doctrine that "the measure of subsistence is the measure of population." Adam Smith, in his "Wealth of Nations," adverted to the relation between food supply and the natural multiplication of the human species, and saw no way in which "the inferior ranks of the people" could escape the pressure of the latter unless the scantiness of food should "destroy a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce."'*

The Abbé Ortes, in his "Riflessioni sulla Popolazione," published at Venice in 1790, entered into a calculation as to the natural increase of population from a single pair on the supposition that four children, two of each sex, survive from each marriage union to become in their turn the founders of families. He shows that while the successive dates of their marriages would move in an arithmetical order the increase of their progeny would multiply in a geometrical order, and that hence the number of their children, at the end of nine hundred years, would be, if otherwise unrestricted, 7,516,192,768 souls, while if men had been left to multiply at the same rate for six thousand years the surface of the whole globe, "from its lowest valleys to its steepest mountains, would not be able to hold them, even should they be crowded and packed like dead and dried herrings in a barrel." He then proceeds to argue that human reason conspires with the order of nature to put a limit on the growth of population beyond a certain fixed number determined by the capacity of the earth to nurture them.

Whatever men may think of Malthus or his doctrines, it must be conceded, as Bonar phrases it, that, though others before him reasoned up to the principle of the law of population, he was the first economist who undertook to reason down from it as offering a solution for a number of dependent questions "in the way of simple corollaries." He saw that if by his method of reasoning he had reached a scientific induction that induction could authenticate and maintain itself only by affording a basis for logical deductions which should be capable of verification in history, and which should lend themselves to that ability of prediction which is the crucial test of scientific prevision. He frankly accepted the test, and hence the detailed and operose exposition of his thesis in the light of universal history—a method of treatment in which he pursued his doc

* Vol. I, Ch. 8.

+ James Bonar, "Malthus and his Work," p. 19.

Riflessioni, &c., Ch. 2.

trine only too absolutely to its logical consequences, though well aware that in doing so he might, by incidental errors of fact and inference, "open the door to many objections and expose himself to much severity of criticism."*

The fundamental doctrine of Malthus, disengaged from the historical, theoretical, and mathematical apparatus with which he encumbered rather than strengthened it, is this: That population has a tendency to multiply itself beyond the conditions of subsistence. He is commonly supposed to have held that this tendency is not only inherent, but that it is always revealing itself in terms of effect as well as in terms of causative force; but this is a mistake. At the very threshold of his discussion he admits that in the actual course of history there has been a constant oscillation of the pendulum between population and food-an oscillation irregular and obscure in the mode and periodicity of its librations, but none the less obvious to the discerning student of history.†

It has been common, too, to suppose that Malthus has complicated the truth of his theory with certain geometrical and arithmetical ratios assumed to represent, respectively, the multiplying capacity of population and food. But, as Horatio says in the play, "Twere to consider too curiously to consider so." Malthus has not bound up the truth of his theory with the reality and uniformity of these particular ratios. The particular ratio placed at the forefront of his discussion, to mark a tendency which must be accepted as potential in the case of population (because in one instance at least it can be shown to have been actual), was drawn from the law of the growth of population in these United States, where the population at the date of Malthus's writing was found to double itself every twenty-four years. Assuming that the population of the whole earth should increase at this rate, while the increase of subsistence "could not possibly [he thought] be made to increase faster than in an arithmetical ratio," he does state, with this modulus of his geometrical progression and with this hypothesis of the food ratio, that the human race would increase as 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 in the course of two hundred years; and in case food should increase during the same period only as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, would follow that at the end of these two hundred years population

*Malthus: Principle of Population, vol. iii, p. 325, edition of 1817. Ibidem, vol. i, p. 27.

it

would be to the means of subsistence as 256 to 9, in three centuries as 4,096 to 13, and in two thousand years the difference would be incalculable. This mathematical comparison is used by Malthus as a descriptive illustration rather than as the formula of a scientific truth, as the index of a potential tendency which may be assumed as speculatively possible rather than as the register of any fixed and invariable law of population.

In point of fact this mathematical rapprochement of the two ratios is very unhappy, even for purposes of rhetorical illustration or of numerical comparison, for there is no proper commensurability between the two series in point of their motive forces. As Bonar justly says, "population is increased by itself, while food is increased, not by food itself, but by an agency external to it, the human beings that want it." Malthus saw this distinction as clearly as anybody else, and, when pressed in argument on this score by the well-known British economist, Nassau William Senior,* he was frank to admit the incongruity of the comparison, without, however, formally retracting it. Writing in the year 1829, more than thirty years after the first appearance of his essay, he said:

"In old States the relative increase of population and food has been found to be practically very variable. It is no doubt true that in every stage of society there have been some nations where, from ignorance and want of foresight, the laboring classes have lived very miserably, and both the food and the population have been nearly stationary long before the resources of the soil had approached toward exhaustion. Of these nations it might safely have been predicted that, in the progress of civilization and improvement, a period would occur when food would increase faster than population."

In the appendices attached to the later editions of his essay, Malthus tacitly withdrew the earlier overstatements of his case and admitted that in the rigorous form too often given to the enunciation of his principle "it was possible that, having found the bow bent too much one way, he was induced to bend it too much the other in order to make it straight."

As Columbus stumbled on the discovery of a new world in seeking to find a western path to the Indies, so Malthus stumbled on the

* Nassau Wm. Senior, "Two Lectures on Population," with letters of Malthus in the Appendix, p. 67.

Malthus, "Principle of Population," vol. iii, p. 427, ed. of 1817.

discovery of what he calls "the principle of population" in trying to write down the sociological doctrines of William Godwin, the Henry George of England in 1793. He commenced by being a political pamphleteer. He ended by being a political economist and a social philosopher. But in bending his bow on the skirmish line of a now forgotten controversy he often overshot his mark and wasted from his full quiver many an arrow which, like that of Acestes in the epic verse of Virgil, marked its way, indeed, with a blazing light, but soon vanished into thin air because it had been aimed at nothing more substantial than the dissolving clouds of a transient gust in the political atmosphere. Among all the things that have been said in just praise of Malthus and in just abatement of the abuse that has been lavished upon him, there is nothing finer or juster than the remark of his latest critic and apologist when he says: "Science seeking answers to its own questions and not to the questions of the eighteenth century has no toleration for the false emphasis of passing controversy." The student who has not patience enough to follow Malthus in all the variations, modifications, retractions, and omissions to which he subjected his "principle" in the six successive editions of his essay from 1798 to 1826 had better renounce all hope of being a Malthusian disciple at first hand, and should content himself with such ready-made opinions as can be got at second hand from thick-and-thin admirers or thick-and-thin haters of the Haileybury professor. He was a bright and shining light in the sky of British economic speculation from 1798 to 1826, but if we would fix his true position or define his true orbit we must make allowance for his historical parallax as seen from these two dates, separated by an interval of nearly thirty years, during which his oscillations of thought betrayed the manifold perturbations to which the body of his doctrine was exposed from the tug and strain of a secular polemic. Science in the making is eristic, bringing strife ; science made and perfected is irenic, bringing peace.

Before Malthus's day the proverbial wisdom of the world found cheap and easy expression in the happy-go-lucky adage: "Wherever Providence sends mouths He sends meat enough to feed them." Malthus turned the adage upside down, or downside up if you please, and made it read as follows: "Wherever Providence sends meat He sends mouths more than enough to eat it." If population

*Bonar, "Malthus and His Work," p. 24.

has a tendency to increase beyond the means of subsistence and is kept down to the level of the latter by the checks which repress the superior power of the former, and if these checks are all resolvable into "moral restraint," preventing superfluous births, and "vice and misery," extinguishing superfluous lives, then it follows that the life of man here below is not only a constant "struggle for existence," but a struggle for existence under difficulties which can never be surmounted. In the emphasis given by Malthus to the "struggle for existence" (for this phrase is Malthus's before it was Darwin's) we might almost be tempted to say that Darwinism is little more than Malthusianism "writ large." But, happily for the theory of Darwin, it finds a door of hope for the origin and improvement of species where Malthus found the very valley of Achor for that part of the animal world which, in being charged with dominion over plants and inferior animals, might have been least expected to exemplify the struggle. In man, where the struggle for existence is really reduced to its minimum, Malthus saw it at its maximum. Whereas Darwin saw this struggle replete with beneficent promise for the improvement of species in plants and lower animals, Malthus, at least in his first desponding outlook on human history, was tempted to see in man's struggle for existence little more than a losing battle, which was ever beginning and never ending, because fought under the shadow of a remorseless destiny which doomed each sally to break to pieces against the same impassable barrier-a paucity of food.

Yet it would be a great mistake to suppose that Malthus was a "malignant philanthropist "--he was a true lover of his race; or that he was a reactionary politician-in politics he was a liberal Whig. It has, indeed, been charged that he favored the slave-trade as an economic expedient justified by the necessities of population in Europe. In fact he was inflexibly opposed to that odious traffic. It has been charged that he was an ascetic and surly misogamist. In fact he was a good family man and begat sons and daughters, though the myth of his eleven daughters is apochryphal. It has been charged that he looked with complacency on wars, pestilences, and famines as subserving a good purpose by thinning out an overcrowded population. In fact he aimed by his whole philosophy to

*Cf. Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 50: "It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms."