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Title: Anarchism and Malthus Author: C. L. James Date: 1910 Language: en Topics: economics, population, progress, William Godwin Source: Retrieved on 31 August 2010 from http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=labadie&cc=labadie&idno=2917581 Notes: Mother Earth Publishing Association210 East 13th Street, New York
John Stuart Mill, who knew little about the difference between Anarchism
and Socialism, but sympathized with both, as far as he understood them,
has left on record the sentiment that the Malthusian theory, long
considered the fatal objection to Socialism, might prove the strongest
argument in its favor. Being much of that opinion myself, I have long
desired Malthus, a writer of whom everybody talks and whom nobody reads,
to be more generally understood. His life and character strike me as
very irrelevant to his reasonings; but since prejudice always insists on
getting them in, and generally tells lies about them, here is the truth.
Daniel Malthus was the friend and executor of Rousseau. It need not be
said, he was a radical. He was also an author to whom some literary
merit is attributed; but he always wrote anonymously. His social grade
was that of an English “gentleman,” living on an income derived from
some sort of stock. That he was pretty rich, and that he met with
financial reverses, may be inferred from the facts that he passed
through the University of Cambridge as a student in the most expensive
class; but his son, Thomas Robert Malthus, the economist, was sent there
on a cheaper plan; at which time we also find that the family, though
increased, had moved into a smaller house than that where he was born.
Here, during the winter of 1797, the father and son had some arguments
about the merits of Political Justice, a book recently published by
William Godwin (husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, and father-in-law of
Percy Bysshe Shelley). Godwin was an Anarchist of that early
unscientific type which preceded Marx and Proudhon. Like his French
contemporary, Condorcet, he vaguely enertained those ideas to which
Saint Simon about twenty-four years later, gave precision. That
prodigious increase of wealth-producing arts which marked the last
quarter of the eighteenth century was transforming military into
industrial organization. The trades of the soldier, the legislator, the
judge, the jailer, the sovereign, and the hangman, would soon be
discarded as useless by a generation whom commerce was bringing to
understand human solidarity. Commerce itself, by its effect in
cheapening the means of life, would be obliged to make way for
Communism. The Golden Age, the Paradisiacal State, was not only before,
instead of behind us — it was at the door. The courageous optimism which
could think so whein the greatest of popular revolutions was, after
fearful bloodshed, in the act of transformation into a conquering
military despotism, does credit to Godwin’s heart, and his imagination;
and the elder Malthus was delighted. But the younger pointed out
difficulties. In Godwin’s Utopia, life was to be maintained so easily
that the “struggle for existence” (a phrase used by Malthus) would have
ceased; and population, naturally, would increase fast. For things had
by no means come to that in the United States, where the settlers were
still killing Indians and working negro slaves; where they had fought
seven years against a tax, and were in the act of domestic rebellion for
cheap whiskey. Yet even in the United States living was so easy, that
population, aside from immigration, doubled every twenty-five years. No
such rate of increase could possibly continue. As this is a point on
which ignorant critics of Malthus continually blunder, we will try to
get it clear. The ignorant critics speak about destructive effects of
this increase as if these were equally remote with the earth’s falling
into the sun, or the extinction of the sun itself. But anyone who can
use a table of logarithms may convince himself in five minutes that the
progeny of one Adam and Eve, doubling every twenty-five years, would
pack like oranges in a box, not after geologic aeons, but in a few
centuries. Of course no such result is possible. Yet it would evidently
happen but that something hinders. What does? Increase of the
death-rate. This comes in various forms, all horrible to contemplate.
Densely peopled countries, India, China, Egypt, Ireland, are mostly very
liable to famine. Those happier in this respect have had dire experience
that crowding and pestilence go together. Even where these destroying
angels spare to smite for the sins of the people, the mortality of
cities, notwithstanding all their opulence and knowledge, is invariably
higher than that of the poorer, ruder country. But above all other
things, war has been not only a check on over-population, but a proof
that even very ignorant people know a check is needed. That they may not
starve, cannibals fight and eat each other. Shepherds, indeed, cannot
starve while their flocks are fed; for the flocks increase faster than
the men.[1] But the flocks must have food as well as the men; and,
because they increase faster, they reach the limit beyond which they
cannot be supported, sooner. Then the shepherd-peoples also resort to
war. They sweep across three continents under the black banner of
Mahomet, or, perhaps, they are defeated, and almost annihilated, in a
battle like that of Aqua Sextiae, by the richer and more civilized
neighbors whose territories they have invaded. Either way, the problem
of over-population is solved for some time, so far as they are concerned
with it. In agricultural countries, war is less popular. But when a
government able to suppress it through a wide region arises, famine
takes its place, unless the birth-rate be reduced at the same time. A
great object-lesson of the kind had recently been seen in India. The
first of her recorded famines on a large scale occurred under
Aurungzebe, — the first sovereign who really ruled all India. And
observe, this could be attributed to nothing but cessation of war,
which, when famine threatened, had previously offered a more hopeful way
of dying; for, except cessation of war, there had been no important
change in the customs of India to account for so terrible a change in
the results. The alternative of war or famine is likewise so generally
understood that, though backward agricultural peoples are less
pugnacious than the cattle-breeders, war was everywhere, always, the
principal fact in their history, till it ended, as war normally does, in
extensive conquests like those of the Great Moguls. In the highest state
of civilization, where there are important manufactures and extensive
commerce, there is less war than anywhere else. But even so typically
modern a country as England had been at war fifty years in the preceding
hundred, and if we clear our minds of cant about “rights,”
“international law,” “the balance of power,” and other diplomatic
flimflam, we shall find that the true object of a modern war is a
commercial advantage, that nations get ready to fight for a commercial
advantage when the pressure of increasing population makes the advantage
sufficiently necessary, that increase of the population is the
fundamental cause of war, — “teterrima causa belli” — as it always was.
Now, Mr. Godwin is witness that war is the cause of government, slavery,
serfdom, laws, punishments, unequal distribution of wealth. If,
therefore, his Utopia, which is to banish all such things, were
established, it could not last, and we should soon have them all back,
unless a way be found of checking propagation. But, in truth, too much
is conceded in supposing his Utopia established at all. Since men were
cannibals, some slow approaches to it have, indeed, been made. The
tortoise of industry may be tiring out the hares of lust and plunder;
but Mr. Godwin himself shows us that they are a long way ahead of her
still; and to imagine them laid asleep by his Arcadian rhetoric is to
show ignorance of human nature. All which led Malthus Jr. to another
series of reflections. What he called Positive Checks on population —
those which increase the death-rate-are inevitable, if propagation goes
on at American speed, which, under Utopian conditions, it should
surpass. But, generally speaking, it does not go on so fast. There are,
then, Checks on population, of a different sort — Preventive — those
which diminish the birth-rate. It is evident that there are many checks
of this kind — among them vicious practices. But on these, Malthus, a
clergyman, had no mercy. He classed them as Positive Checks, — appearing
to hold, rather dogmatically, that they restrain increase as much by
raising the death-rate as by lowering the birth-rate; nor did he
withhold this censure from the least injurious among them, such as those
afterwards proposed by the Malthusian Socialist, Robert Owen.[2] The
only check which Malthus would admit to be truly Preventive, or
Prudential, is continence. This check is, certainly, far from
inefficacious. The lowest savages, who graze like apes, know, indeed,
nothing about it. But in the stage of hunting nomadism, a young man is
not allowed to marry till the cruel rites of barbarian confirmation have
proved him fit for his father’s trade of war. If he cannot pass, he is
good for nothing but a priest; and where priests do not fight (as
sometimes they do) the general rule is that they are celibates. Among
cattleraising nomads, polygamy prevails; and men who are not smart
enough to acquire stock can get no wives. In the agricultural state, and
still more the commercial, it is mere commonplace that to marry without
the means of supporting a family is imprudent. Thus, from the lowest
conditions of man to the highest, we find celibacy increasing uniformly
with civilization, except as superstition sometimes intervenes to cause
a factitious increase, which, we may suspect of being rather apparent
than real. In that increasing celibacy whose causes are economic, much,
no doubt, is loose; but much is genuine. It requires some force of
character, some foresight, some judgment, to do what Jacob did for
Rachel. Yet this is what many young men do in all social states, from
the nomadic shepherd’s upwards, but increasingly. If the qualities they
show be among those which make success in the battle of life, as they
very clearly are, has not Godwin’s materialistic philosophy confounded
effect with cause? Is it not this improvement of habits which has made
increase in wealth and knowledge? If the latter fails, as we see it has
so far failed, to “substitute the industrial régime for the military,”
is not that because the improvement of habits is by no means as general
as are some of its superficial effects? A beggar may be made more
comfortable in London than a king in Darkest Africa; but there is no
making- a fool anything else than a fool, or saving him from being
pushed to the worst place among competitors wherever he may happen to
live.
From these discussions sprang the famous essay of Malthus which was
published in 1798. The prodigious sensation which it immediately
produced caused five editions to follow during the author’s life. The
second, and most important, appeared in 1803. This book, with
expansions, revisions, replies to critics, — in short, the subject of
this book, variously handled — is coextensive with Maithus’ literary
activity. (He had, indeed, written an earlier pamphlet called The
Crisis, in defense of Pitt’s administration; but, by his father’s
advice, he kept it out of print.) The first edition of the Essay
described its topic as the Principle of Population viewed with relation
to, the Future Improvement of Mankind. The motive of a critique on
Godwin’s Political Justice was still in Malthus’ mind. He had also
another reason for introducing his study in this way. Professing to be a
Christian, and having recently taken holy orders, he knew well enough
that he would be attacked on the ground of impugning the Divine
goodness; and that no one would be so savage as his fellow-priests for
this and other reasons. He, therefore, must have his theory about the
future improvement of mankind, which, if not so rose-colored as
Godwin’s, must be sufficient for the pious purpose of vindicating the
ways of God to man. Malthus professes, accordingly, to desire the future
improvement of mankind as much as Godwin can desire it. The only
question between them is about practicable. means. Having argued as
above that Godwin’s Utopia, if set up, would fall; and, moreover, that
it could not be set up, without a radical change in regard to an
important relation which Godwin had forgotten to mention; Maithus
proceeds to contend that his law of population, though it may seem hard
to rebellious flesh, is in truth, the law of human progress from the
brute state of the lowest savage upwards. As distinctly as his most
illustrious pupil, Darwin, does Malthus perceive that “the struggle for
existence” is what makes us progressively better fitted to exist. It is
also what makes us more worthy. Terrible as have been the struggles, it
is to them we owe it that we are not picking worms out of rotten trees,
or ranging the sea-shore for carrion. It is because our ancestors were
cannibals that they have, everywhere except in the most inaccessible
jungles and islands, exterminated those weaker brothers of theirs who
could be content with wild fruits or dead fish. That, as here, so at
every later step in the struggle, whether between nations or
individuals, the world has been made better by the success of the
strongest, bravest, and shrewdest, can scarcely, indeed, be disputed,
but it will not be adequately understood without our realizing that the
improvement has been moral, no less than physical and intellectual. On a
general view, it seems evident enough that the vices — sloth, cowardice,
conceit, spite, envy, vanity, ill-temper, gluttony, lasciviousness, —
are decided handicaps in the struggle, which must be, and are, wearing
down, through the ill-success of those in whom they principally prevail.
Of two only — avarice and falsehood — can it be pretended that they help
anyone to outdo competitors. But too much is allowed in granting that
they generally do. They may help an individual on a pinch. But compare
nations, classes, sects, parties, whose lives are longer than those of
individuals — nay, compare, not two but many, individuals — and it will
be clear enough that neither piggishness nor rascality pays; that
cunning, though an advantage in itself, is no such advantage as a
reputation for veracity; that though generosity is often imprudent, it
is not prudent to lack generosity. And thus the cynical saying that
prudence is the only virtue God rewards, may be transfigured into this
reverent sentiment that all the virtues can be deduced from the premises
of one who will grant a sure reward to even prudence. Thus the actual
causes of past improvement guide us to the process of future. The
general direction is that in which Godwin can see no obstacles. War,
slavery, punishments, inequalities of fortune and station, and the
passions which cause them, are very bad things, to be avoided by every
man, for himself, no less than for the sake of humanity. The man who
will not fight if he can help it, is wiser than the bully. But it does
not do to forget that the best-tempered men will fight for life and
those things without which life is worthless; that it is the direction
of advantage in such necessary strife which has displaced those who
thought fighting a sufficient end by those who very reluctantly adopt it
as a means; that the one great error, of imprudence in giving life
before providing material to support life, will continue, as long as
committed, to make the struggle for existence inevitable. In the second
edition of the Essay, all this elaborate Theodice disappears.[3] So do
many rhetorical passages, chief among them the famous one about
“Nature’s mighty feast,” which all the world quotes, and generally
garbles. There was a reason for this change. Malthus was now a famous
man. Attacks on his doctrines from the side of superstition had come, of
course; but they did not amount to as much as he expected; and he had
ceased to care for them.[4] By Socialists, if the term at this early
date be proper, his work had been rather well received than otherwise —
Godwin particularly using expressions which implied that he had learned
by it; as, from his life and associations we should infer, he easily
might. The day when demolishing Malthus appeared a part of every
radical’s appointed task, did not come till Ricardo (died 1823) had
drawn certain inferences from the theory of Malthus, about which more
anon. Of more interest to Malthus’ scientific mind were criticisms on
statistical and other positive grounds. He determined, therefore, in
revising his Essay, to keep strictly within facts. Even the title was
altered accordingly. His subject is declared to be, not the future
improvement, but the past history and present prospects of mankind. In
the substance of his reasoning there was one modification which his
opponents naturally worked for all it was worth. In the edition of 1798
he had described the positive checks on population as “Vice and Misery,”
the preventive as based upon “the fear of them.” A criticism, in which
he admitted force, was that he had said nothing about hope. Ambition,
the desire of improving one’s condition, is certainly a chief cause of
continence, and this is something more than fear of vice and misery for
oneself or his posterity. Acknowledging this, the tone of theorizing is
certainly more optimistic than before. This change in Malthus’ language,
rather than his meaning, together with the confession that he should
have been more explicit at first, is the basis of the criticism often
made by Coleridge and others, that the theory is a truism from which
nothing can be inferred. That it is no truism, but an extremely
complicated equation, may certainly be inferred from the facility with
which critics misunderstand it, the multiplicity of ways in which they
manage to do that, and the oft-recurring argument ad verecundum — it is
very strange that Menu, Confucius, Moses, Solon, Cato, even the ascetic
Roman Catholic publicists, should have held up increasing the species as
a sacred duty; and that discovering the direful results of doing so
should have been reserved for Malthus![5] Of the four subsequent
editions, nothing need be said here, except that they become
progressively more statistical, comprehensive, and bald, until even
friendly critics thought he would have been clearer for taking less
pains to be clear.
Amidst all these changes, which quite amount to making the book a new
one, there is no wavering about the “main principle,” as Malthus termed
it. The “main principle,” or Malthusian Theory, properly so-called, may
be boiled down to this, that increase of the Positive Check (premature
deaths) can be averted only by increase of the Prudential Check (fewer
births). Its arithmetical self-evidence needs no further exposition, if
the American figures, on which it was founded, be correct. In this
respect it is characteristic of the author. Malthus was not a very
consecutive thinker or lucid writer, though in his youth he was a florid
one; but figures were his strong point (he came out of Cambridge with
the high mathematical rank of Ninth Wrangler). His description of human
increase in America as “geometrical” and increase of food as
“arithmetical” has been pronounced affectedly technical by one of his
few really competent reviewers (Mill); but it is not without
justification. Population, doubling every twenty-five years, does not
increase in a very rapid geometric ratio, like the pennies paid for
nails in the problem of the horse’s shoes. Let such a population live,
as long as it can, on flocks and herds, grain, commissions in exchange,
or what you will; all, except perhaps the last, also increase in a
geometric ratio, and faster than men, thus making their increase at the
old rate practicable — true; while there is vacant land to be exploited;
but how long will that be? The increase of land in pasture; of grain,
under the intensest culture; of commerce, while the continents are being
developed, is not, for want of land, at a geometrical rate — we put it
high in supposing it arithmetical, thus: —
Evidently, too, the principle is highly important. Not to mention “the
future improvement of mankind,” if their “present prospect” be that
forbearance from unchecked indulgence in an appetite they share with
brutes is the only alternative from the double agony of unwelcome births
and premature deaths: if “their past history” have for its key-note
excessive births, necessitating premature deaths, by sacrifice to
Moloch, as in Syria; legal infanticide, as at Rome; illicit infanticide,
as in China;[6] abortion; famine; pestilence; war; the miseries and
disgraces of slavery, which, in all its forms, is the result of war;
between which propositions the first is mathematically demonstrable, and
the other historically notorious; then recalcitration against the moral
is the mark of a brute; the laws which still do in some measure
encourage masculine sensuality, feminine dependence, and their hideous
consequences, are the brutal laws of barbarians, who wanted food for
powder because, like other men, they sought to gratify their desires
with the least exertion, and because plunder is, in the barbarous state,
the easiest way to live; nor can the voluble individual who, in our
time, praises their polity, escape being deemed a brute on any ground
but the contemptuous one that he is only an ignorant sensationalist.
Most assuredly, the whimper that Malthus attributes “vice and misery to
a natural instinct with which are linked the purest and sweetest
affections,” deserves no sympathy from one whose estimate of women’s
rights and duties is at all above the Rooseveltian standard.
Men, however, are not easily convinced of what they do not wish to
believe. The windows of heaven have rained refutations upon Malthus for,
now, a hundred and ten years. That the refutations do not refute is
shown by the fact that they continue to rain. But though the shower
gives no sign of slackening, originality in making the missiles was
exhausted long ago. The modern student not only keeps his refutations of
Malthus on the same shelf with his reconciliations of Genesis and
geology, but knows, as soon as he looks into one, on what part of the
shelf to put it.
Among refuters of Malthus we have specified two kinds, those who say the
theory is a truism, and those who arraign it on some such a priori
ground as impiety; being “dangerous to morals”; being pessimistic; being
a stock argument of Tories and the privileged classes, — concerning
which we shall say more.[7] A third class of refuters, probably as
numerous as the rest put together, are the eclectics, who reproduce all
the arguments of previous anti-Malthusians, without perceiving that they
contradict each other. There are also many who attempt a reductio ad
absurdum, and succeed triumphantly — in making themselves absurd. Such
are those who accuse Malthus of representing vice and misery as rather
good things than otherwise; of supposing we are in danger of an actual
squeeze (!) of recommending infanticide, against which we have seen that
he discovered a new argument; of being refuted by all the wisdom of
antiquity. These are not always easy to distinguish from the a priori
critics; but there is this important difference that Messrs. a priori
fairly understand what Malthus meant, while the reducer to absurdity
always misunderstands him grossly. A common case, which also illustrates
the complexity of his alleged truism and the ease with which it can be
misunderstood, is that of the man who asks for proof that population
does increase, and reminds us of fishers washing their nets upon the
rock of Tyre, or jackals howling among the ruins of Babylon. Now,
Malthus never said that population on the whole did increase — not that
I doubt it, but I might, without contradicting Malthus. He said that
there was a powerful human instinct which tends to increase population;
and therefore (which is an important point) that it must increase —
unless the Positive Check or the Prudential hinders. But he was not so
ignorant of what either can do as to be unaware that celibacy like that
of the Roman Empire, especially after it became Christian, or a
visitation like the Black Death, may diminish population very fast.
The theory of Malthus has, a good long while ago, converted all writers
worthy to be called economists, all biologists, and all historians. Its
first victories were among those emphatically to be designated as the
men of his own time. The great party which had ruled England without
intermission from 1715 to 1760, was breaking in the vortex of the French
Revolution. Those among the Old Whigs who followed Burke and Pitt soon
came to be indistinguishable from the Tories, whose ashes were warmed
into life by a sympathetic reign and by the extinction of their evil
genius, the exiled House of Stuart. Malthus’ place as a politician was
among the New Whigs, whose importance began when the Napoleonic wars
were over — with those who abolished slavery; repealed the Corn Laws;
put an end to imprisonment for debt; took away the political
disabilities of Jews, Catholics, and Dissenters; reformed the
representative system; swept away the Draconian penal code; established
the policy of peace. He deserves to be called a Liberal, because he was
in favor of everything good which was ripe enough to be done during his
own literary period; from the Peace of Amiens, in 1802, to the Reform
Bill, thirty years later, and shortly before his death. But his
celebrity, of course, is mainly in connection with political economy;
his importance is known to ordinary readers chiefly on this account,
that political economy was the especial field of England during the
nineteenth century. The Manchester School, till lately dominant, looks
to Malthus as its second founder; and, since schisms have arisen in that
school, it is to the specific views of Malthus that there has been a
reversion, from those of the long-idolized Ricardo.
David Ricardo, supposed, till Mill openly seceded from among his pupils,
to have placed political economy on a basis of all-comprehensive
demonstration, was six years younger than Malthus, who long outlived
him. They were intimate friends, their disputes were always in perfect
good temper; and since Ricardo continued to be read, but Malthus did
not, very few people, until lately, knew how much they differed. It is
from Malthus’ supposed law of population that Ricardo deduced his famous
law of rent, which George has made familiar to everybody, and on which
Marx founded his “scientific Socialism.” Population increases beyond the
capacity of land, in use, to support it; other land, therefore, must be
taken up; since men seek to gratify their desires with the least
exertion, the best land will be improved first; between its yield and
that of the inferior land intervenes a constantly increasing margin of
rent, which is what makes the difference between rich and poor. It
reduces wages to the minimum obtainable from the poorest land (the Iron
Law of Wages, Lasalle called this). Yet worse remains. Since cultivation
extends, this minimum is not a stationary but a diminishing quantity.
True, the cost of living is diminished, and the laborer’s real wages do
not, therefore, fall as fast as the nominal, but they do fall, for those
commodities the laborer chiefly wants are those most directly derived
from the soil; and they are not being cheapened, but the contrary.[8]
Ricardo is thus the true founder of “the Dismal Science.” The extreme
pessimism and determinism of his views, which have been compared to
those of Calvin, did not prevent their “taking” with English
capitalists, who, during the Corn Law battle, found in them a weapon
against English landlords. But Ricardo also furnished Socialism with a
weapon against both. Except the Anarchists, all Socialists who make any
pretensions to scientific economic reasoning, begin with Ricardo. Their
common burden is that government must, and, when these things become
better understood, a democratic government certainly will, confiscate
rent for the common good, and, they usually add, assume control of
business. How their idol, the government, will, after all, manage to
keep people from finding it harder to live as the Law of Diminishing
Returns keeps shortening the result of their labor, these reformers do
not, indeed, make quite as clear as could be wished. But here is where
their prejudice against Malthus began. His name became associated,
though Ricardo’s rather should be, with the Law of Diminishing Returns.
It is, therefore, a fact of extreme interest that Malthus decidedly
rejected Ricardo’s improvements on his system. The difference between
Anarchism and Socialism, as we usually understand the latter term, is
the difference between Malthus and Ricardo. Malthus, we remember, had
never said that population necessarily increases. Under the existing
conditions, he believed population to be limited by the willingness of
capitalists to employ labor; nor is there much doubt that this is
substantially correct; though the “wage-fund doctrine” of Senior,
McCulloch, and other Ricardians,[9] overdoes it. Now Malthus observed,
nor could Ricardo deny,[10] that capital will not take up waste land
unless it can get from such land as much as from those institutions
which borrow and lend money for speculative enterprises. Except, then,
as improved methods bring up the profit on waste land to the current
rate of interest, there will be no rise of rent. Experimental
cultivation by government, philanthropists, theorists, or communists,
produces no such effect: — it must be business cultivation yielding
profit and also wages up to rate. For one of Malthus’ most striking
doctrines, in pronounced contradiction to Ricardo and all his followers,
is that real wages never fall. Malthus studied history and society,
which Ricardo, in his theorizing a mere formal logician and
mathematician, did not. Ricardo, then, might vaguely think (for here, as
often, he is not clear) that capital indemnifies itself for rent by
cutting wages; but Malthus knew how tenacious labor is of every
advantage it has gained in the war with parasites. He believed such
gains to be continuous. He had a theory of their origin, which, if
rather empirical, is sufficiently comprehensive, and, as usual, savors
very much of Darwin.
What, with Fate-like persistency, has raised real wages since they
consisted in the daily find of toads or lizards, which may take up all a
Digger Indian’s time, is, in Malthus’ language, “accidents.” Some of
these accidents were blessings very terribly disguised. One of the most
important was the Black Death, which killed serfdom throughout the
greater part of Europe, by reducing the number of laborers, and exciting
such competition for their services that they could no longer be kept
from migrating in search of high wages. Such “accidents” would do the
laborer no permanent good, if he were quite the shiftless being which
some bourgeois writers represent him. But, though generally ignorant and
stupid, he has certain “strong instincts and plain rules,” which serve
his turn. He will not work for less (real) wages than he is used to
getting. Even down to the state of chattel slavery we can see this.
Coolies may work for rice gruel; but it would never do not to make negro
slaves more comfortable than many white men are. The “standard of
comfort” among laborers, raised, from time to time, by “fortunate
accidents,” and kept from falling by strikes, peasant insurrections,
increase of continence, in short by the laborer’s determination to keep
it up at whatever hazard, has been the guarantee of progress; for it is
these struggles which increase knowledge.
Examples of the “accidents” are numerous. The breaking up of the Roman
Empire killed chattel slavery, which requires extradition not to be
obtained under the loose rule of the Barbarians. The restoration of
slavery, though favored by circumstances in the colonies, had been
stoutly withstood, and, in Malthus’ time, was evidently failing. The
discovery of America, by relieving pressure in Europe, raised the
standard of comfort there; and legalization of Trades’ Unions is
evidence that it will not fall. The French Revolution made the peasants
landowners, and the restored Bourbon dared not rob them; etc. Evidently,
Malthus’ economy is not a dismal science. Believing a high standard of
comfort the condition of social improvement, he was no prophet of
“parsimony.” He encouraged, indeed, saving by retrenchment of expenses
upon the lower appetites; but with a view to enjoyment, not mere
money-making. The English proletaire who denies himself gin, if at all,
that he may have good clothes, a furnished house, a lease, a library, is
wiser than the French peasant who lives on black bread that he may buy
more land. Malthus went further than perhaps any economist reckoned
“orthodox” in recognition of the great truth that exchange is the chief
source of riches and that starving to get ahead of each other, like the
Coolies and the Jews in many places, makes all the people absolutely
poor whomever it makes relatively rich. Thus his view of “progress and
poverty” differed from Ricardo’s, it has been said, as Arminianism from
Calvinism. Malthus refers everything to the individual, Ricardo to
certain institutions, such as land ownership, which he took for granted.
In the minds of Socialists, Ricardo’s principles tend to passive
reliance on the Omnipotent Goodness of the State, those of Malthus to
repudiation of the State, or Anarchism.
Ricardo’s positive dogmatism, plausible syllogizing, and coherent style,
gave his writings an advantage over those of Malthus. As concerns
conservatism they were equal, or rather Ricardo’s superabundant
acknowledgment of indebtedness to Malthus made the latter appear to the
generation which did not read him more conservative than the former
really was.[11]
The Seniors, McCullochs, Benthams, Macaulays, Mills, Leckys, Martineaus,
Marcets, and other orthodox exponents of Ricardo, contemporary with the
Socialistic upheavals and panics between 1848 and 1871, but little aware
to what purposes Marx and Proudhon were turning their instructor,
deduced from Ricardo, whom they represented as the greater pupil of
Malthus, notwithstanding the real difference, that labor depended for
support on the wage-fund; that to lessen the wage-fund by frightening
capital was to do laborers the worst of injuries; that the admitted
harshness of the social state was due principally to a “natural
monopoly” which government did not make and could not destroy; that
artificial monopolies were, indeed, wrong and pernicious, for which
reason a liberal government was preferable to a monarchy or oligarchy;
but Anarchy, of course, would be the worst of anything, and Socialistic
interference with the natural laws of production fostered Anarchy by
promising impossibilities and causing disappointment; for which reason
authority should be strictly upheld and Utopianism discouraged; above
all that the only real remedies were parsimony and continence (a queer
jumble, which shows how little these public instructors themselves
understood the true relation of Malthusian economy to Ricardian). There
was just enough truth in all this to be timely for conservative
purposes. The fact, in direct contradiction to what Macaulay often says
on the subject, is that great expropriations, like those of the monks by
Henry VIII., of the Church and the nobles during the French Revolution,
of the slave owners during our Civil War, have always, in the long run,
conferred great benefits on the poor; but that, at first, they always
cause increased hardship to the poor, not because there is any such
thing as a wage-fund which supports productive laborers, but because a
large part of the poor are unproductive laborers, whom panic among the
rich at once deprives of their jobs, while time is required for the
productive class to gain anything by fall of an unproductive: which
immediate consequences of insecurity are so well known to the often
unemployed proletaire that he is afraid of attempts at expropriation,
and will not promote them unless his oppressors have first driven him to
the wall. The unpopularity of Socialism, for there can be no doubt that
on the whole it is unpopular, is due to this fear, addressed on two
sides; by the conservative Ricardians, as stated; by the Ricardian
Socialists, like Engel and Lassalle, because they talked of legislative
expropriation. Amidst the fulminations of Ricardian orthodoxy the few
critics who pointed out (like Richard Jones) that Ricardo’s best-known
theories are arbitrarily deductive, and bear no clear relation to
visible facts,[12] were dinned and flashed away, with the inevitable
valediction that “they had failed to understand Ricardo.” But the
cocksureness of the Epigoni, as economists of this period have been
called, did not quite go the length of imputing ignorance to John Stuart
Mill. If there was anything he did not know, it was what they knew still
less. The reaction began, accordingly, when he, originally, like his
father, a Ricardian, decidedly rebelled. The Malthusian direction of
this movement has been very inadequately acknowledged. The Optimistic
school of Carey and Bastiat builds on Malthus’ law that real wages never
fall. The Historical Economist, now the most influential among those
reckoned orthodox, follows the line of investigation which Malthus laid
down, but to which he could not hold Ricardo. On the Socialistic side of
the fence, Ricardianism is sure to age in proportion as it does on the
other. How far the new Socialistic economy of Anarchism is indebted to
Malthus, we have yet to see. But the affinities of American and Russian
Anarchism with his thought are as clear as those of Marx and Proudhon
with Ricardo’s.
Though Malthus’ writings were neglected during the fifty years or so of
Ricardo’s pontificate, his name lived. As the demonstrator of a
principle evidently revolutionary, therefore of transcendent importance,
not only to Economy, but Biology, History, Ethics, and Religion, he was
known, by reputation, to students of all these subjects. For want of
reading him, they often misunderstood, but they had tolerably clear his
“main principle,” that unrestricted propagation means a high death-rate,
involving a “struggle for existence,” which hitherto has been the
determinator of progress: though “moral restraint” on propagation would
be better.
The anatomical and physiological affinities of higher animal and vegetal
types with lower had, before Malthus’ time, suggested to Buffon,
Monboddo, and a few others, the idea that species arise by Evolution.
But their theories on the subject were mere guesses, which commanded
little attention from the scientific world. The glory of placing organic
development on the positive basis of Heredity, Natural Selection, and
Sexual Selection, belongs to Darwin. The fact that species do arise by
evolution has been experimentally demonstrated by Haeckel; and the world
no longer contains a naturalist who disputes it; though there continues
to be controversy upon such minor points as whether post-natal
variations are hereditary.[13]
History, by right the greatest among sciences, since it supplies
material for all which require the use of records, was in a wholly
empirical condition before the epochmaking work of Buckle: — for the
so-called philosophic history of an earlier time did not, as Macaulay
remarked, rise above the level of essay-writing on the philosophy of
history. Fragmentary and in some matters of detail incorrect as Buckle’s
writings are, they forever establish the method, which is entirely
Malthusian. That social progress depends on substitution of Preventive
for Positive Checks on population; which, in turn, depends on
substitution as incentives to action, of more varied desires for the
simple animal appetites of food and sex, and this again on leisure, in
which such desires germinate; that ignorance, and its most legitimate
offspring, superstition, are the great standing obstacles to this happy
change, operating to dull the new desires and content men with their
barbarous ancestors’ ways; these propositions, indeed, involve somewhat
more than the “main principle” of Malthus; but they are all among his
authentic statements, not the innovations of Ricardo and others. Since
Buckle’s time, they have constituted the great working hypothesis by
which all historic phenomena have been elucidated.[14] Ethics, previous
to that evolutionary philosophy in which Malthus was the first wise
master-builder, presented a ruinous chaos, in which the blind forces of
tyranny and superstition essentially hostile to each other but foes to
knowledge, met in refluent eddies like infernal rivers. Private
experience had taught men that sensual and other excesses are haunted by
Remorse. Superstition, seeking to escape this phantom, but without a
guide, has always tended to Asceticism. Even those forms which we call
immoral — the glorification by some religions of prostitution and still
more nauseous vice, of mutilation, drunkenness, human sacrifice, war,
appealed, as is well known among comparative students of human error,
not to the lusts of the flesh themselves, but that despair and rage
which springs from deception by these tempters — it was really ascetic
self-torture which was glorified, and the “consecrated” persons whose
houses Hezekiah took away from the Temple were holy because they served
the appetites of others in ways not agreeable to themselves. On the
other hand, governments, military institutions, designed to serve the
purposes of man’s most violent passions, as rapacity, lust, and
vengeance, invariably encouraged sensuality to breed fighters, invested
war with the glamour of heroism, and cultivated that view of commerce
which makes exchange a disguised robbery. Hence the muddled and
inconsistent ideas of morality given us by two sets of teachers thus
radically opposed, but of whom one was in a measure coerced or bribed by
the other. Except for naturally arising conflicts among themselves,
their only use of logic has been to invent reasons why the king has a
right to govern wrong, why wives should obey their husbands, how it can
be an Englishman’s duty to kill a Frenchman, and equally the Frenchman’s
to kill him.[15] Malthus taught even governments that hungry and
dependent numbers are a source of weakness, not strength.[16] His name
is so familiar that Race Suicide speeches and bills to put a tax on
celibacy have none but humorous effect. It was he who convinced the
rulers that, much as they feared educating the ruled, they had no
choice. Though the “Mercantile” economy, and its practical corollary,
Protection, received their fatal wound from Adam Smith, the root whence
they spring remains in his Wealth of Nations; and the stump-puller
destined to eradicate it was constructed by Malthus. The root is the
doctrine that parsimony enriches. The stump-puller is the Malthusian
proof that it can enrich only individuals, and this only on condition of
having neighbors less parsimonious than themselves — that exchange is
what principally causes increase of wealth; that if a people are all
parsimonious, like the “Jewtown” Hebrews, they must be poor. But the
ultimate services of Malthus to ethics were more radical than this. The
advice of Bacon to treat ethics as an inductive science — to ascertain,
by observation and experiment, what effects are actually produced on
character by heredity, education, example, society, solitude, religious
belief, the civil law, by the indulgence of particular habits, the
reading of particular books, the following of particular trades, — a
sort of knowledge whence we might expect to learn something about how
undesired propensities can be corrected and others cultivated — had been
neglected for three centuries while the doctors continued to dispute as
usual about whether Revelation, Moral Sense, or Expediency furnished the
readiest method of making out perfect the foolish institutions of their
respective countries — all this, chiefly, because they lacked a guide
into the better way. The first height on which the light of positive
discovery began to shine was the effect upon morals of Heredity. The
point of radiation was the Darwinian Theory, and the Darwinian Theory,
in the express words of its originator, only applies Malthus’ doctrine
to the whole animal and vegetable kingdom.
In religious speculation, we have already seen what the original
Theodice of Malthus was. It is the one which has become fashionable.
That it is much more simple, affecting, and sublime, than the grotesque
myths which preceded it, has become commonplace. But of more importance
is the fact that it dissipates the most odious and most unfailing trait
of merely subjective piety — its intolerance. Sin is always stupidity:
it is, therefore, a sin (an injustice) in the sinner who counts himself
partially reformed to be angry with the thicker-headed fellow-sinner who
is not reformed at all: and thus, too, sin vindicates its character as
stupidity; for being angry with sinners is not at all the right way
either to reform them or to prevent others from following their example.
Thus far-reaching has been the influence of Malthus. Expounding it
should serve to illustrate the absurdity of attempting his refutation by
rehashing arguments all of which have long been commonplace. A fortress
like Gibraltar is not to be overthrown with a pop-gun. A structure as
lofty and secure as that which has arisen upon the foundation laid by
Malthus must be “rockrooted in the crust of the earth, and buttressed
with the everlasting hills.”
Refutations continue to rain, however. Of these criticisms which show
only the writer’s limited acquaintance with his subject (and they are
the immense majority) it is unnecessary to say more. There are, however,
two kinds not uncommonly heard from persons who know what they are
talking about. One disputes the validity of the geometric and
arithmetical ratios.[17] A sufficient reply was given by Mill. The
increase of unchecked population is geometrical. That of food may be
more than arithmetical. But what is the use of talking about increase of
food when geometrical increase of population, if it did not bring back
the Positive Check in other ways, as, of course, it would, must soon
restore that Check in the inexorable form of crowding? The other
criticism, much more practical, is perhaps intended only as a criticism,
not a refutation; but if this be meant the critics ought to say so, —
first, in order to clear themselves of identification with the Sadlers,
Godwins, Coleridges, De Quinceys, Georges, and others whose refuted
refutations ring hollow down the corridors of time; secondly, that they
may avoid exercising a pernicious influence upon readers less informed
than themselves. The criticism is based on the. obvious fact that since
Malthus wrote, wealth, at least in England, has increased much faster
than population — a fact from whose significance the one word emigration
takes a great deal — but here become possible suggestions which make
this criticism a phase of the others — we do not know what intenser
cultivation may effect — the actual habits of mankind are not such as to
bring in the Positive Check, etc., etc. “Speak unto us smooth things;
prophesy unto us deceits!” We do know that intenser cultivation will
never banish need for the Prudential Check: and the habits of mankind
are such as to invite the Positive when they are such as to invite wars
for a harbor or a diamond mine every few years. I am sorry to say that
Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops, contains passages which are
adapted (I cannot believe intended) to encourage in careless readers the
loose idea that “everything is lovely” except certain human institutions
(which, saving only the subjection of women, are not causes but
effects).
To conclude the story of Malthus. One of the lies is that he had
thirteen children! He had three, of whom only two survived him. His wife
came from a part of England which he is known to have visited many years
before. It is probable there was a long engagement. Malthus certainly
was a good deal older at marriage than the average. His life and
teachings appear, therefore, to have been entirely consistent. Among the
many attempts to refute him one was by suggesting that man in his
developed state might be above the desire of sex, and that the need for
propagation might be superseded by terrestrial immortality! Malthus
treated this fully as respectfully as it deserved. He said that, while
bondage to the desire was a potent source of vice and misery, the desire
itself was a principal source of the moral virtues and of happiness,
with which it would be by no means desirable, if it were credible, that
mankind in general should dispense. The effect of these discussions on
Godwin’s active imagination may be seen on comparing his famous novels.
Caleb Williams (1794) gives no hint of anything supernatural. It is a
powerful arraignment of “Things As They Are.” In St. Leon (1832) the
hero attains terrestrial immortality, and, like the Wandering Jew, finds
it the greatest of all imaginable curses; but, pervading the story is
the subthought of Godwin’s invincible Optimism — a Salathiel, a St.
Leon, would not be miserable in a world where all the people were
immortal. The time which Godwin chose for his attempt at refuting
Malthus is also significant — it was in 1820, when Ricardo was deducing
from the Malthusian theory corollaries whose legitimacy no one then
seems to have disputed except Malthus himself. Malthus died, from
disease of the heart, in 1834, the sixty-eighth year of his age. Godwin
followed on the 7^(th) of April, 1836. Of the two, Malthus had best
maintained his philosophic dignity. The Anarchist Godwin stooped to
accept a sinecure office from the Liberal administration of Earl Grey.
Malthus declined the tardy favor offered by government to him. “In their
death,” says the best biographer of Malthus, “they were still divided;
but, si quis piorum animis locus, they are divided no longer, and think
hard thoughts of each other no more.”
Before the eyes of both there was growing up a power unobserved of
either, but predestined to solve their problem. Commerce could never
cheapen itself out of existence while population, varying with cheapness
of food, kept up the struggle for existence: nor, though commerce which
cannot do that teaches solidarity, could it prevent recurrence of those
crises when “the eyeless I howls in darkness.” But increase of the
Prudential Check on population has always kept up with, or rather it has
gone before and been the source of, economic progress. Its increase has
depended on that of hope, this on increase of liberty, increase of
liberty on those “accidents” by which Providence has from time to time
interfered to give men intent on enslaving each other and themselves
another call to reflection. If, then, there be a tendency in the
bourgeois system which brings liberty and hope to women; from that we
really may expect revolutionary changes. For the female is the less
amorous sex. The last proposition, which certainly does sound rather
like a stock assertion, may have been unknown to both Godwin and
Malthus. But no reader of Darwin can help knowing that it has been
demonstrated by exhaustive application to every animal species and been
found the clue to progress through heredity. Women have never chosen to
breed food for gunpowder. They have submitted to do so only because they
could not help themselves. Now there is in the bourgeois system a
tendency which, by bringing liberty and hope to women, promises far more
energetic restraint on propagation than the world has ever known, — a
tendency which capitalists view with indifference; reactionaries, and
Socialists not infrequently, with alarm; judicious friends of humanity,
with unmixed satisfaction. The wages paid directly to women in the
factories first afforded to proletarian women, unprotected by
settlements and other contrivances of the rich, a means to live which
was not easily taken from them. True to the maxim that it is not misery
but hope which works improvement, they, who till now had been well
enough content not to own themselves, became refractory the moment the
had something to lose. The entire modern movement for the property
rights of married women, equality of pay with men for all working women,
opening of all the trades to women, political equality of the sexes,
easy divorce, began with employment of women as breadwinners, which came
in as a necessity of the bourgeois situation. That complete emancipation
of women, defect in food for gunpowder, cessation of war, the downfall
of those appliances for plunder which war created, are all threatened by
this movement, there can be no occasion for me to prove. Mr. Roosevelt
will show you that — and afterwards gnash his teeth. The Malthusian
Theory is the fatal objection to every form of Socialism, even if called
Anarchism, which encourages man to think that he can enslave women and
escape the most righteous retribution of being a slave himself. It is
the strongest possible argument for that kind of Socialism or Anarchism
which proposes, through complete emancipation of women, to abolish the
fundamental tyranny from whence all others spring.
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[1] This is one of Henry George’s arguments to show that population may
increase indefinitely — an argument utterly idiotic, as the next
sentence shows.
[2] If he were wrong in this, he at least had something to say. Under
the Roman Empire celibacy, of course, as a rule, impure, which, even
under the Republic, had become a common way of avoiding the pecuniary
pressure, increased to immense proportions. This saved the Roman peace
from ending in famine, like the Mogul. But it did not avert dissolution
of the Empire. Malthus would have been quite in the ordinary way of
thinking if he attributed Roman misfortunes to Roman vice; and
maintained that a chaste celibacy might have had better results.
[3] George says that the Malthusian theory did not originally involve
the idea of progress. Referred even to the later editions of Malthus,
this is incorrect; but for the first it is ridiculous, and shows at once
that George never read what Malthus wrote in 1798.
[4] Those acquainted with Malthus in after life say he was one of the
gentlest and most amiable of men; which we are also told about Ricardo
and Adam Smith. But there are letters of his tutor extant, from which it
appears that he had been a most pugnacious boy; and a phrenologist,
reading his works with knowledge of their occasions, would find ground
on every page for saying: “Firmness and combativeness, Large!” Malthus
said that the charges of discouraging benevolence, and commending
infanticide and abortion, etc., etc., gave him pain, when they were
honest misunderstandings; but, considered as polemical tricks, he had
learned to despise them, and got over answering.
[5] George, whose “refutation of Malthus” is useful because it gives in
epitome those of every one else, with exquisite consistency, suggests
both these views; sometimes wondering ironically that this great truth
never was discovered before; sometimes intimating that it does not
amount to a great truth, because everybody knows all the truth there is
in it, and governs himself accordingly. That Malthus actually stated all
the truth there is in this, would never be suspected by a reader of
George.
[6] Malthus, whose eye surveyed the world, did not, of course, overlook
so huge a fact as infanticide. From a moral point of view, his judgment
on it may be anticipated; but from an economic, he reasoned that it
rather increased population than otherwise, being looked forward to,
wherever tolerated, as a resort, before children are born; while, after
that, parental affection limits it to a last resort.
[7] Much the best criticism of this kind was made by Karl Marx. The
capitalists, he says, have regular employment for a limited number of
proletaires. What they call the surplus is an excess over that number.
They are quite insincere in affecting a desire to reduce it, for it is
the reserve of their army. Out of this “surplus” come the “scab,” the
strike-breaker, the policeman, the common soldier where there is no
conscription. This is true enough; and it is a good reply to hypocrites
who find in the Malthusian Theory a “parry to demands for reform.” But
what it has to do with the truth of the theory I do not see; nay, if we
must be polemical, the fact that neglect of Malthus breeds
strike-breakers seems to me an excellent reason why Socialists should be
Malthusians.
[8] This is important. George repeatedly assures us that ability to
create any kind of wealth is ability to create as much of any other
kind. But if the Law of Diminishing Returns from Agricultural Lands be
correct, this is not correct for the most important kind of wealth.
[9] By making an actual sum out of the “wage-fund,” which in the works
of Adam Smith and Malthus, is only a rhetorical phrase.
[10] This was reserved for George. Ricardo, a practical man of business,
knew too much about the comparative incomes of landlords and
capitalists, under varying conditions of time and place, to say that
Rent was swallowing all which labor and capital ought to get from land
above the poorest.
[11] Thus Henry George, whose premises are taken straight out of
Ricardo, thinks it necessary to refute Malthus, of whose real relation
to Ricardo he knew very little. Extension of cultivation is, according
to Ricardo, the cause of rent. Its own cause (George supposes) is, for
Malthus apud Ricardo, increase of population. To save Ricardo without
adopting Malthus, George ingeniously argues that it is not increase, but
concentration, of population which extends cultivation. The truth is,
Malthus had not said it was either.
[12] No disrespect at all is meant Ricardo by anything said here. He
greatly advanced knowledge by establishing the true relation of rent to
price, which Adam Smith misunderstood, and by showing that when the
price of bullion is said to rise it is really that of paper money which
falls. His maxim that, under free competition labor buys labor, is the
basis of Marx’ theory concerning Surplus Value and of philosophic
Socialism. Like Ptolemy in astronomy and Galen in medicine, he long had
the ill-luck to be influential largely through his mistakes; but that
any man can be that is the measure of his abilities.
[13] Bourgeois writers have seized upon the doctrines of Malthus and
Darwin as upon an argument against co-operation, almsgiving, and above
all, anything like communism. The struggle for existence, they tell us,
is the source of progress. For the strong to assist the feeble in
living, but above all propagating, is to weaken the social organism, as
well as to raise impracticable expectations and increase misery by
adding disappointment to its pains. This is unquestionably true for
compulsory charity. It is true for all voluntary charity whose final
result is to encourage dependence. And in the present general condition
of dependence, all almsgiving has a tendency to do that. But two things
are overlooked. First, co-operation is not charity, but trade: — for
benefits given, benefits are expected. Secondly, the pauperizing effect
of charity depends on a previous degradation of the recipient. No man is
morally worse for the helping hand of a fellow-worker. Every man is, for
the beaming condescension of a patron. Socialistic writers, who
generally know too much to attempt refuting Darwin, attempt instead to
show that the conflict by which the world has advanced was a conflict of
species, not individuals of the same species, among whom co-operation,
not competition, has been the rule. Among those who have secured this
side of the matter due attention, Kropotkin is the most distinguished.
Whether he has contracted anything like a prejudice by the way, may be
inquired later. It is hardly deniable that with men, the struggle has
been very largely between nations and often individuals.
[14] To illustrate, it was a favorite subject of controversy among
writers who, like Montesquieu, made any attempt at philosophic history,
whether the ancient world were more or less populous than the modern? We
may not know much about the world; but, on Malthusian principles, it is
absurd to suppose that France, for example, could have had anything like
her present population when her soil was mainly covered by forests
supporting only half-wild cattle and hogs; when Paris was a village, and
Lyons a rural oppidum, when silk was unknown and wine imported at such
prices as a slave for a jar. A phenomenon which these early writers
noticed, was that, after a great migration of barbarians, like the
Scythians or Northmen, their countries remained quiet for many years.
The explanation was that they were “biding their time” — living,
probably, on ice and air. It is, now, that, until the principle of
population restored their numbers, none were left at home but children
and old people.
[15] James Fitz James Stephen (the crazy snoozer who tried Mrs.
Maybrick) says, in his Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, a reply to
Mill’s Liberty, that there is no absurdity about this paradox. If he had
not said so, we might perhaps have imagined that there was.
[16] Pitt, next to Napoleon the chief modern anthropophagus, had
actually prepared a bill for a bounty on children; but withdrew it in
deference to the arguments of Dr. Parr and others among Malthus’
earliest converts.
[17] To illustrate again the facility with which these things may be
misunderstood, dependent on the complexity of that relation which some
try to evade by calling it a truism — I have said here, in the name of
Malthus, too, that what enables a high rate of propagation to go on is
increase of the death-rate. But the death-rate, from all causes and in
all places of statistical census taken together, has decreased notably
since we began to have reliable returns (which is only since about 1700
A. D.); and what little we know about earlier times indicates that the
death-rate has always decreased, on the whole, since men emerged from
the grazing state of savagery, where the average duration of life is
said to be only thirteen years. How do these statements agree? Simply
enough. Who said propagation had gone on unslackened? The reasoning of
Malthus, and mine, has all been to the effect that the Prudential Check
has gained on the Positive almost continuously since men emerged from
utter barbarism, except where increased facility of living has, for a
time, caused it to be neglected. Wherever that happens — as when a
prairie changes into a Chicago — we may see that the death-rate does
increase as soon as that facility of living which relaxed the Prudential
Check encourages propagation sufficiently to recall the Positive.