dammed on one breach to flow more strongly through other outlets.

This is, I conceive, to say simply that Malthus was introducing a really scientific method.  The facts taken in the true order became at once intelligible instead of suggesting mysterious and irregular interferences.  Earlier writers had been content to single out one particular set of phenomena without attending to its place in the more general and complex processes, of which they formed an integral part.  Infanticide, as Hume had pointed out, might tend to increase population. In prospect, it might encourage people to have babies; and when babies came, natural affection might prevent the actual carrying out of the intention.  To judge of the actual effect, we have to consider the whole of the concrete case.  It may be carried out, as apparently in the South Sea Islands, so generally as to limit population; or it may be, as in China, an indication that the pressure is so great that a number of infants become superfluous.  Its suppression might, in the one case, lead to an increase of the population; in the other, to the increase of other forms of mortality.  Malthus’s investigations illustrate the necessity of referring every particular process to its place in the whole system, of noting how any given change might set up a set of actions and reactions in virtue of the general elasticity of population, and thus of constantly referring at every step to the general conditions of human life.  He succeeded in making many points clear, and of showing how hastily many inferences had been drawn.  He explained, for example, why the revolutionary wars had not diminished the population of France, in spite of the great number of deaths, and thus gave an example of a sound method of inquiry which has exercised a great influence upon later observers.  Malthus was constantly misunderstood and misrepresented, and his opponents often allege as fatal objections to his doctrine the very facts by which it was really supported.  But we may, I think, say, that since his writing no serious economical writer has adopted the old hasty guesses, or has ventured to propose a theory without regard to the principles of which he first brought out the full significance.

V. POLITICAL APPLICATION

This I take to indicate one real and permanent value of Malthus’s writings.  He introduced a new method of approaching the great social problems.  The value of the method may remain, however inaccurate may be the assumptions of facts.  The ‘tendency,’ if interpreted to mean that people are always multiplying too rapidly, may be a figment.  If it is taken as calling attention to one essential factor in the case, it is a most important guide to investigation.  This brings out another vital point.  The bearing of the doctrine upon the political as well as upon the economical views of the Utilitarians is of conspicuous importance.  Malthus’s starting-point, as we have seen, was the opposition to the doctrine of ‘perfectibility.’  Hard facts, which Godwin and Condorcet had neglected, were fatal to their dreams.  You have, urged Malthus, neglected certain undeniable truths as to the unalterable qualities of human nature, and, therefore, your theories will not work.  The revolutionists had opposed an ideal ’state of nature’ to the actual arrangements of society.  They imagined that the ‘state of nature’ represented the desirable consummation, and that the constitution of the ‘natural’ order could be determined from certain abstract principles.  The equality of man, and the absolute rights which could be inferred by a kind of mathematical process, supplied the necessary dogmatic basis.  The antithesis to the state of nature was the artificial state, marked by inequality, and manifesting its spirit by luxury.  Kings, priests, and nobles had somehow established this unnatural order; and to sweep them away summarily was the way of bringing the natural order into full activity.  The ideal system was already potentially in existence, and would become actual when men’s minds were once cleared from superstition, and the political made to correspond to the natural rights of man.  To this Malthus had replied, as we have seen, that social inequality was not a mere arbitrary product of fraud and force, but an expedient necessary to restrain the primitive instincts of mankind.  He thus coincides with Bentham’s preference of ‘security’ to ‘equality,’ and illustrates the real significance of that doctrine.  Property and marriage, though they involve inequality, were institutions of essential importance.  Godwin had pushed his theories to absolute anarchy; to the destruction of all law, for law in general represented coercion or an interference with the state of nature.  Malthus virtually asserted that the metaphysical doctrine was inapplicable because, men being what they are, these conclusions were incompatible with even the first stages of social progress.  This means, again, that for the metaphysical method Malthus is substituting a scientific method.  Instead of regarding all government as a kind of mysterious intervention from without, which has somehow introduced a fatal discord into the natural order, he inquires what are the facts; how law has been evolved; and for what reason.  His answer is, in brief, that law, order, and inequality have been absolutely necessary in order to limit tendencies which would otherwise keep men in a state of hopeless poverty and depression.

This gives the ‘differentia’ of the Utilitarian considered as one species of the genus ‘Radical.’  Malthus’s criticism of Paine is significant. He agrees with Paine that the cause of popular risings is ‘want of happiness.’  But Paine, he remarks, was ’in many important points totally ignorant of the structure of society’; and has fallen into the error of attributing all want of happiness to government.  Consequently, Paine advocates a plan for distributing taxes among the poorest classes, which would aggravate the evils a hundredfold.  He fully admits with Paine that man has rights.  The true line of answer would be to show what those rights are.  To give this answer is not Malthus’s present business; but there is one right, at any rate, which a man does not and cannot possess:  namely, the ’right to subsistence when his labour will not fairly purchase it.’  He does not possess it because he cannot possess it; to try to secure it is to try to ‘reverse the laws of nature,’ and therefore to produce cruel suffering by practising an ‘inhuman deceit.’  The Abbe Raynal had said that a man had a right to subsist ‘before all social laws.’  Man had the same right, replied Malthus, as he had to live a hundred or a thousand years.  He may live, if he can without interfering with others.  Social laws have, in fact, enlarged the power of subsistence; but neither before nor after their institution could an unlimited number subsist.  Briefly, the question of fact comes before the question of right, and the fault of the revolutionary theorists was to settle the right without reference to the possibility of making the right correspond to the fact.

Hence Malthus draws his most emphatic political moral.  The admission that all evil is due to government is the way to tyranny.  Make men believe that government is the one cause of misery, and they will inevitably throw the whole responsibility upon their rulers; seek for redress by cures which aggravate the disease; and strengthen the hands of those who prefer even despotism to anarchy.  This, he intimates, is the explanation of the repressive measures in which the country-gentlemen had supported Pitt.  The people had fancied that by destroying government they would make bread cheap; government was forced to be tyrannical in order to resist revolution; while its supporters were led to ’give up some of the most valuable privileges of Englishmen.’ It is then of vital importance to settle what is and what is not to be set down to government.  Malthus, in fact, holds that the real evils are due to underlying causes which cannot be directly removed, though they may be diminished or increased, by legislators.  Government can do something by giving security to property, and by making laws which will raise the self-respect of the lower classes.  But the effect of such laws must be slow and gradual; and the error which has most contributed to that delay in the progress of freedom, which is ’so disheartening to every liberal mind,’ is the confusion as to the true causes of misery.  Thus, as he has already urged, professed economists could still believe, so long after the publication of Adam Smith’s work, that it was ’in the power of the justices of the peace or even of the omnipotence of parliament to alter by a fiat the whole circumstances of the country.’ Yet men who saw the absurdity of trying to fix the price of provisions were ready to propose to fix the rate of wages.  They did not see that one term of the proportion implied the other.  Malthus’s whole criticism of the poor-law, already noticed, is a commentary upon this text.  It is connected with a general theory of human nature.  The author of nature, he says, has wisely made ’the passion of self-love beyond expression stronger than the passion of benevolence.’ He means, as he explains, that every man has to pursue his own welfare and that of his family as his primary object.  Benevolence, of course, is the ‘source of our purest and most refined pleasures,’ and so forth; but it should come in as a supplement to self-love.  Therefore we must never admit that men have a strict right to relief.  That is to injure the very essential social force.  ’Hard as it may seem in individual instances, dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful.’ The spirit of independence or self-help is the one thing necessary.  ’The desire of bettering our condition and the fear of making it worse, like the vis medicatrix in physics, is the vis medicatrix naturae in politics, and is continually counteracting the disorders arising from narrow human institutions.’ It is only because the poor-laws have not quite destroyed it, that they have not quite ruined the country.  The pith of Malthus’s teaching is fairly expressed in his last letter to Senior. He holds that the improvement in the condition of the great mass of the labouring classes should be considered as the main interest of society.  To improve their condition, it is essential to impress them with the conviction that they can do much more for themselves than others can do for them, and that the only source of permanent improvement is the improvement of their moral and religious habits.  What government can do, therefore, is to maintain such institutions as may strengthen the vis medicatrix, or ‘desire to better our condition,’ which poor-laws had directly tended to weaken.  He maintains in his letter to Senior, that this desire is ‘perfectly feeble’ compared with the tendency of the population to increase, and operates in a very slight degree upon the great mass of the labouring class. Still, he holds that on the whole the ‘preventive checks’ have become stronger relatively to the positive, and, at any rate, all proposals must be judged by their tendency to strengthen the preventive.

Malthus was not a thoroughgoing supporter of the ‘do-nothing’ doctrine.  He approved of a national system of education, and of the early factory acts, though only as applied to infant labour.  So, as we shall see, did all the Utilitarians.  The ‘individualism,’ however, is not less decided; and leads him to speak as though the elasticity of population were not merely an essential factor in the social problem, but the sole principle from which all solutions must be deduced.  He is thus led, as I have tried to show, to a narrow interpretation of his ‘moral check.’  He is apt to take ‘vice’ simply as a product of excessive pressure, and, in his general phrases at least, to overlook its reciprocal tendency to cause pressure.  The ‘moral check’ is only preventive or negative, not a positive cause of superior vigour.  A similar defect appears in his theory of the vis medicatrix.  He was, I hold, perfectly right in emphasising the importance of individual responsibility.  No reform can be permanent which does not raise the morality of the individual.  His insistence upon this truth was of the highest importance, and it is to be wished that its importance might be more fully recognised to-day.  The one-sidedness appears in his proposal to abolish the poor-law simply.  That became the most conspicuous and widely accepted doctrine.  All men of ‘sense,’ said Sydney Smith certainly a qualified representative of the class in 1820, agree, first, that the poor-law must be abolished; and secondly, that it must be abolished very gradually. That is really to assume that by refusing to help people at all, you will force them to help themselves.  There is another alternative, namely, that they may, as Malthus himself often recognises, become demoralised by excessive poverty.  To do simply nothing may lead to degeneration instead of increased energy.  The possibility of an improved law, which might act as a moral discipline instead of a simply corrupting agency, is simply left out of account; and the tendency to stimulate reckless population is regarded not only as one probable consequence, but as the very essence of all poor-laws.  Upon Malthus’s assumptions, the statement that sound political and social theories must be based upon systematic inquiry into facts, meant that the individual was the ultimate unalterable unit, whose interest in his own welfare gave the one fulcrum for all possible changes.  The ideal ‘state of nature’ was a fiction.  The true basis of our inquiries is the actual man known to us by observation.  The main fault of this being was the excess of the instinct of multiplication, and the way to improve him was to show how it might conflict with the instinct of self-preservation.  In this shape the doctrine expressed the most characteristic tendency of the Utilitarians, and divided them from the Socialists or believers in abstract rights of man.

VI.  RENT

Here, then, we are at a central point of the Utilitarian creed.  The expansive force of population is, in a sense, the great motive power which moulds the whole social structure; or, rather, it forces together the independent units, and welds them into an aggregate.  The influence of this doctrine upon other economical speculations is of the highest importance.  One critical stage in the process is marked by the enunciation of the theory of rent, which was to become another essential article of the true faith.  The introduction of this doctrine is characteristic, and marks the point at which Ricardo superseded Malthus as chief expositor of the doctrine.

Malthus’s views were first fully given in his Inquiry into Rent, the second of three pamphlets which he published during the corn-law controversy of 1814-15. The opinions now stated had, he says, been formed in the course of his lecturing at Haileybury; and he made them public on account of their bearing upon the most absorbing questions of the time.  The connection of the theory with Malthus’s speculations and with the contemporary difficulties is indeed obvious.  The landlord had clearly one of the reserved seats at the banquet of nature.  He was the most obvious embodiment of ‘security’ as opposed to equality.  Malthus, again, had been influenced by the French economists and their theory of the ‘surplus fund,’ provided by agriculture.  According to them, as he says, this fund or rent constitutes the whole national wealth.  In his first edition he had defended the economists against some of Adam Smith’s criticisms; and though he altered his views and thought that they had been led into preposterous errors, he retained a certain sympathy for them.  Agriculture has still a certain ‘pre-eminence.’  God has bestowed upon the soil the ’inestimable quality of being able to maintain more persons than are necessary to work it.’ It has the special virtue that the supply of necessaries generates the demand.  Make more luxuries and the price may fall; but grow more food and there will be more people to eat it.  This, however, seems to be only another way of stating an unpleasant fact.  The blessing of ‘fertility’ counteracts itself.  As he argues in the essay, an equal division of land might produce such an increase of population as would exhaust any conceivable increase of food.  These views not, I think, very clear or consistently worked out lead apparently to the conclusion that the fertility is indeed a blessing, but on condition of being confined to a few.  The result, in any case, is the orthodox theory of rent.  The labourer gets less than he would if the products of the soil were equally distributed.  Both wages and profits must fall as more is left to rent, and that this actually happens, he says, with unusual positiveness, is an ’incontrovertible truth.’ The fall enables the less fertile land to be cultivated, and gives an excess of produce on the more fertile.  ’This excess is rent.’ He proceeds to expound his doctrine by comparing land to a set of machines for making corn. If, in manufacture, a new machine is introduced every one adopts it.  In agriculture the worst machines have still to be used; and those who have the best and sell at the same price, can appropriate the surplus advantage.  This, he declares, is a law ’as invariable as the action of the principle of gravity.’ Yet Smith and others have overlooked a ’principle of the highest importance’ and have failed to see that the price of corn, as of other things, must conform to the cost of production.  The same doctrine was expounded in the same year by Sir Edward West; and, as it seems to me, more clearly and simply.  West, like Malthus, says that he has to announce a principle overlooked by Adam Smith.  This is briefly that ’each equal additional quantity of work bestowed on agriculture yields an actually diminished return.’  He holds that profits fall as wealth increases, but he denies Adam Smith’s view that this is a simple result of increased competition. Competition would equalise, but would not lower profits, for ’the productive powers of manufactures are constantly increasing.’  In agriculture the law is the opposite one of diminishing returns.  Hence the admitted fall of profits shows that the necessity of taking inferior soils into cultivation is the true cause of the fall.

Such coincidences as that between Malthus and West are common enough, for very obvious reasons.  In this case, I think, there is less room for surprise than usual.  The writer generally credited with the discovery of the rent doctrine is James Anderson, who had stated it as early as 1777. The statement, however, did not attract attention until at the time of West and Malthus it was forced upon observers by the most conspicuous facts of the day.  Adam Smith and other economists had, as Malthus notices, observed what is obvious enough, that rent in some way represented a ’net produce’ a something which remained after paying the costs of production.  So much was obvious to any common-sense observer.  In a curious paper of December 1804, Cobbett points out that the landlords will always keep the profits of farmers down to the average rate of equally agreeable businesses.  This granted, it is a short though important step to the theory of rent.  The English system had, in fact, spontaneously analysed the problem.  The landlord, farmer, and labourer represented the three interests which might elsewhere be combined.  Prices raised by war and famine had led to the enclosure of wastes and the breaking up of pastures.  The ‘margin of cultivation’ was thus illustrated by facts.  Farmers were complaining that they could not make a profit if prices were lowered.  The landed classes were profiting by a rise of price raised, according to a familiar law, in greater proportion than the deficiency of the harvest.  Facts of this kind were, one must suppose, familiar to every land-agent; and to discover the law of rent, it was only necessary for Malthus and West to put them in their natural order.  The egg had only to be put on its end, though that, as we know, is often a difficult task.  When the feat was accomplished consequences followed which were fully developed by Ricardo.