AS Epitomes
Thomas Malthus: The Principle Of Population
Abstract
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Contents Updated: Saturday, 5 July 2008
Thomas Malthus
Thomas Robert Malthus was born near Dorking, February 17, 1766, and, after having been educated by private tutors and at Cambridge, became a fellow of Jesus College and was ordained. He held a curacy for some time, but soon turned to political economy, which was to be his life study. His theory on population, probably suggested by Hume’s Essay on the Populousness of Ancient Nations, was attacked on all hands. In 1805 he became professor of political economy at East India College, Hertfordshire, where he spent most of the remainder of his life. He died Decemher 3, 1834.
0ne of the most persistently misrepresented doctrines, Malthus’s central theory is nothing less moral than that young persons should postpone marriage until they have the means of supporting a family. It is of the first interest in the history of thought that the reading of this great essay should have independently suggested, first to Darwin, and later to Alfred Russel Wallace, the idea of natural selection as a necessary consequence of that struggle for life so splendidly demonstrated by Malthus in the case of mankind. His survey was not comparative, covering the who1e range of life, but was practically confined to one living form. The treatise whose title was An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, was first published anonymously in 1798.
Increasing Population
Since population is capable of doubling itself at least once in every twenty five years, and since the supply of food can increase in only arithmetical ratio, it naturally follows that increase of population must always be checked by lack of food. But, except in cases of famine, this check is never operative, and the chief checks to increase of population are found to be moral restraint, vice and misery.
In spite of these checks, which are always more or less in operation, there is a constant tendency for the population to increase beyond the means of subsistence. Such increase is followed by lowered wages, dearer food and thus a lowered marriage rate and birth rate, and the lowered wages, in turn, induce more agricultural enterprise, and thus means of subsistence become more abundant again.
More abundant and cheaper food, in turn, promotes marriage and increases the population, until again there is a shortage of food, and this oscillation, though irregular, will always be found, and there will be always a tendency for the population to oscillate around the food limit.
Even among savages, where the degradation of women, infanticide, vice, famine, war and disease are active instruments of decimation, it will be found that the average population, generally speaking, presses hard against the limits of the average food. Among modern pastoral nations the principal checks which keep the population down to the level of the means of subsistence are restraint from inability to obtain a wife, vicious habits with respect to women, epidemics, war, famine and the diseases arising from extreme poverty.
In modern Europe, we find similar preventive and positive checks, in varying proportions, to undue increase of population. In England and Scotland the preventive check to population prevails in a considerable degree. A man of liberal education, with an income only just sufficient to enable him to associate in the rank of gentlemen, must feel absolutely certain that if he marry and have a family he shall be obliged to give up all his former connexions.
The woman whom a man of education would naturally choose is one brought up in similar refined surroundings. Can a man easily consent to place the object of his affections on a lower social plane? Two or three steps of descent in society, particularly at this round of the ladder, where education ends and ignorance begins, will not be considered by the generality of people as a chimerical, but a real evil. If society be desirable, it surely must be free, equal and reciprocal society, where benefits are conferred as well as received, and not such as the dependent finds with his patron, or the poor with the rich.
Restricting Birth
Such considerations certainly prevent many of the better classes from early marriage. Others, possessed of weaker judgement or stronger passion, disregard these considerations, and it would be hard indeed if the gratification of virtuous love did not sometimes more than counterbalance its attendant evils. But those who marry in the face of such considerations too frequently justify the forebodings of the prudent. The sons of tradesmen and farmers are exhorted not to marry till they have a sufficient sure income to support a family, and often accordingly postpone marriage till they are far advanced in life. The labourer who earns eighteen pence or two shillings a day, as a single man, will hesitate to divide that pittance among four or five, seeing the risks such poverty involves.
The servants who live in the families of the rich have yet stronger inducements to forgo matrimony. They live in comparative comfort and luxury, which as married men they could not enjoy. The prolific power of nature is very far from being called fully into action in Great Britain. And yet, when we contemplate the insufficiency of the price of labour to maintain a large family, and the amount of mortality which arises directly and indirectly from poverty, and add to this the crowds of children prematurely cut off in large towns, we shall be compelled to acknowledge that, if the number born annually were not greatly thinned by this premature mortality, the funds for the maintenance of labour must increase with much greater rapidity than they have ever hitherto done in order to find work and food for the additional numbers that would then grow up to manhood.
Those, therefore, who live single, or marry late, do not by such conduct contribute in any degree to diminish the actual population, but merely to diminish the proportion of premature mortality, which would otherwise be excessive, and consequently, from this point of view, do not seem to deserve any very severe reprobation or punishment. It has been usual to consider a great proportion of births as the surest sign of a vigorous and flourishing state. But this is erroneous. Only after great mortality, or under very especial social conditions, is a large proportion of births a favourable symptom. In the average state of a well peopled territory there cannot be a worse sign than a large proportion of births, nor a better sign than a small proportion. A small proportion of births is a decided proof of a very small mortality, since the supply always equals the demand for population. In despotic, miserable, or naturally unhealthy countries, the proportion of births to the whole population will generally be found very great.
In Scotland emigration is a potent cause of depopulation, but any thinning out from this cause is quickly neutralised by an increased proportion of births. In Ireland the details of, population fluctuations are little known, but the cheapness of potatoes and the ignorance and depressed, indifferent state of the people, have encouraged marriage to such a degree that the population is pushed much beyond the resources of the country and the consequence, naturally, is that the lower classes of the people are in the most impoverished and miserable state. The checks to the population are, of course, chiefly of the positive kind, and arise from the diseases caused by squalid poverty. To these positive checks have of late years been added the vice and misery of civil war and of martial law.
That the checks which have been mentioned are the immediate causes of the slow increase of population, and that these checks result principally from an insufficiency of subsistence will be evident from the comparatively rapid increase which has invariably taken place whenever, by some sudden enlargement in the means of subsistence, these checks have been in any considerable degree removed. Plenty of rich land to be had for little or nothing is so powerful a cause of population as generally to overcome all obstacles. The abundance of cheap and profitable land obtained by the colonists in English North America resulted in a rapid increase of population almost without parallel in history. Such an increase does not occur in Britain, and the reason to be assigned is want of food. Want of food is certainly the most efficient of the three immediate checks to population.
Population soon increases after war and disease and convulsions of nature, because the food supply is more adequate for the diminished numbers, but where food is deficient no increase of population can occur.
Necessity
Since the world began, the causes of population and depopulation have been probably as constant as any of the laws of nature with which we are acquainted. The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same that it may always 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 obvious and evident to our understandings that we cannot doubt it. The different modes which nature takes to repress a redundant population do not, indeed, appear 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 takes place, the deaths will shortly exceed the births, and that the increase which has been observed for a few years cannot be the real average increase of the population of the country. If there were no other depopulating causes, and if the preventive check did not operate very strongly, every country would, without doubt, be subject to periodical plagues and famines.
The only true criterion of a real and permanent increase in the population of any country is the increase of the means of subsistence, and even this criterion is subject to some slight variations. Other circumstances being the same, 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 this food is divided, or the quantity which a day’s labour will purchase. This happiness does not depend either upon their being thinly or fully inhabited, upon their poverty or their riches, their youth or age, but on the proportion which the population and the food bear to each other.
In modern Europe, the positive checks to population prevail less, and the preventive checks more, than in past times and in the more uncivilized parts of the world, since wars, plagues, acute diseases and famines have become less frequent. With regard to the preventive checks to population, though it must be acknowledged that the preventive check of moral restraint does not, at present, largely prevail, yet it is becoming more prevalent, and if we consider only the general term, which implies principally a delay of marriage from prudential considerations, it may be considered as the most potent of the checks which in modern Europe keep down the population to the level of the means of subsistence.
Equality
All systems of equality which have been proposed are bound to fail, because the motive to the preventive check of moral restraint is destroyed by equality and community of goods. As all would be equal and in similar circumstances, there would be no reason why one person should think himself obliged to practise the duty of restraint more than another. And how could a man be compelled to such restraint? The operation of this natural check of moral restraint depends exclusively upon the existence of the laws of property and succession, and in a state of equality and community of property could only be replaced by some artificial regulation of a very different stamp, and a much more unnatural character.
No scheme of equality, then, can overcome the population difficulty, emigration is only a palliative and poor law relief only a nostrum which eventually aggravates the evils of over population. The poor laws of England tend to depress the general condition of the poor in two ways. Their first obnoxious 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. The poor laws may be said, therefore, to create the poor which they maintain, and as the provisions must be distributed to the greater numbers in smaller proportions, the labours of those who are not supported by parish assistance will purchase a smaller quantity of provisions than before and consequently more of them will require assistance.
Secondly, the quantity of provisions consumed in workhouses by the least worthy members of the community diminishes the food of the more worthy members, who are thus driven to obtain relief. Fortunately for England, a spirit of independence still remains among the peasantry. The poor laws, though calculated to eradicate this spirit, have only partially succeeded. Hard as it may appear in individual instances, dependent poverty ought to be deemed disgraceful.
Such a stigma seems necessary to promote the general happiness of mankind. 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 their children, but they are tempted unwittingly to injure all in the same class as themselves.
Further, the poor laws discourage frugality and diminish the power and the will of the common people to save, and they live from hand to mouth without thought of the future. A man who might not be deterred from going to the ale house by the knowledge that his death or sickness might throw his family upon the parish, might fear to waste his earnings if the only provision for it were casual charity. The mass of unhappiness among common people must be diminished when one of the strongest checks to idleness and dissipation is thus removed, and when institutions which render dependent poverty so lessen the disgrace which should be attached to it. 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.
In view of all these facts I do not propose a law to prevent the poor from marrying, but I propose a very gradual abolition of the poor laws. By means of an extending commerce a country may be able to purchase an increasing quantity of food and to support an increasing population, but extension of commerce cannot continue indefinitely, it must be checked by competition and other economic interference, and as soon as funds for the maintenance of labour become stationary, or begin to decline, there will be no means of obtaining food for an increasing population.
Law of Nature
It is the union of the agricultural and commercial systems, and not either of them taken separately, that is calculated to produce the greatest national prosperity. A country with an extensive and rich territory, the cultivation of which is stimulated by improvements in agriculture, manufactures and foreign commerce, has such various and abundant resources that it is extremely difficult to say when they will reach their limits. There are, however, limits to the capital population of a country—limits which they must ultimately reach and cannot pass.
To secure a more abundant and, at the same time, a steadier supply of grain, a system of corn laws has been recommended, the object of which is to discourage, by duties or prohibitions, the importation of foreign corn and to encourage by bounties the exportation of corn of home growth. Laws which prohibit the importation of foreign grain, though by no means unobjectionable, are not open to the same objections as bounties and must be allowed to be adequate to the object they have in view, the maintenance of an independent supply. Moreover, it is obviously possible, by restrictions upon the importation of foreign corn, to maintain a balance between the agricultural and commercial classes.
The question is not a question of the efficiency or inefficiency of the measure proposed, but of its policy or impolicy. In certain cases there can be no doubt of the impolicy of attempting to maintain an unnatural balance between the agricultural and commercial classes, but in other cases the impolicy is by no means so clear. Restrictions upon the importation of foreign corn in a country which has great landed resources tend not only to spread every commercial and manufacturing advantage possessed, whether permanent or temporary, on the soil, but tend also to prevent those great oscillations in the progress of agriculture and commerce which are seldom unattended with evil.
As it appears that in the actual state of every society which has come within our view the natural progress of population has been constantly and powerfully checked, and as it seems evident that no improved form of government, no plans of emigration, no direction of natural industry can prevent the continued action of a great check to population in some form or other, it follows that we must submit to it as an inevitable law of nature, and the only inquiry that remains is how it may take place with the least possible prejudice to the virtue and happiness of human society.
All the immediate checks to population which have been observed to prevail in the same and different countries seem to be resolvable into moral restraint, vice and misery, and if our choice be confined to those three, we cannot long hesitate in our decision. It seems certain that moral restraint is the only virtuous and satisfactory mode of escape from the evils of over population. Without such moral restraint, and if it were the custom to marry at the age of puberty, no virtue, however great, could rescue society from a most wretched and desperate state of want, with its innumerable concomitant diseases and famines.
Prudential restraint, if it were generally adopted, would soon raise the price of labour by narrowing its supply, and those practising it would save money and acquire habits of sobriety, industry and economy such as should ensure happy married life. Further, postponement of marriage would give both sexes a better opportunity to choose life partners wisely and well. And the passion, instead of being extinguished by the experience engendered by early sensuality, would burn the more brightly because repressed for a time and attained as the prize of industry and virtue and as the reward of a genuine attachment.
Moral Restraint
Moral restraint in this matter is a Christian duty. There are, perhaps, few actions that tend so directly to diminish the general happiness as to marry without being in possession of the means of supporting children. He who commits this act clearly offends against the will of God, for he violates his duty to his neighbours and also to himself, and listens to the voice of passion rather than fulfils the higher obligations of his duty. This duty is intelligible to the meanest capacity. It is simply that he must not bring beings into the world whom he cannot support. When once this subject is cleared from the obscurity thrown over it by parochial laws and private benevolence, every man must see his obligation.
If he cannot support his children they must starve, and if he marry in the face of a fair probability that he shall not be able to support his children, he is guilty of all the evils which he thus brings upon himself, his wife and his offspring. When the wages of labour are barely sufficient to support two children, a man marries and has five or six, and finds himself in distress. He blames the low price of labour. He blames the parish and the rich and social institutions, but he never blames himself. He may wish he had never married, but it never enters into his head that he has done anything wrong.
Indeed, the converse is the case, for he has always been told that to raise up children for his king and country is a very meritorious and patriotic act. The common people must be taught that they themselves in such a case are to blame and that no one has power to help them if they act thus contrary to the will of God. Those who wish to help the poor must try to raise the relative proportion between the price of labour and the price of provisions, instead of encouraging the poor to marry and overstock the labour market. A market overstocked with labour and an ample remuneration to each labourer are objects perfectly incompatible.
It is not enough, however, to abolish all the positive institutions which encourage population, but we must endeavour at the same time to correct the prevailing opinions which have the same effect. The public must be made to understand that they have no right to assistance and that it is the duty of man not only to propagate his species but to propagate virtue and happiness. Our private charity must also be discriminate. If we insist that a man shall eat even if he do not work, and that his family shall be supported even if he marry without prospect of supporting a family, we merely encourage worthless poverty.
We must not put a premium on idleness and reckless marriages, and we must on no account do anything which tends to remove that inequality of circumstances which ought always to exist between the single man and the man with a family.
