The vagueness of the results shows curiously how much economists had to argue in the dark.Malthus observes in his first edition that he had been convinced by reading Price that population was restrained by 'vice and misery,'as results,not of political institutions,but of 'our own creation.'12This gives the essential point of difference.Mirabeau had declared that the population of all Europe was decaying,Hume's essay,which he criticises,had been in answer to a similar statement of Montesquieu.Price had learned that other countries were increasing in number,though England,he held,was still declining.What,then,was the cause?The cause,replied both Price and Mirabeau,was 'luxury,'to which Price adds the specify English evils of the 'engrossment of farms'and the enclosure of open fields.Price had to admit that the English towns had increased;but this was an additional evil.The towns increased simply by draining the country;and in the towns themselves the deaths exceeded the births.The great cities were the graves of mankind.This opinion was strongly held,too,by Arthur Young,who ridiculed the general fear of depopulation,and declared that if money were provided,you could always get labour,but who looked upon the towns as destructive cancers in the body politic.
The prevalence of this view explains Malthus's position.To attribute depopulation to luxury was to say that it was caused by the inequality of property.The rich man wasted the substance of the country,became demoralised himself,and both corrupted and plundered his neighbours.The return to a 'state of nature,'in Rousseau's phrase,meant the return to a state of things in which this misappropriation should become impossible,the whole industry of the nation would then be devoted to supporting millions of honest,simple peasants and labourers,whereas it now went to increasing the splendour of the great at the expense of the poor,Price enlarges upon this theme,which was,in fact,the contemporary version of the later formula that the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer.The immediate effect of equalising property,then,would be an increase of population.It was the natural retort,adopted by Malthus,that such an increase would soon make everybody poor,instead of making every one comfortable.Population,the French economists had said,follows subsistence.Will it not multiply indefinitely?The rapid growth of population in America was noticed by Price and Godwin;and the theory had been long before expanded by Franklin,in a paper which Malthus quotes in his later editions.'There is no bound,'said Franklin in 1751,13'to the prolific nature of plants and animals but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each other's means of subsistence.'The whole earth,he infers,might be overspread with fennel,for example,or,if empty of men,replenished in a few ages with Englishmen.There were supposed to be already one million of Englishmen in North America.If they doubled once in twenty-five years,they would in a century exceed the number of Englishmen at home.This is identical with Mirabeau's principle of the multiplying of rats in a barn.Population treads closely on the heels of subsistence.Work out your figures and see the results.14Malthus's essay in the first edition was mainly an application of this retort,and though the logic was effective as against Godwin,he made no elaborate appeal to facts.
Malthus soon came to see that a more precise application was desirable.
It was clearly desirable to know whether population was or was not actually increasing,and under what conditions.I have spoken of the contemporary labours of Sinclair,Young,Sir F.Eden,and others.To collect statistics was plainly one of the essential conditions of settling the controversy.
Malthus in 1799travelled on the continent to gather information,and visited Sweden,Norway,Russia,and Germany.The peace of Amiens enabled him in 1802to visit France and Switzerland.He inquired everywhere into the condition of the people,collected such statistical knowledge as was then possible,and returned to digest it into a more elaborate treatise.Meanwhile,the condition of England was giving a fresh significance to the argument.The first edition had been published at the critical time when the poor-law was being relaxed,and disastrous results were following war and famine.
The old complaint that the poor-law was causing depopulation was being changed for the complaint that it was stimulating pauperism.The first edition already discussed this subject,which was occupying all serious thinkers;it was now to receive a fuller treatment.The second edition,greatly altered,appeared in 1803,and made Malthus a man of authority.
His merits were recognised by his appointment in 1805to the professorship of history and political economy at the newly founded East India College at Haileybury.There he remained till the end of his life,which was placid,uneventful,and happy.He made a happy marriage in 1804;and his calm temperament enabled him to bear an amount of abuse which might have broken the health of a more irritable man.Cobbett's epithet,'parson Malthus,'strikes the keynote.He was pictured as a Christian priest denouncing charity,and proclaiming the necessity of vice and misery.He had the ill luck to be the centre upon which the antipathies of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin converged.
