Malthus and His Work

CHAPTER I.. First Thoughts, 1798.

FIRST THOUGHTS, 1798.

The Common Caricature—The Essay an Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations—Godwin’s Political Justice and Enquirer—The Two Postulates and Conclusions from them—Condorcet’s Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind—Organic Perfectibility of Man and its Obstacles—Historical Context of the Essay—The Crisis—Pitt’s Poor Bill—Malthus and his Teachers—Success explained—Theology and Metaphysics—Faults of the Essay—Immediate aim secured.

He was the “best-abused man of the age.” Bonaparte himself was not a greater enemy of his species. Here was a man who defended small-pox, slavery, and child-murder; who denounced soup-kitchens, early marriage, and parish allowances; who “had the impudence to marry after preaching against the evils of a family;” who thought the world so badly governed that the best actions do the most harm; who, in short, took all romance out of life and preached a dull sermon on the threadbare text—“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Such was the character of Malthus as described by his opponents.

If an angry man is probably in the wrong, an abusive man is certainly so; and, when not one or two, but one or two thousand are engaged in the abuse, the certainty amounts to a demonstration. We may measure the soundness of the victim’s logic by the violence of the personal attacks made upon him. For most worldly purposes, to be ignored and to be refuted are the same thing.

Malthus from the first was not ignored. For thirty years it rained refutations. The question, as he stated it, was thoroughly threshed out. The Essay on Population passed in the author’s lifetime through six editions (1798, 1803, 1806, 1807, 1817, and 1826); even between the first edition, in 1798, and the second, in 1803, there were more than a score of ‘Replies’; and the discussion was carried on in private correspondence, as well as in public journals and parliamentary speeches. The case was fully argued; and no one who fairly considers the extent of the discussion, and the ability of the disputants, can fail to believe that we have, in the records of this controversy, ample materials for forming our own judgment on the whole question in dispute.

Such a privilege is seldom used. The world has no time to consult authorities, though it likes them to be within reach of consultation. When an author becomes an authority, he too often ceases to be read, and his doctrines, like current coin, are worn by use till they lose the clear image and superscription of the issuer. In this way an author’s name may come to suggest, not his own book, but the current version of his doctrines. Malthus becomes Malthusianism,—Darwin, Darwinism; and if Adam Smith’s name were more flexible he too would become an epithet. As it is, Adam Smith has left a book which “every one praises and nobody reads,” Malthus a book which no one reads and all abuse. The abuse is, fortunately, not quite unanimous; but it is certain that Malthus for a long time had an experience worse than Cassandra’s, for his warnings were disbelieved without being heard or understood. Miss Martineau, in her girlhood, heard him denounced “very eloquently and forcibly by persons who never saw so much as the outside” of his book. This was in 1816; and when at a later time she inquired about him for herself, she could never find any one who had read his book, but scores who could “make great argument about it and about,” or write sentimental pamphlets on supposed Malthusian subjects. This carelessness was not confined to the general public; it infected the savants. Nothing more clearly shows how political economy, or at least one question of it, had descended into the streets and become a common recreation. Even Nassau William Senior, perhaps the most distinguished professor of political economy in his day, confessed with penitence that he had trusted more to his ears than to his eyes for a knowledge of Malthusian doctrine, and had written a learned criticism, not of the opinion of Mr. Malthus, but of that which “the multitudes who have followed and the few who have endeavoured to oppose” Mr. Malthus, have assumed to be his opinion.

The “opinion” so imagined by Senior and the multitude is still the current Malthusianism. A Malthusian is supposed to forbid all marriage. Mr. Malthus was supposed to believe that “the desire of marriage, which tends to increase population, is a stronger principle than the desire of bettering our condition, which tends to increase subsistence.” This meant, as Southey said, that “God makes men and women faster than He can feed them.” The old adage was wrong then: Providence does not send meat where He sends mouths; on the contrary, He sends mouths wherever He sends meat, so that the poor can never cease out of the land, for, however abundant the food, marriage will soon make the people equally abundant. It is a question of simple division. A fortune that is wealth for one will not give comfort to ten, or bare life to twenty. The moral is, for all about to marry, “Don’t,” and for all statesmen, “Don’t encourage them.”

This caricature had enough truth in it to save it from instant detection, and its vitality is due to the superior ease in understanding, and therefore greater pleasure in hearing, a blank denial or a blank affirmation as compared with the necessary qualifications of a scientific statement. The truth must be told, however, that Malthus and the rest of the learned world were by no means at utter discord. He always treated a hostile economist as a possible ally. He was carrying on the work of their common Founder. In the Essay on Population he was inquiring into the nature and causes of poverty, as Adam Smith had inquired into the nature and causes of wealth. But Malthus himself did not intend the one to be a mere supplement to the other. He did not approach the subject from a purely scientific side. He had not devoted long years of travel and reflection to the preparation of an economical treatise. Adam Smith had written his Moral Sentiments seventeen years before his greater work. When he wrote the latter he had behind him an academical and literary reputation; and he satisfied the just expectations of the public by giving them, in the two quarto volumes of the Wealth of Nations, his full-formed and completely digested conclusions and reasonings definitively expressed (1776). Malthus, on the contrary, gained his reputation by a bold and sudden stroke, well followed up. His Essay was an anonymous pamphlet in a political controversy, and was meant to turn the light of political economy upon the political philosophy of the day. Whatever the essay contained over and above politics, and however far afield the author eventually travelled in the later editions, there is no doubt about the first origin of the essay itself. It was not, as we are sometimes told, that, being a kind-hearted clergyman, he set himself to work to inquire whether after all it was right to increase the numbers of the population without caring for the quality of it. In 1798 Malthus was no doubt in holy orders and held a curacy at Albury; but he seems never to have been more than a curate. The Whigs offered him a living in his later years, but he passed it to his son; and we should be far astray if we supposed his book no more than the “recreations of a country parson.” “Parson” was in his case a title without a rôle and Cobbett’s immortal nickname is very unhappy. He had hardly more of the parson than Condillac of the abbé. In 1798 Pitt’s Bill for extending relief to large families, and thereby encouraging population, was no doubt before the country; but we owe the essay not to William Pitt, but to William Godwin. The changed aspect of the book in its later editions need not blind us to the efficient cause of its first appearance.

Thomas Robert Malthus had graduated at Cambridge as ninth wrangler in the year 1788, in the twenty-second year of his age. In 1797, after gaining a fellowship at Jesus College, he happened to spend some time at his father’s house at Albury in Surrey. Father and son discussed the questions of the day, the younger man attacking Jacobinism, the elder defending it. Daniel Malthus had been a friend and executor of Rousseau, and was an ardent believer in human progress. Robert had written a Whig tract, which he called The Crisis, in the year of Pitt’s new loan and Napoleon’s Italian campaign (1796); but he did not publish it, and his views were yet in solution. We may be sure the two men did not spare each other in debate. In the words of the elder Malthus, Robert then, if at no other time, “threw little stones” into his garden. An old man must have the patience of Job if he can look with calmness on a young man breaking his ideals. But in this case he at least recognized the strength of the slinger, and he bore him no grudge, though he did not live to be won by the concessions of the second essay (1803). That Robert, on his part, was not wanting in respect, is shown by an indignant letter, written in February, 1800, on his father’s death, in reply to the supposed slight of a newspaper paragraph.

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