Henry George

“ I assert that in a state of equality the natural increase of population would constantly tend to make every individual richer instead of poorer. The question of fact into which this issue resolves itself is not in what stage of population most subsistence is produced, but in what stage of population the greatest power of producing wealth is exhibited. For the power of production, wealth in any form is the power of producing subsistence - and the consumption of wealth in any form, or of wealth-producing power, is equivalent to the consumption of subsistence. ”

“ Where will you find wealth devoted with the most lavishness to non-productive use - costly buildings, fine furniture, luxurious equipages, statues, pictures, pleasure gardens and yachts? Where will you find in largest proportion those whom the general production suffices to keep without productive labour on their part? Is it not where population is dense rather than where it is sparse? ”

“ And hence, increase of population, so far as it has yet anywhere gone, does not mean a reduction, but an increase, in the average production of wealth.
Look simply at the facts. Can anything be clearer than that the cause of the poverty which festers in the centres of civilization is not in the weakness of the productive forces? In countries where poverty is deepest, the forces of production are evidently strong enough, if fully employed, to provide for the lowest not merely comfort but luxury. ”

“ Yet there is still this difference between man and all other animals - he is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied. The wants of every other living thing are uniform and fixed. The ox of today aspires to no more than did the ox when man first yoked him. The seagull of the English Channel that poises himself above the swift steamer wants no better food or lodging than the gulls that circled round as the keels of Caesar's galleys first grated on a British beach. ”

“ Had Ireland been by nature a grove of bananas and bread-fruit, had her coasts been lined by the guano deposits of the Chinchas and the sun of lower latitudes warmed into more abundant life her moist soil, the social conditions that have prevailed there would still have brought forth poverty and starvation. How could there fail to be pauperism and famine in a country where rack-rents wrested from the cultivator of the soil all the produce of his labour except just enough to maintain life in good seasons ”

“ Capital could nowhere be safely accumulated nor be used to any considerable extent to assist production. All wealth that could be wrung from the people was in the possession of princes (or their farmers or favourites) who were little better than robber chiefs quartered on the country and it was wasted in useless or worse than useless luxury, while religion, sunken to an elaborate and terrible superstition, tyrannized over the minds as physical force did over the bodies of men. ”

“ If the real law of population is thus indicated, as I think it must be, then the tendency to increase, instead of being always uniform, is strong where the perpetuity of the race is threatened by the mortality induced by adverse conditions; but it weakens just as the higher development of the individual becomes possible and the perpetuity of the race is assured. Any danger that human beings may be brought into a world where they cannot be provided for arises not from the ordinances of nature, but from social maladjustments that in the midst of wealth condemn men to want. ”

“ Is not this a demonstration of the Malthusian theory? Does it not show that no matter how much the possibilities of subsistence are increased, population still continues to press upon it? Does it not show, as Malthus contended, that to shut up the sluices by which superabundant population is carried off is but to compel nature to open new one, and that unless the sources of human increase are checked by prudential regulation, the alternative of war is famine? ”

“ Upon horrors that Macaulay thus but touches, the vivid eloquence of Burke throws a stronger light - whole districts surrendered to the unrestrained cupidity of the worst of humankind, poverty-stricken peasants fiendishly tortured to compel them to give up their little hoards, and once populous tracts turned into deserts. ”

“ Poverty alleged to be inevitable Now, as it did then, the Malthusian theory parries the demand for reform, and shelters selfishness from question and from conscience by the interposition of an inevitable necessity. For poverty, want and starvation are by this theory not chargeable either to individual greed or to social maladjustments - they are the inevitable results of universal laws with which if it were not impious it were as hopeless to quarrel as with the law of gravitation. And thus reforms which would interfere with the interests of any powerful class are discouraged as hopeless. ”

“ That population, constantly tending to increase, must, when unrestrained, ultimately press against the limits of subsistence, not as against a fixed, but as against an elastic barrier, and this makes the procurement of subsistence progressively more and more difficult. Thus, wherever reproduction has had time to assert its power, and is unchecked by prudence, there must exist that degree of want which will keep population within the bounds of subsistence. ”

“ Since the moral law forbids any forestalling of the methods by which the natural law gets rid of surplus population and thus holds in check a tendency to increase potent enough to pack the surface of the globe with human beings as sardines are packed in a box, nothing can really be done either by individual or by combined effort to extirpate poverty, save to trust to the efficacy of education and preach the necessity of prudence. ”

“ Poverty in India In India from time immemorial, the working-classes have been ground down by exactions and oppressions into a condition of helpless and hopeless degradation. For ages and ages the cultivator of the soil has esteemed himself happy if, of his produce, the extortion of the strong hand left him enough to support life and furnish seed. ”

“ Whether we compare different communities with each other, or examine the same community at different times, it is obvious that the progressive society, which is marked by increase of population, is also marked by an increased consumption and an increased accumulation of wealth, not merely in the aggregate, but per capita. ”

“ No matter how sparse its population, no matter what its natural resources, would not pauperism and starvation be necessary consequences in any land where the producers of wealth were compelled to work under conditions which deprived them of hope, of self-respect, of energy, of thrift ”

“ Forces influencing the birthrate In new settlements where the struggle with nature leaves little opportunity for intellectual life, and among the poverty-bound classes of older countries who in the midst of wealth are deprived of all its advantages and are reduced to an all but animal existence, the proportion of births is notoriously greater than it is among the classes to whom the increase of wealth has brought independence, leisure, comfort and a fuller and more varied life. ”

“ Thus, no matter how much men may increase, their increase need never outrun the supply of salmon. In short, while all through the vegetable and animal kingdoms the limit of subsistence is independent of the thing subsisted, with man the limit of subsistence is, within the final limits of earth, air, water, and sunshine, dependent upon man himself. ”

“ William Tennant, a chaplain in the service of the East India Company, writing in 1796, two years before the publication of the Essay on Population, says in his Indian Recreations, volume I, section 39:
When we reflect upon the great fertility of Hindostan, it is amazing to consider the frequency of famine. It is evidently not owing to any sterility of soil or climate; the evil must be traced to some political cause, and it requires but little penetration to discover it in the avarice and extortion of the various governments. The great spur to industry, that of security, is taken away. ”

“ Labour was thus applied in the most inefficient and wasteful manner and labour, that with any security for its fruits would have been applied unremittingly, was dissipated in aimless idleness. But even under these conditions, it is a matter of fact that Ireland did more than support eight millions. For when her population was at its highest, Ireland was a food-exporting country. Even during the famine, grain and meat and butter and cheese were carted for exportation along roads lined with the starving and past trenches into which the dead were piled. ”

“ On the same level of civilization, the same stage of the productive arts, government, etc., the most populous countries are always the most wealthy.
The richest countries are not those where nature is most prolific; but those where labour is most efficient - not Mexico, but Massachusetts; not Brazil, but England. The countries where population is densest and presses hardest upon the capabilities of nature are, other things being equal, the countries where the largest proportion of the produce can be devoted to luxury and the support of non-producers ”

“ Unless the arts of production were in the same time improved in an almost unexampled degree, the inferior soils which must be resorted to, and the more laborious and scantily remunerative cultivation which must be employed on the superior soils, to procure food for so much larger a population, would, by an insuperable necessity, render every individual in the community poorer than before. ”

“ It is from the vegetable and animal kingdoms that man's food is drawn, and hence the greater strength of the reproductive force in the vegetable and animal kingdoms than in man simply proves the power of subsistence to increase faster than population. ”

“ Under these conditions, the only arts that could advance were those that ministered to the ostentation and luxury of the great. The elephants of the rajah blazed with gold of exquisite workmanship, and the umbrellas that symbolized his regal power glittered with gems ”

“ Early British rule in India To this merciless rapidity, which would have produced want and famine had the population been but one to a square mile an the land a Garden of Eden, succeeded, in the first era of British rule, as merciless a rapacity, backed by a far more irresistible power. Says Macaulay, in his essay of Lord Clive: "Enormous fortunes were rapidly accumulated in Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. ”

“ Chapter VI Population and subsistence The doctrine to which Malthus has given his name is that population naturally tends to increase faster than subsistence. It was formulated by him in the proposition that, as shown by the growth of the North American colonies, the natural tendency of population is to double itself at least every twenty-five years, thus increasing in a geometrical ratio, while "the subsistence for man which the earth affords... ”

“ Inferences from facts Seemingly backed by an indisputable arithmetical truth - that a continuously increasing population must eventually exceed the capacity of the earth to furnish food or even standing room - the Malthusian theory is supported by analogies in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, where life everywhere beats wastefully against the barriers that hold its different species in check. ”

“ If all instruments of production were held in joint property by the whole people, and the produce divided with perfect equality among them, and if in a society thus constituted, industry were as energetic and the produce as ample as at present, there would be enough to make all the existing population extremely comfortable ”

“ How is it, then, that neither in classical creeds and codes, nor in those of the Jews, the Egyptians, the Hindoos, the Chinese, nor of any of the peoples who have lived in close association and have built up creeds and codes, do we find any injunctions to the practice of the prudential restraints of Malthus? On the contrary, the wisdom of the centuries, the religions of the world, have always inculcated ideas of civic and religious duty that are the very reverse. ”

“ The Malthusian theory furnishes a general principle which accounts for these and similar facts, and accounts for them in a way that harmonizes with the doctrine that wages are drawn from capital and with all the principles that are deduced therefrom. According to that doctrine, wages fall as increase in the number of labourers necessitates a more minute division of capital. According to the Malthusian theory, poverty appears as increase in population necessitates the more minute division of subsistence. ”

“ The danger that the human race may increase beyond the possibility of finding elbow room is so far off as to have for us no more practical interest than the recurrence of the glacial period or the final extinguishment of the sun. Yet, remote and shadowy as it is, it is this possibility that gives to the Malthusian theory its apparently self-evident character. But if we follow it, even this shadow will disappear. It also springs from a false analogy. That vegetable and animal life tend to press against the limits of space does not prove the same tendency in human life. ”