Hungry Generations: The Nineteenth-Century Case Against Malthusianism 9780231884068

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HUNGRY GENERATIONS

HUNGRY GENERATIONS THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CASE AGAINST MALTHUSIANISM

By Harold A. Boner

KING'S CROWN PRESS COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, 1 9 5 5

C O P Y R I G H T 1 9 5 5 BY H A R O L D A .

KING'S CROWN

BONER

PRESS

is an imprint established by Columbia University Press for the purpose of making certain scholarly material available at minimum cost. Toward that end, the publishers have used standardized formats incorporating every reasonable economy that does not interfere with legibility. The author has assumed complete responsibility for editorial style and for proofreading

LIBRARY O F CONGRESS CATALOG CARD N U M B E R :

54-11390

P U B L I S H E D IN GREAT BRITAIN, CANADA, INDIA, AND PAKISTAN BY G E O F F R E Y C U M B E R L E G E , OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS L O N D O N , T O R O N T O , BOMBAY, AND KARACHI

M A N U F A C T U R E D IN T H E U N I T E D STATES O F AMERICA

PREFACE is a history of the rise and fall of the Malthusian theory in nineteenth-century England. Such a statement demands some amplification; for in a time of growing awareness of the importance of the relation between population and food supply, it is likely to seem preposterous to refer to Malthus' theory as a thing of the past. But memorable as is Malthus* famous statement of the disparate ratios between food and population, and important as it has been to the demographist, the sociologist, and the economist, it was not the sum total of the Malthusian theory. It was merely the premise on which his complete theory was based, the justification for his conclusion that the major cause of poverty was the reckless overbreeding of the poor. As the reader of the following pages will see, it was that appalling conclusion that was to Malthus, and to the men of the nineteenth century, the most important element in his theory. By the Malthusian theory, therefore, I mean not some isolated and perhaps sound fragment of the doctrine, but the total of it, including its fallacious and socially disastrous conclusion. This book is not, therefore, a study only of the influence of certain elements of Malthus' theory which are still of concern to the sociologist or statesman today, nor is it a study of the relationship between these elements and actual historical facts of population growth. It is a history of the long and dramatic struggle by which his theory as a whole was exposed as an invidious and fallacious instrument for concealing exploitation and economic injustice. Such a history may not be quite so academically innocuous as it appears at first glance. There can be little doubt that during the next quarter-century we are going to hear more of the T H I S BOOK

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PREFACE

problem of population than ever before in history. Our present widespread realization of the necessity of preventing another war has led already to the proposal of numerous plans for juster distribution of the world's economic resources; and further consideration of such plans is bound to reveal that their success is directly dependent on their relation to world population. We shall exchange our complacent feeling that overpopulation is a danger only for those who indulge in it for an acute perception that it is the most basic of our own world problems. It hardly seems likely that, once we have clearly grasped the importance of our related economic and demographic problems, we shall be fatally slow in solving them. But there will be no lack of obstacles. We must reckon not only with the weight of honest prejudice, superstition, and inertia, but with the desperate opposition of those powerful elements in world society whose personal interests seem to them threatened by international economic planning. These groups, still firmly in control of the chief techniques and media of propaganda, are not likely to overlook any device which promises to discourage such planning; and it is not impossible that for that purpose they will attempt to utilize the growing concern over population by reviving in some form the Malthusian fallacy of attributing to overpopulation the meager standards of living of the "backward" areas of the world. The chances, not only for the success of such an attempt, but for the attempt itself, seem rather remote. The early success of the Malthusian theory was not due simply to the eager support given it by a privileged class who, having been stripped bare of rational justifications by the philosophers of the eighteenth century, saw in it an almost miraculous restoration of their position. The theory succeeded because its fallacies were so cleverly veiled that it won the honest support of the man in the street and, above all, of the vast majority of professed students of social problems. But no such situation exists today. We still have the privileged groups desperately eager to justify their privileges; but the long debate which is the subject of this book has so

PREFACE

vii

thoroughly exposed the blunders of Malthus that no intellectual leadership remains to encourage an attempt to revive them—as witness the fact that they have so long slept undisturbed. Yet probable as it seems that they can never be revived, recent history has shown what fantastic fallacies can rise and flourish in the very face of reason, for periods long enough, in an age of swift crises, to cause disaster. Under such circumstances there is a marginal chance that such a book as this, which attempts to review and analyze the process of reasoning by which the Malthusian delusion was broken down, may acquire some value as a sort of inoculation against confusion. I doubt, however, if the value of the book is altogether contingent upon the development of this particular danger. For even if the fallacy of Malthus proves to have been exposed beyond all possibility of revival, the mere fact that it did flourish so long and so mightily may well give us pause. The errors in Malthus' logic were, despite their elusive phrasing, so glaring as to make it difficult to see how they can have gone so long undetected by so many. Yet they were so useful to certain groups, and fitted so well with the prejudices of others, as to dominate social thinking for over half a century. Their history therefore, whether it has any more specific value, may illustrate vividly the importance of suspecting our still-existing social doctrines, even—or perhaps especially—our most respectably supported ones, as possible instruments of class advantage. In a time of such general concern with the future of human society, a mere intellectual concern with the motives of society's past behavior is likely to seem rather frivolous. But those who feel that any addition to our understanding of the past will ultimately help us to a better future may derive from the history of Malthusianism a more complete understanding of some puzzling aspects of recent and current history. A realization of the depth of Malthus' hold on the public mind makes comprehensible the otherwise astonishing callousness and brutality of the economic operations of the nineteenth century, and the equally astonishing lag of our economic theories and institutions behind the po-

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litical institutions which developed in the atmosphere of the French Revolution. And finally I cannot resist expressing the hope that readers of this book will experience some pleasure merely in making the acquaintance of those who fought on their side in a hitherto unrecorded war; and in discovering that to many old friends they owe gratitude for gifts not only of beauty but of justice. HAROLD A . BONER

University of Buffalo November 15, 1954

CONTENTS I

A N T I C L I M A X TO HOPE: 1798

3

II

THE RISE OF MALTHUS, 1 7 9 8 - 1 8 1 7

22

III

MALTHUSIAN T R I U M P H , 1 8 1 7 - 1 8 3 4

87

IV

THE TIDE TURNS, 1 8 3 4 - 1 8 5 9

128

THE TWILIGHT OF M A L T H U S : AFTER 1 8 5 9

174

NOTES

201

BIBLIOGRAPHY

217

INDEX

229

V

HUNGRY GENERATIONS

I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam, With horrid warning gaped wide

-Keats

I ANTICLIMAX TO HOPE: 1 7 9 8

THOMAS MALTHUS, curate of Albury in Surrey, might well have turned out to be one of the most ardent revolutionaries in a revolutionary age. 1 His tenth year had seen the beginning of the American Revolution, his twenty-third the beginning of the French Revolution. His entire youth had been exposed to the contagion of a time in which young intellectuals devoured Rousseau and Godwin, feeling that in that dawn of human freedom it was bliss to be alive, and very heaven to be young. Furthermore, he had had the powerful incentive of his father's tutelage. His father, Mr. Daniel Malthus, was no ordinary country gentleman. In the rural quiet of Surrey he lived as a citizen of the world. Such of his time as was not spent in gardening and the education of his children he devoted to study, particularly to political and economic theory. He was a rapt Godwinian, and had been a friend and executor of the great Rousseau. He shared to the full the feeling pervading the time, that a new age was beginning, an era distinguished from the past by the accelerated movement of humanity toward a society of equality and happiness. Yet, whether in spite of or because of the social atmosphere and his father's views, Thomas had turned out at thirty-one to be something of a Whig. His skepticism contained nothing of misanthropy, but it did involve a quite normal filial desire to cast a little doubt on his father's optimism. Even in this desire he was not very serious, for a genuine affection existed between the two. But since childhood Thomas had enjoyed enlivening their discussions of social philosophy by what his father called "throw-

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ing little stones into my garden." It was probably in this halfplayful spirit that he undertook, in the course of such a political discussion during the winter of 1797-98, to devise some conclusive proof of the impossibility of any such liberation of society from poverty as his father anticipated. The task was not one to be taken lightly. For the high hopes which Daniel Malthus shared with so many of the social philosophers of his time were not so clearly as in the past the mere product of wishful thinking. Behind them lay a long process of human thought and labor which had now for the first time given grounds for asserting that no inflexible obstacles to human freedom and comfort existed. The cloud-castle of the good society had in the course of centuries—and especially of the century just ending—been given a substantial material and ethical foundation. In centuries past, an obvious limitation on the power of humanity to wipe out poverty had been the apparent lack of material resources. But there had existed also a practical and ethical obstacle, in the form of an assumption of some connection between the misfortunes and the ability and merits of humanity.- The basis for this assumption is not easy to trace, for in it were mingled religious doctrines such as that of original sin, and quite objective (as far as they went) observations of the limited ability and social productivity of many of the poor. Whatever the origin of the assumption, it unquestionably gave rise to a feeling of doubt as to the extent to which poverty could and should be relieved, had the material resources been available. Taken alone, this doubt constituted no complete obstacle to the relief of the poor; for it was powerfully opposed by the Christian obligation to charity and mercy, which demanded giving to others not merely that which they deserved, and which would not deprive the giver, but that the loss of which would cause injustice, strictly speaking, and hardship to the giver. Under such conditions, even such hardheaded philosophers as Adam Smith were impelled to advocate the tempering of self-interest with benevolence. 3 Yet the common

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5

doubt as to the worth of the poor, combined with the chronic scarcity of material resources, had served to limit social effort toward the relief of poverty chiefly to a scanty and often haphazard distribution of charity through the Church or, in England after the Reformation, through the parishes by state enactment.4 But through the centuries, slowly at first and then in startling crescendo, improvements in technology—in agriculture, in industry and commerce, in science generally—had been conquering the cruelty and niggardliness of nature.5 By the closing years of the eighteenth century, Daniel Malthus and his friends seldom felt any need to argue that the scarcity of material resources which had once seemed an immutable limit to human happiness had been proved removable. Nor could it any longer be asserted positively that the poor themselves possessed innate and unchangeable traits which made them unworthy or incapable of happiness. On the basis of the sensation- and association-psychology of Hobbes, further developed by Locke, Hume, Hartley, and Helvetius, had been erected the concept of the potential equality of all men in worth and ability.6 No longer could the inferiority of the poor be urged as grounds for refusing them assistance; the ethical argument against relief was not merely weakened by the claims of the Christian ethic—its certainty was wiped out by the new psychology. The Christian mystery of the equality of souls in the eyes of God had hardened into the sober scientific assertion that all men are created equal in worldly potentialities. The way was open at last for an advance toward a society free of oppression and poverty. The meager provision for social security which Christianity had exacted from a poor and unwilling society could be replaced by a just and ample distribution of material comfort. Even Utopianism as extreme as that of William Godwin, who asserted the possibility of creating in reality a society as communistic as that of More's fantasy, was not beyond the range of possibility. Unwilling as Thomas Malthus was to yield to his father's optimism, he could not but be aware that it had powerful support.

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As he reflected upon their argument, he wrote: The great and unlooked for discoveries that have taken place of late years in natural philosophy; the increased diffusion of general knowledge from the extension of the art of printing; the ardent and unshackled spirit of inquiry that prevails throughout the lettered and even unlettered world; the new and extraordinary lights that have been thrown on political subjects, which dazzle, and astonish the understanding; and particularly that tremendous phenomenon in the political horizon the French revolution, which, like a blazing comet, seems destined either to inspire with fresh life and vigour, or to scorch up and destroy the shrinking inhabitants of the earth, have all concurred to lead many able men into the opinion, that we were touching on a period big with the most important changes, changes that would in some measure be decisive of the future fate of mankind. 7 Plainly as these guarded words indicate his unwillingness to concede the views of the optimists, just as plainly they reveal his consciousness of the strength with which they were supported, and of the difficulty of discrediting them. Whatever annoyance that difficulty may have caused Malthus was as nothing compared to the acute discomfort it created in the minds of a good many gentlemen of England, Whig and Tory alike. From their point of view, it was neither an occasion for optimism, nor a mere challenge to philosophical ingenuity. It was a deadly menace. 8 Indeed, the establishment of a convincing basis for optimism might well be said to have been the actual revolution of the century, of which Bastille-storming and the Reign of Terror were but the consequence. For when it was no longer possible to attribute human misery to nature or to the poor themselves, the privileged classes found themselves left standing alone in the unhappy role of villain. The survivors of the feudal aristocracy had special reason to be aware of how dangerous that role was; for already the new doctrines of social responsibility had been seized by elements of the commercial

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7

and industrial class to force them to share with that class the advantages of their position. Now, the discomfort of Toryism must have been somewhat assuaged by a grim enjoyment of the predicament of their erstwhile assailants. For the radical sections of the middle class were just arriving at what now seems a remarkably belated realization of the unpleasant implications for themselves of shifting the responsibility for poverty from nature to privilege. They had acclaimed the new ethical pressure against privilege with all the fervor which its usefulness against feudal aristocracy seemed to justify. For a time even after the Terror in France it was fashionable for young men of good family to read and commend the Political Justice of William Godwin. But their reading of Godwin had fallen off abruptly by the time Malthus took up the problem.9 By that time, indeed, must have come the shocking realization that it was not feudal privilege alone that was endangered, or the advancement of the middle class alone that was demanded, by the "New Philosophy" which that class had hailed with such mistaken enthusiasm. It was true that so far in England the menace had not much materialized. The greater part of the working class, illiterate and ignorant, were so untouched by the changed conception of their rights and powers that they had allowed themselves to be led into the war against France, a war which not only deepened their poverty 10 by bringing about a terrible rise in the cost of living,11 but attempted to crush and wipe out the social doctrines which were working for their own liberation. They accepted for the most part the mediaeval view that the social responsibility of the privileged classes ended with the granting of a certain amount of relief for the poor—relief which, though since the days of Queen Elizabeth it had been enforced by the state, was still regarded more as an act of charity than as an act of justice. 12 Nor were employers so far suffering from exorbitant demands for wages. For a working week made up of days lasting from six to six in summer, and from dawn to dark in winter,13 the average country laborer received, according to the

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estimate of Arthur Young, some Is. 6d.—when, by the estimate of another contemporary, a family of five could not exist on less than lis. IVzd.1* And the landowner not only continued to enjoy a wage scale kept low by legal prohibition of labor organization,15 but benefited from grain prices held at an abnormal level, even when no war shortage was present, by a system of import duties and export bounties dating from the reign of William and Mary.16 The comfort to be drawn from these facts, however, was limited. Already there were signs that the new ideology of social change was penetrating the ignorance and apathy of the working masses. The more intelligent and literate among them, often with the aid of renegade intellectuals from the upper classes, were organizing themselves into Corresponding Societies for the exchange of ideas and the spreading of the new doctrines.17 Friendly Societies, despite the passage in 1793 of a registry act designed to discourage their activities, were serving as starting points for the growth of labor unions.18 From such centers as these was pouring out into the masses of England a general indictment of the privileged classes, coupled with demands for a more equal distribution of social rewards—for more adequate relief, for cheaper food, for higher wages, and, most appalling of all, even for the communism of William Godwin; for the philosopher of perfectability, suddenly as his popularity had declined in more respectable quarters, was just beginning to reach the height of favor among such workers as had learned of his theories.19 This increase in working-class resentment was lending greater force to the insistence of numerous "friends of humanity" who had long been advocating the lowering of living costs through subsidized fisheries, the encouragement of potato-planting, and the provision of "cow-and-cottage" allotments for the poorer laborers.20 Already the governing classes had felt it wise to make several increases in the funds for relief.21 And when in 1795 a serious crop failure had created a nearfamine, the Tory government of Pitt, inspired by the so-called Speenhamland Act,22 had introduced a bill to revise and extend

ANTICLIMAX TO HOPE

9

the poor laws by proportioning each relief allowance to the number in the family receiving it.23 From the point of view of the man of property, this alone would have been bad enough; but it seemed clear that the worst was yet to come. So long as the New Philosophy prevailed and spread, so long as no material or ethical obstacle to the relief of poverty appeared, he could never hope to resist changes far more painful to him than the mere increase of the provisions for relief. No bright star rose over Albury during the winter of 1798, nor did any chorus of angels appear to bring to the gentlemen of England glad tidings. But a heroic effort toward their salvation was there being wrought out. Thomas Malthus, bravely surmounting the handicaps of a somewhat limited library and a severe toothache, was singlehanded preparing to lift from their shoulders the burden of their fears.24 In the course of his effort to counter the optimism of his father, he had achieved one of the most stunning anticlimaxes in the history of human thought. He had discovered a basis for asserting that not only the proposals for social betterment so confidently urged by the philanthropists of his day, but the limited measures used for centuries past, were after all not supported by the laws of nature—that whatever other barriers might have been removed from the pathway of humanity toward general happiness, it remained forever blocked, not by mere removable custom and privilege, but by an immutable natural law the existence of which had been overlooked by social philosophers. Searching apparently hopelessly for a little stone to throw into his father's garden, he had found himself at last in possession of a stone worthy of Ajax, capable of crushing down the bloom of all conceivable Edens. ' T h e discussion," as he put it in somewhat dryer fashion, started the general question of the future improvement of society; and the Author at first sat down with an intention of merely stating his thoughts to his friend, upon paper, in a clearer manner than he thought he could do, in conversation.

10

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But as the subject opened upon him, some ideas occurred, which he did not recollect to have met with before; and as he conceived, that every, the least light, on a topic so generally interesting, might be received with candour, he determined to put his thoughts in a form for publication. 25 The result of that determination was the appearance, in the early summer of 1798, of an anonymous Essay on the Principle of PopulationIts portentous character was veiled with a modest disclaimer of any great originality. 'The most important argument that I shall adduce," said Mai thus, is certainly not new. The principles on which it depends have been explained in part by Hume, and more at large by Dr. Adam Smith. It has been advanced and applied to the present subject, though not with its proper weight, or in the most forcible point of view, by Mr. Wallace; and it may probably have been stated by many writers that I have never met with. I should certainly therefore not think of advancing it again, though I mean to place it in a point of view in some degree different from any other that I have hitherto seen, if it had ever been fairly and satisfactorily answered.- 7 "A point of view in some degree different" indeed! For though there had been, as he indicated, suggestions that the obstacle he envisioned might be present, they had never taken such definite form as to disturb the confidence of philanthropists. Plato had wondered if a greater equality in wealth might not, by easing the lot of all, so encourage breeding as to strain the resources of the state. 28 In Malthus' own lifetime, Adam Smith had demonstrated that the general standard of living was affected by the relationship between the size of the food supply and that of the population. 29 And Dr. Robert Wallace, in his Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and Providence (1761) had, after painting a bright picture of a society in which communal holding of property had abolished misery, relinquished it in despair on the theory that men so free of insecurity would in-

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11

crease their numbers so greatly that all would eventually suffer want. 30 Yet the prophets of reform had seen in such speculations no formidable threat to their hopes. Godwin, whose Political Justice appeared in 1793, and Condorcet, whose Utopian Tableau historique des progres de I'esprit humain came in the following year, were aware of the gloomy forebodings of Wallace, but neither saw any great danger to his vision of a society which, having achieved the supremacy of benevolence over self-interest, would be able to do away with private property and live in a sort of communistic anarchism, ruled only by reason and free from insecurity and poverty. 'There is a principle in human society," Godwin asserted, "by which population is perpetually kept down to the level of the means of subsistence." 31 Elsewhere, referring to Wallace's fear that population growth would put an end to any communal society, he added: One of the most obvious answers to this objection is, that to reason thus is to foresee difficulties at a great distance. Three fourths of the habitable globe is now uncultivated. The parts already cultivated are capable of immeasurable improvement. Myriads of centuries of still increasing population may probably pass away, and the earth still be found sufficient for the subsistence of its inhabitants. . . . Who can say what remedies shall suggest themselves for so distant an inconvenience? 32 At least one of these possible remedies Godwin saw as resulting from an increase in the dominion of the intellect: The tendency of a cultivated and virtuous mind is to render us indifferent to the gratifications of sense. The men therefore who exist when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population, will cease to propagate. 33 Obviously, neither Wallace nor his predecessors had offered any convincing evidence that overpopulation was either inevitable or probable. Their gloomy speculations had cast no shadow on the brave new world that appeared just ahead.

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Now into this untroubled atmosphere Malthus thrust two propositions so bold, simple, and striking that they have fixed themselves indelibly in the history of social thought: "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio . . . Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio." 34 The first proposition Malthus made concrete by reference to the actual doubling of population in the United States in a period of twenty-five years. The proof of his second proposition was no more than an appeal to the common sense of his readers. "Let us . . . allow," he said, referring to the rate at which subsistence in England might be made to increase, that by great exertion, the whole produce of the Island might be increased every twenty-five years, by a quantity of subsistence equal to what it at present produces. The most enthusiastic speculator cannot suppose a greater increase than this . . . . Yet this ratio of increase is evidently arithmetical.35 The obvious consequence of the disparity of the two ratios, Malthus went on, is that the potential increase of the human race is limited by the actual amount of the food supply. Among the animals and among savages this limitation can be achieved only by the wiping out by starvation of the excess of lives created. In other words, whenever more lives are created than can be supported by the food supply, there will inevitably arise such poverty as to destroy them. To this creation of life and destruction by poverty Malthus gave the name of "the positive check." Fortunately, he went on, the plight of civilized man is not utterly hopeless. The man who has the intelligence to see that his means are inadequate to the support of a family, and the power of will to control his sexual impulses, can escape poverty and death. "Reason," said Malthus, "interrupts his career," and he postpones marriage until his means are sufficient to prevent the poverty of his family.36 Therefore, the universal poverty of earlier forms of society does not exist in modern times. Prudence, "the preventive

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13

check," has largely taken its place. The operation of the "positive check," or the destruction of excess lives by poverty, is to be seen chiefly among the lower classes. Having completed this analysis of the causes of comfort and of poverty, Malthus was ready to apply it to his father's contention that there was no obstacle to the abolition of poverty. His method of doing so was to examine, one by one, the outstanding plans that had been advanced for relieving poverty, with respect to their replacing the positive check with the preventive. Some indication of the confidence he felt in the terrible power of his argument may be seen in the fact that he began with that method which not only had come to be accepted in recent times, but which had never been questioned, and had been in use for centuries—namely, the granting of relief to the poor: To remedy the frequent distresses of the common people, the poor laws of England have been instituted; but it is to be feared, that though they may have alleviated a little the intensity of individual misfortune, they have spread the general evil over a much larger surface. It is a subject often started in conversation, and mentioned always as a matter of great surprise, that notwithstanding the immense sum that is annually collected for the poor in England, there is still so much distress among them. Some think that the money must be embezzled; others that the churchwardens and overseers consume the greater part of it in dinners. All agree that somehow or other it must be very ill-managed. In short the fact, that nearly three millions are collected annually for the poor, and yet that their distresses are not removed, is the subject of continual astonishment. But a man who sees a little below the surface of things, would be very much more astonished, if the fact were otherwise than it is observed to be, or even if a collection universally of eighteen shillings in the pound instead of four, were materially to alter it. 3T The mystery, Malthus went on, was dissipated once the operation of his law of population increase was observed. For the

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poor, lacking the intelligence or the will power to limit their numbers even when not helped by the rest of society, obviously cannot do so when the incentive to prudence is weakened by the assurance of relief. Nor is this increase in the numbers of the chronically imprudent the only obstacle to the alleviation of poverty by this method; for it actually creates imprudence among those who without it would be prudent. Finally, by thus increasing the total numbers of society, it lessens the share of the food supply available to imprudent and prudent alike. "A poor man," as Malthus put it, "may marry with little or no prospect of being able to support a family in independence." 38 The poor laws may be said therefore in some measure to create the poor which they maintain; and as the provisions of the country must, in consequence of the increased population, be distributed to every man in smaller proportions, it is evident that the labour of those who are not supported by parish assistance, will purchase a smaller quantity of provisions than before, and consequently, more of them must be driven to ask for support. 39 Especially vicious in its effects, Malthus felt, would be such an extension of the provisions of the poor laws as that proposed by Pitt earlier in the year. For the minister's benevolent intentions he professed all respect; but "it must be confessed," he went on, "that it possesses in a high degree the great and radical defect . . . of tending to increase population without increasing the means for its support." 40 As highly conducive to that disastrous tendency, Malthus pointed particularly to "that clause in his poor bill which allows a shilling a week to every labourer for each child he has above three." 41 Clearly, nothing could be better calculated to create even more widespread imprudence than that called forth by the existing poor laws. But if the power of the sexual impulse makes impossible the relief of poverty by such mild measures as those now mistakenly

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15

employed, what was to be said of such extreme projects as the communism of Godwin? Malthus prefaced the slaughter by decking the victim with flowers: I have read some of the speculations on the perfectibility of man and of society, with great pleasure. I have been warmed and delighted with the enchanting pictures which they hold forth. I ardently wish for such happy improvements. 4 With sobriety only faintly tinged with irony he reproduced the "enchanting pictures" of Godwin: Let us suppose all the causes of misery and vice in this island removed. War and contention cease . . . All men are equal . . . And the necessary labours of agriculture are shared amicably among all . . . The spirit of benevolence, guided by impartial justice, will divide this produce among all the members of the society according to their wants 4 3 . . . Provisions and assistance would spontaneously flow from the quarter in which they abounded, to the quarter that was deficient. 44 Would this idyllic state of affairs endure? Unhappily, answered Malthus, nothing could be more calculated to destroy itself; for the destruction of prudence through relief would be as nothing to the destruction caused by completely freeing every man from responsibility for the support of his own family. Thus the chronically imprudent and the potentially prudent alike would give free rein to their sexual impulses, and even those, if any, who remained prudent would find themselves stripped of food by the teeming numbers of their neighbors. Within a single generation, a ghastly poverty would be universal. Alas! what becomes of the picture where men lived in the midst of plenty . . . The spirit of benevolence, cherished and invigorated by plenty, is repressed by the chilling breath of want . . . The corn is plucked before it is ripe, or secreted in unfair proportions . . . The children are sickly from in-

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sufficient food. The rosy flush of health gives place to the pallid cheek and hollow eye of misery.45 Faced with the prospect of perpetual misery and strife, men would be driven to return to the lesser evil they had hoped to abolish; by restoring the system of private property, they would cast back on each individual the responsibility for his own family, and thus by abandoning the imprudent to the consequences of their own weakness, allow the prudent the comfort secured by their own sexual restraint and their industry. Granted his premises, Malthus undoubtedly had not left such Utopians as Godwin and Condorcet a leg to stand on. For if by abolishing private property Godwin was but releasing the actual and potential imprudence in society, his mysterious "principle in human society by which population is perpetually kept down to the level of the means of subsistence" could be nothing but that very misery which he hoped to wipe out.46 He would be throwing poverty out the window only to have it return tenfold by the door. Malthus had reduced to a single generation Godwin's "myriads of centuries" that might pass before any principle for keeping down population was needed. 47 Nor was he troubled by Godwin's suggestion that the obstacle of imprudence might in time decrease as reason gained power over men. Though Malthus did this suggestion the honor of devoting to it an entire chapter of his essay, his reply was essentially the simple—and apparently reasonable—statement that lacking any evidence of such development in the past or present, we have no basis for assuming it in the future. 48 The demolition of the relief and communistic methods of abolishing poverty did not complete the task which Malthus had set himself. Fated also to destruction was the assumption that as the total capital of society increased, poverty might disappear by the increase of the wages of the working class. Malthus approached his attack on this assumption somewhat apologetically, for even Adam Smith, though conscious of some power of population to affect wages, had not questioned it. 49

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17

But in Malthus' view the same obstacle which prevented any benefit from the granting of relief made worse than useless the payment of high wages. For the imprudence of the poor prevented their achieving comfort, and meanwhile the comfort of the prudent was destroyed by the diminution of their share of the food supply because of the increase in the population. 50 If the entire population is engaged in the production of food, said Malthus, naturally the onset of poverty will be less rapid; but if, as in England, much of the production is industrial rather than agricultural, disaster is bound to be swift in its arrival. At only one point did these devastating propositions seem to leave an opening for doubt. Though neither Godwin nor Condorcet had seen any reason to suppose that the growth of population under communism would be inevitable, they had both seen it as possible. And though neither had been seriously concerned, Condorcet had advanced an audacious suggestion for avoiding any suffering that might result—a suggestion which he was careful not to make too specific,51 but which Malthus readily perceived to refer "either to a promiscuous concubinage, which would prevent breeding, or to something else as unnatural." 52 But whatever possibilities of breaking down the Malthusian barrier to happiness such proposals may suggest today, they could scarcely hope to win much attention in 1798. It did not even occur to Malthus that they demanded a reasoned answer; he mentioned them only to dismiss them as beyond the realm of decent consideration. 53 Then what, the bewildered and charitable reader might well ask, could be done to relieve the distresses of the poor? To any such question Malthus saw no very cheerful answer. There did exist one way—and one only—in which some of the victims of poverty might be saved. For among the poor were some who were the victims not of their own incurable imprudence, but of the misguided practice of charity; though capable of prudence, they had been impoverished by the destruction of any motive for prudence, and by that diminution of their share of the food supply which had been brought about by the increase of popu-

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lation. For these there was salvation; the obstacle to their happiness could be removed by "the total abolition of all the present parish-laws." 54 Perhaps, Mai thus conceded, it might not be necessary to refuse utterly to allow the imprudent to draw upon the resources of the rest of society. Premiums might be given for turning up fresh land, and all possible encouragements held out to agriculture above manufactures, and to tillage above grazing. . . . Lastly, for cases of extreme distress, county workhouses might be established, supported by rates upon the whole kingdom, and free for persons of all counties, and indeed of all nations. The fare should be hard, and those that were able obliged to work.-''5 But any further relief would only defeat its own end. Since the cause of most of the poverty now existing is the irreducible imprudence of the poor, there is no remedy for it. The truth is, that the pressure of distress on this part of a community is an evil so deeply seated, that no human ingenuity can reach i t 5 6 . . . To prevent the recurrence of misery, is, alas! beyond the power of man.87 This despairing conclusion would have been shocking enough even in some earlier age when hopes for universal comfort seemed uncertain and remote. But coming at this late hour, when there seemed no reason to doubt that the poor both could and should achieve comfort by taxing the material advantages of the privileged, it was catastrophic in its effect. Not only was the entire basis of optimism built up slowly for centuries wiped out at one blow, but a deeper pessimism than had before existed was put in its place. In place of doubt as to the ability of mankind to abolish misery appeared a cold certainty of its eternal inability to do so. The privileged classes, lately so dangerously exposed to condemnation, found themselves suddenly placed in a more unassailable position than they had ever known. In the first place, they were no longer ethically vulnerable, since poverty was the fault of the poor themselves. And they were not

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even subject to appeals for aid on the basis of mere mercy, since the unalterable imprudence of the poor would inevitably render any assistance vain. Nlalthus himself stressed primarily the latter point. Indeed, the claim has been made that he never sanctioned denying aid to the poor on the mere grounds that, having caused their own poverty, they did not deserve help.58 The claim will hardly stand up. For though as a clergyman, or merely as a professed Christian, he was bound to find that stern attitude embarrassing, and to keep it decently in the background, he gave evidence on more than one occasion that he did subscribe to it.59 And even if he had never mentioned it, it followed so obviously from his premises that it was not likely to be overlooked by the delighted members of the privileged classes, if they should ever have occasion to appeal to it. But in the first light of Malthus' announcement of his theory, the conclusion that the poor did not deserve aid seemed purely academic in view of the more cogent assertion that in any case they could not profit by it. What overshadowed all other considerations was that the wealthy and privileged, just at the depth of their despair of maintaining their defenses against the underprivileged, found themselves suddenly shielded by a barrier which not only had been created by the poor themselves, but could never be removed. The poor, just at the point of entering a realm of warmth and light, found themselves not only charged with the blame for their own misery, but denied all hope. In their pathway towered now a gigantic image of starvation and despair. At first glance, this anticlimactic appearance of a doctrine of despair seems no more than a bewildering instance of historical irony. Yet probably the paradox is more apparent than real. Indeed, the obstacle to optimism postulated by Malthus was most likely to be discerned only when optimism had reached its height; for in a very real sense, the optimism itself called forth the obstacle. Our own time has shown that reaction becomes more resourceful when most hard pressed. So long as less hopeful views of the prospects for human happiness prevailed, so long

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as skeptics were well provided with familiar and unrefuted arguments against social reform, it was hardly necessary to put forth any great intellectual effort in the development of new arguments. Only when the time-honored arguments had been swept aside; when those who doubted or opposed the possibility of a more rational social organization became aware that the weight of reason was no longer on their side; above all, when the French Revolution gave stern warning that Utopia was on the agenda, was there bound to be a concentration of thought on the part of the reactionaries desperate and intense enough to bring to light an argument that might serve their purpose. Yet when found the argument was not such as to give unmixed joy even to those who profited by it. For the world as pictured by Malthus was a place not only darker than that which optimists had believed themselves to be about to enter: it was darker even than that in which they had believed themselves actually to be living. For the poor, it offered no prospect but that of grinding, irremediable misery; and even for the prudent, it offered only a comfort made bitter by the lack of any hope of relief from the scene of wretchedness around them. Malthus' theory was bound to arouse horror and dismay not only among those condemned by him, but among those who as a class would profit by the acceptance of his belief. Even upon the middle class the claims of religion and humanity were strong; and a paternalistic tradition of social responsibility had survived among the Tories from feudal times. Happily, therefore, there remained here and there, among the doubtful and the despairing, men so wedded to their hopes of a better future as to refuse to accept a world of poverty and misery. Though silent at first for the most part, either because they could not discover any basis for contradicting the conclusions of Malthus, or because their reasons for doing so were too vague for expression, they clung nevertheless to the conviction that the immutable law envisioned by Malthus did not exist; they believed that the grinning figure of famine obstructing the human pathway was no substantial fact, but the product of a

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21

conjuring trick, "a mere phantom of the imagination," as one of them put it, "calculated solely to keep the world in unnecessary ignorance, vice, and crime." 6 0 In that conviction they began their search for the right challenge, for the arguments which would expose the conclusions of Malthus as false. Had they failed, we might today be dwelling in a world at least partly shadowed by Malthusian despair. Hence the history of their struggle to exorcise the Malthusian specter is in some sense a part of the history of our own times.

II THE RISE OF MALTHUS, 1 7 9 8 - 1 8 1 7

A P P E A R I N G AS IT did without the prestige of a known name, the Essay on Population was at first largely neglected by the reviews. Though the Monthly Review gave it some attention within two months after its appearance,1 others, such as the British Critic, ignored it until several years later when it was forced upon their attention.2 But its implications were so tremendous and so clear to those who did hear of it that a knowledge of it spread rapidly among well-read men. Godwin, of course, was among the first of these, having studied the Essay carefully within a month or so after its appearance.3 One of the Wedgwoods— perhaps Thomas, who was corresponding with Godwin4—became interested in it, and through his correspondence with Coleridge it is clear that the latter also had read it before his visit to Germany in 1799.5 The learned Dr. Samuel Parr had read it by early 1800.6 And evidently these were not exceptional cases, for by November of 1800 the Monthly Review spoke of Malthus as having "gained some reputation" by his essay.7 To the further growth of that reputation circumstances contributed. The year 1800 was a season of unusual scarcity, high food prices, and even greater suffering than usual among the poor.8 The situation, alarming enough on any score, was made doubly so by the constant threat of French aggression and by the prevalent fear of domestic turmoil. The governing classes were none too sure of how successfully they had repressed the Jacobin spirit. The scarcity, therefore, was the topic of the day in Parliament and elsewhere. Pamphlets flew in clouds from

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the presses. 9 The most dangerous element of the situation was the impression, right or wrong, existing among the people, that there was no acute food shortage, but rather an artificial shortage created by monopolies and regrating among dealers and speculators. A typical expression of this feeling may be seen in a pamphlet published in 1800 by one Alexander Annesley, a Pittite solicitor and sportsman, entitled Strictures on the True Cause of the Present Alarming Scarcity of Grain and Other Provisions, the theme of which is the now all-too-familiar paradox of "famine in the midst of plenty." 10 But many, either convinced that there existed an actual shortage of food, or aroused by the crisis to acute concern over the possibility of a shortage, began turning their attention increasingly to such devices as had for years been urged by philanthropists. Among these was the agriculturalist Arthur Young. In The Question of Scarcity Plainly Stated, and Remedies Considered (1800) Young recommended that every country laborer with as many as three children be given a cow and a small patch of ground for raising potatoes, the latter a cheaper and more plentiful crop than grain. 11 In An Inquiry into the Propriety of Applying Waste Lands to the Better Maintenance and Support of the Poor (1801) he demonstrated the existence of the resources necessary to the carrying out of his plan. 12 Though Malthus was later to become aware that Young's plan conflicted with his theory, he showed at the time no interest in the fact that schemes for increasing the food supply were in the air. But being, like everyone else, interested in the problem of the cause of the scarcity, Malthus was quick to see the applicability to the situation of his overpopulation thesis. The result was his publication in the fall of 1800 of a pamphlet entitled An Investigation of the Cause of the Present High Price of Provisions. Briefly, his contention was that there was no reason to suspect that cornering and regrating (a more local form of monopoly) were responsible for the rise in prices; a real scarcity existed, and prices were bound to rise. But the exaggerated price level, out of proportion to the real extent of the scarcity, was to be attributed to the vicious effects of the poor law,

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which by proportioning the amount of relief to the price of corn was constantly forcing up the price and thus saving the poorest workers at the expense of others. 13 Because of the interest prevailing in the subject of the scarcity, the pamphlet attracted considerable attention, not only to itself, but to the Essay on Population. The British Critic deigned to review the Essay for the first time, in March, 1801.14 And Malthus, in November, 1800, was able to write to a friend: "The circulation of this pamphlet and the prevailing conversation about the population of the country has [s/'c] caused inquiries to be made about the Essay, which is now nowhere to be bought." 15 From the first there were signs of the struggle between shock and satisfaction in the minds not only of many Tories, but of some Whigs. The British Critic, with true Tory distrust of theory, showed a strong inclination to sneer at Malthus even while rejoicing in his annihilation of Godwin. 16 And the Monthly Review, being decidedly on the left wing of Whiggism, was disturbed by the ethical and religious problem posed by Malthus' revelation of fixed and irremediable evil at the heart of human existence.17 Yet whatever the qualms created by Malthus' Essay, it was rapidly recognized as formidable. Neither the Monthly Review nor the British Critic denied its adequacy as a reply to the New Philosophy. 18 When in 1800 Edward Gardner published in Gloucester a Malthusian essay entitled Reflections upon the Evil Effects of an Increasing Population, the British Critic offered no opposition beyond a sneer at its tediousness in "imputing to an increased population 'almost every civil evil.'" 19 And converts of far greater note already were appearing, including the eminent Whig, Dr. Samuel Parr, 20 and the even more eminent William Pitt. If Malthus himself and some of his critics are to be believed, his influence quickly attained such strength as to begin to affect legislation. First of all, early in 1800 Pitt announced in Parliament that he was dropping his Poor Bill, which Malthus had so heartily condemned, in deference to "those whose opinions he was bound to respect." 21 There seems no

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clear evidence that he was referring to Malthus; 22 but both the directness of the Essay's attack on his bill and his later relations with Malthus support that supposition. 23 Later in the same year, at least Malthus himself believed that his pamphlet on the scarcity, which had been sent to Pitt, had influenced the report of the committee appointed by the House of Commons to consider that subject.24 And finally, about the same time Abbot introduced into Parliament and secured the unopposed passage of his Population Bill, which provided for the taking of the first English census, completed in 1801.25 It is doubtful whether the alarm excited by Malthus, or the mere existence of the scarcity, should be credited with this important step. Opposite to the statement that Malthus largely inspired it 2 6 may be placed the opinion of one critic usually not at all slow to give the philosopher every credit, that he neither influenced nor was influenced by the taking of the census.27 So far, the Godwinians and liberals were stunned and silent.28 But opposition was of course growing under the surface. Godwin, naturally, had at the very first made a gesture of opposition. In August, 1798, no more than two months after the appearance of the Essay on Population, he had managed to meet Malthus in London, and immediately followed up their conversation with a letter more fully explaining his objections to the Malthusian theory. To this Malthus replied from Albury a few days later.29 Already in this correspondence appears the line of attack which shortly afterward Godwin was to develop publicly and more fully against Malthus. But at the time neither man was quite clear as to his own position, and neither succeeded in altering the views of the other. Thus Godwin made no public defense of his philosophy, and Malthus' departure shortly afterward on his first trip to the Continent for the purpose of collecting statistics to bolster up his theory probably ended the correspondence. By 1800, however, a series of painful incidents combined with the growing influence of Malthus to force Godwin into the arena. The wave of reaction and Jacobin-baiting which had begun in England after the September Massacres in Paris several

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years before was reaching its height, and frightened liberals were running for cover. Among these were two of Godwin's close associates. James Mackintosh had in the palmy days of the New Philosophy made his fame by replying to Burke's attack on the Revolution so ably as to be made an honorary citizen of France. 30 But by 1799 he had begun to confirm the suspicion which Coleridge and others had entertained from the first,31 that his revolutionary zeal would prove weaker than his personal ambitions. In the early months of that year he delivered at Lincoln's Inn a series of lectures On the Law of Nature and Nations,3'- in the course of which he made Godwin the scapegoat for his own radical sins—with perfect success, for shortly afterward he became Sir James Mackintosh. The case of Dr. Samuel Parr was not quite so shocking to Godwin. For Parr, whom Godwin had met through "Jemmy" Mackintosh, had never been much tarred with the radical brush.33 Learned and vigorous, steeped in porter and tobacco, and topped by a wig famous for its size, he bore with some justice the title of "the Whig Johnson." 34 Though he had been for some years in constant touch with radical circles, he had never been much more than a left-wing Whig. Godwin could hardly feel, therefore, that Parr was a renegade of the Mackintosh type when, in delivering the annual Spital Sermon at Christ Church at Easter of 1800, he launched a powerful attack against the New Philosophy. Parr's thesis was that preoccupation with schemes of universal philanthropy diverted men's minds from their immediate duties of charity. No doubt his listeners, who included the Lord Mayor and other respectable personages, had no difficulty in translating it into their own view that although the practice of charity could hardly be evaded, private property must remain inviolate. In the sermon as delivered there was no mention of Godwin by name; but there could be no doubt who was intended by Parr's scornful remarks, and when shortly afterward he published the sermon, the copious notes appended not only named Godwin, but cited against him "a very judicious writer" of an "Essay on Population." "Gladly," said Dr. Parr,

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do I bestow the tribute of my commendation on the general merits of this work . . . I admit unequivocally the fundamental principle of the writer, that by those general laws of nature, which constitute all experience, and therefore should regulate all our enquiries, "population, under certain circumstances, will increase in a geometrical proportion, and the produce of the earth in an arithmetical only." 33 It is an interesting illustration of the selective power of the polemical mind that Dr. Parr neglected completely the conclusions of Malthus on the effects of charity itself. Further, one is astonished at this highly intelligent clergyman's apparent insensitivity to the moral and religious implications of the assertion that a large part of the human race was irrevocably barred from comfort and happiness. "More particularly," he continued with remarkable sangfroid, I am pleased with the conclusion of chap. vii. where he presents his readers with a most luminous description "of the vices of mankind as the great precursors in the army of destruction; of sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advancing in dreadful array, and sweeping off their thousands and tens of thousands; and gigantic famine stalking in the rear, and levelling with one mighty blow the population, with the food of mankind." 36 One begins to understand how the popular notion arose that the supporters of Malthus rejoiced in the presence of suffering and death. Such a series of attacks was too much even for the longsuffering Godwin. And he was urged on by his knowledge that the influence of Malthus was growing, and had "perplexed . . . many persons who have been well disposed toward the theories of Political Justice." 3 7 He set himself to the task of answering all his critics at once, and in 1801 published Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr's Spital Sermon . . . Being a Reply to the Attacks of Dr. Parr, Mr. Mackintosh, the Author of an

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Essay on Population, and Others. Perhaps nothing that Godwin ever wrote does him more honor as a man and as a writer than this essay. With complete dignity and restraint he pointed out the meanness of Mackintosh's whitewashing himself at the expense of an old associate, and what seemed to him the sophistry involved in Parr's distinction between universal and local philanthropy. But through his courteous reserve plainly appeared his resentment and contempt. Far different, however, was the feeling with which he approached Malthus. 'The general strain of his argument," said Godwin, does the highest honour to the liberality of his mind. He has neither laboured to excite hatred nor contempt against me or my tenets: he has argued the questions between us, just as if they had never been made a theme for political party and the intrigues of faction . . . . This author has a claim, perhaps still higher, upon my respect. With the most unaffected simplicity of manner, and disdaining every parade of science, he appears to me to have made as unquestionable an addition to the theory of political economy, as any writer for a century past.38 What Godwin regarded as valuable in the essay of Malthus was the demonstration of the necessity for limiting the size of the population according to food supply. But the conclusion that such limitation necessitated abandoning the poor to their misery he abhorred and denied. Not only what Mr. Mackintosh styles the "abominable and pestilential paradoxes" of Political Justice, but every generous attempt for any important amelioration of the condition of mankind, is here at stake. The advocates of old establishments and old abuses, could not have found a doctrine, more to their heart's content, more effectual to shut out all reform and improvement forever.39 Godwin's reply was in part a bold denial of the existence of the incurable imprudence envisioned by Malthus, and the rea-

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soning by which he supported his position was an enlargement of the argument he had made in his letter to Malthus in 1798. But now he based it on Malthus' own statement that in existing society there are many who save themselves from poverty by "that sentiment, whether virtue, prudence, or pride, which continually restrains the universality and frequent repetition of the marriage contract." 40 There was, contended Godwin, a consequence of this fact which Malthus had ignored in his conclusions. For in the happier conditions of a communal society, prudence would be bound not only to continue, but to increase. "We have found," Godwin concluded, that, in the community in which we live, one of the great operative checks upon an increasing population arises from virtue, prudence or pride . . . The more men are raised above poverty and a life of expedients, the more decency will prevail in their conduct, and sobriety in their sentiments . . . Every man will understand the interests of the community, and be master of the outline of its political state . . . He will feel his own happiness so entirely dependent on the institutions which will prevail, as will remove far from him all temptation to touch the ark with a sacrilegious hand. 41 However confidently Godwin might assert that any existing imprudence would in time disappear without any compulsion but that of common decency and sobriety, there is a tacit admission of uneasiness in the fact that he went on to stress such sterner measures as Condorcet had suggested years before, which Malthus had refused to take into account. "What was called the exposing of children," he bluntly pointed out, "prevailed to a very extensive degree in the ancient world." 42 And this suggestion he followed with one equally harrowing: In the island of Ceylon for example, it appears to be a part of the common law of the country, that no woman shall be a mother before she is thirty, and they accordingly have their methods for procuring abortions, which, we are told, are perfectly innoxious.43

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Godwin was well aware of the probable effect of such proposals upon "the imagination of persons educated as I and my countrymen have been." But he was resolute in pointing out that, deplorable as they might be, they were less so than perpetual poverty. "If the alternative were complete, I had rather . . . a child should perish in the first hour of its existence, than that a man should spend seventy years of life in a state of misery and vice." 4 4 It was unfortunate for Godwin that he did not amplify this justification of his proposals; for the ease with which Malthus had dismissed the similar suggestion of Condorcet might have warned him that even though, rationally considered, they were much to be preferred to poverty and death, they would not b e accepted without tremendous emotional opposition, even from readers sincerely desirous of seeing poverty removed. And how little in the way of rational criticism was to be expected of the supporters of Malthus was evidenced even by the Whig and Tory reviews which had no great enthusiasm for his doctrine. T h e British Critic, having by this time come to feel somewhat more warmth toward Malthus, opened with violent abuse of Godwin as a forgotten copyist of subversive and criminal doctrines, and continued: T h e attack on Dr. Parr is followed by an attempt to protect the theory of perfectibility, from the objections of Mr. Malthus, in his "Essay on the Principle of Population." Some of his expedients to check excessive population are too ridiculous for serious discussion, and others too atrocious for calm examination. T h e absurdity lay in the idea of limiting families to four children, and the atrocity in the recommendation of abortion and "child murder"—especially in the assertion that "child murder is not vice." Finally, says the reviewer, Godwin's English is bad. 4 5 T h e Monthly Review, a few months later (March, 1802), was somewhat more reserved; the reviewer contented himself with the ironical conclusion that it must be left to posterity to decide

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between infanticide and killing the aged.46 The most complacent refusal to give Godwin a fair hearing came from SydneySmith, in the Edinburgh Review for October, 1802. The Edinburgh, just beginning its career as the voice of the Whigs, was from the first unhesitating in its enthusiasm for Malthus. Naturally giving prominence to Dr. Parr's Spital Sermon, as expressing high sentiments worthy of the fullest public attention, it immediately followed its review of Parr with one of Godwin's reply.47 With Godwin's criticisms of Mackintosh and Parr the reviewer dealt fairly and generously; but his arguments against Malthus were rewarded by nothing but a characteristic passage of partisan slashing: Aware of the very superior manner in which Mr. Godwin's complaint is now accustomed to be treated, we had great hopes, upon reading so far, that a radical cure had been effected: but we had no sooner entered upon his remarks on population, than this pleasing delusion was dispelled, and we were convinced it was a case for life. The great expedients which this philosopher has in store to counteract the bad effects of excessive population, (so ably pointed out by Mr. Malthus), are, abortion and child-murder.4* No mention whatever was made of the one expedient—prudence —on which Godwin had placed most emphasis. Elsewhere in the same issue of the Edinburgh, Smith said of Godwin, "Mr. Malthus took the trouble of refuting him; and we hear no more of Mr. Godwin." 4ft No wonder, one thinks, if this was the fashion in which Godwin was to be reviewed. The reply of Malthus himself came in the following year. Since his tour of Germany, Scandinavia, and Russia in 1799, Malthus had taken advantage of the peace of 1802 to tour France and Switzerland in order to collect further information on population growth for an expanded version of his original essay. And this, when it appeared in 1803, contained a thorough and reasoned reply to Godwin.

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To Godwin's proposals for the practice of infanticide and abortion as means to remove the obstacle of imprudence, in case it proved actually to exist, he devoted most attention. In the first place, he reminded his readers of his original rejection of any such measures as vice beyond the bounds of consideration. And he bolstered up this religious and moral objection with one more practical: such practices would create not only vice but misery, and on that score would be much the same in effect as the imprudence they sought to counteract. Finally, Godwin had suggested no means by which, in a society where poverty was not feared, such measures could be enforced even if they could be morally accepted. Of Godwin's claim that imprudence might decrease and even disappear completely in a society where no compulsion to prudence existed, Malthus said relatively little. Essentially, his reply was simply that such a change in human nature would be so enormous as to be incredible. 50 To the adherents of Godwin this sweeping rejection of their champion's effort to remove the bugbear of imprudence seemed a piece of bewildering impertinence. 51 For not only were they aware that Malthus in his original essay had spoken of the common existence of prudence as a preventive of poverty; they found in the 1803 edition, side by side with the refutation of Godwin, what appeared to be an open acknowledgement that the latter was right. Now, in Malthus' statement of his basic propositions, misery and vice did not stand alone as the checks to population; to them had been added an alternative check of "moral restraint." 52 No longer did Malthus speak as if sexual indulgence were an entirely automatic and uncontrollable phenomenon. Abstinence from motives of prudence was, he admitted, common in modern times, and increasing. 53 By taking this fact into account, he was able, as he pointed out in his preface, "to soften some of the harshest conclusions of the first essay," 54 and to offer the hope that in time education and selfcontrol might eliminate some part of the existing poverty. 55 One can hardly wonder that the supporters of Godwin felt that this increased admission of the power of prudence not only

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softened Malthus' original conclusions, but nullified his refutation of Godwin, and in effect surrendered his entire theory. Unhappily, the feeling was illusory. Neither the original references by Malthus to the existence of prudence, nor his explicit acknowledgement in the second edition that it existed and might even increase, was in any way inconsistent with his own conclusions or with his rejection of those of Godwin. The admission that some men, when threatened with starvation, could control their sexual impulses by no means forced the conclusion that all men could do so. Still less did it prove that men who were unable to control their sexual impulses under pain of starvation and death will be able to do so when those penalties are replaced by the frowns of their neighbors. There was little chance that Godwin's argument would convince many that imprudence could be wiped out even by the harshest of measures, much less by the faint motivation which was all that a Godwinian society could provide. Malthus had therefore every justification for dismissing Godwin's argument on the grounds that evidence of any such development was lacking. But if Godwin failed to demonstrate that imprudence did not prevail among the poor, he at least demonstrated the falsity of Malthus' conclusion that it constituted an unshakable barrier to general happiness; for the practice of infanticide or abortion was undoubtedly a practical, if horrifying, alternative to starvation. He was therefore justified in his belief that aid could be given the poor without so increasing the population as to bring misery upon prudent and imprudent alike; but this fact did not, as he supposed, remove all objections to giving such aid. By falling back from the position that imprudence was not characteristic of the poor to the position that its effects could be eliminated, he had left the Malthusians armed with that ethical obstacle to aiding the poor which was an important, though unobtrusive, part of Malthus' theory. For if it were granted that imprudence already had produced a swarm of poor, then the damage would not be wholly repaired simply by preventing the production of more poor; it could be repaired only by lessen-

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ing the shares of the prudent. This argument was obviously a little too unpalatable, even to a Malthusian, to be often emphasized. But Malthus himself, in a rash moment, brought it into unsavory prominence by adding to his second edition a passage which seemed to his enemies to surpass in coldbloodedness anything else in his essay: A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At Nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he do not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. 56 The fact that the passage was dropped from all later editions shows how wary Malthus was of denying aid to the poor merely on the grounds that they did not deserve it. Such caution was well advised: not only did the passage provide his enemies with ammunition which was still usable more than seventy-five years later, when Henry George cited it against him, 57 but it shocked and alarmed some of his own supporters. 58 Nevertheless, the fact that he did write it, and that it was greeted with enthusiasm by that element of his following which included Windham and Pulteney, 59 shows what a substantial argument against the relief of poverty remained even if Godwin's claim held good that future imprudence could be counteracted. Aside from this objection, which was hardly escapable by anyone who admitted that the poor were imprudent, and therefore justified aiding them by the demands not of justice but merely of mercy, there were two others to which Godwin left himself peculiarly susceptible. It was hardly his fault, of course, that the prevention, to say nothing of the deliberate destruction, of human life was so surrounded by a sense of horror as to prevent any rational weighing of it against the amount of human suffering created by widespread poverty. But he not only knew

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the power of that religious and ethical prejudice among "persons educated as I and my countrymen have been he had seen it utilized by Nlalthus to prevent any necessity for even discussing the measures by which Condorcet had proposed to remove the obstacle of imprudence. In view of the obvious strength and stubbornness of this emotional reaction, Godwin might well have devoted far more space than he did to his contention that infanticide or abortion was morally superior to permitting lives of misery; for his failure to hammer the point well home made it more easily possible for the reviewers to dismiss his argument with ridicule and abuse, and for Malthus to repeat his refusal to discuss the issue. By thus leaving his opponents free to exclude his proposals on moral grounds, Godwin spared them the painful necessity of opposing his suggestions on the grounds that the poor did not deserve relief. It cannot be said, however, that Godwin created this difficulty, for it was inherent in any argument for restriction of life; his weakness lay only in countering it inadequately. But the second difficulty in which he involved himself he could have avoided. By falling back on the position that breeding might be restricted even though prudence failed, he had granted the necessity for enforcing restrictions, and then had neglected to suggest any means of enforcement to replace that limitation which, by granting relief to the poor, he would remove. Thus he had needlessly given Malthus an opening which the latter was quick to use. Despite these weaknesses, Godwin's reply to Malthus was by no means a complete failure. If he had failed to argue convincingly for the existence of prudence among the poor as a whole, and had thereby left them in the position of not deserving aid, he had at least demonstrated that such aid was not, as Malthus had maintained, utterly impossible. And if he failed to justify his methods of restricting births, or to suggest ways to implement their enforcement, it was within the power of later anti-Malthusians to make up these deficiencies. Yet for the

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time being he had failed, and had left Malthus free to reassert the impossibility of relieving poverty. Malthus had still to meet, however, a threat from a different quarter, of which he had become only belatedly aware. Though no attempt had so far been made to remove the Malthusian obstacle to social change by urging the adequacy of the simple expedient of increasing the food supply, that claim was clearly implied in such schemes as Arthur Young's plan to utilize waste lands by furnishing needy laborers a cow and a potato patch. And the Reverend Alexander Irvine, of Ranoch, publishing in 1802 An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of Emigration from . . . Scotland, had explained that phenomenon by "the increase of population beyond the means of subsistence," and had proposed forestalling both emigration and poverty by subsidizing agriculture and bringing waste lands into cultivation in order to increase the food supply. 60 Amusingly enough, Malthus himself had in 1798 suggested that those very expedients might be employed to palliate, though not to prevent, the rigors of overpopulation. 81 But by 1803 it had become apparent to him that any faith in measures for increasing food would mean the rejection of his own theory, and he undertook to repel that danger. His argument needed no such pains as he had taken with his reply to Godwin. He had only to remind his readers that the sacrifice made by the rest of society to provide such aid would be rewarded only by an acceleration of births among the poor and an even vaster mass of poverty to be aided in the future. 62 After the picture he had drawn of the effects of other plans for aiding the poor, it was hardly necessary to dwell at length upon the effects of increasing the food supply: the initial sacrifice of the prudent in furnishing the means for the increase, the immediate response in the form of increased population, and the constantly increasing victimization of the prudent—all for nothing, since the poor would increase faster than food. It goes without saying that this summary dismissal of such proposals as Young's and Irvine's hardly did them justice. These

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advocates of an increased food supply were not Godwinian communists, and can scarcely be imagined to have had in mind that no limitation was to be placed on the amount of aid each man should receive. Had they been more explicit on that point, much of the wind might have been taken from Malthus' sails: for even without attempting, as did Godwin, to demonstrate that the poor had not caused their own poverty, and therefore would in no way be imposing on the charity of the prudent, they might have claimed convincingly that by increasing the food supply, while limiting each man to an equal share of it, the gap between the numbers and the subsistence of the poor might be partly or even wholly closed up, depending on the amount of the increase of food; and the sacrifice required of the prudent members of society would not only be kept from increasing, but would be less than that involved in aiding the poor while the food supply remained static. Such considerations as these, however, had not been thrust upon Malthus, and indeed were never to be advanced. For though many an opponent was later to suggest that the possibility of increasing food proved the imaginary character of the Malthusian obstacle to aiding the poor, no one of them took the pains to enter into the claim minutely enough to expose the superficiality of Malthus' objection to it. For this fact there was adequate reason; for although Malthus' objections might be proved wrong, though it might be argued that an increase of food, like the Godwinian plan of checking increase of population, might aid the poor with only a limited exploitation of the prudent—or indeed, if the poor could be shown not to be generally imprudent, without exploitation of anyone—there remained nevertheless another objection which could hardly be shaken; there must come a time when no further increase of food, or at any rate no further standing-room, could be afforded by a crowded globe. However certain Malthus' foes might feel, therefore, that something was wrong with his objection to increasing food, they were not much inclined to spend their energy in removing it when they themselves saw in the proposal

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only a temporary solution to their problem, only a demonstration that no Malthusian barrier to general happiness existed for the present. The result was that they allowed Malthus to cling to his position, and concentrated on the alternative of restricting increase of population, thus abandoning a cause which was sufficiently unobjectionable to have been genuinely helpful to the poor until such time as other measures could be popularized. It is easy, therefore, to see why Malthus was able to reverse his original position by insisting that no increase in the food supply would serve to alleviate poverty. But nothing in his theory explains adequately the amazing advance beyond that position which also appeared in the 1803 edition. As well as incorporating into the Essay the substance of his pamphlet on the cause of high prices during a scarcity, Malthus came out boldly in support of export bounties on grain and of corn laws in general. Since corn laws inevitably would raise the price of food and thus deprive the poor of some part of what Malthus himself would have recognized as their rightful share of subsistence, such measures were obviously not justified by his principle of restricting the poor to their own resources. Malthus did not in fact so attempt to justify them. Instead, he argued that the poor would be compensated by the stabilizing of prices resulting from enlarged cultivation, and that military necessity demanded such enlargement. 63 This recommendation for the imposition of a gratuitous burden upon the poor was not, however, more than a minor refinement upon Malthus' major thesis. It was therefore of far less moment than the fact that, having won an easy victory over Young, and at least the appearance of a victory over Godwin, he was free to reassert the impossibility of relieving the distress of the poor. Indeed he was, ironically enough, free to assert it for the first time without signs of embarrassment. For the chief immediate effect of Godwin's attempt to refute Malthus was not to force Malthus into a glaring inconsistency, as Godwin's friends had supposed, but to suggest to him a means of strengthening his position. By inadvertently slighting the effects

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of prudence in his first edition, Malthus had involved himself in a considerable religous problem, which made his theory troublesome even to many who on other counts hailed it with delight. If it were true, as Malthus had stated, that the poor were utterly helpless in the grip of a passion that no power could check, and that must inevitably plunge them into misery, what were men to think of the God who had created them thus, destined to a horrible fate which could never be relieved? Malthus had solved this problem as best he could by representing this suffering as God's method of developing humanity, and of cultivating the sense of pity and sympathy in the survivors; but his solution can scarcely have seemed to him quite adequate, and he had fallen back on the inscrutability of the purposes of God. 64 Now Godwin's reminder of his own admission that prudence existed suggested the perfect solution. By explicitly listing as a check to overbreeding that prudence which he had attributed to the well-to-do, and even granting that in time some few of the poor might achieve it, he was able, as he put it, to soften the harsh conclusions of his first edition. His willingness to make this change is hardly surprising. For the implication that what was lacking in the poor was not the power but the desire to be prudent placed God in a somewhat more favorable light. It did so, furthermore, without impairing Malthus' original conclusions as to the poor. Since their prudence was potential rather than actual, it remained for the present impossible to aid them. And their ethical claim to assistance was weakened by their increased culpability. In a sense, this new characterization was somewhat less insulting than the old—most men resent an accusation of criminality less than a charge of weakness. But it was calculated to increase the complacency of those who favored abandoning the poor to their misery. Obviously, Malthus' conclusions were softened chiefly to the advantage of God, who now was exculpated as well as the rich. Thus even more secure than before against the fury of his enemies, Malthus proceeded to expand in his second edition the

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ideas expressed in the first. He added several chapters designed to show that in all ages and all lands population had pressed constantly against the food supply.65 He expanded the argument of the first edition to the effect that emigration, aside from being in itself a form of misery, could give only brief respite from population pressure.66 Above all, he presented a specific plan for abolishing poor relief, by disqualifying all persons bom after a given date, and serving warning upon all brides and grooms of the ineligibility of their children. To this Spartan proposal he added one for establishing parochial schools (specializing in teaching population theory) and for establishing harsh relief allowances for the merely unfortunate.67 The second edition extended Malthus' fame. "By these miserable sophisms," said one of his foes bitterly, "Mr. Malthus has obtained the high reputation which he at present enjoys; his book having become the political bible of the rich, the selfish, and the sensual." 68 Late in 1803 the Monthly Review, having lost some of its misgivings as to his views, helped to popularize them by reviewing the enlarged Essay at length, and praising it as a highly valuable and important contribution to political science.69 Some very hard heads were filled with the same conviction. William Cobbett, only recently back from America and installed by Tory subsidies in the editorship of his Political Register, in 1805 described the Malthusian theory as "a doctrine which can never be shaken." 70 Another convert of whom, besides Pitt, Malthus was most proud was the famous "Pigeon" Paley.71 The Archdeacon, as the pride of Cambridge and the moral oracle of his day, had come to be considered one of the pillars of the Church and State, and it might well be to Malthus no small matter that Paley spoke with great admiration of the Essay on Population.72 There were other evidences of the degree to which the population theory was beginning to influence economic and social thought. In 1803, William Burdon, wealthy coal operator of Newcastle-on-Tyne, published Advice Addressed to the Lower Ranks oj Society, which the Monthly Review, for once rather impatient with Malthusianism, summarized as fol-

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lows: "He kindly informs the Poor, that it is for their interest not to multiply too fast; and he particularly advises them to keep down their numbers, by avoiding early marriages, that they may command good wages." 7 3 One is tempted to see an extension of Malthusianism even into poetry in the Essay on War . . . and other Poems published in 1803 by Nathaniel Bloomfield, brother of the "native genius," whose title poem was designed to show "that war is necessary to thin society, when it becomes overstocked." 74 At any rate, there is some evidence that Malthus' theory quickly came into use, and long remained so, as a justification of war. 75 Of especial value to the extension of Malthus' influence was his superimposing upon his main theory his support of bounties on the exportation of grain. Whatever its motive, it went far to win the hearts of the Tories. The hitherto rather cool tone of the British Critic warmed perceptibly. Though still disliking Malthus' proposal to abolish the poor laws completely, and fearing that too much celibacy might produce vice, its reviewer summarized the enlarged Essay with approval—emphasizing particularly Malthus' arguments in favor of the export bounty on corn. 76 And, happily for Malthus, so strongly was he already entrenched in the affections of the Whigs that even his Tory position on this subject did not lose him their admiration. The Edinburgh, though taking of course the opposing point of view, gave him the place of honor among its antagonists, and handled his views with the utmost politeness and respect. 77 Yet there were still many men in 1803, and even before, who not only felt sure that the Malthusian theory was fallacious, but that they could put their fingers on its weak spots without hesitation. Among these skeptical critics was Coleridge. Malthus had from the first failed to make much of an impression on him; even in 1799 Coleridge had replied to Wedgwood's inquiry about the Essay on Population: "Before I left England, I had read the book of which you speak. I must confess that it appeared to me exceedingly illogical." 78 And what makes this judgment extremely significant is that it was coupled with a declaration of distrust

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of the soundness of Godwin as well as of Malthus. Obviously here is opposition to Malthusianism of a sort quite different from the radical. As a matter of fact, by 1799 Coleridge had quite thoroughly broken away from his Godwinism and Jacobinism; indeed, he was well on his way to being a rather odd variety of Tory. Commonly, this transformation has been ascribed to his disillusionment with the excesses of the French Revolution; but it seems likely that his deeper motivation was internal rather than external. In the first place, he had been from childhood given to a mysticism and idealism to which Godwinian rationalism was utterly foreign; and under the stress of physical and mental illness he must have felt a powerful yearning for what was stable, settled, familiar in thought. Probably without any prompting from external circumstances he would inevitably have returned to idealism, to the religion of his youth, and to what was most traditional in politics. Toryism, which might almost be defined as the unwillingness to disturb the settled customs of men, was a vague tradition rather than a program. But there survived in it the concept of an organic society in which all classes were bound together in feudal ties of duty and mutual responsibility, under the sanction of morality and religion. Crudely for the most part these traits were expressed; yet their presence in Toryism as in no other political creed gave Coleridge a foundation on which he could raise his own structure of thought. From its rubble of feudal and religious tradition he reared lofty pinnacles of idealism, paternalism, and social responsibility. In his social views we touch the thread that leads through Disraeli and Young England to the Tory paternalism, degraded as it may be, of today. It is in these facts that the significance of Coleridge's opposition to Malthus lies; it represented the entrance into the battle against defeatism and human misery of the best and noblest elements of Toryism. Since 1801, when he gave up his position on the Morning Post, Coleridge had been lingering near Wordsworth at Keswick, ill in body and depressed in mind. But when in the course of his voracious reading he came to Malthus' second edition, in 1803,

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he responded far more actively than he had done in 1799. Evidently he had in mind a reply to Malthus, either by himself or by Southey, and fortunately he was an inveterate annotator of his books. Therefore w e have in the margins of his copy of the Essay on Population the outline of his planned attack. 79 The combination of high moral indignation and logical penetration in his notes makes them worthy of quotation. Malthus' proposition that population tends to increase faster than subsistence Coleridge granted readily enough; indeed, he felt that the first point to be made against Malthus was that he had wasted time and space on a truism. Opposite Malthus' statement of the differing ratios, he wrote: Quote this Paragraph, as the first sentence of your Review; and observe that this is the sum and substance of 8 pages— and that the whole work is written in the same Ratio, viz.— 8 lines of Sense and substance to 8 x 30 = 240 Lines of Verbiage and senseless Repetition and even of these 8 Lines all the Pomp of Numerals and Ratios might have been cashiered, by substituting a Proportion which no one in his senses would consider as other than axiomatic . . . 80 But Coleridge rejected with scorn the Malthusian contention that poverty must result from the conflict of the two ratios. Like Godwin, he believed that prudence could exist universally and under any conditions, and that Malthus had admitted as much. Opposite the passage in which Malthus announced the modification of his theory by the "moral" check, Coleridge angrily wrote: And of course you wholly confute your former pamphlet, and might have spared yourself the trouble of making up the present Quarto. Merciful God! are w e now to have a Quarto to teach us that great misery and great vice arise from Poverty and that there must be Poverty in its worst shapes wherever there are more mouths than Loaves, and more Heads than Brains! The whole question is this: Are Lust and Hunger both alike Passions of physical Necessity, and the one equally with

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Finally, Coleridge refused to permit Malthus to reject Godwin's suggestion for the use of physical checks by labeling them "vices." To him as to Malthus the thought of their use was repulsive; but his thinking was too much superior to that of Malthus, in clarity and in freedom, to permit him to regard as vice or misery anything by which a far greater amount of vice or misery might be prevented. "It is in the last degree idle," he wrote impatiently, to write in this way without having stating [ sic ] the meaning of the words Vice and Virtue. That these and all these are Vices in the present state of Society, who doubt?—So was Coelibacy in the Patriarchal Ages. Vice and Virtue subsist in the agreement of the habits of a man with his Reason and Conscience, and these can have but one moral guide, Utility or the Virtue and Happiness of Rational Beings. We mention this not under the miserable notion that any state of Society will render those actions capable of being performed with conscience and virtue, but to expose the utter ungroundedness of this speculation. Adding, however, that if we believed with Mr. Malthus's warmest partizans, that man never will in general be capable of regulating the sexual appetite by the Law of Reason, and that the gratification of Lust is a thing of physical Necessity equally with the gratification of Hunger—a fact [faith?] which we should laugh at for its silliness if its wickedness had not pre-excited Abhorrence—nothing would be more easy than to demonstrate that some one or other of these actions, whether Abortion, or the Exposure of Children, or artificial Sterility on the part of the Male, would become Virtues—a Thought, which we turn from with Loathing; but not with greater Loathing, than we do from the degrading Theory, of which it would be a legitimate Consequence—and which by a strange Inconsequence admits the existence of all

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these Vices, and of all that Mass of Misery, on account of which alone these Vices are Vices, in order to prevent that State of Society, in which admitting some one of these actions after the Birth of the second or third Child, the whole Earth might b e imagined filled to its utmost extent with enlightened and happy Beings. Mr. Malthus is continually involving himself in the silly Blunder of the Quakers, who idolize words . . . I am weary of confuting such childish Blunders. 82 Whether Coleridge made these notes for his own use or that of Southey, it was the latter who did make use of them in a public attack on Malthus. Southey, having after his return from Portugal in 1801 abandoned his study of the law, found himself obliged to supplement the income from his published works with that derived from reviewing. His mainstay in this field was at the time the Annual Review, a short-lived enterprise edited by Arthur Aikin, which might almost be described as the organ of the Aikin family, since its chief contributor of note aside from the editor and Southey was the former's sister Lucy, the biographer of Addison. For this bulky periodical Southey undertook to review the second edition of Malthus' essay. One of his letters, dated January 20, 1804, reveals amusingly the spirit in which he wrote. The recipient of the letter, incidentally, was the one of Southey's friends who might be expected above all others to be interested in the Malthusian controversy—John Rickman, who was not only a student of political economy, but a statistician in the field of population, and had been in charge of the Census of 1801. 8 3 "This vile reviewing," wrote Southey, still bird-limes me . . . Yesterday Malthus received, I trust, a mortal wound from my hand; to-day I am at the Asiatic Researches. Godwin's Life of Chaucer is on the road to me: by-the-by, the philosopher came in for a hard rap over the knuckles with Mr. Malthus. 8 4 As may be judged from the tone of this letter, Southey was no more than Coleridge prompted by love of Godwin to attack Malthus. His political views since the brave days of Panti-

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socracy had been following much the same course as those of Coleridge. 85 Some highly individual traits, of course, survived to give to his Toryism, like that of Coleridge, a sentimental and paternalistic character. A deeply religious man, Southey was never to be free from the claims of generosity and brotherhood. But he lacked the complex mind and the powers of synthesis possessed by Coleridge; and as a result he never built up a consistent theory of society. His Toryism was compounded of incongruous elements such as support of aristocracy and the established church on the one hand, and—strange relic of his Godwinian days—community of property on the other. The full stage of this development, however, he had not reached in 1804. His attack on Malthus revealed only that from the viewpoint of the benevolent Tory, Malthus was even more dangerous to society than Godwin. "A plague o' both your houses" was the theme on which Southey opened his review. No wise man had ever doubted, and no christian had ever disbelieved, that the general condition of mankind could be improved, till the unhappy consequences of the French revolution shook the liberties and morals of Europe. This amelioration was rendered probable to the good by reason, and certain by faith; they religiously expected what they benevolently desired. For these rational and righteous hopes, men who had no faith and little reason, substituted wild speculations how men might live forever [a blow at one of the more unguarded theories of Godwin ]; and these speculations were combated by those who had just reason enough to expose the absurdity of their antagonists, and just faith enough to raise an outcry against their infidelity.86 By the time Southey had begun this review, Coleridge was no longer at Keswick, but off into Devonshire on one of his restless journeys. But plainly he had left his notes with Southey; for after the above paragraph, Southey simply inserted Coleridge's notes verbatim, since he was adding little of his own to his friend's arguments. Sexual indulgence, he maintained, is

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not a physical necessity, but something amenable to the control of reason; eventually, therefore, misery will some day be avoided by the growth of wisdom (a word which naturally Southey as a lover of the venerable and traditional preferred to "reason," with its doctrinaire connotations). And even if wisdom should prove not equal to the task of checking population, he maintained, the physical checks could easily be utilized. In the justification of their use Southey followed Coleridge word for word. And he amplified Coleridge's contention that by admitting the efficacy of "moral restraint" Malthus had made his essay a suicide. 87 Up to this point, the attempt of Coleridge and Southey to remove the Malthusian barrier to the relief of poverty appears almost identical with that of Godwin. By seeming to accept Malthus' view that the poor had so far been responsible for their own poverty, they not only allowed the ethical argument against relief to hold fast against them, but were unable to offer any convincing hope for the development of prudence among the poor in the predictable future. It is true that they were not quite in the impossible position of Godwin. Since as Tories they advocated not Godwinian communism, but merely a paternalistic system of relief, their system could not be said to lack any motivation for prudence—or, if worst came to worst, for the practice of birth control. Therefore to prove it capable of reducing poverty they needed not show, as Godwin would have had to do, that all men could be prudent without motive; they had only to prove that not all the poor were, as Malthus contended, incapable of prudence under any circumstances, but that some of them at least could be prudent if aware that they were to receive only a limited amount of the total subsistence. Unfortunately, they were as unequal to this task as Godwin was to the task of proving that unmotivated prudence could become universal. In citing the admission of Malthus that some were capable of prudence as evidence that all could be, and so asserting that he had slain his own theory, Coleridge had fallen into exactly the same lapse of logic as Godwin; for the existence of

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prudence in some men under powerful motivation no more proved its potential existence in all under the same motivation than it proved its existence in all under no motivation. In such attempts to use Malthus against himself lay no hope of demonstrating that no immutable obstacle of imprudence existed. Insofar as Southey's argument repeated Coleridge's, therefore, it failed to remove either the ethical objection to aiding the poor, or the necessity for advocating the distasteful expedient of birth control. Only in two minor respects did they appear to have improved on Godwin's reply to Malthus. By limiting the amount of aid to be given the poor, they maintained a motive which, even if unable to repress imprudence, might prove powerful enough to enforce some employment of birth control. And Coleridge had, far more fully and strikingly than Godwin, exposed the fallacy of the assumption that God, while abhorring the prevention of life, regards complacently its destruction by misery and starvation. A careful reader of Southey's article might have detected, however, one passage which was infinitely more important than anything suggested by Coleridge. Obviously Southey himself did not see its full implications; for had he done so, he must have seen that they made the rest of his article superfluous and irrelevant. If it is true, he asked Malthus, that it is the imprudence of the poor that causes misery, how can one account for the existing misery of the English poor, in view of the fact that the land is fully capable of producing food for all? How can it be denied, in such case, that something other than the impossibility of feeding the people is reducing them to misery? 8 8 So glaring is the fallacy in Malthus' reasoning which is revealed by Southey's question that it is difficult to see why no critic up to this point had detected it. For Malthus had indicted the poor as the sole cause of their poverty not by disproving the possibility that some other cause existed, but by a sleight-ofhand performance which seemed to do so. Beginning by picturing a Godwinian society as containing two causes of poverty— the overbreeding of the imprudent, and their unjust exactions

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from the prudent—he had gone on to picture its supersession by a society which, by forbidding any to infringe on the shares of others, removed the second-named cause, leaving imprudence as the sole cause of whatever poverty might exist. Then calmly he had leaped to the assumption that this latter society was identical with that of his day. This circuitous procedure had been astonishingly successful so far; his opponents, including Godwin and, apparently, Coleridge, had accepted the conclusion that the poor alone were responsible for poverty. Yet all that was required to shatter it beyond repair was the simple observation that the existing society had not been proved free of all other causes of poverty; for that self-evident fact needed only to be mentioned to make Malthus' indictment of the poor, and therefore both the ethical and the practical arguments against aiding them, highly doubtful. And any convincing evidence that another cause of poverty was not only possible, but actually present, would prove that at worst the poor were responsible for only a part of their poverty, and therefore were both able and deserving to be helped to some extent by the rest of society. Southey obviously felt that the presence of sufficient resources to maintain all in comfort proved that social injustice existed; but he did not stop at the logical inference that the imprudence of the poor was only one cause of their poverty. With an argumentative leap worthy of Malthus himself he drew the conclusion that imprudence did not exist. Hence he displayed a rage against Malthus that contrasts markedly with the complimentary courtesy of Godwin: Where lies the fault . . . ? Is it in human institutions, or in the laws of nature? Is it in Man or in God? Wilt thou condemn me that thou mayest be righteous, said the Lord: who is he that will dare answer the question in Mr. Malthus's behalf? 89 Clearly Southey was pushing his argument too far. Granting his rather doubtful assumption that he had proved social injustice not only possibly but actually existent, that fact alone hardly justified his denial of the imprudence of the poor. The presence

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of another cause of poverty did not weaken the conviction Malthus had created, by his use of the arithmetical and geometrical ratios, that overbreeding was inevitable and irresistible. Curiously enough, Southey was not alone in failing to see the necessity of combating that conviction; for over twenty years his successors in the claim that the poor were victims of social oppression, and not of their own imprudence, failed to make clear the further fallacy of Malthus in assuming that the power to increase geometrically meant the inevitable realization of geometrical increase. But if Southey had not, as he supposed, completely exonerated the poor, and so justified his boast that "the farthing candle of [Malthus'] fame must stink and go out," 9 0 he had struck the first mortal blow at Malthus' assumption of their sole guilt. Just as Godwin's arguments had been to some extent developed by Coleridge and Southey, so theirs were soon notably supplemented by the appearance in 1805 of two remarkable books by a remarkable man. It is regrettable that so little is now known of the life and personality of Dr. Charles Hall, a "Hampden in the nineteenth century," 91 and something of a Karl Marx in its first decade. Born about 1745, he became a doctor of medicine at Leyden, and went into practice at Tavistock. There, apparently, his experiences made him think intensely on the causes of human suffering, and the result was his publication in 1805 of The Effects of Civilization. At the time this book was published, Hall had been reduced to poverty by a lawsuit, and shortly afterward was sentenced to the Fleet prison. There he remained, refusing as a matter of principle the offers of friends to secure his release, until his death years later at the age of about eighty. Briefly, Hall's book is one of the striking anticipations of the scientific socialism developed by Marx. Its central theme is 'class struggle. Society, says Hall, in language to be echoed decades later by Disraeli, is divided into two orders, the rich and the poor, who are natural and inevitable enemies. The rich injure the poor not only by withholding from them seven-eighths of the products of their labor, but by forcing them to divert their

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labor from the production of necessities, such as food, to that of luxuries for the enjoyment of their masters. The poor, who are the truly useful and valuable part of society, behave as do the pigeons in the famous passage from which "Pigeon" Paley drew his nickname—they injure one another in defense of the unjust privileges of the rich. When they become rebellious, the rich lure them into war to kill one another. 92 It is true, Hall stated, that mankind is limited in growth by the size of the food supply; and the slow growth of the European population indicates a lack of subsistence. But, according to his analysis, this lack comes from no deficiency of nature, but from the restrictive effects of the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the rich. 93 For this situation, he felt, republican government affords no remedy; for where the wealth is, there the power lies, regardless of political forms. The release of the forces of production could be achieved only by such measures as the abolition of primogeniture and the luxury manufactures, an equal division of the land, and the guarantee to each man of the whole fruits of his labor. 94 In The Effects of Civilization Hall paid relatively little heed to the population argument against his equalitarianism. Evidently he had not yet become aware of the weight already being attached to Malthus. He did take note of a suggestion he had seen in a periodical that poverty could be alleviated only by restricting the numbers of the poor, but asserted that his main argument proved the falsity of such a view. 95 Of course, he conceded, in time the earth must reach the limits of its productivity; but only at a remote period—perhaps that appointed by God for the end of the universe. In any case, it would be criminal to endure misery now for fear of such a problematical future. 96 So far Dr. Hall showed little sign of having given adequate thought to the problem. But he must have become quickly aware of the weakness of such a temporary measure as increasing the food supply, and later in 1805 he published a supple-

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mentary pamphlet entitled Observations on the Principal Conclusion in Mr. Malthus' Essay on Population. Stating Malthus' argument against the possibility of equality, he repeated his contention that true overpopulation could appear only at a very remote period. And, he now added, such preventive measures as colonization and the regulation of marriage can make it infinitely remote. 97 But by granting the eventual necessity of preventive measures he by no means granted Malthus the impossibility of equality. Indeed, he pointed out, overpopulation could be prevented easily—and jusdy—only under a system of equality. For under such a system any restrictive measures, by falling on all, would bear harshly on none; and all would endure them patiently, because all would have a like interest in obeying, and would harbor no sense of injustice such as would be fully justified by such harsh and unequal treatment of a part of society as was recommended by Malthus, condemning the bees to die to save the drones. Therefore "it still appears," Dr. Hall concluded, "that a more equal distribution of land would be an adequate remedy for the evils of civilization; and that it is the only one." 98 Dr. Hall's argument against Malthus was obviously less sweeping than Southey's. Since he neither assumed that the presence of another cause of poverty disproved any imprudence on the part of the poor, nor detected any fallacy in Malthus' view that such imprudence must exist, he granted the necessity for some enforcement of prudence. But although he thus failed to exculpate the poor completely, he did, by his detailed analysis of the injustice of the social structure, build up a convincing claim that they were more victims than culprits. And by proposing the regulation of marriage rather than infanticide or abortion, he deprived the Malthusians of that moral objection which Malthus had so well utilized to maintain his claim of the impracticability of aiding the poor. The dangerous potentialities of Hall's book were evidently recognized readily enough by the supporters of Malthus, for it called forth an outburst of ridicule and abuse similar to that

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which had been showered on Godwin. Whig and Tory reviews alike were venomous, and as much as two years later, in 1807, the British Critic revived the book for a slashing attack." Perhaps there is some indication of the soundness of their fears in the fact that it went into a second edition in 1813. Even so, it appears to have made more impression on Hall's opponents than on his allies, for another anti-Malthusian, writing in the following year, stated that the Essay on Population "has gained its author some celebrity as a writer on political economy" 100 and that "hitherto nothing of consequence has appeared" 1 0 1 against it. The writer was Thomas Jarrold, later to become prominent in scholarly circles in Manchester, but in 1806 still practicing medicine at Stockport, in Cheshire. His Dissertations on Man (1806) is of interest only as comic relief. If Dr. Hall's reply to Malthus pointed forward to scientific socialism, Dr. Jarrold's looked back to the Middle Ages. So powerful did Jarrold feel his position against Malthus to be that he denied the validity not only of the latter's conclusions, but of his basic propositions. Not only, he said, can the food supply be vastly increased, but there is no tendency of population to outstrip it everywhere and at all times. Further, the effect of vice upon population growth is negligible, and the removal of the check of misery would not produce overpopulation. For this he gave two reasons: The first is that God, constantly looking out for the welfare of man, has ordained that since patriarchal times human life shall be greatly shortened, so that population shall increase more slowly.102 Again, as man reaches a higher stage of culture, he becomes less prolific: "As the faculties of the mind are unemployed, as the man sinks down towards the animal, he is prolific; as he ascends above them, his fruitfulness decreases." 103 By overlooking these facts, he maintained, Malthus was contradicting the divine injunction to increase and multiply, and was slandering God. In view of the dubious nature of Jarrold's disproof of the menace of overpopulation, it is rather amazing to recall his characterization of the work of former critics as inconsequential.

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To both his assertions perhaps the simplest rebuttal was that used by Malthus against Godwin's hope that prudence would become its own excuse for being—namely, that we have no evidence to lead us to expect it. But even granting him the two checks, they would lead only to a continual robbery of the prudent by the imprudent, unless everyone without exception were to be stricken either by death or by a paralyzing attack of intellect upon the birth of his third child. And in the former case at least many might feel that the remedy was worse than the disease. Perhaps the occasion for Jarrold's book was the appearance early in 1806 of the third edition of Malthus' essay. In the text as it stood in the 1803 edition he had made few important changes, perhaps because he felt that his theory was substantially complete, perhaps because events such as his marriage, in 1804, and his appointment in 1805 as Professor of History and Political Economy in the East India College at Haileybury had diverted him from further extensive alterations. But even as the new edition appeared, he evidently was at work on a reply to his critics; and this when completed was early in 1807 added as an appendix to the third edition,1(M and later to the fourth edition, which differed from the third chiefly in the change of the date from 1806 to 1807. This appendix contained one highly interesting passage in which Malthus confessed some alteration of his hitherto severe indictment of the granting of relief to the poor. The poor laws, he now observed, make it desirable for landlords to tear down the cottages on their estates, in order to diminish parish relief rates, and thus they discourage as well as encourage marriage, and so do not much stimulate population. 105 The implications of this passage are greater than Malthus himself saw them to be. If it was true that the poor were made prudent simply by a lack of living quarters, why might they not be supposed to be capable of prudence under threat of starvation? Malthus had unconsciously shifted his ground from his 1803 admission—that the poor might some day become prudent—

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to the dangerous concession that some of them at least were already so—a concession which, if it left a question whether they deserved aid, took away the foundation for Malthus' contention that they could not profit by it. But the rest of the appendix showed no awareness of any such concession; it was devoted to the task of defending his original conclusions against his critics. Most of what had been written against him Malthus professed to dismiss as "so full of illiberal declamation, and so entirely destitute of argument, as to be evidently beneath notice." 1 0 8 He was concerned chiefly with "objections which have been urged in conversation." 1 0 7 These ranged from the most weighty to the apparently malicious. Among them was the not unnatural charge that Malthus was opposed to the use of vaccination (introduced by Jenner some ten years before) on the grounds of its contributing to overpopulation. With this charge Malthus dealt easily. 108 As for the really damaging criticisms of his theory, such as those of Southey and Hall, Malthus's procedure was even simpler—he passed them by without mention. By so doing he maintained himself in a position to dismiss Coleridge's allegation that he had written a quarto volume to demonstrate a truism, and to attack as unrealistic those who, like Jarrold, accused him of contradicting God's commands, or who, like Hall, assailed his assertion that the poor have no right to relief. 109 On the latter point he devoted his attention chiefly to Arthur Young, who, since Malthus' criticism in 1803 of his "cow-and-cottage" system of relief, had fiercely attacked in the Annals of Agriculture Malthus' proposal to abolish the poor laws. 110 Undoubtedly Malthus could now afford the luxury of ignoring his critics, for they were so far making little headway against the tide of his influence. Books continued to appear warning the poor against marriage. Sir Robert Peel the elder, humanitarian and erstwhile sympathizer with the French Revolution, was a Malthusian by 1806; 1 1 1 Sir William Pulteney, called by Hazlitt "Plug Pulteney, the celebrated miser," was at one time, according to Southey, bent on introducing into Parliament

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a bill embodying Malthus' plan for abolishing the poor law, 112 for he was firmly persuaded that the author of the Essay on Population was the greatest man that ever lived, and really wished to have bestowed some personal remuneration on Mr. M. as his political confessor, for having absolved him from all doubts and scruples in the exercise of his favourite virtue.113 Sir William Windham, Cobbett's patron, grew more firm in his respect for Malthus as Cobbett grew less so.114 And events in Parliament during 1807 proved abundantly that among public men generally Malthusian views were flourishing. The debates occasioned by Wilberforce's annual attempt to abolish the slave trade brought the name of Malthus to the floor of the house again and again. The supporters of the slave trade—perhaps prompted by the Letter to William Wilberjorce, esq., M.P., on the Justice and Expediency of the Slave Trade (published in 1806 by a dissolute hack writer named Robert Heron, who had since died of fever in the debtors' prison at Newgate 115)—advanced Malthus' Essay to demonstrate the futility of trying to diminish the total of human misery in Africa, and the usefulness of slavery in saving the surplus Negro population.116 Against this impressive argument the supporters of the bill could produce nothing better than Roscoe's observation that because of the progressive principle of population, abolishing the slave trade would not diminish the population of the West Indies,117 and the Earl of Selkirk's assertion that "this principle had been acknowledged by all writers on the subject, and had been unanswerably explained in the able work of Mr. Malthus upon population." 118 Malthus himself, dismayed at the company in which he found himself, hurried to consult Wilberforce. And when George Hibbert, leader of the West Indian interest in Parliament, had ended a speech citing Malthus' theory as supporting slavery, Wilberforce rose to announce that It had been contended that Mr. Malthus, in his Essay on Population, had favoured the slave trade; the fact, however,

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was not so. Indeed, Mr. Malthus had called upon him that day, and expressed his surprise to have learned, that in some publications of the day he was regarded as a favourer of the slave trade; and stated that he had written an appendix to his work, to remove that impression. 119 The "appendix"—actually a long note attached to the appendix replying to his critics 120 —had been written and published, but to little avail. For a few weeks later Hibbert stubbornly repeated his Malthusian argument; whether Malthus was logical enough to support slavery he did not claim to know, "but the principle he has advanced, and the reasoning he has introduced on this subject, remain unaltered." 121 A far less humorous evidence of the effect of Malthusian influence was given upon the introduction by Samuel Whitbread of a long and complicated bill to amend the poor laws. The bill was calculated to give as little basis as possible for opposition from the Malthusians; it adopted the suggestions of Malthus for providing a system of national free education, and for making the administration of relief more efficient and wages more responsive to the numbers of the poor by modifying the law of settlement and equalizing the rates of the various parishes. 122 The supporters of the bill were careful to pay homage to the reigning deity. "One philosopher in particular has risen amongst us," said Whitbread in introducing his bill, who has gone deeply into the causes of our present situation. I mean Mr. Malthus. His work upon Population has, I believe, been very generally read; and it has completed that change of opinion with regard to the poor-laws, which had before been in some measure begun. His principles, Whitbread went on, "I believe . . . to be incontrovertible." 123 Roscoe, citing Malthus as approving the section of the bill providing for national education, said that "after such an opinion, from such a quarter, he thought that no sound objection could be made to this measure." 124 These attempts at

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protective coloration, however, could not conceal the damning fact that the bill did propose continuing, and in some ways increasing, relief for the poor. Whatever Whitbread's respect for Malthus, he had, since beginning his parliamentary career in 1790 as Whig member for Bedford, been a staunch lieutenant to Fox, and a thom in the side of Pitt, as a supporter of civil rights, Negro emancipation, and national education; 125 it had been his bill presented in 1795 to fix a minimum as well as a maximum wage which had forced Pitt to introduce his own poor-law bill as an alternative. 126 Now Whitbread's proposed revision of the poor laws was designed to forestall the adoption of Malthus' proposal to abolish them altogether—a proposal condemned by Whitbread as so hardhearted that, if put into effect, it would lead to revolt.127 The usual difference in degree of enthusiasm for Malthus between Whigs and Tories appeared in the opposition to the bill. The Edinburgh ran the full range of Malthusian arguments against its liberal features. 128 Tory sentiment on the whole agreed; Windham, Cobbett's former patron, opposing the educational provisions of the bill on the ground that education would be futile, urged that "as long as men would marry, and get children, without even thinking of what was to become of their offspring . . . so long would it be impossible to hope that poverty should not creep in amongst us." 129 But the British Critic, acidulous as usual, commented on Whitbread's tribute to Malthus' essay in his speech presenting his bill: "We trust . . . that the essay, the speech, and the bill, have very few admirers at the present day." 130 Malthus himself was drawn into the fray not only by his conviction that Whitbread's bill meant continuing a futile effort to overcome the immovable imprudence of the poor, but by wounded feelings. Late in life Malthus claimed that he had never allowed himself to be too much disturbed by criticism or even abuse, 131 but Whitbread's accusation of hardheartedness struck a sensitive spot. Malthus' Letter to Samuel Whitbread, published in April, 1807, began by denying that his proposal to abolish public relief

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had been prompted by any concern over its expense or any lack of sympathy for the poor. "I am sure that your own feelings will tell you," he said, that though I must be prepared to hear unmoved all those accusations of "hardness of heart" which appear to me to be the result of ignorance or malice, yet any remark of the same kind coming from an enlightened and distinguished member of the British Senate cannot but give me pain, though accompanied by expressions of respect for my understanding.132 For most of the provisions of Whitbread's bill Nlalthus had nothing but praise. One of its provisions, however, he regarded as not in accordance with his own theory; this was "the clause which empowers parishes to build cottages." 133 Any such provision would remove, he felt, one of the most valuable checks to population. Here, as in the appendix to his third edition, Nlalthus failed to realize that he was crediting the poor with prudence, and so remained undisturbed in his conviction that no aid could save them from themselves. It is to be noted, he said, that the poor laws do not encourage early marriages so much as might naturally be expected. The specific cause of this unexpected effect is, I have little doubt, the difficulty of procuring habitations . . . and it is highly probable that if this difficulty be removed by any of the regulations in your Bill, we shall soon see the proportion of the dependent poor increased in a much greater degree than has ever hitherto been experienced.134 Whitbread's bill drew considerable support outside Parliament from the enemies of Malthus. Dr. Jarrold in a Letter to Samuel Whitbread urged its passage,135 and John Weyland, barrister and expert on the poor laws, who was soon to come out as one of the most hostile critics of Malthus, published a pamphlet in its behalf.136 But there remained some few anti-Malthusians who felt that any legislation which made even the slightest conces-

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sions to the influence of Malthus was a dangerous entering wedge. For instance, the anonymous author of A Letter on the Nature, Extent and Management of Poor Rates in Scotland judged Whitbread's bill to be a testimony to the power of Malthus' Essay, which he feared and condemned.137 The new prominence thus thrust upon Malthus raised up against him foes convinced that the chief concern of the moment was not so much the fate of Whitbread's bill 1 3 8 as the reduction, if possible, of the prestige of Malthus; and among these foes was one of the most eloquent that Malthus was ever to encounter. William Hazlitt at the age of twenty-nine, after a youth of reading and walking in Shropshire, three years of itinerant portrait-painting, and two years as a writer of philosophical and political essays, was just reaching the maturity of his style. It is much easier to see why Malthus aroused his wrath than to explain it in terms of a clear political philosophy. One is almost tempted to say that Hazlitt's ideology was a system of resentments, that he did not so much support certain institutions as hate others. Without loving democratic principles, he detested tyranny and special privilege; and the most positive feature of his faith, his admiration for Napoleon, was to a great extent only the expression of his hatred of Bourbonism. Of Godwinian and other such theories of human perfectibility he had a healthy skepticism. Yet in his reaction to Malthus there is evidence enough of the generous and passionate human sympathy which underlay this skepticism. And undoubtedly, in addressing his criticisms to Cobbett's Political Register, he struck upon an editor congenial to his own type of radicalism. For Cobbett had, during the preceding three years, undergone a swift transition from a strongly conservative to an even more strongly liberal point of view. He had attacked Whitbread's bill in a series of articles in the Political Register, one of which contained a sentence which might be considered the quintessence of Cobbettism: "I wish to see the poor men of England what the poor men of England were when I was bom." 139 Another article of the series had gloated over the embarrassment of Malthus at being cited in

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support of slavery.140 It was therefore with profound pleasure that in the Register for March 14, 1807, he published the first of several letters by Hazlitt, prefacing it with the following comment: I also beg leave to point out to the particular attention of the reader, the letter signed A. O. upon the important subject of the poor, in the writer of which excellent letter, the checkpopulation philosopher, Mr. Malthus, has met with a formidable opponent, who will, I confidently hope, continue on till he has completely put down the hard-hearted doctrine of this misanthropic economist. 141 Hazlitt's opening paragraph, long as it is, is yet so interesting as evidence of the prestige attached to the name of Malthus, and so representative of the eloquent disdain of Hazlitt for the civilities of debate, as to be worth quoting—as indeed, little in his writing is not: Sir,—As the proposed alteration in the system of the Poor Laws must naturally engage your attention, as well as that of the public; and, as the authority of Mr. Malthus has often been referred to, and has great weight with many people on this subject, it may not be amiss to inquire, how far the reputation which that gentleman has gained, as a moral and political philosopher, can be safely reposed on as the foundation of any part of a system which is directed to objects of national utility, and requires close, comprehensive, and accurate reasoning. You, Sir, are not ignorant, that a name will do more towards softening down prejudices, and bolstering up a crude and tottering system, than any arguments whatever. It is always easier to quote an authority than to carry on a chain of reasoning. Mr. Malthus's reputation may, I fear, prove fatal to the poor of this country. His name hangs suspended over their heads, in terrorem, like some baleful meteor. It is the shield behind which the archers may take their stand, and gall them at their leisure. He has set them up as a defenceless

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As this tirade and other passages indicate, Hazlitt felt not only that Malthus' Essay constituted a deadly threat to the poor, but that Malthus' claims of his own disinterestedness and compassion were sheer hypocrisy. True to this belief and to his own impetuous nature, Hazlitt did not employ either the

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courteous style of Godwin, or the lesser restraint of Southey. Against so mortal an enemy he was ready to direct blows fair or foul. The Essay itself he characterized as a work . . . in which the little, low, rankling malice of a parish-beadle, or the overseer of a workhouse is disguised in the garb of philosophy.143 He accused Malthus of exulting in cruelty, of having married, and of being the slave of sexual feeling. To judge from his book, I should suppose Mr. Malthus to be a man of a warm constitution, and amorous complexion.144 Finally, with savage irony he branded the philosopher as a selfseeking hypocrite: I have so good an opinion of Mr. Malthus that I do not think he has any predilection for vice and misery in the abstract, or for their own sakes: I do not believe he would stand forward as the advocate of any abuses from which he himself does not reap some benefit, or which he may not get something by defending.143 Whether this personal abuse strengthened or weakened Hazlitt's case, the exasperation which produced it was probably responsible for the rambling and repetitious nature of the Reply. Coherence and clarity were lacking to a degree unusual for him. It is only by winnowing a considerable amount of verbiage that the reader can come to see whether he strengthened the position which the opponents of Malthus had already established. To Whitbread and his poor-law bill Hazlitt paid scant attention. He questioned neither the reformer's motives nor the merits of much of his bill. His contention was simply that while the malignant influence of Malthus prevailed, any change in the status of the poor was likely only to victimize them further. The first task to be achieved was the destruction of that influence.

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He began with a detailed analysis of the basic propositions of Malthus on population increase and food increase. Like Coleridge, he admitted that mankind had the power of increasing geometrically, and that in the end it might reach the limit of subsistence. "Indeed," he said, I do not much see what there is to discover on the subject, after reading the genealogical table of Noah's descendants, and knowing that the world is round. But even allowing that there was something in the nature of the subject which threw over it a veil of almost impenetrable obscurity, Mr. Malthus was not the first who found out the secret.148 In his determination to divest Malthus of every claim to attention, Hazlitt wasted too many pages in demonstrating his indebtedness to Dr. Robert Wallace. Then, setting to in earnest, he began to point out the fallacies by which Malthus had made population growth seem an insuperable obstacle to aiding the poor. First of all, he contended, there is no reason in nature why subsistence cannot be increased as fast as population, until the earth is fully populated; and until then, human misery cannot be attributed to lack of subsistence, but must be ascribed to other causes. Till then population must be said to be kept down, not by the original constitution of nature, but by the will of man. 147 Having struck at the inevitability of the arithmetical ratio of food-increase, Hazlitt attacked the geometrical ratio of breeding, to demonstrate that Malthus' fears were not only temporarily but permanently groundless. Malthus, he said, had raised in the minds of his readers the image of population doubling and redoubling, until millions must struggle over food enough for hundreds only. But even granting Malthus that the poor were immutably imprudent, no such desperate situation was likely to develop. "On the other hand," Hazlitt argued, I contend that in the natural course of things, that is, if we suppose people to retain their usual dimensions, to eat, and

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drink, and beget children, and bring them up in the usual way, all this could never happen: for it is impossible but they must see and feel that there was only room for a certain number. The moment population became excessive . . . the old checks of a certain degree of vice and misery would come into play again, and a less degree of them (I suppose about as much as we enjoy the advantage of at present) would be sufficient to deter men from plunging into greater, would put a stop to the further increase of population, and anticipate those tremendous evils which Mr. Malthus apprehends from it, which could never happen unless we suppose people to have come to a previous, deliberate resolution mutually to starve one another to death. 148 In thus taking the position that imprudence would never become more prevalent, Hazlitt was simply sparring with the question. He had no intention of stopping there; his purpose was to demonstrate that inevitable imprudence did not exist. For, like Southey a few years earlier, he had not only become conscious of the fallacy of Malthus in overlooking the possible presence of social injustice; he was convinced that no other cause of poverty existed. Men in general are not, he contended, subject to a sexual urge so irresistible as to drive them helplessly into poverty and death. When they find themselves faced with privation, they are able to exercise sufficient prudence to prevent any worse suffering. In fact, he went on, it is not even necessary that privation arrive to produce such prudence; for there exists a source of prudence in the very situation which Malthus saw as the destroyer of prudence. Comfort does not stimulate, but checks breeding; those who know plenty fear its loss more intensely than the starving fear starvation. Therefore the poor, if placed under some such obvious restriction of their shares as could be brought about by making each man earn a livelihood for his family, would profit greatly from an equalization of property, whether by relief, higher wages, or communism. For in general their increased comfort would result in a degree of prudence not only

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as great as, but greater than, that produced by the fear of starvation. And if prudence should fail to so increase, Hazlitt added, boldly following the lead of Godwin and Coleridge, then infanticide with all its horrors would be infinitely preferable to starving the imprudent. Therefore there was no barrier whatever to removing the Malthusian system of inequality and poverty; and if it could be thus amended, it stood condemned as utterly brutal and unjust.149 Hazlitt concluded, Neither the fundamental laws of property then, nor the principle of population seem to imply the necessity of any great inequality of conditions. They do not even require the distinction of rich and poor, much less do they imply the right of the rich to starve the poor.150 This conclusion, said Hazlitt triumphantly, was supported by the admissions of Malthus himself.151 As evidence that Malthus acknowledged fear of losing comfort to be a more powerful motive to prudence than want itself, he cited his foe's own words: It is the hope of bettering our condition and the fear of want, rather than want itself, that is the best stimulus to industry, and its most constant and best directed efforts will almost invariably be found among a class of people above the class of the wretchedly poor.152 By this admission and by the admission that prudence was widely prevalent in society, Malthus had stultified his Essay, said Hazlitt, echoing the claim of Coleridge. He gives up his principle, but retains his conclusion, to which he has no right. He is like a bad poet who to get rid of a false concord alters the ending of his first line, and forgets that he has spoiled his rhyme in the second.153 Unfortunately, Hazlitt's conclusions were far sounder than the argument by which he arrived at them. In support of his claim that comfort would strengthen the prudence of the poor, he offered only the statement that Malthus had admitted them

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to be prudent under the less powerful stimulus of poverty. Had he noted Malthus' recent reference to the poor's refraining from marriage because of a shortage of cottages, he migh have established this claim. But in basing it merely on Malthus' admission in 1803 that some men were capable of prudence, he was only repeating the logical error of his predecessors; he would have been far more nearly correct in his simile had he said that Malthus in changing his first rhyme had not spoiled his second, but amended it. In laboring this sterile argument Hazlitt was not improving on Southey's and Hall's positions. Yet in the course of his insistence that comfort would prove a more powerful incentive to prudence than fear of starvation, he had, though hazily and confusedly, suggested a train of thought which was to develop into one of the most effective methods of attack on Malthus' denial of the prudence of the poor. Implied rather than stated in this position was the idea that even the occurrence of overbreeding might not prove, as Malthus had assumed it did, the presence of an innate and immutable trait of imprudence; rather, it might indicate the presence of an acquired trait, a weakness engendered by external circumstance. Southey and Hall, by pointing out the possible existence of social injustice, had exposed the fallacy of Malthus' assumption that the poor alone were the cause of poverty. Now Hazlitt had suggested a further fallacy in the assumption that they were basically responsible for even a part of it. He had provided a foundation for the possibility that the poor were not offenders, but were victims of two socially remediable factors—the exploitation of an unjust economic system, and their own induced recklessness in breeding. In short, he had made doubtful the existence of either an ethical or a practical objection to aiding the poor. Just as the sound, if incomplete, criticism of Dr. Hall had been accompanied by the archaic supernaturalism of Jarrold, Hazlitt's attack was shortly followed by the feeble performance of Robert Acklom Ingram, Rector of Seagrave, Leicestershire, and author of a number of books on political economy. Ingram's Disquisitions

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on Population (London, 1808) had in common with Hazlitt's essay only that it was a very rambling piece of writing, and that it was inspired by the author's surprise and dismay at "the almost unqualified approbation" 154 of Malthus in Parliament and elsewhere. Its most realistic arguments were those of the former critics. Like those before him, Ingram demonstrated the falsity of the assumption that subsistence could not be increased in geometrical ratio, and emphasized the power of virtue and intelligence as a preventive check to population. Also, he pointed out with some effect the inconsistencies involved in some of Malthus' illustrations of the checks to population in various lands. But, unhappily for his influence, the heart of his argument was an even farther departure from science into religion than that of Jarrold. God, he claimed, fixes sexual appetite to accord with social circumstances, and neither vice and misery nor conscious restraint on the part of mankind is necessary to keep population on a level with the means of subsistence. On this basis, he assailed Malthus as reflecting on the power and goodness of God by approving the maintenance of vice and misery.155 The attention given to Dr. Hall, Hazlitt, and even the feeble Ingram indicates that the supporters of Malthus were beginning to feel the danger of such attacks. 158 But as yet nothing had done any visible damage to Malthus' prestige. His turning his theory to the support of export bounties on corn had done much to soothe the sensibilities of the Tories whose feudal traditions he had earlier outraged. Of course, the finer Toryism represented by Coleridge and Southey still rejected him with scorn. In 1808, when the projectors of the Quarterly Review were discussing its editorial policies, Southey wrote to his and Gifford's friend, Grosvenor Bedford: I hope Malthus will not be a contributor. By that first book moral restraint was pronounced impracticable; by his second it is relied upon as a remedy for the poors' rates, which are to be abolished to prevent the poor from marrying; and moral restraint and the parson are to render them contented in

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celibacy. His main principle is that God makes men and women faster than He can feed them, and he calls upon government to stop the breed. As if we did not at this moment want men for our battles! Rickman's name shall stand in the place of his. Rickman has ten-fold his knowledge and his ability. 157 But unhappily for Southey and the other foes of Malthus, few Tories shared this estimate of the philosopher. In the month before Southey's letter, the Edinburgh, reviewing W. T. Comber's Inquiry into the State of Natural Subsistence, spoke of Malthus as the chief support of those favoring an export bounty. 158 As for the Whigs, even their polite distress at this lapse on the part of Malthus could not counteract the zeal with which they applied the rest of his theory to their political thinking. An instance may be seen in the Edinburgh's review in July 1809 of a new edition of More's Utopia, in which the reviewer took pains to point out More's failure to realize the full extent of the principle of population. 189 More substantial and more interesting was an article on Ingram's and Hazlitt's essays against Malthus which appeared in the Edinburgh for August, 1810. Its author—or authors, for it has been suggested that it was the work of Malthus himself, aided by Jeffrey 18°—began with an apology which was almost an admission of their feeling that the anti-Malthusians were dangerous: We should scarcely have thought it worth while to take any notice of these disquisitions, which consist, in a great degree, of strange misapprehensions and misrepresentations of the doctrines they profess to discuss, if we had not observed, among many persons, besides Mr. Ingram and his anonymous coadjutor, an ignorance of the principles of population, which seems to us nearly unaccountable, considering the careful and detailed manner in which the subject has been lately explained. The excellent work of Mr. Malthus, though it has certainly produced a great and salutary impression on the

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As a reward for writing "this celebrated work," they lamented, Malthus "has been assailed with such clamorous reproaches." 182 Yet, they went on, no clamor could do away with the basic propositions of Malthus: that population can increase only as the funds for labor increase; that these funds increase when "some fortunate event introduces a better order of things "; 1 6 3 that the power of human increase is greater than the power of the funds to increase; and that, therefore, "under a given increase of the funds for the maintenance of labour, it is physically impossible to give to each labourer a larger share of these funds . . . without some increase of the preventive check." 164 These are but facts. How can any critic regard the statement of a fact as an indictment of God? Furthermore, the view of this world as a place of probation is a part of the Christian faith. 185 This rather evasive restatement of the Malthusian theory seemed to Hazlitt to have given the game away. His triumphant rejoinder came three months later in the form of a letter to the Political Register: The defence [of Malthus' essay in the Edinburgh] may indeed be regarded as the euthanasia of that performance. For in what does this defence consist but in an adoption, point by point, of the principal objections and limitations, which have been offered to Mr. Malthus' system? 100 Among the numerous points which he alleged had been conceded, the basic one was of course the possibility of checking the numbers of the poor. This he felt was admitted directly in the reference to "some increase of the preventive check." Furthermore, he insisted, the reviewers had inadvertently confessed, in referring to "the funds for the maintenance of labour" as the subsistence of the poor, that it was not imprudence which was creating poverty. They had exposed the confusion created by Malthus between the total potential food supply and that part

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of it which remains after the rich have seized most of it. The poor were admitted, said Hazlitt, to be starving not because they had bred beyond their fair share of the available subsistence, but because they had never received their fair share. Obviously, he concluded, it is by no law of God or nature that some escape unscathed while others die.167 Undoubtedly Hazlitt at this point was closer to the explicitness of Dr. Hall's demonstration of the existence of social injustice than he had been previously. But in his triumphant feeling that he had relieved the poor of even a share of the blame for poverty he was taking too much for granted. The probability that the poor were suffering from economic injustice left it still to be demonstrated that they were either involuntarily or voluntarily prudent. And by referring to the possibility of "some increase of the preventive check," the reviewers were neither subscribing to Hazlitt's theory that the imprudence of the poor was remediable by comfort, nor making such an unconscious acknowledgment of their prudence as Malthus had made in 1807. Rather they were reverting to the view by which Malthus had in 1803 sugar-coated his bitter conclusions: that the poor could in time achieve prudence, though they were incapable of it at present. Neither Hazlitt nor any of his predecessors had been so far able to check the growth of Malthus' grip on the public mind. In August, 1811, Byron referred to the tendency to defend war on Malthusian grounds by writing from Newstead to Augusta Leigh that he considered her bearing a child to be a patriotic action, despite Malthus' support of war, murder, and other forms of death: "I think," he explained, "we have latterly had a redundance of these national benefits." 168 A few weeks later, in a grimmer mood, probably induced by the recent deaths of his mother and two of his friends, he wrote to Francis Hodgson, who was about to take orders: As to your immortality, if people are to live, why die? And our carcases, which are to rise again, are they worth raising?

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R I S E O F MALTHUS I hope, if mine is, that I shall have a better pair of legs than I have moved on these two-and-twenty years, or I shall be sadly behind in the squeeze into Paradise. Did you ever read "Malthus on Population"? If he is right, war and pestilence are our best friends, to save us from being eaten alive, in this "best of all possible worlds." 1 6 9

Lamb, rather amusingly illustrating the difference between the Elian and the Byronic reactions, managed to extract some humor —rather laboriously—from Malthusianism. In a short contribution in 1812 to Hunt's Reflector he presented the complaint of a housewife against a visiting relative suitably named Edax: I wonder at a time like the present, when the scarcity of every kind of food is so painfully acknowledged, that shame has no effect on him. Can he have read Mr. Malthus' Thoughts on the Ratio of Food to Population? Can he think it reasonable that one man should consume the sustenance of many? 1 7 0 The general concern over the food supply which Lamb mentioned was not humorous invention on his part. Napoleon's Continental System had increased the consciousness of the English of the terrible danger incurred by an island country abandoning agriculture for trade, and the returns of the census of 1811 showed a tremendous increase in the population, 171 particularly in the number of the poor. Even more outstanding in every mind than it had been during the scarcity of 1800 was the problem of providing adequate subsistence for the country. 172 Again there was a flurry of plans for the development of potato growing and of fisheries;173 but the step which suggested itself most readily to the landed interest was that of increasing food production by increasing the profits of agriculture. 174 In such a situation, those who were genuinely concerned for the welfare of the poor had reason to redouble their efforts against Malthus; for insofar as his influence prevailed, the needs of the poor seemed likely to be met only by a harshly restrictive corn law, rather than by any available enlargement of the food supply.

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Liberal Toryism, of course, stood out against this exhibition of greed. Southey made use of his review of Patrick Colquhoun's Treatise

on Indigence

in t h e Quarterly

for December, 1812, to

deliver his second open assault on Malthus, and to support ampler food for the poor. Colquhoun, whose book had originally appeared several years earlier, had passed over Malthus' theory with the brief statement that since population had not risen in proportion to the relief rates, it was obviously not the cause of poverty. The true cause, he felt, was bad social management, especially the neglect of the training of the poor; and he advocated a national benefit society and a national system of education and apprenticeship. 175 Southey adopted Colquhoun's views with enthusiasm, with the curious exception that instead of using Colquhoun's argument to bolster his original claim that the poor were innocent of overbreeding, he took the position that their overbreeding was the result of a vicious social situation. Many, he said, believe in "what they are pleased to call, a discovery in political science; Mr. Malthus having made it appear to their satisfaction, that the primary source of the evil, the causa causans, lies in the system of nature." 179 Malthus' mediocrity and "insipidity" appeal to "the shallow, the selfish, and the sensual." 177 But the vast number of poor revealed by the census, he asserted, was alarming only because the masses were "utterly improvident, because their moral and religious education has been utterly neglected." 178 Their imprudence, said Southey, in the language of Toryism, was the result of the rise of manufacturing, which by removing the worker from the country had removed him from the guidance of the church and the old families. And the remedy for it lay in two directions: first, the increase of the subsistence of the working people by relief, fisheries, high cultivation and reclamation of wastes, national work projects, and— here Southey became almost lyrical—emigration planned and subsidized by government; second, a national system of education, to promote prudence and sobriety of conduct. 179 In some respects a mere versification of Southey's argument

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was the attempt of Wordsworth in Book IX of The Excursion (1814) to disprove the Malthusian theory, though the passage displays a Wordsworthian mildness and serenity far removed from the anxiety and anger of Southey. Though the rest of Europe, said Wordsworth, has been ravaged by the Napoleonic struggles, Meanwhile the sovereignty of these fair Isles Remains entire and indivisible: And, if that ignorance were removed, which breeds Within the compass of their several shores Dark discontent, or loud commotion, each Might still preserve the beautiful repose Of heavenly bodies shining in their spheres. —The discipline of slavery is unknown Among us—hence the more do we require The discipline of virtue; order else Cannot subsist, nor confidence, nor peace. Thus, duties rising out of good possesst And prudent caution needful to avert Impending evil, equally require That the whole people shall be taught and trained. So shall licentiousness and black resolve Be rooted out, and virtuous habits take Their place; and genuine piety descend Like an inheritance, from age to age. With such foundations laid, avaunt the fear Of numbers crowded on their native soil, To the prevention of all healthful growth Through mutual injury! Rather in the law Of increase and the mandate from above Rejoice!—and ye have special cause for joy. For, as the element of air affords An easy passage to the industrious bees Fraught with their burdens; and a way as smooth

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For those ordained to take their sounding flight From the thronged hive, and settle where they list In fresh abodes—their labor to renew; So the wide waters, open to the power, T h e will, the instincts, and appointed needs Of Britain, do invite her to cast off Her swarms, and in succession send them forth; Bound to establish new communities On every shore whose aspect favors hope Or bold adventure; promising to skill And perseverance their deserved reward. 180 Southey and Wordworth might have made their argument more complete by repeating Southey's original point that much of the current poverty was the result of social oppression rather than overbreeding. But even though by neglecting that point they conceded Malthus' assumption that overbreeding alone was responsible for poverty, they followed Hazlitt in pointing out that overbreeding might result not from immutable imprudence, but from a remediable social situation. T h e position, though purely theoretical, was not without weight; for any presentation of a plausible alternative explanation of overbreeding created the possibility that no ethical or practical basis for refusing relief existed. But the implications were difficult to grasp, and among Southey's fellow Tories, most were too much enchanted by Malthus' views to devote much attention to arguments against him. Even the Quarterly began to find it hard to maintain its opposition to a Malthus who favored a strong corn law. At first it solved the problem by reviving for review Comber's National Subsistence,181 which proposed a sliding-scale law while characterizing Malthus as a single-track mind. 182 But by October, 1814, the Quarterly was beginning to sound at least semi-Malthusian, frowning on charity and Young's cow-and-cottage system as encouraging population, and advocating the establishment of county banks, as suggested by Mr. Malthus, to help the poor to save before marrying. 183

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The increasing public discussion of the corn law gave Malthus an opportunity such as he had already shown himself skillful in taking advantage of. As the discussion reached the floor of Parliament, he came out with Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws, a pamphlet purporting to sum up the arguments for and against them. The pamphlet contained, substantially, the views, actually unjustifiable by his own theory,184 which he had already expressed in the 1803 Essay on Population—that although free trade might create both a larger population and a more general prosperity, it also created greater misery by allowing sharp fluctuations in food prices, and above all endangered the self-sufficiency of the country by replacing agriculture with industry.188 The weight attached to Malthus' influence may be seen not only in the eagerness with which this pamphlet was seized upon by the supporters of the bill, but by the desperate efforts of its opponents to pick its reasoning to pieces. In the debate of February 17, 1815, Philips, arguing that the corn law would raise the price of labor, cited Malthus' Observations as admitting that wages could not be kept down without "the most perfect freedom of the com trade," and that by trade a country may reach a higher degree of wealth than it could by agriculture.186 Philips urged the gentlemen not to equalize population and subsistence by limiting population, but by increasing the food supply. In reply, Mr. Brand stated of "the learned Mr. Malthus" that "ten days ago he had published a second pamphlet," in which he declared unequivocally "that some restriction upon the importation of grain has become necessary." 187 This second pamphlet, entitled Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn, went further in support of the proposed corn law. Since Malthus* earlier pamphlet, the sudden advent of peace had brought the terrible depression of 1815, which threw the entire working class and much of the middle class into desperate straits, and, by destroying buying power, kept the price of grain low. The landed interest, already faced with shrinking profits and feeling no adequate

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protection in the existing corn law, saw no hope even in a possible recovery of purchasing power, which by raising prices would simply open the ports to foreign grain. 188 Malthus, feeling that subsidizing landowners was in the national interest, in his Grounds of an Opinion forthrightly supported their desire to raise the point at which importation should be permitted. 189 The respect of the foes of the com law for Malthus' influence is to be seen in the fact that in meeting this new attack they continued to make chief use of his own theory against him. The Edinburgh, in the painful position of having to oppose him, attempted to show that by his own main theory labor could not, as he now asserted it might, benefit by high grain prices.1"0 In the debates in Parliament, Baring claimed the support of the principle of population for free importation of corn, 191 and was backed by Whitbread. 102 A little later, Marryat and others also cited Malthus against himself. 193 These tactics were evidently of no avail. The new corn law passed in Commons on March 10, 1815, and in the Lords ten days later. 184 The effect of this act on the country may well be imagined. To the rage and despair of the masses over the lack of employment, the lowness of wages, and the oppressiveness of working conditions was added the resentment of a tax on food—a resentment soon to show itself so strongly, in rioting and other manifestations, as to throw the government into fear of revolution. It seems probable that Malthus was definitely connected in the public mind with this latest injury, and came in for his full share of resentment. It was about 1816 that Harriet Martineau, later to show herself one of the most ardent admirers of Malthus, heard him denounced, as she disapprovingly recorded, "very eloquently and forcibly by persons who never saw so much as the outside" of his Essay.195 And the period 1815-17 saw a wave of assaults against his doctrine. The first of these, appearing in 1815, was The Happiness of States, by one Simon Gray. It was followed in 1816 by The Principles of Population and Production, by John Weyland (who

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in his 1807 Observations on Mr. Whitbread's Poor Bill had promised to deal more fully with Malthus), 196 and later in that year by James Grahame's Inquiry into the Principle of Population. These three antagonists of Malthus had in common an extraordinary degree of confusion as to what they were trying to prove. Gray, after pointing out, as Hazlitt had done, that Malthus erred in assuming that food could not be increased as rapidly as population, and that therefore no true population surplus could develop until the world was fully cultivated, went on to present what he conceived to be the factors preventing any ill effects from aiding the poor. These were the growth, as civilization advances, of late marriage, laboring with the mind, and luxury in the upper levels of society, and the increased mortality among dwellers in large cities. As a result of these defecundating causes, the upper levels of society tend constantly to die out, and population must be maintained by encouraging the breeding of the lower classes.197 Weyland's argument, though stated in the bold assertion that "Population has a natural tendency to keep within the powers of the soil to afford it subsistence in every gradation through which society passes," 1 0 8 was not greatly different from Gray's, though he postulated a sound state of public and private morals as essential to the preservation of his "natural tendency." 199 Grahame's book was little more than a weak distillate of Southey, Hazlitt, Jarrold, and Weyland. Though he stressed emigration and high cultivation as offering great relief to the poor in the existing state of society, he felt no especial anxiety even about the future. In part, his attitude appeared to rest on a vague faith in the development of such powers as would enable humanity to cope with the problem; but even more he seemed to feel that in the society of his time there were motives adequate to create prudence, and that, should these to some extent fail, the "noviciate of infancy"—in other words, infant mortality—would make the enforcement of celibacy unnecessary and be morally superior to it. 200 These sober if confused arguments were followed by an attack of a quite different kind. The weapon of Thomas Love

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Peacock was ridicule and the reductio ad absurdum. In some of the most memorable scenes of Melincourt (1817), Malthus—or one of his disciples—appears in the guise of Mr. Fax, a solemn philosopher obsessed with the perils of overpopulation, who appears at the rural church just before a rustic wedding to confront the simple pair with the enormity of their flouting of sound social behavior. His horror at discovering that despite their acknowledged poverty they look forward to having children with the cheerful confidence that "where God sends mouths He will send food" is only less strong than their amazement at his opposition to marriage. 201 The name that Peacock gave his philosopher indicates what galled the anti-Malthusians most in the defense Malthus presented against their attacks. To every charge that his claim of the impossibility of aiding the poor violated longstanding emotional, religious, and ethical attitudes of humanity, he had only to disclaim all responsibility, and rest on the necessity for facing the facts, however unpleasant, of human existence. This position had enraged Hazlitt a few years before, and was to enrage Dickens in the future. Mr. Fax is the father of Dickens' Mr. Gradgrind, who named one of his sons Malthus, and insisted on teaching children nothing but "facts, sir, facts!" Peacock's attack was of a kind that later critics of Malthus were increasingly to imitate. Yet under the circumstances it could have no lasting effect; until more convincing evidence had been presented of the dubiousness of the "facts" to which Malthus appealed, he could endure ridicule calmly. How little his recent critics had shaken his appeal to facts Malthus demonstrated when to his fifth edition of the Essay in 1817 he added a second appendix devoted largely to answering Weyland and Grahame. 202 His reply should have been obvious enough to anyone who had read their arguments. They were vulnerable not merely to the charge that infant mortality and the high mortality among city dwellers were not the most cheerful or desirable imaginable means of ending overbreeding and thus allowing aid to the poor—that, like Jarrold in 1806, they

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proffered in place of the misery of poverty a misery scarcely less dire. For since the deaths which they regarded as serving to forestall poverty could be argued to be actually the result of poverty, they were in the extraordinary position of advocating the removal, by means of aid to the poor, of the very checks to overbreeding by whose presence they justified such aid.203 If by representing poverty as the sole means of limiting the numbers of the poor they were not helping Malthus to make his case, they were certainly doing him no perceptible harm. The weakness of his recent critics, however, was the least of the reasons Malthus had for congratulating himself in 1817. The year was so marked by signs of his dominance of important bodies of opinion in England as to appear a kind of climax in his career. One of the most interesting of these was the publication in 1816 of a weighty treatise by John Bird Sumner— still far off from the Archbishopric of Canterbury and membership in the Poor Law Commission of 1834, now merely holder of numerous clerical offices and author of several books expressing sound evangelical views. The title of the book gives almost all that need be said of its contents: A Treatise on the Records of the Creation . . . and the Consistency of the Principle of Population with the Goodness of the Deity. Its significance lies not so much in what it said as in the fact that it said it. For Sumner—though he seems hardly aware that he is doing so— merely amplifies the apology for God that Malthus had given in his first version of his essay: the suffering created by the pressure of population is not a capricious and purposeless element in God's plan, but a device by which man is spurred on to a higher state of civilization, by which brute matter is stirred from animal sloth and wakened into spirit.204 This Browningesque solution of the problem of evil is of most interest, therefore, as an indication that respectable clergymen destined for distinguished careers in the church were finding it not too difficult to reconcile Malthus with their faith. The gratified Malthus thanked Sumner in his 1817 appendix for having so nobly expressed his views; 205 and elsewhere he is reported as having

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praised highly "the ability with which Dr. Sumner had fought the religious part of the battle." 206 Far better known today is another of the evidences of Malthusian influence which appeared in 1817. Though Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy has achieved such fame as almost to obscure that of Malthus, the book owes that fame largely to the fact that it brought the theory of Malthus to bear upon the earlier work of Adam Smith in such fashion as to create what we know today as the classical doctrine in economics. The prosperous readers of this work saw the Malthusian theory employed to amend those deficiencies in the doctrine of Smith which had exempted human labor from the absolute operation of supply and demand, and which had limited Smith's usefulness to the middle class. The promise which that class had seen in Malthus from the first, Ricardo seemed to fulfill; in his warnings against encouraging population by giving any form of help to the poor, and in his statement that the natural wage tends to be that which will hardly support the worker, they saw the complete acceptance of the Malthusian theory. 207 As a matter of fact they were seeing somewhat more than was actually there. Ricardo was a Malthusian with a difference. Either independently, or as a result of the claims of Hazlitt ten years before, he had arrived at the theory that, even though the compulsion of poverty might not create prudence, an established standard of comfort would possibly do so. He apparently either remained blind to the inference which might readily have been drawn—that the poor could be relieved by giving them such comfort—or felt that giving them such comfort would unjustly burden others. But he did imply that they were capable of holding their numbers down sufficiendy to benefit by such gains as economic chance might bring. 208 Thus his position, though it remained Malthusian, actually contained that "softening" of the doctrine which Malthus had elusively suggested in 1803, and constituted an element of danger for the future of Malthusianism. 209 But for the time this weakness went undetected. Perhaps

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that fact was due partly to the carelessness of his readers; but more certainly Ricardo's own lack of precision and clarity was responsible. He gave little emphasis to his modification of Nlalthus' conclusions, and in phrasing his theory of wages allowed that modification to drop out of sight. It is not surprising, therefore, that his statement of the tendency of wages to drop to a subsistence level should have been interpreted as an "iron law," and his entire book as an extension of Malthusian fatalism throughout the economic system. Perhaps more significant than any such sign of the growing influence of Malthus, however, was the change of front in 1817 by the Quarterly Review. Though the Quarterly had at times since 1798 spoken favorably of Malthus—especially when his support of the Corn Law had been prominent in its editorial mind—it had been too much dominated by the paternalistic element in the Tory tradition to support his doctrine as a whole. As late as April, 1816, Southey had managed to make its pages the vehicle for one final attack against him, repeating his claim of the restraining effect of paternalistic Toryism, and sneering at the "new science of population" as "a diarrhoea of the intellect."210 But in 1817, with an article by Sumner, the Quarterly swung over definitely to support of the Malthusian position.211 Henceforth it was to be the voice not of liberal and paternalistic Toryism, but of that Toryism whose awareness of its interests as against those of the lower classes was as strong as that of the middle class.212 No one of these evidences of the hold of Malthus on the public mind was so ominous as the action of Parliament in setting up, early in 1817, a committee to consider revising the poor laws. The proposers of the committee left no doubt of their Malthusian inspiration. Said one of them, The plans proposed by Mr. Gilbert, Mr. East and Mr. Pitt were designed to regulate indeed, but to maintain the present system; those of Sir William Pulteney, Mr. Whitbread, and Mr. Malthus aimed at its abolition. With the latter gentleman I

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perfectly agree, thinking that nothing less than a total change of system can cure the evil.- 1 3 Under such auspices was created a committee which was to remain in existence until the accomplishment of its purpose in 1834.- 14 At the very outset of the committee's career one heroic attempt was made to alter its direction. In 1816 Robert Owen was still unknown as a social philosopher, and though in 1814 he had published several sociological essays under the title of A New View of Society, he had done little toward devising machinery by which to put his ideas into effect, and was exerting himself in London in the limited cause of factory reform. But his reputation as a manufacturer led Brougham to suggest his offering his advice to the committee for revising the poor laws. T h e full irony of the situation—plain to us in view of our knowledge of the Malthusian trend of the times and of Owen's later career—appeared to Owen only after he had submitted his suggestions—which were, essentially, the first outline of his system of socialism—and had been refused even a hearing by the horrified committee. These gentlemen, he then saw, were sitting with the foregone determination to rob the poor of their just and until then their legal rights—that is the right to efficient relief when unable to work or to find employment, and that that relief should be given in accordance with the dictates of humanity for suffering poverty . . . . T h e majority of the members . . . had made up their minds, influenced by the Malthusian irrational notions of overpopulation, to depress the poor out of existence, instead of finding them employment at decent living wages. 215 Owen reacted with vigor. He called a series of public meetings to which to present his plan, and outlined it in pamphlet form and in contributions to the press. In these latter he gave particular attention to Malthus. It was not the first time he had given some attention to the philosopher, with whom, indeed,

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he was personally acquainted. But neither in his New View of Society nor in his articles in 1817 did he state his entire argument against Malthusian theory. In the former work he had contented himself with the assertion that freedom and education would so increase productivity as to postpone any population problem for "many thousand years." 2 1 8 He reiterated this in a letter widely published in the press on July 30, 1817: T h e fear of any evil to arise from an excess of population, until such time as the whole earth shall become a highly cultivated garden, will, on due and accurate investigation, prove a mere phantom of the imagination, calculated solely to keep the world in unnecessary ignorance, vice, and crime . . . . It is the artificial law of supply and demand, arising from the principles of individual gain in opposition to the general wellbeing of society, which has hitherto compelled population to press upon subsistence. 217 In other words, population is pressing not on the food supply, but on its purchasing power limited by the exactions of the wealthy. But this claim did not give Owen the right to assert, as Southey and Hall had been able to do, that at least some of the poor would be prudent enough to profit by assistance. For whatever their present degree of prudence, it seemed bound to b e destroyed by Owen's proposed economic system, which, like Godwin's removed that limitation of each man to a definite share which alone could maintain caution. For this deficiency in his scheme Owen had no remedy that he was willing to publish. But evidently in some fashion that reached the ears of Malthus, at least, he took the only course open to him by advocating the practice of contraception as a means of preventing overpopulation in his model society.- 18 The Malthusians were too much for Owen. "Twice last year," said Hazlitt a year later, "did Major T o r r e n s 2 1 0 go down to the City Meeting with Mr. Malthus's arithmetical and geometrical ratios in his pocket, as a double and effectual bar to Mr. Owen's plan." 2 2 0 Malthus himself in his 1817 edition gave

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Owen considerable attention. 221 Ignoring Owen's claim that the poor were being exploited, with its implication that their general imprudence was unproven, he held to his own position that since they overbreed even when each is held responsible for his own family, they would do so even more under a communistic plan, thereby leaving their own lot unchanged and changing that of their neighbors for the worse. At least, he added, they would do so unless checked; and Owen had suggested no check that was not "unnatural, immoral, or cruel." 222 The magical formula of these words appeared to operate as it had against Godwin and others: by barring contraception from discussion, Malthus was able to save himself from admitting the possibility of aiding the poor, and from the consequent uncomfortable necessity of opposing such aid only on the grounds that it was undeserved. Owen's meetings and pamphlets came to nothing, for he was battling a tide too strong to be resisted. Cobbett was guilty perhaps of a characteristic exaggeration when in Mr. Cobbett's Taking Leave of His Countrymen (1817) he suggested that Malthus had helped to bring on the campaign of repression and terror which was driving him to America. His bitter conjecture that 'The writings of Malthus, who considers men as mere animals, may have had influence in the producing of this change" would appear to give the devil somewhat less than his due.- 23 But without question Malthus had created a dark prospect for the poor and their sympathizers. Despite all efforts so far made to demonstrate the illusory nature of the Malthusian specter, it had grown into an apparently unshakable obstacle to social change. Malthus had gained powerful support among all groups through which public opinion was actuated—churchmen, political economists, Utilitarians, Whigs and Tories: and by their agency in Parliament he had set into action the machinery for bringing his stern prescriptions into practice. Nor were these disinterested or interested converts the only ones. Even among those to whom the Malthusian doctrine was loathsome, reluctant surrender was being forced. Godwin, who

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in 1801 had noted that Malthus' doctrine "perplexed . . . many persons who have been well disposed towards the theories of Political Justice," 2 2 4 conceded in 1820 that "it still holds on its prosperous career," 2 2 3 and quoted a letter written to him by a friend, which said of Malthus' conclusions: "He seems to have convinced almost all men of their absolute truth, and I am sorry to say that I do not perceive his statements to be false." 2 2 6 Shelley at about the same time attributed to the Malthusian doctrine the fact that "gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live." 227 Perhaps the most memorable record of the atmosphere of the time was supplied by Keats. His "Ode to a Nightingale" was of course colored by other and far more intimate griefs than any which might arise from the vision of humanity, struggling vainly against an insuperable barrier; but among the grim images of his own sorrows appeared the Malthusian specter, in the stanza beginning Thou wast not bom for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down. 228

Ill MALTHUSIAN TRIUMPH, 1 8 1 7 - 1 8 3 4

of Malthus by no means silenced the opposition. Among those who had the cause of humanity at heart were many to whom the falsity of his doctrine seemed glaringly apparent. In these, the spectacle of society bemused into apathy created not gloom, but redoubled rage. Shelley in 1818 injected into his preface to "Laon and Cythna" a tirade against "sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus, calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph," 1 and in the preface to "Prometheus Unbound" in the following year justified the "passion for reforming the world", of which he had been accused, with the bitter statement "I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, than go to heaven with Paley and Malthus." 2 Leigh Hunt, defying the forces of reaction which had clamped down upon the country, published in the Examiner in 1819 "A New Chaunt" for reactionaries: B U T THE SUCCESSES

First of all, in order to give a convenient finish to our impudence and collusion, We'll buy and sell seats so openly, that it shall put no true gentlemen to confusion; And we'll put soldiers all about instead of constables, like our good promise making friend the Prussian; And keep all good and knowing things to ourselves, like a close Rosecrucian; And swear nobody shall ever get children, but those who starve other people's, each like a true Malthusian.3

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And in "Reverend Magistracy" he depicted Justice "Ethelstone" —a name rather pointing in the direction of Lord Eldon—as hearing the case of a poor woman whose children have been found sleeping in brick-kilns for warmth. To her plea that she has a large family, Ethelstone replies by a tirade against the poor and all reformers which ends with Comfort's no poor man's business; He ought to place all his in us; Pay tithes, and leave off quizzing us, Nor gall thus: But if they will thus generate, Like those they ought to venerate They must be thinned at any rate, Says Malthus.4 And at about the same time, Brougham on the floor of the House of Commons complained that Malthus was being ridiculed and calumniated by "the low part of the press." 5 But ridicule and invective were not the only products of the rage with which the foes of Malthus reacted to his growing dominance of the public mind. They were roused also to new efforts to demolish his theory—efforts distinguished not only by a fierceness of emotion corresponding with the more immediate danger that theory represented, but by a closer approach to completeness and effectiveness than had marked the work of earlier critics. Indeed, so hard hit was Malthus in the ten years or so following 1817 that one who believed that the popularity of a theory depended on its reasonableness rather than its usefulness would be hard put to it to account for his survival.6 With the substantial criticism, of course, was mingled a certain amount of mere reiteration of earlier arguments. Among the authors of this appears, unhappily, the veteran William Godwin. For years he had been known to be engaged in preparing a conclusive reply to Malthus, and his followers had been eagerly awaiting its completion. A few of his intimates, however, had had misgivings; for the old fighter was aging, ill, and losing his

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mental keenness. And when in 1820 his Of Population came from the press, their misgivings were partly justified. Godwin advanced the now-familiar argument that the food supply could be increased at the same rate as population. But he did not attempt to press this point too far; for his chief point of attack was the other part of what he considered Malthus' "main principle"—the geometrical increase of population. After bringing up all possible historical evidence that never in ancient lands had population even approached doubling within twenty years, he attacked the soundness of the authorities by whom Malthus had shown such a doubling in America, and asserted that the normal growth of population was slight. And that growth, he said, was restricted not by the food supply, but by war, disease, and above all bad government. Godwin's conclusion was a statement of the vicious potentialities of Malthus' theory which, though his rage against Malthus drove him to an unpleasant descent from the dignity of his earlier reply, was so accurate and eloquent as to constitute the best part of his book.7 Godwin did not attempt to deny utterly the possibility that the poor were generally imprudent. His position was rather that since population had never actually grown in geometrical ratio, Malthus' statement of that ratio was not fact, but speculation. 8 In other words, poverty is the result certainly of vicious social conditions, and possibly also of overbreeding among the poor. What Godwin did not see was that this conclusion, which certainly would have justified the relief of poverty at least on a tentative basis, was not clearly established by his arguments. His claim that social conditions were a major cause of poverty was mere assertion; and his demonstration of the lack of any actual doubling of population could hardly destroy belief in the imprudence of the poor, since it left unscathed the basis for the belief which Malthus had created by his assumption that the potential rate of human increase was identical with its inevitable rate. Godwin's essay therefore succeeded in countering Malthus only to the extent of reminding readers, as Southey,

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Hazlitt, and Hall had done, that Malthus had overlooked the possibility that social injustice, rather than overbreeding, might account for part of the total of poverty. Far less confused than Godwin's essay, but hardly more impressive as criticism of Malthus, was Samuel Read's General Statement of an Argument on the Subject of Population in Answer to Mr. Malthus's Theory, which appeared in the following year. At first glance Read appeared to have no more to offer than one more assertion of the fallacy of Malthus' assumption that food could not keep pace with population. The burden of poverty, said Read, is imposed by human institutions; if it were not for the defective organization of society, the food supply could be increased at will. So far, Read appeared to be running head-on into the problem of what would happen when the earth had reached the limit of its productivity. But he had an answer. The "luxury and refinement" in which men would dwell until that limit was reached would prevent its being reached; for these attributes of life would in various ways lessen the strength of the sex impulse, and above all would reduce the fertility of women." It must at least be said for Read that his deus ex machina wore a far kindlier aspect than Jarrold's remedy of death, and came considerably nearer to the realm of natural law than Ingram's intervention of God. But it was scarcely of a nature to be convincing; and the reaction of most readers to it was probably about what their reaction had been to Godwin's theory that in time all men would be moved to sexual restraint by nothing stronger than a desire for the good opinions of their neighbors: that we have no evidence to lead us to expect any such development. And even granting the possibility of such a change, who was to foot the bill for the imprudent until their regeneration? Such inadequate efforts as those of Godwin and Read, however, made up but a small part of the current criticism of Malthus. By far the greater part of that criticism was increasing in effectiveness. Even the befuddled Simon Gray had by 1818 recovered from his confusion of several years earlier. In his

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Gray versus Malthus, presenting himself under the pen-name of George Purves as a commentator on his earlier book, he no longer attempted to employ poverty itself as a check to poverty. But he refused to grant that when the limits of cultivation of the earth had been reached, no means of removing imprudence would be available. "By enacting a law," said Gray, "dictated by necessity, that no man or woman should marry under the age of thirty, all these miseries might be prevented." 10 It might even be done, he added optimistically, by forbidding marriage before the age of twenty-five. And granting that the enforcement of such a law might bring on a certain amount of vice and misery, it would create less than would the regime of starvation urged by Malthus. 11 Plainly Gray's proposal had one tremendous advantage over the pleas of Godwin, Coleridge, and Owen for abortion, infanticide, or birth control: it was not open to the religious objection which told so heavily against them. Indeed, so clear was this advantage, and so simple and obvious was the proposal itself, that it seems remarkable that only Gray and Dr. Hall had so far advanced it. Unfortunately, Gray's removal of this objection could not remedy the inherent weakness of his position; for like all critics of Malthus who left unshaken the assumption that the poor had themselves created the existing poverty, he could not combat the feeling that they deserved their fate, and that aid could be given them only at unjust expense to the prudent. It is for this reason that Gray's argument is far less representative of the immediate period than those or his fellow critics. For the outstanding feature of the criticism of around 1820 is that at last the point which Southey and Hazlitt had raised, and which Dr. Hall had stressed, was beginning to find more adequate expression. Now the foes of Malthus made no suppliant plea for undeserved mercy to the poor. They spent little energy in devising means by which the admitted, or possible, imprudence of the poor might be controlled. With anger deepened by the irony of Malthus' success in the face of their perception of the utter falsity of his doctrine, they proclaimed

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their conviction that aid to the poor not only could be given, and should be given out of Christian charity, but must be given by the merest justice. The first of these critics, who published in 1818 an Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations, was George Ensor, a firebrand from County Armagh. To Ensor, nothing seemed clearer than that imprudence in the Malthusian sense simply did not exist, for all men, given their fair share of the food supply, were perfectly capable of limiting the size of their families to it. For the existing economic system, said Ensor, did not, as it pretended, give every man his fair share of the food supply; rather it gave to some many times their fair share, and to others nothing. There is no grievous pressure by population against subsistence . . . the English people do not receive their share of the public provisions . . . Man has a paramount right to his property, man has also an equal right at least to the produce of his labour, for labour originally determined property. 12 The denial of this right on the pretext of a lack of food, while the rich lavished grain and meat on horses and dogs, and wasted or diverted labor from the production of ample supplies, 13 drew from Ensor passages white-hot with rage: By what law of nature do some feast, and many want necessaries . . . ? By what view of nature, or God, or man, do some rejoice in all the delicacies of the season . . . and others suffer the privations of grain and roots planted in due time and gathered accordingly? There are some questions on this subject that have escaped Mr. Malthus.11 Perhaps inspired by this reinforcement to his own similar charges, Hazlitt returned to the attack in 1819 with a volume of Political Essays which contained five pieces directed against the Malthusians. Some were only sections of his first essay against Malthus, but two of them were developments of those sections of his two replies in which he had put his finger on the basic

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fallacy of Nlalthus which was now being asserted by Ensor. Malthus, said Hazlitt in one of these two essays, proposes abolishing the poor laws because there is no food for the poor; but when he says this while the rich roll in abundance . . . he asserts what he knows not to be true. Mr. Malthus wishes to confound the necessary limits of the produce of the earth with the arbitrary and artificial distribution of that produce. 15 And the followers of Malthus, he continued in the second of the two essays, repeat his error by confusing what the rich allow to the poor with the full 'labour fund." 16 Eloquent as Ensor and Hazlitt were, they were outdone by the aged revolutionary Piercy Ravenstone, 17 who in 1821 in his volume entitled A Few Doubts brought criticism of Malthus to a high level. His principle for decreasing the burden of poverty, like that of Ensor and of Hazlitt, was simply to create prudence by introducing an equal limitation of property, rather than the existing unequal one or the even more unequal one urged by Malthus; but unlike his two allies, he had a simple and specific method for applying this principle: he proposed to maintain relief as a right, and to tax property only, until equality had been achieved. 18 And in his analysis of the central fallacy of Malthus, he achieved a lucidity beyond that of any of his predecessors. "Every society, from its first formation," said Ravenstone, in words later to be echoed by Marx, bears in its bosom the seeds of its destruction; it is built on property; to property it owes its overthrow . . . The industrious have been reduced almost to want, because the idle sharers in their labour have been too many; population has appeared to exceed the means of subsistence, because too small a portion of the society has been employed in production. The earnings of labour are insufficient for the maintenance of the labourer, because the claims of property are previously to be satisfied; and these claims absorb nearly the whole. 19

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These bold vindications of the poor were echoed passionately by the greatest of Godwin's disciples. After several years of floundering efforts Shelley also had arrived at a clear perception of the basic fallacy of the Malthusian theory. When in 1812 he had set down his Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists he had been able only to defy rather than deny the obstacle to his hopes which Malthus had postulated: Many well-meaning persons . . . would tell me not to make people happy, for fear of over-stocking the world . . . War, vice and misery are undeniably bad, they embrace all we can conceive of temporal and eternal evil. Are we to be told that these are remedyless, because the earth would in ease of their remedy, be overstocked? We should, he concluded, do what we can, and let any evils resulting in sixty centuries be remedied then. 21 By the following year he had evidently come to place his faith, at least partly, in increasing the food supply; for his Vindication of Natural Diet placed among other benefits of vegetarianism the fact that it would, if generally adopted, release for cultivation vast tracts now used for grazing, and thus remove any fear of the Malthusian barrier to happiness. 22 But obviously he had by this time begun to see also that no such measure was required; for in "Queen Mab," also of 1813, he placed an emphatic assertion that "Force and Falsehood," rather than imprudence and its resultant dearth of food, were the actual causes of human misery. Hath Nature's soul, That formed this world so beautiful, that spread Earth's lap with plenty, and life's smallest chord Strung to unchanging unison . . . . . . on Man alone, Partial in causeless malice, wantonly Heaped ruin, vice, and slavery; his soul Blasted with withering curses; placed afar The meteor-happiness, that shuns his grasp,

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But serving on the frightful gulf to glare, Rent wide beneath his footsteps? Nature!—no! Kings, priests, and statesmen blast the human flower . . . Let priest-led slaves cease to proclaim that man Inherits vice and misery, when Force And Falsehood hang even o'er the cradled babe. 23 It was this faith that poverty was caused by the denial to the poor of resources to which they were entitled that animated Shelley's reference, in the now famous sonnet inspired by the dark year 1819 and the Peterloo Massacre, to A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field.24 For during the same year, in one of his most ambitious and unpublishable pieces of propaganda, "A Philosophical View of Reform," he charged the "priest, eunuch, and tyrant" Malthus with proposing that after the poor have been stript naked by the tax-gatherer and reduced to bread and tea and fourteen hours of hard labour by their masters . . . the last tie by which Nature holds them to benignant earth whose plenty is garnered up in the strongholds of their tyrants is to be divided . . . They are required to abstain from marrying under penalty of starvation. And it is threatened to deprive them of that property which is as strictly their birthright as a gentleman's land is his birthright . . . whilst the rich are to be permitted to add as many mouths to consume the products of the labour of the poor as they please. 25 In the following year, 1820, Shelley's "Ode to Liberty" replaced the rather vague "Force and Falsehood" with a specific indictment of the wealthy whose exactions from the working people make vain the abundance of the earth; He who taught man to vanquish whatsoever Can be between the cradle and the grave

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MALTHUSIAN TRIUMPH Crowned him the King of Life. Oh, vain endeavor! If on his own high will, a willing slave, He has enthroned the oppression and the oppressor. What if earth can clothe and feed Amplest millions at their need, And power in thought be as the tree within the seed . . . . . . if Life can breed New wants, and wealth from those who toil and groan Rend of thy gifts and hers a thousandfold for one! 2 0

In one important respect these critics, from Ensor to Shelley, strengthened the claim of Southey and others that social oppression was the actual cause of poverty. Whereas the earlier critics had based their claims of injustice to the poor on the mere fact that inequalities of wealth existed, Ensor and those after him uniformly stressed the existence of superfluity and extravagance of wealth in the hands of the "prudent." The shift in emphasis was important. For mere inequality of wealth might indicate only the difference in effect between prudence and imprudence; but the existence of boundless wealth implied the existence of injustice. Those who possessed more wealth than any imaginable number of children could exhaust could hardly claim that any man whose resources could be exhausted by the number of his children was receiving an equal share. So plain was this implication that by stressing it Ensor and his coadjutors went far to present injustice not as a possibility, but as a fact. It is of course true that, in using the existence of injustice to the poor as grounds for asserting that imprudence did not exist, they were being carried away by feeling, as Southey had been. And since they saw no necessity for adding to their argument any such support as Hazlitt's "comfort theory" of prudence, they had added to the logic of the case against Malthus only in that they had converted the possibility of injustice to the poor into an apparent fact. This was an important feat in itself, since it gave far greater weight to the claim that within the limits of justice the poor both could and should be aided.

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Curiously enough, it had never so far occurred to any of these enemies of Malthus that, however adequate they might assert the prudence of the poor to be, they could still profit by paying some attention to the several suggestions which had been made for popularizing contraception. Though Godwin, Coleridge, and Hazlitt had been able to see that preventing life was better than enforcing starvation and death, even they had been too much dominated by the prevailing moral code to see that it was also better than the rigors of prudence. They had therefore assumed that contraception was to be recommended only in the absence of prudence. Their successors, occupied with proving some check adequate, were too busy to give much thought to which check would prove least burdensome, and had never closely examined that assumption; they still regarded the suggestion of contraception as constituting a humiliating admission that the poor were imprudent and could receive help only as an undeserved mercy. As, therefore, they grew increasingly confident of the efficacy of prudence, they grew increasingly resentful of any proposal of contraception. Some years of confusion had yet to pass before it began to become apparent to most anti-Malthusians that such a proposal might be designed as a means of making prudence less exacting, and not as an implied insult to the poor. The existence of this confusion was made plain by the reception given in the years around 1820 to those who, for whatever reason, revived the suggestion of contraception which had been made frequently since the days of Condorcet and Godwin. The first of these was the Utilitarian leader, James Mill. Mill had accepted, as had the Benthamites generally,27 the entire body of Malthusian doctrine; he saw no reason to doubt that the imprudence of the poor had been the cause of their poverty. Therefore he saw neither any reason for aiding them, nor any hope of their aiding themselves by increasing their own "moral restraint." Reflection upon the size of his own family and that of his friend Place had created in him a rueful skepticism regarding even the faint hope which Malthus had placed in such

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an increase; if he and Place, despite the advantages of intelligence and education, had been responsible for the existence of a small army of little Mills and Places, what was to be expected of the laborer unguided by the light of political economy? 28 Had Mill actually been motivated solely by that logic in which the Utilitarians so prided themselves, he might have been content, in consistency with the Benthamite creed of rugged individualism, to accept the misery of the poor as beyond help. But that same laudable inconsistency which had enabled Bentham to bridge the gap between undiluted self-interest and "the greatest good for the greatest number" was present also in Mill. Sternly as he had dismissed both the Christian faith and all emotional sympathies, he could not escape the demands of the humanitarianism which had come to pervade society. The result was that, seeing little hope for the poor in unaided prudence, he was imperatively driven to strike into a more daring course by advocating birth control. His first step, an extremely cautious one, was taken in 1818 with the publication in a supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica of his article "Colony." The subject enabled him handily to present the Malthusian view of the ultimate futility of emigration as a remedy for overpopulation; and this in turn presented the opening for the very thin wedge of his own solution. The great problem of a real check to population, said Mill, has, till this time, been miserably evaded by all those who have meddled with the subject . . . And yet, if the superstitions of the nursery were discarded, and the principle of utility kept steadily in view, a solution might not be very difficult to be found . . ,29 This almost invisible trial balloon having escaped unscathed, Mill released a slightly more conspicuous one when in 1821 he p u b l i s h e d his Elements

of Political Economy.

No orthodox Mal-

thusian would have found in it much with which he could disagree until he arrived at passages containing far more optimism

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for the future of the poor than Malthus himself ever admitted: "The result to be aimed at is," said Mill, to secure to the great body of the people all the happiness which is capable of being derived from the matrimonial union, preventing the evils which the too rapid increase of their numbers would entail. The progress of legislation, the improvement of the education of the people, and the decay of superstition will, in time, it may be hoped, accomplish the difficult task of reconciling these important objects. 30 The key to this optimism was the phrase "the decay of superstition," which elsewhere Mill made somewhat more explicit: there are, he said, two checks to population; The one is poverty . . . The other is prudence; by which either marriages are sparingly contracted, or care is taken that children, beyond a certain number, shall not be the fruit.31 The grand practical problem, therefore, is [he said elsewhere] to find the means of limiting the number of births. 32 It is easy enough to see today that the only feature of Mill's proposals which really deserved the resentment of the antiMalthusians was his failure to suggest that assistance for the poor by which, whether they had been imprudent or not, they could benefit, if his suggestion of birth control were accepted. For, by his assumption that no such aid should be given— whether it resulted from his failure to see the full possibilities of his own advocacy of contraception or from the dominance of mercy by justice in the Utilitarian ethic—he remained essentially a Malthusian. But we should regard his advocacy of contraception as making him the sponsor of a "soft" Malthusianism, which, if it did nothing to aid the poor in material fashion, at least enabled them to escape the worst stringencies of their oppressed situation. Far different was the feeling of many anti-Malthusians of his

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day. To some of them, Mill's recommendation of birth control seemed to make him a monster worse than Malthus. Shelley in 1820 opened his satire Swellfoot the Tyrant with the following scene, in which his Theban tyrant (a thin disguise for a monarch somewhat nearer home) is represented as interrupted, while worshipping Famine in "A magnificent Temple, built of thigh-bones and deaths'-heads, and tiled with scalps," 33 by the clamors of the swine who are his subjects: You ought to give us hog-wash and clean straw, And sties well-thatched; besides it is the lawl Swellfoot. This is sedition, and rank blasphemy! Ho! there, my guards! Enter a Guard. Guard. Your sacred Majesty. Swellfoot. Call in the Jews, Solomon the court porkman, Moses the sow-gelder, and Zephaniah The hog-butcher. Guard. They are in waiting, Sire. Enter Solomon, Moses, and Zephaniah. Swellfoot. Out with your knife, old Moses, and spay these sows (The Pigs run about in consternation.) That load the earth with Pigs; cut close and deep. Moral restraint I see has no effect, Nor prostitution, nor our own example, Starvation, typhus-fever, war, nor prison— This was the art which the arch-priest of Famine Hinted at in his charge to the Theban clergyCut close and deep, good Moses.34 Despite the slight confusion arising from Shelley's synthesizing of the King, Malthus, and the advocates of birth control, he records clearly enough the rage of the anti-Malthusians at those who proposed, instead of aiding the poor, to lower them to the level of brute beasts. Perhaps never so far in the entire tangle of thought and feeling that makes up the history of the Mai-

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thusian controversy had there been so complete an instance of confusion. It was of course absurd to regard Mill as having added an insult to the injury proposed by Malthus; for the allegation of the imprudence of the poor was as fully present in Malthus' own theorizing. But it was equally erroneous, and far more seriously so, to so connect contraception itself with the allegation of imprudence as to reject it in favor of the harsher regime of prudence. The same confusion was considerably worse confounded when in 1822 Francis Place published his Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population. For where Mill's book had aroused a misdirected resentment of contraception by recommending its use by the poor, Place's aroused the same resentment by doing nothing of the sort. The position that Place actually took was just about that of the anti-Malthusians who so utterly mistook his meaning. Successful business man though he was, and close friend of Mill, Place shared neither the selfish opportunism of the Whigs nor the more honest Malthusianism of the Benthamites; in his struggle up from the ranks of the working class his cool mind had lost neither its honesty nor its generosity. It seemed to him too clear for argument that Malthus erred in his contention that the imprudence of the poor was the cause of poverty. It is true, said Place, that poverty is to some extent caused by the imprudence of the poor; but it is also caused by the withholding from the poor of a fair share of the food supply. By abolishing the poor laws, Malthus would partly remove the first of these causes of poverty at the cost of greatly accentuating the other. As for the claim of Malthus that poverty could not be further diminished, said Place, possession of wealth is no more a law of nature than is the right to relief, and the poverty caused by the inequality of wealth can be completely abolished; as for the poverty created by imprudence, it too can be greatly diminished—if by no gentler means, then by the Godwinian method of infanticide—once the misery arising from the failure of mere prudence is recognized as worse than any "vice" or "misery" connected with more efficient methods of checking population.

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Specifically, Place recommended, in addition to a program of education in public responsibility, such measures as the legalization of unions, the abolition of corn laws and tariffs, and the subsidization of emigration, to diminish the poverty arising from inequalities in wealth; and the spreading of a knowledge of contraceptive technique to diminish the poverty created by the poor themselves. 35 It is rather difficult to see why Place did not become instantly the idol of the anti-Malthusians. Not only had he urged measures obviously helpful to the poor, but he had credited the poor with prudence. His reservation to the effect that there were bound to be among them some for whose sake it would be necessary to advocate the practice of birth control did not imply its practice by all. Perhaps the chief reason why he came to be regarded as urging, equally with Mill, the general practice of contraception was that he came to be credited widely with the authorship of a handbill surreptitiously circulated during the same year, entitled To the Married of Both Sexes, and containing quite explicit instructions for the prevention of conception. Though this "diabolical handbill," as it was generally called, was by some attributed to Robert Owen, it was considered by many to be the first move of Place toward bringing about the universal habit of birth control among the poor.38 Thus Place, one of the sanest and most vigorous allies the poor had ever acquired, became anathema to many anti-Malthusians, for their blind persistence in regarding birth control as more painful than prudence continued; they still could not see that it might be not only more efficient than prudence, but also superior in other respects. Therefore they thought that anyone recommending that the poor make use of it—as they oddly supposed Place to do—meant only that it was a necessity, and thereby insulted the poor. Such radical publications as Wooler's Black Dwarf and Carlisle's Republican showed definite hostility.37 Perhaps the injustice suffered by Place, and Mill too for that matter, was not in vain. It would appear that the storm aroused by their proposals led rather quickly to the belated perception

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that birth control might be not a device to be urged only because of its power to counteract imprudence, and therefore an insult, but a resource superior in other respects to prudence. In time, even such radicals as Carlisle recovered from their resentment of Mill and Place sufficiently to realize that, whether accompanied by injustice or by economic assistance, birth control was decidedly preferable to the rigors of prudence. Handbills, pamphlets, and books advocating the practice, which were beginning to circulate among the working people, were at least condoned by the foes of Malthus, regardless of the neo-Malthusian purpose of some of their authors.38 Outstanding among these publications was the Moral Physiology of Robert Dale Owen, which gave very concrete form to that remedy for overpopulation, the very whisper of which by the author's philanthropist father had so shocked Malthus.39 To the general public Owen's booklet still appeared quite the reverse of moral, and the distributors of it and similar propaganda were in constant danger of prosecution on grounds of obscenity. One enthusiast, indeed, suffered for his misdeeds not only in life but in death. The arrest of John Stuart Mill in the very act of placing handbills in areaways was to deprive him, decades later, of his memorial in Westminster Abbey.40 The history of the birth control movement is not, however, strictly a part of the record of the Malthusian controversy. For however important to the happiness of the poor it might be to replace abstinence with contraception, it added nothing to the case against Malthus. To show that the poor both could and should be aided, it was necessary only to show that prudence had generally existed among them in the past, and would therefore presumably continue; the further perception that it might be replaced by birth control, though it added to the prospect of freedom from poverty that of freedom from rigid sexual restraint, did not seem essential to establishing the possibility of freedom from poverty. Therefore the genuinely important achievement of the period was that of Ensor and those who followed him in making more substantial the basis for asserting that the poor

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were the victims of exploitation, and were consequently not all demonstrably less prudent than the rest of society. Obviously, in view of the coming triumph of Malthus' theory, that assertion failed to win majority assent. Yet it may not have been totally without effect. Gray in 1818 stated that "the populationists," by which he meant the anti-Malthusians, "are now evidently gaining ground"; 41 and they proved themselves able not only to block the earliest of those attempts to deprive the poor of relief which had been foreshadowed by the establishment of the House committee in 1817, but to undertake a counteroffensive. The first victory was not too easily won; for the results of the census of 1821 were even more alarming to Malthusians than those of 1811; the decade showed an increase in the population of the country from 10,488,000 to 12,218,500, or 16.39 percent. 42 Scarlett, backed by Ricardo, brought in a poor bill of Malthusian inspiration which provided for placing a limit on the funds for relief, abolishing the law of settlement, and denying relief to those marrying after its passage. 43 But the anti-Malthusians were able to force its withdrawal. As to the clause impeding the marriages of the poor ('No no!' from Mr. Scarlett) Mr. Gurney said he could hardly trust himself to speak on it. But it was an attempt to bring the detestable system of Mr. Malthus to bear on the legislation of the country . . . But he hoped and trusted that the House would never be led . . . to give any countenance to a doctrine which in this country should recognize a right in the rich, to say to the poor, that they had no business to be bom; that it was in the order of nature that they should starve . . 44 The counteroffensive against the Malthusians took a form which at first glance is likely to seem rather inconsistent with the beliefs of most of the Malthusians' foes. To all those who believed restriction of population growth possible—both those who upheld the poor as generally prudent and those who conceded that their past imprudence could be redeemed only by

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some sacrifice by the prudent—it seemed unnecessary to increase the food supply by any such devices as subsidizing agriculture, fisheries, or emigration; for whether they believed that the already existing supply would be hard strained if it was more equally distributed, or that it would be abundant, they agreed in the feeling that it was sufficient to prevent poverty in any quarter. Hence it appears rather curious that their attempts to maintain assistance for the poor should chiefly have taken the form of proposals which included making food more plentiful, whether by allowing importation of foreign grain at lower prices, or allowing exportation of the consumer at low prices by subsidizing emigration. As a matter of fact, the inclusion of such an aim in their attempts to aid the poor was, consciously or unconsciously, the soundest of strategy. For plans to aid the poor which proposed to draw only upon the already existing wealth of society would necessarily seem—and be—revolutionary in character; but if the aid given were obtained largely from an increase in the total wealth of society, the expense to the wealthy would presumably be much less. Therefore, whether those who were to be called upon to give up some of their wealth believed with the Malthusians that the aid given would little benefit the poor, or that it would be effectual, they would drive a better bargain by directing it toward increasing the food supply. In the case of emigration, at least, this was especially true; for the necessary machinery was already in existence in Britain, a maritime nation with extensive colonies, and the building up of those colonies would inevitably bring considerable compensation for whatever expense it involved. Even to the most hardened Malthusian, the subsidizing of emigration was bound to appear to demand less sacrifice from the prudent in behalf of the imprudent than any other form of relief which had been proposed. Already, in the years following the scarcity panic of 1800, there had begun a movement for the promotion of emigration, and interest in the subject had not since died out. In 1818, for instance, Colquhoun had published a pamphlet urging government organization of

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emigration to South Africa.45 It was therefore a natural sequel to the withdrawal of Scarlett's Poor Bill that Nolan a year later issued in the House a denunciation of those theorists who would discourage marriage, coupled with the announcement of his intention to bring in a bill to encourage emigration to the colonies.46 Parliament allowed itself to be persuaded into cautious experimentation. In 1823 the House voted £50,000 for subsidizing emigration, and made a further appropriation in 1825.47 In 1826 Wilmot Horton, no ardent anti-Malthusian, but willing to believe that a way could be found to create prudence among the poor, moved and secured the appointment of a Select Committee on Emigration.48 The Malthusians, however, had by no means been put to flight. In 1827, Slaney, citing "Mr. Ricardo, Mr. Malthus, and others, as authorities to guide him," introduced a poor bill the chief aim of which was to forbid relief to all individuals able to work.49 Horton, though willing to support Slaney's bill for the purpose of enforcing prudence upon the poor,50 was not willing to support it unless some means were provided for affording them the assistance which Slaney's bill would take away, and gave the anti-Malthusians a rallying point by introducing a bill to allow parishes to use relief funds for promoting emigration.51 The gradual intensification of the conflict in Parliament was accompanied by a heightening of Malthusian discussion outside. The large number of references, usually jeering, to Malthus and Malthusianism in Byron's Don Juan testify to his own and his public's awareness of the struggle. Of these, perhaps the only one often recalled today is the line "And Malthus does the thing 'gainst which he writes" 52—something of a slander, incidentally, since there was no foundation for the belief widely current, then as now, that the philosopher had reared a large family.33 Sharpest in their critical implications were two other passages, one containing the line "Without cash, Malthus tells you—Take no brides',"54 and the other satirizing equally Malthus and Adeline, one of those

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zealous matrons, Who favour, malgré Malthus, generationProfessors of that genial art, and patrons Of all the modest part of Propagation; Which after all at such a desperate rate runs, That half its produce tends to Emigration, That sad result of passions and potatoesTwo weeds which pose our economic Catos. Had Adeline read Malthus? I can't tell; I wish she had: his book's the eleventh commandment, Which says, 'Thou shalt not marry," unless well: This he (as far as I can understand) meant.r,fi Lamb, in "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading," published in the London Magazine in 1822, protested against the cursed prevalence of Malthusian discussion; expressing his loathing of "books which are no books—biblia a-biblia," such as almanacs, Hume, Gibbon, and Paley's Moral Philosophy, he cited as one of the worst of common literary experiences "to reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it is some kind-hearted play-book, then, opening what 'seem its leaves,' to come bolt upon a withering Population Essay." 5 0 In Thomas Lister's novel Granby (1826), Lady Harriet Duncan, a pronounced bluestocking, invites the hero to a party at Lady Wigley's, adding enticingly: "She has just written a pamphlet on Population—a very clever thing, I'm told, but I don't pretend to understand the subject." 57 Somewhat later in the story, the heroine's Tory father, Sir Thomas Jermyn, exclaims: "We are in a very ticklish condition. Why only look at our population—see how frightfully that is increasing—and what are we to do with the surplus?" 58 Literary ladies of far less scholarly character than "Lady Wigley" were not completely untouched by the current interest in the subject, which appears to provide the note of pathos in two poems of about the same date by Letitia Landon. In "Love Nursed by Solitude" she lamented that Young Love should be

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belied by being linked with Misery, and in a fragment entitled "The Poor" she deplored the fact that the rich no longer felt the obligation even to pity the wretched. 59 Though most anti-Malthusians of the period centered their attention on promoting emigration, or some alternative means of increasing the food supply, there remained some who refused to allow such devices to divert them from their purpose of making the already existing resources available to the poor. Of these critics one was the veteran Hazlitt, whose essay on Malthus in The Spirit of the Age in 1825 ignored the current proposals, and confined itself to a reiteration, though a somewhat politer one than was to be expected, of its author's familiar position that poverty was the product not of imprudence, but of the denial to the poor of economic justice. But at one point he achieved a clearer statement of the argument for that belief than had been made several years earlier by himself, Ensor, or Ravenstone: The division of the produce of the soil, the price of labour, the relief afforded to the poor, are matters of human arrangement; while any charitable hand can extend relief, it is a proof that the means of subsistence are not exhausted in themselves, that the "tables are not full." . . . A country-squire keeps a pack of hounds: a lady of quality rides out with a footman behind her, on two sleek, well-fed horses . . . if any one insists at the same time that "the laws of nature, which are the laws of God, have doomed the poor and their families to starve" . . . we beg leave to deny both fact and inference. 60 Another critic who insisted on the same point did so not by ignoring anti-Malthusian devices which he did not consider essential to his theory, but by accepting them as auxiliaries. This was the Owenite William Thompson, wealthy landlord of County Cork and devotee of Godwin, whose Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth (1824), is one of the highwater marks of anti-Malthusian argument. Thompson's central

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doctrine, the right of labor to the whole produce of labor, was subject to denial on the Malthusian basis that the poor not only would be, but had been, responsible for their own misery. To this challenge Thompson replied by the familiar claim that they had instead been impoverished by the predatory activities of the rich. But he supported that claim by an argument so obvious that its neglect by all previous foes of Malthus is hard to understand. Malthus, said Thompson, had based his entire theory upon a glaring fallacy; for he had presented no evidence whatever for his assumption that the power of men to increase their numbers necessarily involved their exercise of that power. With this telling blow, Thompson might well have rested his case. He felt that he had established the ability of the poor to limit their numbers, not only when they began to feel the pressure of poverty, but before; for he had arrived, with Hazlitt, if not with Ricardo, at the conviction that comfort would constitute a more powerful incentive to prudence than starvation. But he saw no reason why this limitation of their numbers by the poor should be any more stringent than necessary. Therefore he accepted gladly any devices by which the process might be made easier. He was fully in sympathy with those who advocated increasing the food supply; and he saw no reason why even the prudent should not escape the rigors of abstinence and aid the imprudent by spreading a knowledge of contraception. 61 So thoroughly did Thompson gather and integrate all the outstanding arguments against Malthus which had appeared in any quarter that it is little wonder his book became one of the important sources of St. Simonian and Marxist thought. 62 Aside from Hazlitt and Thompson, however, few of the writers of the time attempted more than furthering either emigration or some other means of increasing food. De Quincey's essay on Malthus published in 1823 as the second of his "Notes from the Pocket Book of a Late Opium-Eater" was not altogether anti-Malthusian. De Quincey dismissed Coleridge's accusation that Malthus had written a quarto on a truism with the sugges-

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tion that Coleridge had "probably contented himself more suo with reading the first and last pages of the work"; 63 he thought that Malthus had undoubtedly solidified political economy. But in one respect, said De Quincey, he had erred: he had failed to see that not only man, but wheat, can increase in geometrical ratio. Therefore he had not seen that though food cannot be made to keep pace with man for ever, it can for a long time to come. 64 The list of advocates of higher domestic production, beginning with Arthur Young, was also swelled by the name of Sir Walter Scott. In "Malachi Malagrowther on the Currency," published in the Edinburgh Weekly Journal during 1826, Scott advocated the encouragement and aid of such productive industries as those of the fishermen and kelp-gatherers of the Western Isles, rather than adherence to the theories of "one philosopher" who "will convert the whole country into workhouses." 05 Again, in 1827, Scott's interest in the problem appeared in a Quarterly article, "On Planting Waste Lands," which advocated the planting of forests as an indirect means of stimulating food production worthy of the support of "the philosophical economist, who looks with anxiety for the mode of occupying and supporting an excess of population." 66 Ebenezer Elliott had, of course, an even simpler plan for increasing the food supply. His conviction that plenty could be provided for all, not by exporting the poor to cheap food but merely by allowing cheap food to be imported to them, had filled his poems from the first with bitter references to the Malthusian theorists. In 1823, his poem "Love" expressed his scorn of the apprehension of famine upon a bountiful earth. 67 In ' T h e Ranter" (1827) he referred with contempt to those who would "make fertility a baneful weed"; 68 two years later, in ' T h e Village Patriarch," he sneered at "all our plans to starve the poor," and remarked that Christ did not think want a crime; 69 and in ' T h e Splendid Village" in 1832 he painted a savage portrait of the new middle-class squire who "thanks the Blessed powers for crime and want." 70

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Much of the interest of the anti-Nlalthusians was centered on the effort to enlist government support for emigration. Thomas Campbell in 1828 contributed his mite to the cause. Two years earlier, his "Lines on Revisiting a Scottish River" had recorded his sadness at the changes brought about by industry's breeding a population so impoverished that "death, that thins them, scarce seems public woe";71 now in his "Lines on the Departure of Emigrants for New South Wales," he cheered the saddened exiles on with the prospect of freedom, room for increase, and abundance of food. 72 In the following year, 1829, William Cobbett, now back from exile and at the height of his parliamentary career, published a pamphlet designed to encourage the hesitant poor to emigrate.7:1 This step appears to have marked a change in Cobbett's intransigent views on the question of population. He had never, during the quarter-century since his lapse from belief in Malthus, admitted for a moment that any preventive of poverty was needed except giving the poor their economic rights. His "Sermon on the Sin of Forbidding Marriage," published in 1822, had stormed at Malthus as the preacher of a "doctrine of devils," designed to make robbing the poor even easier.74 Later, he had published a play entitled Surplus Population, which was banned by the magistrates when a performance was attempted at Tonbridge. 75 This somewhat primitive drama presented the Malthusians in the persons of two characters: Sir Gripe Grindum, who rejoices in the deaths of the four children of a poor cottager, and urges abstention from marriage upon the innocent maiden Betsy (upon whom, of course, he himself has foul designs), and "Peter Thimble, Esq., a great anti-Population Philosopher." Thimble, who was intended as a caricature of Francis Place, urges upon the poor a potato diet, birth control, and emigration, only to be told by Farmer Stiles that relief is a right of the poor, since it only returns to them a part of the fair share of which they are being deprived. 76 Cobbett's Advice to Young Men (1829) had contained the following account of his conversation with a young couple encountered on a journey:

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"Why," said I, "how many children do you reckon to have at last?" "I do not care how many," said the man: "God never sends mouths without sending meat." "Did you ever hear," said I, "of One Parson Nlalthus?" "No, sir." "Why, if he were to hear of your works, he would be outrageous; for he wants an act of parliament to prevent poor people from marrying young, and from having such lots of children." "Oh! the brute!" exclaimed the wife; while the husband laughed, thinking that I was joking.77 Obviously up to this time Cobbett had shared the confused feeling of some of the earlier anti-Malthusians that those who, like Place, urged contraception, and those who advocated emigration or cheaper food, were thereby denying the prudence of the poor. But his Emigrant's Guide seems to indicate that at last he had come to see, like Thompson, that emigration might be one means of securing for the poor some part of their rights. A much higher estimate of the value of emigration was held by a man destined soon to take his place beside Cobbett in Parliament as an ardent enemy of Malthus—George Poulett Scrope, just at the point of transforming himself from a geologist specializing in volcanism into a politician and economist. Scrope, whose lively mind was capable of such strikingly "modern" views as his attributing the abolition of serfdom to the desire of capitalists to free themselves of responsibilities for their workmen, had already dedicated his powers to the task of opposing Malthus. It was as a first step in that direction that in 1832 he published a volume of letters from emigrants, designed to inspire the poor to follow their example. 78 But long before most of this support for the anti-Malthusians had arisen outside Parliament, evidence had appeared within Parliament of support from an astonishing source. The antiMalthusians supporting Horton's emigration bill, assailed by

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reminders of Malthus' condemnation of any aid to the poor, and especially of his assertion of the futility of emigration as a remedy for poverty, found a basis of reply in the utterances not only of many hitherto impeccable Malthusians, but of Malthus himself. Two years earlier, in 1826, Horton had cited McCulloch as approving aid to emigrants "provided means were taken to prevent the vacancies left by them in population from being filled up." 79 And in 1827, Malthus, called to testify before the Select Committee on Emigration, had qualified his usual opinion of the futility of emigration by conceding that it might forestall the necessity of abolishing relief if some way could be found to prevent an increase of population as great as the number of emigrants. So far, he stated, the considerable amount of voluntary emigration to the colonies and America had been rendered vain both by the increase of the English population, and an inrush of hungry Irish; but he no longer completely despaired of any remedy for this phenomenon. If landlords would make it a practice to redistribute the holdings and tear down the cottages of the emigrants upon their departure, the "vacuum" would not be immediately filled.80 Horton in the course of his fight for his emigration bill made the most of this testimony, and claimed that he was similarly supported, or at least unopposed, by Ricardo, McCulloch, and Torrens. 81 Neither Horton himself, nor Malthus, nor above all the followers of Malthus, showed any signs of recognizing the full implications of the situation. It is of course impossible to tell how much weight should be attached to Horton's claim of the support of Ricardo and McCulloch; but if they actually were lending support to the subsidizing of emigration, they were consciously or unconsciously taking a long step away from Malthusian doctrine. Ricardo in 1817 had confessed his belief that comfort might create adequate incentive to prudence. But neither he nor McCulloch, whose Principles of Political Economy, published in 1825, had faithfully repeated Ricardo on that point as on most others,82 had seen in it any reason to advocate aiding the poor. Now, if Horton is to be trusted, they had taken a

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position which would seem to indicate that in emigration at least they saw a means by which aid might be given. And it is far more certain, from Nlalthus' own testimony, that he himself had come not only to grant explicitly, rather than inadvertently, the possibility of prudence among the poor, but even to acknowledge the consequent possibility that aid would benefit them. 83 If there was any chance that this startling lapse from the stem conclusions of the original Malthusian theory would go unnoticed by the foes of Malthus, it was soon removed. In 1829 Nassau Senior, professor of political economy at Oxford and one of the mainstays of the Malthusian school, published two lectures which he had delivered at Oxford the year before, which made painfully clear his defection from Malthusian orthodoxy. Malthus, said Senior, had done the world great service in calling attention to the necessity for controlling population, and should not therefore be too much blamed for having fallen into one serious error. That error Senior did not take to be a complete denial of prudence, for he credited Malthus with admitting that poverty might create it; rather the error lay in overlooking the value of comfort as a source of prudence. Men are moved more strongly to prudence by fear of losing the decencies of life, said Senior, than by loss of the necessities or the luxuries. Evidence for this assertion he found in the fact that in countries which have achieved a decent standard of living, the rate of population growth declines; in no such country, Senior claimed, has population increased as rapidly as wealth. 84 Senior's attempt to furnish that proof of the "comfort" theory which Hazlitt, Ricardo, and others had lacked is hardly completely convincing. For the coincidence within a community of increasing wealth and a lessening rate of population growth might simply mean that while the prudent limited their numbers, the poor were increasingly breeding and starving. Yet the mere possibility that imprudence was an acquired rather than an innate trait of the poor was a powerful argument against Malthus. And Senior had, by presenting a statement of the

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comfort theory which was more complete and supported by sounder psychological analysis than that of his predecessors, given it much wider currency than they had been able to do— so much wider, in fact, that it was generally ascribed to him rather than to them. Senior was unaware that he had been anticipated in this position by any of his Malthusian confreres; he believed that he was setting his faith in the power of prudence into opposition with the views not only of James Mill and, in part, of Malthus, but also of McCulloch. Yet it would appear from the emigrationists' claim of the support of Ricardo and McCulloch that Senior's conversion to the comfort theory of population control was only one part of the astonishing situation that was taking shape—a situation in which, while the Malthusians as a whole pressed irresistibly toward reshaping society to fit their theory, their leaders were beginning to eye that theory with doubt or disbelief. At last the seed planted by Hazlitt had borne formidable fruit. In the very citadel of Malthusianism were appearing those who not only agreed that the poor in general were already capable of prudence, but also saw, as the logical inference from that fact, that the poor were capable of profiting from some forms of assistance. The further inference that they were not basically responsible for their past imprudence neither Senior nor his associates seemed to see; but the ethical argument against relief which they thus left to the Malthusians was, as Malthus had always realized, not a pleasant one to uphold in the face of Christian ideals. As yet Malthus could hardly have suspected the full extent of the danger, which he himself had helped to create, but he was alert enough to be alarmed by Senior's lectures. In a long letter to Senior he questioned the latter's statement that food tends to increase faster than population, and ignored his own recent admissions of the prudence of the poor, insisting that he had never granted the existence of prudence except among the higher classs. The bland inconsequence of Senior's reply sug-

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gests an intention to remind Malthus by irony of the futility of trying to retract his admission. He was happy to know, he wrote, that Malthus did not support the policies of his followers, who by ignoring his admission that prudence is effective as a check to population, opposed emigration and the cheapening of food by the removal of corn laws. Malthus broke off the correspondence with a curt letter containing only the rather vague retort that prudence is the only hope of the poor. 85 Malthus had ample reason for alarm at this evidence of defection among his most eminent supporters; for a very few years were to see it spread with such power and speed as almost to wipe out the intellectual leadership of Malthusianism. Yet at the moment there seemed small cause for concern. On the whole the followers of Malthus continued to ignore not only, as Senior had said, the weakness of Malthus' own position, but the defections of their other leaders. Either they showed no sign of noticing such theories as Senior's, or they rejected them out of hand, as witness Macaulay's cavalier treatment of the diffuse work published in 1830 by Michael Thomas Sadler, M.P., under the title The Law of Population. Sadler, a businessman of Leeds, had grown from a boy preacher of Methodist sermons into a Tory with Christian socialist leanings. His approach to the problem of population was a highly religious one. Because of his faith in the goodness and wisdom of God, he regarded as blasphemous any intimation that the interference of man might be necessary to patch up cosmic flaws. Hence he had in the House been one of the leaders of the opposition both to Slaney's poor bill and Horton's emigration bill, on the simple grounds that no such thing as "redundant population" could exist, and that both the Malthusians and the antiMalthusians who offered their needless plans for restricting population were officiously insulting God. And not content to let the matter rest there, he now offered to the general public his explanation of how God's plan operated, in order, as he expressed it by the slight misquotation on his title-page,

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That to the height of this great argument, I may assert eternal Providence And justify the ways of God to Men. Sadler's account of the ways of God to men was notably similar to Senior's. As the population of the earth becomes denser, he asserted, the necessity arises for a slowing of the rate of increase; but God has so devised that the situation provides its own remedy, for accompanying the growth in density of population is inevitably a growth in security and comfort, which actuates a heightening of prudence sufficient to limit the population. Thus the true law of population, ordained by God, is that increase is in inverse ratio to the density of the population. Sadler's method of proof was statistical; he furnished copious tables showing the differing rates of growth in regions of differing densities of population, and cited the small families of the British peerage to show the tendency of comfort and security to lower the birth rate. 86 Macaulay showed no such alarm at Sadler's book as Malthus had felt at Senior's. It was with an air of easy confidence that he undertook, in two articles in the Edinburgh Review in July, 1830, and January, 1831, to demolish the hapless Sadler; perhaps he felt too much confidence to allow him to do himself full justice, for he was considerably stronger in ridicule than in argument. Macaulay employed his customary spider tactic of stinging his victim into paralysis in order to devour him at leisure. His opening attack on Sadler's redundancy and turgidity of style was characteristically brilliant, condescending, and exaggerated; its effect was to cover Sadler's arguments with ridicule even before they were presented. Macaulay may well have felt justified not only by the fact that the faults he instanced were actually present, but also by the fact that Sadler had shown small courtesy to Malthus as a person; nevertheless, the cleverness of his criticism was tainted by its savagery. For the rest, his concrete arguments against Sadler were a mixture of logic and of petty

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quibbling. The chief instance of the latter is his taking Sadler up on his inexact use of the term "inverse," though it must have been perfectly clear to any reader what Sadler meant by it, and the inaccuracy did nothing to vitiate his general principle. Macaulay was on far firmer ground when he argued that since Sadler's tables showed population still increasing, even if slowly, in congested areas, they merely confirmed Malthus, and when he cited, against Sadler's assumption, the large families of the peerage. This was hardly so complete an answer to Sadler as might well have been made; but it seemed to Macaulay to be sufficient proof that Malthus had but described a harsh aspect of human life. The problem of evil, he concluded, was not created by Malthus, nor was it in any way altered by him; for the least and most intermittent of human miseries represents evil as fully as the greatest and most inescapable. In denying the existence of overpopulation, Sadler was taking the dangerous step of setting God in hazard against science, as did those who asserted that the roundness of the earth would deny God's truth. Was not this a greater danger to religion than anything in Malthus? 87 "People here think," wrote Macaulay to Napier in February, 1831, "that I have answered Sadler completely. Empson tells me that Malthus is well pleased, which is a good sign." 88 And if Macaulay saw no great threat to Malthusianism in such theories as those of Senior and Sadler, most of his fellow Malthusians showed no sign even of being aware of them. It was with no suggestion of misgiving that Dr. Thomas Chalmers, like Sumner before him, conferred on Malthus the benediction of religion*9 in his On Political Economy in Connexion with the Moral State and Moral Prospects of Society, published in 1832. Chalmers, a vigorous divine, destined a decade later to lead the secession of the Reformed Church in Scotland, approached his subject from a background of successful experience in organizing relief in industrial districts, and offered a program based on that experience. He blends the Malthusian theory into a kind of Toryism starched with Scottish sternness. To him the situation seemed

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to admit of no further delay. Between Nlalthusian doctrine and Christianity he saw no conflict, and those who saw any such conflict he branded as sentimental: if a man lacks the strength of will to make use of the means of salvation which God has given him, how is God to be blamed? It might well be expected that a man holding such flattering opinions of human powers would find the solution of the problem of poverty relatively simple; and so it was with Dr. Chalmers. His basic remedy was the one we still hear urged today in every social crisis—the extension of Christianity; but Chalmers' Christianity included not only the education of the people in economics and ethics, but the restriction of relief to private charity locally administered. By its practice he hoped to combine the Malthusian aim of restricting population with the Tory aim of knitting together the classes in bonds of discipline, mutual affection, and personal contact, to give unity to the state. 90 Equally confident of the Malthusian views of divine providence was Miss Harriet Martineau. This indefatigable herald of enlightenment, destined to fame as an ardent Malthusian, had undertaken a series of tales designed to explain in fictional guise the entire system of classical economics, with the purpose of luring the populace into swallowing the bitter pill which she saw to be their only cure. Miss Martineau owed the idea of popularizing economics in some such fashion to her reading in 1827 of Mrs. Jane Marcet's Conversations on Political Economy (1818).91 In this textbook in dialogue form, little Caroline was assured by her governess, Mrs. B., that the wage level depends on the proportion between population and subsistence. Therefore "it often happens," said Mrs. B., that as soon as the labouring classes find their condition improved, whether by a diminution of numbers, or an augmentation of capital, which may spring up from some new source of industry, marriages again increase, a greater number of children are reared, and population once more out-

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strips the means of subsistence; so that the condition of the poor, after a temporary improvement, is again reduced to its former wretchedness. Doubtless little Caroline upon hearing this thanked her stars for the foresight which had prompted her to get herself born into a family comfortably exempted from such unhappy contingencies. She was assured by Mrs. B., however, that the poor might easily save themselves by acquiring education, joining Friendly Societies and savings banks, and abolishing the poor laws.92 Perhaps no project so dreary as Miss Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy was ever so well carried out. Certainly these tales will never rank as more than literary curiosities; and yet—mostly at such time as Miss Martineau allowed her purpose to falter in the grip of her creative imagination—they have a rather surprising degree of interest of character, vividness of detail and atmosphere, and dramatic suspense. But Miss Martineau was conscientious; and no such extraneous matters were allowed to divert her from the stem message with which in 1832 she came to the aid of the Malthusian forces in Parliament. In "Weal and Wae in Garveloch," she set up her usual microcosm of a society on one of the Western Isles off Scotland, depicted its breeding up to the limit of its subsistence, and then plunged it into misery by means of a crop failure. Naturally, starvation threatens all—particularly a notably shiftless family, and an Irish couple living on potatoes (this last a device which, as encouraging overpopulation, was regarded with peculiar dismay by Malthusians). Enlightened by this calamity as to the inescapable laws of political economy, Ronald, a brother of the Ella who is the protagonist of the story, heroically resolves to exercise moral restraint by abandoning his courtship of the widow Katie Cuthbert, who, poor woman, has already afflicted the world with four children. The climactic scene is that in which Ella informs the heartbroken—but docile—young woman of his decision:

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"Since Providence has not made food increase as men increase," said Katie, "it is plain that Providence wills restraint here as in the case of other passions." "And awful are the tokens of its pleasure, Katie" (replied Ella). "The tears of mothers over their dead children, that shrunk under poverty like blossoms withering before the frosts, the fading of the weak, the wasting of the strong, thefts in the streets, sickness in the houses, funerals by the wayside—these are the tokens that unlimited increase is not God's will." 'These tell us where we are wrong, Ella. How shall we learn how we may be right?" "By doing as you have done through life, Katie: by using our judgment, and such power as we have. We have not the power of increasing food as fast as our numbers may increase; but we have the power of limiting our numbers to agree with the supply of food. This is the gentle check which is put into our own hands, and if we will not use it, we must not repine if harsher checks follow. If the passionate man will not restrain his anger, he must expect punishment at the hands of him whom he has injured; and if he imprudently indulges his love, he must not complain when poverty, disease, and death lay waste his family." 93 It is to be noted that Miss Martineau, like Chalmers and like Malthus before 1827, offered her characters no escape by emigration or by the contraception advocated by Mill, Place, and Owen. Their condition was not to be improved by any such degrading expedients, which were abhorred by a Providence that apparently found no difficulty in contemplating either the tame surrender of their strongest desires, or the agonies of their death by starvation. One wonders whether the bitterest resentment of Malthusianism was created by its enemies or its apologists. Clearly the situation was not one to be regarded cheerfully by the foes of Malthus: even if they had themselves had time to

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detect the defection of some of the leaders of Malthusianism, the Malthusians had not. And not only was the eagerness of the Malthusians to impose their measures upon the country unimpaired; their power to do so was heightened. For one thing, the returns of the 1831 census brought many to their side by showing an increase in population since 1821 from 12,218,500 to almost 14,000,000.94 Today, more significant than this increase is the fact that its rate had declined somewhat, from the 16.39 percent of 1811-21 to the 13.74 percent of 1821-31,95 for in that decline we recognize the beginning of the ebb of that phenomenal and abnormal rate of increase which marked the early nineteenth century. Rut men in 1831 had no such reassuring knowledge; to them the outstanding feature of the census was that population was still growing at a terrifying rate, seeming to confirm the gloomiest forebodings of Malthus. And this added incentive toward Malthusian legislation was accompanied by the fact that the reformed Parliament created by the famous bill of 1832 was dominated by middle-class and Utilitarian leaders thoroughly saturated with Malthusian doctrine.96 From the very day of the passage of the Reform Bill the foes of Malthus must have felt that their defeat was inevitable. Their gloomy forebodings were expressed by one of their number who almost thirty years before had launched one of the earliest attacks against Malthus. As through the years Coleridge had developed the peculiar variety of Toryism advocated in The Constitution oj Church and State and A Lay Sermon—a Toryism so blended with ecclesiasticism and idealism that it would have astonished either a fox-hunting squire or a medieval clerk—his original horror of Malthusianism had been reinforced by a perception of its disintegrating effect upon society. A right relationship between God and the human soul demanded, he believed, the moral and social influences provided by a state patterned pretty much on the close relationships of a feudal society, with particular emphasis on the spiritual guidance of the "clerisy," an estate in which he united all the learned, whether in the church or out. To him, therefore, Benthamism in general

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and Malthusianism especially, with their destructive effect upon "Cavalier principles" and "organic" relations within the state, were in every sense detestable; 97 and it was with a sick heart that in 1832 he surveyed the future: Is it not lamentable—is it not even marvellous—that the monstrous practical sophism of Malthus should now have gotten complete possession of the leading men of the kingdom! Such an essential lie in morals—such a practical lie in fact as it is too! I solemnly declare that I do not believe that all the heresies and sects and factions which the ignorance and the weakness and the wickedness of man have ever given birth to, were altogether so disgraceful to man as a Christian, a philosopher, a statesman, or citizen, as this abominable tenet. It should be exposed by reasoning in the form of ridicule. Asgill or Swift would have done much; but, like the Popish doctrines, it is so vicious a tenet, so flattering to the cruelty, the avarice, and sordid selfishness of most men, that I hardly know what to think of the result. 98 The result feared by Coleridge was not to be brought about without one last powerful protest. Though in 1832 Thomas Carlyle, just at the threshold of his fame, was still more the mystic than the critic of public affairs, under the pressure of this crisis he was driven to take a specific stand. His opposition to Malthus took the form of supporting those in Parliament who still hoped to aid the poor by promoting emigration. One of the most eloquent passages in his Characteristics (1832) is that in which he pictures the hapless poor packed in their black Calcutta-dungeon of a Europe, while around them the vast waste spaces of the world cry out for tillage—and all for want of leadership. 99 It was only in the following year, however, that this new champion of the emigrationist wing of opposition to Malthus unleashed the full power of Carlylean irony. It is worth noting that in that blend of metaphysics, autobiography, and social criticism to which he gave the title Sartor Resartus, specific and detailed discussions of particular contemporary prob-

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lems are few. Therefore it says much of Carlyle's feeling of the danger of Malthusianism that he made it the subject of an entire chapter. Hofrath Heuschrecke, he tells us, has written a tract entitled Institute for the Repression of Population. He goes on: Into the Hofrath's Institute, with its extraordinary schemes, and machinery of Corresponding Boards and the like, we shall not so much as glance. Enough for us to understand that Heuschrecke is a disciple of Malthus; and so zealous for the doctrine, that his zeal almost literally eats him up. A deadly fear of Population possesses the Hofrath; something like a fixed-idea; undoubtedly akin to the more diluted forms of Madness. Nowhere, in that quarter of his intellectual world, is there light; nothing but a grim shadow of Hunger; open mouths opening wider and wider; a world to terminate by the frightfullest consummation: by its too dense inhabitants, famished into delirium, universally eating one another. 100 Carlyle follows this sketch of the mind of the Malthusian with several of the marginal notes with which Teufelsdrockh counters his schemes: The old Spartans had a wiser method; and went out and hunted down their Helots, and speared and spitted them, when they grew too numerous. With our improved fashions of hunting, Herr Hofrath, now after the invention of firearms, and standing-armies, how much easier were such a hunt! Perhaps in the most thickly-peopled country, some three days annually might suffice to shoot all the able-bodied Paupers that had accumulated within the year. Let Governments think of this. The expense were trifling; nay the very carcasses would pay it. Have them salted and barrelled; could not you victual therewith, if not Army and Navy, yet richly such infirm Paupers, in workhouses and elsewhere, as enlightened Charity, dreading no evil of them, might see good to keep alive?101

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Teufelsdrockh-Carlyle had far more in mind, however, than to rival the saeva indignatio of Swift; in a passage of splendid irony he opposed to the defeatism of the Malthusians an optimism greater than that of most of his fellow-migrationists: 'True, thou Gold-Hofrath," cries the Professor elsewhere: "too crowded indeed! Meanwhile, what portion of this inconsiderable terraqueous Globe have ye actually tilled and delved, till it will grow no more? How thick stands your Population in the Pampas and Savannas of America; round ancient Carthage, and in the interior of Africa; on both slopes of the Altaic chain, in the central Platform of Asia; in Spain, Greece, Turkey, Crim Tartary, the Curragh of Kildare? One man, in one year, as I have understood it, if you lend him Earth, will feed himself and nine others. Alas, where now are the Hengsts and Alarics of our still-glowing, still-expanding Europe; who, when their home is grown too narrow, will enlist, and like Fire-pillars, guide onwards those superfluous masses of indomitable living Valour; equipped, not now with the battle-axe and war chariot, but with the steam-engine and ploughshare? Where are they?—Preserving their Game!" 102 Only a few years later, this torrent of eloquence might have had far greater effect—not only because of Carlyle's increasing fame, but because of the increase in public awareness of the arguments against Malthusian doctrine. But the lag of the general public behind the leaders in the controversy was still too great, and Carlyle's was a voice crying in the wilderness. In 1834, following the report of a commission appointed by Lord Grey's reformed government, Lord Althorp introduced the famous Poor Law Amendment Bill with apologies for the fact that, in retaining some provisions of aid to the poor, the bill softened "the more strict principles of political economy." 103 Its spirit and provisions were almost literally those of the fifth chapter of Malthus' Essay. Much was left to the discretion of the Board of Commissioners which the act created; but clearly stated was the central principle that "the situation of the person receiving re-

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lief should not on the whole be made really or apparently so eligible as the situation of the independent labourer of the lowest class." Implicit in the bill was the abolition of outdoor relief for the able-bodied, and the imposition of the workhouse test, with its accompanying segregation of the sexes.104 The Malthusians in supporting the bill made use, of course, of the conventional indictment of the old poor law as a stimulus to surplus population. 105 The workhouse feature of the bill, as a device for checking population and reducing the amount of relief without abolishing it entirely, was warmly applauded by many members, including Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 106 who in his England and the English a year earlier had advocated workhouses in place of relief. 107 Prominent among the opponents of the bill were Poulett Scrope and Cobbett. 108 In 1833 Scrope had followed his 1832 volume of Letters from Emigrants with his Principles of Political Economy, designed as a further step in refuting "that most pernicious dogma" of Malthus, and "the heartless and paralyzing doctrine which this chimera has engendered." 109 The center of emphasis in the book was the almost limitless extent of unused land in the world, the existence of which, Scrope maintained, made it possible by emigration alone to remove any danger of overpopulation into a future too remote for concern. Scrope therefore denounced Malthus, as well as Chalmers, without restraint, and praised the Poor Law as the poor man's charter. 110 In expressing this latter view on the floor of the House of Commons, Scrope was, of course, strongly abetted by Cobbett. To "A noble Lord" who "had said that the principles of Malthus were sound and just, and that he would defend them to the utmost extent," Cobbett replied that the principle of Malthus was that the poor had no right to relief, though such a right was a part of the constitution, as the just compensation of the lower classes for their lack of the property which other classes were allowed to enjoy. 111 ' T h e great object of the Bill was," he maintained at a later stage in the debate, "to teach the poor to live as man and wife without having any children. This was a base and filthy philosophy." 112

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The futility of all opposition appeared when the bill came to a vote. It apparently won the approval not merely of the nowdominant Whigs, or of their general staff, the philosophical radicals, but of members of whatever political faith; in both houses its majority was enormous. 113 At last Malthusianism had become the law of the land.

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the closing days of 1834, departed in the hour of his triumph. His theory had come to prevail after more than three decades of the bitterest resistance by humanitarians of all parties. Society had accepted and was about to begin acting upon the principle that the poor, having created their own misery, must be left to endure it, lest it spread to others. In the grim figure of starvation he had created, not only blocking further advance, but driving society back along the way it had come, he seemed to have left a monument more lasting than brass. Yet, ironically, the year which appeared to be the beginning of his victory opened the period of his decline and ultimate defeat. The rate of that decline cannot be gauged very precisely, but it seems likely that by 1859, when Darwin, drawing from the Essay on Population a conclusion of which Malthus himself had never dreamed,1 set up an image of ape-like degeneracy which threatened for a time to replace the Malthusian specter of starvation, that specter had ceased to dominate the majority of minds. Just as the period from 1798 to 1834 had seen a rapid swing to support of Malthus by the leaders and molders of thought and action, the period from 1834 to about 1860 saw their equally rapid swing to opposition. To say this is not to say that the Malthusian doctrine was near death by I 8 6 0 ; there is evidence enough that it was still widely held even by intelligent and informed men. But its foes now included not a mere handful of nondescript poets, Utopian radicals, and philosophical Tories, but the guiding minds of most of the powerful parties or groups in England. By 1860, they MALTHUS, DYING IN

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far outstripped the upholders of Nlalthus both in numbers and in prestige; and their increased tendency to substitute ridicule or mere condemnation for exhaustive argument indicates their confidence that the Nlalthusian theory was no longer an effectual obstacle to social change. Essentially, this turning of the scales against Malthusianism was but the continuation and the result of the desperate battle that had been waged ever since 1798. In the end, the accumulation of argument against Malthus' theory was bound to develop such weight as to break down the assumptions which he had skillfully erected in so many minds. But the acceleration of the anti-Malthusian trend after 1834 was so notable as to mark the period sharply off from the earlier decades of slow and seemingly ineffectual progress. For this acceleration there were two principal reasons. One was that by the middle of the century certain facts began to appear to lend support to anti-Malthusian theory. The unprecedented development of industry, with its promise of a degree of productivity undreamed of a few decades earlier, was accompanied by the weaving of a network of cheap and efficient transportation over land and sea. These phenomena alone were enough to lend plausibility to the claims of those who asserted that emigration and expansion of the domestic food supply were practicable means of dealing with any population growth that might arise from aiding the poor. 2 As early as 1854, Robert Owen remarked that the increase in productivity was such as to "silence all fear of want, or of an over-population, and to terminate all pretences for man to make a slave of man." 3 And in the following year Harriet Martineau recorded that Corn Law repeal, increase in agricultural production, and emigration "have extinguished all present apprehension and talk of 'surplus population' ",4 And when to this was added the fact that census returns after the mid-century showed population-growth leveling out somewhat, it became clear that the increase in population was not even keeping pace with the potential increase in the food supply. To many, such a situation was bound to suggest

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the lightness of Senior and others in their claim that the poor, when placed in more comfortable circumstances, became more prudent, and therefore could be given some form of aid. The second reason for the swiftness of the turn away from Malthusianism after 1834 was an emotional rather than a factual one. The decline in the prestige of the Malthusians was hastened by the very victory they had won in the passing of the New Poor Law. The translation of Malthusianism from concept to harsh reality roused to redoubled efforts those who had already rejected the concept; and the poor themselves, already deeply resentful of their betrayal by the Whigs whom they had helped into power, responded hotly to the radical orators' denunciations of the poor law; from their resentment arose the ominous Chartist movement at which England trembled for the next five years. The storm aroused by the New Poor Law spread until it awakened powerful allies in every quarter for the enraged workers of the North who rioted against efforts to put the law into effect. The Poor Law Commissioners were caricatured as "the bashaws of Somerset House"; liberal Tories such as Disraeli and Radicals such as Cobbett were joined by the mighty Times in assailing the "Poor Law Bastilles" and the "Poor Man's Robbery Bill." 5 But there was also a less obvious way in which the Malthusian victory backfired; it created even among those who had supported or accepted the Malthusian theory such a profound shock as to compel more searching examination of it. As John Stuart Mill learned by painful experience, even a Utilitarian has his feelings. Even to a man of strict rational principles, the process of making the "situation (of the person receiving relief) . . . not . . . so eligible as the situation of the independent labourer" 8 looked far less unpleasant in print than in the grim embodiment of the workhouse. And there were others among the supporters of Malthus who were more susceptible to such weak feelings than were the Utilitarians—men who had not so successfully disengaged their emotions from the claims of Christianity, of Tory paternalism, or of mere hu-

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manitarianism. Now, faced by an actual situation rather than a theory, they were driven by its emotional impact to a closer scrutiny of the grounds for following the Malthusian program. One of the first voices raised against the regime of Malthusianism came from a Tory direction. Wordsworth, who in the Excursion years before had stated his benevolent faith that the poor might be aided without fear of overburdening society if prudence were enforced by the paternal supervision of the upper classes, was moved by his resentment of the New Poor Law to advance to a more explicit, heated, and radically anti-Malthusian position. The poor, he pronounced flatly in a postscript on the poor law attached to his 1835 Poems, "are entitled to a maintenance by law." Stronger than the law of property, he went on, is the law of nature which gives men in need the right to take from others as much as will not reduce the others to a level lower than their own. This right the poor still have, for the assumption that they have caused their own poverty is baseless; they are poor, for the most part, not because they have married imprudently, but because they have been the victims of misfortunes beyond their control. All that is needed to remedy their poverty, he concluded, with an abrupt lapse from radicalism into Tory paternalism, is to give them their rightful relief under the guidance of a strengthened Church and boards of overseers composed of gentlemen. 7 What is most interesting in this utterance is not that it added anything to this body of argument against Malthus; for other critics long before had asserted not only that the imprudence of the poor could be checked, and therefore the degree of sacrifice incurred by the prudent in helping them limited, but that helping them involved not sacrifice but mere justice; and some of these critics had provided explicit and convincing support for both assertions, as Wordsworth did not do. What is remarkable is that when Wordsworth, under the compulsion of his reaction against the New Poor Law, spoke out against Malthusianism for a second time, he had advanced to the extreme anti-Malthusian view which held not that the poor could be

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aided if the prudent were willing to make the sacrifice, but that they must be aided as a matter of justice. Nor did benevolent Toryism protest through Wordsworth alone. The voice of Coleridge, first raised against Malthus more than thirty years before, echoed even from the grave where he, like Malthus, had been laid in 1834. His Table Talk, published in the year following his death, contained not only his bitter utterances on Malthus at the time when the New Poor Law was impending, but others in the same vein. "What solemn humbug," he was reported as saying in 1833, "this modern political economy is . . . This particularly applies to their famous ratios of increase between man and the means of his subsistence." Political economy, he went on, is not a science, for human action is not limited by immutable laws of nature. 8 These passages, together with others in the Table Talk and in the first two volumes of Coleridge's Literary Remains, which appeared in 1836, brought forth a response which testifies to the growing sensitiveness of the Malthusians. Evidently possessed of advance knowledge of the anti-Malthusian passages in the Table Talk, several periodicals, including the Quarterly and the Westminster, reviewed it abusively even before its appearance. 9 And in January, 1837, William Empson, colleague and friend of Malthus at Haileybury, reviewing in the Edinburgh the second edition of Malthus' Political Economy, gave evidence that Coleridge's abuse struck home harder than Wordsworth's argument. 10 The reviewer expressed resentment especially of a passage from the Literary Remains: "Finally, behold this mighty nation, its rulers and its wise men listening—to Paley and —to Malthus! It is mournful, mournful." 11 But his response to it, as to the anti-Malthusian tirades of Poulett Scrope (labeled by Empson as one to "tread and talk irreverently over a wise man's grave")12 was strikingly defensive. What Empson stressed in Malthus' behalf was not so much the truth and justice of his theory as the benevolence of his disposition. Malthus was a good son, husband, and father, Empson asserted, and he drew up a list of character witnesses: Mackintosh loved Malthus,

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Paley and Pitt were convinced by him, Sumner upheld his righteousness.13 The tone is not quite the lofty one with which the Edinburgh had responded to the earliest criticisms of Nlalthus. The hope for "reasoning in the form of ridicule" against Malthus which Coleridge's Table Talk expressed was fulfilled two years later when, in Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens turned against the New Poor Law a talent mighty in its power over the middle class.14 Dickens was hardly the Swift that Coleridge had longed for; genial and winning—and soothing to the social conscienceseem Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Mann and Mrs. Thingummy beside the stench and gibbering of the Yahoos. And the satire of Dickens is all too likely to give way without warning to sentimentality, just as Mr. Bumble is likely to turn from parochial bullying to tender tears. But of all Dickens' novels of a protest type Oliver Twist offers least grounds for the charge that he preferred to make sure that his lions were comfortably dead, or at least in extremis, before beginning his flaying operations. Detested as the New Poor Law was by the working people and their supporters, it promised salvation from surplus population, if by a somewhat Procrustean method; and for that reason it seemed good to vast numbers of those decent people who, though perhaps indifferent to the opinions of working men and radicals, knew very well what they expected of their novelists. There was courage as well as serious purpose behind the facetiousness of that outstanding passage of the book which pictured the Commissioners of the New Poor Law putting the law into effect: The members of this board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out at once, what ordinary folks would never have discovered—the poor people like it! It was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes: a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all the year round, a brick and mortar

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elysium, where it was all play and no work. "Oho!" said the board, looking very knowing; "we are the fellows to set this to rights; we'll stop it all, in no time." So, they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they), of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the water-works to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays. They made a great many other wise and humane regulations, having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary to repeat; kindly undertook to divorce poor married people, in consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctors' Commons; and, instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor! There is no saying how many applicants for relief, under these last two heads, might have started up in all classes of society, if it had not been coupled with the workhouse; but the board were long-headed men, and had provided for this difficulty. The relief was inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened people . . . It was rather expensive at first, in consequence of the increase in the undertaker's bill, and the necessity of taking in the clothes of all the paupers, which fluttered loosely on their wasted, shrunken forms, after a week or two's gruel. But the number of workhouse inmates got thin as well as the paupers; and the board were in ecstasies. 15 Dickens did not take the trouble to furnish justification for his condemnation; apparently he believed that nothing more than the picture of the cruel effects of the poor law was needed to make clear how false was the claim of its necessity. No doubt this fact kept his influence from achieving its full potentialities. But it was nevertheless of the utmost importance that the at-

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tack upon Malthus had been joined by a writer capable of appealing powerfully to the feelings of a vast audience including many who could never have been reached by other means. Radicalism as well as middle-class humanitarianism had its satirists. Leigh Hunt, who in 1819 had launched several light darts against the Malthusians, had continued to take every possible occasion to combat their fallacies; in his satirical poem Captain Sword and Captain Pen (1835) he had included a refutation of the recurrent Malthusian justification of war by quoting and replying to one of its proponents: "But famine? but plague? worse evils by far." 0 last mighty rhetoric to charm us to war! Look round—what has earth, now it equably speeds, To do with these foul and calamitous needs?16 And in a postscript, he had commented laconically: As to those superabundances of population which wars and other evils are supposed to be necessary in order to keep down, there are questions which have a right to be put, long before any such necessity is assumed.17 His opponents, he had concluded significantly, know what they are. And now in 1837, in a lighter vein suited to the treatment of a literary lady, he directed a shaft of sarcasm at Malthusianism in the person of Miss Martineau. His "Blue-Stocking Revels" depicted a supper at which Apollo, acting as host to a party including Mme. d'Arblay, Elizabeth Barrett, Maria Edgeworth, Letitia Landon, and others of equal note, greeted Miss Martineau as one given to . . . turning statistics To stories, and puzzling your philogamystics. 1 own I can't see, any more than dame Nature, Why love should await dear good Harriet's dictature! But great is earth's need of some love-legislature.18

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Miss Martineau's prominence as a Malthusian propagandist drew upon her also the attention of James Smith; in one passage of "Chigwell Revisited" almost as dexterous as any of the Rejected Addresses, the humorist represented himself as puzzling over the static population of the village of his school days: Strange that a village should survive, For ten years multiplied by five, The same in size and figure. Knowing not plenty nor distress— If foiled by fortune, why no less? If favoured, why no bigger? Say, why has population got Speed-bound upon this level spot, Undamaged by profusion? A tyro, I the question ask— Be thine, Miss Martineau, the task T o tender the solution. 19 The airy satire of Malthusianism which was possible for such an intellectual radical as Hunt was impossible to many of his fellows whose barer lives had filled them with intense resentment. William Manning, a self-educated workingman who in 1838 had published The Wrongs of Man Exemplified, restated in impassioned rhetoric the conclusions of Hazlitt, Ensor, and Ravenstone, and supported them more soundly than these predecessors had done. It is the exploitation of the poor by others, said Manning, which alone creates poverty; for, he went on, utilizing the observations of Senior and his followers, insofar as the poor overbreed, it is because of the misery and vice into which they have been helplessly depressed. Given equality, their tendency to increase beyond subsistence will be checked by "improved intelligence." 2 0 Therefore, he concluded, "the injustice of oppression and exaction, which originates vice and misery, is the original cause of all the evils which have afflicted so-

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ciety." 2 1 So obvious did this conclusion appear to Manning that he scorned any discussion of such checks as had been proposed by those anti-Malthusians who accepted the possibility of the imprudence of the poor. Like Godwin and Shelley, he saw nothing in the Malthusian theory to account for its popularity except its usefulness to its supporters; the exploiters of the people, he said, "catch hold of anything that will serve as a cover to their iniquity, and afford a plausible reason and means for an attempt to escape. Thus our wonder ceases at the absurdity of this doctrine . . . " 2 2 From 1834 to the time when Manning's book appeared, there had been little sign of any desire of the Malthusians to expose themselves further to that rage of the working people which he expressed. Except for the defensive reviews of the posthumous volumes of Coleridge, the only Malthusian publication of any note had been A. H. Moreton's Civilization, which appeared in 1836. In view of the fact that Moreton had astonishingly got the impression that Malthus' thesis was that no one could be saved from eventual universal poverty, it is not surprising that he felt capable of making the picture a bit brighter. His argument was that which Senior had first presented in 1829, and had since incorporated into An Outline of the Science of Political Economy (1836). 23 Population, Moreton said, bolstering his case with statistical evidence derived from countries varying in density of population, increases more slowly as it becomes denser; for the increased "diffusion of wealth and comforts" which accompanies density stimulates prudence. Though it is true that among the lower orders misery and death from starvation do occur, they do so only during temporary shortages. 24 Plainly, Moreton was far more optimistic not only than he supposed Malthus to be, but than Malthus actually was; but he remained a Malthusian, since he did not see the implication which Senior had seen—that if the poor had sufficient prudence to help themselves, they were likely to have enough to be aided by others.

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But at the very time Manning's book appeared there came a manifestation of Malthusianism far more worthy of being labeled "a cover for iniquity" than was Nloreton's cheerful version. During 1838 there appeared in London, "Printed for Private Circulation," an anonymous essay entitled An Essay on Populousness, which soon after was expanded under the pen-name of "Marcus" and the title On the Possibility of Limiting Populousnessr5 This amazing production, opening with a rebuke to Malthus for his timidity in not pointing out to the poor how to escape their misery, and indicating the inadequacy of celibacy and infant mortality to solve their problem, called for the formation of an association of public-spirited citizens to undertake the painful duty of controlling the "pauper-herd" by suffocating its superfluous infants in chambers of "gaz" (evidently carbon monoxide).26 The feelings of parents, said "Marcus," might be somewhat assuaged by informing them of the utter painlessness of the process, by keeping alive some of the infants so that each parent might feel some chance that his own child had been spared, and by establishing beautiful cemeteries, to be used as public pleasure grounds, so that each "parturient female will be considered as enlarging or embellishing it. This field of fancy will amuse her confinement . . ." 27 One hardly knows what to make of "Marcus." The first inclination is, of course, to suspect that somewhere among the Chartists, who were just then reaching the peak of their rage and aggressiveness against the Poor Law, there was a pamphleteer who had noted the wish expressed by Coleridge for a new Swift. Yet the crude and murky style of the essay hardly hints at a mind capable of such sustained irony, and it has been taken commonly as a serious rather than a "modest" proposal. 28 Whether the Chartists actually so took it or not, its potentialities as propaganda were far too good to be neglected. By the following year (1839) they had reprinted it, with appropriate comments, as The Book of Murder: A Vade-Mecum for the Commissioners and Guardians of the New Poor Law. Though, admitted the commentator, the "Demon Author" was unknown,

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the Commissioners themselves had been suspected of writing it, since the New Poor Law was clearly the first step toward such treatment of the poor as it recommended. After this implied characterization of the Commissioners, which must have given something of a start to that group of well-intentioned clergymen and philanthropists, the commentator revived the memory of Place's curiously unappreciated attempt to popularize contraception, which he represented as also a recommendation of murder, though by preventing life. The doctrine of Malthus, he added, proposed thus to deepen the misery to which the working people had been brought by the "rapacity of Capitalists." 29 It was probably the sensation created by this episode which called forth in the same year one of Thomas Hood's characteristic productions. Hood's humor was predominantly of the "spot news" variety, depending for its effects upon happenings of current public interest; and the situation created by the Book of Murder clamored for his "Ode to Mr. Malthus." In its opening lines, Hood depicts himself as sending his fifteen children out of the room; and after thus freeing himself to speak frankly, exclaims: Oh Mr. Malthus, I agree In everything I read with thee! The world's too full, there is no doubt, And wants a deal of thinning out . . . There is a dreadful surplus to demolish, And yet some Wrongheads, With thick, not long heads, Poor Metaphysicians! Sign petitions Capital punishment to abolish; And in the face of censuses such vast ones New hospitals contrive, For keeping life alive, Laving first stones, the dolts! instead of last ones!30

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Continuing in ardent admiration of Malthus' doctrine, Hood proposes that the Lord Mayor poison the little Bluecoat boys, and that the Bishop of London contrive to crush the charity boys under the dome of St. Paul's during the annual service; and in concluding, he expresses his wonder at the folly of fighting a plague, When if I understand the thing you mean, We ought to import the Cholera Morbus!31 There was a powerful reminiscence of the Malthusianism of "Marcus" also in Carlyle's Chartism, in which in the same year he gave solemn warning that the mounting tide of working class resentment and revolt was the result of the suicidal folly and neglect and oppression of that class by the rest of societyneglect and oppression largely due to the influence of Malthus. Malthusianism, said Carlyle, is not a solution of the problem of poverty which threatens to wreck society: How often have we read in Malthusian benefactors of the species: "The working people have their condition in their own hands; let them diminish the supply of laborers, and of course the demand and the remuneration will increase!" Yes, let them diminish the supply: but who are they? They are twenty-four millions of human individuals, scattered over a hundred and eighteen square miles of space and more; weaving, delving, hammering, joinering; each unknown to his neighbor; each distinct within his own skin. They are not a kind of character that can take a resolution, and act on it, very readily . . . O, Wonderful Malthusian prophets! Millenniums are undoubtedly coming, must come one way or another; but will it be, think you, by twenty millions of working people . . . passing, in universal trade-union, a resolution not to beget any more till the labor-market becomes satisfactory?32 Years before Carlyle had savagely recommended, as a method preferable to that of Malthus, hunting down and killing the poor. Now in similar vein, in memory of the Book of Murder

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incident, he suggested that far more reasonable than Malthusian abandonment of the poor to their own misery would be the establishment of a "Parish Exterminator; or say a Reservoir of Arsenic, kept up at the public expense, free to all parishioners." 33 But he was too much shocked to be able to maintain the tone of irony. "We have read Marcus," he went on. "We hoped he would turn out to have been in sport: ah no; it is grim earnest with him; grim as very death." 3 4 Carlyle's diagnosis was better than the serious prescription he went on to make. His method for removing the burden of poverty was, as it had been in 1832, emigration, organized and carried out by the natural leaders of the people, the erstwhile Plugson of Undershot and the Joe-Manton lord, regenerated now from scanting of wages and slaughter of partridges, and set to the performance of the work for which they receive their rightful wages. 35 But emigration without measures to restrict population was now more impressive as an alternative to Malthusianism than it had been before 1834. For though Carlyle neither denied that the poor had overbred, nor suggested any measures to prevent their doing so in the future, other anti-Malthusians had by this time so stressed these points as to give powerful support to his claim that emigration would give substantial relief from poverty. The emigration theme was echoed repeatedly by the followers of Carlyle, at least one of whom corrected Carlyle's inconsistency in urging emigration while doubting the prudence of the poor. Archibald Alison, Tory member of the bar and bench at Glasgow, who at sixteen had written a paper opposing Malthus, ran into diffuseness when in 1840 he published The Principles of Population and Their Connection with Human Happiness, to the preparation of which he had devoted years of study and travel; but he did answer explicitly the obvious objection to the proposal of emigration. He not only pointed out that subsistence already was far ahead of population, and promised for a long time to be so, but he asserted confidently that, with more

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widespread education and religion, overbreeding of the poor could be prevented by reason, artificial wants, the desire of bettering their condition, and so on.™ The widespread conviction created by Malthus of the imprudence of the poor, said Alison, echoing the argument of Thompson in 1824, "arises from considering the moving without the controlling power." 3 7 Far less reasoned than Alison's case for emigration was that of his disciple James Napier Bailey, who, like Carlyle and Elliott, ignored the question of whether any check existed to replace that of starvation. Bailey, whose essay "On Wealth-Producing Power" was published in 1842, drew heavily on Alison and on Scrope's Principles of Political Economy for material to illustrate the vast emptiness and fertility of the earth, and the power of one man to support many others. 38 Bailey's position is so exactly that taken by Carlyle in his eloquent appeal in Sartor Resartus for modern Hengsts and Alarics to lead emigrants that it seems to follow naturally that Carlyle took up the theme once more in the following year. The inspiration for his Past and Present, published in 1843, was far more than the accident of the discovery and publication of Jocelin of Brakelond's chronicle of St. Edmundsbury; for the terrible years of "the hungry forties" had come, and the "condition of England question" was in the foreground of every mind. Never, said Carlyle, had the world seen such a tragedy of irony: Here sit some millions of men in their poor-law prisons, as if under an enchantment, surrounded by vast stores of wealth which they cannot reach—and the aristocracies of industry and the land, appealed to for some way of breaking the spell, answer only "It is impossible." So violent was Carlyle's desire to disprove that doctrine of defeatism that for once he ventured to offer a few of what he was usually inclined to scorn as "Morrison's pills"—that is, specific remedial measures at the hands of government. The situation of the workers could be improved, he insisted, by the establishment of factory inspection and sanitary regulations—and, of course, by a genuine program of emigration:311

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Then again, why should there not be an "Emigration Service", and Secretary, with adjuncts, funds, forces, idle Navy-ships, and ever-increasing apparatus; in fine an effective system of Emigration; so that, at length, before our twenty years of respite ended, every honest willing Workman who found England too strait, and the "Organization of Labor" not yet sufficiently advanced, might find likewise a bridge built to carry him into new Western Lands, there to "organize" with more elbowroom some labor for himself? . . . Our little Isle is grown too narrow for us; but the world is wide enough yet for another Six Thousand Years . . . why should not London long continue the All-Saxon-home, rendezvous of all the "Children of the Harz-Rock," arriving, in select samples, from the Antipodes and elsewhere, by steam and otherwise, to the "season" here!—What a future; wide as the world, if we have the heart and heroism for it,—which, by Heaven's blessing, we shall.40 Whether Carlyle by this time had come to realize that his position, like that of Railey and the other emigrationists, was inconsistent with his own belief in the overbreeding of the poor and the consequent sacrifice of the prudent, he did in Past and Present show some awareness that it was not impregnable. Rut he refused to labor over improving it. "For the rest," he said defiantly, let not any Parliament, Aristocracy, Millocracy, or Member of the Governing Class, condemn with much triumph this small specimen of "remedial measures"; or ask again, with the least anger, of this Editor, What is to be done, How that alarming problem of the Working Classes is to be managed? Editors are not here, foremost of all, to say How . . . An Editor's stipulated work is to apprise thee that it must be done. 41 This attitude was of course much less harmful than in the past because of the fact that the lack of substance in the Malthusian obstacle had been by the time so widely proclaimed by others

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that Carlyle's readers could complete his argument for themselves. Yet it is regrettable that he failed to see and demonstrate the lack of proof that the poor had created their poverty. For now the assertion that some members of society were receiving many times their share of available subsistence was dramatized by the fact, visible to every eye, that there was famine in the midst of plenty. It was the golden moment for driving home not only that injustice shared with imprudence the responsibility for poverty, but that the Malthusian assumption of the imprudence of the poor was wiped out by the demonstration of another possible cause for their poverty. Had these conclusions, in part dating back to Southey, Hazlitt, Ensor, and others, but now given force by the actual social situation, been voiced by Carlyle at the height of his power, the Malthusian theory might have received its death blow much sooner than it did. But Carlyle, mightily as he ranged in denunciation from Voltairean wickedness to Biblical solemnity, lacked or scorned the power of connected argument. It was left to a lesser man to make the points he had missed. Samuel Laing, whose book on the subject of the National Distress appeared in 1844, the year after Past and Present, exhibited not only a Toryism illuminated by Carlyle's fervor, but a far greater power of sustained argument. Opening with an appalling picture in the best Carlylean style of the poverty of the masses, Laing not only emphasized the irony of its existence in the midst of great wealth, but drew the proper conclusion: In England we have already seen that if amount of national wealth,—nay more, if increase of national wealth in a faster ratio than population, were the sole condition of national welfare, that condition is abundantly fulfilled. 42 We have therefore in the existing situation, he argued, concrete evidence that faulty distribution exists, and that therefore Malthus* assumption that imprudence exists in higher degree among the poor is utterly unproven. Furthermore, he added, drawing

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upon the claims of Senior and, more recently, Manning, prudence is increased rather than decreased by a heightening of comfort and security.43 Consequently, it has come to be widely seen that the only real cause of poverty is unequal distribution, and that the practical inference drawn by many from the theory of Malthus, that all attempts at bettering the condition of the poor by measures of immediate relief, and by the efforts of public and private benevolence, are vain and nugatory, is completely false, and . . . the true practical inference to be deduced from the recorded facts concerning population is, that the only effectual means of regulating the progress of population in a country, is to begin by taking effectual means to raise the condition of its poorer inhabitants. 44 As such effectual means, Laing listed a genuinely helpful poor law in place of the existing one (which, he asserted, had done some good insofar as it had not been fully applied), free trade, a graduated income tax to equalize wealth, increased education, and subsidized emigration. 45 The doubt cast on the truth of Malthusianism by the then current depression may account not only for the confidence with which Laing argued, but for the greater confidence with which some of his immediate successors drew similar conclusions without taking much pains to argue. In Two Lectures on Population published in the same year, Henry Raikes, a canon of Chester, and for some time chaplain to John Bird Sumner, asserted, in contradiction to the Malthusian views of his superior, a theory traceable to Jarrold and Gray. Even now, said Raikes, moral restraint is stronger than Malthus supposed; and an increased emphasis on intellectual rather than physical activity as civilization advances creates habits conducive to celibacy, and thus decreases the rate of population growth. 46 Travers Twiss, professor of political economy at Oxford, publishing in 1845 four lectures which he had delivered there, made rather more use than he should have of Laing's material on the high standard of

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living in Switzerland, to bolster up the latter's claim, originally suggested by Senior, that increased comfort heightened rather than destroyed prudence. 47 By no means all the voices raised against Nlalthus as the depression of the forties swept over the country were those of Carlylean Tories. Neither the liberals of the middle class nor the radicals were silent. Of the former group, more startling than impressive was the Newcastle soap manufacturer, poet, and playwright, Thomas Doubleday. The argument against Malthus embodied in his True Law of Population (1842) was at least novel; it added to the psychological check already attributed to comfort a physiological check. A higher level of nutrition, said Doubleday, is accompanied, whether among plants, animals, or man, by a reduction in fertility. 48 It is hardly to be wondered at that his book is reported to have aroused considerable controversy. Meanwhile, two former foes of Malthus were returning to the attack. Ebenezer Elliott in 1840 seized upon the occasion of the new Queen's marriage to Prince Albert to appeal for the removal of the New Poor Law: And thou wilt wake, with him thou lov'st From brief and troubled slumbers, If law of thine deal lessening loaves To famine's doubling numbers. 49 It need hardly be added that Elliott's alternative to refusing aid to the poor was to increase the food supply by abolishing the Corn Law. Only this, he urged eloquently in another poem of the same period, could avert social disaster: Tardy day of hoarded ruin, Wild Niagara of blood! Coming sea of headlong millions, Vainly seeking work and food! Why is famine reaped for harvest? Planted curses always grow; Where the plough makes want its symbol, Fools will gather as they sow. 50

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Elliott's protest was soon followed by one of the most imperishable of all denunciations of Malthusianism. When Dickens set to work in 1843 to create in the person of Scrooge the antithesis to the Christmas spirit of goodwill to men, he could think of no better device than to make the old sinner a follower of Malthus. Hence the memorable scene from Stave One of the Christmas Carol in which Scrooge is visited by a charitable gentleman soliciting aid for the poor. Are there, sneers Scrooge, no prisons? No treadmills and poor law? No workhouses? Yes, replies his caller, but "Many can't go there; and many would rather die." "If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population . . . " 5 1 Dickens' own reply to Scrooge is given in Stave Three, where the Spirit of Christmas Present, reminding the wretched miser of his unfeeling words, exhorts him sternly: "Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until we have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die! . . . Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!" 52 So powerfully did Dickens feel, evidently, that the Malthusian doctrine constituted a perfect contrast to every Christian virtue that he repeated the device in his Christmas book for the following year, 1844. In the First Quarter of The Chimes, the stouthearted porter Toby Veck, while talking with his daughter Meg and her lover Richard before the home of Alderman Cute, is engaged in conversation by that wily gentleman and his friend Mr. Filer. When it comes out by chance that Meg and Richard are about to be married, the horror of Filer knows no bounds. "Married! Married! The ignorance of the first principles of political economy on the part of these people . . . A man

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may live to be as old as Methusalah," said Mr. Filer, "and may labour all his life for the benefit of such people as those; and may heap up facts on figures, facts on figures, facts on figures, mountains high and dry; and he can no more hope to persuade 'em that they have no right or business to be married, than he can hope to persuade em that they have no earthly right or business to be bom. And that we know they haven't. We reduced it to a mathematical certainty long agol" 8 3 Despite the humor of this latter scene (a somewhat derivative humor, one feels, recalling the use made of the same situation by Peacock and by Cobbett), there is no mistaking the sincerity of Dickens' conviction that no surplus of children on the part of the poor, but rather a surplus of wealth on the part of the rich, was the real cause of poverty. But in the breasts of those who, less fortunate than Dickens, had not been able to make their escape from misery, there was no space for humor. Wild Chartism, reviving now under the stimulus of continued economic depression, found its voice when in 1845 Thomas Cooper, successively shoemaker, teacher, newspaper writer, and poet, published The Purgatory of Suicides, a long poem composed during more than two years' confinement in Stafford gaol for inciting striking colliers to violence. The poem as a whole is not without power; but its notable passages are those in which Cooper introduces himself and his own times; and among those some of the most vigorous are his denunciations of the Poor Law: Ah! darling Robin, thou wilt soon behold No homes for poor men on old England's shore: No homes but the vile gaol, or viler fold Reared by new rule to herd the "surplus poor"— Wise rnle which unto Pauperism's foul core— The rich man's purse-plague's core—shall penetrate: Paupers shall multiply their race no more

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Except they live in palaces! Debate Upon the rule they may: but,—the slaves bear their fate!54 Though Cooper's rage in its extremity turns even against his fellow workers who tamely endure Malthusian restraints, he soon repents and diverts it to its proper objects, with special reference to those upholding such proposals as that of James Mill or Place: Drudge on in peace!—Ay, though ye starve, still drudge,— Lest from your fondlings ye be torn, to herd With eunuch-paupers! Tyrants wreck [j/c] their grudge Not as of old: high lords then massacred The scurvy slaves who insolently dared To murmur: now they wisely take revenge On murmurers like men who have conferred With meek Philosophy,—and mildly change Murder of breathing things for annihilation strange Of things designed,-as they believe,—to breathe;— And if they do not thus believe, they lie— The atheistic hypocrites!55 The tenth book of the poem contains a withering attack on Brougham for his championship of the Poor Law,56 and the poem closes with a passage worth quoting for its quality as well as for its denial of the truth of Malthusian theories. Speaking as from a happier world of the future, Cooper says: Bethink ye also that if men now fast And pine no more, it is because the Proud Have ceased to be: Earth ever was endowed With tenfold more of plenty than her sum Of life required for food: the hills were browed With luscious vines that smiled as round they clomb The olives, or festooned them with their purple bloom . . ,57 The entire passage, too long to be included here, is a little like Shelley in his hortatory mood.

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The rising voices of middle-class reformists like Dickens and Chartists like Cooper were menacing enough; but now suddenly they were reinforced from an unexpected quarter. The genius of Disraeli, searching for some device by which to restore Toryism to power, found it in that tradition of the mutual interdependence of all classes of society which had come down from the golden age of Burke through Coleridge, Southey, and, in a sense, Carlyle. Disraeli's inspiration appears to have come largely from the latter's Past and Present; for though Carlyle transcends the limits of any political group or movement of his time, and Tory paternalism represents but a section of his broader thought, his praise of the class relationships of feudal society was in the direct line of the best in Tory tradition. With a canny sense of the futility of urging that tradition upon the older members of his party, and of its potential appeal to the idealism and chivalry of youth, Disraeli directed his propaganda at "Young England." And his first outstanding attempt to win mass support was the publication in 1844 of Coningsby. Into the thesis of the book—the necessity for mutual support and cooperation between the aristocracy and the laboring classes— the Malthusian doctrine was bound to enter; and Disraeli introduced it as the subject of a dinner conversation during Coningsby's visit at Beaumanoir, the home of his friend Lord Henry Sydney. Henry's father the Duke, says Disraeli, had been a great patron and a zealous administrator of the New Poor Law. He had been persuaded that it would elevate the condition of the labouring class. His son-in-law, Lord Everingham, who was a Whig, and a clear-headed, coldblooded man, looked upon the New Poor Law as another Magna Charta. Lord Everingham was completely master of the subject. He was himself the Chairman of one of the most considerable Unions of the kingdom. The Duke, if he ever had a misgiving, had no chance in argument with his son-inlaw. Lord Everingham overwhelmed him with quotations from Commissioners' rules and Sub-commissioners' reports,

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statistical tables, and references to dietaries. Sometimes with a strong case, the Duke struggled to make a fight; but Lord Everingham, when he was at fault for a reply, which was very rare, upbraided his father-in-law with the abuses of the old system, and frightened him with visions of rates exceeding rentals. 58 But with the arrival of Young England, in the person of Lord Henry (about whom hangs a strong fragrance of Sir Philip Sydney), Lord Everingham is put to rout. Lord Henry would not listen to statistics, dietary tables, Commissioners' rules, Sub-commissioners' reports. He went far higher than his father; far deeper than his brother-in-law. He represented to the Duke that the order of the peasantry was as ancient, legal and recognized an order as the order of the nobility; that it had distinct rights and privileges . . . He assured his father that it would never be well for England until this order of the peasantry was restored to its pristine condition; not merely in physical comfort, for that must vary according to the economical circumstances of the time, like that of every class; but to its condition in all those moral attributes which make a recognised rank in a nation; and which, in a great degree, are independent of economics, manners, customs, ceremonies, rights, and privileges." A demonstration of how this was to be accomplished is given in the following chapter, by means of a visit to the estate of Mr. Lyle, young Catholic landlord of the neighborhood, who has revived the monastic custom of almsgiving. As Mr. Lyle describes his system, The rectors of the different parishes grant certificates to those who in their belief merit bounty according to the rules which I have established. These are again visited by my almoner, who countersigns the certificate, and then they present it at the postern-gate. 60

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The noble visitors, much impressed, watch the pensioners approach, The old man . . . the widow with her child at the breast . . . curly-headed urchins . . . and sometimes a stalwart form baffled for a time of the labour which he desired. But not a heart there that did not bless the bell that sounded from the tower of St. Genevieve. 81 More direct and cutting was the attack on the Malthusians made by Disraeli when in the following year he published Sybil. The subtitle which he used, The Two Nations, probably suggested by Carlyle's division of society into the two sects of the Dandies and the Drudges, indicates the emphasis he wished to place upon the danger involved in a rupture of class relationships, and the necessity of creating a liaison between a benevolent aristocracy and the best energy and intelligence of the working class itself. Disraeli's vehicle for illustrating the folly which prevents such a liaison is Lord Mamey, Tory of the old school, ignorant, grasping, and addicted to using overpopulation as the scapegoat upon which he may cast his own social sins. He eulogized the new poor-law, which he declared would be the salvation of the country, provided it was "carried out" in the spirit in which it was developed in the Marney Union; but then he would add that there was no district except their union in which it was properly observed. 62 Lord Mamey cannot bring himself to believe that the law is susceptible to criticism from any quarter, above all from within his own party: "Peel, in or out, will support the Poor-Law," said Lord Marney, rather audaciously, as he reseated himself after the ladies had retired. "He must"; and he looked at his brother, whose return had in a great degree been secured by crying that Poor-Law down. "It is impossible," said Charles, fresh from the hustings, and

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speaking from the card of Taper; for the condition of the people was a subject of which he knew nothing. "He will carry it out," said Lord Mamey, "youll see, or the land will not support him." "I wish," said Sir Vavasour, "we could manage some modification about outdoor relief." "Modification!" said Lord Marney, "why, there has been nothing but modification. What we want is stringency." "The people will never bear it," said Egremont; "there must be some change." "You cannot go back to the abuses of the old system," said Captain Grouse, making, as he thought, a safe observation. "Better go back to the old system than modify the new," said Lord Marney. "I wish the people would take to it a little more," said Sir Vavasour; "they certainly do not like it in our parish." ' T h e people are very contented here, eh, Slimsey?" said Lord Marney. "Very," said the vicar. 83 To a vicar of a somewhat different stamp from Mr. Slimsey— Mr. St. Lys, the sincere vicar of Mowbray—Disraeli entrusted the task of exposing Marney's stupidity. "We have nothing to complain of," said Lord Marney. "We continue reducing the rates, and as long as we do that the country must improve. The workhouse test tells. We had the other day a case of incendiarism, which frightened some people; but I inquired into it, and am quite satisfied it originated in purely accidental circumstances; at least nothing to do with wages. I ought to be a judge, for it was on my own property." "And what is the rate of wages in your part of the world, Lord Marney?" enquired Mr. St. Lys, who was standing by. "Oh! good enough: not like your manufacturing districts; but people who work in the open air instead of a furnace can't

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expect, and don't require much. They get their eight shillings a week; at least generally." "Eight shillings a week!" said Mr. St. Lys. "Can a labouring man with a family, perhaps of eight children, live on eight shillings a week?" "Oh! as for that," said Lord Niamey, "they get more than that, because there is beer-money allowed, at least to a great extent among us, though I for one do not approve of the practice, and that makes nearly a shilling per week additional; and then some of them have potato grounds, though I am entirely opposed to that system." "And yet," said Mr. St. Lys, "how they contrive to live is to me marvellous." "Oh! as for that," said Lord Marney, "I have generally found the higher the wages the worse the workman. They only spend their money in the beer-shops. They are the curse of this country." "But what is a poor man to do," said Mr. St. Lys, "after his day's work, if he returns to his own roof and finds no home; his fire extinguished, his food unprepared; the partner of his life, wearied with labour in the field or the factory, still absent, or perhaps in bed from exhaustion, or because she has returned wet to the skin, and has no change of raiment for her relief? We have removed woman from her sphere; we may have reduced wages by her introduction into the market of labour; but under these circumstances what we call domestic life is a condition impossible to be realized for the people of this country; and we must not therefore be surprised that they seek solace or rather refuge in the beer-shop." Lord Mamey looked up at Mr. St. Lys with a stare of highbred impertinence, and then carelessly observed, without directing his words to him. "They may say what they like, it is all an affair of population." "I would rather believe that it is an affair of resources," said Mr. St. Lys; "not what is the amount of our population,

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but what is the amount of our resources for their maintenance." "It conies to the same thing," said Lord Niamey. "Nothing can put this country right but emigration on a great scale; and as the government do not choose to undertake it, I have commenced it for my own defence on a small scale. I will take care the population of my parishes is not increased. I build no cottages, and I destroy all I can; and I am not ashamed or afraid to say so." "You have declared war to the cottage, then," said Mr. St. Lys, smiling. "It is not at the first sound so startling a cry as war to the castle." "But you think it may lead to it?" said Lord de Mowbray. "I love not to be the prophet of evil," said Mr. St. Lys. 64 One or two other short passages reveal how capable Lord Marney was of grasping St. Lys' warning: "I wonder why ricks are burnt now, and were not in the old days," said Egremont. "Because there is a surplus population in the kingdom," said Lord Marney, "and no rural police in the county." 6 3 And again: "Our family have always been against manufactories, railroads—everything," said Egremont. "Railroads are very good things, with high compensation," said Lord Niamey; "and manufactories not so bad, with high rents; but after all, these are enterprises for the canaille, and I hate them in my heart." "But they employ the people, George." 'The people do not want employment; it is the greatest mistake in the world; all this employment is a stimulus to population." 6 6 The campaign initiated by Disraeli spread alarm in the ranks of the advocates of laissez-faire, from old-style Tories to Utili-

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tarians; already hard pressed by the assaults of the working class and its sympathizers, they were dismayed by the potential dominance of Toryism by the paternalists, such as Southey and Coleridge, who had hitherto been safely subordinated. The Edinburgh, casting about for a champion to uphold the gospel of political economy, found him in the person of John Stuart Mill, whose reply to "Young England" was introduced in April, 1845, in the guise of a review of Helps' The Claims of Labour,67 The result was anything but happy. For Mill, in the very course of his vindication of Malthusian economics against its other assailants, justified the suspicions some of his associates had formed from his dallying with Carlyle, Coleridge, and St. Simon—that he himself could no longer be counted on to uphold fully the faith of his father and of the Benthamites who looked to him for leadership. It was not that he failed in the task entrusted to him of demonstrating the weakness of the "Young England" program; for he accepted fully the Malthusian principle that the tendency of the poor to overbreed must be checked, and inquired pointedly what check benevolent Toryism proposed to employ to replace the Malthusian check of misery and starvation which would be removed by the monastic almsgiving of a Mr. Lyle. Would some enforced restriction of population be included in the fostering care of the aristocracy? 63 But at this point suddenly appeared the revelation of how mistakenly the Edinburgh had put its faith in Mill; for his denial of the possibility of aiding the poor by Tory paternalism was followed by his advocacy of aiding them by methods of his own. The statement by Malthus of his theory, he insisted, did not preclude, but pointed the right way to the abolition of poverty: Though the assertion may be looked upon as a paradox, it is historically true, that only from that time has the economical condition of the labouring classes been regarded by thoughtful men as susceptible of permanent improvement. 69 For Malthus, by demonstrating the folly of such methods of relief as had been used up to his time, had simultaneously sug-

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gested to "thoughtful men" not that no methods were effective, but that better ones were available. Among these, said Mill, first place must be given to the education of the poor, that they might come to understand the necessity of prudence. But, he continued, consideration should be given also to legislation to facilitate the division of land into small farms, and the establishment of profit sharing in industry.70 Mill's backers had no reason to rejoice if they grasped the implications of his review. The champion of the sanctity of property had indeed attacked the enemy; but even in so doing he had not demolished it, for the party of Disraeli would have been perfectly justified in pointing out that their scheme of paternalistic relief, since it need not be so limitless as to encourage reckless breeding, was supported as fully as were Mill's own proposals by Senior's theory of comfort as incentive to prudence. And more ominous than this failure on Mill's part to dispose of the Tory attack was the fact that he had suggested to his own party schemes more radical than those of Disraeli; the hero they had sent out had not only failed to crush the foe, but had himself become a threat. Whatever doubts of Mill's orthodoxy his review suggested might well have been strengthened when in the following year William Thomas Thornton published his Over-Population and Its Remedy; for Thornton, a clerk in the East India House and a close friend of Mill, therein showed himself to be a highly dubious Malthusian. Though he reaffirmed the usual claims of the vicious effects of the old poor law in encouraging population, of the need for "restrictions upon the marriages of the poor," and of the futility of promoting emigration, he did not retain the Malthusian conclusion that no means could be found for aiding the poor. Malthus had erred, he believed, in underestimating their prudence. Accepting the view of the school of Senior that fear of losing comfort or status was a powerful incentive to prudence, he advocated, as Mill had done, measures designed to create a class of small farm proprietors.71

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Ampler evidence of the unreliability of Mill was made available when three years later, in 1848, he published the first edition of his Principles

of Political

Economy.

B u t this e v i d e n c e w a s

somewhat obscured by a beguiling appearance of conformity to the accepted doctrine of Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo. Opening with an objective analysis of production in the existing economic system, Mill emphasized, in a clear statement of the law of diminishing returns, the ultimate limitation of production by the available produce of the land, and echoed the Malthusian and Ricardian conclusion that the reward of labor must be determined by the proportion between this available produce and the size of a population tending constantly to overtax it.72 Though prudence is undoubtedly increasing, Mill asserted, it has been and is true that most workers, if better off, produce too many children; 73 the evidence of the truth of Malthus' main propositions is so ample and incontestable, that they have made their way against all kinds of opposition, and may now be regarded as axiomatic; though the extreme reluctance felt to admitting them, every now and then gives birth to some ephemeral theory, speedily forgotten, of a different law of increase in different circumstances, through a providential adaptation of the fecundity of the human species to the exigencies of society.74 Such "ephemeral theories"—probably he had in mind such theories as Doubleday's—Mill dismissed with scorn; and he still saw no basis for believing in the power of any schemes of allowances, allotments, or other devices of Tory paternalism to aid the poor without canceling their own effects by stimulating overpopulation. 75 Dismissing as he did the hopes for aiding the poor advanced by some of the outstanding opponents of Malthus, Mill seemed to support the Malthusian conclusion that the poor could be aided only by an increase of their own industry and prudence. But any orthodox Malthusian who read him carefully must have

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noted uneasily the suggestion, in Mill's discussion of production, that population growth could be controlled by raising the habitual living standard of the poor; 76 and must have read even more uneasily the opening sentences of his section on distribution: The laws and conditions of the production of wealth, partake of the character of physical truths . . . It is not so with the Distribution of Wealth. That is a matter of human institution, solely.77 For, as Mill went on to make clear, the actual state of the poor at the moment was to him no evidence that they were beyond help; by "a system of measures which shall . . . extinguish extreme poverty for one whole generation," they could be permanently freed from misery. 78 Of the "system of measures" he went on to propose, three were designed first of all to effect a great and immediate increase in subsistence. When the growth of numbers outstrips the progress of improvement [he had said earlier in his book], and a country is driven to obtain the means of subsistence on terms more and more unfavorable—there are two expedients by which it may hope to mitigate that disagreeable necessity, even though no change should take place in the habits of the people with respect to their rate of increase. One of these expedients is the importation of food from abroad. The other is emigration. 79 To these measures, long the goals of the emigrationists and the foes of the Corn Law, he added his own favorite, the fostering of a system of peasant proprietorship. 80 Mill was of course perfectly aware that at this point his task began; for the removal of the Malthusian obstacle to relief depended not on removing the poverty of the poor, but on removing their tendency to breed themselves back into poverty. But he was confident of the adequacy of his system to this task. Prudence, he believed, was far more widespread than Malthus had credited it with being; 81

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and Senior's theory of the "comfort" check gave grounds for the belief that prudence might vastly increase if a higher standard of living could be maintained until it became habitual. 82 For the scheme of peasant proprietorship involved individual responsibility, and, by limiting each man to his own resources, enforced prudence upon him. 83 Given these motives for prudence, and a scheme of universal education designed to enforce them upon the public mind, he saw every hope that a strong desire could be created to restrict population; 84 and the means of making that desire effective was already present. "The idea, in this country, never seems to enter anyone's mind," said Mill, in words whose tone of irritation reveals his impatience at the prejudices which prevented open discussion of the subject, "that having or not having a family, or the number of which it shall consist, is at all amenable to their own control." 85 There was, of course, nothing very new about Mill's conviction that society could devise effectual means of aiding the poor, or about most of the specific measures he urged. Almost every one of the latter can be traced back to the very earliest opponents of Malthus; and many of these opponents, including Dr. Hall, Hazlitt, Ravenstone, Place, and Manning, had gone far beyond Mill's view that society could aid the poor if the prudent were willing to make some sacrifice; they had insisted, some of them white-hot with rage, that the poor were not responsible for their poverty, and that aiding them was not only possible, not only required by mercy, but demanded by the bare principle of justice. Mill's much less extreme anti-Malthusianism was, therefore, notable chiefly for the fact that it had sprung from the very heart and center of the Malthusian stronghold. From the foes of Malthus, it might have been less significant; but coming from Mill, it should have shaken the hearts of the faithful as a portent of doom. 86 However, they were slow to show any sign of realizing that they had been deserted. It seems likely that they were themselves deceived by the orthodox tone of much of the book, and thus prevented from realizing at first glance how thoroughly

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Mill's proposals, taken all together, shattered the foundations of Malthusian defeatism. If such lack of perception seems improbable, it may be noted that Mill himself was slow in grasping, or at least in acknowledging, the full implications of his denial that an immovable barrier to the relief of poverty existed. It was only in the third edition of the Principles in 1852 that he inserted a passage indicating his realization that his demonstration of the possibility of removing the Malthusian obstacle to the relief of poverty justified a belief not only in such specific relief measures as he had proposed, but in the communism which Malthus had above all regarded as ruinous: Another of the objections to Communism is similar to that, so often urged against poor-laws; that if every member of the community were assured of subsistence for himself and any number of children . . . population would start forward at a rate which would reduce the community through successive stages of increasing discomfort to actual starvation. There would certainly be much ground for this apprehension if Communism provided no motives to restraint, equivalent to those which it would take away. But Communism is precisely the state of things in which opinion might be expected to declare itself with greatest intensity against this kind of selfish intemperance. Any augmentation of numbers which diminished the comfort or increased the toil of the mass, would then cause (which now it does not) immediate and unmistakable inconvenience to every individual in the association; inconvenience which could not then be imputed to the avarice of employers, or the unjust privileges of the rich. In such altered circumstances opinion could not fail to reprobate, and if reprobation did not suffice, to repress by penalties of some description, this or any other culpable self-indulgence at the expense of the community. The Communistic scheme, instead of being peculiarly open to the objection drawn from danger of overpopulation, has the recommendation of tending in an especial degree to the prevention of that evil." 87

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Not only was Mill slow to see how his own reasoning had nullified Malthus' denial of the possibility of communism; he apparently never realized that it nullified the iron law of wages also. For when at last in 1869, prompted by Thornton's Labour and Its Claims, he publicly announced his abandonment of the wages-fund theory, he did so on the ground of labor's ability to strike successfully for higher wages, rather than its ability to restrict its numbers. 88 Mill was quickly joined by a number of other economists. In 1850 Nassau Senior reprinted, under the title Political Economy, the Outline of 1836 in which he had reiterated the comfort theory stated in his lectures in 1829.89 In 1853, W. E. Hickson, Mill's successor as editor of the Westminster Review, stressed in his Essay on the Principle of Population the fact that human productivity was steadily outstripping population growth. 90 George Rickards, professor of political economy at Oxford, repeated that theme in his Population and Capital (1854). In 1819, said Rickards, the Malthusians had held the cruel view, expressed by Jeffrey in a letter, that there was "no radical remedy but starving out the surplus" of the poor. But thanks to the arguments of their opponents, among whom he mentioned with respect Sadler, Doubleday, and Senior, it had become clear that the poor are capable of prudence if given a higher standard of living.91 The speed with which Mill's explicit analysis complemented the burning eloquence of Carlyle may be seen in the fact that the two men quickly became the patron saints of Kingsley's Christian Socialism. It was undoubtedly Mill rather than Carlyle who furnished the immediate stimulus to that strange little band of crusaders, headed by the two clergymen Kingsley and Maurice, who set out in 1848, after the fiasco of the great Chartist petition, to take Chartism away from the Chartists. For though the spirit of Carlyle breathes from every word of Kingsley's social gospel, Carlyle's great voice had by 1850 subsided into certain grim mutterings in his Latter-Day Pamphlets about the growth of the poor "in fatal geometrical progression," 92 and it was to Mill that Kingsley paid open tribute when

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in 1850, following the example of Disraeli in utilizing the novel for disseminating his ideas, he published Alton Locke?3 Kingsley's hero, a working-class poet modeled on Thomas Cooper, becomes a member of the Chartist movement, only to discover in the end that its selfishness and violence doom it to failure, and that only a patient building of Christian brotherhood and cooperation among all classes will bring relief to the poor. But however great Kingsley's objections to the Chartists, he is one with them in their resentment of the brutality of prevailing economic doctrine. The real beginning of Alton's career as a laureate of the people is a visit he pays to a wretched family in which several girls are supporting themselves by bitter toil and by prostitution to keep their sick mother alive. "Doesn't the parish allow the old lady anything?" I ventured to ask. 'They used to allow half-a-crown for a bit, and the doctor ordered Ellen things from the parish, but it isn't half of 'em she ever got; and when the meat came, it was half times not fit to eat, and when it was her stomach turned against it. If she was a lady she'd be cockered up with all sorts of soups and jellies, and nice things, just the minute she fancied em, and lie on a water bed instead of the bare floor—and so she ought; but where's the parish'll do that? And the hospital wouldn't take her in because she was incurable, and, besides, the old 'un wouldn't let her go—not into the union neither. When she's in a good-humor like, she'll sit by her by the hour, holding her hand and kissing of it, and nursing of it, for all the world like a doll. But she won't hear of the workhouse; so now, these last three weeks, they takes off all her pay, because they says she must go into the house, and not kill her daughter by keeping her out—as if they wam't a-killing her themselves." "No workhouse—no workhouse!" said the old woman, turning round suddenly, in a clear, lofty voice. "No workhouse, sir, for an officer's daughterl" And she relapsed into her stupor.

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At that moment the other girl entered with the coals—but without staying to light the fire, ran up to Ellen with some trumperty dainty she had bought, and tried to persuade her to eat it. "We have been telling Mr. Mackaye everything," said poor Lizzy. "A pleasant story, isn't it? Oh! if that fine lady, as we're making that riding-habit for, would just spare only half the money that goes to dressing her up to ride in the park, to send us out to the colonies, wouldn't I be an honest girl there? —maybe an honest man's wifel Oh, my God, wouldn't I slave my fingers to the bone to work for him! Wouldn't I mend my life then! I couldn't help it—it would be like getting into heaven out of hell." 9 4 Later in the story, Locke on his first visit to rural England is confirmed in his hatred of oppression by a conversation with a farm worker, who replies to the question "But are you so ill off?" "Oh! he'd had a good harvesting enough; but then he owed all that for he's rent; and he's club money wasn't paid up, nor he's shop. And then, with he's wages"—(I forget the sumunder ten shillings)—"how could a man keep his mouth full, when he had five children! And then, folks is so unmarciful— I'll just tell you what they says to me, now, last time I was over at the board—" And thereon he rambled into a long jumble of medicalofficers, and relieving officers, and Farmer This, and Squire That, which indicated a mind as ill-educated as discontented. He cursed or rather grumbled at—for he had no spirit, it seemed, to curse anything—the New Poor Law; because it "ate up the poor, flesh and bone"—bemoaned the "Old Law" when "the Vestry was forced to give a man whatsomever he axed for, and if they didn't, he'd go to the magistrates and make 'em, and so sure as a man got a fresh child, he went and got another loaf allowed him next vestry, like a Christian;"—and

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so turned through a gate, and set to work forking up some weeds on a fallow, leaving me many new thoughts to digest.95 Locke's final conversion to Chartism is brought about by hearing one of his Chartist friends, Crossthwaite, read and comment on a government reply to a petition which the organized tailors have presented requesting better working conditions and pay: "Look again. There's worse comes after that. 'If government did interfere, it would not benefit the workmen, as his rate of wages depends entirely on the amount of competition between the workmen themselves.' Yes, my dear children, you must eat each other; we are far too fond parents to interfere with so delightful an amusement! Curse them—sleek, hard-hearted, impotent do-nothings! They confess themselves powerless against competition—powerless against the very devil that is destroying us, faster and faster every year! They can't help us on a single point. They can't check population; and if they could, they can't get rid of the population which exists. They daren't give us a comprehensive emigration scheme. They daren't lift a finger to prevent gluts in the labour market. They daren't interfere between slave and slave, between slave and tyrant. They are cowards, and like cowards they shall fall!" "Ay—like cowards they shall fall!" I answered; and from that moment I was a rebel and a conspirator.08 Kingsley was perfectly ready to admit that so long as the view prevailed that nothing could be done to help the poor, their one hope was to follow the Malthusian advice to restrict their own numbers. Crossthwaite, having been discharged, assures Alton that he can bear poverty steadfastly. ". . . And thank God, I have no children, and never intend to have, if I can keep true to myself, till the good times come." "Oh! Crossthwaite, are not children a blessing?"

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"Would they be a blessing to me now? No, my lad—let those bring slaves into the world who will! I will never beget children to swell the numbers of those who are trampling each other down in the struggle for daily bread, to minister in ever-deepening poverty and misery to the rich man's luxury —perhaps to lust." "Then you believe in the Malthusian doctrines?" "I believe them to be an infernal lie, Alton Locke; though good and wise people like Miss Martineau may sometimes be deluded into preaching them. I believe there's room on English soil for twice the number there is now; and when we get the Charter we'll prove it; we'll show that God meant living human heads and hands to be blessings and not curses, tools and not burdens. But in such times as these, let those who have wives be as though they had none—as St. Paul said, when he told his people under the Roman Emperor to be above begetting slaves and martyrs. A man of the people should keep himself as free from encumbrances as he can just now. He will find it all the more easy to dare and suffer for the people, when their turn comes—""7 Yet plainly as Kingsley expressed in Alton Locke his conviction that the Malthusian doctrine was an infernal lie, it was chiefly in Yeast, published in book form the following year (though printed in Fraser's during 1848) that he pointed out how in his opinion the Malthusian objection to aiding the poor could be removed. In casual and indiscriminate charity he had no faith, for he regarded it, much as did the Malthusians, as removing all motive for prudence, and thus impoverishing the prosperous without aiding the poor; therefore he condemned the old Poor Law as heartily as the new, and took occasion to indulge in a few slighting remarks at Disraeli's Mr. Lyle and his medieval almsgiving.0* His own prescription was embodied in several sections of the novel. In one memorable scene, Lancelot, Kingsley's hero, who like Disraeli's Coningsby is undergoing his apprenticeship in social consciousness, wonders

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what might have been made of the wretched poacher Crawy if someone had enabled him to migrate to some less preempted part of the world, or had provided him with ten acres and a warning that he must make his way on it. He had learnt, and learnt rightly, the self-indulgence, the danger, the cruelty, of indiscriminate alms. It looked well enough in theory, on paper. "But—but—but," thought Lancelot, "in practice, one can't help feeling a little of that uneconomic feeling called pity. No doubt the fellow has committed an unpardonable sin in daring to come into the world when there was no call for him; one used to think, certainly, that children's opinions were not consulted on such points before they were born, and that therefore it might be hard to visit the sins of the fathers on the children, even though the labour-market were a little overstocked—"mais nous avons change tout cela,' like M. Jourdain's doctors. No doubt, too, the fellow might have got work if he had chosen—in Kamachatka or the Cannibal Islands; for the political economists have proved, beyond a doubt, that there is work somewhere or other for every one who chooses to work. But as, unfortunately, society has neglected to inform him of the state of the Cannibal Island labour-market, or to pay his passage thither when informed thereof, he has had to choose in the somewhat limited labour-field of the Whitford Priors' union, whose workhouse is already every winter filled with ablerbodied men than he, between starvation—and this—. Well, as for employing him, one would have thought that there was a little work waiting to be done in those five miles of heather and snipe-bog, which I used to tramp over last winter—but those, it seems, are still on the 'margin of cultivation', and not a remunerative investment—that is, to capitalists. I wonder if any one had made Crawy a present of ten acres of them when he came of age, and commanded him to till that or be hanged, whether he would not have found it a profitable investment? But bygones are bygones, and there he is, and the

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moors, thanks to the rights of property—in this case the rights of the dog in the manger—belong to poor old Lavington—that is, the game and timber on them; and neither Crawy nor any one else can touch them. What can I do for him? Convert him? to what? . . . " 0 8 Later, on his way from a visit to the village fair, with its appalling display of poverty and degradation, Lancelot sees that in England itself lie the resources for relieving poverty: A long silence followed, as they paced on past lonely farmyards, from which the rich manure-water was draining across the road in foul black streams, festering and steaming in the chill night air. Lancelot sighed as he saw the fruitful materials of food running to waste, and thought of the "overpopulation" cry; and then he looked across to the miles of brown moorland on the opposite side of the valley, that lay idle and dreary under the autumn moon, except where here and there a squatter's cottage and rood of fruitful garden gave the lie to the laziness and ignorance of man, who pretends that it is not worth his while to cultivate the soil which God has given him. "Good heavens!" he thought, "had our forefathers had no more enterprise than modern landlords, where should we all have been at this moment? Everywhere waste? Waste of manure, waste of land, waste of muscle, waste of brain, waste of population—and we call ourselves the workshop of the world!" 1 0 0 Perhaps the most important passage in the book expressing Kingsley's views is that in which the principal speaker is Lord Minchampstead, the self-made gentleman who represents enlightened Whiggism. At first glance Lord Minchampstead seems to represent the Malthusian school of economists: in reply to a comment on the prosperity of American working girls, "It is a great pity," said Lord Minchampstead, "that our factory-girls are not in the same state of civilization. But it is socially impossible. America is in an abnormal state. In

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a young country the laws of political economy do not make themselves fully felt. Here, where we have no uncleared world to drain the labour-market, we may pity and alleviate the condition of the working classes, but we can do nothing more. All the modern schemes for the amelioration which ignore the laws of competition, must end either in pauperization"—(with a glance at Lord Vieuxbois), "or in the destruction of property." 101 But evidently Lord Minchampstead classes as injurious because they "ignore the laws of competition" only such schemes as destroy prudence among the poor. "You think, then, my lord, (Lancelot asked), that in the present state of society, no dead-lift can be given to the condition —in plain English, the wages—of working-men, without the destruction of property?" Lord Minchampstead smiled, and parried the question. "There may be other dead-lift ameliorations, my young friend, besides a dead-lift of wages." . . . Lord Minchampstead was thinking of cheap bread and sugar. 102 And he has himself taken certain vigorous steps to "alleviate the condition of the working classes." . . . How the farmers swore and the labourers chuckled when he took all the cottages into his own hands and rebuilt them, set up a first-rate industrial school, gave every man a pig and a garden, and broke up all the commons "to thin the labourmarket." Oh, how the labourers swore and the farmers chuckled, when he put up steam-engines on all his farms, refused to give away a farthing in alms, and enforced the new Poor Law to the very letter . . , 103 It is clear enough from these passages how much of Kingsley's program for the relief of poverty was taken directly from Mill— the recommendation of cheap food, of aided emigration, of peasant proprietorship, and the reliance upon the "comfort"

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theory of Manning as developed from Senior for the maintenance of prudence. The only missing element is the advocacy of birth control. But if in the latter respect Kingsley weakens Mill's position, in one important respect he improves on it. Where Mill had based his faith only on Senior's "comfort" theory that the poor are potentially prudent, Kingsley implies that no evidence exists that they have ever been anything but prudent: "The poor of Whitford," he says in the epilogue to his story, "owing, as it seems to them and me, to quite other causes than an 'over-stocked labour market,' or too rapid 'multiplication of their species' are growing more profligate, reckless, pauperized, year by year." 104 The superiority of this position to Mill's should be clear enough; it is easier to believe in the prudence of people who have always behaved prudently than of those who have not. As opposed to this array of champions challenging Malthus, few supporters of his doctrine had appeared since the incredible "Marcus" in 1838. There are indeed signs that the fears generated by Malthus lingered still in many minds. In 1842 Tennyson ended ten years of silence with a volume containing many of his maturest poems, including "Locksley Hall." In one of the gloomiest passages of that poem, his embittered hero, stressing the contrast between his youthful vision of "the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World" and his present feeling that all order festers, all things here are out of joint Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point; 105 inserts as his one concrete basis for this feeling the vivid statement: Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher, Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.108

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Perhaps it would be making too much of Tennyson's choice of a figure of speech to see in it as much fear of as sympathy for the poor. With Malthusian methods as embodied in the New Poor Law he felt no sympathy, if we may judge by the disgust with which another angry Tennysonian hero a few years later (in "Maud ") regarded the fact that "the poor are hovelled and hustled together, each sex, like swine." 107 But the "Locksley Hall" passage, together with the suspicion of the masses so often to be felt in Tennyson's poetry, would support a conjecture that even in the forties he shared to some extent the fears of the Malthusians. Such concern as he showed was felt also by others. Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) reflected the gloomier period of Malthusian theory in the sincere argument of Mr. Carson, the benevolent millowner, that employers cannot better the workers' conditions, as wages must be determined by supply and demand. 108 The assumption of the inevitability of overpopulation appears in that episode of Bulwer-Lytton's The Caxtons (1849) in which Pisistratus, having rejected the prospect of "Malthusian fellowships (premiums for celibacy)", is reminded by his mentor Trevanion that emigration draws off surplus population, and decides to make his fortune in Australia. 109 A more somber note reminiscent of Malthus' original theory was sounded when in 1852 Herbert Spencer entered the field of Malthusian controversy with an article in the Westminster Review. Spencer was unable to accept the view of the comfort theorists that prudence exists in such degree as to prevent misery and death. True, he had discovered in biological science a new basis for belief that prudence might gradually increase. Science shows, ran his argument, that all organisms multiply slower as their ability to maintain individual life increases. This ability arises from the development of the nervous system; and the pressure of population is constantly increasing this development by the necessity of discipline, and by the death of the undisciplined. But in this there was nothing to justify the new hope of such cheerful Malthusians as Moreton that the poor were capable of prudence if unaided—to say nothing of Senior's faith that they

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would be prudent if helped; for Spencer's implication was that there were and would continue to be undisciplined members of society who must suffer poverty and death. 110 Somewhat less rigorous than Spencer was John Elliott Cairnes, professor of political economy at Dublin, whose Character and Logical Method of Political Economy was published in 1857. Cairnes ("among the faithless", one historian has remarked, "faithful only h e " i n ) defended Malthus to the utmost, and attacked Rickards for his contention that the poor were capable of prudence. In view of the fact that Cairnes, in defending Malthus, was under the impression that Malthus granted the poor could be prudent if not aided, it would appear that he inclined to that view himself, though he was more doubtful than he thought Malthus to be. 112 Obviously Malthusianism was by no means dead. Yet when in 1854 Dickens in Hard Times resorted once more to satire as a weapon against it, he had greater reason for confidence in that weapon than ever before. The literary device he employed was, like that of The Chimes, taken directly from Peacock's Melincourt and its "Mr. Fax." Dickens' Mr. Gradgrind, the man of facts, who has named two of his children Adam Smith Gradgrind and Malthus Gradgrind, has reared them to regard the poor as . . . something to be worked on so much and paid so much, and then ended; something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand; something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into difficulty; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and over-ate itself when wheat was cheap; something that increased at such a rate of percentage, and yielded such another percentage of crime, and such another percentage of pauperism . . , 113 Gradgrind's coadjutor, the schoolmaster M'Choakumchild, is aghast when one of his pupils, Sissy Jupe, replies to his query as to the first principle of political economy by giving the Golden Rule; 114 but he is consoled by the correct views of Bitzer, his

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prize pupil, who later in the story puts the approved principles into effect by sending his aged mother to the workhouse. 115 When at last a well-merited retribution strikes down Mr. Gradgrind, it comes appropriately just at a moment when he is composing an essay to prove "that the Good Samaritan was a bad Economist." 118 But if the satire was no stronger than that of Peacock, the situation was such as to make it more effective. Since the appearance of Peacock's book in the somber year 1817, when so many signs of the influence of Malthus were coincident with it, much had happened to provide a sounder basis for satire. Laing in 1844 had stated with conviction that Malthusianism was "now on the decline." 117 Two years later, Thornton was rather defensive about even his partial apology for Malthus. "Such principles," he said, "have been so sternly denounced, and so mercilessly ridiculed, that few are now found bold enough to avow them . . . Even hard-headed and hard-hearted political economists," he continued, citing as examples Laing and even McCulloch, "shrink from one whom they were once proud to hail as a colleague." 118 Whereas in 1817 opposition to Malthus had been headed by a small and not too influential group of writers, it was headed now by leaders of some of the most powerful bodies shaping society—radicals, middle-class liberals, Tories, Christian reformists, and Utilitarian economists. It is not too surprising that even the poet who of all writers of the time was gloomiest about the human situation was not intimidated by the Malthusian phantom of starvation. It was not dearth, but blindness and cruelty, James Thomson told his country in 1857, which caused the massive misery of the poor: Thy heritage vast and rich is ample to clothe and feed The whole of thy millions of children beyond all real need. 119

V THE TWILIGHT OF MALTHUS: AFTER 1 8 5 9

A COMPLETE HISTORY of Malthusianism would continue down to the present day; for since Mai thus announced his theory in 1798, there has been no period at which it can be said to have been universally accepted or rejected. But at this point—c. 1860—the history of Malthusianism as an obstacle to social reform may be considered as ended. Already its adherents had so declined in numbers and prestige as to constitute no longer a clear majority; and their decline was reflected in the fact that mere assertion or ridicule had come to predominate over argument in the attacks of their foes. The rest of the story is but that of the dwindling of the Malthusian minority into its present obscurity, and the effect of that process on the attitude of its assailants. With a few exceptions, chiefly in the earlier part of the period after 1860, they either referred to Malthus with perfunctory scorn rather than extended argument; or they felt it unnecessary to make any reference to his theory whatever; or, perhaps worst of all, they discussed it calmly as an interesting but obviously fossil specimen of economic thought. This statement by no means implies that Malthusianism had vanished by 1860. Relatively few as are the evidences of its influence after that date, they are sufficient to indicate the survival for some time of all the principal forms of the doctrine which had developed. Indeed, there is some evidence, definite enough, though annoyingly difficult to amplify, that there had arisen, as a part of the free-trade doctrine of the Manchester school, a remarkably optimistic version of Malthusianism which pictured the poorer classes as not only capable of developing

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prudence at some time in the future, but as having already so thoroughly acquired it as to have abolished poverty except for local and temporary visitations.1 The question of whether the rest of society could or should contribute to their assistance was apparently not raised; but the absence of any mention of such assistance implies the assumption that the poor should be left to redeem their own past indulgence in overbreeding. It can hardly be wondered at if this revision of Malthusian doctrine was popular among the followers of the Manchester school. In two important respects it suited their purposes better than other versions of the Malthusian theory. In the first place, it reinforced the claim that the poor either could not or should not receive social assistance (a claim which had been by this time pretty severely mauled by the anti-Malthusians) with the assertion that the poor were in no need of such assistance. And even more important was the fact that it did not demand advising the poor to reduce their numbers. As the industrialism and imperialism of the nineteenth century developed, it must have become clearer than it could have been in Malthus' youth that his theory, however valuable as a means of gaining immunity from charitable or just demands, had the defect of urging constant reduction in size upon the labor and military supply. A theory which, without removing from the poor the accusation of past imprudence, credited them with present prudence, was designed to afford not only immunity from social demands, but a plentiful and cheap supply of labor. There were still a considerable number of Malthusians, however, who found themselves incapable of thus cheerfully ignoring the obvious existence of chronic poverty. Not all, and probably not most, of these adhered to that sternest and most primitive type of Malthusianism which not only accused the poor of causing their own poverty but asserted the impossibility of checking their overbreeding. Many of them, though they saw no evidence that the task either had been or was immediately being accomplished, accepted the belief, to which Malthus him-

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self had quickly come, that the poor were in general capable of achieving prudence eventually. And there were some who did not deny that the poor were already sufficiently prudent to avert poverty. Among these latter Malthusians, who differed from their more optimistic brethren only in insisting that education was required to bring out the potential prudence of the poor, was Matthew Arnold, who in 1869, dissecting in Culture and Anarchy the "Hebraism" of his age, turned the lance of his irony against the upholders of cheerful Malthusianism. Our free-trade friends, said Arnold, if reminded in the midst of their rejoicing over our growing wealth and population that the happiness of a population is more important than its size, reply with two maxims: One is, that, other things being equal, the more population increases, the more does production increase to keep pace with it; because men by their numbers and contact call forth all manner of activities and resources in one another and in nature, which, when men are few and sparse, are never developed. The other is, that, although population always tends to equal the means of subsistence, yet people's notions of what subsistence is enlarge as civilisation advances, and take in a number of things beyond the bare necessaries of life; and thus, therefore is supplied whatever check on population is needed. But the error of our friends is precisely, perhaps, that they apply axioms of this sort as if they were self-acting laws which will put themselves into operation without trouble or planning on our part, if we will only pursue free-trade, business, and population zealously and staunchly. Whereas, the real truth is, that, however the case might be under other circumstances, yet in fact, as we now manage the matter, the enlarged conception of what is included in subsistence does not operate to prevent the bringing into the world of numbers of people who but just attain to the barest necessaries of life or who even fail to attain to them . . ?

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Under such circumstances, Arnold went on, it seemed hardly yet time to begin indulging in such glorifications of multiplicity as were to be encountered: "We move to multiplicity," says Mr. Robert Buchanan. "If there is one quality which seems God's and his exclusively, it seems that philoprogenitiveness, that passionate love of distribution and expansion into living forms. Every animal added seems a new ecstasy to the Maker; every life added, a new embodiment of his love. He would swarm the earth with beings. There are never enough. Life, life, life,—faces gleaming, hearts beating, must fill every cranny. Not a corner is suffered to remain empty. The whole earth breeds, and God glories." It is a little unjust, perhaps, to attribute to the Divinity exclusively this philoprogenitiveness, which the British Philistine, and the poorer class of Irish, may certainly claim to share with him; yet how inspiriting is here the whole strain of thought! and these beautiful words, too, I carry about with me in the East of London, and often read them there . . .3 Though Arnold did not deny that the poor were as a group capable of prudence, he insisted that they must be given education and good example: where "Hebraism" tells us all is well, "Hellenism" insists that . . . the knowledge how to prevent their accumulating is necessary, even to give their moral life and growth a fair chance! . . . And surely what it tells us is, that a man's children are not really sent, any more than the pictures on the wall, or the horses in his stable are sent; and that to bring people into the world, when one cannot afford to keep them and oneself decently and not too precariously, or to bring more of them into the world than one can afford to keep thus, is, whatever the Times and Mr. Robert Buchanan may say, by no means an accomplishment of the divine will or a fulfilment of Nature's simplest laws, but is just as wrong, just as contrary

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to reason and the will of God, as for a man to have horses, or carriages, or pictures, when he cannot afford them, or to have more of them than he can afford; and that, in the one case as in the other, the larger scale on which the violation of reason's law is practised, and the longer it is persisted in, the greater must be the confusion and final trouble . . . .4 It is difficult to see just how Arnold contrived to remain a Malthusian at all. For though he took sharp issue with his more optimistic confreres on their claim that prudence had already come almost universally to prevail, he seemed to agree with them to the extent of granting that it was potential in the poor, who were in need only of education. And either position permitted not only an optimistically Malthusian conclusion that the poor could abolish their own poverty, but the quite antiMalthusian conclusion that others could help them. It is not too hard to understand why many Malthusians may have overlooked the latter implication; but it is a little surprising that in this direction Hellenism saw with no sharper eyes than Hebraism. It is of course possible that since Arnold did not doubt that the poor were responsible for their poverty, he felt that they should not be assisted by others even though they could be. Evidence of the presence of a type of Malthusianism considerably less optimistic than Arnold's appeared in 1876 in W. R. Greg's Mistaken Aims and Attainable Ideals of the Artizan Class. The targets of Greg's attack were Laing's proposals for the promotion of peasant proprietorships, and the efforts of the working people to increase their share of the social income by organization into unions. Greg was not pessimistic enough to maintain that the poor could never improve their lot; desperation, he said, will "arouse them to prudence and exertion." 5 But the obvious implication of this attitude was that prudence and exertion would come so slowly as to make impracticable any present assistance from others. Of this argument, Greg made little; for evidently in his mind the claim that the poor should not be helped was so strong as to make superfluous the claim

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that they could not be. He presented, therefore, perhaps the boldest and most explicit statement in Nlalthusian literature of the view that since the poor by overbreeding have created their poverty, justice will not permit taxing the resources of the rest of society for their assistance.8 It would appear from Arnold's statement of his disagreement with the most optimistic school of Malthusians that he regarded Robert Buchanan as one of their number. If so, Buchanan's views in time took a decided shift to the darker side; for when in 1891 he published his essay entitled The Coming Terror, he took a position hardly as optimistic as that of Greg. Absent was not only any faith that prudence was already operating to banish poverty, but any confidence that it existed sufficiently to do so in the predictable future. Therefore, although he considered acts of private charity permissible, he despaired of the efficacy of any assistance to the poor, on the ground not only that they should not, but that they could not, profit by it. In time, he granted, individual moral growth might check overbreeding; but until then, poverty and death must be allowed to claim the superfluous. 7 Other Malthusian utterances of the period seem to indicate also some degree of faith in the existence of future prudence of the poor, but do not make clear just what degree. Typical are the sentiments expressed in Ragged London in 1861, a lurid piece of journalism by John Hollingshead, a special correspondent for the Morning Post, who advised the poor that "a little less drunken indulgence in matrimony and child-breeding would at once better their condition, as the Rev. Mr. Malthus told them long ago." s "Let them defer their marriages for six or seven years," remarked Hollingshead cheerfully, "and they will turn their backs on strikes and starvation." 9 Hollingshead's views were applauded by the Westminster Review.10 Much like his attitude was that of an article on T h e Agricultural Labourer" in the Cornhill Magazine in 1873, whose prescription for the salvation of that chronically depressed countryman was that he

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must not marry until he had reached the age of forty to fortyfive.11 It would appear that the sternest and most primitive form of Malthusian doctrine, which not only accused the poor of causing their poverty but asserted the impossibility of checking their overbreeding, had been generally abandoned by those Malthusians who took the pains to publish extended statements on the subject, as it had been dropped by Malthus himself after his first edition. But obviously it lingered strongly in the public mind. When Bulwer-Lytton in 1871 published his fantasy of the future entitled The Coming Race, he apparently still adhered to that conviction of the inevitability of overbreeding which had made him one of the ardent supporters of the New Poor Law in 1834. "At stated periods," he wrote, "the surplus population departed to seek a realm of its own." 12 Of an ultimate solution to the problem he had nothing to say; presumably when there were no further realms to seek, starvation became the lot of the surplus. In 1875 Winwood Reade depicted to the readers of his novel The Outcast a sensitive young man driven to despair and insanity by acceptance of the darkest form of Malthusian doctrine: One day he came to me in trouble. He had been reading the great work of Malthus—the Essay on Population—and said that it made him doubt the goodness of God . . . A little while afterwards he read The Origin of Species, which had just come out, and which proves that the Law of Population is the chief agent by which Evolution has been produced. From that time he began to show symptoms of insanity . . . He dressed always in black, and said that he was in mourning for mankind. The works of Malthus and Darwin, bound in sombre covers, were placed on a table in his room; the first was lettered outside, The Book of Doubt, and the second, The Book of Despair.13 Ten years later, in 1885, William Hale White put into the

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mouth of the central character of his Mark Rutherford's Deliverance these melancholy words: It is appalling to reflect what our future will be if the accumulation of population be not checked . . . The only thing I could do was faintly, and I was about to say stupidly, hope— for I had no rational, tangible grounds for hoping—that some force of which we are not now aware might some day develop itself which will be able to resist and remove the pressure which sweeps and crushes into a hell, sealed from the upper air, millions of human souls every year in one quarter of the globe alone.14 Not even White's faint hope "that somehow good will be the final goal of ill" was left in the mind of Tennyson when in 1886 he poured out in "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After" the full flood of bitterness and doubt which had gathered in his aging mind. Around him he saw nothing but triumphant evil and hideousness; and for the future, he saw, if not that justification of war which had been a common theme in Malthusian thought, at least the futility of attempting to prevent war: After all the stormy changes shall we find a changeless May? All diseases quench'd by Science, no man halt, or deaf, or blind; Stronger ever born of weaker, lustier body, larger mind? Earth at last a warless world, a single race, a single tongue— I have seen her far away—for is not Earth as yet so young?— Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent passion kill'd, Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert till'd. Robed in universal harvest up to either pole she smiles, Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles. Warless? when her tens are thousands, and her thousands millions, t h e n All her harvest all too narrow—who can fancy warless men? 15

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And even the generally optimistic Meredith shows here and there in his poetry haunting traces of doubt of the power of men to free themselves from self-induced poverty; in "Foresight and Patience," for instance, dating from 1894, he lamented the patience needed to await men's "release from duress in the swamp of their increase." 16 Ample as are the evidences that a considerable body of Malthusian opinion survived into the last forty years of the century, it apparently had not sufficient weight to give serious concern to its opponents. Whereas for some sixty years after 1798 proposers of social reform had found it imperative to answer Malthus in full, few of those who undertook to solve the problem of poverty during the decades after 1860 showed any feeling of the necessity for doing so. Such exceptions as there were naturally occurred chiefly during the decade 1860-70, when it was least clear which way the tide was turning. John Ruskin had some reason to feel it necessary to reply fully to Malthus when in 1860, having detected the causes of the degradation of the arts in the degradation of the classical economic doctrine, he submitted to the Cornhill Magazine an extended attack upon that doctrine, in the essays published two years later as Unto This Last. "John was obliged," his father reported, "to put 'JR- > a s the editor would not be answerable for opinions so opposed to Malthus and the Times and the City of Manchester." 17 Ruskin's attention was centered on the less optimistic Malthusians. "In all the ranges of human thought," he said, I know none so melancholy as the speculations of political economists on the population question. It is proposed to better the condition of the labourer by giving him higher wages. "Nay," says the economist,—"if you raise his wages, he will either people down to the same point of misery at which you found him, or drink your wages away." 18 But like Arnold, Ruskin refused to see in the present imprudence of the poor proof of their permanent imprudence:

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He will [he went on]. I know it. Who gave him this will? . . . Either these poor are of a race essentially different from ours, and unredeemable (which, however often implied, I have heard none yet openly say), or else by such care as we have ourselves received, we may make them continent and sober as ourselves. . , 18 So redeemed, he insisted, the poor might lie aided without being led to consume one another. I hope for another end, though not, indeed, from any of the three remedies for over-population commonly suggested by economists. These three are, in brief—Colonization; Bringing in of waste lands: or Discouragement of Marriage. The first two of these, Ruskin felt, "merely evade or delay the question." 2 Wherein the discouragement of marriage disagreed with his own notion of continence he never quite stated, wandering off from the entire subject in that disconcerting fashion common to his later writing, which so often suggests the fading of a faulty radio just as the climax of a program is approaching. Hard as it may be to see just why Ruskin should have rejected, as if foreign to his own, measures which, in view of his insistence that the inculcation of prudence would make it possible to help the poor, he might well have accepted as specific parts of his own program, it is plain enough that from the same premise from which Arnold reached a false conclusion Ruskin had arrived at the logical one. In one respect only was his reasoning weak; for answering the argument of those Malthusians who had conceded the possibility of general prudence among the poor, it was adequate; but for those who had made no such concession, some surer means was required to prevent the poor from nullifying any aid given them. Ruskin was a bit slow in seeing this defect in his position, but did at last get round to remedying it, when in 1867 he published Time and Tide. His

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remedy is hard to distinguish from that very "Discouragement of Marriage" he had rejected so cavalierly seven years before. Youths, he said, should be obliged to demonstrate their social competence and responsibility before receiving a license to marry. Thus provided, like Coleridge long before him, with one answer for those who believed in the prudence of the poor and one for those who did not, he urged aid to the poor not merely as possible and merciful, but as possible and demanded by every standard of human and divine justice; for he saw in the operations of society a rapacious and constant withholding from the poor of the rightful rewards of their labor, as well as a misdirection of their labor to destructive ends. 21 A few other than Ruskin paid Malthus the tribute of argument. Frederick Harrison did take the pains to counter the Malthusian objection to the Positivism he represented, when in 1865 he published in the Fortnightly Review an article on "The Limits of Political Economy." It was, he asserted, fallacious to assume that any immutable ratio existed between population and subsistence; the great revelation of Comte was that all economic laws, including the law of population, are based on moral conditions, on the nature of the social philosophy as a whole. Harrison's view obviously was that poverty was the result not of an innate imprudence in the poor, but of social conditions which both deprived them of a livelihood and made them reckless in overbreeding. 22 Though Harrison offered smaller grounds than Ruskin for thus contradicting the conclusions of Malthus, he was explicitness itself compared to most of those who during the period expressed their faith in the ability of society to wipe out poverty. These, if they did not ignore the Malthusian theory altogether, tended to dismiss it with slight attention. Harrison's fellow Positivist, E. S. Beesly, writing in defense of trades unions in the Westminster Review in 1861, included a warning to workers that reckless increase could nullify their gains, but showed no doubt that such a warning would be sufficient to avert the danger. 23 Dickens, who had never troubled to supply his characters with

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much in the way of argument against Malthus, did so even less than usual when he delivered one last volley of mingled satire and pathos in Our Mutual Friend in 1864-65; Mr. Podsnap bristled against the meek individual who had dared criticize the Poor Law with "not a country in the world, sir, where so noble a provision is made for the poor;" 24 Old Betty Higden fled from parish to parish starving to escape that noble provision—"It is a remarkable Christian improvement," observed Dickens, "to have made a pursuing Fury of the Good Samaritan"; 25 and when at last she died, the Reverend Frank Milvey came in the burial service to the words "our sister," and "his heart misgave him that all was not quite right between us and our sister—or say our sister in law—Poor Law." 28 An attitude perhaps even more indicative of the extent to which Malthusianism had declined appeared in 1871 in Francis Newman's article in Fraser's Magazine entitled "Malthusianism, True and False." Newman's confidence in the abolition of poverty %vas based in part on the ability of society to increase the food supply; he stressed the inability of Malthus to foresee "our vast powers, industrial and locomotive," which had removed limitations on emigration and the importing of food. 27 But he plainly regarded such devices as more convenient than necessary; he criticized Malthus for not seeing that the injustice of landholders had been responsible for much poverty; and in reaching the main point of his article, which was a plea for depending upon celibacy rather than resorting to the "false Malthusianism" of contraception, he showed no doubts of the presence of sufficient prudence to make his recommendation effective. What makes Newman's approach to Malthus most interesting is not that he dismissed the Malthusian theory with slight attention, as did Beesly, or with ridicule, as did Dickens, but that he criticized it with an air of pointing out the recognized flaws of an outmoded concept. 28 The same attitude appeared even more strongly in the essay on Malthus by Walter Bagehot which was published as a part of his Economic Studies in 1880. It is rather startling to note that Bagehot repeated the error of Godwin and

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Coleridge in attributing to Malthus himself the early admission that the poor were actually capable of prudence. But what is most significant in his essay is its assumption that the errors of Malthus have only to be pointed out to be acknowledged. Discussing Malthus' addition of prudence to the checks listed in his second edition, Bagehot remarked: he does not seem to see that he has cut away the ground of his whole argument. If there be this principle of virtuous self-restraint, he no longer answers Godwin; he no longer destroys the dreams of perfectibility. If it be possible for a perfectly virtuous community to limit their numbers, they will perform that duty just as they perform all others; there is no infallible principle that will break up the village community; it can adjust its numbers to its food, and may last forever. In its first form the "Essay on Population" was conclusive as an argument, only it was based on untrue facts; in its second form it was based on true facts, but it was inconclusive as an argument. 29 With the same air of calm certitude Bagehot went on to distinguish the current views on population from the errors of Malthus: We must be careful to see what these principles themselves mean; for they are often mistaken. Even apart from physiology, they do not say that an increase in the comfort of a people necessarily tends to augment their numbers; it does so in two cases only. The first case is when the people are at the "physical minimum," with just enough to support life, and do not exercise self-restraint; here, the moment there is more food there will be more numbers. Such people will always multiply, just as the ryots in Bengal, in a somewhat similar state of things, are multiplying. The second case is when the people are at the "moral minimum," with just what will support the existing numbers in the sort of life they think proper, be it high or low; such numbers being kept down by

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self-restraint, and when the people do not change their standard. Then, undoubtedly, more comfort will be turned into more children; and in a little while the new state of things will produce no more comfort to each person than the old one, only there will be more persons to enjoy it. But there is no sort of necessity in this; as has been explained, the "moral minimum" is very movable; the people may change their standard, and in that case more comfort will not produce more persons,—there will only be as many as there would have been before, and the average of these will have a better life. Whether a people take one course or the other will depend on this sort of change, and on its relation to the sort of civilization enjoyed by the people; I doubt if any general formula can be found for it. Some writers have said that a great sudden change which elevates a whole generation is more likely to raise the population standard than a series of successive small changes; but as far as I can judge, more depends on the previous preparation of the people than on its absolute amount. A really thrifty people used to self-denial will profit exceedingly by a series of small improvements—they will not "run to numbers," they will augment in happiness; and an easy-going enjoying nation will mostly not be much the better for any boon of plenty, however great or sudden,— they will live at the same average, but the average will not be raised. 30 Even the redoubtable Huxley, who with Darwin owed so much to Malthus, and who believed himself to be an ardent supporter of the latter's doctrine, made no attempt to deny that society could, so far as mere possibility was concerned, so check imprudence as to eliminate poverty. His complete version of Evolution and Ethics published in 1894 pictured, much as Malthus' essay had done, a colony in which truly Godwinian happiness had been created; but Huxley was prepared to admit that the resultant increase of population need not bring such dismal conditions as Malthus had pictured as inevitable:

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When the colony reached the limit of possible expansion, the surplus population must be disposed of somehow; or the fierce struggle for existence must recommence and destroy that peace, which is the fundamental condition of the maintenance of the state of art against the state of nature. Supposing the administrator to be guided by purely scientific considerations, he would, like the gardener, meet this most serious difficulty by systematic extirpation, or exclusion, of the superfluous. The hopelessly diseased, the infirm aged, the weak or deformed in body or in mind, the excess of infants bom, would be put away, as the gardener pulls up defective and superfluous plants, or the breeder destroys undesirable cattle. Only the strong and the healthy, carefully matched, with a view to the progeny best adapted to the purposes of the administrator, would be permitted to perpetuate their kind. 31 Huxley did not, it is true, intend to recommend the remedy he showed to be possible; for he was convinced that it would affect adversely the quality of the population: "There is no hope that mere human beings will ever possess enough intelligence to select the fittest."3- But his admission indicates that even in a mind so friendly to it as his, the Malthusian theory did not stand up when not supported by the fear of qualitative degeneration of the race. The tendency to dismiss Malthus with scorn or to assume a general public realization of the falsity of his theory was particularly strong among those anti-Malthusians who advocated socialistic or other radical methods of social reform. The outstanding exception occurred, curiously enough, as late as 1879, when Henry George published Progress and Poverty. George was possessed by what must be regarded, in view of the attitude of his confreres, as a singularly exaggerated notion of the prevalence of Malthusian views. 33 "In current thought," he said, "this doctrine holds all but undisputed sway"; and he asserted that it was still being generally taught in the colleges of Eng-

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land and America.34 George's alarm had a very wholesome effect upon the quality of his criticism of Malthus; for though there was nothing for him to say which had not been said many times before, he took pains to make his argument ample and complete. Beginning with an eloquent and clear statement of the historical situation which had given rise to the fame of the Malthusian theory, and had caused it to be stubbornly supported long after its fallacies had been exposed to every eye, he proceeded to a detailed and acute dissection of those fallacies. His most important achievement was to indicate clearly the effect of the existence of exploitation and injustice in society upon the Malthusian proof of imprudence by the absence of any other cause of poverty.35 Having thus exposed the lack of any evidence of the general imprudence of the poor, he drew upon the comfort theory to give positive support to his claim of the prevalence of prudence, and its potentialities of increase.36 Therefore, "I assert," he said, "that the injustice of society, not the niggardliness of nature, is the cause of the want and misery which the current theory attributes to over-population." 37 George was alone among the radicals in showing such dread of Malthusian influence. A decade earlier, Karl Marx had attempted in his Capital to document the age-old cry of social injustice by tracing inequalities of wealth back to the withholding from the working class of a great part of the just reward of its labors; and in the course of doing so, he made it clear that to him, as to Hazlitt, Ensor, Ravenstone, and others, the presence of economic injustice was sufficient disproof of the imprudence of the poor: It is not merely that an accelerated accumulation of total capital, accelerated in a constantly growing progression, is needed to absorb an additional number of labourers, or even, on account of the constant metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those already functioning. In its turn, this increasing accumulation and centralization becomes a source of new changes in the composition of capital, of a more ac-

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celerated diminution of its variable, as compared with its constant constituent. This accelerated relative diminution of the variable constituent, that goes along with the accelerated increase of the total capital, and moves more rapidly than this increase, takes the inverse form, at the other pole, of an apparently absolute increase of the labouring population, an increase always moving more rapidly than that of the variable capital or the means of employment. But in fact, it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus-population. 38 The labouring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to an always increasing extent. This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits alone. An abstract law of population exists for plants and animals only, and only in so far as man has not interfered with them. 39 In thus dismissing Malthus, Marx was of course overworking his thesis; for granted that exploitation of the poor existed, this by no means meant that imprudence was absent. But he wasted no pains on furnishing a complete argument, either by exposing Malthus' confusion of potential increase with inevitable increase, or by recommending measures by which any increase could be controlled; he contented himself with a scornful footnote reminding the reader of the patent baselessness and interested character of Malthus' theory:

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If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose "Essay on Population' appeared in 1798, I remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, &c., and does not contain a single sentence thought out by himself. The great sensation this pamphlet caused, was due solely to party interest. The French Revolution had found passionate defenders in the United Kingdom; the "principle of population," slowly worked-out in the eighteenth century, and then, in the midst of a great social crisis, proclaimed with drums and trumpets as the infallible antidote to the teachings of Condorcet, &c., was greeted with jubilance by the English oligarchy as the great destroyer of all hankerings after human development. 40 Marx's confidence that readers could be depended on to reject the Malthusian objections to communism was matched by that of his followers, as is rather interestingly illustrated by the propagandistic novel The True History of Joshua Davidson, Communist, published in 1872 by Elizabeth Lynn Linton, wife of a poet-engraver Chartist leader. 41 Joshua, distressed by the wretchedness of the children who swarm the slum court where he lives, is told by a noted M.P., "a great political economist and a strict Malthusian," that the only remedy is "abstinence . . . you must lighten the labour market by bringing fewer labourers into it . . . and as many of you can [s/c], emigrate." Joshua replies only that the poor too love home and family: "Why should they be required to forego these that the rich may not be called upon to share?" And when sternly asked "Would you destroy the existing order of society?" he merely replies Yes, for it allows too great inequality. 42 Later, Joshua comments bitterly on the conversation, "He advocates our making ourselves so slender that we can slip through our bands and fetters," instead of breaking them. 43 Joshua's points are all well made; but they are too little brought into connection to form a clear argu-

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ment, and depend for their effect on the reader's lack of belief in the Malthusian position. Malthus received almost equally scant attention from the socialists of the Fabian group when in 1889 they made their first major appeal for public support by the publication of Fabian Essays. The volume, the authors of which included Sidney Webb, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, George Bernard Shaw, and others, consisted of speeches designed to present on a popular level a complete theory of socialism. Yet of all the contributors, the only one who saw occasion to refer to the question of population growth in connection with poverty was Shaw; and his single specific reference to Malthus was loaded with scorn. Discussing the tendency of capitalism to reduce the working people to less than subsistence, Shaw said: Private property, in fact, left no room for newcomers. Malthus pointed this out, and urged that there should be no newcomers—that the population should remain stationary. But the population took exactly as much notice of this modest demand for stagnation as the incoming tide took of King Canute's ankles. Indeed the demand was the less reasonable since the power of production per head was increasing faster than the population (as it still is), the increase of poverty being produced simply by the increase and private appropriation of rent. 44 In thus attributing poverty to injustice rather than to the poor themselves, Shaw did not deny the existence of overbreeding among the poor; but he insisted that this was in itself a consequence and a part of the suffering inflicted upon them by the existing economic system: It also produces a delusive promise of endless employment which blinds the proletariat to those disastrous consequences of rapid multiplication which are obvious to the small cultivator and peasant proprietor. But indeed, the more you degrade the workers, robbing them of all artistic enjoyment, and

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all chance of respect and admiration from their fellows, the more you throw them back, reckless, on the one pleasure and the one human tie left to them—the gratification of their instinct for producing fresh supplies of men. You will applaud this instinct as divine until at last the excessive supply becomes a nuisance: there comes a plague of men; and you suddenly discover that the instinct is diabolic, and set up a cry of "over-population." 45 Shaw unfortunately gave at moments the impression of contradicting this attitude by employing such Malthusian phraseology as "pressure of population," and even in one instance by attributing the increase of population to "an irresistible impulse"; 40 but numerous passages make it clear that by such terms he meant no more than a justified increase, made damaging only by a simultaneous social injustice: Although the safety valve of emigration has been furiously at work during this century, yet the pressure of population has forced us to begin the restitution to the people of the sums taken from them for the ground landlords, holders of tenant right, and capitalists, by the imposition of an income tax, and by compelling them to establish out of their revenues a national system of education, besides imposing restrictions—as yet only of the forcible-feeble sort—on their terrible power of abusing the wage contract. 47 And he closed one of his two essays with a passage worth quoting for its tone of triumphant certainty that the Malthusian era was a thing of the dead past: The old school of political economists, who could see no alternative to private property, put forward in proof of the powerlessness of benevolent action to arrest the deadly automatic production of poverty by the increase of population, the very analysis I have just presented. Their conclusions exactly fitted in with the new ideas. It was Nature at it again—the struggle for existence—the remorseless extirpation of the weak

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—the survival of the fittest—in short, natural selection at work. Socialism seemed too good to be true; it was passed by as merely the old optimism foolishly running its head against the stone wall of modem science. But Socialism now challenges individualism, skepticism, pessimism, worship of Nature personified as a devil, on their own ground of science. The science of the production and distribution of wealth is Political Economy. Socialism appeals to that science, and turning on Individualism its own guns, routs it in incurable disaster. Henceforth the bitter cynic who still finds the world an eternal and unimprovable doghole, with the placid person of means who repeats the familiar misquotation, "the poor ye shall have always with you," lose their usurped place among the cultured, and pass over to the ranks of the ignorant, the shallow, and the superstitious. As for the rest of us, since we were taught to revere proprietary respectability in our unfortunate childhood, and since we found our childish hearts so hard and unregenerate that they secretly hated and rebelled against respectability in spite of that teaching, it is impossible to express the relief with which we discover that our hearts were all along right, and that the current respectability of today is nothing but a huge inversion of righteous and scientific social order weltering in dishonesty, uselessness, selfishness, wanton misery, and idiotic waste of magnificent opportunities for noble and happy living. It was terrible to feel this, and yet to fear that it could not be helped—that the poor must starve and make you ashamed of your dinner—that they must shiver and make you ashamed of your warm overcoat. It is to economic science—once the Dismal, now the Hopeful —that we are indebted for the discovery that though the evil is enormously worse than we knew, yet it is not eternal—not even very long lived, if we only bestir ourselves to make an end of it. 48 Two further examples of radical references to population may serve to round out the picture of the Malthusian decline toward

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the end of the century. William Morris, whose idyll of the future appeared in 1891 as News from Nowhere, stated without troubling to offer any explanation that the population of his Utopia, though much more rationally distributed at home and throughout the world, had remained the same as at the end of the nineteenth century. 49 And when ten years later H. G. Wells discussed the subject in his Anticipations, the period of Malthusian controversy had become so remote that he was able to speak of Malthus not as an instrument of evil, but as the bestower upon the world of an unintended benefit. Malthus, said Wells, laid waste the Utopian equalitarianism of the eighteenth century, and in so doing forced the world into a new era of realism in ethical and social thought. His denial that it is possible to abolish poverty has not held fast, but it has forced us to see that improvement of the condition of the poor must be accompanied by the enforcement of a limitation on number of children, together with the popularization of contraception. Wells intimated that euthanasia was within the realm of consideration. 50 Long before the end of the century it had become clear that the proponents of social reform had good reason for their confident dismissals of Malthusianism. The battle was plainly won; against the gospel of despair were now solidly ranked not only the working masses, but the academic and reputable economists and sociologists. Henry Sidgwick, in an introductory chapter of his Principles of Political Economy (1883), noted with obvious approval that the hostility of "influential artisans to the traditional Political Economy" had "only changed somewhat from sullen distrust to confident contempt." 51 James E. Thorold Rogers, commenting in Six Centuries of Work and Wages (1884), on the fact that wages were not lowered by the relative plenty of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, added: I do not, indeed, imagine that the economist who duly collects his inferences from a wide range of facts, would be under the impression that such a result would necessarily en-

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sue, or, indeed, unless there were other causes at work, conclude that the tendency of population would be to grow up to the limits of subsistence . . . We shall see in the course of this inquiry that an excess of population, is quite compatible with no increase in numbers, and that the misery of the working classes can be frequently ascribed to other causes besides their own improvidence and recklessness. In the same year, Frederick Harrison's fellow disciple of Carlyle, 53 Arnold Toynbee, opened his Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England with these salty words: The bitter argument between economists and human beings has ended in the conversion of the economists . . . Assailed for two generations as an insult to the simple natural piety of human affections, the Political Economy of Ricardo is at last rejected as an intellectual imposture. The obstinate, blind repulsion of the labourer is approved by the professor/' 4 And in 1909, the Poor Law Commissioners, applauding the rise of a new attitude toward the relief of poverty, remarked: We ascribe the revolution in thought . . . mainly to the silent abandonment, by all the experts, both of the Malthusian Law of Population and of the Theory of a Wage Fund."'3 Such statements as that of the Commissioners must be regarded with caution by anyone attempting to estimate the achievement of those who carried on the long struggle against the Malthusian theory. Of the soundness of the arguments of the anti-Malthusians there is little question. Such occasional remarks as that of H. G. Wells that "the Socialist has shirked . . . the older crux of Malthus" 56 can hardly be explained except on the basis that their authors have not looked further back than the casual dismissals of Malthus characteristic of the recent past; for a survey of the earlier history of the controversy makes very clear that neither the socialists nor many others have shirked the problem. But crediting them with success in reply-

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ing to Malthus would not of itself justify the implication of the Poor Law Commissioners that they were thereby solely responsible for the removal of the Malthusian obstacle to the relief of poverty. The realm of historical causation notoriously abounds in dangers; and of these the most beguiling to the student of ideas is the inclination to overestimate ideas as agents of social change. The direction in which caution must be observed is suggested by such statements as that of Harriet Martineau in 1855 that such factors as increased food production and facilities for emigration "have extinguished all present apprehension and talk of surplus population"; 37 and even more by the remark of D. C. Somervell in 1929 that those same factors left Malthus by 1860 "discredited and well-nigh forgotten." r'8 The implication here seems to be that the abandonment by society of Malthusian patterns of action has been the result not of a general conviction of the falsity of Malthus' theory, but of an increasing hope of forcing production, for a time, to keep pace with population. B9 This theory might well suggest another possible reservation as to the actual value of the work of the anti-Malthusians: that not only the recklessness of other classes, but the rise of political power of working people selfishly indifferent to the justice of their own claims, has been a powerful factor in the abandonment of Malthusian treatment of the poor. The full acceptance of either of these two suggestions would mean placing a low value indeed on the work of the intellectual antagonists of Malthus. But neither suggestion seems wholly acceptable. To believe that the decline of Malthusianism was due chiefly to faith in high productivity rather than to doubt of the imprudence of the poor would mean believing that a doctrine accepted at last by virtually all the experts, and almost unopposed from any quarter, remained nevertheless the minority opinion. The suggestion that the increase of working-class power, untempered by reasonable criticism, was largely responsible for the new approach to poverty seems rather more substantial. But if it is considered that the admission to power of

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working people has been achieved largely by the consent and aid of other groups in society, even groups whose selfish interests would place them in opposition to the workers, it does not seem possible to deny a considerable value to the labors of the critics of Malthus. Probably in time the mere weight of observed facts regarding the relationship between family size and poverty would have destroyed the Malthusian doctrine. But there can be no doubt that the efforts of its critics at least hastened the restoration of social responsibility, and thereby diminished the degree and duration of human suffering in our own time. It is difficult, of course, to resist the feeling that the critics might well have done a better and faster job. For the fallacies of Malthus, once discovered, seem glaring—so glaring, indeed, as to suggest that the acceptance of a social theory is likely to depend far more on its usefulness to a dominant social group than on its logical appeal. His opponents, had they analyzed his theory clearly, had no need to grant his premises, and to attempt only to deny his conclusions by upholding the possibility of forcing prudence on the poor. By calling attention to the fact that he had in no way proved either the prevalence or imprudence among the poor or the absence of external causes of their poverty, they might have removed not only the practical but the ethical objection to the removal of poverty. If one regards only the logic of the controversy, therefore, he is likely to feel that the anti-Malthusians were unjustifiably confused and inept. Few, of course, were as much so as Grahame and Weyland, who argued for Malthus' own position under the impression that they were refuting him; or as Jarrold and Doubleday, who called upon God or some spontaneous biological change to check the imprudence of the poor. But with a few such exceptions as Hall, Ravenstone, Place, Hazlitt, Thompson, and Mill, the critics of Malthus did not present their case in anything approaching its full strength. At their best, they frequently offered evidence without making clear its significance, as did Southey in failing to clarify the reply to Malthus

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suggested by the existence of a surplus of wealth in a few hands, or Hazlitt in showing the power of comfort to check overbreeding without noting the implication that imprudence in the poor might be an acquired rather than an innate trait; or they overlooked evidence which would have provided a more complete refutation of Malthus, as did all those who merely argued that the imprudence of the poor could be checked, instead of questioning Malthus' proof of its existence. At their worst, they omitted essential parts of their arguments, as did Coleridge and others who claimed that relief would not destroy prudence in the poor, but neglected to stress their assumption that such relief would be carefully limited; or they mistook irrelevant facts as support for their claims, as did all those who based their claim that the poor were equally prudent on nothing more than Malthus' admission that many people were, or merely on the possibility that other causes of poverty existed. The slowness and confusion of their progress against Malthus can hardly, however, be held too much to their discredit. A conjuror's trick which seems embarrassingly obvious once it is explained may confuse the most alert when it is first performed. And it was a maddeningly elusive piece of sleight-of-hand which they were endeavoring to expose. The two major assumptions on which Malthus had based his conclusion that society could not and should not aid the poor were, whether inadvertently or by design, well disguised. The assumption that the poor were incurably imprudent was concealed by the substitution of the potential for the actual rate of human increase; and the apparent elimination of other causes of poverty was accomplished by substituting the Godwinian Utopia for nineteenth-century England. So great was the difficulty of even discovering Malthus' fallacies that the shortcomings of his opponents should not be weighed too heavily against the service they rendered in breaking down the Malthusian barrier to social progress.60 It is especially worthy of note that in the performance of that task the literary men of the century played a prominent part, perhaps indeed the leading one. Few of the great names of the

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time were absent from the list of participants in the Malthusian battle; and of these participants, all but a little band—including chiefly Macaulay, Miss Martineau, and to some extent De Quincey and Tennyson—stood in the anti-Nlalthusian ranks. This fact alone gives further evidence of the sound and healthy relationship between literary men and the major concerns of their society which is one of the greatest distinctions of the nineteenth century in England; and it may be observed that the prominence of the so-called Romantic writers gives no support to popular views of Romanticism as a form of escape from reality. But it is not merely by their number that the literary men were conspicuous in the fight. They were not only followers in the ranks, but leaders in the vanguard. At a time when the experts in the field, the professed economists and students of social problems, were bowing down before the grinning image of starvation which Malthus had created, poets, essayists, and novelists were rising up to wage lonely war against it. To a very great extent they anticipated, if they did not bring about, the change in the views of the experts. Coleridge, Southey, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, and Shelley, to mention only the most outstanding, had been carrying on the campaign for many years before Senior in 1829 made the first conspicuous break from the Malthusian front of the economists; and as a whole, the contributions to the controversy made by the literary men seem at least as substantial as those of the more practical economic theorists. In the long struggle to exorcise the Malthusian specter they hold the place of honor.

NOTES I.

ANTICLIMAX TO HOPE: 1798

1. Except as otherwise noted, the facts of Malthus' life are taken from Bonar, Malthus and His Work, pp. 6-8, 401 ff. 2. Interesting evidence of this existence of this attitude is given by Beer, British Socialism, I, 13-18, 73, 85-86. 3. Wealth of Nations, I, 80. 4. See Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government, VII, 17-19, 51-53. 5. For typical opinions on this point, see Rogers, Work and Wages, p. 477, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government, VIII, 6-7. On the contemporary realization of increased productivity, see Bowden, Industrial Society, pp. 70-72, and Haldvy, Philosophic Radicalism, p. 226. Godwin, Political Justice, II, 813, cited a contemporary estimate that Europe could support five times its existing population. 6. The best accounts of this development I have found are given by Halevy, Philosophic Radicalism, pp. 1-23; Stephen, English Thought, II, 265-75; and Bury, Progress, pp. 159-76, 226-27. 7. Essay, pp. 1-2. 8. The well-known phenomenon of a sudden increase in 1798 in the number of carriages seen outside English churches gives amusing testimony of upper-class panic. For accounts of middle-class radicalism before the Terror, and its sudden decline afterwards, see Cole, Working Class Movement, I, 43-52; Philip Anthony Brown, The French Revolution, pp. 27-99; Hal£vy, Philosophic Radicalism, pp. 164-77; and Stephen, The English Utilitarians, I, 123-30. 9. For a lively account of the rise and fall of Godwin, see Hazlitt, "The Spirit of the Age," Works, XI, 16-18. Also Ford K. Brown, Life of Godwin, pp. 58-59, 62-64, 97, 105, 151. 10. Bowden, Industrial Society, p. 234, cites John Howlett's estimate early in the war period that in rural parishes nearly one third of the people could not live without charity or relief, and in large towns nearly one sixth. 11. Bonar, Malthus and His Work, pp. 215-16, states that grain, normally 40 to 50 shillings per quarter, averaged over 82 shillings, 1800-09; and

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Claphain. Economic History, I, 602, shows that a cost-of-living index based on 1790 as 100 rose to 170 in 1800. 12. Clapham, Economic History, I, 349-51, and Halevy, Philosophic Radicalism, pp. 205-7, show the existence of some feeling of the right of the pr to relief. But J. L. and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer, pp. l