James Bonar

“ It is a sympathy not sad enough for pity. It is not wholly sad to find Godwin in his old age a lonely man, his friends dropping off one by one into the darkness and leaving him solitary in a world that does not know him. The world that had begun to realize the ideas of Malthus had begun to realize the ideas of Godwin also. It was a world far more in harmony with political justice than that into which Godwin had sent his book forty years before. It was good that Malthus had lived to see the new Poor Law, but still better that both had lived to see the Reform of ’32. ”

“ With such an education there will be hope for better things. Things as they are and the struggle for existence as it now is among the helpless classes can please me as little as Godwin. It is a struggle which leads to no progress. But, unlike Godwin, I do not regard Government as necessarily creating the distress; and I certainly regard it as the necessary engine for removing the distress by education in the end, and toning down its effects by restrictions for the present. If only as an engine of education, paternal government must be a permanent factor of society. ”

“ We can suppose an unchecked increase of men going on without any change in human nature; we have only to suppose for the future the same encouragement to marriage and the same habits of life, together with the same law of mortality. ”

“ Malthus did not enter with sympathy or even with full intelligence into the spirit of modern trade. But he sees that large manufacture, with its complement of speculative trading, must succeed or fail precisely as it has judged rightly or judged wrongly of its markets, for it no longer, like the old English small production, waits for orders—it anticipates, woos, and coaxes them. He believes that the awakening of man’s insatiable wants will tend to secure us against both over-population and over-production, by creating a high standard of living. ”

“ We ought, he thinks, to mourn not only for the two and a half millions of men killed, but for the twelve millions whom their death prevented from being born. To which Malthus wisely answers that the slain, being full-grown men, reared at no little cost to themselves and their country, may be fitly mourned, but not the unborn twelve millions, whose appearance in the world would only have sent or kept a corresponding number out of it,—and “if in the best-governed country in Europe we were to mourn the posterity which is prevented from coming into being, we should always wear the habit of grief.” ”

“ The time may come when we shall be so full of liveliness that we shall not sleep, and so full of life that we shall not die. The need for marriage will be superseded by earthly immortality, and the desire for it by the development of intellect. On the renewed earth of the future there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage, but we shall be as the angels. “The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have, in a certain degree, to recommence her career every thirty years. ”

“ If poverty were no evil, churlishness would be no vice. But extreme poverty [942] is a real hindrance to goodness. In the apparent exceptions, as in the voluntary poverty of St. Francis, the greatest evil is absent, for there is no struggle for bare life. To abolish that struggle, and help men to comfort, is in some degree to help men to goodness; and it was the end for which Malthus laboured. The most sure and solid way of reaching it lay, as he thought, in impressing every man with a strong sense of his responsibility for his acts and of his power over his own destiny. ”

“ In our own day and country, men marry when they cannot support a family; the children whom they cannot support die of hunger or sickness, if the charity of the public does not interfere;—or else the fear of misery makes men avoid a marriage for which they have not the means, and their celibacy, whether pure or impure, keeps the numbers of the people on a level with the food. [32] Godwin himself had written in so many words: “There is a principle in human society by which population is perpetually kept down to the level of the means of subsistence.” ”

“ The bad government of our ancestors left much produce unused, and in consequence we have for the present a large margin to draw on. But, “if merely since the time of William the Conqueror all the nations of the earth had been well governed, and if the distribution of property and the habits both of the rich and the poor had been the most favourable to the demand for produce and labour, though the amount of food and population would have been prodigiously greater than at present, the means of diminishing the checks to population would unquestionably be less.” ”

“ Ricardo, on the other hand, says that profits can never be reduced by mere accumulation of capital or competition of capitals, but only by the progressively less fruitful character of the investments to be found for capital as accumulation goes on. As long as there is fertile land to be had, yielding a rich return to capital, no one will accept a poor return. “If in the progress of countries in wealth and population new portions of fertile land can be added to such countries with every increase of capital, profits would never fall nor rents rise.” ”

“ With all his regard for the nation, Malthus looks at social problems too much from the individual’s point of view. He speaks much, for example, of the good effect, on the individual man, of the domestic ideal, and of the ideals of personal prosperity in the world, both built on security of property and liberty of action. He speaks little of the duty of the citizen to the community, and of the return he owes it for his security and liberty. The citizen in his picture of him seems to have nothing but duties to his family and nothing but claims on the state. ”

“ Grant me two postulates, and I disprove your millennium. The first is, that food is necessary; the second, that the instinct for marriage is permanent. No one denies the first, and Godwin’s denial of the second is purely dogmatic. He has given us no proofs. Men have no doubt made progress in other respects; they have passed from barbarism to civilization. But in respect of the second postulate they are the same now as they were 4000 years ago. ”

“ But, unless society itself has moved in a circle, the Utopias will resemble each other no more and no less than do the states of society which they would replace. Our own socialists, therefore, can hardly be dismissed by the stroke of the pen, that classifies them with people so curiously unlike them and each other as Plato, Ball, More, the Fifth Monarchy men, the Levellers, Godwin and Spence and Owen. Malthus does not, in fact, so dismiss them. ”

“ Wherever the people have room and food, they will marry and multiply their numbers, till they press against the limits of both, and begin a fierce struggle for existence, in which death is the punishment of defeat. Godwin and the whole French school are sadly wrong in attributing all inequality to human institutions; human nature is to blame, and, without any artificial aid, this one passion of human nature will be the standing cause of inequality, the most serious obstacle to the removal of it. ”

“ In a general preface to his chapters on Central Europe, Malthus quite recognizes these distinctions and warns us against exact statements. “It seldom happens,” he says, “that the increase of food and of population is uniform; and when the circumstances of a country are varying either from this cause or from any change in the national habits with respect to prudence and cleanliness, it is evident that a proportion which is true at one period will not be at another. Nothing is more difficult than to lay down rules on this subject that do not admit of exceptions.” ”

“ They trust to its cheap labour to save them from the depression which in our days (though never before) appears with unfailing regularity after brisk trade and a crisis. If the hands were not always there for them to employ, they would not at once be able to seize the happy moment of a reviving demand for their goods. “Malthus with his narrow views understands the surplus population to be superfluous absolutely in itself, and not merely in relation to capital; but even he recognizes that over-population is a necessity of modern industry.” ”

“ This may be put more generally than Malthus has put it. If rent is to be paid, there must be wherewithal to pay it; and there cannot be so if production does no more than repay cost. There may, however, be a production beyond mere repayment of cost, not only in farming but in all trades. The very principle of the division of labour and the separation of trades implies that devotion to one occupation makes men so dexterous in production that, besides providing for themselves, they have an overplus wherewith to supply their other wants and the wants of others. ”

“ He argues, in substance, that to give relief in money is to enable the relieved persons to retain their ordinary rate of consumption at the expense of the rest. To this the reply is obvious:—the sufficiency of the stock is not so finely calculated, neither is the amount of it so fixed that it cannot be increased from home or foreign stores,—and to withdraw money from the rich for the poor, and increase the country’s total expenditure on necessaries, might be simply to divert the stream of importation into the channel of necessaries, and lead to a larger use of food other than bread. ”

“ And it might be argued that, if we give up agriculture for manufacture, we change the character of our people; manufacturing industry conduces to mental activity, to an expansion of comforts, to the growth of the middle classes, and to the growth with them of political moderation; but it is more subject than agriculture to the fluctuations of fashion, which lead to chronic destitution and discontent, and the conditions of artizan life are “even in their best state unfavourable to health and virtue.” ”

“ Even the good man is strongest when he can make his very circumstances war against his power to do evil. Mixed from the first of time, human motives will, in this world, remain mixed unto the last, whether in saint, sage, or savage. But civilization, involving, as it does, a progressive change in the dominant ideas of society, will alter the character of the mixture and the proportion of the elements. The laws of Malthus will be obeyed, though the name of Malthus be not mentioned, and the checks, physical or moral, be never brought to mind. ”