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Title: Life and Writings of Thomas R. Malthus

Author: Charles R. Drysdale

Release date: September 29, 2019 [eBook #60378]

Language: English

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        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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Produced by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)









                                  THE
                           Life and Writings
                                   OF
                           THOMAS R. MALTHUS


                                   BY

                        CHAS. R. DRYSDALE, M.D.

[Illustration]

                                LONDON:
              GEO. STANDRING, 7 & 9 FINSBURY STREET, E.C.

                         SECOND EDITION.—1892.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                CONTENTS


 PREFACE.
 THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS R. MALTHUS.
 CHAPTER II. AN ANALYSIS OF THE “ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION.”
 CHAPTER III. OF THE CHECKS TO POPULATION AMONG THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND
    ROMANS.
 CHAPTER IV. CHECKS TO POPULATION IN MODERN EUROPE.
 CHAPTER V. OF THE CHECKS TO POPULATION IN FRANCE.
 CHAPTER VI. ON THE CHECKS TO POPULATION IN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND
    IRELAND.
 CHAPTER VII. DETACHED ESSAYS.
 CHAPTER IX. OF POOR LAWS.
 CHAPTER X. WEALTH AS IT AFFECTS THE POOR.
 CHAPTER XI.
 CHAPTER XII.
 APPENDIX.




                                PREFACE.


Since 1877, when the Lord Chief Justice of England in his charge to the
jury pronounced the discovery of Malthus to be an irrefragable truth, a
vast amount of literature has appeared upon the population question. The
conclusion come to by many of the most recent writers has been in accord
with that pithy expression of John Stuart Mill, where he says: “Every
one has a right to live. We will suppose this granted. But no one has a
right to bring children into life to be supported by other people.
Whoever means to stand upon the first of these rights must renounce all
pretension to the last.” Mr. Cotter Morison, a distinguished writer,
says, in his work entitled _The Service of Man_: “The criminality of
producing children whom one has no reasonable probability of being able
to keep, must in time be seen in its true light, as one of the most
unsocial and selfish proceedings of which a man nowadays is capable. If
only the devastating torrent of children could be arrested for a few
years, it would bring untold relief.” Sir William Windeyer, of New South
Wales, in a judgment delivered in 1888, concerning a Malthusian work,
says: “It is idle to preach to the masses the necessity of deferred
marriage and of a celibate life during the heyday of passion.... To use
and not abuse, to direct and control in its operation any God-given
faculty, is the true aim of man, the true object of all morality.” The
Rev. Mr. Whatham, in a pamphlet entitled _Neo-Malthusianism_, says: “It
becomes the duty of every thoughtful man and woman to think out some
plan to stop or even check this advancing tide of desolation; and the
only plan, to my thinking, that is at all workable is artificial
prevention of child-birth.” Professor Mantegazza, Senator of Italy,
says, in his _Elements of Hygiene_, to those affected with hereditary
diseases: “Love, but do not beget children.” The Rev. Mr. Haweis says,
in _Winged Words_: “Overpopulation is one of the problems of the age.
The old blessing of ‘increase and multiply,’ suitable for a sparsely
peopled land, has become the great curse of our crowded centres.” Mr.
Montague Cookson says: “The limitation of the family is as much the duty
of married persons as the observance of chastity is the duty of those
who remain unmarried.” Professor Huxley, the Bishop of Manchester, Mr.
Leonard Courtney, Dr. William Ogle, and the Archbishop of Canterbury
have all recently endorsed the truth of the Malthusian law of
population, which, as Mr. Elley Finch has truly said, “is, in company
with the Newtonian law of gravitation, the most important discovery ever
made.”

                                               CHARLES R. DRYSDALE, M.D.

 _23 Sackville-street, Piccadilly, London, W.
       October, 1892._




                         THE LIFE AND WRITINGS
                                   OF
                           THOMAS R. MALTHUS.


[Illustration]

A great deal has been said in Courts of Law during the last two years
about the Malthusian principle of population. The Lord Chief Justice of
England has pronounced that it is an irrefragable truth, and that all
parties who have studied such questions know, since the days of the Rev.
T. R. Malthus, that the great cause of indigence is the tendency that
population has to increase faster than agriculture can furnish food. And
yet we have serious doubts whether one out of a thousand of the
population of the British Islands knows who Mr. Malthus was, or, indeed,
whether he was a Roman, or a citizen of modern Europe, at all. It is,
therefore, we are convinced, very important to let his countrymen know
that Thomas Robert Malthus was an Englishman; that he was a denizen of
the 19th century; and that he lived most part of his life in the
neighbourhood of London.

Thomas Robert Malthus was born at the Rookery, near Dorking, in Surrey,
in 1766. Those who are interested in the matter will do well to make a
pilgrimage, as we have done, to the romantic birth-place of the
discoverer of the law of population, the greatest (if we measure
discoveries by their effect on human happiness) ever made. Malthus’
father was an able man, a friend and correspondent of the noble and
unfortunate J. J. Rousseau, and one of his executors. Thomas Robert was
his second son, and, as a boy, evinced so much ability that his father
kept him at home and superintended his education himself. The son repaid
his father’s care, and had awakened in him that spirit of independence
and love of truth which were ever afterwards the characteristics of his
mind. He had two tutors, in addition to his father, both men of
genius—Richard Graves and Gilbert Wakefield—the former the author of the
“Spiritual Quixote,” the latter the correspondent of Fox, and well known
in his day as a violent democratic writer and politician.

In 1784, when 22 years of age, T. R. Malthus went to Cambridge; and, in
1797, became a Fellow of Jesus College. After this he took orders, and
for a time officiated in a small parish near his father’s house, in
Surrey. In 1798, appeared his first printed work, which may be seen in
the British Museum. It is entitled “An Essay on the Principle of
Population, as it affects the future Improvement of Society; with
Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, Mr. Condorcet, and other
Writers.”

The writer in the Encyclopædia Britannica, from whom these details of
Malthus’ life are taken, informs us that the book was received with some
surprise, and excited considerable attention, as being an attempt to
overturn the prevalent theory of political optimism, and to refute, upon
philosophical principles, the speculations then so much in vogue, as to
the indefinite perfectibility of human institutions. In this remarkable
essay the general principle of population, which Wallace, Hume, and
others had very distinctly enunciated before him, though without
foreseeing the consequences that might be deduced from it, was clearly
expounded; and some of the important conclusions to which it leads in
regard to the probable improvement of human society were likewise stated
and explained; but his illustrations were not sufficient, and he,
therefore, sought in travel further confirmation of his theories.

In 1799 he visited Norway, Sweden, and Russia, and, after the peace of
Amiens, France; in which countries he busily collected all the data he
could bearing upon his researches. In 1815 he was appointed to the
professorship of political economy and modern history at Haileybury,
near London, which chair he occupied until his death in 1834, at the age
of 70. He left behind him one son and one daughter. The son is, we
believe, still alive, or was so a few years ago.

The account given by Mr. Malthus of the way in which he discovered the
law of population is to this effect. His father, Mr. Daniel Malthus, a
man of romantic and somewhat sanguine character, had espoused warmly the
doctrines of the great writers Condorcet and Godwin, with respect to the
perfectibility of man, to which the sound sense of the son was always
opposed; and when the subject had been very frequently discussed between
them, and the son had always objected to Godwin’s views, on account of
the tendency of population to increase faster than subsistence, he was
asked by his father to put down in writing his views on this point. The
result was the Essay on Population; and his father was so much struck
with the value of the arguments, that he recommended his son to publish
it.

In the first edition of this work he principally deals with the views of
Condorcet and Godwin; but on his return from the Continent, where he had
collected ample materials, the state and prospects of the poor became
the prominent features of the second edition, which appeared in two
volumes, in 1805.

The latter years of the life of Mr. Malthus were passed in the midst of
his family, in the performance of his professional and professorial
duties, and in the editing of the various editions of his work and other
treatises on political economy. In proportion as the views enunciated in
his Essay on Population became known, his fame was extended. Most of the
statesmen of his time, and the whole of the eminent political economists
of Great Britain, adopted his opinions; and thus the way was prepared
for the adoption of a better system of poor-law relief than the one
which at that time was ruining England. On the Continent, too, and
indeed wherever science extended, his views were adopted by the foremost
writers on political economy. He was elected a member of the most
eminent scientific societies abroad, such as the Institute of France and
the Royal Academy of Berlin. At home, he founded the Political Economy
Club and the Statistical Society.

In the other departments of the science of Political Economy Malthus was
a distinguished writer. He was, in company with Dr. West, a promulgator
of the theory of rent, first mooted, it seems, by a Scotchman, Dr.
Anderson, a contemporary of Adam Smith. Ricardo, the eminent political
economist, has acknowledged his deep obligations to Malthus, for his
exposition of this theory.

The great Principle of Population has been examined carefully and
accepted as a splendid discovery by the master minds of all countries
since the discoverer’s death in 1834. To say that it is looked upon as
axiomatic by the two Mills, by Ricardo, Senior, Cairnes, Alexander Bain,
Garnier, Bertillon, Fawcett, William Ellis, and William Hunter, is to
say that its truth has been fully proved to the ablest thinkers on
social science and on political economy that this and other European
States have produced.

It was, before the days of Malthus, the almost universal belief of
mankind that the wealth of a country was in proportion to its
population. Statesmen, poets, and philanthropists were constant in their
endeavour to secure as rapid a multiplication of the citizens as
possible: and, up till the publication of his essay—indeed, long after
that event, it was the custom in many European States for the Government
to give prizes to such parents as had given birth to and reared a more
than averagely large family of children. Such a law, indeed, was not
abrogated until about 25 years ago in Sardinia.

Mr. Malthus clearly exposed the error of such teaching. He showed that,
such is the immense power of increase in the human family, it is
probable that, were food plentiful enough, population might double in
some fifteen years, or even less. With incredible assiduity he read and
examined ancient history and the statistics of European countries and
their colonies, for the confirmation of his theory. He found, for
example, that after the great pestilences which had from time to time
ravaged European states, the surviving population had been so well fed
and housed that it had been enabled to replace the blanks left by deaths
usually in a very few years—in twenty years in several instances.

Turning to the colonies of Great Britain in the United States, Malthus
confirmed what the great pioneer of all progress in political economy,
Adam Smith, had noted, namely, that the colonists of those States had
doubled since their settlement in considerably less than twenty-five
years in some cases, without taking into account any fresh
immigration. In an article in the Encyclopædia Britannica, written by
Malthus, he gives most accurately the figures of the doubling of the
population of the United States from the year 1790 until 1820; and
shows, from statistics, that very few immigrants had arrived from
Europe during this period. Making ample allowance for the contingent
for such immigration, Malthus showed that, from 1790 to 1815, the
population of the States had more than doubled. Hence he was led to
the following expression:—“Population, when unchecked, goes on
doubling every twenty-five years, or increases in a geometrical
ratio.”

He next shows that the tendency of agricultural produce fit for the food
of man is to increase very much more slowly than man could increase.
This has been termed the “law of agricultural increase,” and is very
easily understood by taking an example. Let us grant that the average
quantity of wheat that can be grown at present on an acre of ground in
England is thirty bushels. It would be clearly impossible to suppose
that in 25 years 60 bushels per acre could be produced; in 50 years, 120
bushels, and so on. Whereas, the tendency of population to double in
from 12 to 25 years is clear enough, when it is remembered that the
human female commences to be capable of reproduction at about fifteen
and continues so until forty-five, in this climate. Were European women
to marry as early as the Hindoo women do, there would be a possibility,
if food were forthcoming, of a doubling of the population in some
fifteen years or less.

Mr. Malthus closely examined the statistics of European nations when he
wrote in 1805. Before the commencement of this century, he found that
the time taken for doubling of the populations of Europe was often as
great as some five hundred years. This remark had been anticipated by
Adam Smith, who had all the materials, had he sufficiently reflected on
them, to have written accurately on the Population Question, since he
also was acquainted with the rapid doubling of civilised peoples, when
they had been conveyed to new and fertile colonies such as the United
States. Here, then, was the conclusion of Malthus, which is perfectly
obvious when it is clearly stated. Whenever population, in Europe or
elsewhere, fails to double itself as rapidly as it does in new
countries, it must be checked in some way or other. Proceeding a little
further, he adds that it must either be checked by there being fewer
births or a greater number of deaths. Whatever tends to produce a
smaller number of births is included by Malthus among the _preventive
checks_ to population: whatever leads to a greater number of deaths,
among the _positive checks_.

His travels through Europe were mainly directed towards the inquiry as
to what kind of check was prevalent in each European state. In ancient
times, he saw that the positive checks to population had everywhere
extensively prevailed. Plagues and famines, with war and infanticide,
had been the checks in Greece and Rome, as now in China and Hindostan.
In the Europe of his day, all of these positive checks existed, in
greatly diminished proportions, indeed, but still they were far from
unknown. The extreme prevalence of celibacy, however, struck him in all
the civilised states of Europe which he then visited. He noticed that,
in many parts of the Continent, where the death-rate was lower than
elsewhere, it was the custom for the women to marry very late in life.
In one canton of Switzerland, where comfort and longevity were most
notable, Malthus found, on enquiry, that it was the custom for the
spinsters to delay their bridal day till long after the age of thirty.
On the other hand, wherever marriages were early, and the birth-rate was
high, he found on investigation that the death-rate was also above the
average.

From this experience of his, he was led to the conclusion that early
marriage, as a rule, was certain to lead to poverty and the positive
checks to population; and, therefore, in his practical maxims for
improving the condition of the poorer classes, he looked forward solely
to the exercise of that celibacy, which he had found so often
accompanied by long life and material comforts.

Had Mr. Malthus lived at this moment, he would have been aware of the
remarkable fact, that the French peasantry of modern days have, simply
from experience and without any theory, become acquainted with the
results of his enquiries, that a rapid increase of births leads
inevitably to poverty and early death. To quote from the most celebrated
of French statists, M. Maurice Block, the artizans of towns, and peasant
proprietors of whole districts of France, are accustomed to limit the
size of their families to two children; and thus, although France is the
most noted for its number of married couples of all European States, it
is also the country in all Europe which is the least rapid in the
increase of its population. The population check in France, then,
Malthus, had he lived, would have found to be, not celibacy, but the
_voluntary limitation of families_, in the midst of a married and most
moral and domestic community. The great philanthropist, who was so
distinguished for his charming temper and amiability, could not have
failed, we may rest assured, to have, with J. S. Mill, Garnier, and
Sismondi, given the preference to the modern French checks to population
over all others.

In closing this chapter, we should like to refer to a few additional
biographical circumstances of Malthus’ life. They have been supplied by
Mr. Robert Porter, of Beeston, Notts., a gentleman well known as an
admirer of the great discoverer, and as an expositor of his views. “The
Reverend Henry Malthus,” Mr. Porter writes, in February, 1879, “the only
son of Thomas Robert Malthus, lives at Effingham. The only daughter,
Emily, was living at Bathwick Hill Villa, Bath, some time back. She
married Captain Pringle. I have many letters from her, as also from her
mother, who was living with her in 1862, in her 86th year, when she had
a photograph taken from the family portrait, and sent to me with a scrap
of his MS. handwriting. I send you this to see and peruse. I wrote to
Mrs. Pringle about the memoir of her Father in his _Political Economy_,
saying there was much of Mr. Daniel Malthus in it, but nothing about his
mother, from whom I thought Mr. Malthus had received his best qualities.
In letter 3 you will see the reply, and I think will be interested to
read it. Dr. Anderson really _discovered_ the Law of Rent, as you may
see in Vol. 6 of _The Bee_, pp. 292–300.—1791.”

The information given by Mrs. Pringle, and referred to in the above
letter to Mr. Robert Porter, is as follows. After referring to Mr.
Ellis’ teachings in the _Friend of the People_, written about the year
1860, she speaks of the personal appearance of her father as follows:
“The likeness (photograph sent) is excellent, and to enable you to form
a complete idea of his personal appearance, I must tell you that his
complexion was fair, with light and curling hair, red whiskers, and
bright darkish blue eyes. His height was five feet eleven inches, and a
very well-formed figure.” Another granddaughter of Mrs. Malthus, the
mother of Thomas Robert, says that Daniel Malthus, the father, although
refined, was a selfish man. His wife was devoted to him, and although
not a _talented_ woman, was accomplished, and educated her own daughter
without a governess. All her children were devoted to her, especially
her eldest son. Thomas Robert was, perhaps, more attached to his father;
but his mother’s amiability descended to him, for he was never known to
say a harsh word of anyone, although more attacked than any writer has
perhaps ever been. It appears that Malthus died, not of heart disease,
but of bronchitis. His mother’s maiden name was Graham, and she was of
an old Scotch family. Here is one sentence to depict her character:—“In
short, I imagine her gentle, unobtrusive, loving, romantic, and
perfectly unselfish; but not the sort of person to form her sons’
characters, though to attract their affections.”

[Illustration]




                              CHAPTER II.
       AN ANALYSIS OF THE “ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION.”


Comparatively few students of Political Economy at the present day
appear to read Malthus’ celebrated Essay in the original. This, in our
opinion, is a great mistake. That work is as readable now as it was when
it attracted such well-merited attention at the commencement of this
century; and the statistics given by the learned author become even more
valuable than ever, owing to the important additions made to them of
recent years by the various modern writers on Social Economy.

The third edition of Malthus’ essay, which appeared in 1806, is now
before us: and consists of two volumes of about one thousand pages in
all, of large type, full of the most interesting accounts ever given of
the manners and customs of the different nations of ancient and modern
times. The first volume is divided into two books. In Book I. there are
fourteen chapters, the first of which states the Law of Population, or
the _tendency_ which population has to increase more rapidly than the
means of subsistence. The second chapter treats of the general checks to
population, and the way in which these operate. Then come three most
interesting chapters on the checks to population among savage nations,
followed by one on those obtaining among the ancient inhabitants of
Northern Europe. Chapter seven gives an account of the checks existing
among modern pastoral nations; and this is followed by an account of the
checks in Africa, and Northern and Southern Siberia. Then follows a most
interesting account of the brutal checks to population in Turkey, and
the lamentable starvation checks of Hindostan and China. Book I. ends
with chapters on the checks to population among the ancient Greeks and
Romans.

In Book II. there is a most important account given by Mr. Malthus of
the results of his extensive travels in Europe, in 1799 and after years,
with details of the checks to population existing in Norway, Sweden,
Russia, Germany, Switzerland, France, England, Scotland, and Ireland.

If those persons who at present think that the Malthusian law of human
increase has been found by subsequent investigation to be erroneous,
could only be induced to read Mr. Malthus’ essay in the original, they
would soon find that all these objections have been anticipated in that
celebrated work, and perhaps acknowledge, with Mr. J. S. Mill and other
economists, that the truth is “axiomatic,” or no longer requiring
discussion. In the last pamphlet, indeed, which we have seen, dedicated
to one of the most deservedly popular of modern British authors, Thomas
Carlyle, the writer, like Mr. Carlyle himself, speaks as if the law of
Malthus _had_ been refuted; but, as usual in such cases, it is clear
that the writer has not the least idea of what the celebrated Essay on
Population was written to prove.

In his first chapter, Malthus observes that Euler, a great
mathematician, had calculated that, on the supposition of such a
moderate amount of mortality as one in 36 (which is considerably higher
than our present mortality of one in 42 in England), and with the
further supposition of the births being to the deaths as three to one (a
ratio which seems nearly to hold good, at present, in New Zealand), the
period of doubling a population would be only 12⅘ years; and Sir William
Petty, in his work on _Political Arithmetic_, supposed a doubling to be
possible in some ten years.

Malthus compares this tendency with the _actual increase_ of man in such
countries as China and Japan. He observes that it may fairly be doubted
whether the best directed efforts of human industry could double the
agricultural produce of China even once, in _any_ number of years. The
difference between the time of doubling, which has taken place of late
in some twenty or thirty years, in North America, and in our Australian
colonies, when compared with the slow increase of the Chinese
population, gives the most complete view of the case that can be
obtained.

In countries which are naturally healthy, and where the _preventive_
check is found to prevail, too, with considerable force, the _positive_
check, as Malthus observes, will prevail very little, and the mortality
will be small; but in _every_ country some of the checks are and will
always continue to be, in constant operation: so that mankind has only a
_choice_ of evils, for we cannot possibly escape from _some_ of the
population checks, which are inevitable.

In his third chapter our author reviews the population checks in the
lowest stage of human society; and shows how impossible it is for such
unfortunate peoples as the natives of the Tierra del Fuego, or of Van
Diemen’s Land, to increase rapidly in numbers, owing to their extreme
ignorance of the laws of nature. In New Zealand, Captain Cook found the
checks to population to be war, and starvation so great as to prompt to
cannibalism, in a country where, as it is at present colonized by a
civilized people, the deaths seem not to exceed fifteen per 1,000
annually, and population doubles in about twenty years or less, without
counting immigrants.

In Mr. Malthus’ day, there still existed large numbers of those
unfortunate races of American Indians, which are now so rapidly
disappearing in the modern “struggle for existence” with civilised
Europeans. Then, as now, these tribes lived principally by hunting and
fishing, most narrow modes of subsistence. The mortality of infants
among such tribes was always enormous, and the Jesuit missionaries
mentioned how that the Indians of South America were subject to
perpetual diseases for which they knew no remedy; scarcely ever did the
individuals of such tribes attain to an advanced age; and the checks to
population among them were chiefly of the _positive_ kind—plagues,
starvation, brutal wars, and disease. The North American Indians, too,
lived in such a state of filth and over-crowding in their huts, that
every infectious disease carried off vast numbers. Cannibalism,
according to Captain Cook, as seen in New Zealand and other islands,
originated in the fearful privations experienced by such peoples when
their numbers were pressing on the food supplies.

And here let us quote Malthus’ own words,—“It is not that the American
tribes have never increased sufficiently to render the pastoral or
agricultural state necessary to them; but, from some cause or other,
they have not adopted in any great degree these more plentiful modes of
procuring subsistence, and therefore cannot have increased so as to
become populous. If hunger alone could have prompted the savage tribes
of America to such a change in their habits, I do not conceive that
there would have been a single nation of hunters and fishers remaining;
but, it is evident, that some fortunate train of circumstances, in
addition to this stimulus, is necessary for the purpose.”

In chapter v., our author gives a curious account of how population was
checked in the islands of the South Seas. It is among such islands as
these (and, indeed, the British islands in ancient times resembled them
greatly), that we trace the origin of many of the singular institutions
destined to retard the rapid increase of mankind—cannibalism, late
marriages, the consecration of virginity, and ferocious punishments
against such women as reproduce the species at too early an age. Captain
Cook found such a constant state of warfare existing among the various
tribes in New Zealand, that each village in its turn applied to him to
assist them in destroying the others. In his third voyage he adds that
warlike ferocity is so constant “that one hardly ever finds a New
Zealander off his guard, either by night or day.”

In Otaheite and the Society Islands, again, where the size of the
islands was too small, and the knowledge of navigation acquired by the
islanders too scanty to make it possible for population to increase
rapidly, all sorts of sufferings were seen among the poorer classes of
the people; the richer classes, however, seemed, according to Captain
Cook, to check their own increase by having recourse to the fearful
practice of infanticide, to an enormous and unparalleled extent. Even
with these checks, however, population, in the South Sea Islands,
occasionally pressed so hard on subsistence that animal food became very
scarce in certain seasons, and such destructive wars ensued that Captain
Vancouver, on visiting Otaheite, in 1777, and again in 1791, found that
most of his friends of 1777 were dead, having been killed in the wars.
Prostitution, and destruction of female infants, were extremely common
in Otaheite in Captain Cook’s time.

In taking a general review of that department of human society, classed
under the name of savage life, the only advantage Malthus notices is the
possession of a greater degree of leisure by the mass of the people,
than that possessed by those of civilised countries. “There is less work
to be done, and, consequently, there is less labour. When we consider
the incessant toil to which the lower classes, in civilised societies,
are condemned, this cannot but appear to us a striking advantage; but it
is probably overbalanced by greater disadvantages.”

This remark of Mr. Malthus shows us, to a certain extent, on what J. J.
Rousseau founded his belief as to the superior happiness of the state of
nature over the civilised. Had Rousseau read the Essay on Population, he
could not, we believe, have failed to perceive that the evils of
civilisation are almost solely due to the universal want of knowledge of
the Population Law. The late marriages, and prostitution, so bitterly
inveighed against by that author, are merely the sorrowful population
checks of most modern civilised nations, that have passed into the
pastoral and agricultural stages of society, and have not yet proceeded
far enough to control the enormous fecundity of the race by less painful
and more thoughtful expedients than those which Jean Jacques Rousseau so
clearly perceived and so powerfully denounced in the French society of
the reign of Louis XV.

After speaking of the positive checks to population which have been so
universal among savage nations, Mr. Malthus proceeds in chapter vi. to
treat of the checks which prevented increase among the ancient
inhabitants of the North of Europe. Astonishment has often been
expressed at the hordes of warriors that, at various periods of the
decay of the Roman Empire, were poured down upon it from the Northern
nations. Mr. Malthus explains, with great clearness, that, wherever the
customs of such nations as composed the immigrants were such as to
conduce to health and early marriage, the immense fecundity of the race
fully accounts for these crowds of immigrants so rapidly succeeding each
other until the destruction of Rome ensued. Machiavel, in the beginning
of his _History of Florence_, says: “The people who inhabit the northern
parts that lie between the Rhine and the Danube, living in a healthful
and prolific climate, often increase to such a degree, that vast numbers
of them are forced to leave their country and go in search of new
habitations. These emigrations proved the destruction of the Roman
Empire.”

There can be no doubt that this is a true account of the way in which
poverty and over-rapid reproduction cause emigration in ancient and
modern times; and we cannot help regarding the present warlike policy of
England and Germany as signs of a growing over-population in both of
these States, which tempts the _proletaire_ members of the governing
classes to seek ever fresh territory, and makes the other classes of
society so tolerant of such unjust conduct in their rulers. In fact, it
may be truly said that the adoption of Neo-Malthusian views is the only
really revolutionary measure, and the only safeguard of nations against
wars of conquest or intestinal dissension.

In chapter vii. Malthus speaks of the checks to population among modern
pastoral nations. Pastoral nations, although not so poor as hunting
nations, are, of course, far more unable to acquire wealth than nations
that have adopted agricultural pursuits. Hence, population increases but
slowly in such communities, and they are often on the verge of famine
for lengthened periods. Volney, in his travels, says, that the pastoral
tribes of the Arabian desert deny that the religion of Mahomet was made
for them. “For how,” they say, “can we perform ablutions when we have no
water; how can we give alms when we have no riches; or what occasion can
there be to fast during the month of Ramadan, when we fast all the
year?”

And yet it seems that in Arabia, as elsewhere, the direct social
encouragements to population are very great. A Mahometan is taught that
one of the great duties of man is to procreate children to glorify the
Creator. But, as Mr. Malthus truly says, “While the Arabs retain their
present manners, and the country remains in its present state of
cultivation, the promise of paradise to every man who had ten children
would but little increase their numbers, though it might greatly
increase their misery.”

The checks to population existing in Africa seem to be chiefly of the
positive kind. Incessant warfare, with death by famine or epidemics, are
described by the early travellers on that Continent, Park and Bruce, as
carrying off whole tribes. Park states that, independently of violent
causes, the struggle for food is so great in most African states, that
longevity is rare among the negroes. At forty, most of them become
grayhaired and covered with wrinkles, and but few of them survive the
age of fifty-five or sixty. There was, in his day, but little difficulty
in obtaining slaves in times of famine in Africa, as even free negroes
were often so pressed with hunger as to entreat, according to Dr.
Laidley, to be put on his slave-chain, to save them from starvation.
Bruce reports that, in many of the tribes, women begin to be mothers at
the age of eleven: and to such a life of privation and care does this
rapid reproduction lead, that he speaks of the women in some States near
Abyssinia as becoming, at the age of twenty-two, “more wrinkled and
deformed by age, than an European woman is at sixty.”

Mr. Malthus, after a very curious account of the checks to population in
Northern and Southern Siberia, then passes on in chapter x., to treat of
the Turkish Dominions and Persia, and his remarks are especially
interesting to our modern politicians. The fundamental cause of the low
rate of increase of population in Turkey, he truly remarks, is
undoubtedly the nature of the Turkish government. Its tyranny, its
feebleness, its bad laws, and worse administration of them, with the
consequent insecurity of property, throw such obstacles in the way of
agriculture, that the means of subsistence are necessarily decreasing
yearly, and with them, of course, the number of people. It is calculated
at the present day that population would double only once in 555 years
in Turkey, owing to the positive checks caused by its wretched
government. The population of modern Turkey is about 28 millions, or
only some 16 persons per square mile; and, in 1876, it was stated in
governmental reports that the population of the empire was fast
declining, and its cultivated lands falling into the condition of
deserts. In Europe, as in Asia, we are informed by Malthus, it was the
maxim of Turkish policy, originating in the feebleness of government,
and the fear of popular tumults, to keep the price of corn low in all
the considerable towns. “When Constantinople is in want of provisions,
ten provinces are perhaps famished for a supply. At Damascus, during the
scarcity of 1784, the people paid only one penny farthing a pound for
their bread, whilst the peasants in the villages were actually dying
with hunger.”

As to the checks to population in Persia, the dreadful convulsions to
which that country has been subject for many hundred years must have
been fatal to her agriculture. The periods of repose from external wars
and internal commotions have been short and few, and even during the
times of profound peace, the frontier provinces were constantly subject
to the ravages of the Tartars. Hence the slow increase.

One of the most valuable parts of the _Essay on Population_ is that
wherein Mr. Malthus treats of the checks to population in Hindostan and
Tibet. In Hindostan, according to the ordinance of Menu, the Indian
legislator, marriage is very greatly encouraged, and a male heir is
considered as an object of the first importance. Hindoo maidens are
married at the age of eleven, and even younger: and become mothers
before they attain the age of twelve. For such reasons, Hindostan has
been one of the most noted countries in the world for devastations,
epidemics, and famines. The lower classes have for centuries been
reduced to the extremest poverty, and compelled to adopt the most frugal
and scanty mode of subsistence. Whilst the average annual income per
head in England was calculated, by Mr. Henry Fawcett in 1870, at about
some eighteen pounds; in Hindostan, it was lately stated by Mr. J.
Bright, that about two or three pounds sterling for food is all a Hindoo
peasant gets. And, as Lord Derby remarked in his admirable Rochdale
speech in 1879, the people of Hindostan seem to be a marked example of
how very low a standard of living a nation may people down to.

Recent years have made us familiar with the tales of Indian famines; but
there is nothing novel in these in the history of that long over-peopled
country. One of the Jesuits cited by Malthus says that it is impossible
for him to describe the misery to which he was witness during the two
years’ famine in 1737 and 1738, and another Jesuit writes, “Every year
we baptize a thousand children, whom their parents can no longer feed,
or who, being likely to die, are sold to us by their mothers in order to
get rid of them.”

Tibet, it seems, according to Malthus, is perhaps the only country where
habits tending to repress population are, or were, universally
encouraged by the government. Celibacy is there much encouraged among
government employés, and the number of monasteries and nunneries is
considerable. “But, even among the laity, the business of population
goes on very coldly. All the brothers of a family, without any
restriction of age or of numbers, associate their fortunes with one
female, who is chosen by the eldest and considered as the mistress of
the house.” It is evident that this custom, combined with the celibacy
of such a numerous body of ecclesiastics, must operate, says Malthus, in
the most powerful manner as a preventive check to population. Yet,
according to Mr. Turner’s account, it appears that the population of
Tibet presses on the means of subsistence. Tibet, in Mr. Turner’s time,
seems to have suffered, as England now does, and as we hear that even
our wealthy colonies of Victoria and New South Wales do, from a set of
paupers created by an extremely unwise system of out-door relief—a
system which but too often manufactures the very paupers it wishes to
relieve.

Mr. Malthus’ account of the Checks to Population in China and Japan,
contained in chapter xij. of his work is one of the most important
contributions to the question conceivable. His authorities are Duhalde’s
History of China and Sir G. Staunton’s Account of his Embassy to China.
According to the former author, writing in 1738, the population of China
was then estimated as at least three hundred and thirty-three millions.
At present China is said to contain some four hundred millions.

The causes of the great populousness of China are, according to Malthus,
its advantageous position as to climate and irrigation, and the very
great encouragement given to agriculture by the monarchs of that nation.
The Emperor himself every year, to set an example, ploughs a few ridges
of land, and the mandarins of every city perform the same ceremony. The
whole surface of the empire is, with trifling exceptions, dedicated to
the production of food for man alone. There is no meadow, and very
little pasture, and no waste land. Even the soldiers of the Chinese army
are mostly employed in agriculture.

The extraordinary encouragements given to marriage also contribute to
make China more populous in proportion to the extent of its territory
than any other country. The permission given by parents to abandon their
children, which exists in China, is shown by Sir G. Staunton to
facilitate marriage, and cause even greater over-population than in more
civilized states where such barbarities are not permitted. The effect of
this early marriage and rapid peopling is to subdivide property; and it
is a common remark among the Chinese, that fortunes seldom continue
considerable in the same family beyond the third generation. One of the
Jesuits, writing on China, says: “The richest and most flourishing
empire of the world is, in one sense, the poorest and most miserable of
all. Four times as much territory would be necessary to put the
inhabitants at their ease.”

It cannot be said in China, as it often is said in Europe, that the poor
are idle, and might gain a subsistence if they would work. The labours
and efforts of these poor people are beyond conception. “A Chinese will
pass whole days in digging the earth, sometimes up to his knees in
water, and in the evening is happy to eat a little spoonful of rice, and
to drink the insipid water in which it is boiled.” This is the remark of
a Jesuit: and although it is evidently an exaggeration, since modern
researches on diet show that such food could not maintain animal
existence, it shows what miseries are caused by the peopling down to
such a low standard of comfort.

“The procreative power,” says Malthus, “would, with as much facility,
double in twenty-five years the population of China, as that of any of
the States of America.” We can readily sympathise, then, with the alarm
felt by our fellow-countrymen in Australasia and California, at the
possible invasion of the untold millions which China could, with the
greatest facility, pour into them. It is, for this reason, that the
Legislature of New South Wales has quite recently, by a large majority,
passed a Bill to stem the current of Chinese immigration. It will be for
the ultimate advantage of the human race that nations with such a low
standard of comfort as the Chinese, should learn that they must imitate
the more prosperous nations in prudential restraint before they can
become entitled to claim to become citizens of such countries.

We have lately understood the magnitude of a Chinese famine, where
millions of unfortunate people are reduced to misery and death at once,
from the failure of the crops. Mr. Malthus notices that, in such times
of dearth, China can obtain no assistance from her neighbours: and must
perforce draw the whole of her resources from her own provinces. When
such failures of the crops occur, the government of China pretend to be
very assiduous in providing schemes for the miseries of the people; but,
in the meanwhile, hosts of unfortunates are starved to death, since
there is not enough food forthcoming, so little margin is left, on
account of the very scanty share falling to the lot of each, even in
times of plenty.

In this chapter upon China and Japan Malthus makes an acute remark on
the question, which is sometimes discussed in this country, whether the
consumption of grain in the manufacture of spirits is ever a cause of
famine. The whole tendency of such a manufacture is, he asserts, to the
contrary. “The consumption of corn, in any other way but that of
necessary food, checks the population before it arrives at the utmost
limits of subsistence, and, as the grain may be withdrawn from this
particular use in the time of a scarcity, a public granary is thus
opened richer probably than could have been formed by any other means.
When such a consumption has been once established, and has become
permanent, its effect is exactly as if a piece of land, with all the
people upon it, were removed from the country. The rest of the people
would certainly be precisely in the same state as they were before,
neither better nor worse, in years of average plenty; but, in a time of
dearth, the produce of this land would be returned to them, without the
mouths to help them to eat it.”

This fact should be borne in mind by Mr. Hoyle and other writers on
abstinence from alcohol, since the advocacy of a good cause is often
impeded by incorrect reasoning. “China, without her distilleries, would
certainly be more populous,” says Malthus, “but on a failure of the
seasons would have still less resource than she has at present, and as
far as the magnitude of the cause would operate, would, in consequence,
be more subject to famines, and those famines would be severe.”
Temperance advocates, then, should, if possible, try to substitute a
less injurious luxury in the place of alcohol, which causes so much
disease; and not forget that the poverty of over-population is one of
the great causes of drunkenness.

The principal cause of the great populousness of Japan is doubtless the
persevering industry of the inhabitants. The checks to population in
Japan have been famines, as in China and Hindostan; but the Japanese are
also more warlike than the Chinese, and there is much less encouragement
given to marriage in Japan than there is in China. Hence the superior
enlightenment of the Japanese, and the intelligence which has recently
made them so alive to the benefits conferred on mankind by European
civilization.

The all-important nature of the discovery of Malthus may be better seen
by comparing the condition of China with that of the United States of
America, than by any other example. So far advanced have the Chinese
been, for perhaps some thousands of years, in the knowledge of the art
of agriculture, that it is now probable that the four hundred millions
at present occupying the Empire could not possibly double in _any given
number_ of years. Whereas, the population of the United States has for
the last century continued to double, aided by immigration, in periods
of less than twenty-five years. He must, indeed, be gifted with a poor
capacity for reason, who does not, on comparing these two rates, at once
see, that the grand problem for our race is to prevent the instinct of
reproduction from causing the terrible evils of early death, and chronic
poverty. To introduce the new Malthusian views into China and Hindostan
is the only way to cope with the famines, infanticides, and life-long
starvation of these terribly over-peopled countries.

[Illustration]




                              CHAPTER III.
    OF THE CHECKS TO POPULATION AMONG THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND ROMANS.


The more equal division of landed property among the Greeks and Romans
in the earlier period of their history, must have tended greatly to
encourage population, since agriculture, Mr. Malthus says, is the only
kind of industry which permits of multitudes existing. When, as often
occurred, the number of free citizens did not exceed ten or twenty
thousand, every individual would naturally feel the value of his own
exertions, and know that, if he left his lands idle, he would be wanting
in his duty as a citizen. Hence, a great attention was paid to
agriculture in Greece. Population rapidly increased, and colonization
was common, so that the legislators of Greece had their attention
frequently called to the question of over-population. Mr. Malthus had
already shown that the practice of infanticide, as existing in China,
tended rather to increase population, by tempting people into early
marriage. Solon permitted the exposition of infants, Mr. Malthus is
inclined to think, partly for the purpose of tempting the citizens into
early marriage, and thus increasing the population.

The great philosophers of Greece, such as Plato and Aristotle, are the
origin of all real civilisation in succeeding ages throughout Europe:
and have saved us from the deluge of crude theologies, such as those of
Palestine or less cultured tribes. The so-called divine law of “Increase
and multiply and replenish the earth,” and other equally vague and
meaningless exclamations, are in strongest contrast with the scientific
reasoning of these _masters of all the learned_. Plato, in his
“Republic,” limits the number of free citizens in his ideal state to
five thousand and forty. Procreation, he maintains, when it proceeds too
fast, may be checked, or when it goes on too slowly, may be encouraged,
by the proper distribution of honors and marks of ignominy, and by the
admonitions of the elders to prevent or promote it according to
circumstances. Mr. John Stuart Mill evidently was of a similar opinion,
and his followers have advocated State intervention as a cure for
poverty. Plato also anticipated Mr. Darwin himself and the modern
Darwinians, who lay such great and just stress on the point of the
rational selection of parents. In the fifth book of his “Republic,” he
proposes that the most healthy men should be joined in marriage to the
finest specimens among the women, and the inferior citizens should be
paired with each other. He next proposes that the children of the first
class alone shall be brought up, the others not. It will doubtless be
one of the results of the Neo-Malthusian movement of this day, that
persons afflicted with hereditary disease will not so often desire to
become parents as the healthy, whilst they may follow the advice of
Professor Mantegazza, of Florence, and “marry, but not procreate.”

From these and other passages it is clear that Plato well saw the
tendency of population to increase beyond the means of subsistence. His
expedients for checking it were not permissible, indeed, but the extent
to which they were to be used shows how great he perceived the
difficulty to be. How backward most modern nations are in speculation on
such points may be judged of by the unwillingness in Germany, England,
and even in France to look the question fairly in the face. In Plato’s
time wars were nearly perpetual, and very destructive, and if, whilst
knowing this, he could still contemplate the destruction of the children
of the poorer and sicklier of the population, of all who were born when
their parents were either too young or too old, the fixing of the date
of marriage late, and the regulating the number of marriages, his
reasonings and experience must have pointed out to him the terrible
tendency of population to over-pass the means of subsistence.

The great writer, Aristotle, seems to have seen the principle even more
clearly than Plato. He fixes the age of marriage for men in his Republic
actually at thirty-seven; and, even with this late marriage, he foresaw
that there might be too many children, so that he proposed that the
number allowed to each marriage should be regulated. Aristotle accuses
Plato of not being sufficiently attentive to the population difficulty,
and for proposing to equalise property without limiting the number of
children (_De Repub._ lib. ii. ch. vi.). This may be a hint to modern
Socialists, especially to those of Germany, where Socialism seems to be
becoming the creed of the masses, in despair at ever hearing any good
thing from the military despots now in power. Aristotle justly observes
that the laws require to be much more definite and precise in a state
where property is equalised, than in others, since, in ordinary
circumstances, an increase of population would only occasion a further
sub-division of landed property, whereas, in a state of communism, the
supernumeraries would be altogether destitute, because the lands, being
reduced to equal elementary parts, would be incapable of further
sub-division. He remarks that it is necessary in all cases to regulate
the number of children, so that they may not exceed the proper number.
In doing this, death and sterility are of course to be taken into
account. But if, he says in chapter vii., every person be left free to
have as many children as he pleases, the necessary consequence will be
poverty: and poverty is the mother of crime and sedition. For these very
reasons, an ancient writer on politics, Pheidon of Corinth, introduced a
regulation to limit population without equalising wealth.

Speaking again, in book ii. ch. vii., of schemes for the equalisation of
wealth, Aristotle says that, in order that such schemes should be
successful, it would be imperative to regulate at the same time the size
of families. For, if children multiply beyond the means of supporting
them, the law will necessarily be broken, and families will be suddenly
reduced from opulence to beggary, a revolution always dangerous to
public tranquility. In Sparta the landed property had passed into the
hands of a very small number of the citizens: and Aristotle remarks that
in such a state the encouragement of large families by rewards could
only have for its effect to cause an immense accumulation of indigence,
so long as a better distribution of the land were not secured. It would
have been well for European nations up to this time, had their rulers
known even as much as Aristotle and Plato of this matter: they would
have avoided those disastrous historical incentives to procreation,
which must always have ended only in increasing indigence and premature
death.

The positive checks to population in ancient Greece and Rome are
palpable enough. Incessant wars, plagues, and famines prevailed. Livy
expresses his surprise that the Volci and Æqui, who were so often
destroyed by the Romans, should have been able to bring fresh armies
into the field, but when the principle of population is understood, our
astonishment ceases. Such conquered tribes, like the ancient Germans,
doubtless gave full scope to the powers of procreation, and hence were
soon as numerous as before their defeat. And yet it seems clear that the
horrible practice of infanticide was very common in Italy, for Romulus
was supposed already to have forbidden it, though the constant warfare
of the Romans must have lessened the necessity for this check. The Roman
population of Italy soon fell off when the land passed into the hands of
a few great proprietors, since the other classes, having no means of
selling their labour, or competing with the numerous slaves of the
wealthy, would have been entirely starved, had it not been for the
curious custom which arose of distributing large quantities of corn
gratis to the poorer or landless citizens. No less than two hundred
thousand were thus fed in Augustus’ reign, and probably had little else
to depend upon. Hence the poorer free citizens could not increase, and
they are said to have been constantly in the habit of exposing their
unfortunate children, since the quantity of food doled out was not
enough for a family to subsist upon.

The _jus trium liberorum_ (law for rewarding fathers of three children)
could effect nothing in such circumstances, in making the poor give
birth to large families, although it may occasionally have tempted the
landed proprietors to increase their families. Had the poor had large
numbers of children in such a miserable state of society, they must have
been born only to die of starvation, since the food doled out by the
Government was not sufficient to feed all.

Positive laws to encourage marriage, says Mr. Malthus, enacted on the
urgency of the occasion, and not mixed with religion, as in China and
some other countries, are seldom calculated to answer the end they aim
at, and therefore generally indicate ignorance in the legislator who
proposes them; but the apparent necessity of them almost always
indicates a very great degree of moral and political depravity in the
State; and in the countries in which they are most strongly insisted on,
not only vicious manners will be found to prevail, but political
institutions extremely unfavourable to industry, and, consequently, to
population.

On this account Malthus entirely disagreed with Hume, who supposed that
the Roman world was probably most populous during the long peace under
Trajan and the Antonines. Wars, he says, do not depopulate much while
industry continues in vigour: and peace will not increase the number of
people when they cannot find means of subsistence. “The renewal of the
laws relating to marriage under Trajan indicates the continued
prevalence of vicious habits, and of a languishing industry, and seems
to be inconsistent with the supposition of a great increase of
population.”

Hume also thought that the population of the ancient world was greater
than in modern times, because, he said, there were hosts of domestic
servants in modern States remaining unmarried. But the contrary
inference, says Malthus, seems to be the more probable. When the
difficulties attending the rearing of a family are very great, and,
consequently, many persons of both sexes remain single, we may naturally
suppose that the population is stationary, but by no means that it is
not absolutely great; because the difficulty of rearing a family may
arise from the very circumstance of a very great absolute population,
and the consequent fulness of all the channels to a livelihood; though
the same difficulty may undoubtedly exist in a thinly peopled country,
which is yet stationary in its population.

The number of unmarried persons in proportion to the whole number, says
Malthus, may form some criterion by which we may judge whether
population is increasing, stationary, or decreasing; but will not enable
us to determine anything respecting absolute populousness. Yet even in
this point we may be deceived, since, in some southern countries early
marriages are general, and very few women remain in a state of celibacy,
yet the people not only do not increase, but the actual number is
perhaps small. In this case the removal of the preventive check is made
up by the excessive force of the positive check. The sum of all the
positive and preventive checks taken together, forms, undoubtedly, the
immediate cause which represses population; but we never can expect to
obtain and estimate accurately this sum in any country; and we can
certainly draw no safe conclusion from the contemplation of two or three
of these checks taken by themselves, because it so frequently happens
that the excess of one check is balanced by the defect of some other.

Causes which affect the number of births or deaths may or may not affect
the average population, according to circumstances; but causes which
affect the production and distribution of the means of subsistence must
necessarily affect population; and it is therefore on these causes,
besides actual enumerations, on which we can with any certainty rely.
“All the checks to population, which have been hitherto considered in
the course of this review of human society, are clearly resolvable into
moral restraint, vice, and misery.”

With regard, then, to the checks to population in ancient Rome, Mr.
Malthus thinks that moral restraint acted but feebly in restraining the
increase of numbers. And of the other branch of the preventive check,
which comes under the denomination of “vice,” according to Mr. Malthus,
though its effect seems to have been very considerable in the later
periods of Roman history and in some other countries; yet, on the whole,
he thinks its operation was much inferior to the positive checks. A
large portion of the procreative power was called into action among the
Romans, the redundancy being checked by violent causes, among which war
was the most prominent and striking, and after which came famines and
violent diseases.

In most of these ancient nations the population seems to have been
seldom measured accurately according to the average and permanent means
of subsistence, but generally to have vibrated between the two extremes,
and therefore the contrasts between want and plenty were strongly
marked, as might be expected in the earlier and less experienced ages of
human society.

[Illustration]




                              CHAPTER IV.
                 CHECKS TO POPULATION IN MODERN EUROPE.


Book ij. of Malthus’ Essay treats of the checks to population in the
different States of modern Europe,—Norway, Sweden, Russia, Germany,
Switzerland, France, Great Britain, and Ireland. In Malthus’ day, Norway
seems to have been, perhaps, the most prosperous country in Europe; and
it was distinguished by the great healthiness of its people. The
death-rate he puts down as only one in 48, in a population of about
three-quarters of a million.

With such a very low _positive_ check, Malthus at once looked for the
existence of a very high _preventive_ check; and found this to be
present in the very small proportion of marriages (one in 130) taking
place annually in Norway.

There were, then as now, no large manufacturing towns in Norway to take
away the overflowing population of the country; and, hence, as
emigration was not then in vogue, the Norwegian peasant seldom left the
village he was born in. Until, then, some married person died, there was
usually no place for another marriage to take place. “In countries more
fully peopled (says Malthus) this subject is always involved in great
obscurity. Each man naturally thinks that he has as good a chance of
finding employment as his neighbour, and that if he fail in one place he
shall succeed in another. He marries, therefore, and trusts to fortune:
and the effect too frequently is, that the redundant population
occasioned in this manner is repressed by the positive checks of poverty
and disease.”

It is without doubt, says our author, owing to the preventive check to
population, as much as to any peculiar healthiness of air, that the
mortality of Norway is so low. In every country the principal mortality
takes place among very young children; and the smaller number of these
in Norway, in proportion to the whole population, will naturally
occasion a smaller mortality than in other countries, supposing the
climate to be equally healthy.

The population of Norway is now about 1,800,000, a very large accession
since the days of Malthus, and there has of late years been a very large
emigration from that country to the United States, which indicates that,
in all probability, there will soon be less of prudential restraint in
the matter of births, and hence, doubtless, a higher death-rate than at
the commencement of this century. The former low death-rate of Norway,
one in 48, is not attained to at present by almost any European State
except Norway. It is little more than 20 per 1000 per annum.

Malthus mentions in his work that Norway is almost the only country in
Europe where a traveller will hear any apprehensions expressed of a
redundant population, and where the danger to the happiness of the lower
classes of people from this cause, is in some degree seen and
understood. “This obviously arises from the smallness of the population
altogether and the consequent narrowness of the subject. If our
attention were confined to one parish, and there were no power of
emigrating from it, the most careless observer could not fail to remark
that, if all married at twenty, it would be perfectly impossible for the
farmers, however carefully they might improve their land, to find
employment and food for those that would grow up; but when a great
number of these parishes are added together in a populous kingdom, the
largeness of the subject and the power of moving from place to place
obscure and confuse our view. We lose sight of a truth which before
appeared completely obvious; and in a most unaccountable manner
attribute to the aggregate quantity of land a power of supporting people
beyond comparison greater than the sum of all its parts.”

In Sweden, in Mr. Malthus’ day, the inhabitants of the towns were only
one-thirtieth part of the whole population; and the mortality, when
Malthus wrote, seems to have been as high as one in 35. The proportion
of yearly marriages he found, in Sweden, to be about one in 112: varying
from one in 100, in good years, to one in 124, in bad ones. When it is
remembered that the marriage-rate in Norway was but one in 135, against
one in 112 in Sweden, the reason of the high death-rate is at once
explained.

As usual, in Europe at that time, however, Swedish legislators were in
the habit of endeavouring to increase population in all sorts of foolish
ways, as, for instance, by encouraging strangers to settle in the
country. Malthus remarks that, by doing so, the Government of Sweden was
merely raising the already high death-rate, and not really increasing
the population at all.

According to the economist, Cantzlaer, the principal measures in which
the Government had been employed for the encouragement of the population
were the establishment of the Colleges of Medicine, and of Lying-in and
Foundling Hospitals. Malthus remarks, that “the example of the hospitals
of France may create a doubt whether such establishments are universally
to be recommended. Foundling hospitals, whether they attain their
professed object or not, are, in every view, hurtful to the State.”

The population of Sweden, in 1751, was 2,229,000. It is now 4,400,000.
There has recently been, as from Norway, a very large emigration from
that State to America. “The sickly periods in Sweden (says Malthus)
which have retarded the increase of its population, appear in general to
have arisen from the unwholesome nourishment occasioned by severe want.
And this want has been caused by unfavourable seasons falling upon a
country which was without any reserved store, either in its general
exports, or in the liberal division of food to the labourer in common
years, and which was therefore peopled up to its produce before the
occurrence of the scanty harvest. Such a state of things is a clear
proof that if, as some of the Swedish economists assert, their country
ought to have a population of nine or ten millions, they have nothing
further to do than to make it produce food sufficient for such a number,
and they may rest perfectly assured that they will not want mouths to
eat it, without the assistance of lying-in and foundling hospitals.”

With regard to the State of Russia at the beginning of this century,
Malthus has left us a most interesting account derived from queries made
during his travels in that country. At that date, the births in some
parts of Russia were, to the deaths, according to Russian statistics,
nearly as three to one. This reminds us moderns of 1879, of the birth
and death-rate of our happy colony of New Zealand, where in 1877, there
was the prodigious birth-rate of 41 per 1000, with the very low
death-rate of only 12·4. Russian mortality, in Malthus’ time, must have
been very low indeed; and Mr. Tooke, in his _View of the Russian
Empire_, published about that time, made out that the general mortality
in Russia was one in 58 of the population annually. This is incredible,
we think, in such an uncivilised State as Russia then was.

The birth-rate in Russia was, at that date, about 40 per 1,000, or
similar to that of New Zealand. The marriage-rate (one in 90) was vastly
higher than that of Norway (one in 130), so that the population of
Russia was evidently increasing most rapidly at that time. If we are to
give any credit to the healthiness of Russia in Malthus’ time, it is
clear that the city of Saint Petersburg was an exception to it, for the
half of all persons born there lived only till the age of 25.

With regard to foundling hospitals, Mr. Malthus’ visit to the renowned
Russian State hospitals of this description, has often been quoted, and
deserves to be attentively studied by all who speak of the question of
illegitimacy and charity. Malthus found the mortality in the _Maison des
Enfans trouvés_ prodigious. One hundred deaths a month was a common
average. The average number of children taken into this charity was at
that time ten daily, and the death-rate terrible and heartrending.
Children were taken in and no questions asked from the mothers, but were
handed over to nurses, and given back to their parents at any time when
they could prove themselves able to support them.

The country nurses to whom these unfortunate children were given were
paid only some fifteen-pence a week, and the children were received into
that hospital without any limit. The children returned from the country
(when they did return, for most of them died), at the age of six or
seven; and the girls left the charity at 18, the boys at 20. The
excessive mortality of the London Foundling Hospital of former days,
caused it to be forced almost entirely to close its doors; and to
become, what it now is, one of the many useless charities and shams of
the metropolis of Mr. Malthus’ native land.

Mr. Malthus also speaks of the great mortality of the Moscow Foundling
Hospital, which was instituted in 1786, as follows: “It appears to me
that the greatest part of this mortality is clearly to be attributed to
these institutions, miscalled ‘philanthropical.’ If any reliance can be
placed on the accounts given of the infant mortality in the Russian
towns and provinces, it would appear to be unusually small. The
greatness of it, therefore, in the foundling hospitals, may justly be
laid to the account of the institutions which encourage a mother to
desert her child, at the very time when, of all others, it stands most
in need of her fostering care. The frail tenure by which an infant holds
its life will not allow of a remitted attention, even for a few hours.”

Foundling Hospitals, it is clear, in Paris, Vienna, and in all
countries, tend to cause women to become thoughtless and heartless.
Malthus, indeed, makes a remark which we have recently heard paralleled
in Vienna. “An English merchant at Saint Petersburg told me that a
Russian girl, living in his family, under a mistress who was considered
as very strict, had sent six children to the Foundling hospital, without
the loss of her place. And with regard to the moral feelings of a
nation, it is very difficult to conceive that they must not be very
sensibly impaired by encouraging mothers to desert their offspring, and
endeavouring to teach them that their love for their new-born infants is
a prejudice, which it is the interest of their country to eradicate.”

Malthus mentions that the population of Russia, in 1796, was 36,000,000.
At present it is computed at eighty-five and a half millions, only seven
millions of which is found in Asia, and the rest in Europe.

A Government that had a true sense of what was advantageous for its
subjects would, instead of offering _encouragements_ to population, and
incentives to thoughtlessness on the part of parents, such as foundling
hospitals and other charities, encourage, by all means in its power, the
feeling of parental responsibility among all classes. To do this, the
most direct way would be, to show by some slight fine on the production
of large families, that there is no possibility of attaining comfort and
a low death-rate without _conjugal prudence_.

In Chapter ix. of Book ii., Malthus treats on the Checks to Population
in the Middle parts of Europe at the beginning of this century. He makes
the observation that there are few countries where the poorer classes
have so much foresight as to defer marriage till they have a fair
prospect of being able to support properly all their children: and in
all countries, he adds, a great mortality, whether arising from the too
great frequency of marriage, or occasioned by the number of towns and
the natural unhealthiness of the situation, will necessarily produce a
great frequency of marriage.

In Holland, in the registers of twenty-two villages, Sussmilch noted one
marriage to every 64 persons living, the usual rate being about 1 in
120. Malthus says he was for some time puzzled at this high annual
marriage-rate, until he found that the mortality in these villages was
actually 45 per 1,000 of the population. The extraordinary number of
marriages was merely produced by the rapid dissolution of the old
marriages by death, and the consequent vacancy of some employment by
which a family might be supported. In Norway the mortality in his day
was only 22 per 1,000, and the annual marriage-rate 1 in 130. This is a
notable contrast with the figures relating to Holland just quoted.

Of late years the birth and death-rate in Holland have been much more
satisfactory than they were in the days of Malthus: but the extreme
poverty of the working classes in South, as compared with North-Holland,
has been recently shown by Mr. S. Van Houten to result in a far higher
birth-rate and death-rate in the districts adjoining Rotterdam, than
occurs among the more prudent and well-fed inhabitants of Groningen.
Still, there have been years quite recently in Holland, when the
death-rate has been as high as 29 per 1,000 (1871), and even as lately
as 1875 it was 25 per 1,000.

The standard of comfort has greatly changed in several cities in
Germany. Thus, in Leipsig, Malthus mentions that, in 1620, the annual
marriage-rate was 1 in 82: whilst it fell in 1756 to 1 in 120. He
observes that, in countries which have long been fully peopled, and in
which no new sources of subsistence are opening, the marriages being
regulated principally by the deaths, will generally bear nearly the same
proportion to the whole population, at one period as another. In Berlin,
at the commencement of this century, the annual marriage-rate was 1 in
110, whilst it was 1 in 137 at Paris. Berlin, then as now, was probably
a very unhealthy city. The death-rate of infants there at present is
said to amount to one-half of all born in the first year of life in some
years.

Direct encouragements to marriage are, says Malthus, either perfectly
futile, or produce a marriage when there is no place for one, thus
increasing the mortality. Montesquieu, Sussmilch, and other authors
thought that princes and statesmen would really merit the name of
fathers of their people, if from the proportion of 1 in 120–125, they
could increase the marriages to the proportion of 1 in 80 or 90. But,
says Malthus, as this would greatly raise the death-rate and the poverty
in the State, such princes would more justly deserve the title of
destroyers of the people. Had Mr. Malthus lived in our day, he would
have been aware that a high marriage-rate is not by any means
necessarily followed by a high birth-rate, since, in modern France,
where there are the greatest number of married women in proportion to
population, over the age of 15, of any European state, the birth-rate is
_lower_ than in any other European state. But, in Malthus’ day, human
beings were still dominated greatly by instinct, and had not begun to
allow reason to prevail in the most important of all human acts, that
which leads to the addition of new members to society.

Mr. Malthus mentions that it had been calculated in his time that, when
the proportion of the people in towns in any State was to those in the
country as 1 to 3, then the mortality was about 28 per 1,000, rising to
32 in 1,000, when the proportion of townsmen to countrymen was as 3 to
7; and falling below 28 per 1,000 when the townsmen are to the
countrymen as 1 to 4. This holds true in principle in modern times: and
it is out of the question to expect to have the death-rate of large
cities as low as it is in country districts inhabited by well-fed
peasants.

In chapter vi. our author speaks of the checks to population in
Switzerland. From statistics existing in Geneva, it seems that in that
town, during the sixteenth century, the probability of life, or the age
to which half of those born live, was only 4·88, or rather less than 5;
and the mean life was about 18½ years. In the seventeenth century the
probability of life was 11½, and the mean life 23¼. In the eighteenth
century the probability of life had increased to 27, and the mean life
to 32.

M. Muret, a Swiss clergyman of Vevey, in the eighteenth century,
mentions the case of a village called Leyzin, with a population of 400
persons, where there were only eight births a year. The probability of
life in this model parish appeared to be so extraordinarily high as to
reach 61 years. And the average number of the births having been for 30
years almost accurately equal to the number of deaths, clearly proved
that the habits of the people had not led them to emigrate, and that the
resources of the parish for the support of the population had remained
nearly stationary. As the marriages in this parish would, with few
exceptions, be very late, it is evident that a very large proportion of
the subsisting marriages would be among persons so far advanced in life
that the women had ceased to bear. The births were only about 1 in 49 of
the population or much fewer than in France of modern days (1 in 40). In
England they are 1 in 28 of the population at present.

M. Muret made some calculations at Vevey respecting the fecundity of
marriages. He found that 375 mothers had produced 2,093 children:
_i.e._, about six children each: and he also found that there were 20
sterile women out of 478, or about 1 in 23 wives. Taking this into
account, the average number of children to a family at Vevey was 5⅓. In
modern France it is about 3, in Prussia 4·68, and in England about 4¼.
In those days, the proportion of annual marriages to population was
lower in the Canton de Vaud than even in Norway, being only 1 in 140. In
the model village of Leyzin only one-fifth of the total mortality was
among persons under fifteen. Such were the results of what Mr. Malthus
considered as the only true “moral restraint,” late marriages. All these
calculations of M. Muret imply the operation of the preventive check to
population in a very great degree in the Canton de Vaud. In the town of
Berne, the proportion of unmarried persons, including widows and
widowers, was considerably above the half of the adults, and the
proportion of the living below sixteen to those above was nearly as 1 to
3 in the beginning of this century. The peasants in Berne were noted for
comfort and wealth, doubtless owing to the low birth-rate in that
country. A law there prevented those who had no means from marrying.

Mr. Malthus gives an amusing account of a conversation he had with a
peasant who went with him from the Lac de Joux to the sources of the
river Orbe. This man said that the habit if early marriage might be
really said to be the vice of the country: and he was so strongly
impressed with the necessary and unavoidable wretchedness that must
result from it, that he thought a law ought to be made restricting men
from entering into the married state before they were forty years of
age, and then allowing it only with old maids, who might bear them two
or three children instead of six or eight. That peasant would have been,
we doubt not, one of the most zealous advocates of the _two children
system_, so wonderfully carried out in many of the most flourishing
districts of France, and probably would have abandoned all desire to
keep prudent couples like those in these French districts from marrying.
We hold with that simple peasant of the Jura, who had learnt the truths
he expounded by sad and cruel experience, he having married himself when
very young, and with his family, suffered much from poverty, that
governments are culpable when they do not attempt to lessen high
birth-rates. To forbid early marriage, indeed, is to encourage
prostitution and cause many other evils; but to affix a stigma on those
who produce large families is, as far as we can see, a plan which can
only produce good and need produce no evil results. It is an utter
misunderstanding of the rights of the individual to suppose that each
man and woman ought to have the _right_ to cause misery to their
unfortunate children, and at the same time produce a pressure upon the
powers of the soil and lessen the productive powers of past and present
labour. That this will ere long be seen to be the truth arising out of
the discoveries of the great English professor we cannot for a moment
doubt.

[Illustration]




                               CHAPTER V.
                 OF THE CHECKS TO POPULATION IN FRANCE.


In the sixth chapter of Book II., Mr. Malthus gives us some account of
the checks to population which existed in France at the end of last
century, which might convince the most sceptical of modern pessimists of
the vast strides which a nation may take in a short period towards the
attainment of comfort and well-being.

The population of France, before the beginning of the war, says Malthus,
was estimated by the Constituent Assembly at 26¼ millions. Necker
estimated the yearly births, in 1780, to be above a million, and it is
curious, as we shall soon see, that France, in 1874, had not a million
of births with a population of 36 millions. Malthus estimated that, out
of that million, 600,000 would attain the age of 18; and, considering
that nearly as many persons are to be found in a given society,
unmarried as married, he amply accounts for the seeming paradox that,
whilst France was supposed to have lost 2½ millions by actual war and
its consequences, at the time of the Revolution, the population was
found to have increased, in 1800, as compared with 1790.

“At all times,” says Malthus, “the number of small farmers and
proprietors in France was great: and though such a state of things is by
no means favourable to the clear surplus produce or disposable wealth of
a nation, yet sometimes it is not unfavourable to the absolute produce,
and it has always a tendency to encourage population.” This last remark
of Mr. Malthus has not been verified. In no country does the population
tend to increase so slowly as in modern France—the land _par excellence_
of peasant proprietors. In all probability, the rapid increase of
population at the time of the French Revolution arose from the lower
death-rate which always follows a sudden amelioration of the position of
the humbler classes, such as that which took place where landed property
came into their possession.

The average proportion of births to population in all France, before the
Revolution was, according to Necker, 39 per 1000. It has singularly
altered since that time, and is now only 26 per 1,000, or the lowest
birth-rate in Europe. The death-rate then was 33 per 1,000, and has
fallen of late to 21 per 1,000, or nearly the lowest death-rate in
Europe.

Sir Francis d’Ivernois, in a work entitled _Tableau des Pertes_, has the
following remark: “Those have yet to learn the first principles of
political arithmetic, who imagine that it is in the field of battle and
the hospitals, that an account can be taken of the lives which a
revolution or a war has cost. The number of men it has killed is of much
less importance than the number of children which it has prevented, and
will still prevent, from coming into the world.” To this Mr. Malthus
replies: “And yet if the circumstances on which the foregoing reasonings
are founded should turn out to be true, it will appear that France has
not lost a single birth by the revolution. She has the most just reason
to mourn the two millions and a half of individuals which she may have
lost, but not their posterity: because, if those individuals had
remained in the country, a proportionate number of children born of
other parents, which are now living in France, would not have come into
existence. If in the best governed country in Europe we were to mourn
the posterity which is prevented from coming into being, we should
always wear the habit of grief.”

“It is evident,” he continues, “that the constant tendency of the births
in every country to supply the vacancies made by death, cannot, in a
moral point of view, afford the slightest shadow of excuse for the
wanton sacrifice of men. The positive evil that is committed in this
case, the pain, misery, and wide-spreading desolation and sorrow, that
are occasioned to the existing inhabitants, can by no means be
counterbalanced by the consideration that the numerical breach in the
population will be rapidly repaired. We can have no other right, moral
or political, except that of the most urgent necessity, to exchange the
life of beings in the full vigour of their enjoyments for an equal
number of helpless infants.”

The next passage shows how immensely ameliorated is the condition of
modern France, as compared with that before the Revolution. “At all
times,” says our author, “the number of males of a military age in
France was small in proportion to the population, on account of the
tendency to marriage (1 to 113 of the population, according to Necker),
and the _great number of children_. Necker takes particular notice of
this circumstance. He observes that the effect of the very great misery
of the peasantry is to produce a dreadful mortality of infants under
three or four years of age; and the consequence is that the number of
young children will always be in too great a proportion to the number of
grown-up people. A million of individuals, he justly observes, will, in
this case, neither present the same military force, nor the same
capacity of labour, as an equal number of individuals in a country where
the people are less miserable. Switzerland, before the Revolution, could
have brought into the field, or have employed in labour appropriate to
grown-up persons, one-third more in proportion to her population, than
France at the same period.”

How strikingly all this has been altered by the prudent habits with
regard to families, induced by the peasant holdings in France, is
clearly seen by the following statistics:—Between the ages of 20 and 60
the human frame is most capable of production, and, according to Kolb,
there are in 10,000 persons in the several States in Europe the
following numbers of persons of the productive ages: In France, 5,373;
in Holland, 4,964; in Sweden, 4,954; in Great Britain, 4,732; and in the
United States, 4,396. France has, of all nations in Europe, the highest
average of ages of the living. Thus it is there 31·06 years: in Holland,
27·76; in Sweden, 27·66; in Great Britain, 26·56; and in the United
States, 23·10. And in France there are a greater number of persons who
attain to old age than in any other country, for, out of 100 deaths
there are, in France, over the age of sixty, 36; in Switzerland, 34; in
England, 30; in Belgium, 28; in Wurtemburg, 21; in Prussia, 19; and in
Austria, 17.

But the most notable of all the facts of modern Europe is that marriages
are more prevalent in proportion to population in France than elsewhere,
and, curiously, there is the smallest number of illegitimate births.
Thus, the illegitimate births in France were, from 1825–67, only 7·27
per cent. of all births, whilst in Prussia they were 8·24 per cent. in
1867; in Sweden they were 10 per cent.; in Austria, 11; and in Bavaria,
in 1868, even 22 per cent. of all births. Paris is an exception to this,
for the illegitimate births there are about one-fourth of all births.

France had, in 1867, a mortality of only 1 in 44·24 persons; whilst in
Prussia the death-rate was 1 in 33·88, in Austria 1 in 29·72, in Holland
1 in 36·25, and in Bavaria 1 in 34·65 inhabitants. And here again is a
striking contrast of modern France with the country of the days of
Necker. France has now the lowest birth-rate of Europe. There is but one
birth annually there in 39 inhabitants, whilst in Prussia there is one
birth in 25·47; in Holland 1 in 29; in Austria 1 in 26: in England 1 in
28 inhabitants. According to an article by M. Bertillon on Marriage, in
1877, the average family to a marriage in France is at present only 3:
against 4·68 in Germany, 3·96 in Russia, 4·35 in Spain, and 4·25 in
England. This is what has been recently styled in Europe the “two (or
rather three) Children System of the French.” When we hear of the
absurdly high birth-rate of 4·68 of Germany, need we wonder that the
death-rate in many German towns sometimes amounts to one-half of all
born in the first year of life?

France had, in 1872, a population of 36,102,921, and the number of
births with this population (966,001) did not come up to what it was in
the days of Necker, when the population was only 26¼ millions. And
whilst the population of the United Kingdom, according to our
Registrar-General, is increasing at the rate of 1,173 a day, of which
about 700 are left to swell the home population, the surplus of births
over deaths in France is generally not much more than some 60,000
persons annually added to her population, so that it would take some 300
years for that country to double at its present rate.

As a consequence of our great birth-rate, 36 per 1,000, there is
naturally a great emigration, amounting, as the Registrar-General tells
us, to some 468 persons daily from these shores on an average, an
emigration which, as it has been mainly masculine, has left us a surplus
of nearly one million of women in these islands. In France there is no
great need for emigration; and hence but little takes place; whilst, so
contented are the peasant proprietors with their homes, that, in 1872,
it was found that of the 36 millions of France 30½ millions were born
within the registration districts. This fact accounts for the
continuance of a Republic in France. Poverty is the cause of the ruin of
Republics.

We add a few passages from a recent author to show how great a step has
been taken by the inhabitants of many parts of France towards the
removal of that terrible indigence which is found in most European
countries, and even in less favoured districts in France.

In an article on Auvergne, written in 1874 and contained in his work
entitled _Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy_, which appeared last
year, Mr. Cliffe Leslie makes the following remarks: “The minute
sub-division of land during the last 25 years in the Limagne, whatever
may be its tendencies for good or evil in manners and other respects,
assuredly cannot be ascribed to over-population, once regarded in
England as the inevitable consequence of the French law of
succession.... The Report of the _Enquête Agricole_ on the department
states: ‘All the witnesses have declared that one of the principal
causes of the diminution of the population is the diminution of children
in families. Each family usually wishes for only one child; and when
there are two, it is the result of a mistake (_une erreur_), or that
having had a daughter first, they desire to have a son.’ A poor woman
near Royat, to whom I put some questions respecting wages and prices,
asked whether my wife and children were there, or at one of the other
watering places, and seemed greatly surprised that I had neither. She
thought an English tourist must be rich enough to have several children;
but when asked how many she had herself, she answered, with a
significant smile, ‘One lad; that’s quite enough.’ Our conversation at
this point was as follows:—‘_Votre dame et vos enfants, sont ils à
Royat?_’ ‘_Non._’ ‘_Ou donc? A Mont Dore?_’ ‘_Moi, je n’ai ni enfants ni
femme._’ ‘_Quoi! Pas encore?!_’ ‘_Et vous, combien d’enfants
avez-vous?_’ ‘_Un gars: c’est bien assez. Nous sommes pauvres, mais vous
êtes riche. Cela fait une petite difference._’ The translation of which
is: ‘Are your wife and children at Royat?’ ‘No.’ ‘Where then? At Mont
Dore?’ ‘I have neither wife nor children.’ ‘What! Not yet?!’ ‘And you,
how many children have you?’ ‘One boy: that is quite enough. We are
poor, but you are rich. That makes a little difference.’”

Mr. Leslie continues, p. 424: “If over-population gives rise to
tremendous problems in India, the decline in the number of children in
France seems almost equally serious. If two children are born to each
married couple, a population must decline, because a considerable number
will not reach maturity. If only one child be born to each pair, a
nation must rapidly become extinct. The French law of succession is
producing exactly the opposite effect to what was predicted in this
country. Had parents in France complete testamentary power, there would
not be the same reason for limiting the number of children. M. Leon
Iscot, accordingly, in his evidence on this subject before the _Enquête
Agricole_ on the Puy-de-Dome, said—‘The number of births in families has
diminished one-half. We must come to liberty of testation. In countries
like England, where testamentary liberty exists, families have more
children.’”

Mr. Leslie puzzles us terribly. He recommends, in an essay on _The
Celibacy of the Nation_, that the state of female celibacy should be
greatly encouraged in all countries that desire to have happy marriages,
but yet he is against the _two children system_ of the French.
Decidedly, Mr. Leslie has not thought out the question. He adds, on p.
424: “Whatever may be thought of the change which is taking place in
France in respect of the numbers of the population, there is one change
of which no other country has equal reason to be proud. Its agricultural
population before the Revolution was in the last extremity of poverty
and misery—their normal condition was half-starvation; they could
scarcely be said to be clothed; their appearance in many places was
hardly human. No other country in Europe, taken as a whole, can now
show, upon the whole, so comfortable, happy, prosperous, and respectable
a peasantry.”

In an article on “Holidays in Eastern France, Seine et Marne,” in
_Fraser’s Magazine_, September, 1878, we find this passage:—“We are in
the midst of one of the wealthiest and best cultivated regions of
France, and when we penetrate below the surface we find that in manners
and customs, as well as dress and outward appearance, the peasant, and
agricultural population generally, differ no little from their remoter
fellow-countrymen, the Bretons.... There is no superstition, hardly a
trace of poverty, and little that is poetic. The people are rich,
laborious, and progressive.... It is a significant fact that in this
well-educated district, where newspapers are read by the poorest, and
where well-being is the rule and poverty a rare exception, the church is
empty on Sunday and the priest’s authority is _nil_.

“It is delightful to witness the widespread well-being of this
highly-favoured region. ‘There is no poverty here,’ say my host and
hostess, ‘and that is why life is so pleasant.’ True enough! Wherever
you go you find well-dressed contented-looking people—no rags, no
squalor, no pinched want.... The habitual look of content written upon
the faces you meet is very striking. It seems as if in this land of
Goshen life were no burden, but matter of satisfaction only. Class
distinctions can hardly be said to exist. There are employers and
employed, masters and servants, of course; but the line of demarcation
is lightly drawn, and we find an easy familiarity existing between them,
wholly free from impoliteness, much less vulgarity.... One is struck,
too, by the good looks, intelligence, and trim appearance of the
children, who, it is clear, are well cared for. The houses have vines
and sweet peas on the walls, flowers in the windows, and altogether a
look of comfort and ease found nowhere in Western France.... Here order
and cleanliness prevail, with a diffusion of well-being hardly to be
matched out of America....

“Dirt is rare, I might almost say as unknown, as rags.... Drunkenness is
also comparatively, in some places we might say absolutely, absent. As
we make further acquaintance with these favoured regions, we might
suppose that here, at least, the dreams of the Utopians had come true,
and that poverty, squalor and wretchedness were banished for ever.”

In the month of August, 1878, I had the great advantage of reading, in
my capacity of Vice-President of the First Section of the International
Congress of Hygiene at Paris, an essay on “The Too Rapid Increase of
Population as a Cause of Disease and Death.” In the debate which
followed, Dr. Bertillon, the distinguished Professor of the Faculty of
Medicine of Paris, who has done so much for social statistics, said that
he considered that in many parts of France there was too great a
disinclination on the part of the people to increase the population. In
Brittany, the marriages were few but very prolific, and the people were
very poor. The influence of the priests was paramount in that province,
and the mortality, both adult and infantile, great. There were very few
children to a family in Normandy, and the death-rate was low in that
province. The French Government he said, appeared to be acting according
to the plan advised by the reader of the essay, since they taxed persons
with large families as much as those with small ones. He admitted that
the size of a family should be regulated by parental forethought; but
thought that at present French population was too stationary.

Dr. Lagneau said, that in France it was the rich who had the smallest
families, whilst the very poor often had large ones. The rich employés
of Government, above all, were noted for the small size of their
families. In the case of the peasant vine-growers of the Marne, many
would only have one child, or even none at all, since these peasants
found it difficult to get people to come from the town and help them
with their farms, and had to do all the work by themselves. Hence,
female labour was much in demand.

These facts will, doubtless, afford to many thoughtful persons a clear
enough picture of the remarkable position of modern France, the only
country in Europe which, as yet, seems to have begun fairly to grapple
with the giant question of population.




                              CHAPTER VI.
     ON THE CHECKS TO POPULATION IN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND.


Mr. Malthus, in the seventh chapter of his second book, speaks of the
checks to population in England. He points out that a man of liberal
education, with an income just sufficient to enable him to associate
with educated people, must feel absolutely certain that, if he should
marry and have a family, he will be obliged to mix in the society of
uneducated persons. Such considerations make him pause. Sons of
tradesmen and farmers are exhorted not to marry until settled in some
business or farm, and the labourer who earns two shillings a day, and
lives comfortably while single, will hesitate to divide that pittance
among five! The servants of rich people have so many comforts that
_they_ naturally are averse to sink down to be the proprietors of some
poor alehouse.

Hence, in Malthus’ day (1806), the annual marriages in England and Wales
were as 1 in 123 of the population, a smaller proportion than obtained
in any European country at that time, except Norway and Sweden. Dr.
Short, writing in 1750, proposed that single people should be heavily
taxed for the support of the married poor. Mr. Malthus replies to this
proposal of the learned judge, that it is not wise to ask people to
enter the married state, so long as such crowds of children die in
infancy and so much poverty exists among married persons. Those, he
adds, who live single or marry late do not diminish the actual
population by so doing. They merely prevent the proportion of premature
mortality which would otherwise be excessive. Sir F. M. Eden mentioned
that in some English villages the mortality seemed to be very low, viz.
1 in 47, or 21 per 1,000. London, in the beginning of this century, was,
it seems, by no means so healthy as it is at present. According to a
great authority, Dr. Price, the mortality was actually 60 per 1,000 (1
in 20¾), whilst at present it is about 23 per 1,000. At the same epoch,
the Manchester death-rate was 1 in 21, or 35 per 1,000; so that
Manchester was in those days much healthier than London. Manufactures,
alas! however useful, are almost always most unwholesome, because they
crowd hosts of people together without comfort, education, or
forethought.

Mr. Malthus truly observes that “there certainly seems to be something
in great towns, and even in moderate towns, peculiarly unfavourable to
the very early stages of life.” Towns, he adds, are especially dangerous
to the life of children. “In London, according to former calculations,
one-half of the born died under three years of age; in Vienna and
Stockholm under two; in Northampton under ten. In country villages, on
the contrary, half the born live to thirty, forty, forty-six, and
above.” He adds that in parishes where the mortality is so small as 1 in
60 or 1 in 75, half the born would be found to have lived to 50 or 55.
This is precisely the case among the members of the professional classes
in England and Wales at this time, according to Mr. Charles Ansell’s
oft-quoted tables.

Dr. Short, it seems, estimated the birth-rate of England at 1 in 28, or
35 per 1,000. This is just about our present birth-rate. “It has
hitherto,” says our author, “been usual with political calculators to
consider a great proportion of births as the surest sign of a vigorous
and flourishing state. It is to be hoped, however, that this prejudice
will not last long. In countries circumstanced like America, or in other
countries after any great mortality, a large proportion of births may be
a favourable symptom; but in the average state of a well-peopled
territory, there cannot well be a worse sign than a large proportion of
births, nor can there well be a better sign than a small proportion.”
This sentence ought to be written in letters of gold on the public
monuments of all civilised States.

Sir Francis d’Ivernois, who is by no means always so wise, is cited by
Malthus as writing as follows:—“If the various States of Europe kept and
published annually an exact account of their population, noting
carefully in a second column the exact age at which the children die,
this second column would show the relative merit of the governments and
the comparative happiness of their subjects. A single arithmetical
statement would then perhaps be more conclusive than all the arguments
that could be adduced.”

Mr. Malthus speaks of the great difficulty that existed in former
centuries of obtaining reliable information as to the numbers of the
people. According to Davenant, he says, in 1690, the number of houses
(in England and Wales) was 1,319,215. Allowing five persons to a house,
this would give a population of six millions and a half in 1690; and it
is quite incredible that from this time to 1710 the population should
have diminished nearly a million and a half. So that the estimated
population of England and Wales in the latter year was said to have been
only five millions.

                  *       *       *       *       *

In chapter eight of his second book, our author speaks of the checks to
population in Scotland and Ireland. At the beginning of this century, as
now, Scotland seems to have been one of the healthiest countries in
Europe. Malthus mentions that in the parish of Crossmichael, in
Kircudbright, the mortality was given as one in 98, and the yearly
marriages as one in 192 of the population. Mr. Wilkie stated that from
the accounts of 36 parishes, the expectation of an infant’s life
appeared to be as high as 40·3. There can be little doubt that these
figures are all, more or less, erroneous.

Mr. Malthus, writing in 1806, says that “in these parishes in Scotland,
where manufacturing has been introduced, which offered employment to
children as soon as they have reached their sixth or seventh year, a
habit of marrying early naturally follows; and, while the manufacture
continues to flourish and increase, the evil arising from it is not very
perceptible; although humanity must confess with a sigh, that one of the
reasons why it is not so perceptible is that room is made for fresh
families by the unnatural mortality which takes place among the children
thus employed.” Mr. Van Houten gave a most eloquent variation of this
theme at the meeting of the International Congress of Medical Men, at
Amsterdam, in 1879, when he said that children should never be employed
in industry:—“The child belongs to himself and to play. How many lives
of children,” he continued, “do we not wear out in our clothes, or smoke
away in our cigars!”

Another writer in Malthus’ day is astonished at the rapid increase of
population in parts of Scotland, in spite of a considerable emigration
to America in 1770, and a large drain during the war. In the parish of
Duthie (Elgin) the annual births were 1/12 of the whole population, the
marriages one in 55. Each marriage in this place was stated to yield
seven children, and yet the population had decreased. The women of
Scotland appeared in those days to have been very prolific. In the
parish of Nigg (Kincardine) there were 57 families with 405
children—_i.e._, nearly 7⅛ each. Compare this with modern France, with
an average of three children to a marriage. In Scotland at present the
number of children to a marriage is about four.

The illustrious clergyman, Dr. Chalmers, whose centenary of birth was
celebrated on March 7, 1880, was always greatly averse to the
introduction of the English poor-law system into Scotland. Mr. Malthus
points out that before his day “the poor of Scotland were in general
supported by voluntary contributions, distributed under the inspection
of the minister of the parish; and it appears, upon the whole, that they
have been conducted with considerable judgment. Having no claim by right
to relief, and the supplies, from the mode of their collection, being
necessarily uncertain, and never abundant, the poor have considered them
merely as a last resource in cases of extreme distress, and not as a
fund on which they might rely.” In the account of Caerlaverock, in
answer to the question, “How ought the poor to be supplied?” it is most
judiciously remarked, “that distress and poverty multiply in proportion
to the funds created to relieve them; that the measures of charity ought
to remain invisible till the moment when it is necessary that they
should be distributed; that in the country parishes of Scotland in
general small occasional voluntary collections are sufficient; that the
legislature has no occasion to interfere to augment the stream, which
already is copious enough; in fine, that the establishment of a poor
rate would not only be unnecessary, but hurtful, as it would tend to
oppress the land-holder without bringing relief to the poor.”

Chalmers preached these doctrines enthusiastically during his long and
eventful life, and his conduct in moralising that part of the city of
Glasgow where he was pastor will ever be remembered with gratitude by
all lovers of human happiness.

The Poor-law Act of 1834, which was carried out in accordance with the
views of Malthus and Chalmers, unfortunately placed no effectual check
on the quantity of out-door relief, and hence the number of out-door
paupers in England is often as high as one-eighth of all relieved. This
demoralises and pauperises the English poor to an alarming extent. This
Poor-law was introduced, with its worst features exaggerated, into
Scotland in 1845, when a brand-new Poor-law was brought in with great
facilities for out-door relief. Well might Chalmers warn his countrymen
against such a Poor-law. It has already pauperised the most interesting
peasantry in the British Islands to such a degree that, whilst in
England one out of every twenty persons is often a pauper, in Scotland
already one in twenty-three are so, whereas in Ireland, with a far lower
standard of comfort, but a much more stringent Poor-law, only one in
seventy-four persons are in receipt of any parish relief.

“The endemic and epidemic diseases in Scotland,” says Malthus, “fall
chiefly, as is usual, on the poor.... To the same causes, in a great
measure, are attributed the rheumatisms which are general and the
consumptions which are frequent among the common people. Wherever, in
any place, from particular circumstances, the condition of the poor has
been rendered worse, these disorders, particularly the latter, have been
observed to prevail with greater force.” In these observations Mr.
Malthus lays the very foundation of the science of health. Health in
Europe, he shows, is incompatible with high birth-rates, which cause
over-crowding, consumption, and death.

Scotland, says Malthus, writing in 1806, is certainly still
over-peopled, but not so much as it was a century ago, when it contained
fewer inhabitants. Scotland in 1801, had 1,608,420 inhabitants, and in
1871, 3,360,018, so that its time of doubling has been nearly seventy
years, or much slower than that of England and Wales.

With regard to Ireland, there is only one short paragraph in Malthus’
tenth Chapter of Book Second upon that country. We give it in its
entirety:—“The details of the population of Ireland are but little
known. I shall only observe, therefore, that the extended use of
potatoes has allowed of a very rapid increase of it during the last
century (18th). But the cheapness of this nourishing root, and the small
piece of ground which, under this cultivation, will in average years
produce the food for a family, joined to the ignorance and barbarism of
the people, which have prompted them to follow their inclinations with
no other prospect than an immediate bare subsistence, have encouraged
marriage to such a degree that the population is pushed much beyond the
industry and present resources of the country; and the consequence
naturally is that the lower classes of people are in the most depressed
and miserable state. The checks to the population are, of course,
chiefly of the positive kind, and arise from the diseases occasioned by
squalid poverty, by damp and wretched cabins, by bad and insufficient
clothing, by the filth of their persons, and occasional want.”

Malthus here foresaw the famine of 1848, which, aided by emigration,
reduced the Irish population from 8,175,124 in 1841 to 6,552,385 in
1851. Doubtless, as shown by Mr. J. S. Mill, Professor Laveleye, and
other subsequent writers, the miserable condition of the Irish peasant
is due mainly to the intolerable feudal laws of land tenure, which have
been so violently put an end to in our happiest of modern European
States, France.




                              CHAPTER VII.
                            DETACHED ESSAYS.


In Volume II. of the “Essay on the Principle of Population” (edition
1806) there are to be found a number of most interesting remarks on the
population question. Book II. contains chapters on the Fruitfulness of
Marriage, on the Effects of Epidemics, on Registers of Births, Deaths,
and Marriages, and on the General Deductions from the Preceding View of
Society.

“There is no absolutely necessary connection,” says Malthus, “between
the average age of marriage and the average age of death. In a country
the resources of which will allow of a rapid increase of population, the
expectation of life or the average age of death may be extremely high,
and yet the age of marriage may be very early; and the marriages, then,
compared with the contemporary deaths of the registers, would, even
after the correction for second and third marriages, be very much too
great to represent the true proportion of the born living to marry.”

At the commencement of this century, it appears from the transactions of
the Society of Philadelphia, in a paper by Mr. Barton, entitled
“Observations on the Probability of Life in the United States,” that the
proportion of marriages to births was as 1 to 4½. As, however, this
proportion was taken principally from towns, it is probable, according
to Malthus, that the births given were too low, and that as many as five
might be taken as an average for town and country. According to this
author, the mortality at that date was about 1 in 45; and, if the
population doubled in twenty-five years, the births would be 1 in 20 (50
per 1,000).

In England at the commencement of this century the proportion of
marriages to births appears to have been about 100 to 350. But in those
days Mr. Malthus calculated that the annual marriages to the births in
England amounted to about 1 in 4. In the East End of London at the
present day the writer has found that the average number of children to
a marriage among the women of the poorer classes is about 7, whilst the
annual births in England and Wales to the marriages are nearly as 4¼ to
1. In France the annual marriages are to the births as 1 to 3.

A writer in Mr. Malthus’s day, Crome, observes that when, the marriages
of a country yield less than four births, the population is in a very
precarious state; and he estimates the prolificness of marriages by the
proportion of yearly births to marriages. If this had been true, the
population of many countries of Europe would be at present in a
precarious state, since in many, as in France, the proportion of
marriages to births is much under 4 to 1.

“The preventive check,” says Malthus, “is perhaps best measured by the
smallness of the proportion of yearly births to the whole population.
The proportion of yearly marriages to the population is only a just
criterion in countries similarly circumstanced, but is incorrect where
there is a difference in the prolificness of marriages or in the
proportion of the population under the age of puberty, and in the rate
of increase. If all the marriages of a country, be they few or many,
take place young, and be consequently prolific, it is evident that to
produce the same proportion of births a smaller number of marriages will
be necessary, or, with the same proportion of marriages, a greater
proportion will be produced.”

Curiously enough, in his day Malthus mentions that in France both the
births and deaths were greater than they were in Sweden, although the
proportion of marriages was then rather less in France. “And when,” he
adds, “in two countries compared, one of them has a much greater part of
its population under the age of puberty than the other, it is evident
that any general proportion of the yearly marriages to the whole
population will not imply the same operation of the preventive check
among those of a marriageable age.”

One of the most interesting chapters in the second volume of Malthus’
essay is that which relates to the rapid increase of births after the
plagues. According to Sussmilch, very few countries had hitherto been
exempt from plagues, which every now and then would sweep away
one-fourth or one-third of their population. That writer calculated that
above one-third of the people in Prussia were destroyed by the plague of
1711; and yet, notwithstanding this great diminution of the population,
it appeared that the number of marriages in 1711 was very nearly double
the average of the six years preceding the plague. Hence the proportion
of births to deaths was prodigious—320 to 100—an excess of births as
great, perhaps, as has ever been known in America. In the four years
succeeding the plague the births were to the deaths in the proportion of
above 22 to 10, which, calculating the mortality at 1 in 36, would
double the population in 21 years.

“In contemplating,” says Malthus, “the plagues and sickly seasons which
occur in the tables of Sussmilch, after a period of rapid increase, it
is impossible not to be struck with the idea that the number of
inhabitants had, in these instances, exceeded the food and accommodation
necessary to preserve them in health. The mass of the people would, upon
this supposition, be obliged to live worse, and a greater number of them
would be crowded together in one house; and these natural causes would
evidently contribute to increase sickness, even though the country,
absolutely considered, might not be crowded and populous. In a country
even thinly inhabited, if an increase of population takes place before
more food is raised, and more houses are built, the inhabitants must be
distressed for room and subsistence.”

In Chapter xi. we have some general deductions from the preceding views
of Society. Mr. Malthus there shows that the main cause of the slow
growth of populations in Europe is insufficiency of supplies of food. No
settlements, says our author, could have been worse managed than those
of Spain, Mexico, Peru and Quito. Yet, under all their difficulties,
these colonies made a quick increase in population. But the English
North American Colonies added to the quantity of rich land they held in
common with the Spanish and Portuguese settlements, a greater degree of
liberty and equality. In Pennsylvania there was no right of
primogeniture in Malthus’ time: and in the provinces of New England the
eldest son had only a double share. The consequence of these favourable
circumstances united was a rapidity of increase almost without a
parallel in history. Throughout all the northern provinces the
population was found to double itself in 25 years. The original number
of persons which had settled in the four provinces of New England, in
1643, was 21,200. Afterwards it was calculated that more left them than
went to them. In the year 1760 they were increased to half a million.
They had, therefore, all along, doubled their numbers in 25 years. In
New Jersey the period of doubling appeared to be 22 years; and in Rhode
island still less. In the back settlements, where the inhabitants
applied themselves solely to agriculture, and luxury was not known, they
were supposed to double their numbers in 15 years.

The population of the United States, says Malthus, writing in 1806,
according to the last Census, is 11,000,000. “We have no reason to
believe that Great Britain is less populous at present, for the
emigration of the small parent stock which produced these numbers. On
the contrary, a certain amount of emigration is known to be favourable
to the population of the mother country. Whatever was the original
number of British emigrants which increased so fast in North America,
let us ask. Why does not an equal number produce an equal increase in
the same time in Great Britain? The obvious reason is the want of food;
and that this want is the most efficient cause of the three immediate
checks to population which have been observed to prevail in all
societies, is evident, from the rapidity with which even old States
recover the desolations of war, pestilence, famine, and the convulsions
of nature. They are then for a short time placed a little in the
condition of new colonies, and the effect is always answerable to what
might be expected. If the industry of the inhabitants be not destroyed,
subsistence will soon increase beyond the wants of the reduced numbers;
and the invariable consequence will be, that population, which before
perhaps was nearly stationary, will begin immediately to increase, and
will continue its progress till the former population is recovered.”

The decennial censuses of the United States during this century have
been as follows, in round numbers:—In 1800, 5,305,000; in 1810,
7,239,000; in 1820, 9,638,000; in 1830, 12,866,000; in 1840, 17,069,000;
in 1850, 23,193,000; in 1860, 31,443,000; in 1870, 38,558,000. If we
compare the cypher of 1830—12,866,000—with that of 1800—5,305,000—we see
that the population of the States far more than doubled itself in the
first thirty years of the century, making all due allowance for
immigration, by the simple process of fecundity inherent in the human
species.

Mr. Malthus mentions (chapter xi. p. 67), that in New Jersey “the
proportion of births to deaths, in an average of seven years, ending
1743, was 300 to 100. In England and France, he says, at that time the
highest average proportion could not be reckoned at more than 120 to
100.” At this date, 1880, the proportion of births to deaths in France
is as 111 is to 100, and in England it is as 152 is to 100, whereas in
Dublin the deaths exceed the births. In New Zealand the births are to
the deaths as 340 is to 100. There is nothing, he says, the least
mysterious in this. “The passion between the sexes has appeared in every
age to be so nearly the same, that it may be considered, in algebraic
language, as a given quantity. The great law of necessity which prevents
population from increasing in any country beyond the food which it can
either produce or acquire, is a law so open to our view, so obvious and
evident to our understandings, that we cannot for a moment doubt it. The
different modes which nature takes to repress a redundant population, do
not appear, indeed, to us so certain and regular; but though we cannot
always predict the mode, we may with certainty predict the fact. If the
proportion of the births to the deaths for a few years indicates an
increase of numbers much beyond the proportional increased or acquired
food of the country, we may be perfectly certain that unless an
emigration take place the deaths will shortly exceed the births, and
that the increase that has been observed for a few years cannot be the
real average increase of the population of that country. If there were
no other depopulating causes, and if the preventive check did not act
very strongly, every country would without doubt be subject to
periodical plagues and famines.”

This is a well-known passage, and shows the genius of the writer as well
as any in his work. How immensely superior is his clear enunciation of
the attraction between the sexes when compared with the strange
speculations of Mr. Herbert Spencer of late years, about the supposed
gradual decay of that attraction in proportion to the alleged increase
in the weight of the human brain. It is quite deplorable to see what
ingenuity has been exercised by latter-day philosophers to get over the
plain and inevitable conclusions of Malthus and his common-sense school.
The struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest has been put
forward as a plea for allowing over-population to grind the masses in
constant misery, and the delusive ideal of the equation of mouths to
food in the course of ages by a mere fanciful tendency of organisms to
become more perfect, without the exercise of volition, are the latest
struggles of the ostrich to burrow with his head in the sand in order to
avoid the sight of the inevitable.

“The only criterion,” says Malthus, “of a real and permanent increase in
the population of any country is the increase in the means of
subsistence. But even this criterion is subject to slight variations,
which, however, are completely open to observation. In some countries
population seems to have been forced: that is the people have been
habituated by degrees to live almost upon the smallest possible quantity
of food. There must have been periods in such countries when population
increased permanently without an increase in the means of subsistence.
China, India, and the countries possessed by the Bedoween Arabs, as we
have seen in the former part of this work, appear to answer to this
description. The average produce of these countries seems to be but
barely sufficient to support the lives of the inhabitants, and, of
course, any deficiency from the badness of the seasons must be fatal.
Nations in this state must necessarily be subject to famines.”

Almost all the histories of epidemics which we have read tend to confirm
the supposition that they are greatly caused by that over-population
which, as in Dublin in 1880, leads to over-crowded houses filled by
ill-fed and ill-clad inmates. Dr. Short, an author of the last century,
shows in his work (Air, Seasons, &c., vol. ii. p. 206), that a very
considerable proportion of the epidemic years either have followed or
were accompanied by seasons of dearth and bad food. In other places he
also mentions great plagues as diminishing particularly the numbers of
the poorest classes; and in speaking of different diseases, he observes,
that those which are occasioned by bad and unwholesome food generally
last the longest.

“We know (says our author) from constant experience that fevers are
generated in our jails, our manufactories, our crowded workhouses, and
in the narrow and close streets of our large towns, all which situations
appear to be similar in their effects to squalid poverty, and we cannot
doubt that causes of this kind, aggravated in degree, contributed to the
production and prevalence of those great and wasting plagues formerly so
common in Europe, but which now, from the mitigation of their causes,
are everywhere considerably abated, and in many places appear to be
completely extirpated.

“Of the other great scourge of mankind—famine—it may be observed that it
is not in the nature of things that the increase of population should
absolutely produce one. This increase, though rapid, is necessarily
gradual, and as the human frame cannot be supported, even for a very
short time, without food, it is evident that no more human beings can
grow up than there is provision to maintain. But though the principle of
population cannot absolutely produce a famine, it prepares the way for
one in the most complete manner, and by obliging all the lower classes
of people to subsist merely on the smallest quantity of food that will
support life, turns even a slight deficiency from the failure of the
seasons into a severe dearth; and may be fairly said, therefore, to be
one of the principal causes of famine. Among the signs of an approaching
dearth, Dr. Short mentions one or more years of luxuriant crops
together, and this observation is probably just, as we know that the
general effect of years of cheapness and abundance is to dispose a
greater number of persons to marry, and under such circumstances the
return to a year which gives only an average crop might produce a
scarcity.”

Much has been lately spoken in professional assemblies about recent
epidemics of small-pox. It is curious to hear what our author, writing
in 1806, or seven years after the discovery of Edward Jenner, has to
say. “The small-pox (says Malthus, book 2, ch. xi., p. 61), which at
present may be considered as the most prevalent and fatal epidemic in
Europe, is of all others, perhaps, the most difficult to account for,
though the periods of its return are in many places regular. Dr. Short
(Air, Seasons, vol. ii., p. 441), observes that from the history of this
disorder it seems to have very little dependence on present
constitutions of the weather of seasons, and that it appears
epidemically at all times and in all states of the air, though not so
frequently in hard frost. We know of no instances, I believe, of its
being clearly generated under any circumstances of situation. I do not
mean, therefore, to insinuate that poverty and crowded houses ever
absolutely produced it; but I may be allowed to remark that in those
places where its returns are regular, and its ravages among children,
particularly among those of the lowest class, are considerable, it
necessarily follows that these circumstances, in a greater degree than
usual, must always precede and accompany its appearance; that is, from
the time of its last visit, the average number of children will be
increasing, the people will, in consequence, be growing poorer, and the
houses will be more crowded till another visit removes this
superabundant population.”

Other circumstances being equal, it may be affirmed that countries are
populous according to the quantity of human food which they produce or
can acquire; and happy, according to the liberality with which the food
is divided, or the quantity which a day’s labor will purchase. Compare,
on this standard of our author, the condition of an agricultural laborer
in England, with beefsteak at one shilling the pound in London, with
that of Dunedin, where, as we write, it is at fourpence the pound, and
wages are at least two and a half those in England for that class. “Corn
countries are more populous than pasture countries, and rice countries
more populous than corn countries. But their happiness does not depend
either upon their being thinly or fully inhabited, upon their poverty or
their riches, their youth or their age; but on the proportion which the
population and the food bear to each other. This proportion is generally
the most favorable in new colonies, where the knowledge and industry of
an old state operate on the fertile unappropriated land of a new one. In
other cases the youth or the age of a state is not, in this respect, of
great importance. It is probable that the food of Great Britain is
divided in more liberal shares to its inhabitants at the present period
than it was two thousand, three thousand, or four thousand years ago.”

This passage from Malthus shows that he at least does not believe in the
view sometimes attributed to him that the position of civilised society
is tending continually to become more and more unbearable from pressure
of population on food. Malthus saw quite clearly that the prevention of
a rapid birth-rate was more and more practised by nations in proportion
as they became better educated, and he therefore did not at all take the
pessimistic aspect of human society that many believe.

“In a country never to be overrun by a people more advanced in arts, but
left to its own natural progress in civilisation; from the time when its
produce might be considered as a unit, to the time that it might be
considered as a million, during the lapse of many thousand years, there
would not be a single period when the mass of the people could be said
to be free from distress, either directly or indirectly, from want of
food. In every state in Europe, since we have first had accounts of it,
millions and millions of human existences have been suppressed from this
simple cause, though perhaps in some of these states an absolute famine
may never have been known.”

These expressions of Mr. Malthus are entirely opposed to the idea that
he held that the future of society was likely to be less bright than
that of the past. Still there is a certain sadness in the following
sentence, which is the real secret of the unpopularity of the great
discoverer’s doctrine. In page 73, book ii., chap. xi., he says:
“Population invariably increases when the means of subsistence increase,
unless prevented by powerful and obvious checks.... Famine seems to be
the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population
is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,
that unless arrested by the preventive check, premature death must in
some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind 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 this work of extermination, sickly
seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array,
and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be
still incomplete, gigantic, inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and at
one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.”

In Mr. Malthus’s edition of 1806, the third book contains several essays
on the different systems or expedients which have been proposed or have
prevailed in society, as they affect the evils arising from the
principle of population. In chapter i., p. 77, he treats of systems of
equality proposed by Wallace, and the illustrious Condorcet. Mr.
Wallace, whose name has been adverted to by many writers as one of those
who partly saw the importance of the tendency of mankind to increase
more rapidly than food, did not seem to be aware that any difficulty
would arise from this cause till the whole earth had been cultivated as
a garden, and was incapable of any further increase of produce. Mr.
Malthus remarks upon this idea of Mr. Wallace, that “at every period
during the period of cultivation, from the present moment to the time
when the whole earth was become like a garden, the distress for want of
food would be constantly pressing on all mankind if they were equal.
Though the produce of the earth would be increasing every year,
population would be tending to increase much faster, and the redundancy
must necessarily be checked by the periodical action of moral restraint,
vice, or misery.”

M. Condorcet’s _Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit
humain_ was written, it is said, under the pressure of that cruel
proscription which terminated in his death during the French Revolution,
and the posthumous publication is only a sketch of a much larger work
which he proposed to write. By the application of calculations to the
probabilities of life and the interest of money, Condorcet proposed that
a fund should be established, which should assure to the old an
assistance produced in part by their own former savings, and in part by
the savings of individuals, who in making the same sacrifice die before
they reap the benefit of it. These establishments, he observes, might be
made in the name and under the protection of the state. Mr. Blackley
brought forward a somewhat similar proposal in 1880. Condorcet adds that
by the just application of such calculations, means might be found of
more completely preserving a state of equality, by preventing credit
from being the exclusive privilege of large fortunes, and yet giving it
a basis equally solid, and by rendering the industry and activity of
commerce less dependent on great capitalists.

Mr. Malthus criticises the schemes of Condorcet as follows:—“Supposing
for a moment that they would give no check to production, the greatest
difficulty remains behind. Were every man sure of a comfortable
provision for a family, almost every man would have one; and were the
rising generation free from the killing frost of misery, population must
increase with unusual rapidity.” And Condorcet himself saw this, for he
says: “But in this progress of industry and happiness, each generation
will be called to more extended enjoyments, and, in consequence, by the
physical constitution of the human frame, to an increase in the number
of individuals. Must not there arise a period when these laws, equally
necessary, shall counteract each other; when the increase of the number
of men surpassing their means of subsistence, the necessary result must
be, either a continual diminution of happiness and population—a movement
truly retrograde—or, at least, a kind of oscillation between good and
evil. Shall we ever arrive at such a period? It is equally impossible to
pronounce for or against the future realization of an event, which
cannot take place but at an era when the human race will have attained
improvements of which we can at present scarcely form a conception.”

To this Mr. Malthus replies that the only point in which he differs from
Condorcet in the paragraph just cited is with regard to the period when
it may be applied to the human race. Condorcet thought that his age of
iron would not come until a very distant era. Our author remarks, on the
contrary, that the period when the number of men surpassed their
subsistence had long ago arrived; and that this constantly subsisting
cause of periodical misery has existed ever since we have any history of
mankind, and continues to exist at the present moment.

“M. Condorcet (says Malthus) however goes on to say that should the
period which he conceives to be so distant ever arrive, the human race,
and the advocates of the perfectibility of man, need not be alarmed at
it. He then proceeds to remove the difficulty in a manner which I
profess not to understand. Having observed that the ridiculous prejudice
of superstition would by that time have ceased to throw over morals a
corrupt and degrading austerity, he alludes either to a promiscuous
concubinage which would prevent breeding, or to something else as
unnatural. To remove the difficulty in this way will surely, in the
opinion of most men, be to destroy that virtue and purity of manners
which the advocates of equality, and of the perfectibility of man,
profess to be the end and object of their views.”

It is from passages such as these that Mr. Malthus differs so much from
the so-called New-Malthusians, who look for the solution of the
population difficulty to the “small-family system” of the French. It
would seem that the great French writer, Condorcet, had a prophetic
knowledge of what the effect of the great French Revolution would be, a
revolution which, by converting the cultivator of the soil of that state
into the proprietor, has made France the most prudent country in the
known world in the question of the size of families. Mr. Bonar, too, in
a clever pamphlet, published in 1880, shows that Mr. Malthus retained
somewhat the same phraseology as he uses here, in his 7th edition, page
512, where he thus speaks: “If it were possible for each married couple
to limit by a wish the number of their children, there is certainly
reason to fear that the indolence of the human race would be very
greatly increased.” Had he lived in 1881, and seen how rapidly the
industry of France is increasing, her wealth developing, and poverty
diminishing in that happiest of modern European states in the face of
the lowest European birth-rate (26 per 1,000), he would have been the
first, we doubt not, to retract these crude expressions, and to see
wherein the virtue consists.

M. Condorcet seems to have entertained some very hopeful ideas as to the
perfectibility of the human frame, and to have thought that though man
would not become absolutely immortal, yet that the duration between his
birth and his natural death would increase without ceasing, would have
no natural term, and might properly be expressed by the term indefinite.
Malthus demurs to these speculations. He thinks that the average
duration of human life will, to a certain extent, vary from healthy or
unhealthy climates, from wholesome or unwholesome food, from virtuous or
vicious manners, and from other causes; but it may be fairly doubted
whether there has been really the smallest perceptible advance in the
natural duration of human life since we had any authentic history of
man. “What can we reason but from what we know?”

“The capacity of improvement in plants and animals, to a certain extent,
no person can possibly doubt. A clear and decided progress has already
been made, and yet I think that it would be highly absurd to say that
this progress has no limits.... The error does not seem to lie in
supposing a small degree of improvement possible, but in not
discriminating between a small improvement, the limit of which is
undefined, and an improvement really unlimited. As the human race could
not be improved in the same way as the domestic animals, without
condemning all the bad specimens to celibacy, it is not probable that an
attention to breed should ever become general.” Here, again, we prefer
the injunction of Professor Mantegazza to consumptive parents: ‘Amate,
ma non generate’ (‘Marry but do not reproduce’). The speculations of
Condorcet seem, to a certain extent, to have been revived in modern days
by Mr. H. Spencer and Dr. B. W. Richardson. The former of these
distinguished authors seems to look forward to a time when the wants of
mankind shall by the process of evolution become equated to their powers
of acquiring food, without calling in the will; and Dr. Richardson seems
to look forward to a far greater longevity for individuals of the human
species than has been experienced in its past history.

“When paradoxes of this kind (says Malthus) are advanced by ingenious
and able men, neglect has no tendency to convince them of their
mistakes. Priding themselves on what they conceive to be a mark of the
make and size of their own understandings, of the extent and
comprehensiveness of their views, they will look upon this neglect
merely as an indication of poverty and narrowness of the mental
exertions of their contemporaries, and only think that the world is not
yet prepared to receive their sublime truths. On the contrary, a candid
investigation of these subjects, accompanied with a perfect readiness to
adopt anything warranted by sound philosophy, may have a tendency to
convince them that in forming unfounded and improbable hypotheses, so
far from enlarging the bounds of science, they are contracting it; so
far from promoting the improvement of the human mind, they are
obstructing it; they are throwing us back again almost into the infancy
of knowledge, and weakening the foundations of that mode of
philosophising under the auspices of which science has of late made such
rapid advance. The late rage for wide and unrestrained speculation seems
to have been a kind of mental intoxication, arising perhaps from the
great and unexpected discoveries which had been made in various branches
of science. To men elate and inspired with such successes, everything
appears to be within the grasp of human powers, and under this illusion
they confounded subjects where no real progress could be proved with
those where the progress had been marked, certain and acknowledged.”

The great antagonist of Mr. Malthus at the commencement of this century
was Mr. Godwin, who, in his work on _Political Justice_, gives a
magnificent picture of a system of equality, which, by his account, is
to regenerate society. On page 458 of book IV. of that work Mr. Godwin
thus speaks:—“The spirit of oppression, the spirit of servility, and the
spirit of fraud, then, are the immediate growth of the established
administration of property. They are alike hostile to intellectual
improvement. The other vices of envy, malice, and revenge are their
inseparable companions. In a state of society where men lived in the
midst of plenty, and where all shared alike the bounties of nature,
these sentiments would inevitably expire. The narrow principle of
selfishness would vanish. No man being obliged to guard his little
store, or provide with anxiety or pain for his restless wants, each
would lose his individual existence in the thought of the general good.
No man would be an enemy to his neighbours, for they would have no
subject of contention; and, of consequence, philanthropy would resume
the empire which reason assigns her. Mind would be delivered from her
perpetual anxiety about corporeal support, and free to expatiate in the
field of thought which is congenial to her. Each would assist the
inquiries of all.”

The great error, as Malthus observes, under which Mr. Godwin labors
throughout his whole work is in attributing almost all the vices and
miseries that prevail in civil society to human institutions. Political
regulations, and the established administration of property, are, with
him, the fruitful sources of all evil, the hotbed of all the crimes that
degrade mankind. “Man cannot live (says Malthus) in the midst of plenty.
All cannot share alike the bounties of nature. Were there no established
administration of property, every man would be obliged to guard with
force his little store. Selfishness would be triumphant. The subjects of
contention would be perpetual. Every individual would be under a
constant anxiety about corporeal support, and not a single intellect
would be left free to expatiate in the field of thought.”

Mr. Godwin supposed that the population difficulty would only become of
importance at some remote future. “Three-fourths of the habitable globe
are now uncultivated. The parts already cultivated are capable of
immeasurable improvement. Myriads of centuries of still increasing
population may pass away, and the earth be still found sufficient for
the subsistence of its inhabitants.” Mr. Malthus asks us to imagine for
a moment Mr. Godwin’s system of equality realised in its utmost extent,
and see how soon the difficulty of population might be expected to press
upon us under so perfect a form of society.

Let us suppose, he says, all the causes of vice and misery in this
island removed. “War and contention cease. Unwholesome trades and
manufactories do not exist. Crowds no longer collect together in great
and pestilent cities for purposes of Court intrigue, of commerce, and
vicious gratification. Simple, healthy, and rational amusements take
place of drinking, gambling, and debauchery. There are no towns
sufficiently large to have any prejudicial effects on the human
constitution. The greater part of the happy inhabitants of this
terrestrial Paradise live in hamlets and farm-houses, scattered over the
face of the country. All men are equal. The labors of luxury are at an
end, and the necessary labors of agriculture are shared amicably among
all. The number of persons and the produce of the island we suppose to
be the same as at present. “The spirit of benevolence guided by
impartial justice will divide this produce among all the members of
society according to their wants. Though it would be impossible that
they should all have animal food every day, yet vegetable food, with
meat occasionally, would satisfy the desires of a frugal people, and
would be sufficient to preserve them in health, strength, and spirits.”

“Mr. Godwin considers marriage as a fraud and a monopoly. Let us suppose
the commerce of the sexes established upon principles of the most
perfect freedom. Mr. Godwin does not think himself that this freedom
would lead to a promiscuous intercourse, and in this I perfectly agree
with him. The love of variety is a vicious, corrupt, and unnatural
taste, and could not prevail in any great degree in a simple and
virtuous state of society. Each man would probably select for himself a
partner to whom he would adhere, as long as that adherence continued to
be the choice of both parties. It would be of little consequence,
according to Mr. Godwin, how many children a woman had, or to whom they
belonged. Provisions and assistance would spontaneously flow from the
quarter in which they abounded to the quarter in which they were
deficient, and every man according to his capacity would be ready to
furnish instruction to the rising generation.”

“I cannot conceive a form of society so favorable upon the whole to
population. The irremediableness of marriage, as it is at present
constituted, undoubtedly deters many from entering into this state. An
unshackled intercourse, on the contrary, would be a most powerful
incitement to early attachments, and as we are supposing no anxiety
about the future support of children to exist, I do not conceive that
there would be one woman in a hundred, of twenty-three years of age,
without a family.”

“With these extraordinary encouragements to population, and every cause
of depopulation, as we have supposed, removed, the numbers would
necessarily increase faster than in any society that has ever yet been
known. I have before mentioned that the inhabitants of the back
settlements of America appear to double their numbers in fifteen years.
England is certainly a healthier country than the back settlements of
America; and as we have supposed every house in the island to be airy
and wholesome, and the encouragements to have a family greater even than
in America, no probable reason can be assigned why the population should
not double itself in less, if possible, than fifteen years.”... “It is
probable that the half of every man’s time (in a system of equality)
must be employed for this purpose (in agriculture). Yet with such a much
greater exertion, a person who is acquainted with the nature of the soil
of the country, and who reflects on the fertility of the lands already
in cultivation, and the barrenness of those that are not cultivated,
will be very much disposed to doubt whether the whole average produce
could possibly be doubled in twenty years from the present period. The
only chance of success would be from the ploughing up most of the
grazing countries, and putting an end almost entirely to animal food.
Yet this scheme would probably defeat itself. The soil of England will
not produce much without dressing; and cattle seem to be necessary to
make that species of manure which best suits the land.

“Alas, what becomes of the picture, where men lived in the midst of
plenty, when no man was obliged to provide with anxiety and pain for his
restless wants; when the narrow principles of selfishness did not exist;
when the man was delivered from his perpetual anxiety for corporal
support, and free to expatiate in the field of thought which is so
congenial to him? This beautiful fabric of the imagination vanishes at
the severe touch of truth.... The children are sickly from insufficient
food. The rosy flush of health gives place to the pallid cheek and
hollow eye of misery.”

In as short a period as fifty years the whole of the worst evils of
society will certainly re-appear, if population be not checked (says
Malthus) by moral restraint, vice, or misery. After showing that a
regime of equality would inevitably end in these shallows, so long as
the birth-rate was not restricted, Malthus contends that some such laws
of private property, as those which at present exist, would be certain
to re-appear and misery to be increased. He then continues to give the
best account of the irrevocable contract of marriage, with which we are
familiar, that any writer has ever attempted to give.

“The next subject which would come under discussion, intimately
connected with the preceding, is the commerce of the sexes. It would be
urged by those who had turned their attention to the true cause of the
difficulties under which the community labored, that while every man
felt secure that all his children would be well provided for by general
benevolence, the powers of the earth would be absolutely inadequate to
produce food for the population which would inevitably ensue; that even
if the whole attention and labor of the society were directed to this
sole point, and if by the most perfect security of property, and every
other encouragement that could be thought of, the greatest possible
increase of produce were yearly obtained; yet still the increase of food
would by no means keep pace with the much more rapid increase of
population; that some check to population, therefore, was imperiously
called for; that the most natural and obvious check seemed to be to make
every man provide for his own children; that this would operate in some
respect as a measure and a guide in the increase of population, as it
might be expected that no man would bring beings into the world for whom
he could not find the means of support; that when this, notwithstanding,
was the case, it seemed necessary, for the example of others, that the
disgrace and inconvenience attending such conduct should fall upon that
individual who had thus inconsiderately plunged himself and his innocent
children into want and misery. The institution of marriage, or at least
of some express or implied obligation on every man to support his own
children, seems to be the natural result of these reasonings, in a
community under the difficulties that we have supposed.”

Mr. Malthus then proceeds with his theory of the reason why society
punishes carelessness in sexual relations much more in the case of a
woman than in that of a man. “The view of these difficulties presents us
with a very natural reason why the disgrace which attends a breach of
chastity should be greater in a woman than in a man. It could not be
expected that a woman should have resources sufficient to support her
own children. When, therefore, a woman had lived with a man who had
entered into no compact to maintain her children; and aware of the
inconveniences that he might bring upon himself, had deserted her, those
children must necessarily fall upon the society for support or starve.
And to prevent the frequent recurrence of such an inconvenience, as it
would be highly unjust to punish so natural a fault by personal
restraint or infliction, society might agree to punish it with disgrace.
The defence is besides more obvious and conspicuous in the woman, and
less liable to any mistake. The father of a child may not always be
known; but the same uncertainty cannot easily exist with regard to the
mother. Where the evidence of the offence was most complete, and the
inconvenience to society at the same time the greatest, there it was
agreed that the largest share of blame should fall. The obligation on
every man to support his children the society would enforce by positive
law, and the greater degree of inconvenience or labor to which a family
would necessarily subject him, added to some feature of disgrace, which
every human being must incur who leads another into unhappiness, might
be considered as a sufficient punishment for the man.

“That a woman should at present be almost driven from society for an
offence which men commit nearly with impunity, seems to be undoubtedly a
breach of natural justice. But the origin of the custom, as the most
obvious and effectual method of preventing the frequent recurrence of a
serious inconvenience to a community, appears to be natural, though not
perhaps perfectly justifiable. This origin, however, is now lost in the
new train of ideas that the custom has since generated. What at first
sight might be dictated by state necessity is now supported by female
delicacy, and operates with the greatest force on that part of the
society, where, if the original intention of the custom were preserved,
there is the least occasion for it.”

These most ingenious speculations of our author contain undoubtedly a
great deal of truth in them. At the same time, it is clear that when
society shall begin to replace traditional views of morality by more
positive and scientific deductions from experience, when it shall be
generally acknowledged in all civilised states of the old world that the
basis of true morality must consist in that conduct which will keep the
birth-rate very low, Mr. Malthus’s arguments in favour of irrevocable
marriage and excessive severity towards those who prefer not to enter
the imperfect marriage arrangements of modern European countries, with a
full knowledge of what they are doing, must be gradually replaced by
some law which shall affix a stigma, not so much upon illegitimacy, but
rather upon the production of large families. Those who are well
acquainted with the modern position of the marriage question in Europe,
and who have studied what has been written on it by Wilhelm von Humboldt
and J. S. Mill, will readily acknowledge that, if society would but take
care to stigmatise as immoral all those persons who take more than a
very moderate share of the blessings of parentage in old countries, it
might, as Humboldt proposes, entirely withdraw from all legal
interference in the contracts between the sexes. Moral obligations might
still remain in full force towards those who have been led to base their
future life on the implied continuance of such contracts; but doubtless
the law of civilised states is at present tending towards far greater
facility of dissolving such contracts than Mr. Malthus seems to have
approved of.

In chapter iii. of book III. our author disposes of the so-called
“futurity fallacy,” which unfortunately still continues to be opposed to
the teachings of the economists, as if it had not been over and over
again refuted by the author of the essay on population. “Other persons,”
says our author, “besides Mr. Godwin have imagined that I looked to
certain periods in future when population would exceed the means of
subsistence in a much greater degree than at present, and that the evils
arising from the principle of population were rather in contemplation
than in existence; but this is a total misconception of my argument.
Poverty, and not absolute famine, is the specific effect of the
principle of population, as I have before endeavoured to show. Many
countries are now suffering all the evils that can ever be expected to
flow from this principle, and even if we were arrived at the absolute
limit to all further increase of produce, a point which we shall
certainly never reach, I should by no means expect that those evils
would be in any marked manner aggravated. The increase of produce in
most European countries is so very slow, compared with what would be
required to support an unrestricted increase of people, that the checks
which are constantly in action to repress the population to the level of
a produce increasing so slowly would have very little more to do in
wearing it down to a produce absolutely stationary.”

The great historian Hume had pointed out that in those countries where
infanticide was permitted by law, there was greater over-population than
in others where it was prohibited, because parents were too humane to
betake themselves to such a frightful “positive check.” The excessive
poverty of China, where the custom of infanticide prevails, is an
example of the truth of Mr. Hume’s remarks. “It is still, however,
true,” adds our author (p. 139), “that the expedient is, in its own
nature, adequate to the end for which it was cited, but to make it so in
fact, it must be done by the magistrate, and not left to the parents.
The almost invariable tendency of this custom to increase population,
when it depends entirely upon the parents, shows the extreme pain which
they must feel in making such a sacrifice, even when the distress
arising from excessive poverty may be supposed to have deadened in great
measure their sensibility. What must the pain be then upon the
supposition of the interference of a magistrate, or of a positive law,
to make parents destroy a child, which they feel the desire and think
they possess the power of supporting? The permission of infanticide is
bad enough and cannot but have a bad effect on the moral sensibility of
a nation: but I cannot conceive anything more detestable or shocking to
the feelings than any direct regulation of this kind, although
sanctioned by the names of Plato and Aristotle.”

It is a singular fact that Mr. Godwin (_Reply_, p. 70), made a
supposition respecting the number of children that might be allowed to
each prolific marriage. That writer, however, did not enter into any
detail as to the mode by which a greater number might be prevented. The
last check which Mr. Godwin mentions, Mr. Malthus feels persuaded is the
only one which that author would seriously recommend. It is “That
sentiment, whether virtue, prudence, or pride, which continually
restrains the universality and frequent repetition of the marriage
contract.” He says he entirely approves of this check, and adds that the
tendency to early marriage is so strong that we want every possible help
that we can get to counteract it; and therefore he thinks that a system
of equality like that proposed by Mr. Godwin, which tends to weaken the
foundations of private property, and to lessen in any degree the full
advantage and superiority which each individual may derive from his
prudence, must remove the only counteracting weight to the passion of
love that can be depended upon for any essential effect.

Mr. Godwin acknowledges that in his system “the ill consequences of a
numerous family will not come so coarsely home to each man’s individual
interest as they do at present.” Mr. Malthus is sorry to say that from
what we know hitherto of the human character, we can have no rational
hopes of success without this coarse application to individual interest.

In our author’s day it was out of the question for him to be aware that
Mr. Godwin’s hint as to the limitation of the family would come to be
the prominent social doctrine it has since become. In France, among the
respectable classes the production of a large family is now looked upon
as quite a mark of a low state of morality and culture; and so effectual
has this public opinion become in that most remarkable state that the
families of the professional classes are not even two on an average
(1·74). That Mr. Malthus should have considered late marriage as the
only remedy for poverty is easily understood. Experience alone can
enable mankind to judge of how happiness is to be best attained; and it
was doubtless because our incomparable writer on social questions, Mr.
J. S. Mill, had so long resided in France that he could take the decided
stand he did against the large families which cause such terrible misery
in England and Germany. The result of this great prudence among the
better classes of France is well shown by the very small excess of
births over deaths. Thus, in 1879, the increase of population from this
cause was but 92,000, whereas M. Yves Guyot speaks of a total of births
in 1879 in unfortunate Ireland of 887,055, with a total of deaths of
500,348, which gives an excess of births over deaths, in a population of
about five millions, of 386,707. No wonder that Ireland is so fond of
emigration and still so steeped in poverty.

It has recently been contended by the author of the “Elements of Social
Science” that the only way of raising wages and profits in old countries
and making life a desirable thing to all lies in the state making it an
offence, to be punished by a small fine, to bring into an over-crowded
country more than a very moderate average number of children. Mr. J. S.
Mill’s teachings tended in the same direction, and this view of the duty
of the citizen towards his neighbour is fast becoming a piece of
morality accepted by the most thinking and most dutiful portion of
society. When this duty of limiting our offspring, not only to the
income we possess, but also to the powers possessed by the community, of
affording an increase of numbers, becomes a political question, then,
but not until then, will happiness for the masses be possible.

[Illustration]




                              CHAPTER IX.
                             OF POOR LAWS.


In Chapter V. of Mr. Malthus’s book iii., we have these luminous remarks
of his on Poor Laws, which have been so often quoted by statesmen and
philanthropists:—

“It is,” says our author, “a subject often started in conversation, and
mentioned always as a matter of great surprise, that, notwithstanding
the immense sum which is annually collected for the poor in this
country, there is still so much distress among them. But a man who looks
a little below the surface of things would be much more astonished if
the fact were otherwise than it is showed to be, or even if a collection
universally of eighteen shillings in the pound, instead of four, were
materially to alter it. Suppose that by a subscription of the rich, the
eighteen pence or two shillings which men earn now were made up to four
shillings, it might be imagined, perhaps, that they would then be able
to live comfortably, and have a piece of meat every day for their
dinner. But this would be a very false conclusion. The transfer of three
additional shillings a day to each labourer would not increase the
quantity of meat in the country. There is not at present enough for all
to have a moderate share. What would then be the consequence? The
competition among the buyers in the market of meat would rapidly raise
the price from 8d. or 9d. to two or three shillings in the pound, and
the commodity would not be divided among many more people than at
present.

“When an article is scarce, and cannot be distributed to all, he that
can show the most valid patent, that is, he that offers the most money,
becomes the possessor ... and when subsistence is scarce in proportion
to the number of the people, it is of little consequence whether the
lowest members of the society possess two shillings or five. They must,
at all events, be reduced to live upon the hardest fare and in the
smallest quantity.

“A collection from the rich of eighteen shillings in the pound, even if
distributed in the most judicious manner, would have an effect similar
to that resulting from the supposition which I have just made; and no
possible sacrifices of the rich, particularly in money, would for any
time prevent the recurrence of distress among the lower members of
society, whoever they were. Great changes might, indeed, be made. The
rich might become poor and some of the poor rich; but while the present
proportion between population and food continues, a part of society must
necessarily find it difficult to support a family, and this difficulty
will naturally fall on the least fortunate members.”

Malthus mentions that in a great scarcity which occurred in England in
1801, no less than ten millions sterling were given away in charity. In
one case cited by our author, a man with a family received fourteen
shillings a week from his parish. His common earnings were ten shillings
a week, and his weekly revenue therefore twenty-four. Before the
scarcity he had been in the habit of purchasing a bushel of flour a
week, with eight shillings perhaps, and consequently had two shillings
out of his ten to spare for other necessaries. During the scarcity he
was enabled to purchase the same quantity at nearly three times the
price. He paid twenty-two shillings for his bushel of flour, and had as
before two shillings remaining for other wants.

The price of labour, says Malthus, when left to find its natural level,
is a most important political barometer, explaining the relations
between the supply of provisions and the demand for them: between the
quantity to be consumed and the number of consumers: and, taken on the
average, it further expresses clearly the wants of society respecting
population—that is, whatever may be the number of children to a marriage
necessary to maintain exactly the present population, the price of
labour will be just sufficient to support this number, or be above it or
below it, according to the state of the real funds for the maintenance
of labour, whether stationary, progressive, or retrograde. “Instead,
however, of considering it in this light, we consider it as something
which we may raise or depress at pleasure, something which depends
principally upon his Majesty’s justices of the peace. When an advance in
the price of provisions already expresses that the demand is too great
for the supply, in order to put the labourer in the same position as
before, we raise the price of labour; that is, we increase the demand,
and are then much surprised that the price of provisions continues
rising. In this we act much in the same manner, as if, when the
quicksilver in the common glass stood at ‘stormy,’ we were to raise it
by some mechanical pressure to ‘settled fair,’ and then be greatly
astonished that it continued raining.”

“In the natural order of things, a scarcity must tend to lower, instead
of to raise, the price of labour. Many men who would shrink at the
proposal of a maximum would propose themselves that the price of labour
should be proportioned to the price of provisions, and do not seem to be
aware that the two proposals are very nearly of the same nature, and
that both tend directly to famine. It matters not whether we enable the
labourer to purchase the same quantity of provisions which he did before
by fixing their price, or by raising in proportion the price of labour.”

These arguments of Mr. Malthus were a death-blow to the frightful system
of the rate in aid of wages which at the early part of the present
century was fast turning England into the most pauper-ridden country in
Europe.

In Chapter VI. of Book iii., Malthus remarks that, independently of any
considerations respecting a year of deficient crops, it is evident that
an increase of population without a proportional increase of food must
lower the value of each man’s earnings. The food must necessarily be
distributed in smaller quantities, and consequently a day’s labour will
purchase a smaller quantity of provisions. An increase in the price of
provisions will arise either from an increase of population faster than
the means of subsistence, or from a different distribution of the money
of the society.

Speaking of the Poor Laws of 1805, he says: “The Poor Laws of England
tend to depress the general condition of the poor in two ways. Their
first obvious tendency is to increase population without increasing the
food for its support. A poor man may marry with little or no prospect of
being able to support a family without parish assistance. They may be
said, therefore, to create the poor which they maintain; and as the
provisions of the country must, in consequence of the increased
population be distributed to every man in smaller proportions, it is
evident that the labour of those who are not supported by parish
assistance will purchase a smaller quantity of provisions than before,
and consequently many of them must be driven to apply for assistance.

“Secondly, the quantity of provisions consumed in workhouses, upon a
part of the society that cannot be considered the most valuable part,
diminishes the shares that would otherwise belong to the more
industrious and more worthy members, and this, in the same manner,
forces more to become dependent. If the poor in the workhouses were to
live better than they do now, this new distribution of the money of the
society would tend more conspicuously to depress the condition of those
out of the workhouse, by occasioning an advance in the price of
provisions.”

Fortunately for England, says our author, a spirit of independence still
remains among the peasantry. The poor laws are strongly calculated to
eradicate this spirit. “They have succeeded in part: but had they
succeeded as completely as might have been expected, their pernicious
tendency would not have been so long concealed.”

The following paragraph has often been cited by violent democrats as a
proof of the hard-heartedness of Malthus. At present, few of the
ultra-liberal party in this country are ill-instructed enough to
vituperate any one for his opinions in this matter. “Hard as it may
appear,” he continues, “in individual cases, dependent poverty ought to
be held disgraceful. Such a stimulus seems to be absolutely necessary to
promote the happiness of the general mass of mankind: and every general
attempt to weaken this stimulus, however benevolent its intention, will
always defeat its own purpose. If men be induced to marry from the mere
prospect of parish provision, they are not only unjustly tempted to
bring unhappiness and dependence upon themselves and children, but they
are tempted, without knowing it, to injure all in the same class with
themselves.”

It is very probable that the independence of character of the English
labouring classes was fatally lowered by the system Malthus complains
of, for to this very day, in many counties, the following experience of
our author holds good. “The labouring poor, to use a vulgar expression,
seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their
whole attention; and they seldom think of the future. Even when they
have an opportunity of saving they seldom exercise it; but all that they
earn beyond their present necessities goes, generally speaking, to the
alehouse. The poor laws may, therefore, be said to diminish both the
power and the will to save among the common people, and thus to weaken
one of the strongest incentives to sobriety and industry, and
consequently to happiness.”

No wonder that Thomas Chalmers, the great Scottish economist, struggled
so hard against the introduction of the English poor laws into Scotland.
That poor law in Scotland is at present worse administered than it even
is in England, and has done much to create a pauper class. There is,
indeed, but little prospect of another poet like Burns arising in modern
Scotland. “The Cotters’ Saturday Night” was composed when the parish
gave discriminating relief only to the worthy and necessitous.

“These evils,” says Malthus, “attendant on the poor laws seem to be
irremediable. If assistance is to be distributed to a certain class of
people, a power must be lodged somewhere of discriminating the proper
objects, and of managing the concerns of the institutions that are
necessary; but any great interference with the affairs of other people
is a species of tyranny, and in the common course of things, the
exercise of this power may be expected to become grating to those who
are driven to ask for support. The tyranny of justices, churchwardens,
and overseers, is a common complaint among the poor; but the fault does
not lie so much in these persons, who probably before they were in power
were not more cruel than other people, but in the nature of all such
institutions. I feel persuaded that if the poor laws had never existed
in this country, though there might have been a few more instances of
very severe distress, the aggregate mass of happiness among the common
people would have been much greater than it is at present.”

The famous 43rd of Elizabeth, which has been so often referred to and
admired, enacts that the overseers of the poor “shall take order from
time to time, by and with the consent of two or more justices, for
setting to work the children of all such whose parents shall not by the
said persons be thought able to keep and maintain their children; and
also such persons married or unmarried, as having no means to maintain
them, use no ordinary and daily trade of life to get their living by.
And also to raise, weekly or otherwise, by taxation of every inhabitant,
and every occupier of lands in the said parish (in such competent sums
as they shall think fit) a convenient stock of flax, hemp, wax, thread,
iron, and other necessary ware and stuff, to set the poor to work.”

“What is this,” exclaims Malthus, “but saying that the funds for the
maintenance of labour in this country may be increased at will, and
without limit, by a _fiat_ of Government, or an assessment of the
overseers. Strictly speaking, this clause is as arrogant and as absurd
as if it had enacted that two ears of wheat should grow where one only
had grown before. Canute, when he commanded the waves not to wet his
princely foot, did not, in reality, assume a greater power over the laws
of nature. No directions are given to the overseers how to increase the
funds for the maintenance of labour; the necessity of industry, economy,
and enlightened exertion, in the management of agricultural and
commercial capital, is not insisted on for this purpose; but it is
expected that a miraculous increase of these funds should immediately
follow an edict of the Government, used at the discretion of some
ignorant parish officers.”

Mr. Malthus adds to these denunciations of the Poor Law Act of
Elizabeth, as carried out in 1805, the following: “If this clause were
really and _bonâ fide_ put into execution, and the shame attending the
receiving of parish relief worn off, every labouring man might marry as
early as he pleased, under the certain prospect of having all his
children properly provided for; and, as according to the supposition,
there would be no check on population from the consequences of poverty
after marriage, the increase of population would be rapid beyond example
in old States. After what has been said in the former part of this work,
it is submitted to the reader whether the utmost exertions of the
enlightened government could, in this case, make the food keep pace with
the population, much less a more arbitrary effort, the tendency of which
is certainly rather to diminish than to increase the funds for the
maintenance of productive labour.”

In the year 1880 it was found by the census of our most flourishing
colony of New Zealand that the population of those fertile islands had
actually been able to double in eleven years. But, as Mr. Malthus
observes: “After a country has once ceased to be in the peculiar
situation of a new colony, we shall always find that in the actual state
of its cultivation, or in that state which may rationally be expected
from the most enlightened government, the increase of its food can never
allow for any length of time an unrestricted increase of population,
and, therefore, the due execution of the clause in the 43rd of
Elizabeth, as a permanent law, is a physical impossibility.”

One only circumstance, Mr. Malthus seems to think, in the administration
of the English Poor Laws at the commencement of this century prevented
them from plunging the country into ruin. This was the condition that
they contained that each parish should maintain its own poor. “As each
parish,” he says, “is obliged to maintain its own poor, it is naturally
fearful of increasing their numbers, and every land-holder is, in
consequence, more inclined to pull down than to build cottages. This
deficiency of cottages operates necessarily as a strong check to
marriage, and this check is probably the principal reason why we have
been able to continue the system of the poor laws so long.”

Mr. Malthus’ writings made such a powerful impression on the minds of
his contemporaries, that in 1834 an entire revolution took place in the
Poor Laws of England and Wales. Mr. Gladstone, in an admirable speech on
Free Trade, delivered in Leeds in the summer of 1881, refers to the
passing of this Act as the most beneficent change that had preceded the
long and earnest struggle which immediately followed upon the principles
of Free Trade, and which culminated in 1846 in the abolition of the
duties on food supplies. Mr. John Stuart Mill is enthusiastic in his
admiration of the Act of 1834. In his magnificent and well-known chapter
on Popular Remedies for Low Wages (Book ij. chap. 12, § 2.), he thus
speaks of the English Law of 1834:—

“To give profusely to the people, whether under the name of charity or
of employment, without placing them under such influences that
prudential motives shall act powerfully upon them, is to lavish the
means of benefiting mankind without attaining the object. Leave the
people in a situation in which their condition manifestly depends upon
their number, and the greatest permanent benefit may be derived from any
sacrifice made to improve the physical well-being of the present
generation, and raise, by that means, the habits of their children. But
remove the regulation of their wages from their own control; guarantee
to them a certain payment, either by law or by the feeling of the
community; and no amount of comfort that you can give them will make
either them or their descendents look to their own self-restraint as the
proper means for preserving them in that state. You will only make them
indignantly claim the continuance of your guarantee to themselves, and
their full complement of possible posterity.”

“On these grounds some writers have altogether condemned the English
Poor Law, and any system of relief to the able-bodied, at least when
uncombined with systematic legal precautions against over-population.
The famous Act of the 43rd of Elizabeth undertook, on the part of the
public, to provide work and wages for all the able-bodied; and there is
little doubt that if the intent of that Act had been fully carried out,
and no means had been adopted by the administrators of relief to
neutralize its natural tendencies, the poor-rate would by this time have
absorbed the whole net produce of the land and labour of the country.”

“It is not at all surprising, therefore, that Mr. Malthus and others
should at first have concluded against all Poor Laws whatever. It
required much experience, and careful examination of different modes of
Poor Law management, to give assurance that the admission of an absolute
right to be supported at the cost of other people could exist in law and
in fact, without fatally relaxing the springs of industry and the
restraints of prudence. This, however, was fully substantiated by the
investigations of the original Poor Law Commissioners. Hostile as they
are unjustly accused of being to the principle of legal relief, they are
the first who fully proved the compatibility of any Poor Law in which a
right to relief was recognised with the permanent interests of the
labouring class and of posterity.”

“By a collection of facts, experimentally ascertained in parishes
scattered throughout England, it was shown that the guarantee of support
could be freed from its injurious effects upon the minds and habits of
the people, if the relief, though ample in respect to necessaries, was
accompanied with conditions which they disliked, consisting of some
restraints on their freedom, and the privation of some indulgences.”

“Under this proviso it may be regarded as irrevocably established that
the fate of no member of the community need be abandoned to chance; that
society can and therefore ought to ensure every individual belonging to
it against the extreme of want; that the condition, even of those who
are unable to find their own support, need not be one of physical
suffering, or the dread of it, but only of restricted indulgences and
enforced rigidity of discipline. This is surely something gained for
humanity, important in itself, and still more so as a step to something
beyond; and humanity has no worse enemies than those who lend
themselves, either knowingly or unintentionally, to bring odium on this
law, or on the principles in which it originated.”

“In the actual circumstances of every country (says Malthus, p. 180,
Book iii.) the prolific power of nature seems always ready to exert
nearly its full force; but within the limit of possibility, there is
nothing, perhaps, more improbable, or more out of the reach of any
government to effect, than the direction of the industry of its subjects
in such a manner as to produce the greatest quantity of sustenance that
the earth could bear. It evidently could not be done without the most
complete violation of the law of property, from which everything that is
valuable to man has hitherto arisen. Such is the disposition to marry,
particularly in very young people, that if the difficulties of providing
for a family were entirely removed, very few would remain single at
twenty-two. But what statesman or rational government could propose that
all animal food should be prohibited, that no horses should be used for
business or pleasure, that all people should live upon potatoes, and
that the whole industry of the nation should be exerted in the
production of them, except what was necessary for the mere necessaries
of clothing and houses. Could such a revolution be effected, would it be
desirable; particularly as, in a few years, notwithstanding all their
exertions, want, with less resource than ever, would inevitably recur.”

“The attempts,” says our author, “to employ the poor on any great sale
in manufactures have almost invariably failed, and the stock and
materials have been wasted. In those few parishes which, by better
management of larger funds, have been enabled to persevere in this
system, the effect of these new manufactures in the market must have
been to throw out of employment many independent workmen, who were
before engaged in fabrications of a similar nature. This effect has been
placed in a strong point of view by Daniel De Foe, in an address to
Parliament, entitled _Giving Alms no Charity_. Speaking of the
employment of parish children in manufactories, he says, ‘For every
skein of worsted these poor children spin there must be a skein the less
spun by some poor family that spun it before.’ Sir F. M. Eden, on the
same subject, observes, that whether mops and brooms are made by parish
children or by private workmen, no more can be sold than the public is
in want of.”

“It will be said, perhaps, that the same reasoning might be applied to
any new capital brought into competition in a particular trade or
manufacture, which can rarely be done without injuring, in some degree,
those that were engaged in it before. But there is a material difference
in the two cases. In this, the competition is perfectly fair, and what
every man on entering his business must lay his account to. He may rest
secure that he will not be supplanted, unless his competitor possess
superior skill and industry. In the other case, the competition is
supported by a great bounty, by which means, notwithstanding very
inferior skill and industry on the part of his competitors, the
independent workman may be undersold, and unjustly excluded from the
market. He himself is made to contribute to this competition against his
own earnings, and the funds for the maintenance of labour are thus
turned from the support of a trade which yields a proper profit to one
which cannot maintain itself without a bounty. It should be observed in
general that when a fund for the maintenance of labour is raised by
assessment, the greatest part of it is not a new capital brought into
trade, but an old one, which before was much more profitably employed,
turned into a new channel. The farmer pays to the poor’s rates for the
encouragement of a bad and unprofitable manufacture what he would have
employed on his land with infinitely more advantage to his country. In
the one case, the funds for the maintenance of labour are daily
diminished; in the other, daily increased. And this obvious tendency of
assessments for the employment of the poor to decrease the real funds
for the maintenance of labour in any country, aggravates the absurdity
of supposing that it is in the power of a government to find employment
for all its subjects, however fast they may increase.”

It is strange how the present generation begins to forget the truths
that were clearly seen by the one immediately preceding. We have had a
proof of this in the late agitation for Protection _versus_ Free Trade.
And on November 5th, 1881, there was another example so given in the
case of a deputation of ratepayers of Newington, who waited on Mr.
Dodson, the President of the Local Government Board, to ask him to
administer out-door relief instead of building a new workhouse at
Champion Hill, at a cost of £200,000. The deputation, which actually
contained a professor of political economy, Mr. Thorold Rogers, urged
that the system of the workhouse test entailed a cost of 7s. a week to
the parish, whereas, if persons were relieved at home, 3s. or 4s. would
be all that would be required. Well might a French economist write an
essay upon “things that are seen, and things that are not seen”!

Mr. Dodson, in his able reply to this deputation, tried to teach again
the lesson taught by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1834, that the whole
object and system of the Poor Law which was then established in this
country was, that it should be strictly administered, with a view simply
of testing and checking absolute destitution, and no means, no effectual
means, had been devised, of so testing destitution, except by offering
the house: and just in proportion as the poor-law was strictly
administered, so in proportion the entrance to the house was insisted
upon as the condition of relief. In the case of out-door relief it was
impossible absolutely to test the case. Out-door relief could not be
closely watched. They could not tell, when a man received relief, that
he was not receiving aid from other sources, that he was not earning
something for himself, and might possibly, if he were left to his own
resources, earn more. This was a system, he said, which in that way
acted as a check upon exertion and upon providence; and he need not say
that anything which acted as a check on these could not result but in
the increase of pauperism, the demoralisation of the working classes,
and in increased charges upon the ratepayers. Of course, he knew that it
was very tempting, when a case came before them, to relieve a man by
out-door relief. They might give him 1s. 6d. and a loaf, or 2s.; and if
they brought him into the house it would of course cost 4s. or 5s., and
thus the ratepayers would not, for the moment, have so much to pay. But
the system of the workhouse was not so expensive as that, for we knew
that not more than one man in ten would go into the house. Where ten
would accept out-door relief, they could not get more than one or two
who would accept in-door relief. And, besides, they must further
remember this, that if they increased the rates by this system, they
were making the prudent and industrious man, who maintained himself and
his family by his own labour, support the idlers and vagrants who did
not make similar exertions. He knew how tempting it was to wish to save
the money of the ratepayers, and at the same time to gratify the
feelings of humanity to the poor by giving out-door relief, since it
often appeared hard and cruel to compel people to enter the workhouse,
and, as it was said, to “break up their homes.” But he, Mr. Dodson,
reminded his hearers that, as guardians, they had the administration of
the ratepayers’ money, and not the administration of a benevolent fund.
They were not administering a Charity, but were the stewards for the
ratepayers, and were bound to administer the Poor Law in the manner
which, not superficially and for the moment, was the most really
economical. The workhouse test was known by experience to be, in the
long run, the only truly economical and feasible way of administering
relief to the destitute. For what, he asked, was the whole history of
the modern English Poor Law? What was the condition of England before
1830, when that law was loosely administered? It was a system ruinous to
the indigent classes, and destructive to the ratepayers. The Poor Law
Commissioners had shown that the only way in which the people could be
guaranteed against starvation was by enforcing the workhouse test, and
thus avoiding the creation of a pauper class too numerous to be
alleviated.

It is gratifying to find that Mr. Dodson is so well instructed in the
affairs of the office in which he holds sway. Doubtless, he is also
aware of the grand difficulty which opposes all State assistance of the
poor at their own houses, and which consists in the utter recklessness
still so prevalent among the uneducated classes as to the size of their
families. To give out-door relief in the present state of public opinion
would merely be to offer a premium upon large families, and this could,
of course, only result in early death, degradation of the family, and a
relapse into barbarism. Even in Australia it has been found possible to
raise up a pauper class by such unwise out-door doles, which are no
charity at all, but merely a means to degrade and enslave the poorest
classes.

[Illustration]




                               CHAPTER X.
                     WEALTH AS IT AFFECTS THE POOR.


In the seventh chapter of book III. Mr. Malthus criticises an essay of
Adam Smith, on “Increasing Wealth as it Affects the Condition of the
Poor.” The professed object of Adam Smith’s enquiry is the nature and
causes of the wealth of nations. “There is another, however, perhaps
still more interesting (says our author) which he occasionally mixes
with it, the causes which affect the happiness and comfort of the lower
orders of society, which in every nation forms the most numerous class.
I am sufficiently aware of the near connection of these two subjects,
and that, generally speaking, the causes which contribute to increase
the wealth of a state tend also to increase the happiness of the lower
classes of the people. But perhaps Dr. Smith has considered these two
inquiries as still more nearly connected than they really are; at least
he has not stopped to take notice of those instances, when the wealth of
a society may increase, according to his definition of wealth, without
having a proportional tendency to increase the comforts of the labouring
part of it.”

Malthus observes that the comforts of the labouring poor must
necessarily depend upon the funds destined for the maintenance of
labour, and will generally be in proportion to the rapidity of their
increase. The demand for labour, which such increase occasions, will of
course raise the value of labour; and till the additional number of
hands required are reared, the increased funds will be distributed to
the same number of persons as before, and therefore every labourer will
live more at his ease. But Adam Smith was wrong when he represented
every increase of the revenue or stock of a society, as a proportional
increase of these funds. Such surplus stock or revenue will indeed
always be considered by the individual possessing it, as an additional
fund from which he may maintain more labour; but with regard to the
whole country, it will not be an effectual fund for the maintenance of
an additional number of labourers, unless part of it be convertible into
an additional quantity of provisions; and it will not be so convertible
when the increase has arisen merely from the produce of labour, and not
from the produce of land. A distinction may in this case occur between
the number of hands which the stock of a society could employ and the
number which its territory can maintain.

“Supposing a nation for a course of years to add what it saved from its
yearly revenue to its manufacturing capital solely, and not to its
capital employed on land, it is evident that it might grow richer
without a power of supporting a greater number of labourers, and
therefore without any increase in the real funds for the maintenance of
labour. There would, notwithstanding, be a demand for labour, from the
extent of manufacturing capital. This demand would of course raise the
price of labour; but if the yearly stock of provisions in the country
were not increasing this rise would soon turn out merely nominal, as the
price of provisions must necessarily rise with it.”

The question is how far wealth increasing in this way has a tendency to
better the condition of the labouring poor. “It is a self-evident
proposition, that any general advance in the price of labour, the stock
of provisions remaining the same, can only be a nominal advance, as it
must shortly be followed by a proportional rise in provisions. The
increase in the price of labour which we have supposed, would have no
permanent effect therefore in giving to the labouring poor a greater
command over the necessaries of life. In this respect they would be
nearly in the same state as before. In some other respects they would be
in a worse state. A greater portion of them would be employed in
manufactures, and a smaller portion in agriculture. (The present
condition of England in 1882.) And this exchange of profession will be
allowed, I think, by all to be very unfavourable to health, an essential
ingredient to happiness, and to be further disadvantageous on account of
the greater uncertainty of manufacturing labour, arising from the
capricious tastes of man, the accidents of war, and other causes which
occasionally produce very severe distress among the lower classes of
society.”

Mr. Malthus then feelingly alludes to the miserable condition of the
poor young operatives in Manchester in his day, and to the destruction
of the comforts of the family so often caused by the women becoming so
frequently mere _hands_ in mills and quite unacquainted with any
household work. “The females are wholly uninstructed in sewing,
knitting, and other domestic affairs, requisite to make them notable and
frugal wives and mothers. This is a very great misfortune to them and to
the public, as is sadly proved by a comparison of the families of
labourers in husbandry, and those in manufactures in general. In the
former we meet with neatness, cleanliness, and comfort: in the latter
with filth, rags, and poverty, although their wages may be nearly double
those of the husbandman. In addition to these evils we all know how
subject particular manufactures are to fail, from the caprice of taste,
or the accident of war. The weavers of Spitalfield were plunged into the
most severe distress by the fashion of muslins instead of silks; and
numbers of the workmen of Sheffield and Birmingham were for a time
thrown out of employment, from the adoption of shoe strings and covered
buttons, instead of buckles and metal buttons. Under such circumstances,
unless the increase of the riches of a country from manufactures gives
the lower classes of the society, on an average, a decidedly greater
command over the necessaries and conveniences of life, it will not
appear that their condition is improved.”

Mr. Malthus continues: “It will be said, perhaps, that the advance in
the price of provisions will immediately turn some additional capital
into the channel of agriculture, and thus occasion a much greater
produce. But from experience it appears that this is an effect which
sometimes follows very slowly, particularly if heavy taxes that affect
agricultural industry, and an advance in the price of labour, had
preceded the advance in the price of provisions. It may also be said,
that the additional capital of the nation would enable it to import
provisions sufficient for the maintenance of those whom its stock could
employ. A small country with a large navy, and great accommodation for
inland carriage, may indeed import and distribute an effectual quantity
of provisions; but in large landed nations, if they may be so-called, an
importation adequate at all times to the demand is scarcely possible.”

In 1881 the inhabitants of the British Islands had to import food
consisting of live and dead meat, butter, eggs, flour, and wheat, &c.,
at an expense of no less than one hundred and thirty-two millions
sterling, inclusive of sugar, one of the requisites of nutrition, or at
the cost of one hundred and eight millions sterling without sugar. And
yet the price of butter was about 1s. 6d. the pound and meat about 9d. a
pound in London, whilst milk sold for 5d. the quart. Thus we see how
true the words of the great writer on population were, even writing
before the days of steam and electric telegraphs, improvements in the
way of obtaining food supplies that might easily have made food as cheap
here as in New Zealand, had it not been for the excessive birth-rate
that has been going on for the whole of this century in the United
Kingdom.

Mr. Malthus points out that a nation which from its extent and
population must necessarily support the greater part of its population
on the produce of its own soil, but which yet, in average years, draws a
small portion of its corn from abroad, is in a more precarious position
with regard to the constancy of its supplies, than such states as draw
almost the whole of their provisions from other countries. A nation
possessed of a large territory is unavoidably subject to this
uncertainty of its means of subsistence, when the commercial part of its
population is either equal to, or has increased beyond the surplus
produce of its cultivators. “No reserve being in these cases left in
exportation, the full effect of every deficiency from unfavorable
seasons must necessarily be felt; and, although the riches of such a
country may enable it for a certain period to continue raising the
nominal rate of wages, so as to give the lower classes of the society a
power of purchasing imported corn at a high price; yet, a sudden demand
can very seldom be fully answered, the competition in the market will
invariably raise the price of provisions in full proportion to the
advance in the price of labor; the lower classes will be but little
relieved, and the dearth will operate severely throughout all the ranks
of society.

“According to the natural order of things, years of scarcity must
occasionally recur in all landed nations. They ought always therefore to
enter into our consideration; and the prosperity of any country may
justly be considered as precarious, in which the funds for the
maintenance of labour are liable to great and sudden fluctuations from
every unfavourable variation in the seasons.

“But putting for the present, years of scarcity out of the question.
When the commercial population of any country increases so much beyond
the surplus produce of the cultivators, that the demand for imported
corn is not easily supplied, and the price rises in proportion to the
rate of wages, no further increase of riches will have any tendency to
give the laborer a greater command over the necessaries of life. In the
progress of wealth this will naturally take place, either from the
largeness of the supply wanted, the increased distance from which it is
brought, and consequently, the increased expense of importation; the
greater consumption of it in the countries in which it is usually
purchased, or, what must unavoidably happen, the necessity of a greater
distance of inland carriage in these countries. Such a nation, by
increasing industry in the improvement of machinery, may still go on
increasing the yearly quantity of its manufactured produce; but its
funds for the maintenance of labor, and consequently its population,
will be perfectly stationary. This point is the natural limit to the
population of all commercial states. In countries at a great distance
from this limit, an effect approaching to what has been here described
will take place, whenever the march of commerce and manufactures is more
rapid than that of agriculture.”

Malthus takes China as an example, that every increase in the stock or
revenue of a nation cannot be considered as an increase of the real
funds for the maintenance of labor, and therefore cannot have the same
good effect upon the condition of the poor. China, as Adam Smith
remarked, has probably long been as rich as the nature of her laws and
institutions will admit; although, with other laws and institutions, and
on the supposition of unshackled foreign commerce, she might still be
richer, yet, the question is, would such an increase of wealth be an
increase of the real funds for the maintenance of labor, and
consequently tend to place the lower classes in China in a state of
greater plenty?

Malthus contends that if trade and foreign commerce were held in great
honour in China, it is evident that, from the great number of laborers,
and the cheapness of labor, she might work up manufactures for foreign
sale to an immense amount. It is equally evident, that from the great
bulk of provisions, and the amazing extent of her inland territory, she
could not in return import such a quantity as would be any sensible
addition to the annual stock of subsistence in the country. “Her immense
amount of manufactures therefore, she would exchange chiefly for
luxuries collected from all parts of the world. At present it appears
that no labor whatever is spared in the production of food. The country
is rather over-peopled in proportion to what its stock can employ, and
labor is therefore so abundant that no pains are taken to abridge it.
The consequence of this is probably the greatest production of food that
the soil can possibly afford; for it will be generally observed, that
processes for abridging agricultural labor, though they may enable a
farmer to bring a certain quantity of grain cheaper to market, tend
rather to diminish, than increase the whole produce. An immense capital
could not be employed in China in preparing manufactures for foreign
trade, without taking off so many laborers from agriculture, as to alter
this state of things, and in some degree, to diminish the produce of the
country. The demand for manufacturing laborers would naturally raise the
price of labor; but, as the quantity of subsistence would not be
increased, the price of provisions would keep pace with it, or even more
than keep pace with it, if the quantity of provisions were really
decreasing. The country would, however, be evidently advancing in
wealth. The exchangeable value of the annual produce of its land and
labor would be annually augmented; yet the real funds for the
maintenance of labor would be stationary, or even declining; and
consequently, the increasing wealth of the nation would tend rather to
depress than to raise the condition of the poor. With regard to the
command over the necessaries of life, they would be in the same, or
rather worse state than before, and a great part of them would have
exchanged the healthy labor of agriculture, for the unhealthy
occupations of manufacturing industry.”

The observations of the greatest living Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr.
W. E. Gladstone, of late years, have frequently pointed out to us how
very unfair a proportion of the increasing wealth of this country has
been absorbed by the possessors of capital, as compared with that by the
recipients of wages. It may indeed be said, in the words of Mr. J. S.
Mill, that owing to the way in which population has increased in this
century in this country, _pari passu_ with the increase of the wealth of
the nation, it is doubtful whether all the improvements in manufactures
and in instruments for abbreviating manual toil have taken one hour’s
work from the shoulders of the working classes.

“The condition of the poor in China,” says Malthus, “is indeed very
miserable at present, but this is not owing to their want of foreign
commerce, but to their extreme tendency to marriage and increase; and if
this tendency were to continue the same, the only way in which the
introduction of a greater number of manufacturers could possibly make
the lower classes of people richer, would be by increasing the mortality
among them, which is certainly not a very desirable mode of growing
rich.” This argument of our author might convince both the fair traders
and the free traders of this day, that neither free trade, nor
protection, are panaceas against starvation among the poorest classes,
and make them learn the lesson that a small-family system alone can
solve the fundamental question of man’s destiny—how to make the
proportion of mouths to food most favorable.

The argument perhaps appears clearer when applied to China, because it
is generally allowed that its wealth has been long stationary, and its
soil cultivated nearly to the utmost. With regard to any other country
it might always be a matter of dispute, at which of the two periods
compared wealth was increasing the fastest, for Adam Smith, and others
of his followers think that the condition of the poor depends on the
rapidity of the increase of wealth at any particular epoch. Malthus to
this replies that: “It is evident that two nations might increase
exactly with the same rapidity in the exchangeable value of the annual
products of their land and labor; yet, if one had applied itself chiefly
to agriculture, and the other chiefly to commerce, the funds for the
maintenance of labor, and consequently the effect of the increase of
wealth in each nation, would be extremely different. In that which had
applied itself chiefly to agriculture, the poor would live in greater
plenty, and population would rapidly increase. In that which had applied
itself chiefly to commerce the poor would be comparatively but little
benefited, and consequently, population would either be stationary, or
increase very slowly.”

“The condition,” says Malthus, “of the laboring poor, supposing their
habits to remain the same, cannot be very essentially improved, but by
giving them a greater command over the means of subsistence. But any
advantage of this kind must from its nature be temporary, and is
therefore really of less value to them than any permanent change in
their habits. But manufactures, by inspiring a taste for comforts, tend
to promote a favorable change in these habits, and in this way perhaps
counterbalance all their disadvantages. The laboring classes of society,
in nations merely agricultural, are generally on the whole poorer than
in manufacturing nations, though less subject to those occasional
variations which among manufacturers often produce the most severe
distress.”

There are two chapters in Malthus’s second volume devoted to the
consideration of the Agricultural and Commercial Systems about which so
much was written by his contemporaries. Mr. Malthus says in Chapter
VIII. that there are none of the definitions of the wealth of a state
that are not liable to some objections. If the gross produce of the land
be taken as indicating wealth, it is clear that this may increase very
rapidly whilst the nation is very poor, and, wealth again may increase
without tending to increase the funds for the maintenance of labor and
population. “Whichever of these definitions is adopted, the position of
the economists will remain true, that the surplus produce of the
cultivators is the great fund which ultimately pays all not employed in
the land. Throughout the whole world the number of manufacturers, of
proprietors, and of persons engaged in the various civil and military
professions must be exactly proportional to the surplus produce, and
cannot in the nature of things increase beyond it. If the earth had been
so niggardly of her produce as to oblige all her inhabitants to labor
for it, no manufacturer or idle persons could ever have existed. But her
first intercourse with man was a voluntary present, not very large
indeed, but sufficient as a fund for his subsistence, till by the proper
exercise of his faculties he could produce a greater. In proportion as
the labor and ingenuity of man increased, again, the land has increased
this surplus produce; leisure has been given to a greater number of
persons to employ themselves in all the inventions which embellish
civilised life; and, although in its turn, the desire to profit by these
inventions has greatly contributed to stimulate the cultivators to
increase their surplus produce; yet the order of precedence is clearly
the surplus produce, because the funds for the subsistence of the
manufacturer must be advanced to him before he can complete his work.”

“In the history of the world,” says Malthus, “the nations whose wealth
has been derived principally from manufactures and commerce, have been
perfectly ephemeral beings, compared with those whose wealth has been
agriculture. It is in the nature of things that a state which subsists
upon a revenue furnished by other countries, must be infinitely more
exposed to all the accidents of time and chance, than one which produces
its own. No error is more frequent than that of mistaking effects for
causes. We are so blinded by the shrewdness of commerce and
manufactures, as to believe that they are almost the sole cause of the
wealth, power, and prosperity of England; but perhaps they may be more
justly considered as the consequence, than the cause of the wealth.
According to the definition of the economists, which considers only the
produce of land, England is the richest country in Europe, in proportion
to her size. Her system of agriculture is beyond comparison better, and
consequently, her surplus produce is more considerable. France is very
greatly superior to England in extent of territory and population; but
when the surplus produce, or disposable revenue of the two nations are
compared, the superiority of France almost vanishes. According to the
returns lately made of the population of England and Wales, it appears
that the number of persons employed in agriculture is considerably less
than a fifth part of the whole.”

This was written by Malthus in 1806, and it is curious to contrast the
state of matters which now exists in the United Kingdom. In 1881 she
consumed 1,740,000 tons of meat, and only produced 1,090,000 of these
herself. She also consumed 607 millions of bushels of grain, and
produced only 322 millions of these, so that, although her agricultural
skill has greatly increased since the days of Malthus, she imports
nearly half of her grain and one-third of her meat supplies.

Malthus was of opinion that the National Debt of England was chiefly
injurious because it absorbed the redundancy of commercial capital and
kept up the rate of interest, thus preventing capital from overflowing
upon the soil. He thought that thus a large mortgage had been
established on the lands of England, the interest of which was drawn
from the payment of productive labor, and dedicated to the support of
idle consumers. “It must be allowed, therefore, upon the whole, that our
commerce has not done so much for our agriculture, as our agriculture
has done for our commerce; and that the improved system of cultivation
which has taken place, in spite of considerable discouragements, creates
yearly a surplus produce which enables the country, with but little
assistance, to support so vast a body of people engaged in pursuits
unconnected with the land.”

About the middle of the eighteenth century, England, says our author,
was genuinely, and in the strict sense of the economists, an
agricultural nation. With London containing a population of more than
four millions, and our other immense cities, this description of England
is now quite out of place.

About the middle of the last century, says Malthus, we were genuinely,
and in the strict sense of the economists, an agricultural nation. “We
have now, however, slipped out of the agricultural system into a state
in which the commercial system clearly predominates, and there is but
too much reason to fear that even our consumers and manufacturers will
ultimately feel the disadvantage of the change. When a country in
average years grows more wheat than it consumes, and is in the habit of
exporting a part of it, those great variations of price which from the
competition of commercial wealth, often produce lasting effects, cannot
occur to the same extent. The wages of labour can never rise very much
above the common price in other commercial countries; and under such
circumstances England would have nothing to fear from the fullest and
most open competition.”

Our author thinks (chap. ix. book iii.) that if we were to lower the
price of labour by encouraging the import of foreign corn, we should
probably aggravate our evils. The decline in our agriculture would be
certain. The British grower could not, in his own markets, stand the
competition of foreign growers, in average years. Arable lands of a
moderate quality would hardly pay the expenses of cultivation. Rich
soils alone would yield a rent. Round our towns the appearance would be
the same as usual; but in the interior of the country much of the land
would be neglected, and almost universally, where it was practicable,
pasture would take the place of tillage. This state of things would
continue till the equilibrium was restored, either by the fall of
British rent and wages, or an advance in foreign corn, or, what is more
probable, by the union of both causes. But a period would have elapsed
of considerable relative encouragement to manufactures, and relative
discouragement to agriculture. A certain portion of capital would be
taken from the land, and when the equilibrium was at length restored,
the nation would probably be found dependent upon foreign supplies for a
great portion of its subsistence: and unless some particular cause were
to occasion a foreign demand greater than the home demand, its
independence, in this respect, would not be recovered. In the natural
course of things, a country which depends for a considerable part of its
supply of corn upon its poorer neighbours may expect to see this supply
gradually diminish, as those countries increase in riches and
population, and have less surplus produce to spare.

This last remark of Malthus has been verified of late years in Europe,
for countries from which we used some few years back to receive a
considerable amount of our supplies of meat and grain, have now become
competitors with us for supplies of these articles from the United
States and Australasia. And for other countries his further remark holds
true, that the political relations of such a country may expose it,
during a war, to have that part of its supply of provisions which it
derives from foreign states suddenly stopped or greatly diminished; an
event which could not take place without producing the most calamitous
effects. “A nation,” he continues, “in which agricultural wealth
predominates, though it may not produce at home such a surplus of
luxuries and conveniences as the commercial nation, and may therefore be
exposed possibly to some want of these commodities, has, on the other
hand, a surplus of that article which is essential to the well-being of
the whole state, and is therefore secure from want in what is of the
greatest importance. And if we cannot be so sure of the supply of what
we derive from others, as of what we produce at home, it seems to be an
advantageous policy in a nation whose territory will allow of it, to
secure a surplus of that commodity, a deficiency of which would strike
most deeply at its happiness and prosperity.”

Malthus held that there is no branch of trade more profitable to a
country, even in a commercial point of view, than the sale of rude
produce. And here he seems to have disagreed with Adam Smith’s views.
That illustrious writer on Wealth observes that a trading and
manufacturing country exports what can subsist and accommodate but very
few, and imports the subsistence and accommodation of a great number.
The other exports the subsistence and accommodation of a great number,
and imports that of a very few only. The inhabitants in the one must
enjoy, said Adam Smith, a much greater quantity of subsistence than what
their own land, in the actual state of cultivation, could afford. The
inhabitants of the other must always enjoy a much smaller quantity.

Malthus demurs to much of this argument of Adam Smith. For, says he,
“though the manufacturing nation may export a commodity which, in its
actual shape, can only subsist and accommodate a very few, yet it must
be recollected that in order to prepare this commodity for exportation,
a considerable part of the revenue of the country has been employed in
subsisting and accommodating a great number of workmen. And with regard
to the subsistence and accommodation which the other nation exports,
whether it be of a great or a small number, it is certainly no more than
sufficient to replace the subsistence that has been consumed in the
manufacturing nation, together with the profits of the master
manufacturer and merchant, which probably, are not so great as the
profits of the farmer and the merchant in the agricultural nation; and,
though it may be true that the inhabitants of the manufacturing nation
enjoy a greater quantity of subsistence than what their own lands in the
actual state of their cultivation could afford, yet an inference in
favour of the manufacturing system by no means follows, because the
adoption of the one or the other system will make the greatest
difference in their actual state of cultivation. If, during the course
of a century, two landed nations were to pursue these two different
systems, that is, if one of them were regularly to export manufacture
and import subsistence, and the other to export subsistence and import
manufacture, there would be no comparison at the end of the period
between the state of cultivation in the two countries; and no doubt
could rationally be entertained that the country which exported its raw
produce would be able to subsist and accommodate a much larger
population than the other.”

It is a matter, says our author, of very little comparative importance,
whether we are fully supplied with broadcloth, linens, and muslins, or
even with tea, sugar, and coffee, and no rational politician therefore
would think of proposing a bounty on such commodities. “But it is
certainly a matter of the very highest importance, whether we are fully
supplied with food; and if a bounty would produce such a supply, the
most liberal economist might be justified in proposing it, considering
food as a commodity distinct from all others, and pre-eminently
valuable.”

[Illustration]




                              CHAPTER XI.


In Chapter X. Mr. Malthus treats of bounties on the exportation of corn.
He sets out by observing that according to the general principles of
political economy, it cannot be doubted, that it is for the interest of
the civilised world that each nation should purchase its commodities
wherever they can be had the cheapest.

“During the seventeenth century, and indeed the whole period of our
history previous to it, the prices of wheat were subject to great
fluctuations, and the average price was very high. For fifty years
before the year 1700, the average price of wheat per quarter was £3 0s.
11d., and before 1650 it was £6 8s. 10d. From the time of the completion
of the corn laws in 1700 and 1706, the prices became extraordinarily
steady, and the average price for forty years previous to the year 1750,
sunk as low as £1 16s. per quarter. This was the period of our greatest
exportations. In 1757 the laws were suspended, and in 1773 they were
totally altered. The exports of corn have since been regularly
decreasing, and the imports increasing. The average price of wheat for
the forty years ending in 1800, was £2 9s. 5d., and for the last five
years of this period £3 6s. 6d. During this last term the balance of the
imports of all sorts of grain is estimated at 2,938,357.”

Mr. Malthus observes that it is totally contrary to the habits and
practice of farmers to save the superfluity of six or seven years. Great
practical inconvenience generally attends the keeping of so large a
reserved store. Difficulties often occur from a want of proper
accommodation for it. It is at all times liable to damage from vermin
and other causes. When very large it is apt to be viewed with a jealous
and grudging eye by the common people. And in general, the farmer may
either not be able to remain so long without the returns, or may not be
willing to employ so considerable a capital in a way in which the
returns must necessarily be distant and precarious.

Mr. Malthus was in favour of a bounty on the exportation of corn,
because the effect of such a bounty was to repress slightly the increase
of population in years of plenty, whilst it encouraged it comparatively
in years of scarcity. This effect, he maintained, was one of the
greatest advantages which could possibly occur to a society, and
contributed more to the happiness of the labouring poor than could
easily be conceived by those who had not deeply considered the subject.
“In the whole compass of human events,” he says, “I doubt if there be a
more fruitful source of misery, or one more invariably productive of
disastrous consequences, than a sudden start of population from two or
three years of plenty, which must necessarily be repressed on the first
return of scarcity, or even of average crops.” From 1637 to 1700, both
inclusive, the average price of corn, according to Adam Smith, was £2
11s.; yet in 1681 the growing price was only £1 8s. This high average
price, according to Malthus, would not proportionally encourage the
cultivation of corn. Though the farmer might feel very sanguine during
one or two years of high price, and project many improvements, yet the
glut in the market which would follow, would depress him in the same
degree, and destroy all his projects. Sometimes, indeed, a year of high
prices really tends to impoverish the land, and prepare the way for
future scarcity.

In a foot-note in page 264, Chapter X., Mr. Malthus makes the remark
that, “On account of the tendency of population to increase in
proportion to the means of subsistence, it had been supposed by some
that there would always be a sufficient demand at home for any quantity
of corn which could be grown. But this is an error. It is undoubtedly
true that if the farmers could gradually increase their growth of corn
to any extent, and could sell it sufficiently cheap, a population would
arrive at home to demand the whole of it. But in this case, the great
increase of demand arises solely from the cheapness, and must therefore
be totally of a different nature from such a demand as, in the actual
circumstances of this country, would encourage an increased supply. If
the makers of superfine broadcloth would sell their commodity for a
shilling a yard, instead of a guinea, it cannot be doubted that the
demand would increase more than tenfold, but the certainty of such an
increase of demand, in such a case, would have no tendency whatever, in
the actual circumstances of any known country, to encourage the
manufacture of broad cloths.”

In page 267 Mr. Malthus adverts to what has recently been commented upon
by a great French statistician, Mr. Maurice Block, viz.: the danger of a
country becoming too dependent on others for its supplies of food. “A
rich and commercial nation is by the natural course of things led more
to pasture than to tillage, and is tempted to become daily more
dependent upon others for its supplies of corn. If all the nations of
Europe could be considered as one great country, and if any one state
could be as sure of its supplies from others, as the pasture district of
a particular state are from the corn districts in their neighbourhood,
there would be no harm in this dependence, and no person would think of
proposing corn laws. But can we safety consider Europe in this light?
The fortunate condition of this country, and the excellence of its laws
and government, exempt it, above any other nation, from foreign invasion
and domestic tumult, and it is a pardonable love for one’s country,
which under such circumstances produces an unwillingness to expose it,
in so important a point as the supply of its principal food, to share in
the dangers and chances which may happen on the Continent. How would the
miseries of France have been aggravated during the revolution if she had
been dependent on foreign countries for the support of two or three
millions of her people.”

It is instructive to read what was thought might be the magnitude of our
future imports of wheat in 1806. In page 268 Mr. Malthus writes: “We can
hardly doubt that in the course of some years we shall draw from
America, and the nations bordering on the Baltic, as much as two
millions of quarters of wheat, besides other corn, the support of above
two millions of people. If under these circumstances, any commercial
discussion, or other dispute, were to arise with these nations, with
what a weight of power they would have to negociate! Not the whole
British Navy could offer a more convincing argument than the single
threat of shutting all their ports. I am not unaware that in general, we
may securely depend upon people not acting directly contrary to their
interest. But this consideration, all powerful as it is, will sometimes
yield voluntarily to national indignation, and it is sometimes forced to
yield to the resentment of a sovereign. It is of sufficient weight in
practice when applied to manufactures; because a delay in their sale is
not of such immediate consequence. But in the case of corn, a delay of
three or four months may produce the most complicated misery; and from
the great bulk of corn, it will generally be in the power of the
sovereign to execute almost completely his resentful purpose.” This is
the argument of Mr. Block, with respect to our dependence on the United
States for so much of our food supplies. He remarks that it might easily
happen that some party in the United States might take to prohibiting
the export of corn, and in such a case there can be no doubt that the
people of this country would at once be plunged into the severest
trouble with respect to their food supplies. A war with the United
States is of course most unlikely, too, but alas! even such a
catastrophe is possible in the present position of human affairs.

The argument made use of by M. Maurice Block, that, in times of war,
Great Britain may possibly in some future time be in danger of seeing
much of its population starved from want of food supplies, was
anticipated by Malthus in a foot-note in chapter x. He there says:—“I
should be misunderstood if, from anything I have said in the four last
chapters, I should be considered as not sufficiently aware of the
advantages derived from commerce and manufactures. I look upon them as
the most distinguishing characteristics of civilization, the most
obvious and striking marks of the improvement of society, and calculated
to enlarge our enjoyments, and add to the sum of human happiness. No
great surplus of agriculture could exist without them, and if it did
exist, it would be comparatively of very little value. But still they
are rather the ornaments and embellishments of the political structure
than its foundations. While these foundations are perfectly secure, we
cannot be too solicitous to make all the apartments convenient and
elegant: but if there be the slightest reason to fear that the
foundations themselves may give way, it seems to be folly to continue
directing our principal attention to the less essential parts. There has
never yet been an instance in history of a large nation continuing with
undiminished vigour to support four or five millions of its people on
imported corn; nor do I believe that there ever will be such an instance
in future. England is, undoubtedly, from her insular situation and
commanding navy, the most likely to form an exception to this rule; but
in spite even of the peculiar advantages of England, it appears to me
clear that if she continues yearly to increase her importations of corn,
she cannot ultimately escape that decline which seems to be the natural
and necessary consequence of excessive commercial wealth. I am not now
speaking of the next twenty or thirty years, but of the next two or
three hundred. And though we are little in the habit of looking so far
forward, yet it may be questioned whether we are not bound in duty to
make some exertions to avoid a system which must necessarily terminate
in the weakness and decline of our posterity. But whether we make any
practical application of such a discussion or not, it is curious to
contemplate the cause of those reverses in the fate of empires, which so
frequently changed the face of the world in past times, and may be
expected to produce similar, though perhaps not such violent changes in
future. War was undoubtedly, in ancient times, the principal cause of
these changes; but it frequently only finished a work which excess of
luxury and agriculture had begun. Foreign invasions, or internal
convulsions, produced but a temporary and comparatively slight effect
upon such countries as Lombardy, Tuscany, and Flanders, but are fatal to
such states as Holland and Hamburg, and though the commerce and
manufactures of England will probably always be supported in a great
degree by her agriculture, yet that part which is not so supported will
still remain subject to the reverses of dependent states.”

Writing in 1806, Mr. Malthus adds:—“We should recollect that it is only
within the last twenty or thirty years that we have become an importing
nation. In so short a period it could hardly be expected that the evils
of the system should be perceptible. We have, however, already felt some
of its inconveniences; and if we persevere at it, its evil consequences
may by no means be a matter of remote speculation.”

In the eleventh chapter of his third book our author treats of the
prevailing errors respecting population and plenty, and notices some of
the arguments which have this very year (1883) been put forward, over
and over again, by the disciples of Mr. Henry George, an American writer
who has acquired a sudden celebrity for his work on “Progress and
Poverty.” “It has been observed,” says Mr. Malthus, “that many countries
at the period of their greatest degree of populousness have lived in the
greatest plenty, and have been able to export corn; but at other
periods, when their population was very low, have lived in continual
poverty and want, and have been obliged to import corn. Egypt,
Palestine, Rome, Sicily, and Spain are cited as particular examples of
this fact: and it has been inferred that an increase of population in
any state, not cultivated to the utmost, will tend rather to augment
than diminish the relative plenty of the whole society; and that, as
Lord Kaimes observes, a country cannot easily become too populous for
agriculture, because agriculture has the signal property of producing
food in proportion to the number of consumers.... The prejudices on the
subject of population bear a very striking resemblance to the old
prejudices about specie, and we know how slowly and with what difficulty
those last have yielded to juster conceptions. Politicians, observing
that states which were powerful and prosperous were almost invariably
populous, have mistaken an effect for a cause, and concluded that their
population was the cause of their prosperity, instead of their
prosperity being the cause of their population; as the old political
economists concluded, that the abundance of specie was the cause of
national wealth, instead of the effect of it. The annual produce of the
land and labour, in both of these instances, became in consequence a
secondary consideration, and its increase, it was conceived, would
naturally follow the increase of specie in the one case, or of
population in the other. Yet surely the folly of endeavouring to
increase the quantity of specie in any country without an increase of
the commodities which it is to circulate, is not greater than that of
endeavouring to increase the number of people without an increase of the
food which is to maintain them; and it will be found that the level
above which no human laws can raise the population of a country, is a
limit more fixed and impassable than the limit to the accumulation of
specie.”

“Ignorance and despotism seem to have no tendency to destroy the
passions which prompt to increase; but they effectually destroy the
checks to it from reason and foresight. The improvident barbarian who
thinks only of his present wants, or the miserable peasant, who, from
his political situation, feels little security of reaping what he has
sown, will seldom be deterred from gratifying his passion by the
prospect of inconvenience, which cannot be expected to press upon him
under three or four years. Industry cannot exist without foresight and
security. Even poverty itself, which appears to be the great spur to
industry, when it has passed certain limits almost ceases to operate.
The indigence which is hopeless destroys all vigorous exertion, and
confines the efforts to what is sufficient for bare existence. It is the
hope of bettering our condition, and the fear of want rather than want
itself, that is the best stimulus to industry; and its most constant and
best directed efforts will almost invariably be found among a class of
people above the class of the wretchedly poor.”

This remark of Malthus is a reply to those who say that if food were
cheaper and the poor better fed, they would only work as much as was
needed to get a scanty supply of food. Experience in our colonies and in
the United States shows that the fear of want is an incentive to make
the early colonists of a fertile country fervid in their desire to
obtain wealth.

“That an increase of population,” says Malthus, “when it follows in its
natural order, is both a great positive good in itself, and absolutely
necessary to a further increase in the annual produce of the land and
labour of any country, I should be the last to deny. The only question
is, What is the natural order of this progress? In this point, Sir James
Stewart appears to me to have fallen into an error. He determines that
multiplication is the efficient cause of agriculture, and not
agriculture of multiplication; but though it may be allowed that the
increase of people beyond what could easily subsist on the natural
fruits of the earth, first prompted man to till the ground: and that the
view of maintaining a family, or of obtaining some valuable
consideration in exchange for the products of agriculture, still
operates as the principal stimulus to cultivation; yet it is clear that
these products, in their actual state, must be beyond the lowest wants
of the existing population before any permanent increase can possibly be
supported. We know that a multiplication of births has in numberless
instances taken place, which has produced no effect upon agriculture,
and has merely been followed by an increase of diseases: but perhaps
there is no instance where a permanent increase of agriculture has not a
permanent increase of population, somewhere or other. Consequently
agriculture may with more propriety be termed the efficient cause of
population, than population of agriculture, though they certainly react
upon each other, and are mutually necessary to each other’s support.”

“The author of ‘L’Ami des Hommes’ (Mirabeau’s father), in a chapter on
the effects of a decay in agriculture upon population, acknowledges that
he had fallen into a fundamental error in considering population as the
source of revenue: and that he was afterwards convinced that revenue was
the source of population. From a want of attention to this most
important distinction, statesmen, in pursuit of the desirable object of
population, have been led to encourage early marriages, to reward the
fathers of families, and to disgrace celibacy; but this, as the same
author justly observes, is to dress and water a piece of land without
sowing it, yet to expect a crop.” It is curious that so backward is
speculation on this question even in modern France, the most practical
Neo-Malthusian country in Europe, that this year has already seen two
proposals made by learned Frenchmen to encourage marriage and large
families. The first emanated from the son of one of the most
distinguished surgeons of Paris, Dr. Richet; the other from a member of
the French _Corps Legislatif_.

“Among the other prejudices,” says Malthus, “which have prevailed on the
subject of population, it has been generally thought that while there is
either waste among the rich, or land remaining uncultivated in any
country, the complaints for want of food cannot be justly founded, or at
least that the presence of distress among the poor is to be attributed
to the ill-conduct of the higher classes of society and the bad
management of the land. The real effect, however, of these two
circumstances is merely to narrow the limit of the actual population;
but they have little or no influence on what may be called the average
pressure of distress on the poorer members of society. If our ancestors
had been so frugal and industrious, and had transmitted such habits to
their posterity, that nothing superfluous was consumed by the higher
classes, no horses were used for pleasure, and no land was left
uncultivated, a striking difference would appear in the state of the
actual population, but probably none whatever in the state of the lower
classes of people, with respect to the price of labour and the facility
of supporting a family. The waste among the rich, and the horses kept
for pleasure, have indeed a little the effect of the consumption of
grain in distilleries, noticed before with regard to China. On the
supposition that the food consumed in this manner may be withdrawn on
the occasion of a scarcity, and be applied to the relief of the poor,
they operate certainly as far as they go, like granaries which are only
opened at the time that they are wanted, and must therefore tend rather
to benefit than to injure the lower classes of society.

“With regard to uncultivated land,” says our author, “it is evident that
its effect upon the poor is neither to injure nor to benefit them. The
sudden cultivation of it would undoubtedly tend to improve their
condition for a time, and the neglect of lands before cultivated will
certainly make their situation worse for a certain period; but when no
changes of this kind are going forward the effect of uncultivated land
on the lower class operates merely like the possession of a smaller
territory. It is indeed a point of very great importance to the poor
whether a country is in the habit of exporting or importing corn; but
this point is not necessarily connected with the complete or incomplete
cultivation of the whole territory, but depends upon the proportion of
the surplus produce to those who are supported by it; and in fact this
proportion is generally the greatest in countries which have not yet
completed the cultivation of their territory.

“We should not, therefore, be too ready to make inferences against the
internal economy of a country from the appearance of uncultivated
heaths, without other evidence. But the fact is, that no country has
ever reached, or probably ever will reach, its highest possible acme of
produce, it appears always as if the want of industry, or the
ill-direction of that industry, was the actual limit to a further
increase of produce and population, and not the absolute refusal of
nature to yield any more; but a man who is locked up in a room may be
fairly said to be confined by the walls of it, though he may never touch
them; and with regard to the principle of population, it is never the
question whether a country will produce _any more_, but whether it may
be made to produce a sufficiency to keep pace with an unchecked increase
of people. In China the question is not, whether a certain additional
quantity of rice might be raised by improved culture, but whether such
an addition could be counted on during the next twenty-five years as
would be sufficient to support an additional three hundred millions of
people. And in this country it is not the question whether, by
cultivating all our commons, we could raise considerably more than at
present: but whether we could raise sufficient for a population of
twenty millions in the next twenty-five years and forty millions in the
next fifty years.

“The allowing of the produce of the earth to be absolutely unlimited
scarcely removes the weight of a hair from the argument, which depends
entirely upon the differently increasing ratios of population and food;
and all that the most enlightened governments and the most persevering
and best guided efforts of industry can do, is to make the necessary
checks to population act more equably, and in a direction to produce the
least evil; but to remove them is a task absolutely hopeless.”

We have now arrived at the last part of Malthus’s great essay on
population. In Book IV. our author speaks in chapter i. of future
prospects of the removal or mitigation of the evils arising from the
principle of population. He shows that we must submit to the population
law as an ultimate law of nature, and that all that remains for us is,
how we may check population with the least prejudice to the virtue and
happiness of human society. He claims for moral restraint that it is the
least harmful of all the checks. “If we be intemperate in eating and
drinking (he says) we are disordered; if we indulge the transports of
anger, we seldom fail to commit acts of which we afterwards repent; if
we multiply too fast, we die miserably of poverty and contagious
diseases.... The kind of food, and the mode of preparing it, best suited
for the purposes of nutriment and the gratification of the palate, &c.,
were not pointed out to the attention of man at once, but were the slow
and late result of experience, and of the admonitions received by
repeated failures.”

Mr. Malthus then, following Hippocrates, points out that in the history
of every epidemic, it has almost invariably been observed, that the
lower classes of people, whose food was poor and insufficient, and who
lived crowded together in small and dirty houses, were the principal
victims. “In what other manner can nature point out to us, that if we
increase too fast for the means of subsistence, so as to render it
necessary for a considerable part of the society to live in this
miserable manner, we have offended against one of her laws?” After the
desire of food, the most powerful and general of our desires is passion
between the sexes, taken in an enlarged sense. Mr. Godwin had said, in
one of his works: “Strip the commerce of the sexes of all its attendant
circumstances, and it would be generally despised.” To this Mr. Malthus
replies, that Godwin might as well say to a man who admired trees:
“Strip them of their spreading branches and lovely foliage, and what
beauty can you see in a bare pole?” “The evening meal, the warm house,
and the comfortable fire-side would lose half of their interest if we
were to exclude the idea of some object of affection with whom they were
to be shared.”

Few or none, then, of our human passions would admit of being greatly
diminished, without narrowing the sources of good more powerfully than
the sources of evil. The fecundity of the human species is, in some
respects, a distinct consideration from the passion between the sexes.
It is strong and general, and apparently would not admit of any very
considerable diminution without being inadequate for its object. “It is
of the very utmost importance to the happiness of mankind that they
should not increase too fast; but it does not appear that the object to
be accomplished would admit of any very considerable diminution in the
desire for marriage. It is clearly the duty of each individual not to
marry until he has a prospect of supporting his children; but it is at
the same time to be wished that he should retain undiminished his desire
for marriage, in order that he may exert himself to realise this
prospect, and be stimulated to make provision for the support of greater
numbers.

“Our obligation not to marry till we have a fair prospect being able to
support our children will appear to deserve the attention of the
moralist, if it can be proved that an attention to these obligations is
of more effect in the prevention of misery than all the other virtues
combined; and that if, in violation of this duty, it was the general
custom to follow the first impulse of nature, and marry at the age of
puberty, the universal prevalence of every known virtue in the greatest
conceivable degree would fail of rescuing society from the most wretched
and deplorable state of want, and all the diseases and famines which
usually accompany it.”

In chapter ii. Mr. Malthus speaks of the effects which would result to
society from the prevalence of this virtue of moral restraint. “No man
whose earnings were only sufficient to maintain two children, would put
himself in a situation in which he might have to maintain four or five,
however he might be prompted to it by the passion of love. The interval
between the age of puberty and the period at which each individual might
venture to marry must, according to this view be passed in strict
chastity; because the law of chastity cannot be violated without
producing evil. The effect of anything like a promiscuous intercourse
which prevents the birth of children, is evidently to weaken the best
affections of the heart, and in a very marked manner to degrade the
female character. And any other intercourse would, without improper
arts, bring as many children into society as marriage, with a much
greater probability of their becoming a burden to it.”

The phrase, “improper arts,” is the only point on which the so-styled
Neo-Malthusians differ from Malthus. To his modern disciples it seems
abundantly proved, from the experience of France and elsewhere, that
late marriage is not what must be trusted to check population; but a
restraint in the size of families. Mr. Malthus, indeed, seems himself to
recognise the evils of late marriages, for he writes: “The late
marriages at present are, indeed, principally confined to the men; and
there are few, however advanced in life they may be, who, if they
determine to marry, do not fix their choice on a very young wife. A
young woman, without fortune, when she has passed her twenty-fifth year,
begins to fear, and with reason, that she may lead a life of
celibacy.... If women could look forward with just confidence to
marriage at twenty-eight or thirty, I fully believe that, if the matter
were left to them for choice, they would clearly prefer waiting till
this period, to the being involved in all the cares of a large family at
twenty-five.”

Lord Derby, some years ago, truly observed that great emperors did not
like their subjects to be too well off. This remark may have been a
citation from Malthus, where he says: “The ambition of princes would
want instruments of destruction, if the distresses of the lower classes
of their subjects did not drive them under their standards. A recruiting
sergeant always prays for a bad harvest and want of employment, or in
other words, a redundant population.” Mr. Malthus points out that a
society with a low birth-rate will be extremely powerful both in war and
peace. One of the principal encouragements to an offensive war would be
removed, and there would be greater freedom from political dissensions
at home. “Indisposed to a war of offence, in a war of defence such a
society would be strong as a rock of adamant. Where every family
possessed the necessaries of life or plenty, and a decent portion of its
comforts and conveniences, there could not exist that hope of change, or
at best that melancholy and disheartening indifference to it, which
sometimes prompts the lower classes of people to say—Let what will come,
we cannot be worse off than we are now.”

In chapter iii. Mr. Malthus speaks rather gloomily as to the prospect of
Society adopting his recommendation of late marriages, “I believe (he
says) that few of my readers can be less sanguine of expectations of any
great change in the general conduct of men on this subject than I am.”
He proposes it, it seems, in order chiefly to vindicate the character of
the Deity! This is at present known by all scientific inquirers to be a
fallacious argument; and we cannot but contrast with our great author’s
vacillating doctrine, the clear line of duty laid down by the greatest
of his followers, Mr. J. S. Mill, when he says that the happiness of
society is quite attainable, if only it becomes a rule of morals that
the producing of large families in Europe should be looked upon as a
vice.

“Almost everything that has hitherto been done for the poor has tended,
as if with solicitous care, to throw a veil of obscurity over this
subject, and to hide from them the true cause of their poverty. A man
has always been told that to raise up subjects for his king and country
is a meritorious act. In an endeavour to raise the proportion of the
quantity of provisions to the number of consumers in any country, our
attention would naturally be first directed to the increasing of the
absolute quantity of provisions, but finding that, as fast as we did
this, the numbers of consumers more than kept pace with it, and that
with all our exertions we were still as far as ever behind, we should be
convinced that our efforts directed in this way would never succeed. It
would appear to be setting the tortoise to catch the hare. Finding
therefore, that from the laws of nature we could not proportion the food
to the population, our next attempt should naturally be to proportion
the population to the food. If we can persuade the hare to go to sleep,
the tortoise may have some chance of overtaking her.”

In chapter iv., our author replies to some objections. Some of his
critics had said that if his advice were followed, the market would be
rather understocked with labour. To this Malthus observes that “a market
overstocked with labour, and an ample remuneration to each labourer, are
objects perfectly incompatible with each other. In the annals of the
world they have never existed together; and to couple them even in
imagination betrays a gross ignorance of the simplest principles of
political economy.” Mr. Malthus then replies to the oft repeated
futurity argument as follows: “I can easily conceive that this country,
with a proper direction of the national industry, might, in the course
of some centuries, contain two or three times its present population,
and yet every man in the kingdom be better paid and clothed than he is
at present.”

“While the springs of industry continue in vigor, and a sufficient part
of that industry is directed to agriculture, we need be under no
apprehension of a deficient population; and nothing perhaps would tend
so strongly to create a spirit of industry and economy among the poor,
as a thorough knowledge that their happiness must always depend
principally upon themselves; and that if they obey their passions in
opposition to their reason, or be not industrious and frugal while they
are single men, and save a sum for the common contingencies of the
married state, they must expect to suffer the natural evils which
Providence has prepared for those who disobey its admonitions.”

This, then, is the main argument of our author; but, as we have seen, he
fears lest he will not be listened to by the masses, and also sees
clearly enough that his advice to delay the marriage day until funds
have been reserved to meet all demands on the married pair, is not
unlikely to lead to other evils. “A third objection which may be started
(he says) to this plan, and the only one which appears to me to bear any
kind of plausibility is, that by endeavoring to urge the duty of moral
restraint on the poor, we may increase the quantity of sexual vice.”

Malthus finds considerable difficulty in meeting this attack, and few
will be found who will be satisfied with the following reply to this
objection. “I should be extremely sorry to say anything which could be
either remotely or directly construed unfavorably to the cause of
virtue; but I certainly cannot think that the vices which relate to the
sex are the only vices which are to be considered in a moral question;
or that they are even the greatest and most degrading to the human
character. They can rarely or never be committed without producing such
offences somewhere or other, and therefore ought always to be strongly
repudiated; but there are other vices, the effects of which are still
more pernicious; and there are other situations which lead more
certainly to moral offences than the refraining from marriage.”

All of this is beside the question; and our author fell into this kind
of argument precisely because he had no experience as we moderns have of
marriage with small families. This alone of all the alternatives gives
the human race a chance of comfort, love, and family joys. Were it the
custom for all in a country like England to consider it immoral to have
a family exceeding four children, there might doubtless be hope that all
might lead a virtuous life; but Mr. Malthus’ plan of late marriage
necessarily condemns many women to celibacy, and, as he admits, tends to
the degradation of numbers of other women.

Our author continues: “Powerful as may be the temptations to a breach of
chastity, I am inclined to think that they are impotent, in comparison
with the temptations arising from continued distress. A large class of
women and many men, I have no doubt, pass a considerable part of their
lives in chastity; but I believe there will be found very few who pass
through the ordeal of squalid and hopeless poverty, or even of
long-continued embarrassed circumstances without a considerable
degradation of character.... Add to this that squalid poverty,
particularly when joined with idleness, is a state the most unfavorable
to character that can well be conceived. The passion is as strong, or
nearly so, as in other situations, and every restraint on it from
personal respect or a sense of morality is generally removed. There is a
degree of squalid poverty in which, if a girl was brought up, I should
say that her being really modest at twenty was an absolute miracle.
Those persons must have extraordinary minds indeed, and such as are not
usually found under similar circumstances, who can continue to respect
themselves when no other person whatever respects them. If the children
thus brought up were even to marry at twenty, it is probable that they
would have passed some years in vicious habits before that period.”

Had Mr. Malthus been alive at this moment, and travelled as he did in
his lifetime through the rural districts of France, he would have been
the first to admit that the French have given the only solution of the
problem he states so clearly, that has ever been given by any nation.

“If (says our author) statesmen will not encourage late marriages, but
rather the opposite, then to act consistently they should facilitate,
instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of
nature in causing a great infantile mortality. Instead of recommending
cleanliness to the poor, they should cultivate contrary habits. If by
these and similar means, the annual mortality were increased from 1 in
36 or 40, to 1 in 18 or 20, we might probably every one of us marry at
the age of puberty, and yet few be absolutely starved. If, however, we
all marry at this age, and yet still continue our exertions to impede
the operations of nature, we may rest assured that all our efforts will
be vain. Nature will not, and cannot be defeated in her purposes. The
necessary mortality must come, in some form or other: and the
extirpation of one disease will only be the signal for the birth of
another perhaps more fatal. We cannot lower the waters of rivers by
pressing them down in different places, which must necessarily make them
rise somewhere else; the only way in which we can hope to effect our
purpose is by drawing them off.”

“In a country which keeps up its population at a certain standard, if
the average number of marriages and births be given, it is evident that
the average number of deaths will also be given: and to use Dr.
Heberden’s metaphor, the channels through which the stream of mortality
is constantly flowing will always convey off a given quantity. Now, if
we stop up any of these channels, it must be perfectly clear that the
stream of mortality must run with greater force through some of the
other channels: that is, if we eradicate some diseases, others will
become proportionally more fatal.”

“Dr. Heberden, (says Malthus) draws a striking picture of the favorable
change observed in the health of the people of England, and greatly
attributes it to the improvements which have gradually taken place, not
only in London but in all great towns; and in the manner of living
throughout the kingdom, particularly in respect to cleanliness and
ventilation. But these causes would not have produced the effect
observed, if they had not been accompanied by an increase of the
preventive check; and probably the spread of cleanliness, and better
mode of living, which then began to prevail, by spreading more generally
a decent and useful pride, principally contributed to this increase. The
diminution in the number of marriages, however, was not sufficient to
make up for the great decrease of mortality, from the extinction of the
plague, and the striking reduction of the deaths from the dysentery.
While these, and some other diseases became evanescent, consumption,
palsy, apoplexy, gout, lunacy and the small-pox became more mortal. The
widening of these drains was necessary to carry off the population which
still remained redundant, notwithstanding the increased operation of the
preventive check, and the part which was annually disposed of, and
enabled to subsist by the increase of agriculture.”

Mr. Malthus then adds: “For my own part, I feel not the slightest doubt,
that if the introduction of the cow-pox should extirpate the small-pox,
and yet the number of marriages continue the same, we shall find a very
perceptible difference in the increased mortality of some other
diseases. Nothing could prevent this effect but a sudden start in our
agriculture; and should this take place, which I fear we have not much
reason to expect, it will not be owing to the number of children saved
from death by the cow-pox inoculations, but to the alarms occasioned
among the people of property by the late scarcities, and to the
increased gains of farmers, which have been so absurdly reprobated. I am
strongly, however, inclined to believe, that the number of marriages
will not in this case remain the same; but that the gradual light which
may be expected to be thrown on this interesting topic of human inquiry,
will teach us how to make the extinction of a mortal disorder, a real
blessing to us, and a real improvement in the general health and
happiness of the society.”

In these admirable remarks Malthus points out that whenever we make
improvements in the science of health, we must be contented to lessen
the birth-rate, if we would really secure the benefits we might expect.
Thus, if drainage, good water supply, and the extirpation of fevers are
to be of service to us, it must be that we are determined to have fewer
children. For, if we have an equally high birth-rate, and no great
addition to our food supplies from abroad or from our own soil, we must
die inevitably of some other chronic, although different, maladies than
those produced by bad drainage and fevers, or small-pox. In no case can
we have a birth-rate of 40 per 1,000 in an old country, without a high
death-rate.

[Illustration]




                              CHAPTER XII.


In Chapter VI. of Book IV. Mr. Malthus treats of the effects of the
knowledge of the principal cause of poverty on Civil Liberty, observing
at the outset that it may appear to some that a doctrine which
attributes the greatest part of the sufferings of the lower classes of
society exclusively to themselves, is unfavorable to the cause of
liberty, affording, it may be said, a tempting opportunity to
governments of oppressing their subjects at pleasure, and laying all the
blame on the improvident habits of the poor. Our author contends that,
on the other hand, the pressure of distress on the lower classes of
people, with the habit of attributing the distress to their rulers,
appears to him to be the rock of defence, the castle and the guardian
spirit of despotism, affording as it does to the tyrant the unanswerable
plea of necessity.

“The patriot who might be called upon by the love of his country to join
with heart and hand in a rising of the people for some specific
attainable object or reform, if he knew that they were enlightened
respecting their own situation, and would stop short when they had
attained their demand, would be called upon by the same motion to submit
to very great opposition rather than give the slightest countenance to a
popular tumult, the members of which, at least the greatest number of
them, were persuaded that the destruction of the Parliament, the Lord
Mayor, and the monopoly would make bread cheap, and that a revolution
would enable them all to support their families. In this case it is more
the ignorance and delusion of the lower classes of people that occasions
the oppression, than the actual disposition of the government to
tyranny.”

Mr. Malthus observes that the circulation of Paine’s Rights of Man was
said to have done great mischief among the lower and middle classes in
this country: and that might be true; but that was because Mr. Paine in
many important points had shown himself totally unacquainted with the
structure of society, and the different moral effects to be expected
from the physical difference between this country and America. Mobs of
the same description as those collections of people known by that name
in Europe could not at that day exist in America. The number of people
without property was, then, at that time, from the physical state of the
country, comparatively small: and therefore the civil power which was
needed to protect property, did not require to be so large. Mr. Paine
argued that the real cause of riots was always want of happiness, and
maintained that such was always due to something being wrong in the
system of Government. But this is evidently not always the case. The
redundant population of an old state furnishes materials for
unhappiness, unknown to such a state of that of America.

Nothing would so effectually counteract the mischief caused by Mr.
Paine’s Rights of Man (says our author), as a general knowledge of our
true rights. “What these rights are, it is not now my business to
explain: but there is one right which man has generally been thought to
possess, which I am confident he neither does nor can possess, a right
to subsistence when his labor will not fairly purchase it. Our laws (in
1806) indeed say that he has this right, and bind the society to furnish
employment and food to them who cannot get them in the regular market;
but in so doing they attempt to reverse the laws of nature; and it is in
consequence to be expected, not only that they should fail in their
object, but that the poor who were intended to be benefited should
suffer most cruelly from this inhuman deceit which is practised upon
them.”

Malthus adds that the Abbé Raynal had said that before all other social
laws, man has a right to subsistence. “He might just as well have said
that every man had a right to live 100 years. Yes! He has a right to do
so, if he can. Good social laws enable truly a greater number of people
to exist than could without them; but neither before nor since the
institution of social laws can an unlimited number exist. Consequently,
as it is impossible to feed all that might be born, it is disgraceful to
promise to do so.

“If the great truths on these subjects were more generally circulated,
and the lower classes could be convinced that by the laws of nature,
independently of any particular institution, except the great one of
property, which is absolutely necessary in order to attain any
considerable produce, no person has any claim or _right_ on society for
subsistence, if his labor will not purchase it, the greatest part of the
mischievous declamation on the unjust institutions of society would fall
powerless to the ground. If the real causes of their misery were shown
to the poor, and they were taught to know how small a part of their
present distress was attributable to government, discontent would be far
less common.

“Again—Remove all fear from the tyranny or folly of the people, and the
tyranny of government could not stand a moment. It would then appear in
its proper deformity, without palliation, without pretext, without
protection.

“Good governments are chiefly useful to the poorer classes, by giving
them a clearer view of the necessity of some preventive check to
population. And in despotic governments it is usually found that the
checks to population arise more from the sickness and mortality
consequent on poverty, than from any such preventive check.”

Mr. Malthus contends that “the most successful supporters of tyranny are
without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of
the poor, and almost all the evils to which society is subject, to human
institutions and the iniquity of governments. The falsity of these
accusations, and the dreadful consequences that would result from their
being generally admitted and acted upon, make it absolutely necessary
that they should at all events be resisted: not only on account of the
immediate revolutionary horrors to be expected from a movement of the
people acting under such impressions, a consideration which must at all
times have very great weight, but on account of the extreme probability
that such a revolution would soon terminate in a much worse despotism
than that which it had destroyed. Whatever may be, therefore, the
intention of those indiscriminate accusations against governments, their
real effect undoubtedly is to add a weight of talents and principles to
the prevailing power which it would never have received otherwise.”

“Under a government constructed upon the best and purest principles, and
executed by men of the highest talents and integrity, the most squalid
poverty and wretchedness might universally prevail from an inattention
to the prudential check to population, and as this cause of unhappiness
has hitherto been so little understood, that the efforts of society have
always tended rather to aggravate than to lessen it, we have the
strongest reason for supposing that in all the governments with which we
are acquainted, a great part of the misery to be observed among the
lower classes of the people arises from this cause.”

The inference, therefore, which Mr. Godwin, and in latter days Mr.
Hyndman and the Democratic Federation, have drawn against governments
from the unhappiness of the people is palpably unfair, and before we
give a sanction to such accusations, it is a debt we owe to truth and
justice, to ascertain how much of this unhappiness arises from the
principle of population, and how much is fairly to be attributed to
government. When this distinction has been properly made, and all the
vague, indefinite, and false accusations removed, government would
remain, as it ought to be, clearly responsible for the rest, and the
amount of this would still be such as to make the responsibility very
considerable. “Though government has but little power in the direct
relief of poverty, yet its indirect influences on the prosperity of its
subjects is striking and incontestible. And the reason is, that though
it is comparatively impotent in its efforts to make the food of a
country keep pace with an unrestricted increase of population, yet its
influence is great in giving the best direction to those checks, which
in some form or other must necessarily take place.”

The first great requisite, says Mr. Malthus, to the growth of prudential
habits is the perfect security of property, and the next perhaps is that
respectability and importance which is given to the lower classes by
equal laws, and the possession of some influence in the framing of them.
The more excellent, then, is the government, the more does it tend to
generate that prudence and elevation of sentiment by which alone in the
present state of our being can poverty be avoided.

Mr. Malthus was greatly opposed to despotic government; and he remarks
that it has been sometimes asserted, that the only reason why it is
advantageous that the people should have some share in the government,
is that a representation of the people tends best to secure the framing
of good and equal laws; but that if the same object could be obtained
under a despotism, the same advantage would accrue to the community. If,
however, the representative system, by securing to the lower classes of
society a more equal and liberal mode of treatment from their superiors,
gives to each individual a greater personal respectability and a greater
fear of personal degradation, it is evident that it will powerfully
co-operate with the security of property in animating the exertions of
industry, and in generating habits of prudence, and thus more powerfully
tend to increase the riches and prosperity of the lower classes of the
community, than if the same laws had existed under a despotism.

But, says our author, though the tendency of a free constitution and a
good government to diminish poverty is certain, yet its effect in this
way must necessarily be indirect and slow, and very different from the
immediate and direct relief which the lower classes of people are too
frequently in the habit of looking forward to as the consequences of a
revolution. This habit of expecting too much, and the irritation
occasioned by disappointment, continually give a wrong direction to
their efforts in favor of liberty, and continually tend to defeat the
accomplishment of those gradual reforms in government, and that slow
amelioration of the lowest classes of society, which are really
attainable.

The following passage might be well studied in these days of proposed
schemes for land confiscation and communism. “It is of the very highest
importance, therefore, to know distinctly what government cannot do, as
well as what it can do. If I were called upon to name the cause which,
in my conception, had more than any other contributed to the very slow
progress of freedom, so disheartening to every liberal mind, I should
say that it was the confusion that had existed respecting the causes of
the unhappiness and discontent which prevail in society; and the
advantage which governments had been able to take, and indeed had been
compelled to take, of this confusion, to confirm and strengthen their
power. I cannot help thinking, therefore, that a knowledge generally
circulated, that the principal cause of want and unhappiness is only
indirectly connected with government, and totally beyond its power to
remove; and that it depends upon the conduct of the poor themselves,
would, instead of giving any advantage to government, give a great
additional weight to the popular side of the question, by removing the
danger with which from ignorance it is at present accompanied; and these
tend in a very powerful manner to promote the cause of rational
freedom.”

Mr. J. S. Mill, who was more of a Socialist than Mr. Malthus and a
greater optimist, admits that it would be possible for the State to
ensure employment at ample wages to all that are born. But, he adds, if
it does this, it is bound in self-protection, and for every purpose for
which the State exists, to see that no one should be born without its
consent. That is, he seems to favor the framing of a statute directed
against the production of large families.

In suggesting that it would be possible for the State to ensure
employment at ample wages to all that are born, if it only takes care
that too many shall not be born, Mr. Mill differs a good deal from Mr.
Malthus and from many of the _laissez faire_ economists of the school of
Adam Smith. Persons who are great admirers of individual liberty
confound, as is very often the case, the idea of freedom with that of
the right to do wrong. It is quite clear that if in an old country, such
as any of the European States, all classes of society were to engender
as many children as is now done by the poorest and most thoughtless
members, poverty would become as universal as it formerly was, when
mankind were less civilised and had a very low standard of comfort. Mr.
Mill and those who follow him in this contention, among whom is to be
reckoned the author of the “Elements of Social Science,” affirm that,
although it is quite true that a grown-up man or woman should be
perfectly free to live his or her own life so far as relates to
self-regarding actions, it is a confusion of ideas to style the bringing
into life of another human being, an act purely self-regarding. When a
country is over-peopled, or threatened with that greatest of all
calamities, the production, it is held by these able writers, of more
than a very small number of children by any couple is a gross offence
against all who gain their living by toil, since the over-crowding of a
country with human beings makes it very difficult for those at the
bottom of society to get enough even of the coarsest food for themselves
and their families, whilst life is rendered harder for all who have to
gain it by services of any kind. The number of children to a family
among the richer classes in France appears now to be on an average not
quite two to a _family_: whereas the poorer classes in Paris and some of
the less thoughtful districts of France have families of more than six
on an average. London now exhibits the notable fact that, whereas in the
comfortable parishes of Kensington, St. George Hanover Square, St. James
Westminster, and Hampstead, the birth-rate in 1886 was not much above 21
per 1000 inhabitants annually; in the poor parishes of Shoreditch,
Bethnal Green, St. George in the East, and Whitechapel the birth-rate
was 38·6 per 1000 in that year, _i.e._, nearly twice as many children
are born of 1000 persons in the poor quarters as in the rich. As a
consequence of this, the death-rate in the East End is to that in the
West End as 3 to 2. Mr. Mill, and in this I entirely concur with him,
thinks that the State can and ought to discourage the production of
large families by some social stigma, and the author of the “Elements of
Social Science” thinks that some fine might be the penalty for the
production of more than four children by any married pair. This he looks
upon as a far juster way of checking rapid birth-rates than the
Continental plan of preventing the poorest persons from marrying, since
it is not marriage, he observes, but the production of large families,
that the State ought to endeavor to guard against. The mere discussion
in the House of Commons of such a proposition would do an immense deal
of good in this and in all European States, since the poorer classes are
generally anxious enough to do their duty, if they only knew what that
duty was. Of course any penalty for the production of a large family
should fall equally on the rich and the poor, since the miseries
inflicted by the well-to-do parent, who produces a large family, on his
helpless and innocent offspring, in the shape of life-long celibacy, may
fairly be compared with the want of food which such conduct causes among
the poor. And any penalty ought to be very small, because, if not so,
persons might be led to practise criminal abortion or infanticide,
practices most inimical to the welfare and even the existence of
society.

The existence of the Malthusian theory of population was greatly
obscured during the greater part of this century by the writings of the
Free Traders, many of whom, in common with the illustrious leaders of
the movement, Messrs. Cobden and Bright, thought that by means of the
free importation of food, poverty might be entirely put an end to. It
was said by some of the most enthusiastic speakers against the Corn
Laws, that if they were but abolished, the workhouses would soon
disappear; and the United Kingdom would be filled with a numerous and
contented population. This shows how little these eminent men had
considered the immense power of multiplication of the human race. As Mr.
Malthus said, the power of increasing production is, to the power of
reproduction, as the speed of a tortoise is to that of a hare. The
tortoise can only overtake the hare if the swifter animal fall asleep.
Hence, free trade, however admirable in itself, has but little influence
on the life of the poorest inhabitants of an over-crowded country. The
share they get of the productions of the world will always be most
meagre, so long as they increase so rapidly in number by producing
families of ten or fifteen children, and thus courting the positive
check of the lower animals.

Soon after Mr. Malthus wrote his essay, it began to be noticed that in
France families were much smaller, among the respectable classes, than
they were in England; and Mr. Francis Place wrote a pamphlet in which he
pointed this out and recommended the plan in place of the preventive
check of late marriages. His pamphlet and remarks had much influence on
the celebrated Robert Owen, and it is said that the latter
philanthropist made known Place’s views to his workmen at New Lanark, in
Scotland, and it was on that account that that famous socialistic
experiment succeeded so well. Mr. Robert Dale Owen, son of Robert Owen,
emigrated to the United States and was ambassador to Europe from that
country for some years. His pamphlet entitled “Moral Physiology” was a
most eloquent plea for parental prudence, or early marriages and small
families. That pamphlet was written subsequently to one written by Mr.
Richard Carlile, entitled “Every Woman’s Book,” and also to Dr. Charles
Knowlton of Boston’s work, written in 1833, entitled the “Fruits of
Philosophy.”

This last work, in company with those of Owen, Carlile, and Austin
Holyoake, which last was called “Large and Small Families,” were sold
openly for some forty years in London and elsewhere, chiefly by the
Secular party. In the year 1876, the “Fruits of Philosophy” was attacked
as an obscene publication under a new Act of Parliament, called “Lord
Campbell’s Act,” and a Bristol bookseller named Cook was sentenced to
two years’ imprisonment for selling it. Mr. Charles Watts, the London
publisher of the work, was also prosecuted; but, on his submission, he
was allowed to get free with the payment of costs. This did not suit the
views of the more chivalrous of the Secularist party, and accordingly
Mr. Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant, the leaders of that party
in England, issued the work again with a preface, and invited the
authorities to prosecute them. The “Fruits of Philosophy” was sold
openly at 28, Stonecutter Street, London, and as the City authorities
prosecuted, the case was sent up for trial to the Queen’s Bench, where
it was tried before the Lord Chief Justice Cockburn in June, 1877. The
details of this most interesting of all trials are to be found in a work
published by Mr. Charles Bradlaugh, which should be perused by all who
wish to understand how our liberties are gradually acquired. Mr.
Bradlaugh, in his admirable speech, maintained that the advocacy of all
checks to population is lawful, except such as advise the destruction of
the fœtus in utero, or the child after birth. The Lord Chief Justice
admitted the truth of the principle of population, and summed up most
favorably to the defendants; but the jury being quite new to the
question, gave the following verdict: “We are unanimously of opinion
that the book in question is calculated to deprave public morals; but at
the same time we entirely exonerate the defendants from any corrupt
motives in publishing it.” It turned out that the indictment was faulty;
and, on appeal to a higher court, the defendants were set free from the
fine and imprisonment imposed on them by Chief Justice Cockburn, which
he sentenced them to because they went on selling the pamphlet. In the
year 1877 the Malthusian League, a society for the propagation of
Malthusian literature, was inaugurated. In February, 1878, Mr. Edward
Truelove, bookseller, of Holborn, London, was prosecuted by the
authorities of the City of London, for the publication of the Hon. R. D.
Owen’s pamphlet “Moral Physiology,” and another pamphlet entitled
“Individual, Family, and National Poverty.” His case was admirably
defended by Mr. William Hunter, and Mr. Truelove was set free; but a
second trial took place shortly after this at the Old Bailey, and the
jury then gave a verdict of guilty, on which the judge sentenced the
defendant to a fine of £200 and a period of four months’ imprisonment.
Fortunately, Mr. Truelove’s health was excellent, and he supported his
period of imprisonment without injury, emerging from his prison a hero
to all those who understand the immense value of the cause for which he
suffered. No further trials have taken place of such works in London,
although Mrs. Annie Besant’s new pamphlet, the “Law of Population,” and
others have had a quite enormous sale of recent years. In the North of
England and in Scotland, there is still a remnant of the old persecuting
spirit, for a travelling hawker named Mr. Williamson has been imprisoned
at Goole and in Lincolnshire for selling Mrs. Besant’s pamphlet in 1887.
In the same year Dr. Henry Arthur Allbutt of Leeds, published a medical
work called “The Wife’s Handbook,” which gave details of how the size of
a family might be controlled by married people; and the Royal College of
Physicians of Edinburgh in 1887 summoned him in March to come up in
three months time, to show cause why he should not be deprived of his
diploma for this act of common humanity. A host of protests and
petitions were at once despatched to the Fellows of the College, showing
them the gross wickedness of this action of theirs; and the consequence
of this was that up to July, 1887, Dr. H. Arthur Allbutt had heard
nothing more of this atrocious persecution by the governing body of a
noble profession against one of its members for telling the poor how to
get rid of poverty. Hopes are entertained that not only may that body of
physicians withdraw its opposition to Dr. H. A. Allbutt’s work; but that
they may even see fit to act the generous part, and, whilst confessing
their error, ask for forgiveness from outraged humanity.

[Illustration]




                               APPENDIX.


At the Annual Meeting of the Malthusian League in May, 1887, held in
London at the South Place Institute, Finsbury, DR. CHARLES R. DRYSDALE,
President of the Malthusian League, read the Presidential Address, which
contained the following passages:—

To that objection to the Neo-Malthusian propaganda which is usually
successful with timid people, that incontinence would be increased if
the means recommended by New-Malthusians were adopted, Mr. Place says:
“I am of opinion it would not; so much depends on manners, that it seems
to be by no means an unreasonable expectation that, if these were so
improved as greatly to increase the prudential habits, and to encourage
the love of distinction, the master-spring of public prosperity, and if,
in consequence of the course recommended, all could marry early, there
would be less debauchery of any kind. An improvement in manners would be
an improvement in morals; and it seems absurd to suppose an increase of
vice with improved morals.”

Mr. James Mill, a friend of Mr. Place, writing also in 1820, (article
“Colony,” _Encyclop. Brit._) speaks of the question of checking
population rationally as “the most important practical problem to which
the wisdom of the politician and the moralist can be applied.” “If,” he
says, “the superstitions of the nursery were discarded, and the
principles of utility kept steadily in view, a solution might not be
difficult to be found, and the means of drying up one of the most
copious sources of human evil—a source which, if all other sources of
evil were taken away, would alone suffice to retain the great mass of
human beings in misery, might be seen to be neither doubtful nor
difficult to be applied.”

Mr. Francis Place and Mr. James Mill exhibited in these utterances one
of the qualities of true men of science—that is, they were enabled to
foretell truly what has taken place before the end of the century in
civilised countries like England and France. The truth of their
prophecies is shown in the fact that the inhabitants of France, who, at
the commencement of this century, had a birth-rate of 33 children
annually per 1000 of inhabitants, have now one of 26 per 1000; while the
West End of London shows a still lower birth-rate than this—in
Kensington of 20, in St. George, Hanover Square, of 19, and in Hampstead
Parish of 22 per 1000. In France, the low birth-rate is due, as every
intelligent person now knows, to Neo-Malthusian practices and not to
celibacy, for France contains, in every 1000 inhabitants, 140 married
women between the ages of fifteen and fifty, against 133 in this country
and under 128 in Prussia. This prudence among the French population,
since the time of the French Revolution, seems to have been due to a
certain extent to the acquisition of landed property by the masses of
the population, and also to the law of equal inheritance in France,
which prohibits parents from leaving their real or personal estates to
one person. The extreme desire to keep the land in the hands of a few
descendants has made the more respectable of the French peasants the
most careful of Europeans. Thus we find, from an essay by the late Dr.
Bertillon, that in the thirty departments of France where there are the
greatest number of proprietors of land, 285 per 1000 inhabitants, the
birth-rate is only 24·7, against 28·1 in those departments where there
are only 177 proprietors per 1000 of the population. The professional
classes in France are so thoughtful in regard to the number of children
they bring into the world, that they do not have quite two children
(1·75) to a family; whilst the average children to a family in France
does not exceed 3, against 5 in Germany, 4½ in England, 5¼ in Scotland,
and 5½ in poor and distressed Ireland. How true it is, then, what James
Mill and Mr. Francis Place predicted!

Universally we may say of modern Europeans, that the poorer classes are
less prudent in the size of their families; and, indeed, it has been
said by M. de Haussonville (“La vie et les salaires à Paris”) that the
number of children to a family in the poor quarters of Paris is three
times as great as it is in the rich quarters. The same story holds
nearly true in modern London since 1877—_i.e._, since the date of the
trial of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant; for the birth-rate
in Kensington is at present 20 per 1000, against 40 per 1000 in Bethnal
Green, a result which is yearly becoming due rather to small families in
the West End than to late marriages or celibacy, the old-fashioned
causes of lower birth-rates. The celebrated cases of “Regina _v._
Bradlaugh and Besant,” “Regina _v._ Edward Truelove,” and, at this
moment, of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh against the
esteemed and learned physician, Dr. H. A. Allbutt, of Leeds, who is
threatened by that body with expulsion from the list of its members,
because he has published, in a popular work of a practical character,
what has been said so many times, that large families lead to early
death, prostitution, and every horror to which mortality is subject,
have disclosed the fact that there is an idea strongly implanted in the
minds of the majority of mankind, that, if people in general knew,
especially at an early age, what any medical student knows as soon as he
commences to study anatomy and physiology, vice and profligacy would
immediately abound. This is, indeed, a strange idea. Civilisation
differs from savage life mainly in that civilised men know more of
nature than savages; but, just on that very account, civilised people
are more moral than savages. “It is impossible for us to understand,”
says M. Joseph Garnier, “how the counsels of marital prudence can lead
to the abolition of marriage and the debauchery of the young. Has not
prudence the effect of rendering the state of marriage more happy and
more attractive? Youth is encouraged to marriage more easily by the
example of prosperous and wisely managed households than by the example
of households crushed under the tortures of misery.” And M. Villermé,
one of the greatest writers on Health that this century has produced,
mentions that the workmen of La Croix Rouge, Lyons, had, in his day, an
average of only 3¼ children to a family; and that “these workmen were
the foremost in France for behavior and dignity of character.” “The
question is,” says a distinguished Vice-President of the Malthusian
League, Mr. Van Houten, Deputy at the Hague, “whether morality can
demand that a married couple shall have offspring immediately after
their marriage; that constantly, as soon as the mother, after giving
birth to one, is able, a second one should at once succeed the first.
The question is, whether those less blessed with worldly goods must
restrain their desires and remain celibates, because they are unable,
while following the traditional morality, to provide for a family? Or
whether those whose inclination for one another, or whose trust in the
future was too great when their expectations proved deceptive, must be
condemned, in the name of morality, to procreate children who will be
insufficiently fed, tended and educated, and can never become energetic
citizens, or who, if sickly, are born only to descend speedily to the
grave, to be succeeded by others equally unfortunate.” Mr. Van Houten
truly says: “An end must be put to our ignorance of physiology. Everyone
ought to _know_; and it must be left to his own requirements and to his
own judgment what use he will make of his knowledge.”

How dangerous such superstitions as those referred to by Mr. Van Houten
are to the happiness of mankind is best seen in the old civilisations of
Hindostan and China. Owing to certain strange doctrines in those
countries as to the importance of children as a religious duty, the
unfortunate Hindoo people are so terribly over-peopled that a man will
work hard for wages equivalent to six shillings a month. The most
learned of Italian medical writers on health, Senator Paulo Mantegazza,
mentions that his work was placed on the Index by the Pope of Rome in
1863, because he had ventured to recommend to persons afflicted with
hereditary disease, such as insanity or epilepsy, or to excessively poor
people, to marry but to have as few children as possible. When two human
beings (says that author) love each other, and yet from the bad health
of one or both of them there is every likelihood that diseased children
will result, is it a greater fault to engender epileptic, insane, or
scrofulous children, or to prevent such births? Or when, from the
excessive increase of the family itself, human beings are brought into
the world almost inexorably condemned to hunger, to degradation, to
disease, is it a greater sin to limit the number of children or to
increase the sufferings of the human family? What reply ought we to
give? Whilst the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh is displaying
to the denizens of the end of the 19th century, an amount of ignorance
and conventional bigotry which will be incredible to the next
generation, it is remarkable that what is usually considered the most
benighted Church in Christendom, the Holy Catholic Apostolic Roman
Church, has latterly shown evident signs of admitting that
Neo-Malthusian practices, which are so habitually made use of in France,
must at least be acknowledged to be morally innocent. Thus, in 1870, the
Vatican Council was implored by a French priest, Dr. Friedrich, to
reconsider its judgment on conjugal prudence: “and not to cause the
damnation of so many millions of souls by letting the directors
(confessors) lay upon their consciences, commands or prohibitions
impossible to observe. It will be our duty (he exclaims) to search in
the holy books alone for condemnation of the act in question; if it be
found to be forbidden neither by the decalogue nor by the other laws of
God contained in Holy Writ, nor by the apostles, nor by the commands of
the Church assembled in Council General, nor by the Pope speaking _ex
cathedrâ_, we shall say it (conjugal prudence) cannot be condemned by
anyone.” Dr. Friedrich continues: “A learned and holy devotee of a very
austere Order says: ‘I have studied this case with all the powers of my
intelligence and of my conscience, and I have come to this formal
conviction, that we are on the wrong track. To my mind, this act is
enormously below the smallest mortal sin, and it is enormously lessened
by all the motives that provoke it, real motives of health, even of
interest, of family, &c.’” Lastly, he informs us that Rome has enjoined
on confessors to question very little and to dwell as little as possible
upon this subject. Surely, after this, the Royal College of Physicians
of Edinburgh might hesitate! What Rome has done, other churches might
surely do; and I am pleased to say that many excellent members of the
English Establishment are inclined to side with the Malthusian League in
its earnest recommendation to all classes of the community to replace
the heartrending positive checks to population—war, pestilence, and
famine—and the torturing agonies of prolonged celibacy, which Dr.
Bertillon’s statistics show to be so inimical even to longevity, by the
far more humane and rational plan of early marriage conjoined with very
much smaller families than are at the present time the fashion among all
classes. Some check to population we must submit to; and there is not
the slightest doubt in my own mind that the morality of the near future
will look upon the production of large families in European states as
the most anti-social of all the actions of a citizen. Then, and not till
then, will indigence disappear from the face of all civilised society.

[Illustration]

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. Table of Contents added by transcriber.
 2. P. 101, “the clear [?]in  of duty laid down by the greatest of his
      followers” was assumed to be “the clear line of duty laid down by
      the greatest of his followers”.
 3. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
 4. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as
      printed.
 5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.







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