I. THE MALTHUSIAN CONTROVERSY

The Economic theory became triumphant.  Expounded from new university chairs, summarised in text-books for schools, advocated in the press, and applied by an energetic party to some of the most important political discussions of the day, it claimed the adhesion of all enlightened persons.  It enjoyed the prestige of a scientific doctrine, and the most popular retort seemed to be an involuntary concession of its claims.  When opponents appealed from ‘theorists’ to practical men, the Utilitarians scornfully set them down as virtually appealing from reason to prejudice.  No rival theory held the field.  If Malthus and Ricardo differed, it was a difference between men who accepted the same first principles.  They both professed to interpret Adam Smith as the true prophet, and represented different shades of opinion rather than diverging sects.  There were, however, symptoms of opposition, which, at the time, might be set down as simple reluctance to listen to disagreeable truths.  In reality, they were indications of a dissatisfaction which was to become of more importance and to lead in time to a more decided revolt.  I must indicate some of them, though the expressions of dissent were so various and confused that it is not very easy to reduce them to order.

Malthus’s doctrine was really at the base of the whole theory, though it must be admitted that neither Malthus himself nor his opponents were clear as to what his doctrine really was.  His assailants often attacked theories which he disavowed, or asserted principles which he claimed as his own. I mention only to set aside some respectable and wearisome gentlemen such as Ingram, Jarrold, Weyland, and Grahame, who considered Malthus chiefly as impugning the wisdom of Providence.  They quote the divine law, ‘Increase and multiply’; think that Malthus regards vice and misery as blessings, and prove that population does not ‘tend’ to increase too rapidly.  Jarrold apparently accepts the doctrine which Malthus attributes to Suessmilch, that lives have been shortened since the days of the patriarchs, and the reproductive forces diminished as the world has grown fuller.  Grahame believes in a providential ‘ordeal,’ constituted by infant mortality, which is not, like war and vice, due to human corruption, but a beneficent regulating force which correlates fertility with the state of society.  This might be taken by Malthus as merely amounting to another version of his checks.  Such books, in fact, simply show, what does not require to be further emphasised, that Malthus had put his version of the struggle for existence into a form which seemed scandalous to the average orthodox person.  The vagueness of Malthus himself and the confused argument of such opponents makes it doubtful whether they are really answering his theories or reducing them to a less repulsive form of statement.

In other directions, the Malthusian doctrine roused keen feeling on both sides, and the line taken by different parties is significant.  Malthus had appeared as an antagonist of the revolutionary party.  He had laid down what he took to be an insuperable obstacle to the realisation of their dreams.  Yet his views were adopted and extended by those who called themselves thorough Radicals.  As, in our days, Darwinism has been claimed as supporting both individualist and socialistic conclusions, the theory of his predecessor, Malthus, might be applied in a Radical or a Conservative sense.  In point of fact, Malthus was at once adopted by the Whigs, as represented by the Edinburgh Review.  They were followers of Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart; they piqued themselves, and, as even James Mill admitted, with justice, upon economic orthodoxy.  They were at the same time predisposed to a theory which condemned the revolutionary Utopias.  It provided them with an effective weapon against the agitators whom they especially dreaded.  The Tories might be a little restrained by orthodox qualms.  In 1812 Southey was permitted to make an onslaught upon Malthus in the Quarterly; but more complimentary allusions followed, and five years later the essay was elaborately defended in an able article. An apology was even insinuated for the previous assault, though the blame was thrown upon Malthus for putting his doctrines in an offensive shape.  A reference to Owen suggests that the alarm excited by Socialism had suggested the need of some sound political economy.

Another controversy which was being carried on at intervals indicates the line of cleavage between the capitalist and the landed interest.  James Mill’s early pamphlet, Commerce Defended (1808), and Torrens’s pamphlet, Economists Refuted, were suggested by this discussion.  Although the war was partly in defence of British trade, its vicissitudes produced various commercial crises; and the patriotic Tories were anxious to show that we could thrive even if our trade was shut out from the Continent.  The trading classes maintained that they really supplied the sinews of war, and had a right to some control of the policy.  The controversy about the orders in council and Berlin decrees emphasised these disputes, and called some attention to the questions involved in the old controversy between the ‘mercantile’ and the ‘agricultural’ systems.  A grotesque exaggeration of one theory was given by Mill’s opponent, William Spence (1783-1860), in his Britain independent of Commerce, which went through several editions in 1808, and refurbished or perverted the doctrine of the French economists.  The argument, at least, shows what fallacies then needed confutation by the orthodox.  In the preface to his collected tracts, Spence observes that the high price of corn was the cause of ’all our wealth and prosperity during the war.’  The causes of the high price (’assisted,’ he admits, ‘by occasional bad seasons’) were the ‘national debt, in other words, taxation,’ which raised the price, first, of necessaries, and then of luxuries (thus, he says, ’neutralising its otherwise injurious effects’), and the virtual monopoly by the agriculturist of the home market. All our wealth, that is, was produced by taxation aided by famine, or, in brief, by the landowner’s power of squeezing more out of the poor.  Foreign trade, according to Spence, is altogether superfluous.  Its effect is summed up by the statement that we give hardware to America, and, in return, get only ’the vile weed, tobacco.’ Spence’s writings only show the effect of strong prejudices on a weak brain.  A similar sentiment dictated a more noteworthy argument to a much abler writer, whose relation to Malthus is significant Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), probably best remembered at present for his leadership of the great disruption of 1843.  He had a reputation for eloquence and philosophic ability not fully intelligible at the present day.  His appearance was uncouth, and his written style is often clumsy.  He gave an impression at times of indolence and of timidity.  Yet his superficial qualities concealed an ardent temperament and cordial affections.  Under a sufficient stimulus he could blaze out in stirring speech and vigorous action.  His intellectual training was limited.  He had, we are told, been much influenced in his youth by the French philosophers of the time, and had appeared on the side of the more freethinking party in the famous Leslie controversy.  Soon afterwards, however, he was converted to ‘evangelical’ views.  He still accepted Thomas Brown as a great metaphysician, but thought that in moral questions Brown’s deistical optimism required to be corrected by an infusion of Butler’s theory of conscience.  He could adapt Butler’s Analogy, and write an edifying Bridgewater Treatise.  I need only say, however, that, though his philosophy was not very profound, he had an enthusiasm which enables him at times to write forcibly and impressively.

Chalmers was from 1803 to 1815 minister of Kilmany, Fifeshire, and his attention had already been drawn to the question of pauperism.  He took part in the Spence controversy, by an essay upon the Extent and Stability of National Resources. In this he expounds a doctrine which is afterwards given in his Political Economy in Connection with the Moral State and Moral Aspects of Society. The main purpose of his early book is the patriotic.  It is meant, like Spence’s pamphlet, to prove that Napoleon could do us no vital injury.  Should he succeed, he would only lop off superfluous branches, not hew down the main trunk.  Chalmers’s argument to show the ease with which a country may recover the effects of a disastrous war is highly praised by J. S. Mill as the first sound explanation of the facts.  Chalmers’s position, however, is radically different from the position of either James or J. S. Mill.  Essentially it is the development of the French economists’ theory, though Chalmers is rather unwilling to admit his affinity to a discredited school. He has reached some of their conclusions, he admits, but by a different path. He coincides, in this respect, with Malthus, who was equally impressed by the importance of ‘subsistence,’ or of the food-supply of the labourer.  The great bulk of the food required must be raised within our own borders.  As Chalmers says, in 1832, the total importation of corn, even in the two famine years, 1800 and 1801, taken together, had only provided food for five weeks, and could normally represent a mere fringe or superfluous addition to our resources.  His main argument is simple.  The economists have fallen into a fatal error.  A manufacturer, he observes, only makes his own article. The economists somehow imagine that he also supports himself.  You see a prosperous ‘shawl-making village.’  You infer that its ruin would cause the destitution of so many families.  It would only mean the loss of so many shawls.  The food which supports the shawl-makers would still be produced, and would be only diverted to support makers of some other luxury. There would be a temporary injury to individuals, but no permanent weakening of national resources.  Hence we have his division of the population.  The agriculturists, and those who make the ‘second necessaries’ (the cottages, ploughs, and so forth, required by the agriculturist), create the great wealth of the country.  Besides these we have the ‘disposable’ population, which is employed in making luxuries for the landowners, and, finally, the ‘redundant’ or what he calls in his later book the ‘excrescent’ or ‘superinduced’ population, which is really supported by foreign trade.  Commerce, then, is merely ’the efflorescence of our agriculture.’ Were it annihilated this instant, we should still retain our whole disposable population.  The effect of war is simply to find a different employment for this part of the nation.  Napoleon, he says, is ’emptying our shops and filling our battalions.’ All the ‘redundant’ population might be supported by simply diminishing the number of our cart-horses. Similarly, the destruction of the commerce of France ’created her armies.’  It only transferred men from trade to war, and ’millions of artisans’ were ’transformed into soldiers.’ Pitt was really strengthening when he supposed himself to be ruining his enemy.  ‘Excrescence’ and ‘efflorescence’ are Chalmers’s equivalent for the ‘sterility’ of the French economists.  The backbone of all industry is agriculture, and the manufacturers simply employed by the landowner for such purposes as he pleases.  Whether he uses them to make his luxuries or to fight his battles, the real resources of the nation remain untouched.  The Ricardians insist upon the vital importance of ‘capital.’  The one economic end of the statesmen, as the capitalist class naturally thinks, should be to give every facility for its accumulation, and consequently for allowing it to distribute itself in the most efficient way.  Chalmers, on the contrary, argues that we may easily have too much capital.  He was a firm believer in gluts.  He admits that the extension of commerce was of great good at the end of the feudal period, but not as the ‘efficient cause’ of wealth, only as ’unlocking the capabilities of the soil.’ This change produced the illusion that commerce has a ‘creative virtue,’ whereas its absolute dependence upon agriculture is a truth of capital importance in political economy.  More Malthusian than Malthus, Chalmers argues that the case of capital is strictly parallel to the case of population. Money may be redundant as much as men, and the real causes of every economic calamity are the ’over-speculation of capitalists,’ and the ’over-population of the community at large.’ In this question, however, Chalmers gets into difficulties, which show so hopeless a confusion between ‘capital,’ income, and money, that I need not attempt to unravel his meaning. Anyhow, he is led to approve the French doctrine of the single tax.  Ultimately, he thinks, all taxes fall upon rent. Agriculture fills the great reservoir from which all the subsidiary channels are filled.  Whether the stream be tapped at the source or further down makes no difference.  Hence he infers that, as the landlords necessarily pay the taxes, they should pay them openly.  By an odd coincidence, he would tax rents like Mill, though upon opposite grounds.  He holds that the interest of the landowners is not opposed to, but identical with, the interest of all classes.  Politically, as well as economically, they should be supreme.  They are, ‘naturally and properly, the lords of the ascendant,’ and, as he oddly complains in the year of the Reform Bill, not ’sufficiently represented in parliament.’ A ‘splendid aristocracy’ is, he thinks, a necessary part of the social edifice; the law of primogeniture is necessary to support them; and the division of land will cause the decay of France.  The aristocracy are wanted to keep up a high standard of civilisation and promote philosophy, science, and art. The British aristocracy in the reign of George IV. scarcely realised this ideal, and would hardly have perceived that to place all the taxes upon their shoulders would be to give them a blessing in disguise.  According to Chalmers, however, an established church represents an essential part of the upper classes, and is required to promote a high standard of life among the poor. In connection with this, he writes a really forcible chapter criticising the economical distinction of productive and unproductive labour, and shows at least that the direct creation of material wealth is not a sufficient criterion of the utility of a class.

Chalmers’s arguments are of interest mainly from their bearing upon his practical application of the Malthusian problem.  His interest in the problem of pauperism had been stimulated by his residence in Glasgow, where from 1815 to 1823 he had been actively engaged in parochial duties.  In 1819 he had set up an organised system of charity in a poor district, which both reduced the expenditure and improved the condition of the poor.  The experiment, though dropped some years later, became famous, and in later years Chalmers successfully started a similar plan in Edinburgh.  It was this experience which gave shape to his Malthusian theories.  He was, that is, a Malthusian in the sense of believing that the great problem was essentially the problem of raising the self-respect and spirit of independence of the poor.  The great evil which confronted him in Glasgow was the mischief connected with the growth of the factory system.  He saw, as he thought, the development of wealth leading to the degradation of the labourer.  The great social phenomenon was the tendency to degeneration, the gradual dissolution of an organism, and corruption destroying the vital forces.  On the one hand, this spectacle led him, as it led others, to look back fondly to the good old times of homely food and primitive habits, to the peasantry as represented in Burns’s Cotter’s Saturday Night or Scott’s Heart of Midlothian, when the poor man was part of a social, political, and ecclesiastical order, disciplined, trained, and self-respecting, not a loose waif and stray in a chaotic welter of separate atoms.  These were the facts which really suggested his theory of the ‘excrescent’ population, produced by the over-speculation of capitalists.  The paupers of Glasgow were ‘excrescent,’ and the ‘gluts’ were visible in the commercial crises which had thrown numbers of poor weavers out of employment and degraded them into permanent paupers.  The facts were before his eyes, if the generalisation was hasty and crude.  He held, on the other hand, that indiscriminate charity, and still more the establishment by poor-laws of a legal right to support, was stimulating the evil.  The poor-law had worked incalculable mischiefs in England, and he struggled vigorously, though unavailingly, to resist its introduction into Scotland.  Chalmers, however, did not accept the theory ascribed to the Utilitarians, that the remedy for the evils was simply to leave things alone.  He gives his theory in an article upon the connection between the extension of the church and the extinction of pauperism.  He defends Malthus against the ‘exécrations’ of sentimentalism.  Malthus, he thinks, would not suppress but change the direction of beneficence.  A vast expenditure has only stimulated pauperism.  The true course is not to diminish the rates but to make them ’flow into the wholesome channel of maintaining an extended system of moral and religious instruction.’ In other words, suppress workhouses but build schools and churches; organise charity and substitute a systematic individual inspection for reckless and indiscriminate almsgiving.  Then you will get to the root of the mischief.  The church, supported from the land, is to become the great civilising agent.  Chalmers, accordingly, was an ardent advocate of a church establishment.  He became the leader of the Free Church movement not as objecting to an establishment on principle, but because he thought that the actual legal fetters of the Scottish establishment made it impossible to carry out an effective reorganisation and therefore unable to discharge its true functions.

Here Chalmers’s economical theories are crossed by various political and ecclesiastical questions with which I am not concerned.  His peculiarities as an economist bring out, I think, an important point.  He shows how Malthus’s views might be interpreted by a man who, instead of sharing, was entirely opposed to the ordinary capitalist prejudices.  It would be idle to ask which was the more logical development of Malthus.  When two systems are full of doubtful assumptions of fact and questionable logic and vague primary conceptions, that question becomes hardly intelligible.  We can only note the various turns given to the argument by the preconceived prejudices of the disputants.  By most of them the Malthusian view was interpreted as implying the capitalist as distinguished from the landowning point of view.

To Southey as to Chalmers the great evil of the day was the growth of the disorganised populace under the factory system.  The difference is that while Chalmers enthusiastically adopted Malthus’s theory as indicating the true remedy for the evil, Southey regards it with horror as declaring the evil to be irremediable.  Chalmers, a shrewd Scot actively engaged in parochial work, had his attention fixed upon the reckless improvidence of the ‘excrescent’ population, and welcomed a doctrine which laid stress upon the necessity of raising the standard of prudence and morality.  He recognised and pointed out with great force the inadequacy of such palliatives as emigration, home-colonisation, and so forth. Southey, an ardent and impulsive man of letters, with no practical experience of the difficulties of social reform, has no patience for such inquiries.  His remedy, in all cases, was a ‘paternal government’ vigorously regulating society; and Malthus appears to him to be simply an opponent of all such action.  Southey had begun the attack in 1803 by an article in the Annual Review (edited by A. Aikin) for which the leading hints were given by Coleridge, then with Southey at Keswick. In his letters and his later articles he never mentions Malthus without abhorrence. Malthus, according to his article in the Annual Review, regards ‘vice’ and ‘misery’ as desirable; thinks that the ’gratification of lust’ is a ‘physical necessity’; and attributes to the ’physical constitution of our nature’ what should be ascribed to the ’existing system of society.’  Malthus, that is, is a fatalist, a materialist, and an anarchist.  His only remedy is to abolish the poor-rates, and starve the poor into celibacy.  The folly and wickedness of the book have provoked him, he admits, to contemptuous indignation; and Malthus may be a good man personally.  Still, the ‘farthing candle’ of Malthus’s fame as a political philosopher must soon go out.  So in the Quarterly Review Southey attributes the social evils to the disintegrating effect of the manufacturing system, of which Adam Smith was the ‘tedious and hard-hearted’ prophet.  The excellent Malthus indeed becomes the ‘hard-hearted’ almost as Hooker was the ‘judicious.’  This sufficiently represents the view of the sentimental Tory.  Malthus, transformed into a monster, deserves the ‘exécrations’ noticed by Chalmers.  There is a thorough coincidence between this view and that of the sentimental Radicals.  Southey observes that Malthus (as interpreted by him) does not really answer Godwin.  Malthus argues that ‘perfectibility’ gives an impossible end because equality would lead to vice and misery.  But why should we not suppose with Godwin a change of character which would imply prudence and chastity?  Men as they are may be incapable of equality because they have brutal passions.  But men as they are to be may cease to be brutal and become capable of equality.  This, indeed, represents a serious criticism.  What Malthus was really concerned to prove was that the social state and the corresponding character suppose each other; and that real improvement supposes that the individual must somehow acquire the instincts appropriate to an improved state.  The difference between him and his opponents was that he emphasised the mischief of legislation, such as that embodied in the poor-law, which contemplated a forcible change, destroying poverty without raising the poor man’s character.  Such a rise required a long and difficult elaboration, and he therefore dwells mainly upon the folly of the legislative, unsupported by the moral, remedy.  To Godwin, on the other hand, who professed an unlimited faith in the power of reason, this difficulty was comparatively unimportant.  Remove political inequalities and men will spontaneously become virtuous and prudent.

Godwin accordingly, when answering Dr. Parr and Mackintosh, in 1801, welcomed Malthus’s first version of the essay.  He declares it to be as ‘unquestionable an addition to the theory of political economy’ as has been made by any writer for a century past; and ’admits the ratios to their full extent.’ In this philosophical spirit he proceeds to draw some rather startling conclusions.  He hopes that, as mankind improves, such practices as infanticide will not be necessary; but he remarks that it would be happier for a child to perish in infancy than to spend seventy years in vice and misery. He refers to the inhabitants of Ceylon as a precedent for encouraging other practices restrictive of population.  In short, though he hopes that such measures may be needless, he does not shrink from admitting their possible necessity.  So far, then, Godwin and Malthus might form an alliance.  Equality might be the goal of both; and both might admit the necessity of change in character as well as in the political framework; only that Malthus would lay more stress upon the evil of legislative changes outrunning or independent of moral change.  Here, however, arose the real offence.  Malthus had insisted upon the necessity of self-help.  He had ridiculed the pretensions of government to fix the rate of wages; and had shown how the poor-laws defeated their own objects.  This was the really offensive ground to the political Radicals.  They had been in the habit of tracing all evils to the selfishness and rapacity of the rulers; pensions, sinécures, public debts, huge armies, profligate luxuries of all kinds, were the fruits of bad government and the true causes of poverty.  Kings and priests were the harpies who had settled upon mankind, and were ruining their happiness.  Malthus, they thought, was insinuating a base apology for rulers when he attributed the evil to the character of the subjects instead of attributing it to the wickedness of their rulers.  He was as bad as the old Tory, Johnson, exclaiming:

    ’How small of all that human hearts endure
    That part which kings and laws can cause or cure!’

He was, they held, telling the tyrants that it was not their fault if the poor were miserable.  The essay was thus an apology for the heartlessness of the rich.  This view was set forth by Hazlitt in an attack upon Malthus in 1807. It appears again in the Enquiry by G. Ensor (1769-1843) a vivacious though rather long-winded Irishman, who was known both to O’Connell and to Bentham. Godwin himself was roused by the appearance of the fifth edition of Malthus’s Essay to write a reply, which appeared in 1820.  He was helped by David Booth (1766-1846), a man of some mathematical and statistical knowledge.  Hazlitt’s performance is sufficiently significant of the general tendency.  Hazlitt had been an enthusiastic admirer of Godwin, and retained as much of the enthusiasm as his wayward prejudices would allow.  He was through life what may be called a sentimental Radical, so far as Radicalism was compatible with an ardent worship of Napoleon.  To him Napoleon meant the enemy of Pitt and Liverpool and Castlereagh and the Holy Alliance.  Hazlitt could forgive any policy which meant the humiliation of the men whom he most heartily hated.  His attack upon Malthus was such as might satisfy even Cobbett, whose capacity for hatred, and especially for this particular object of hatred, was equal to Hazlitt’s.  The personal rancour of which Hazlitt was unfortunately capable leads to monstrous imputations.  Not only does Malthus’s essay show the ’little low rankling malice of a parish beadle ... disguised in the garb of philosophy,’ and bury ’false logic’ under ’a heap of garbled calculations,’ and so forth; but he founds insinuations upon Malthus’s argument as to the constancy of the sexual passion.  Malthus, he fully believes, has none of the ordinary passions, anger, pride, avarice, or the like, but declares that he must be a slave to an ‘amorous complexion,’ and believe all other men to be made ’of the same combustible materials.’ This foul blow is too characteristic of Hazlitt’s usual method; but indicates also the tone which could be taken by contemporary journalism.

The more serious argument is really that the second version of Malthus is an answer to his first.  Briefly, the ‘moral check’ which came in only as a kind of afterthought is a normal part of the process by which population is kept within limits, and prevents the monstrous results of the ‘geometrical ratio.’  Hazlitt, after insisting upon this, admits that there is nothing in ’the general principles here stated that Mr. Malthus is at present disposed to deny, or that he has not himself expressly insisted upon in some part or other of his various works.’ He only argues that Malthus’s concessions are made at the cost of self-contradiction.  Why then, it may be asked, should not Hazlitt take the position of an improver and harmoniser of the doctrine rather than of a fierce opponent?  The answer has been already implied.  He regards Malthus as an apologist for an unjust inequality.  Malthus, he says, in classifying the evils of life, has ’allotted to the poor all the misery, and to the rich as much vice as they please.’ The check of starvation will keep down the numbers of the poor; and the check of luxury and profligacy will restrain the multiplication of the rich.  ’The poor are to make a formal surrender of their right to provoke charity or parish assistance that the rich may be able to lay out all their money on their vices.’ The misery of the lower orders is the result of the power of the upper.  A man born into a world where he is not wanted has no right, said Malthus, to a share of the food.  That might be true if the poor were a set of lazy supernumeraries living on the industrious.  But the truth is that the poor man does the work, and is forced to put up in return with a part of the produce of his labour. The poor-laws recognise the principle that those who get all from the labour of others should provide from their superfluities for the necessities of those in want. The ‘grinding necessity’ of which Malthus had spoken does not raise but lower the standard; and a system of equality would lessen instead of increasing the pressure.  Malthus, again, has proposed that parents should be responsible for their children.  That is, says Hazlitt, Malthus would leave children to starvation, though he professes to disapprove infanticide.  He would ’extinguish every spark of humanity ... towards the children of others’ on pretence of preserving the ‘ties of parental affection.’  Malthus tries to argue that the ‘iniquity of government’ is not the cause of poverty.  That belief, he says, has generated discontent and revolution.  That is, says Hazlitt, the way to prevent revolutions and produce reforms is to persuade people that all the evils which government may inflict are their own fault.  Government is to do as much mischief as it pleases, without being answerable for it. The poor-laws, as Hazlitt admits, are bad, but do not show the root of the evil.  The evils are really due to increasing tyranny, dependence, indolence, and unhappiness due to other causes.  Pauperism has increased because the government and the rich have had their way in everything.  They have squandered our revenues, multiplied sinécures and pensions, doubled salaries, given monopolies and encouraged jobs, and depressed the poor and industrious.  The ‘poor create their own fund,’ and the necessity for it has arisen from the exorbitant demands made by the rich. Malthus is a Blifil, hypocritically insinuating arguments in favour of tyranny under pretence of benevolence.

Hazlitt’s writing, although showing the passions of a bitter partisan, hits some of Malthus’s rather cloudy argumentation.  His successor, Ensor, representing the same view, finds an appropriate topic in the wrongs of Ireland.  Irish poverty, he holds, is plainly due not to over-population but to under-government, meaning, we must suppose, misgovernment.  But the same cause explains other cases.  The ’people are poor and are growing poorer,’ and there is no mystery about it.  The expense of a court, the waste of the profits and money in the House of Commons, facts which are in striking contrast to the republican virtues of the United States, are enough to account for everything; and Malthus’s whole aim is to ‘calumniate the people.’  Godwin in 1820 takes up the same taunts.  Malthus ought, he thinks, to welcome war, famine, pestilence, and the gallows. He has taught the poor that they have no claim to relief, and the rich that, by indulging in vice, they are conferring a benefit upon the country.  The poor-laws admit a right, and he taunts Malthus for proposing to abolish it, and refusing food to a poor man on the ground that he had notice not to come into the world two years before he was born.

Godwin, whose earlier atheism had been superseded by a vague deism, now thinks with Cobbett that the poor were supported by the piety of the mediaeval clergy, who fed the hungry and clothed the naked from their vast revenues, while dooming themselves to spare living. He appeals to the authority of the Christian religion, which indeed might be a fair argumentum ad hominem against ‘Parson Malthus.’  He declares that Nature takes more care of her work than such irreverent authors suppose, and ’does not ask our aid to keep down the excess of population.’ In fact, he doubts whether population increases at all.  Malthus’s whole theory, he says, rests upon the case of America; and with the help of Mr. Booth and some very unsatisfactory statistics, he tries to prove that the increase shown in the American census has been entirely due to immigration.  Malthus safely declined to take any notice of a production which in fact shows that Godwin had lost his early vigour.  The sound Utilitarian, Francis Place, took up the challenge, and exploded some of Godwin’s statistics.  He shows his Radicalism by admitting that Malthus, to whose general benevolence he does justice, had not spoken of the poor as one sprung like himself from the poor would naturally do; and he accepts modes of limiting the population from which Malthus himself had shrunk.  For improvement, he looks chiefly to the abolition of restrictive laws.

II.  SOCIALISM

The arguments of Hazlitt and his allies bring us back to the Socialist position.  Although it was represented by no writer of much literary position, Owen was becoming conspicuous, and some of his sympathisers were already laying down principles more familiar to-day.  Already, in the days of the Six Acts, the government was alarmed by certain ‘Spencean Philanthropists.’  According to Place they were a very feeble sect, numbering only about fifty, and perfectly harmless.  Their prophet was a poor man called Thomas Spence (1750-1815), who had started as a schoolmaster, and in 1775 read a paper at Newcastle before a ’Philosophical Society.’ He proposed that the land in every village should belong to all the inhabitants a proposal which Mr. Hyndman regards as a prophecy of more thoroughgoing schemes of Land Nationalisation.  Spence drifted to London, picked up a precarious living, partly by selling books of a revolutionary kind, and died in 1815, leaving, it seems, a few prosélytes.  A writer of higher literary capacity was Charles Hall, a physician at Tavistock, who in 1805 published a book on The Effects of Civilisation. The effects of civilisation, he holds, are simply pernicious.  Landed property originated in violence, and has caused all social evils.  A great landlord consumes unproductively as much as would keep eight thousand people. He gets everything from the labour of the poor; while they are forced to starvation wages by the raising of rents.  Trade and manufactures are equally mischievous.  India gets nothing but jewellery from Europe, and Europe nothing but muslin from India, while so much less food is produced in either country. Manufactures generally are a cause and sign of the poverty of nations.

Such sporadic protests against the inequalities of wealth may be taken as parts of that ‘ancient tale of wrong’ which has in all ages been steaming up from the suffering world, and provoking a smile from epicurean deities.  As Owenism advanced, the argument took a more distinct form.  Mill mentions William Thompson of Cork as a ’very estimable man,’ who was the ‘principal champion’ of the Owenites in their debates with the Benthamites.  He published in 1824 a book upon the distribution of wealth. It is wordy, and is apt to remain in the region of ‘vague generalities’ just at the points where specific statements would be welcome.  But besides the merit of obvious sincerity and good feeling, it has the interest of showing very clearly the relation between the opposing schools.  Thompson had a common ground with the Utilitarians, though they undoubtedly would consider his logic to be loose and overridden by sentimentalism.  In the first place, he heartily admired Bentham:  ’the most profound and celebrated writer on legislation in this or any other country.’ He accepts the ‘greatest happiness principle’ as applicable to the social problem.  He argues for equality upon Bentham’s ground.  Take a penny from a poor man to give it to the rich man, and the poor man clearly loses far more happiness than the rich man gains.  With Bentham, too, he admits the importance of ‘security,’ and agrees that it is not always compatible with equality.  A man should have the fruits of his labour; and therefore the man who labours most should have most.  But, unlike Bentham, he regards equality as more important than security.  To him the main consideration is the monstrous mass of evil resulting from vast accumulations of wealth in a few hands.  In the next place, he adapts to his own purpose the Ricardian theory of value.  All value whatever, he argues, is created by labour.  The labourer, he infers, should have the value which he creates.  As things are, the labourer parts with most of it to the capitalist or the owner of rents.  The capitalist claims a right to the whole additional production due to the employment of capital.  The labourer, on the other hand, may claim a right to the whole additional production, after replacing the wear and tear and allowing to the capitalist enough to support him in equal comfort with the productive labourers. Thompson holds that while either system would be compatible with ‘security,’ the labourer’s demand is sanctioned by ‘equality.’  In point of fact, neither system has been fully carried out; but the labourer’s view would tend to prevail with the spread of knowledge and justice.  While thus anticipating later Socialism, he differs on a significant point.  Thompson insists upon the importance of ‘voluntary exchange’ as one of his first principles.  No one is to be forced to take what he does not himself think a fair equivalent for his labour.  Here, again, he would coincide with the Utilitarians.  They, not less than he, were for free trade and the abolition of every kind of monopoly.  But that view may lead by itself to the simple adoption of the do-nothing principle, or, as modern Socialists would say, to the more effectual plunder of the poor.  The modern Socialist infers that the means of production must be in some way nationalised.  Thompson does not contemplate such a consummation.  He denounces, like all the Radicals of the day, monopolies and conspiracy laws.  Sinécures and standing armies and State churches are the strongholds of tyranny and superstition.  The ‘hereditary possession of wealth’ is one of the master-evils, and with sinécures will disappear the systems of entails and unequal distribution of inheritance. Such institutions have encouraged the use of fraud and force, and indirectly degraded the labourer into a helpless position.  He would sweep them all away, and with them all disqualifications imposed upon women. This once done, it will be necessary to establish a universal and thoroughgoing system of education.  Then the poor man, freed from the shackles of superstition and despotism, will be able to obtain his rights as knowledge and justice spread through the whole community.  The desire to accumulate for selfish purposes will itself disappear.  The labourer will get all that he creates; the aggregate wealth will be enormously multiplied, though universally diffused; and the form taken by the new society will, as he argues at great length, be that of voluntary co-operative associations upon Owen’s principles.

The economists would, of course, reject the theory that the capitalists should have no profits; but, in spite of this, they might agree to a great extent with Thompson’s aspirations.  Thompson, however, holds the true Socialist sentiment of aversion to Malthus.  He denies energetically what he takes to be the Malthusian doctrine:  that increased comfort will always produce increased numbers. This has been the ’grand scarecrow to frighten away all attempts at social improvement.’  Thompson accordingly asserts that increased comfort always causes increased prudence ultimately; and looks forward to a stationary state in which the births will just balance the deaths.  I need not inquire here which theory puts the cart before the horse.  The opposition possibly admits of reconciliation; but here I only remark once more how Malthus stood for the appeal to hard facts which always provoked the Utopians as much as it corresponded to the stern Utilitarian view.

Another writer, Thomas Hodgskin, honorary secretary of the Birkbeck Institution, who published a tract called Labour defended against the Claims of Capital, or the Unproductiveness of Capital proved (1825), and afterwards gave some popular lectures on political economy, has been noticed as anticipating Socialist ideas.  He can see, he says, why something should go to the maker of a road and something be paid by the person who gets the benefit of it.  But he does not see why the road itself should have anything. Hodgskin writes without bitterness, if without much logic.  It is not for me to say whether modern Socialists are well advised in admitting that these crude suggestions were anticipations of their own ideas.  The most natural inference would be that vague guesses about the wickedness of the rich have been in all ages current among the poor, and now and then take more pretentious form.  Most men want very naturally to get as much and to work as little as they can, and call their desire a first principle of justice.

Perhaps, however, it is fairer to notice in how many points there was unconscious agreement; and how by converting very excellent maxims into absolute dogmas, from which a whole system was deducible, the theories appeared to be mutually contradictory, and, taken separately, became absurd.  The palpable and admitted evil was the growth of pauperism and demoralisation of the labourer.  The remedy, according to the Utilitarians, is to raise the sense of individual responsibility, to make a man dependent upon his own exertions, and to give him security that he will enjoy their fruit.  Let government give education on one hand and security on the other, and equality will follow in due time.  The sentimental Radical naturally replies that leaving a man to starve does not necessarily make him industrious; that, in point of fact, great and growing inequality of wealth has resulted; and that the rights of man should be applied not only to political privilege, but to the possession of property.  The Utilitarians have left out justice by putting equality in the background.  Justice, as Bentham replied, has no meaning till you have settled by experience what laws will produce happiness; and your absolute equality would destroy the very mainspring of social improvement.  Meanwhile the Conservative thinks that both parties are really fostering the evils by making individualism supreme, and that organisation is necessary to improvement; while one set of Radicals would perpetuate a mere blind struggle for existence, and the other enable the lowest class to enforce a dead level of ignorance and stupidity.  They therefore call upon government to become paternal and active, and to teach not only morality but religion; and upon the aristocracy to discharge its functions worthily, in order to stamp out social evils and prevent a servile insurrection.  But how was the actual government of George IV. and Sidmouth and Eldon to be converted to a sense of its duties?  On each side appeal is made to a sweeping and absolute principle, and amazingly complex and difficult questions of fact are taken for granted.  The Utilitarians were so far right that they appealed to experience, as, in fact, such questions have to be settled by the slow co-operation of many minds in many generations.  Unfortunately the Utilitarians had, as we have seen, a very inadequate conception of what experience really meant, and were fully as rash and dogmatic as their opponents.  I must now try to consider what were the intellectual conceptions implied by their mode of treating these problems.