DETACHED ESSAYS.  
In Volume II. of the “Essay on the Principle of Population” (edition 1806) there are to be found a number of most interesting remarks on the population question. Book II. contains chapters on the Fruitfulness of Marriage, on the Effects of Epidemics, on Registers of Births, Deaths, and Marriages, and on the General Deductions from the Preceding View of Society.
“There is no absolutely necessary connection,” says Malthus, “between the average age of marriage and the average age of death. In a country the resources of which will allow of a rapid increase of population, the expectation of life or the average age of death may be extremely high, and yet the age of marriage may be very early; and the marriages, then, compared with the contemporary deaths of the registers, would, even after the correction for second and third marriages, be very much too great to represent the true proportion of the born living to marry.”
At the commencement of this century, it appears from the transactions of the Society of Philadelphia, in a paper by Mr. Barton, entitled “Observations on the Probability of Life in the United States,” that the proportion of marriages to births was as 1 to 4?. As, however, this proportion was taken principally from towns, it is probable, according to Malthus, that the births given were too low, and that as many as five might be taken as an average for town and country. According to this author, the mortality at that date was about 1 in 45; and, if the population doubled in twenty-five years, the births would be 1 in 20 (50 per 1,000).
In England at the commencement of this century the proportion of marriages to births appears to have been about 100 to 350. But in those days Mr. Malthus calculated that the annual marriages to the births in England amounted to about 1 in 4. In the East End of London at the present day the writer has found that the average number of children to a marriage among the women of the poorer classes is about 7, whilst the annual births in England and Wales to the marriages 46are nearly as 4? to 1. In France the annual marriages are to the births as 1 to 3.
A writer in Mr. Malthus’s day, Crome, observes that when, the marriages of a country yield less than four births, the population is in a very precarious state; and he estimates the prolificness of marriages by the proportion of yearly births to marriages. If this had been true, the population of many countries of Europe would be at present in a precarious state, since in many, as in France, the proportion of marriages to births is much under 4 to 1.
“The preventive check,” says Malthus, “is perhaps best measured by the smallness of the proportion of yearly births to the whole population. The proportion of yearly marriages to the population is only a just criterion in countries similarly circumstanced, but is incorrect where there is a difference in the prolificness of marriages or in the proportion of the population under the age of puberty, and in the rate of increase. If all the marriages of a country, be they few or many, take place young, and be consequently prolific, it is evident that to produce the same proportion of births a smaller number of marriages will be necessary, or, with the same proportion of marriages, a greater proportion will be produced.”
Curiously enough, in his day Malthus mentions that in France both the births and deaths were greater than they were in Sweden, although the proportion of marriages was then rather less in France. “And when,” he adds, “in two countries compared, one of them has a much greater part of its population under the age of puberty than the other, it is evident that any general proportion of the yearly marriages to the whole population will not imply the same operation of the preventive check among those of a marriageable age.”
One of the most interesting chapters in the second volume of Malthus’ essay is that which relates to the rapid increase of births after the plagues. According to Sussmilch, very few countries had hitherto been exempt from plagues, which every now and then would sweep away one-fourth or one-third of their population. That writer calculated that above one-third of the people in Prussia were destroyed by the plague of 1711; and yet, notwithstanding this great diminution of the population, it appeared that the number of marriages in 1711 was very nearly double the average of the six years preceding the plague. Hence the proportion of births to deaths was prodigious—320 to 100—an excess of births as great, perhaps, as has ever been known in America. In the four years succeeding 47the plague the births were to the deaths in the proportion of above 22 to 10, which, calculating the mortality at 1 in 36, would double the population in 21 years.
“In contemplating,” says Malthus, “the plagues and sickly seasons which occur in the tables of Sussmilch, after a period of rapid increase, it is impossible not to be struck with the idea that the number of inhabitants had, in these instances, exceeded the food and accommodation necessary to preserve them in health. The mass of the people would, upon this supposition, be obliged to live worse, and a greater number of them would be crowded together in one house; and these natural causes would evidently contribute to increase sickness, even though the country, absolutely considered, might not be crowded and populous. In a country even thinly inhabited, if an increase of population takes place before more food is raised, and more houses are built, the inhabitants must be distressed for room and subsistence.”
In Chapter xi. we have some general deductions from the preceding views of Society. Mr. Malthus there shows that the main cause of the slow growth of populations in Europe is insufficiency of supplies of food. No settlements, says our author, could have been worse managed than those of Spain, Mexico, Peru and Quito. Yet, under all their difficulties, these colonies made a quick increase in population. But the English North American Colonies added to the quantity of rich land they held in common with the Spanish and Portuguese settlements, a greater degree of liberty and equality. In Pennsylvania there was no right of primogeniture in Malthus’ time: and in the provinces of New England the eldest son had only a double share. The consequence of these favourable circumstances united was a rapidity of increase almost without a parallel in history. Throughout all the northern provinces the population was found to double itself in 25 years. The original number of persons which had settled in the four provinces of New England, in 1643, was 21,200. Afterwards it was calculated that more left them than went to them. In the year 1760 they were increased to half a million. They had, therefore, all along, doubled their numbers in 25 years. In New Jersey the period of doubling appeared to be 22 years; and in Rhode island still less. In the back settlements, where the inhabitants applied themselves solely to agriculture, and luxury was not known, they were supposed to double their numbers in 15 years.
The population of the United States, says Malthus, writing 48in 1806, according to the last Census, is 11,000,000. “We have no reason to believe that Great Britain is less populous at present, for the emigration of the small parent stock which produced these numbers. On the contrary, a certain amount of emigration is known to be favourable to the population of the mother country. Whatever was the original number of British emigrants which increased so fast in North America, let us ask. Why does not an equal number produce an equal increase in the same time in Great Britain? The obvious reason is the want of food; and that this want is the most efficient cause of the three immediate checks to population which have been observed to prevail in all societies, is evident, from the rapidity with which even old States recover the desolations of war, pestilence, famine, and the convulsions of nature. They are then for a short time placed a little in the condition of new colonies, and the effect is always answerable to what might be expected. If the industry of the inhabitants be not destroyed, subsistence will soon increase beyond the wants of the reduced numbers; and the invariable consequence will be, that population, which before perhaps was nearly stationary, will begin immediately to increase, and will continue its progress till the former population is recovered.”
The decennial censuses of the United States during this century have been as follows, in round numbers:—In 1800, 5,305,000; in 1810, 7,239,000; in 1820, 9,638,000; in 1830, 12,866,000; in 1840, 17,069,000; in 1850, 23,193,000; in 1860, 31,443,000; in 1870, 38,558,000. If we compare the cypher of 1830—12,866,000—with that of 1800—5,305,000—we see that the population of the States far more than doubled itself in the first thirty years of the century, making all due allowance for immigration, by the simple process of fecundity inherent in the human species.
Mr. Malthus mentions (chapter xi. p. 67), that in New Jersey “the proportion of births to deaths, in an average of seven years, ending 1743, was 300 to 100. In England and France, he says, at that time the highest average proportion could not be reckoned at more than 120 to 100.” At this date, 1880, the proportion of births to deaths in France is as 111 is to 100, and in England it is as 152 is to 100, whereas in Dublin the deaths exceed the births. In New Zealand the births are to the deaths as 340 is to 100. There is nothing, he says, the least mysterious in this. “The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same, that it may be considered, in algebraic language, as a given 49quantity. The great law of necessity which prevents population from increasing in any country beyond the food which it can either produce or acquire, is a law so open to our view, so obvious and evident to our understandings, that we cannot for a moment doubt it. The different modes which nature takes to repress a redundant population, do not appear, indeed, to us so certain and regular; but though we cannot always predict the mode, we may with certainty predict the fact. If the proportion of the births to the deaths for a few years indicates an increase of numbers much beyond the proportional increased or acquired food of the country, we may be perfectly certain that unless an emigration take place the deaths will shortly exceed the births, and that the increase that has been observed for a few years cannot be the real average increase of the population of that country. If there were no other depopulating causes, and if the preventive check did not act very strongly, every country would without doubt be subject to periodical plagues and famines.”
This is a well-known passage, and shows the genius of the writer as well as any in his work. How immensely superior is his clear enunciation of the attraction between the sexes when compared with the strange speculations of Mr. Herbert Spencer of late years, about the supposed gradual decay of that attraction in proportion to the alleged increase in the weight of the human brain. It is quite deplorable to see what ingenuity has been exercised by latter-day philosophers to get over the plain and inevitable conclusions of Malthus and his common-sense school. The struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest has been put forward as a plea for allowing over-population to grind the masses in constant misery, and the delusive ideal of the equation of mouths to food in the course of ages by a mere fanciful tendency of organisms to become more perfect, without the exercise of volition, are the latest struggles of the ostrich to burrow with his head in the sand in order to avoid the sight of the inevitable.
“The only criterion,” says Malthus, “of a real and permanent increase in the population of any country is the increase in the means of subsistence. But even this criterion is subject to slight variations, which, however, are completely open to observation. In some countries population seems to have been forced: that is the people have been habituated by degrees to live almost upon the smallest possible quantity of food. There must have been periods in such countries when population increased permanently without an increase in the 50means of subsistence. China, India, and the countries possessed by the Bedoween Arabs, as we have seen in the former part of this work, appear to answer to this description. The average produce of these countries seems to be but barely sufficient to support the lives of the inhabitants, and, of course, any deficiency from the badness of the seasons must be fatal. Nations in this state must necessarily be subject to famines.”
Almost all the histories of epidemics which we have read tend to confirm the supposition that they are greatly caused by that over-population which, as in Dublin in 1880, leads to over-crowded houses filled by ill-fed and ill-clad inmates. Dr. Short, an author of the last century, shows in his work (Air, Seasons, &c., vol. ii. p. 206), that a very considerable proportion of the epidemic years either have followed or were accompanied by seasons of dearth and bad food. In other places he also mentions great plagues as diminishing particularly the numbers of the poorest classes; and in speaking of different diseases, he observes, that those which are occasioned by bad and unwholesome food generally last the longest.
“We know (says our author) from constant experience that fevers are generated in our jails, our manufactories, our crowded workhouses, and in the narrow and close streets of our large towns, all which situations appear to be similar in their effects to squalid poverty, and we cannot doubt that causes of this kind, aggravated in degree, contributed to the production and prevalence of those great and wasting plagues formerly so common in Europe, but which now, from the mitigation of their causes, are everywhere considerably abated, and in many places appear to be completely extirpated.
“Of the other great scourge of mankind—famine—it may be observed that it is not in the nature of things that the increase of population should absolutely produce one. This increase, though rapid, is necessarily gradual, and as the human frame cannot be supported, even for a very short time, without food, it is evident that no more human beings can grow up than there is provision to maintain. But though the principle of population cannot absolutely produce a famine, it prepares the way for one in the most complete manner, and by obliging all the lower classes of people to subsist merely on the smallest quantity of food that will support life, turns even a slight deficiency from the failure of the seasons into a severe dearth; and may be fairly said, therefore, to be one of 51the principal causes of famine. Among the signs of an approaching dearth, Dr. Short mentions one or more years of luxuriant crops together, and this observation is probably just, as we know that the general effect of years of cheapness and abundance is to dispose a greater number of persons to marry, and under such circumstances the return to a year which gives only an average crop might produce a scarcity.”
Much has been lately spoken in professional assemblies about recent epidemics of small-pox. It is curious to hear what our author, writing in 1806, or seven years after the discovery of Edward Jenner, has to say. “The small-pox (says Malthus, book 2, ch. xi., p. 61), which at present may be considered as the most prevalent and fatal epidemic in Europe, is of all others, perhaps, the most difficult to account for, though the periods of its return are in many places regular. Dr. Short (Air, Seasons, vol. ii., p. 441), observes that from the history of this disorder it seems to have very little dependence on present constitutions of the weather of seasons, and that it appears epidemically at all times and in all states of the air, though not so frequently in hard frost. We know of no instances, I believe, of its being clearly generated under any circumstances of situation. I do not mean, therefore, to insinuate that poverty and crowded houses ever absolutely produced it; but I may be allowed to remark that in those places where its returns are regular, and its ravages among children, particularly among those of the lowest class, are considerable, it necessarily follows that these circumstances, in a greater degree than usual, must always precede and accompany its appearance; that is, from the time of its last visit, the average number of children will be increasing, the people will, in consequence, be growing poorer, and the houses will be more crowded till another visit removes this superabundant population.”
Other circumstances being equal, it may be affirmed that countries are populous according to the quantity of human food which they produce or can acquire; and happy, according to the liberality with which the food is divided, or the quantity which a day’s labor will purchase. Compare, on this standard of our author, the condition of an agricultural laborer in England, with beefsteak at one shilling the pound in London, with that of Dunedin, where, as we write, it is at fourpence the pound, and wages are at least two and a half those in England for that class. “Corn countries are more populous than pasture countries, and rice countries more 52populous than corn countries. But their happiness does not depend either upon their being thinly or fully inhabited, upon their poverty or their riches, their youth or their age; but on the proportion which the population and the food bear to each other. This proportion is generally the most favorable in new colonies, where the knowledge and industry of an old state operate on the fertile unappropriated land of a new one. In other cases the youth or the age of a state is not, in this respect, of great importance. It is probable that the food of Great Britain is divided in more liberal shares to its inhabitants at the present period than it was two thousand, three thousand, or four thousand years ago.”
This passage from Malthus shows that he at least does not believe in the view sometimes attributed to him that the position of civilised society is tending continually to become more and more unbearable from pressure of population on food. Malthus saw quite clearly that the prevention of a rapid birth-rate was more and more practised by nations in proportion as they became better educated, and he therefore did not at all take the pessimistic aspect of human society that many believe.
“In a country never to be overrun by a people more advanced in arts, but left to its own natural progress in civilisation; from the time when its produce might be considered as a unit, to the time that it might be considered as a million, during the lapse of many thousand years, there would not be a single period when the mass of the people could be said to be free from distress, either directly or indirectly, from want of food. In every state in Europe, since we have first had accounts of it, millions and millions of human existences have been suppressed from this simple cause, though perhaps in some of these states an absolute famine may never have been known.”
These expressions of Mr. Malthus are entirely opposed to the idea that he held that the future of society was likely to be less bright than that of the past. Still there is a certain sadness in the following sentence, which is the real secret of the unpopularity of the great discoverer’s doctrine. In page 73, book ii., chap. xi., he says: “Population invariably increases when the means of subsistence increase, unless prevented by powerful and obvious checks.... Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that unless arrested by the preventive 53check, premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this work of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic, inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and at one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.”
In Mr. Malthus’s edition of 1806, the third book contains several essays on the different systems or expedients which have been proposed or have prevailed in society, as they affect the evils arising from the principle of population. In chapter i., p. 77, he treats of systems of equality proposed by Wallace, and the illustrious Condorcet. Mr. Wallace, whose name has been adverted to by many writers as one of those who partly saw the importance of the tendency of mankind to increase more rapidly than food, did not seem to be aware that any difficulty would arise from this cause till the whole earth had been cultivated as a garden, and was incapable of any further increase of produce. Mr. Malthus remarks upon this idea of Mr. Wallace, that “at every period during the period of cultivation, from the present moment to the time when the whole earth was become like a garden, the distress for want of food would be constantly pressing on all mankind if they were equal. Though the produce of the earth would be increasing every year, population would be tending to increase much faster, and the redundancy must necessarily be checked by the periodical action of moral restraint, vice, or misery.”
M. Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain was written, it is said, under the pressure of that cruel proscription which terminated in his death during the French Revolution, and the posthumous publication is only a sketch of a much larger work which he proposed to write. By the application of calculations to the probabilities of life and the interest of money, Condorcet proposed that a fund should be established, which should assure to the old an assistance produced in part by their own former savings, and in part by the savings of individuals, who in making the same sacrifice die before they reap the benefit of it. These establishments, he observes, might be made in the name and under the protection of the state. Mr. Blackley brought forward a somewhat similar proposal in 1880. Condorcet adds that by 54the just application of such calculations, means might be found of more completely preserving a state of equality, by preventing credit from being the exclusive privilege of large fortunes, and yet giving it a basis equally solid, and by rendering the industry and activity of commerce less dependent on great capitalists.
Mr. Malthus criticises the schemes of Condorcet as follows:—“Supposing for a moment that they would give no check to production, the greatest difficulty remains behind. Were every man sure of a comfortable provision for a family, almost every man would have one; and were the rising generation free from the killing frost of misery, population must increase with unusual rapidity.” And Condorcet himself saw this, for he says: “But in this progress of industry and happiness, each generation will be called to more extended enjoyments, and, in consequence, by the physical constitution of the human frame, to an increase in the number of individuals. Must not there arise a period when these laws, equally necessary, shall counteract each other; when the increase of the number of men surpassing their means of subsistence, the necessary result must be, either a continual diminution of happiness and population—a movement truly retrograde—or, at least, a kind of oscillation between good and evil. Shall we ever arrive at such a period? It is equally impossible to pronounce for or against the future realization of an event, which cannot take place but at an era when the human race will have attained improvements of which we can at present scarcely form a conception.”
To this Mr. Malthus replies that the only point in which he differs from Condorcet in the paragraph just cited is with regard to the period when it may be applied to the human race. Condorcet thought that his age of iron would not come until a very distant era. Our author remarks, on the contrary, that the period when the number of men surpassed their subsistence had long ago arrived; and that this constantly subsisting cause of periodical misery has existed ever since we have any history of mankind, and continues to exist at the present moment.
“M. Condorcet (says Malthus) however goes on to say that should the period which he conceives to be so distant ever arrive, the human race, and the advocates of the perfectibility of man, need not be alarmed at it. He then proceeds to remove the difficulty in a manner which I profess not to understand. Having observed that the ridiculous prejudice of 55superstition would by that time have ceased to throw over morals a corrupt and degrading austerity, he alludes either to a promiscuous concubinage which would prevent breeding, or to something else as unnatural. To remove the difficulty in this way will surely, in the opinion of most men, be to destroy that virtue and purity of manners which the advocates of equality, and of the perfectibili............