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Title: The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 04 (of
12)

Author: William Hazlitt

Editor: Arnold Glover
A. R. Waller

Release date: April 6, 2020 [eBook #61763]
Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT, VOL. 04 (OF
12) ***

THE
COLLECTED WORKS OF
WILLIAM HAZLITT
IN TWELVE VOLUMES

VOLUME FOUR

All rights reserved

William Hazlitt.

From a
miniature on
ivory Executed
by John Hazlitt
about 1784

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
WILLIAM HAZLITT

EDITED BY A. R. WALLER
AND ARNOLD GLOVER

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

W. E. HENLEY

❦

A Reply to Malthus
The Spirit of the Age
Etc.

❦

1902
LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.: NEW YORK

Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, (late) Printers to Her Majesty

CONTENTS
PAGE
A REPLY TO MALTHUS’S ESSAY ON POPULATION 1

THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE 185

PREFACE, ETC., FROM AN ABRIDGMENT OF THE LIGHT OF
NATURE PURSUED 369

PREFACE FROM A NEW AND IMPROVED GRAMMAR OF THE
ENGLISH TONGUE 387

NOTES 397

A REPLY TO THE ESSAY ON
POPULATION BY THE REV. T. R.
MALTHUS
In a Series of Letters. To which are added,
Extracts from the Essay, with Notes

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Published anonymously in one 8vo vol. of 378 pages
(1807) with the following title-page: ‘A Reply to the Essay
on Population, by the Rev. T. R. Malthus. In a Series of
Letters. To which are added, Extracts from the Essay; with
notes. London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and
Orme, Paternoster Row. 1807.’ The volume was printed by
Arliss and Huntsman, 32 Gutter Lane, Cheapside.

ADVERTISEMENT

The three first of the following letters appeared
originally in Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register. There are
several things, in which they may seem to require some
apology. First, some persons, who were convinced by the
arguments, have objected to the style as too flowery, and
full of attempts at description. If I have erred in this
respect, it has been from design. I have indeed
endeavoured to make my book as amusing as the
costiveness of my genius would permit. If however these
critics persist in their objection, I will undertake to produce
a work as dry and formal as they please, if they will
undertake to find readers. Secondly, some of the
observations may be thought too severe and personal. In
the first place, I shall answer that the abuse, of which there
is to be sure a plentiful sprinkling, is not I think unmerited
or unsupported; and in the second place, that if I could
have attacked the works successfully, without attacking the
author, I should have preferred doing so. But the thing was
impossible. Whoever troubles himself about abstract
reasonings, or calm, dispassionate inquiries after truth?
The public ought not to blame me for consulting their taste.
As to the diffuseness, the repetitions, and want of method
to be found in these letters, I have no good defence to
make. I may however make the same excuse for the great
length to which they have run, as the Frenchman did, who
apologised for writing a long letter by saying, that he had
not time to write a shorter.

LETTERS IN

ANSWER TO MALTHUS, &c.

LETTER I
INTRODUCTORY

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

mark, on which both friends and foes may exercise their
malice, or their wantonness, as they think proper. He has
fairly hunted them down, he has driven them into his toils,
he has thrown his net over them, and they remain as a prey
to the first invader, either to be sacrificed without mercy at
the shrine of cold unfeeling avarice, or to linger out a
miserable existence under the hands of ingenious and
scientific tormentors.—There is a vulgar saying, ‘Give a dog
a bad name, and hang him.’ The poor seem to me to be
pretty much in this situation at present. The poor, Sir,
labour under a natural stigma; they are naturally despised.
Their interests are at best but coldly and remotely felt by
the other classes of society. Mr. Malthus’s book has done all
that was wanting to increase this indifference and apathy.
But it is neither generous nor just, to come in aid of the
narrow prejudices and hard-heartedness of mankind, with
metaphysical distinctions and the cobwebs of philosophy.
The balance inclines too much on that side already, without
the addition of false weights. I confess I do feel some
degree of disgust and indignation rising within me, when I
see a man of Mr. Malthus’s character and calling standing
forward as the accuser of those ‘who have none to help
them,’ as the high-priest of ‘pride and covetousness,’
forming selfishness into a regular code, with its codicils,
institutes and glosses annexed, trying to muffle up the hand
of charity in the fetters of the law, to suppress ‘the
compunctious visitings of nature,’ to make men ashamed of
compassion and good-nature as folly and weakness, ‘laying
the flattering unction’ of religion to the conscience of the
riotous and luxurious liver, and ‘grinding the faces of the
poor’ with texts of scripture. Formerly the feelings of
compassion, and the dictates of justice were found to
operate as correctives on the habitual meanness and
selfishness of our nature: at present this order is reversed;
and it is discovered that justice and humanity are not
obstacles in the way of, but that they are the most effectual

strengtheners and supporters of our prevailing passions.
Mr. Malthus has ‘admirably reconciled the old quarrel
between speculation and practice,’ by shewing (I suppose
in humble imitation of Mandeville) that our duty and our
vices both lean the same way, and that the ends of public
virtue and benevolence are best answered by the
meanness, pride, extravagance, and insensibility of
individuals. This is certainly a very convenient doctrine;
and it is not to be wondered at, that it should have become
so fashionable as it has.[1]
While the prejudice infused into the public mind by this
gentleman’s writings subsists in its full force, I am almost
convinced that any serious attempt at bettering the
condition of the poor will be ineffectual. The only object at
present is to gain time. The less it is meddled with either
with good or bad intentions, the better. Tampering with the
disease ‘will but skin and film the ulcerous part, while foul
corruption, mining all within, infects unseen.’ I have not
confidence enough either in the integrity, the abilities, or
the power of our state-doctors to be willing to trust it
entirely in their hands. They risk nothing, if they fail. The
patient is in too desperate a state to bring any imputation
on their skill; and after all, it is only trying experiments in
corpore vili. The only thing they need be afraid of is in
reality doing too much good. This is the only error which
would never be forgiven by those whose resentment they
have most reason to dread. This however there will be no
danger of. The state of public feeling, the dispositions of
individuals, the narrow jealousy of parties, and the
interests of the most powerful members of the community
will, I suspect, suffer little effectually to be done for
bettering the condition, exalting the character,
enlightening the understandings, or securing the comforts,
the independence, the virtue and happiness of the lower
classes of the people. But, I am not equally sure that the

means employed for this very purpose may not be made a
handle for stifling every principle of liberty and honour in
the hearts of a free people. It will be no difficult matter, as
things are circumstanced, under pretence of propriety and
economy, to smuggle in the worst of tyrannies, a principle
of unrelenting, incessant, vexatious, over-ruling influence,
extending to each individual, and to all the petty concerns
of life.
This is what strikes me on the first view of the subject. I
would ask, Is Mr. Whitbread sure of the instruments he is
to employ in the execution of his scheme? Is he sure that
his managing partners in this new political firm of opulent
patronage will not play the game into the hands of those
whose views of government and civilization are very
different from his own? But it seems, that whether
practicable, or no, Mr. Whitbread must bring in a Poor Bill.
The effect of it appears to me to be putting the poor into
the wardship of the rich, to be doing away the little remains
of independence we have left, and making them once more
what they were formerly, the vassals of a wealthy
aristocracy. For my own part, who do not pretend to see far
into things, and do not expect miracles from human nature,
I should wish to trust as little as possible to the liberality
and enlightened views of country squires, or to the tender
mercies of justices of the peace.
The example of Scotland is held out to us as a proof of
the beneficial effects of popular education, and we are
promised all the same advantages from the adoption of the
same plan. The education of the poor is the grand specific
which is to cure all our disorders, and make the leper
whole again; and, like other specifics, it is to operate
equally on all constitutions and in all cases. But I may ask,
Is the education of the poor the only circumstance in which
Scotland differs from England? Are there no other
circumstances in the situation of this country that may

render such a scheme impracticable, or counteract its good
effects, or render it even worse than nugatory? Is
knowledge in itself a principle of such universal and
indisputable excellence that it can never be misapplied,
that it can never be made the instrument and incentive to
mischief, or that it can never be mixed and contaminated
with ‘baser matter’? Do not the peculiar principles and
discipline of the church of Scotland, does not the
traditional and habitual faith in the doctrines of religion, do
not the general manners not of the poor only, but of the
other classes of society, does not the state of cultivation, do
not the employments of the people, the absence of luxury,
and temptation, the small number of great towns, and the
remains of ancient customs, tend to strengthen, to forward,
to give consistency to, and secure the good effects of
education? Or will Mr. Whitbread say that he can supply
the place of these with a beadle, a white wand, a spelling
book, and a primmer? Supposing it practicable, will the
adoption of a general plan of education have the same
effect in our great manufacturing towns, in our sea-ports,
in the metropolis, that it has in the heart of Scotland, or in
the mountains of Cumberland? Will it not have the contrary
effect?
It is not reading in the abstract, but the kind of reading
they are likely to meet with, and the examples about them
leading them to emulate the patterns of sobriety and
industry, or of vice and profligacy held out to them in
books, that will do either good or harm to the morals of a
people. In the country the people read moral or religious,
or, at least, innocent books, and therefore, they are
benefited by them; in towns, they as often meet with
licentious and idle publications, which must do them harm.
It is in vain to say that you will give them good books, they
will get bad ones. Will those hotbeds of vice, the factories
of Manchester, &c., be less fruitful for having the farina of

knowledge sprinkled over them? Will not corruption
quicken faster, and spread wider for having this new
channel opened to it? Will a smattering in books, and the
current pamphlets of the day tend to quench and smother
the flame of the passions, or will it add fuel to them? I do
not scruple to assert, that religion itself, when it comes in
contact with certain situations, may be highly dangerous. It
is the soil in which the greatest virtues and the greatest
vices take root. Where it has not strength to stop the
torrent of dissolute manners, it gives it additional force by
checking it; as the bow that has been bent the contrary
way, recoils back with tenfold violence. It is for this reason
that the morals of the people in the trading towns in the
north of England are, I believe, worse than they are farther
south, because they are brought up more religiously. The
common people there are almost all of them originally
dissenters. Again, it may be asked, will the poor people in
the trading towns send their children to school instead of
sending them to work at a factory? Or will their employers,
forgetting their own interests, compel them to do it? Or will
they give up their profits and their wealth for the sake of
informing the minds, and preserving the morals of the
poor? Oh! no. It may be replied, that it is chiefly for the
peasantry and country people, who compose the largest
part of the community, that this plan of education is
intended. But they are the very people who do not stand in
need of it, and to whom, if it does no harm, it will do little
good. If working hard, and living sparingly are the chief
lessons meant to be inculcated in their minds, they are
already tolerably perfect in their parts. As for the rest, it is
in vain to attempt to make men any thing else but what
their situation makes them. We are the creatures not of
knowledge, but of circumstances.
For all these reasons I cannot help looking at this
general parallel between the benefits derived from

education in Scotland, and those expected from it in this
country as little better than a leurre de dupe. The
advantages of education in the abstract are, I fear, like
other abstractions, not to be found in nature. I thought that
the rage for blind reform, for abstract utility, and general
reasoning, had been exploded long since. If ever it was
proper, it was proper on general subjects, on the nature of
man and his prospects in general. But the spirit of
abstraction driven out of the minds of philosophers has
passed into the heads of members of parliament: banished
from the closets of the studious, it has taken up its
favourite abode in the House of Commons. It has only
shifted its ground and its objects according to the
character of those in whom it is found. It has dwindled
down into petty projects, speculative details, and dreams of
practical, positive matter-of-fact improvement. These new
candidates for fame come in awkwardly holding up the
train of philosophy; and, like the squires of political
romance, invite you to sit down with them to the spoonfuls
of whipt syllabub, the broken scraps of logic, and the same
banquet of windy promises which had been so much more
handsomely served up, and to satiety, by their masters.
I know nothing of Mr. Whitbread personally. His
character stands fair with the public, for consistency and
good intention. But I cannot recognise in his plodding,
mechanical, but ill-directed and unsuccessful endeavours to
bring to justice a great public delinquent, in his flowery
common-place harangues, or in the cold, philosophic
indifference of the sentiments he has expressed upon the
present occasion, either the genius, penetration, or
generous enthusiasm, (regulated, not damped by the
dictates of reason) which shall be equally proof against the
artifices of designing men, against the sanguine delusions
of personal vanity, or the difficulties, the delays, the
disgust, and probable odium to be encountered in the

determined prosecution of such a task. The celebrated
Howard fell a martyr to the great cause of humanity in
which he embarked. He plunged into the depth of
dungeons, into the loathsome cells of disease, ignominy,
and despair; he sacrificed health and life itself as a pledge
of the sincerity of his motives. But what proof has Mr.
Whitbread ever given of his true and undissembled
attachment to the same cause? What sacrifices has he
made, what fatigues has he suffered, what pain has he felt,
what privation has he undergone in the pursuit of his
object, that he should be depended on as the friend and
guardian of the poor, as the dispenser of good or ill to
millions of his fellow-beings? The ‘champion’ should be the
‘child’ of poverty. The author of our religion, when he came
to save the world, took our nature upon him, and became
as one of us: it is not likely that any one should ever prove
the saviour of the poor, who has not common feelings with
them, and who does not know their weaknesses and wants.
To the officious inquiries of all others, What then are we to
do for them? The best answer would perhaps be, Let them
alone.—
I return to the subject from which I set out, and from
which I have wandered without intending it; I mean the
system of Mr. Malthus, under the auspices of whose
discoveries it seems the present plan is undertaken, though
it differs in many of its features from the expedients
recommended by that author. I am afraid that the parent
discovery may, however, in spite of any efforts to prevent it,
overlay the ricketty offspring. Besides, the original design
and principle gives a bias to all our subsequent
proceedings, and warps our views without our perceiving
it. Mr. Malthus’s system must, I am sure, ever remain a
stumbling block in the way of true political economy, as
innate ideas for a long time confused and perplexed all
attempts at philosophy. It is an ignis fatuus, which can only

beguile the thoughtless gazer, and lead him into bogs and
quicksands, before he knows where he is. The details of his
system are, I believe, as confused, contradictory, and
uncertain, as the system itself. I shall, however, confine my
remarks to the outlines of his plan, and his general
principles of reasoning. In these respects, I have no
hesitation in saying that his work is the most complete
specimen of illogical, crude and contradictory reasoning,
that perhaps was ever offered to the notice of the public. A
clear and comprehensive mind is, I conceive, shewn, not in
the extensiveness of the plan which an author has chalked
out for himself, but in the order and connection observed in
the arrangement of the subject, and the consistency of the
several parts. This praise is so far from being applicable to
the reasoning of our author, that nothing was ever more
loose and incoherent. ‘The latter end of his commonwealth
always forgets the beginning.’ Argument threatens
argument, conclusion stands opposed to conclusion. This
page is an answer to the following one, and that to the
next. There is hardly a single statement in the whole work,
in which he seems to have had a distinct idea of his own
meaning. The principle itself is neither new, nor does it
prove any thing new; least of all does it prove what he
meant it to prove. His whole theory is a continued
contradiction; it is a nullity in the science of political
philosophy.
I must, however, defer the proof of these assertions to
another letter, when, if you should deem what I have
already said worthy the notice of your readers, I hope to
make them out to their and your satisfaction.

LETTER II
ON THE ORIGINALITY OF MR. MALTHUS’S
PRINCIPAL ARGUMENT

Sir,—The English have been called a nation of
philosophers; as I conceive, on very slender foundations.
They are indeed somewhat slow and dull, and would be
wise, if they could. They are fond of deep questions without
understanding them; and have that perplexed and plodding
kind of intellect, which takes delight in difficulties, and
contradictions, without ever coming to a conclusion. They
feel most interest in things which promise to be the least
interesting. What is confused and unintelligible they take to
be profound; whatever is remote and uncertain, they
conceive must be of vast weight and importance. They are
always in want of some new and mighty project in science,
in politics, or in morality for the morbid sensibility of their
minds to brood over and exercise itself upon: and by the
time they are tired of puzzling themselves to no purpose
about one absurdity, another is generally ready to start up,
and take its place. Thus there is a perpetual restless
succession of philosophers and systems of philosophy: and
the proof they give you of their wisdom to-day, is by
convincing you what fools they were six months before.
Their pretensions to solidity of understanding rest on the
foundation of their own shallowness and levity; and their
gravest demonstrations rise out of the ruins of others.
Mr. Malthus has for some time past been lord of the
ascendant. But I will venture to predict that his reign will
not be of long duration. His hour is almost come; and this
mighty luminary, ‘who so lately scorched us in the

meridian, will sink temperately to the west, and be hardly
felt as he descends.’ It is not difficult to account for the
very favourable reception his work has met with in certain
classes of society: it must be a source of continual
satisfaction to their minds by relieving them from the
troublesome feelings so frequently occasioned by the
remains of certain silly prejudices, and by enabling them to
set so completely at defiance the claims of ‘worthless
importunity in rags.’ But it is not easy to account for the
attention which our author’s reasonings have excited
among thinking men, except from a habit of extreme
abstraction and over-refined speculation, unsupported by
actual observation or a general knowledge of practical
subjects, in consequence of which the mind is dazzled and
confounded by any striking fact which thwarts its previous
conclusions. There is also in some minds a low and narrow
jealousy, which makes them glad of any opportunity to
escape from the contemplation of magnificent scenes of
visionary excellence, to hug themselves in their own
indifference and apathy, and to return once more to their
natural level. Mr. Malthus’s essay was in this respect a nice
let-down from the too sanguine expectations and
overstrained enthusiasm which preceded it. Else, how a
work of so base tendency, and so poorly glossed over, which
strikes at the root of every humane principle, and all the
while cants about sensibility and morality, in which the
little, low, rankling malice of a parish-beadle, or the
overseer of a work-house is disguised in the garb of
philosophy, and recommended as a dress for every English
gentleman to wear, in which false logic is buried under a
heap of garbled calculations, such as a bad player might
make at cribbage to puzzle those with, who knew less of
the game than himself, where every argument is a felo de
se, and defeats its own purpose, containing both ‘its bane
and antidote’ within itself, how otherwise such a miserable
reptile performance should ever have crawled to that

height of reputation which it has reached, I am utterly
unable to comprehend. But it seems Mr. Malthus’s essay
was a discovery. There are those whom I have heard place
him by the side of Sir Isaac Newton, as both equally great,
the one in natural, the other in political philosophy. But
waving this comparison, I must confess, that were I really
persuaded that Mr. Malthus had made any discovery at all,
there is so little originality, and so much ill-nature and
illiberality in the world, that I should be tempted to
overlook the large share of the latter which Mr. Malthus
possesses in common with the rest of mankind (and which
in him may probably be owing to ill-digestion, to a sickly
constitution, or some former distaste conceived against
poverty) and to consider him merely in the light of a man of
genius. Multum abludit imago. Indeed 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. Whatever some of
his ignorant admirers may pretend, Mr. Malthus will not
say that this was the case. He has himself given us a list of
authors, some of whom he had read before, and some since
the first publication of his Essay,[2] who fully understood
and clearly stated this principle. Among these Wallace is
the chief. He has not only stated the general principle with
the utmost force and precision, by pointing out the
necessary disproportion between the tendency in
population and the tendency in the means of subsistence to
increase after a certain period, (and till this period, namely
till the world became full, I must contend in opposition to
Mr. Malthus that the disproportion would not be necessary,
but artificial); but what is most remarkable, he has brought
this very argument forward as an answer to the same
schemes of imaginary improvement, which the author of

the Essay on population first employed it to overturn.[3] For
it is to be remembered that the use which our author has
since made of this principle to shut up the work-house, to
snub the poor, to stint them in their wages, to deny them
any relief from the parish, and preach lectures to them on
the new-invented crime of matrimony, was an after-thought.
His first, his grand, his most memorable effort was directed
against the modern philosophy. It was the service his
borrowed weapons did in that cause, that sanctified them
at all other purposes. I shall have occasion by and by to
examine how far the argument was a solid one; at present I
am only inquiring into the originality of the idea. And here I
might content myself with referring your readers to
Wallace’s work; or it might be sufficient to inform them that
after indulging in the former part of it in all the schemes of
fancied excellence and Utopian government, which Sir
Thomas More and so many other philosophers and
speculators have endeavoured to establish, he then enters
into an elaborate refutation of them, by describing the
evils, ‘the universal confusion and perplexity in which all
such perfect forms of society must soon terminate, the
sooner on account of their perfection,’ from the principle of
population, and as he expresses it, ‘from these primary
determinations in nature, a limited earth, a limited degree
of fertility, and the continual increase of mankind.’
However, as it is probable that most of your readers may
not have the book within their reach, and as people do not
like to take these things upon trust, or from a mere general
representation of them, I must beg your insertion of the
following extract from the work itself; and though it is
pretty long, yet as you, Sir, seem to be of opinion with me
that the subject of Mr. Malthus’s reputation is a matter of
no mean interest to the public, I am in hopes that you will
not think your pages misemployed in dissipating the
illusion. As to Mr. Malthus himself, if he is a vain man, he

ought to be satisfied with this acknowledgement of his
importance.
‘But without entering further into these abstracted and
uncertain speculations, it deserves our particular attention,
that as no government which hath hitherto been
established, is free from all seeds of corruption, or can be
expected to be eternal; so if we suppose a government to
be perfect in its original frame, and to be administered in
the most perfect manner, after whatever model we suppose
it to have been framed, such a perfect form would be so far
from lasting for ever, that it must come to an end so much
the sooner on account of its perfection. For, though happily
such governments should be firmly established, though
they should be found consistent with the reigning passions
of human nature, though they should spread far and wide;
nay, though they should prevail universally, they must at
last involve mankind in the deepest perplexity, and in
universal confusion. For how excellent soever they may be
in their own nature, they are altogether inconsistent with
the present frame of nature, and with a limited extent of
earth.
‘Under a perfect government, the inconveniences of
having a family would be so intirely removed, children
would be so well taken care of, and everything become so
favourable to populousness, that though some sickly
seasons or dreadful plagues in particular climates might
cut off multitudes, yet in general, mankind would encrease
so prodigiously, that the earth would at last be overstocked,
and become unable to support its numerous inhabitants.
‘How long the earth, with the best culture of which it is
capable from human genius and industry, might be able to
nourish its perpetually encreasing inhabitants, is as
impossible as it is unnecessary to be determined. It is not
probable that it could have supported them during so long
a period as since the creation of Adam. But whatever may

be supposed of the length of this period, of necessity it
must be granted, that the earth could not nourish them for
ever, unless either its fertility could be continually
augmented, or by some secret in nature, like what certain
enthusiasts have expected from the philosopher’s stone,
some wise adept in the occult sciences, should invent a
method of supporting mankind quite different from any
thing known at present. Nay, though some extraordinary
method of supporting them might possibly be found out, yet
if there was no bound to the increase of mankind, which
would be the case under a perfect government, there would
not even be sufficient room for containing their bodies
upon the surface of the earth, or upon any limited surface
whatsoever. It would be necessary, therefore, in order to
find room for such multitudes of men, that the earth should
be continually enlarging in bulk, as an animal or vegetable
body.
‘Now since philosophers may as soon attempt to make
mankind immortal, as to support the animal frame without
food; it is equally certain, that limits are set to the fertility
of the earth, and that its bulk, so far as is hitherto known,
hath continued always the same, and probably could not be
much altered without making considerable changes in the
solar system. It would be impossible, therefore, to support
the great numbers of men who would be raised up under a
perfect government; the earth would be overstocked at
last, and the greatest admirers of such fanciful schemes
must foresee the fatal period when they would come to an
end, as they are altogether inconsistent with the limits of
that earth in which they must exist.
‘What a miserable catastrophe of the most generous of
all human systems of government! How dreadfully would
the magistrates of such commonwealths find themselves
disconcerted at that fatal period, when there was no longer
any room for new colonies, and when the earth could

produce no further supplies! During all the preceding ages,
while there was room for increase, mankind must have
been happy; the earth must have been a paradise in the
literal sense, as the greatest part of it must have been
turned into delightful and fruitful gardens. But when the
dreadful time should at last come, when our globe, by the
most diligent culture, could not produce what was
sufficient to nourish its numerous inhabitants, what happy
expedient could then be found out to remedy so great an
evil?
‘In such a cruel necessity, must there be a law to
restrain marriage? Must multitudes of women be shut up in
cloisters like the ancient vestals or modern nuns? To keep a
ballance between the two sexes, must a proportionable
number of men be debarred from marriage? Shall the
Utopians, following the wicked policy of superstition, forbid
their priests to marry; or shall they rather sacrifice men of
some other profession for the good of the state? Or, shall
they appoint the sons of certain families to be maimed at
their birth, and give a sanction to the unnatural institution
of eunuchs? If none of these expedients can be thought
proper, shall they appoint a certain number of infants to be
exposed to death as soon as they are born, determining the
proportion according to the exigencies of the state; and
pointing out the particular victims by lot, or according to
some established rule? Or, must they shorten the period of
human life by a law, and condemn all to die after they had
compleated a certain age, which might be shorter or
longer, as provisions were either more scanty or plentiful?
Or what other method should they devise (for an expedient
would be absolutely necessary) to restrain the number of
citizens within reasonable bounds?
‘Alas! how unnatural and inhuman must every such
expedient be accounted! The natural passions and
appetites of mankind are planted in our frame, to answer

the best ends for the happiness both of the individuals and
of the species. Shall we be obliged to contradict such a
wise order? Shall we be laid under the necessity of acting
barbarously and inhumanly? Sad and fatal necessity! And
which, after all, could never answer the end, but would give
rise to violence and war. For mankind would never agree
about such regulations. Force, and arms, must at last
decide their quarrels, and the deaths of such as fall in
battle, leave sufficient provisions for the survivors, and
make room for others to be born.
‘Thus the tranquillity and numerous blessings of the
Utopian governments would come to an end; war, or cruel
and unnatural customs, be introduced, and a stop put to
the increase of mankind, to the advancement of knowledge,
and to the culture of the earth, in spite of the most
excellent laws and wisest precautions. The more excellent
the laws had been, and the more strictly they had been
observed, mankind must have sooner become miserable.
The remembrance of former times, the greatness of their
wisdom and virtue, would conspire to heighten their
distress;[4] and the world, instead of remaining the mansion
of wisdom and happiness, become the scene of vice and
confusion. Force and fraud must prevail, and mankind be
reduced to the same calamitous condition as at present.
‘Such a melancholy situation in consequence merely of
the want of provisions, is in truth more unnatural than all
their present calamities. Supposing men to have abused
their liberty, by which abuse, vice has once been introduced
into the world; and that wrong notions, a bad taste, and
vicious habits, have been strengthened by the defects of
education and government, our present distresses may be
easily explained. They may even be called natural, being
the natural consequences of our depravity. They may be
supposed to be the means by which providence punishes
vice; and by setting bounds to the increase of mankind,

prevents the earth’s being overstocked, and men being laid
under the cruel necessity of killing one another. But to
suppose that in the course of a favourable providence, a
perfect government had been established, under which the
disorders of human passions had been powerfully corrected
and restrained; poverty, idleness, and war banished; the
earth made a paradise; universal friendship and concord
established, and human society rendered flourishing in all
respects; and that such a lovely constitution should be
overturned, not by the vices of men, or their abuse of
liberty, but by the order of nature itself, seems wholly
unnatural, and altogether disagreeable to the methods of
providence.
‘By reasoning in this manner, it is not pretended that
’tis unnatural to set bounds to human knowledge and
happiness, or to the grandeur of society, and to confine
what is finite to proper limits. It is certainly fit to set just
bounds to every thing according to its nature, and to adjust
all things in due proportion to one another. Undoubtedly,
such an excellent order, is actually established throughout
all the works of God, in his wide dominions. But there are
certain primary determinations in nature, to which all other
things of a subordinate kind must be adjusted. A limited
earth, a limited degree of fertility and the continual
increase of mankind are three of these original
constitutions. To these determinations, human affairs, and
the circumstances of all other animals, must be adapted. In
which view, it is unsuitable to our ideas of order, that while
the earth is only capable of maintaining a determined
number, the human race should increase without end. This
would be the necessary consequence of a perfect
government and education. On which account it is more
contrary to just proportion, to suppose that such a perfect
government should be established in such circumstances,
than that by permitting vice, or the abuse of liberty in the

wisdom of providence, mankind should never be able to
multiply so as to be able to overstock the earth.
‘From this view of the circumstances of the world,
notwithstanding the high opinion we have of the merits of
Sir Thomas More, and other admired projectors of perfect
governments in ancient or modern times, we may discern
how little can be expected from their most perfect systems.
‘As for these worthy philosophers, patriots, and law-
givers, who have employed their talents in framing such
excellent models, we ought to do justice to their characters,
and gratefully to acknowledge their generous efforts to
rescue the world out of that distress into which it has
fallen, through the imperfection of government. Sincere,
and ardent in their love of virtue, enamoured of its lovely
form, deeply interested for the happiness of mankind, to
the best of their skill, and with hearts full of zeal, they have
strenuously endeavoured to advance human society to
perfection. For this, their memory ought to be sacred to
posterity. But if they expected their beautiful systems
actually to take place, their hopes were ill founded, and
they were not sufficiently aware of the consequences.
‘The speculations of such ingenious authors enlarge our
views, and amuse our fancies. They are useful for directing
us to correct certain errors at particular times. Able
legislators ought to consider them as models, and honest
patriots ought never to lose sight of them, or any proper
opportunity of transplanting the wisest of their maxims into
their own governments, as far as they are adapted to their
particular circumstances, and will give no occasion to
dangerous convulsions. But this is all that can be expected.
Though such ingenious romances should chance to be read
and admired, jealous and selfish politicians need not be
alarmed. Such statesmen need not fear that ever such airy
systems shall be able to destroy their craft, or disappoint
them of their intention to sacrifice the interests of mankind

to their own avarice or ambition. There is too powerful a
charm which works secretly in favor of such politicians,
which will for ever defeat all attempts to establish a perfect
government. There is no need of miracles for this purpose.
The vices of mankind are sufficient. And we need not doubt
but providence will make use of them, for preventing the
establishment of governments which are by no means
suitable to the present circumstances of the earth.’ See
Various Prospects of mankind, nature and providence.
Chap. iv. p. 113.
Here then we have not only the same argument stated;
but stated in the same connection and brought to bear on
the very same subject to which it is applied by the author of
the Essay. The principle and the consequences deduced
from it are exactly the same. It often happens that one man
is the first to make a particular discovery or observation,
and that another draws from it an important inference of
which the former was not at all aware. But this is not the
case in the present instance. As far as general reasoning
will go, it is impossible that any thing should be stated
more clearly, more fully and explicitly than Wallace has
here stated the argument against the progressive
amelioration of human affairs, from the sole principle of
population. ‘So will his anticipation prevent Mr. Malthus’s
discovery;’ for it happens that Wallace’s book was
published so long ago as the year 1761. As to the details of
the Essay, I shall leave them to the connoisseurs, not
pretending to know much about the matter; but as to the
general principle or ground-work, I must contend that it
was completely pre-occupied: Mr. Malthus has no more
pretentions to originality on that score, than I or any one
else would have, who after having read Mr. Malthus’s work
undertook to retail the arguments contained in it and did it
in words a little different from his own.—‘Oh! but,’ I hear
some one exclaim, ‘the geometrical and arithmetical series!

Has Wallace said any thing of them? did he find them out,
or was not this discovery reserved entirely for the genius
and penetration of Mr. Malthus?’ Why really I do not know:
whether after having brought his principle to light, he
christened it himself, is more than I can pretend to
determine. It seems to me sufficient for Wallace to have
said that let the one ratio increase as fast as it would, the
other would increase much faster, as this is all that is
practically meant by a geometrical and arithmetical series.
I should have no objection to let Mr. Malthus have the
honour of standing godfather to another’s bantling (and Mr.
Shandy was of opinion that it was a matter of as great
importance to hit upon a lucky name for a child as to beget
it) but that the technical phrase he has employed as a
convenient shorthand method of explaining the subject, in
reality applies only to one half of it. The gradual increase
applies only to the degree of cultivation of the earth, not to
the quantity. These two things are palpably distinct. It does
not begin to take place till the whole surface of the earth
has been cultivated to a certain degree, or only with
respect to those parts of it which have been cultivated. It is
evident that while most of the soil remained wholly
unoccupied and uncultivated, (which must have been the
case for many ages after these two principles began to
operate, and is still the case in many countries) the power
of increase in the productions of the earth, and
consequently, in the support of population would be exactly
in proportion to the population itself, for there would be
nothing more necessary in order to the earth’s maintaining
its inhabitants than that there should be inhabitants
enough to till it. In this case the cultivation of the earth
would be limited by the population, not the population by
the state of the cultivation. Where there was no want of
room, and a power of transporting themselves from place
to place, which there would naturally be in great
continents, and in gradually increasing colonies, there

could be no want of subsistence. All that would be wanted
would be power to raise or gather the fruits which the
earth had in store, which as long as men were born with
hands they would be always able to do. If a certain extent
of ground easily maintained a certain number of
inhabitants, they would only have to spread themselves
over double the surface to maintain double the number. The
difficulty is not in making more land maintain more men,
but in making the same spot of ground maintain a greater
number than it did before. Thus Noah might have taken
possession of the three contiguous quarters of the globe for
himself and his three sons; and, if instead of having three
sons, he had had three hundred, there would, I believe,
have been no danger of their starving, but the contrary,
from the rapid increase of population. What I mean to shew
is, that it is not true as a general principle that the increase
of population and the increase of subsistence are
necessarily disproportionate to each other, that the one is
in a geometrical, the other is in an arithmetical ratio; but,
that in a particular and very important view of the subject,
the extent of population is only limited by the extent of the
earth, and that the increase of the means of subsistence
will be in proportion to the greater extent of surface
occupied, which may be enlarged as fast as there are
numbers to occupy it. I have been thus particular, because
mathematical terms carry with them an imposing air of
accuracy and profundity, and ought, therefore, to be
applied strictly, and with the greatest caution, or not at all.
I should say, then, that looking at the subject in a general
and philosophical point of view, I do not think that the
expression of an arithmetical and geometrical series
applies: for, with respect to the extent of ground occupied,
which is one thing on which population depends, and in the
first instance always, this might evidently be increased in
any ratio whatever, that the increase of population would
admit, until the earth was entirely occupied; and after that

there would be no room either for a geometrical or
arithmetical progression; it would be at an absolute stand.
The distinction is therefore confined to the degree of art
and diligence used in the cultivation of those parts which
have been already occupied. This has no doubt gone on at a
very slow kind of snail’s pace from the very first, and will I
dare say continue to do so. Or to adopt Wallace’s
distinction, the increase of population is either not
restricted at all by the ‘limited nature of the earth,’ or it is
limited absolutely by it: it is only kept back indefinitely by
the ‘limited fertility’ of the earth; and it cannot be said to
be kept back necessarily by this, while there are vast tracts
of habitable land left untouched. Till there is no more room,
and no more food to be procured without extreme exertion
and contrivance, the arithmetical and geometrical ratios do
not naturally begin to operate; and the gradual increase
that might take place after that period, is not in my opinion
(who am no great speculator) of sufficient importance to
deserve a pompous appellation. I would, therefore, rather
stop there, because it will simplify the question. Till the
world is full, or at least till every country is full, that is,
maintains as many inhabitants as the soil will admit,
namely, till it can be proved satisfactorily that it might not
by taking proper methods be made to maintain double the
number that it does, the increase of mankind is not
necessarily checked by the ‘limited extent of the earth,’ nor
by its ‘limited fertility,’ but by 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. Till
then, Mr. Malthus has no right to set up his arithmetical
and geometrical ratios upon the face of the earth, and say
they are the work of nature. You, Sir, will not be at a loss to
perceive the fallacy which lurks under the gloss which Mr.
Malthus has here added to Wallace’s text. His readers
looking at his mathematical scale will be apt to suppose,
that population is a naturally growing and necessary evil;

that it is always encroaching on and straitening the means
of existence, and doing more harm than good: that its
pernicious effects are at all times and in all places equally
necessary and unavoidable; that it is at all times an evil,
but that the evil increases in proportion to the increase of
population; and that, therefore, there is nothing so
necessary as to keep population down at all events. This is
the imperious dictate of nature, the grinding law of
necessity, the end and the fulfilling of the commandment. I
do not mean to say, that Mr. Malthus does not often shift
his ground on this subject, or that he is not himself aware
of the deception. It is sufficient for him that he has it to
resort to, whenever he is in want of it, that he has been
able to throw dust in his readers’ eyes, and dazzle them by
a specious shew of accuracy; that he has made out a bill of
indictment against the principle of population as a common
nuisance in society, and has obtained a general warrant
against it, and may have it brought into court as a felon
whenever he thinks proper. He has alarmed men’s minds
with confused apprehensions on the subject, by setting
before their eyes, in an orderly series, the malignant nature
and terrible effects of population, which are perpetually
increasing as it goes on: and they are ready to assent to
every scheme that promises to keep these dreadful evils at
a distance from them. ‘Sacro tremuere timore. Every
coward is planet-struck.’ But nothing of all this is the truth.
Population is only an evil, as Mr. Malthus has himself
shewn, in proportion as it is excessive; it is not a necessary
evil, till the supply of food can, from natural causes, no
longer keep pace with it: till this is the case, no restraints
are necessary, and when this is the case, the same
wholesome degree of restraint, the same quantity of vice
and misery, will operate equally to prevent any tremendous
consequences, whether the actual population is great or
small; that is, whether it is stopped only from having
reached the utmost limits prescribed by nature, or whether

it has been starved and crushed down long before that
period by positive, arbitrary institutions, and the perverse
nature of man. But this is entering upon a matter which I
intended to reserve for another letter in which I shall
examine the force of the arguments which Mr. Malthus has
built upon this principle. At present, I have done all that
was necessary to the performance of the first part of my
engagement, which was to shew that Mr. Malthus had little
claim to the praise of originality.

LETTER III
ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION AS
AFFECTING THE SCHEMES OF UTOPIAN
IMPROVEMENT
‘A swaggering paradox, when once explained, soon sinks into an unmeaning
common-place.’
Burke.

Sir,—This excellent saying of a great man was never more
strictly applicable to any system than it is to Mr. Malthus’s
paradox, and his explanation of it. It seemed, on the first
publication of the Essay on Population, as if the whole
world was going to be turned topsy-turvy, all our ideas of
moral good, and evil were in a manner confounded, we
scarcely knew whether we stood on our head or our heels:
but after exciting considerable expectation, giving us a
good shake, and making us a little dizzy, Mr. Malthus, does
as we do when we shew the children London,—sets us on
our feet again, and every thing goes on as before. The
common notions that prevailed on this subject, till our
author’s first population-scheme tended to weaken them,
were that life is a blessing, and that the more people could
be maintained in any state in a tolerable degree of health,
comfort and decency, the better: that want and misery are
not desirable in themselves, that famine is not to be
courted for its own sake, that wars, disease and pestilence
are not what every friend of his country or his species
should pray for in the first place: that vice in its different
shapes is a thing, that the world could do very well without,

and that if it could be got rid of altogether, it would be a
great gain. In short, that the object both of the moralist and
politician was to diminish as much as possible the quantity
of vice and misery existing in the world: without
apprehending that by thus effectually introducing more
virtue and happiness, more reason and good sense, that by
improving the manners of a people, removing pernicious
habits and principles of acting, or securing greater plenty,
and a greater number of mouths to partake of it, they were
doing a disservice to humanity. Then comes Mr. Malthus
with his octavo book, and tells us there is another great
evil, which had never been found out, or at least not
sufficiently attended to till his time, namely excessive
population: that this evil was infinitely greater and more to
be dreaded than all others put together; and that its
approach could only be checked by vice and misery: that
any increase of virtue or happiness, was the direct way to
hasten it on; and that in proportion as we attempted to
improve the condition of mankind, and lessened the
restraints of vice and misery, we threw down the only
barriers that could protect us from this most formidable
scourge of the species, population. Vice, and misery were
indeed evils, but they were absolutely necessary evils;
necessary to prevent the introduction of others of an
incalculably, and inconceivably greater magnitude; and that
every proposal to lessen their actual quantity on which the
measure of our safety depended, might be attended with
the most ruinous consequences, and ought to be looked
upon with horror. I think, Sir, this description of the
tendency and complexion of Mr. Malthus’s first essay is not
in the least exaggerated, but an exact and faithful picture
of the impression, which it made on every one’s mind.
After taking some time to recover from the surprise and
hurry into which so great a discovery would naturally throw
him, he comes forward again with a large quarto, in which

he is at great pains both to say and unsay all that he had
said in his former volume, and upon the whole concludes,
that population is in itself a good thing, that it is never
likely to do much harm, that virtue and happiness ought to
be promoted by every practicable means, and that the most
effectual as well as desirable check to excessive population
is moral restraint. The mighty discovery, thus reduced to,
and pieced out by common sense, the wonder vanishes, and
we breathe a little freely again. Mr. Malthus is however, by
no means willing to give up his old doctrine, or eat his own
words: he stickles stoutly for it at times. He has his fits of
reason and his fits of extravagance, his yielding and his
obstinate moments, fluctuating between the two, and
vibrating backwards and forwards with a dexterity of self-
contradiction which it is wonderful to behold. The following
passage is so curious in this respect that I cannot help
quoting it in this place. Speaking of the reply of the author
of the Political Justice to his former work, he observes, ‘But
Mr. Godwin says, that if he looks into the past history of the
world, he does not see that increasing population has been
controlled and confined by vice and misery alone. In this
observation I cannot agree with him. I will thank Mr.
Godwin to name to me any check, that in past ages has
contributed to keep down the population to the level of the
means of subsistence, that does not fairly come under some
form of vice or misery; except indeed the check of moral
restraint, which I have mentioned in the course of this
work; and which to say the truth, whatever hopes we may
entertain of its prevalence in future, has undoubtedly in
past ages operated with very inconsiderable force.’[5] When
I assure the reader that I give him this passage fairly and
fully, I think he will be of opinion with me, that it would be
difficult to produce an instance of a more miserable
attempt to reconcile a contradiction by childish evasion, to
insist upon an argument, and give it up in the same breath.
Does Mr. Malthus really think that he has such an absolute

right and authority over this subject of population, that
provided he mentions a principle, or shews that he is not
ignorant of it, and cannot be caught napping by the critics,
he is at liberty to say that it has or has not had any
operation, just as he pleases, and that the state of the fact
is a matter of perfect indifference. He contradicts the
opinion of Mr. Godwin that vice and misery are not the only
checks to population, and gives as a proof of his assertion,
that he himself truly has mentioned another check. Thus
after flatly denying that moral restraint has any effect at
all, he modestly concludes by saying that it has had some,
no doubt, but promises that it will never have a great deal.
Yet in the very next page, he says, ‘On this sentiment,
whether virtue, prudence or pride, which I have already
noticed under the name of moral restraint, or of the more
comprehensive title, the preventive check, it will appear,
that in the sequel of this work, I shall lay considerable
stress,’ p. 385. This kind of reasoning is enough to give one
the head-ache. But to take things in their order.
The most singular thing in this singular performance of
our author is, that it should have been originally ushered
into the world as the most complete and only satisfactory
answer to the speculations of Godwin, Condorcet and
others, or to what has been called the modern philosophy. A
more complete piece of wrong-headedness, a more strange
perversion of reason could hardly be devised by the wit of
man. Whatever we may think of the doctrine of the
progressive improvement of the human mind, or of a state
of society in which every thing will be subject to the
absolute control of reason, however absurd, unnatural, or
impracticable we may conceive such a system to be,
certainly it cannot without the grossest inconsistency be
objected to it, that such a system would necessarily be
rendered abortive, because if reason should ever get this
mastery over all our actions, we shall then be governed

entirely by our physical appetites and passions, without the
least regard to consequences. This appears to me a
refinement on absurdity. Several philosophers and
speculatists had supposed that a certain state of society
very different from any that has hitherto existed was in
itself practicable; and that if it were realised, it would be
productive of a far greater degree of human happiness than
is compatible with the present institutions of society. I have
nothing to do with either of these points. I will allow to any
one who pleases that all such schemes are ‘false,
sophistical, unfounded in the extreme.’ But I cannot agree
with Mr. Malthus that they would be bad, in proportion as
they were good; that their excellence would be their ruin;
or that the true and only unanswerable objection against all
such schemes is that very degree of happiness, virtue and
improvement to which they are supposed to give rise. And I
cannot agree with him in this because it is contrary to
common sense, and leads to the subversion of every
principle of moral reasoning. Without perplexing himself
with the subtle arguments of his opponents, Mr. Malthus
comes boldly forward, and says, ‘Gentlemen, I am willing to
make you large concessions, I am ready to allow the
practicability and the desirableness of your schemes, the
more happiness, the more virtue, the more refinement they
are productive of the better, all these will only add to the
“exuberant strength of my argument”; I have a short
answer to all objections, to be sure I found it in an old
political receipt-book, called Prospects, &c. by one Wallace,
a man not much known, but no matter for that, finding is
keeping, you know’: and with one smart stroke of his wand,
on which are inscribed certain mystical characters, and
algebraic proportions, he levels the fairy enchantment with
the ground. For, says Mr. Malthus, though this improved
state of society were actually realised, it could not possibly
continue, but must soon terminate in a state of things
pregnant with evils far more insupportable than any we at

present endure, in consequence of the excessive population
which would follow, and the impossibility of providing for
its support.
This is what I do not understand. It is, in other words,
to assert that the doubling the population of a country, for
example, after a certain period, will be attended with the
most pernicious effects, by want, famine, bloodshed, and a
state of general violence and confusion, this will afterwards
lead to vices and practices still worse than the physical
evils they are designed to prevent, &c. and yet that at this
period those who will be the most interested in preventing
these consequences, and the best acquainted with the
circumstances that lead to them will neither have the
understanding to foresee, nor the heart to feel, nor the will
to prevent the sure evils to which they expose themselves
and others, though this advanced state of population, which
does not admit of any addition without danger is supposed
to be the immediate result of a more general diffusion of
the comforts and conveniences of life, of more enlarged
and liberal views, of a more refined and comprehensive
regard to our own permanent interests, as well as those of
others, of corresponding habits and manners, and of a state
of things, in which our gross animal appetites will be
subjected to the practical control of reason. The influence
of rational motives, of refined and long-sighted views of
things is supposed to have taken place of narrow, selfish
and merely sensual motives: this is implied in the very
statement of the question. ‘What conjuration and what
mighty magic’ should thus blind our philosophical
descendants on this single subject in which they are more
interested than in all the rest, so that they should stand
with their eyes open on the edge of a precipice, and instead
of retreating from it, should throw themselves down
headlong, I cannot comprehend; unless indeed we suppose
that the impulse to propagate the species is so strong and

uncontrolable that reason has no power over it. This is
what Mr. Malthus was at one time strongly disposed to
assert, and what he is at present half inclined to retract.
Without this foundation to rest on, the whole of his
reasoning is unintelligible. It seems to me a most childish
way of answering any one, who chooses to assert that
mankind are capable of being governed entirely by their
reason, and that it would be better for them if they were, to
say, No, for if they were governed entirely by it, they would
be much less able to attend to its dictates than they are at
present: and the evils, which would thus follow from the
unrestrained increase of population, would be excessive.—
Almost every little Miss, who has had the advantage of a
boarding-school education, or been properly tutored by her
mamma, whose hair is not of an absolute flame-colour, and
who has hopes in time, if she behaves prettily, of getting a
good husband, waits patiently year after year, looks about
her, rejects or trifles with half a dozen lovers, favouring
one, laughing at another, chusing among them ‘as one picks
pears, saying, this I like, that I loathe,’ with the greatest
indifference, as if it were no such very pressing affair, and
all the while behaves very prettily; till she is at last smitten
with a handsome house, a couple of footmen in livery, or a
black-servant, or a coach with two sleek geldings, with
which she is more taken than with her man:—why, what an
idea does Mr. Malthus give us of the grave, masculine
genius of our Utopian philosophers, their sublime
attainments and gigantic energy, that they will not be able
to manage these matters as decently and cleverly as the
silliest women can do at present! Mr. Malthus indeed
endeavours to soften the absurdity by saying that moral
restraint at present owes its strength to selfish motives:
what is this to the purpose? If Mr. Malthus chooses to say,
that men will always be governed by the same gross
mechanical motives that they are at present, I have no
objection to make to it; but it is shifting the question: it is

not arguing against the state of society we are considering
from the consequences to which it would give rise, but
against the possibility of its ever existing. It is absurd to
object to a system on account of the consequences which
would follow if we were to suppose men to be actuated by
entirely different motives and principles from what they are
at present, and then to say, that those consequences would
necessarily follow, because men would never be what we
suppose them. It is very idle to alarm the imagination by
deprecating the evils that must follow from the practical
adoption of a particular scheme, yet to allow that we have
no reason to dread those consequences, but because the
scheme itself is impracticable.—But I am ashamed of
wasting your reader’s time and my own in thus beating the
air. It is not however my fault that Mr. Malthus has written
nonsense, or that others have admired it. It is not Mr.
Malthus’s nonsense, but the opinion of the world
respecting it, that I would be thought to compliment by this
serious refutation of what in itself neither deserves nor
admits of any reasoning upon it. If however we recollect
the source from whence Mr. Malthus borrowed his
principle and the application of it to improvements in
political philosophy, we must allow that he is merely
passive in error. The principle itself would not have been
worth a farthing to him without the application, and
accordingly he took them as he found them lying snug
together; and as Trim having converted the old jack-boots
into a pair of new mortars immediately planted them
against whichever of my uncle Toby’s garrisons the allies
were then busy in besieging, so the public-spirited
gallantry of our modern engineer directed him to bend the
whole force of his clumsy discovery against that system of
philosophy which was the most talked of at the time, but to
which it was the least applicable of all others. Wallace, I
have no doubt, took up his idea either as a paradox, or a jeu
d’esprit, or because any thing, he thought, was of weight

enough to overturn what had never existed anywhere but in
the imagination, or he was led into a piece of false logic by
an error we are very apt to fall into, of supposing because
he had never been struck himself by the difficulty of
population in such a state of society, that therefore the
people themselves would not find it out, nor make any
provision against it. But though I can in some measure
excuse a lively paradox, I do not think the same favour is to
be shewn to the dull, dogged, voluminous repetition of an
absurdity.
I cannot help thinking that our author has been too
much influenced in his different feelings on this subject, by
the particular purpose he had in view at the time. Mr.
Malthus might not improperly have taken for the motto of
his first edition, ‘These three bear record on earth, vice,
misery, and population.’ In his answer to Mr. Godwin, this
principle was represented as an evil, for which no remedy
could be found but in evil;—that its operation was
mechanical, unceasing, necessary; that it went strait
forward to its end, unchecked by fear, or reason, or
remorse; that the evils, which it drew after it, could only be
avoided by other evils, by actual vice and misery.
Population was in fact the great devil, the untamed
Beelzebub that was only kept chained down by vice and
misery, and that if it were once let loose from these
restraints, it would go forth, and ravage the earth. That
they were therefore the two main props and pillars of
society, and that the lower and weaker they kept this
principle, the better able they were to contend with it: that
therefore any diminution of that degree of them which at
present prevails, and is found sufficient to keep the world
in order, was of all things chiefly to be dreaded.—Mr.
Malthus seems fully aware of the importance of the stage-
maxim, To elevate and surprise. Having once heated the
imaginations of his readers, he knows that he can

afterwards mould them into whatever shape he pleases. All
this bustle and terror, and stage-effect, and theatrical-
mummery, was only to serve a temporary purpose, for all of
a sudden the scene is shifted, and the storm subsides.
Having frighted away the boldest champions of modern
philosophy, this monstrous appearance, full of strange and
inexplicable horrors, is suffered quietly to shrink back to its
natural dimensions, and we find it to be nothing more than
a common-sized tame looking animal, which however
requires a chain and the whip of its keeper to prevent it
from becoming mischievous. Mr. Malthus then steps
forward and says, ‘the evil we were all in danger of was not
population,—but philosophy. Nothing is to be done with the
latter by mere reasoning. I therefore thought it right to
make use of a little terror to accomplish the end. As to the
principle of population you need be under no alarm, only
leave it to me and I shall be able to manage it very well. All
its dreadful consequences may be easily prevented by a
proper application of the motives of common prudence and
common decency.’ If however any one should be at a loss to
know how it is possible to reconcile such contradictions, I
would suggest to Mr. Malthus the answer which Hamlet
makes to his friend Guildenstern, ‘’Tis as easy as lying:
govern these ventiges (the poor-rates and private charity)
with your fingers and thumb, and this same instrument will
discourse most excellent music; look you, here are the
stops,’ (namely, Mr. Malthus’s Essay and Mr. Whitbread’s
Poor Bill). To sum up the whole of this argument in one
word. Let us suppose with Mr. Malthus that population can
only be kept down by a certain degree of vice and misery.
Let us also suppose that these checks are for a time
removed, and that mankind become perfectly virtuous and
happy. Well, then, according to the former supposition, this
would necessarily lead to an excessive increase of
population. Now the question is, to what degree of excess it
would lead, and where it would naturally stop. Mr. Malthus,

to make good his reasoning, must suppose a miracle to take
place; that after population has begun to increase
excessively, no inconvenience is felt from it, that in the
midst of the ‘imminent and immediate’ evils which follow
from it, people continue virtuous and happy and
unconscious of the dangers with which they are
surrounded; till of a sudden Mr. Malthus opens the flood-
gates of vice and misery, and they are overwhelmed by
them, all at once. In short he must suppose either that this
extraordinary race of men, in proportion as population
increases, are gradually reduced in size, ‘and less than
smallest dwarfs, in narrow room, throng numberless, like
that pygmean race beyond the Indian mount, or fairy elves’;
or that they have some new world assigned them as a
breeding-place, from which attempting to return they are
immediately squeezed to death, like people rushing into a
crowded theatre. On the other hand, I contend that in the
natural course of things, that is, if we suppose people to
retain their usual dimensions, to eat, and 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 from the excess of
virtue and happiness, its inconveniences would return, and
people would no longer be perfectly virtuous and happy:
that is, 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. There is therefore no foundation for the
alarm given by Mr. Malthus, for vice and misery are such

ready and sure resources that we can be at a loss for them
at no time; and farther with respect to the state of society
supposed by Mr. Malthus, that is if we could once drive vice
and misery out of the world, I really do not see what
occasion we should have for them afterwards.
The most important question yet remains, which is not
how Mr. Malthus came by his discovery, nor whether he
was right in endeavouring to exemplify it in the first
instance by shewing its effects on an imaginary state of
society where it would be naturally disarmed of its
malignity, but whether the practical conclusions he has
drawn from it are not of weight and moment in themselves,
and whether they are not established so clearly and fully as
to make it necessary for us to reverse almost entirely all
our old reasonings on the principles of political economy. I
confess, I have some difficulty in determining, whether Mr.
Malthus’s principles do or do not materially affect the
commonly received notions on this subject, because I really
do not know what those principles are, and till Mr. Malthus
himself tells us, whether he would have us believe in the
new revelation or the old, it is impossible that any one
should. If we are to consider those as Mr. Malthus’s real
and chastized opinions which are the least like himself,
which most flatly contradict his former assertions, which
being forced from him may be looked upon as confessions
of the truth, I see nothing in these that in any manner
interferes with the common sense of mankind. And though
Mr. Malthus still perseveres in almost all his extreme
conclusions, yet as those conclusions are for the most part
unwarrantable assumptions, disproved even by his own
concessions, and shew nothing more than Mr. Malthus’s
qualifications for the delicate office of conscience-keeper to
the rich and great, I am so far from considering them as
new and important discoveries, that I must be excused if I

consider them as in the highest degree false and
dangerous, and treat them accordingly.

LETTER IV
ON THE GENERAL TENDENCY OF
POPULATION TO EXCESS

Sir,—Mr. Malthus’s argument against a state of
unlimited improvement, of perfect wisdom, virtue and
happiness, from the vice, misery, and madness inseparable
from such a state would, if admitted, be an effectual bar to
all limited improvement whatever. It is for this reason, that
I have dwelt so long on the subject. If out of timidity, or
complaisance, or prejudice against an unpopular system,
we suffer ourselves to be wheedled into a silly persuasion,
that the worst thing that could happen for the human race
would be their being able to realise not in words only, but
in deed all the fine things, that have been said of them, we
then fairly throw ourselves upon the mercy of our
adversaries. For what is there in this case, to hinder Mr.
Malthus, or any one else, from representing every degree
of practical improvement as an approximation to this
deplorable crisis, from binding up the slips and scyons of
human happiness with this great trunk of evil, and root of
all our woe, from marking with his slider and graduated
scale all our advances towards this ideal perfection,
however partial or necessary, as so many deviations from
the strict line of our duty, and only sphere of our permanent
happiness? It is evident, that the only danger of all
imaginary schemes of improvement arises from their being
exaggerations of the real capacities of our nature, from
supposing that we can pick out all the dross, and leave
nothing but the gold; that is, from their being carried to
excess, and aiming at more than is practicable. But if we

allow that improvement is an evil in the abstract, and that
the greater the improvement, the greater the mischief, that
the actual and complete success of all such schemes would
be infinitely worse even than their failure, for that the most
complete and extensive improvement would only prepare
the way for the most deplorable wretchedness, and that the
very next step after reaching the summit of human glory
would plunge us into the lowest abyss of vice and misery,—
why truly there will be little encouragement to set out on a
journey that promises so very disagreeable a conclusion;
such a representation of the matter will not add wings to
our zeal for practical reform, but will rather make us stop
short in our career, and refuse to advance one step farther
in a road, that is beset with danger and destruction. People
will begin to look with a jaundiced eye at the most obvious
advantages, to resist every useful regulation, and dread
every change for the better. Our feelings are governed very
much by common-place associations, and are most
influenced by that sort of logic which is the shortest. Thus,
‘that the parts are contained in the whole,’ is a general rule
which is found to hold good in most of the concerns of life;
and it is not therefore easy to drive it out of people’s heads.
For this reason, it will always be difficult to persuade the
generality of mankind that a less degree of improvement is
a good thing, though a greater would be a bad thing, or
that the subordinate parts of a system, that would in reality
embody all the ills of life, can be very desirable in
themselves. Mr. Malthus has however by no means left this
conclusion to the mere mechanical operation of our
feelings. He endeavours formally to establish it. The
following passage seems the connecting link in the chain,
which unites the two worlds of theory and practice
together; it cements the argument, gives solidity and
roundness to it, and renders it complete against all
improvement, real or imaginary, present or future, against

all absolute perfection or imperfect attempts at it, and
gradual approaches to it. It fairly blocks up the road.
‘It cannot but be a matter of astonishment that all
writers on the perfectibility of man, and of society, who
have noticed the argument of an overcharged population,
treat it always very slightly, and invariably represent the
difficulties arising from it, as at a great, and almost
immeasurable distance. Even Mr. Wallace, who thought the
argument itself of so much weight as to destroy his whole
system of equality, did not seem to be aware that any
difficulty would occur from this cause, till the whole earth
had been cultivated like a garden, and was incapable of any
further increase of produce. Were this really the case, and
were a beautiful system of equality in other respects
practicable, I cannot think that our ardour in the pursuit of
such a scheme ought to be damped by the contemplation of
so remote a difficulty. An event at such a distance might
fairly be left to providence; but the truth is, that if the view
of the argument given in this Essay be just, the difficulty so
far from being remote, would be imminent and immediate.
At every period during the progress 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 might be increasing every
year, population would be increasing much faster; and the
redundancy must necessarily be repressed by the
periodical or constant action of vice and misery.’[6]
In answer to this statement (allowing however that it is
a fair inference from Wallace’s reasoning, and from our
author’s own principle) I would simply ask, whether during
this progress of cultivation, the distress for want of food
would be constantly pressing on all mankind more than it
does at present. Let us suppose that men remain just as
vicious, as imprudent, as regardless of their own interests

and those of others as they are at present, let us suppose
them to continue just what they are, through all the stages
of improved cultivation to the time when the whole earth
was become like a garden, would this in the smallest
degree detract from the benefit? Would nothing indeed be
gained by the earth’s being cultivated like a garden, that is,
by its producing ten times the quantity of food that it does
at present, and being able to maintain ten times the
quantity of inhabitants in the same degree of comfort and
happiness that it does at present, because forsooth they
would not at the same time be ten times better off than
they are now? Is it an argument against adding to the
happiness of mankind tenfold, by increasing their number,
their condition remaining the same, that we cannot add to
it a hundred-fold, by increasing their number and
improving their condition proportionably? Or is it any
objection to increasing the means of subsistence by the
improved cultivation of the earth, that the population would
keep pace with it? It appears to me that there must be a
particular perversity, some egregious bias in the mind of
any person who can either deny the inference to be drawn
from these questions, or evade it as a matter of
indifference, by equivocation and subterfuge. We might as
well assert that because it is most likely that the
inhabitants of the rest of Europe are not better, nor indeed
quite so well off as the people of England, that it would
therefore be no matter if the whole continent of Europe
were sunk in the sea, as if human life was merely to be
considered as a sample of what the thing is, and as if when
we have a sample of a certain quality, all the rest might be
very well spared, as of no value. As however I conceive that
Mr. Malthus is not a man to be moved either by common
feelings or familiar illustrations, I shall venture to lay down
one dry maxim on the subject, which he will get over as
well as he can, namely, that an improved cultivation of the
earth, and a consequent increase of food must necessarily

lead to one or other of these two consequences, either that
a greater number of people will be maintained in the same
degree of comfort and happiness, other things being the
same, or that means will be afforded for maintaining an
equal number in greater ease, plenty, and affluence. It is
plain either that existence is upon the whole a blessing and
that the means of existence are on that account desirable;
that consequently an increased population is doubly a
blessing, and an increase in the means of existence doubly
desirable; or else life is an evil, and whatever tends to
promote it is an evil, and in this case it would be well if all
the inhabitants of the earth were to die of some easy death
to-morrow!
For my own part, ‘who am no great clerk,’ I cannot by
any efforts, of which I am capable, separate these two
propositions, that it is desirable either that population
should have stood still at first, or that it should go on
increasing till the earth is absolutely full; or in other words,
I see no rational alternative between the principle of
extermination (as far as it is in our power) and the principle
of the utmost possible degree of populousness. It is, I
conceive, an incontrovertible axiom, that the proportion
between the population and food being given (and Mr.
Malthus tells us that it holds nearly the same in all the
stages of society) the actual increase of population is to be
considered as so much clear gain, as so much got into the
purse, as so much addition to the sum of human happiness.
Mr. Malthus says in another place (second edition, p. 357),
‘The only point in which I differ from M. Condorcet in this
description’ [of the evils arising from increased population,]
‘is with regard to the period, when it may be applied to the
human race. M. Condorcet thinks that it cannot possibly be
applicable, but at an era extremely distant. If the
proportion between the natural increase of population and
food, which was stated in the beginning of this essay, and

which has received considerable confirmation from the
poverty that has been found to prevail in every stage and
department of human society, be in any degree near the
truth, it will appear on the contrary, that the period, when
the number of men surpass their means of subsistence, has
long since arrived, &c.’ Mr. Malthus in different parts of his
work makes a great rout about the distinction between
actual and relative population, and lays it down that an
actual increase of population is an advantage, except when
it exceeds the means of subsistence; yet he here seems to
treat the proportion between the increase of population,
and food, which he says has always continued pretty much
the same, as the only thing to be attended to, and to
represent the progressive increase of the actual population,
unless we could at the same time banish poverty entirely
from the world, as a matter of the most perfect
indifference, or rather as the most dangerous experiment,
that could be tried. Is not this being wilfully blind to the
consequences of his own reasoning? Oh! but, says Mr.
Malthus, you do not state the case fairly. If men were to
continue what they are at present; if there were the same
proportionable quantity of vice, and misery in the world,
what you say would be true. Every thing would then go on
as well, or indeed better than before. But this is impossible,
because this increased cultivation, and a more equal
distribution of the produce of the earth could only take
place, in consequence of the increased civilization, virtue,
good sense, and happiness of mankind: and this would
necessarily spoil all. For remove the present quantity of
vice and misery existing in the world, and you remove the
only checks, that can keep population down. ‘Though the
produce of the earth might be increasing every year, the
population would be increasing much faster; and the
redundancy must be repressed by the old restraints of vice
and misery.’ That is to say, though (according to the second
edition) vice, misery, and moral restraint, operate mutually

as checks to population, and though the diminution of vice
and misery could only be the consequence of the increased
strength in the principle of moral restraint, yet this latter
principle would in reality have no effect at all, and in
proportion as the other checks to population, viz. vice and
misery, were superseded, they would become more and
more necessary. If there could be a gradual, and indefinite
improvement in the cultivation of the soil, and every facility
could be afforded for the supply of an increasing
population, without supposing some change in the
institutions of society, which would render men better and
wiser, than they now are, Mr. Malthus will perhaps with
some reluctance, and uncertainty hanging over his mind,
allow that this would be a considerable advantage; the
population might in this case be kept within some bounds,
and not increase faster than the means of subsistence: but
as this is a change that cannot be looked for without
supposing a correspondent improvement in the morals and
characters of men, we must set off one thing against
another, and give up the chance of improvement, to prevent
the shocking alternative connected with it. With our
present modicum of wit and command over our passions,
we do contrive in some measure to make both ends meet,
or to cut our coat according to our cloth, or look before we
leap, and are not carried away, neck or nothing, by this
high-mettled courser, Population, over all the fences and
barriers of common sense. But if we were to make any
considerable improvements in horsemanship, or in our
knack at calculation, we should instantly, belying all
reasonable expectation, throw the bridle on the horse’s
neck, rush blindly forward in spite of all obstacles, and
freed from the shackles of necessity without having
acquired the discipline of reason, though the one always
instantly resumes its sway, the moment the other ceases,
plunge into all the miseries of famine, without remorse, or
apprehension.

This I conceive is an express contradiction in terms. Yet
I grant that it is a logical inference from Mr. Malthus’s
original statement, that vice and misery are the only
adequate checks to population. If this were indeed the
case, all the consequences that Mr. Malthus describes, the
utmost degree of vice and misery, would necessarily be the
lot of man in all stages and departments of society, whether
in his improved or unimproved state, because in all cases
and at all times his reason would be of no use to him.
However great or however small our attainments in arts or
science, or in all other virtues might be, in this respect we
should still be the same; that is, we should be exactly in the
condition of the brutes, entirely governed by an impulse,
over which we should have neither check nor control. Mr.
Malthus, however, finding that this account is inconsistent
with the state of human life, and with those checks which
certainly do keep population back from going its natural
lengths, now adds moral restraint as a convenient
supplement to his theory, and as our chief security against
vice and misery, though he still insists that where its effect
must be greatest, it would have no effect at all. 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. On the whole, then, it
appears, that at no one period during the progress of
cultivation from the present moment to the time when it
should have reached its utmost limits, would the distress
for want of food be greater than it is at present. In the
mean time, the number of mankind, and consequently their
happiness would go on increasing with the means of their
happiness, or subsistence, till the whole earth had been
cultivated like a garden, and was incapable of any further
increase, and we should then be exactly where we are now
with respect to the checks on population. That is, the earth
would maintain ten times its present number of inhabitants

in the same comfort as at present, without our having
involved ourselves in any of those straits and difficulties,
those pits and snares, against which we are so kindly
warned by Mr. Malthus. The population, and the means of
subsistence would indeed be stationary, but so they may be
said to be at present. The only difference is that they are at
present unnecessarily stationary from artificial causes,
from moral and political circumstances; in that case the
line would be drawn by nature herself, in other words, by
the limited extent of the earth, and by its limited fertility.
This being the case and were a beautiful system of equality
in other respects practicable, (for observe, reader, I leave
the question as to those other respects exactly where I
found it) I cannot think that our ardour in pursuit of such a
scheme can in any wise be damped by the contemplation of
the difficulties attendant upon it from the principle of
population. All that could be gained, would be pure gain
without any loss whatever. In short, the principle of
population does not, as I conceive, affect the future
improvement of society in any way whatever, whether on a
larger or a smaller scale, theoretically or practically,
generally, or particularly. I have thus, Sir, endeavoured to
answer Mr. Malthus’s argument against the improved
cultivation of the earth, and an increase of population, from
the increased difficulties (as he falsely represents them),
that would all the way press upon society during its
progress. He has rendered his paradox in some measure
palatable to the reader, by introducing it as one branch of
his answer to Condorcet, and others of the same school,
herein imitating the policy of the house of commons, who
sometimes prevail on the house of lords to pass a bill which
they do not much like, by tacking a money-bill to it.
However as the two subjects are entirely distinct, I beg that
they may not be confounded. The question is simply,
whether we are to look upon the progress of agriculture,
civilization, and the populousness which would follow, (no

matter to what extent, nor by whom it is brought about,
whether it is projected by a junto of philosophers, or
decided upon in a committee of the house of commons,
enlightened by the genius of Mr. Malthus and guided by Mr.
Whitbread’s wisdom), whether I say, as a general principle
we are to look upon an addition to the inhabitants of a
state, if there is enough to support them, as a good or an
evil. Mr. Malthus has chosen to answer this question under
the head, modern philosophy, so that he is secure of the
protection of the court. I have been willing not to deprive
him of this advantage, and have answered it under the
same head. If however any of my readers should dislike the
argument in this connection, they may easily take it out of
the mould in which it is cast, without doing it the least hurt.
To shew how lightly all schemes of improvement sit on Mr.
Malthus’s mind, how easily he thinks they may be puffed
aside with the least breath of sophistry, it will be sufficient
to quote the following passage. After allowing in general
that even the best cultivated countries in Europe might be
made to produce double what they do at present, he says,
‘We should not be too ready to make inferences against the
internal economy of a country from the appearance of
uncultivated heaths without other evidence.’ [It is
wonderful with what slowness and circumspection Mr.
Malthus always proceeds in his disapprobation of any
thing, that comes in the prepossessing garb of an evil. He is
only confident and severe in his decisions against those
hidden mischiefs, which lie concealed under a delusive
appearance of good. There is something in the prospect of
dearth and barrenness which is perfectly congenial to the
disposition of Mr. Malthus. He is unwilling to give up a
subject which promises so much scope for his singular
talents of bringing good out of evil.] ‘But the fact is, that as
no country has ever reached, or probably will ever reach its
highest possible acme of produce, it appears always, as if
the want of industry, or the ill-direction of that industry was

the actual limit to a further increase of produce and
population, and not the absolute refusal of nature to yield
any more; but a man who is locked up in a room, may be
fairly said to be confined by the walls of it, though he may
never touch them; and with regard to the principle of
population, it is never the question whether a country will
produce any more, but whether it may be made to produce
a sufficiency to keep pace with an unchecked increase of
people.’ This I confess is a singular passage for a practical
philosopher to write. Mr. Malthus here lays it down that the
question is not whether we should do all the good we can,
but whether we should do what we cannot. As to his
illustration of a man locked up in a room, though it is smart
and clever, it is not much to the purpose. The case is really
that of a man who has the range of a suite of rooms and
who in a fit of the spleen, or from indolence, or stupidity, or
from any other cause you please, confines himself to one of
them, or of a man who having hired a large commodious
apartment, says, I never make use of the whole of this
apartment, I never go within a foot of the walls, I might as
well have it partitioned off, it would be snugger and
warmer, and so still finding that he does not run against his
partition any more than against the wall, should continue,
being determined to have no unnecessary spare-room, to
hemm himself in closer and closer till at last he would be
able to stir neither hand nor foot. That any one, allowing as
Mr. Malthus does, that with proper management and
industry this country might be made to maintain double its
present number of inhabitants, or twenty millions instead
of ten, should at the same time affect to represent this as a
mere trifling addition, that practically speaking cannot be
taken into the account, can I think only be explained by
supposing in that person either an extreme callousness of
feeling, or which amounts to pretty much the same thing, a
habit of making his opinions entirely subservient to his
convenience, or to any narrow purpose he may have in view

at the moment.—Perhaps if the truth were known, I am as
little sanguine in my expectations of any great
improvement to be made in the condition of human life
either by the visions of philosophy, or by downright,
practical, parliamentary projects, as Mr. Malthus himself
can be. But the matter appears to me thus. It requires some
exertion and some freedom of will to keep even where we
are. If we tie up our hands, shut our eyes to the partial
advantages we possess, and cease to exert ourselves in that
direction in which we can do it with the most effect, we
shall very soon ‘go deep in the negative series.’ Take away
the hope and the tendency to improvement, and there is
nothing left to counteract the opposite never-failing
tendency of human things ‘from bad to worse.’ There is
therefore a serious practical reason against losing sight of
the object, even when we cannot attain it. However, I am
‘free to confess’ (to borrow the language of my betters)
that there is as much selfishness as public spirit in my
resistance to Mr. Malthus’s contradictions. It is a remote
question whether the world will ever be much wiser than it
is: but what I am certainly interested in, is not to submit to
have all my ideas confounded by barren sophistry, nor to
give up the little understanding which I may actually
possess. Nor for my own part, were I confined to my room,
should I think myself obliged to any one for blocking up my
view of a pleasant prospect, because I could not move from
the place, where I was.
The fundamental principle of Mr. Malthus’s essay is
that population has a constant tendency to become
excessive, because it has a tendency to increase not only in
a progressive, but in a geometrical ratio, whereas the
means of subsistence are either positively limited, or at
most can only be made to increase in an arithmetical ratio.
But to be sure of avoiding any thing like misrepresentation
in this part of the argument, where the least error or

omission might be fatal to our author’s whole scheme, let
us take his own words.
‘It may be safely affirmed that population when
unchecked goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years,
or increases in a geometrical ratio.
‘That we may be the better able to compare the
increase of population and food, let us make a supposition,
which without pretending to accuracy, is clearly more
favourable to the power of production in the earth, than
any experience that we have had of its qualities will
warrant.
‘Let us suppose that the yearly additions which might
be made to the former average produce, instead of
decreasing, which they certainly would do, were to remain
the same; and that the produce of this island might be
increased every twenty-five years by a quantity equal to
what it at present produces; the most enthusiastic
speculator cannot suppose a greater increase than this. In
a few centuries it would make every acre of land in the
island like a garden.
‘If this supposition be applied to the whole earth, and if
it be allowed that the subsistence for man which the earth
affords, might be increased every twenty-five years by a
quantity equal to what it at present produces; this will be
supposing a rate of increase much greater than we can
imagine that any possible exertions of mankind could make
it.
‘It may be fairly pronounced therefore that considering
the present average state of the earth, the means of
subsistence, under circumstances the most favourable to
human industry, could not possibly be made to increase
faster than in an arithmetical ratio.
‘The necessary effects of these two different rates of
increase, when brought together, will be very striking. Let

us call the population of this island eleven millions; and
suppose the present produce equal to the easy support of
such a number. In the first twenty-five years the population
would be twenty-two millions, and the food being also
doubled, the means of subsistence would be equal to this
increase. In the next twenty-five years, the population
would be forty-four millions, and the means of subsistence
only equal to the support of thirty-three millions. In the
next period, the population would be eighty-eight millions,
and the means of subsistence just equal to the support of
half that number. And at the conclusion of the first century,
the population would be a hundred and seventy-six
millions, and the means of subsistence only equal to the
support of fifty-five millions; leaving a population of a
hundred and twenty-one millions totally unprovided for.
‘Taking the whole earth instead of this island,
emigration would of course be excluded: and supposing the
present population equal to a thousand millions, the human
species would increase as the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32,
64, 128, 256, and subsistence as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. In
two centuries the population would be to the means of
subsistence as 256 to 9; in three centuries as 4096 to 13,
and in two thousand years, the difference would be almost
incalculable.
‘In this supposition no limits whatever are placed to the
produce of the earth. It may increase for ever, and be
greater than any assignable quantity; yet still the power of
population being in every period so much superior, the
increase of the human species can only be kept down to the
level of the means of subsistence by the constant operation
of the strong law of necessity acting as a check upon the
greater power;’ or as he elsewhere expresses it ‘by misery
or the fear of misery.’
Oh! my good Sir, spare your calculations. We do not
wish to be informed what would be the exact proportion of

the imaginary means of subsistence to the imaginary
population at a period, and at a rate of increase, at which,
if it had been possible for it to have gone on only half so
long as you suppose, the whole race would have been long
ago actually extinct. Mr. Malthus here treats us as the
fantastical landlord treated Sancho Panza, by giving him a
magnificent list of a great variety of delicacies, which it
appeared on examination were not to be had, but made no
mention of an excellent dish of cow-heel, which was the
only thing he had in the house, and which exactly suited
the stomach of the squire. I am, like Sancho, disposed to be
satisfied with what I can get; and therefore I must fairly tell
Mr. Malthus that if he will only spare me that first ratio of
his, of a doubled population with respect to this island, or
to the whole earth (though there, begging his pardon, if all
other things went right, his arithmetical and geometrical
distinction would not as I have shewn come into play for
some time), I say if he will allow, as far as the principle of
population is concerned, that it is possible to double the
number of inhabitants of this country or of the world
without any injury, I shall be perfectly content with this
concession: this first ratio shall be to me the golden
number of Pythagoras, and he may do as he pleases with all
the remaining links of an impossible series, which he has
started only, I imagine, as we throw out a tub to a whale by
way of diversion. As to any serious argument, it is perfectly
immaterial, perfectly irrelevant to the question, whether
we should double our population, that we cannot forsooth
go on doubling it for ever; unless indeed it could be shewn
that by thus doubling it once, when we can do it without
any inconvenience, we should be irresistibly impelled to go
on doubling it afterwards when it would have become
exceedingly inconvenient, and in fact till the consequence
would be general famine and the most extensive misery.
Without this addition to his argument, either expressed or
implied, Mr. Malthus’s double series is of no use or avail

whatever: it looks very pretty upon paper, and reads very
neat, but is of no practical importance. The evils which it
describes so accurately as arising from the increased
disproportion between the ratios at every step are mere
imaginary things, existing no where but in the morbid
enthusiasm of Mr. Malthus’s mind, unless we suppose that
every increase of the existing population, either with or
without a proportionable increase in the means of
subsistence, is a vicious habit, a species of phrensy, where
one step only leads to another, till we are plunged into
irretrievable ruin. But I would ask, supposing the
inhabitants of a country to have increased gradually in
consequence of an increase in the means of subsistence,
from two millions to four, how that population of four
millions would have a greater tendency to excess, than the
present population of two millions? Would not the same
sense of inconvenience, the same dread of poverty, the
same regard to the comforts of life, operate in the same
way and just as much upon every individual of the four
millions, as upon every individual of the two millions? What
then becomes of the increased tendency to excessive
population in consequence of its actual increase? Yet
without this, an increased population is not in itself an evil,
or a good necessarily leading to evil, but a pure and
unmixed good unconnected with any greater evil.
Even our author’s own account will give us a new
country and a new earth; it will double all the happiness
and all the enjoyment that there is at present in the world.
If he had been a man of sanguine or poetical feelings,
methinks this single consideration would have been enough
to have made his heart leap up with a lively joy—to see ‘fast
by hanging in a golden chain this pendant world,’ &c. but
he is a man whom you may call rather of a saturnine than
of a sanguine disposition. He therefore had no leisure to
behold this cheering object, but passes on ‘to nature’s

farthest verge,’ till he enters once more into ‘the confines
of Chaos, and the bosom of dim night.’ Mr. Malthus
somewhere speaks familiarly of the association of ideas, as
if he were acquainted with that doctrine. He has here at
any rate very skilfully availed himself of that kind of
reasoning, which owes all its weight to that mechanical
principle. In all the stages of an unchecked population,
except the first, it having appeared that there is a great
disproportion between this principle and the progress of
agriculture, our author concludes that his readers will
forget that that, which is so often represented as an evil,
can ever be a good, and therefore peremptorily adds, in
defiance of his own statement, that in every period of the
increase, the power of population is much superior to the
other. Though it appears to me then that Mr. Malthus by his
ratios has gained nothing in point of argument over his
readers, he has gained much upon their imagination. By
representing population so often as an evil, and by
magnifying its increase in certain cases as so enormous an
evil, he raises a general prejudice against it. Whenever you
talk of any improvement or any increase of population
consequent upon it, he immediately plays off his infinite
series against you. He makes the transition from a
practicable to an impracticable increase of population,
from that degree of it, which is desirable to that which is
excessive, by the assistance of his mathematical scale, as
easily as you pass from the low notes of a harpsichord to
the high ones. There seems no division between them. It is
true that so long as we confine ourselves to the real
question before us and distinguish between what is
practicable, and what can never possibly happen, the evil
consequences of the system we contend for are merely
chimerical. But as Hercules in order to strangle the earth-
born Antæus was obliged to lift him from the ground, Mr.
Malthus, in order to complete his triumph over common
sense, is obliged to call to his aid certain airy speculations

and fanciful theories of dangers, that, by his own
confession, can never possibly exist. Whenever you are for
setting out on the road of reform, Mr. Malthus stops you on
the threshold, and says, Do you consider where you are
going? Don’t you know where this road will lead you? and
then, with a ‘come on, sir, here’s the place: look how fearful
and dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eye so low’; he hurries you
forward to his imaginary precipice, and shews you the
danger you have so narrowly escaped. However, it is not
Mr. Malthus’s rhetoric, but our own wilful blindness, that
must persuade us that we have escaped being dashed to
pieces down any precipices, when he himself tells us that
the road is nothing more than a long winding declivity.
I conceive there were two very capital errors in Mr.
Malthus’s first essay, which though he has abandoned or in
a great measure softened them down in his subsequent
edition, still adhere to all his reasonings, and give them a
wrong bias. The first of these was, that vice and misery are
the only checks to population: secondly, that if population
were for any time freed from these restraints, it would in
that case go on increasing with a force and rapidity, which
nothing would be able to withstand, and which would bear
down the feeble mounds that had before opposed its
progress till the whole would end in one wide scene of
universal uproar and confusion. As if, in the first place,
mere misery of itself, without a sense of greater misery, and
a desire to avoid it, would do any thing to prevent
population; and in the second place, as if though the tax of
vice and misery were taken off for a time, yet the
recurrence of the same evils afterwards would not operate
in the same way to repress population, or as if population
would in the mean time have acquired any preternatural
strength, with which its counteracting causes would be
unable to contend, or as if the mere mechanical checks to
population from the actual evils attendant upon it were not

always necessarily a match for, and proportioned to, the
strength of the principle itself, and its immediate tendency
to excess. It is astonishing to see how those men, who
pique themselves the most on the solidity of their
understandings, and on a kind of dull matter-of-fact
plodding accuracy, are perpetually led away by their
imaginations: the more so because they are the dupes of
their own vanity, and never suspect that they are liable to
any such deception. In the present instance our author has
been hurried into an unfounded assumption by having his
imagination heated with a personification. He has given to
the principle of population a personal existence, conceiving
of it as a sort of infant Hercules, as one of that terrific giant
brood, which you can only master by strangling it in its
cradle; forgetting that the antagonist principle which he
has made its direct counterpoise, still grows with its
growth and strengthens with its strength, being in fact its
own offspring: and that the sharper evils which excessive
population brings along with it, more severe in proportion
to its excess, naturally tend to repress and keep population
down to the same level, other circumstances being
supposed the same. Nothing can be clearer to my
understanding than this; yet it is upon the
misrepresentation or misconception of this principle that
most of Mr. Malthus’s sophisms and ambiguities hinge.
It is necessary to make a distinction between the
tendency in population to increase, and its power to
increase; otherwise we may fall into great errors. The
power of population to increase is an abstract thing
independent of circumstances, and which is therefore
always the same. Its effects may therefore be very well
described by a mathematical series. When we speak of the
power of population to increase in a certain continued
ratio, we do not mean to say that it will or will not do so,
but merely that it is possible that it should do so from the

nature of the principle itself. The power of population to
increase is in fact the same both before and after it has
become excessive. But I conceive this is not the case with
its tendency to increase, unless we mean its unchecked
tendency, which is saying nothing; for if we speak of its
real tendency to increase, this certainly is not always the
same, but depends exceedingly on circumstances, that is, is
greater or less in proportion as the population is or is not
excessive. The ratio in which Mr. Malthus has represented
population as having a natural tendency to increase, can
therefore only relate to its unchecked progress, or to its
increase while the means of subsistence can be made to
keep pace with it; inasmuch as it has an actual tendency to
increase in this ratio, only while it is free from checks; but
the moment these checks begin to operate it is necessarily
limited by them, or kept down within a certain point to the
level of the means of subsistence. In short, as a practical
guide, Mr. Malthus’s table is extremely fallacious; for the
population has a tendency to go on as 1, 2, 4, 8, &c. only
while the subsistence answers to it, or is as 1, 2, 4, 8, &c.
and when the means of subsistence can only be made to
increase as 1, 2, 3, 4, &c. then the population will, in the
natural course of things, come down to it and increase only
as 1, 2, 3, 4, &c. or supposing it to have generally a certain
tendency to excess, it will then increase as 1¼, 2½, 3¾, 5,
&c. The actual, positive, practical tendency in population to
increase is not therefore always the same, and for that very
reason its tendency to excess is always the same, neither
greater nor less, in consequence of the absolute increase in
population. Mr. Malthus himself admits fully the distinction
between the actual increase of population and its excessive
increase, between the tendency of population to increase
with the means of subsistence and its tendency to increase
beyond those means. In fact, almost one half of his
voluminous work is taken up by extensive historical
researches to prove that the population is in all ages and

countries, in every form of society, and stage of civilization
kept down nearly to the means of subsistence: that
population has not therefore at one time more than
another, when it is strong than when it is weak, in an
improved than in a neglected state of cultivation, a
tendency to rush on beyond its necessary limits: yet if there
is any one inference to be drawn from the general spirit
and tenor of Mr. Malthus’s reasonings, it is this, that we
ought not to encourage population, nor be anxious about
the increase of the means of subsistence, but ought rather
to keep them back as much as possible, because every
addition made to population by whatever means or in
whatever circumstances, has a direct and unavoidable
tendency to make it go on increasing with an accelerated
force; or that the positive benefit of an enlarged population
is always counterbalanced by the increased danger of the
excess to which it naturally leads. Mr. Malthus by setting a
certain degree of plenty against a certain degree of
excessive population, has made it appear as if the two
things were inseparably connected, as if supposing a
certain progress made in the one ratio you may then by
passing over to the opposite line see immediately what
progress had been made at the same time in the other, that
is, what quantity of actual and excessive population,
proportioned to the increase in the means of subsistence
and its immediate consequence, would require to be cut off
by forcible and unnatural means, by vice and misery. It
therefore looks very much as if plenty were the immediate
fore-runner of famine, as if by sowing the seeds of virtue
and happiness you were ensuring a larger harvest of vice
and misery, the evil engrafted on any good being always
greater than the real benefit itself, and as if by advancing
population and increasing the means of its support, you
were only opening a new Iliad of woes, and giving larger
scope to the baneful operation of this principle. So that it is
not the increase of good that we are to think of, but the

introduction of evil that we are to guard against. The
proportion by which we are to be guided is clear and
demonstrable; it is as 256 to 9, and so regularly through all
the gradations upwards and downwards. At this rate it is
pretty clear that our only object must be to confine human
happiness within as narrow limits, and to keep the
population down as low as possible, at least to suffer no
addition to it. We are something in the condition of a man
suspended on a balance with sharp-pointed spikes placed
close to his body, and who must not stir for his life. Now the
source of this fallacy (on which the whole turns, for without
it it is null and abortive) lies here, namely in supposing that
of the two ratios here connected together, the one is the
cause of, or has any thing to do with the other. For the ratio
in the upper line being at number 256 does not depend on
the other ratio being at number 9, but simply on its being
so many removes from the root or first number. It only
expresses a possible or imaginary series, or the
independent, direct, physical power of increase, or abstract
tendency to increase in population at each step, and what
that increase would amount to in a given number of steps,
being left entirely to itself. If it expresses any thing else, or
the actual increase of population combined with and in
reference to the means of subsistence, it is utterly false and
delusive, and a contradiction in terms. For population as
regulated by, and arising out of the means of subsistence
cannot have got the start of it in so prodigious a manner,
and as unconnected with the increase of the latter cannot
depend upon it. In the one case, population instead of being
to the means of subsistence as 256 to 9, will only be a little
a-head of it, or as 9½ to 9: in the other case it will be as
256, whether the food has in a given time increased from 1
to 9, or only from 1 to 6, or whether it has stood still at 1.
The number of inhabitants from the beginning of the world,
proceeding by the geometrical ratio, would have been
going on just the same whether they had ever had any

thing to eat or not (they are a kind of enchanted people
who live without food) whether the quantity of food had
been more or less, whether there has been any
improvements in agriculture or not. Though the
improvements in agriculture had stood still at 1 in the
arithmetical scale this would not lessen or alter the height
to which the geometrical scale would have mounted in the
interval. ‘It keeps on its way unslacked of motion.’ By
advancing in the arithmetical scale or increasing the means
of subsistence, you do not advance the geometrical scale,
much less by increasing the disproportion between the two,
do you increase the waste population of the world, which
must be greater in proportion as less of it had been
provided for. On the other hand, you necessarily lessen this
disproportion. For instead of supposing that if we had
remained at 1 in the lower scale, we should then have been
at 1 in the upper, or that if we had advanced no further
than 3, the disproportion would then only have been 4 to 3,
and so on, whereas by going on it is now as 256 to 9, the
fact is that the disproportion instead of being as 256 to 9,
would have been 256 to 1, or 2, or 3: and that the further
we go in the one scale, though we cannot keep up with, or
overtake the other, yet we lose so much the less ground
and are nearer it than we should otherwise be. To argue
otherwise is to be like the children who when they cannot
keep up with others, stand still and begin to cry, thinking
this the likeliest way to make them slacken their pace. I
shall therefore beg leave to look upon every increase in the
means of subsistence or actual population, as so much
gained upon the infinite series: by keeping back the actual
means of subsistence, I do not lessen the possible or
abstract tendency of population to increase, and I only add
to its actual tendency to increase in proportion as I add to
its actual means of support. We have therefore a clear
addition to its actual quantity without any addition to its
tendency to excess, or without strengthening the evil

principle, the germ of incalculable mischief, which
population contains within it. Mr. Malthus has taken no
pains to guard his readers against the conclusion, that by
increasing the actual population, you increase its actual
tendency to increase, as if either the disposition to
propagate the species were stronger in proportion to the
number of those who possess it, or as if in proportion as the
power is spread over a larger surface, it were not
counteracted by being accompanied in each individual with
a proportionable share of common sense and reason, so
that he will not be a bit more likely to run upon famine
because there will be twice as many to keep him company
as there used to be. The tendency to excessive population
in any community does not depend upon the number of
individuals in it, who have the power of abusing their
liberty, or on the quantity of mischief they might do, but
upon the moral character of the individuals composing it,
upon the difference between the strength of moral restraint
and the strength of physical appetite, or on the actual
inconvenience to which they will submit for the sake of
gratifying their passions. In short the tendency to excess
does not depend on the point in the scale where the limit is
drawn, but upon the tendency to overleap that limit; now
this tendency or impetus is not increased by the distance
which it has gone, like a stone rolling down a hill, or like a
torrent of water accumulating, but is like a cart or waggon
left on a declivity with a drag-chain fastened to one of the
wheels, which is carried forward till the chain is pulled
tight and then it stops of itself. This is a very clumsy
comparison, but it has some resemblance to the thing. We
are not to calculate the actual tendency to excess in
population by the excess of the power itself over the means
of subsistence, which is greater as we advance, but by the
excess of the power restrained by other motives and
principles over the means of subsistence. In algebraic
language the tendency to excess is not equal to the power

of population simply, but to the power, minus the difficulty
of providing for its support, or the influence which that
difficulty has on the conduct of rational beings.
If we suppose a barren island with half a dozen savages
upon it, living upon roots, vermin, and crawfish, without
any of the arts or any of the conveniences of life, ignorant
of agriculture, neither knowing nor caring how to improve
their condition, passing their time in stupid indolence, with
as little pretensions to reason or refinement as can well be
desired, in short a very unphilosophical, improgressive,
viscious, miserable set of barbarians as need be; now what
difference would it make in the condition of these poor
uninformed wretches, or how would it add to their vices,
their ignorance, or ‘squalid poverty,’ if we suppose another
island at a few leagues distance, of about the same
circumference, maintaining nearly the same number of
inhabitants living in the same manner? Yet as it is probable
that these poor lousy wretches[7] leading a life of sloth and
hunger, may upon the whole have more enjoyment than
misery (for even the life of a savage seems better than no
life at all, nay some have gone so far as to say that it was
better than any other life) it would be desirable that there
should be such another island so inhabited. But it is exactly
the same thing whether we suppose twice the number of
people inhabiting twice the extent of ground, or maintained
on the same ground, being twice as much cultivated;
population would not press the more on the means of
subsistence, nor would the misery be greater, nor the
checks required to prevent it greater. That is to say, an
advance made in the state of cultivation and in the arts of
life so as to maintain double the population must always be
the means of doubling the numbers and enjoyment of any
people. The only possible difference would be that as this
increased population would be the consequence of greater
industry and knowledge, it would, one should think, denote

of itself, that the people would be less liable to unforeseen
accidents, and less likely to involve themselves in wilful
distress than before. This is the first step in the progress of
civilization and in the history of all nations. From this
description of a barren island supporting a few wandering
half-starved ignorant savages, such as England might have
been once, let us turn our eyes to what England is now;—
populous, enlightened, free, rich, powerful and happy;
excelling equally in arts, and arms, the delight and terror of
the rest of the world; the abode of science, the nurse of
virtue, the darling seat of the muses; boasting her long line
of heroes, and sages; her Bacon, her Newton, her
Shakespear, her Milton, and her Locke;[8] blest with the
most perfect government administered in the most perfect
manner; having a king, lords, and commons, each
balancing the other, and each in their several station and
degree being security for every kind of liberty and every
kind of property, harmoniously conspiring together for the
good of the whole, taking care first of their own rights and
interests as the most important, and then of those of
others: subject to mild and equal laws, which afford the
same immediate protection to every one in the enjoyment
of his liberty and his property, whether that property is five
thousand a year or no more than a shilling a day:
maintaining in different degrees of comfort, and affluence,
from the common necessaries to the highest luxuries of life,
ten millions of souls, all supported by their own labour and
industry or that of others; all plying close with cheerful and
patient activity to some ingenious and useful handicraft, or
some more severe but necessary labour, or else reclining in
ease and elegance, and basking in the sunshine of life; her
meanest beggar owing the rags which cover his nakedness,
and the crust of bread which keeps his body and soul
together to some of the most useful inventions which
support, and to that humanity which is only to be found in
civilized society. Shall we forget her schools, her colleges,

her hospitals, her churches, her crowded cities, her streets
lined with shops, enriched with the produce and
manufactures of her own soil, or glittering with the spoils
of a hundred nations, her thronged assemblies, her
theatres, her balls, her operas, her ‘palaces, her ladies and
her pomp’; her villas, her parks, her cottages, her hamlets,
her rich cultivated lands, teeming with plenty, her green
valleys, her ‘upland swells, echoing to the bleat of flocks,’
her brave contented peasantry, their simple manners and
honest integrity; and shall we wish to degrade this queen of
nations, this mistress of the world once more into a horde
of fierce barbarians, treading back our steps, and resigning
this splendid profusion of all that can adorn and gladden
human life, this gay variety, this happy union of all that is
useful and all that is ornamental, the refinements of taste
and decorations of fashion, the beautiful distinctions of
artificial society, and the solid advantages derived from our
constitution in church and state, for the groveling
dispositions, the brutal ignorance, the disgusting poverty,
the dried skins and miserable huts of the inhabitants of
Terra del Fuego, or New Holland? Yet this it seems from
the doctrine of Mr. Malthus is our only safe policy, since the
lower we are in the scale of existence, the fewer and more
miserable we are, the farther removed we must be from the
tremendous evils of excessive population, which are the
necessary consequences of the progress of refinement and
civilization. But as the fact so far does not, as I suppose Mr.
Malthus will himself allow, square with his theory, (for at no
time during the progress of cultivation does the population
appear to have been pressing with increased force on the
means of subsistence, so that though the produce of the
earth was increasing every year, the inhabitants were
increasing much faster, every addition to the actual
produce only occasioning some new addition to the swoln
and bloated state of population, and aggravating the
already dreadful symptoms of the disease) as I say the

progress of cultivation and improvement of different kinds
has not produced any of those fatal consequences we might
be led to expect from it, so neither do I apprehend any of
these fatal consequences in future from carrying it as much
farther as it can go. I should just reverse the reasoning of
Mr. Malthus, who taking the evil as at its greatest height
when the world is supposed to be completely full and
completely enlightened, thence argues downwards against
all attempts at improvement as dangerous innovations; so I,
finding that an improved cultivation and enlarged
population are good things through the inferior gradations,
am apt to think they would continue so, proceeding
upwards to the topmost round of the ladder, as far as
population is concerned, for I once more give full and fair
warning that I engage in this question no farther, any loose,
general or accidental expressions to the contrary
notwithstanding. To make good Mr. Malthus’s argument
against population, we must suppose, as I have said before,
that the tendency in population to increase goes on
increasing with the thing itself: this would be true, if as our
author supposes in his first edition, the passion always
required the same vent, in all circumstances, that is if we
suppose man to be a mere headstrong animal in this
respect, his reason having no influence whatever over his
conduct, or which amounts to the same thing, that actual
vice and misery (not foreseen, but felt) are the only checks
to population. At this rate, it is evident that the degree of
misery attending the gratification of the passion would
have no effect to restrain it, all degrees being alike
indifferent or that the quantity of actual misery incurred
would be in proportion to the increased power of producing
it. I shall examine these positions more at large in another
letter; I here wish to shew in a few words that as applied to
the subject of increasing population, they lead to a direct
absurdity. If we suppose this passion to be perfectly blind
and insensible, to be deaf to all remonstrance, and

regardless of all consequences, then no matter in what
depths of misery it involves us, it will have its way, and go
its own lengths. Take away the preventive check of moral
restraint (which only comes in as a snivelling interpolation
in some places of the second edition) and the population
would no doubt go on doubling as fast as it could, not as
fast as the means of subsistence would let it; that is, the
excess of population would be great in proportion to the
actual previous increase, or the excessive multiplication of
the species would be the necessary consequence of, and
commensurate with the power of excessive multiplication,
which would depend on the number of persons having that
power. Now this is contrary to all we know of facts and
human nature, since in this case there could be no restraint
to population at any time, but the extreme of vice or the
extreme of misery. The power of population to increase is
(we will grant) unlimited, but the tendency to increase is
necessarily limited by its tendency to excess and limited by
it in proportion to the excess. That is to say, it does not
follow that though when there ought to be only two millions
of inhabitants, there may be four, owing to the weakness of
the above-mentioned principle of moral restraint, that
therefore that four (by the tendency of population to
increase in a geometrical ratio or to double itself,) will in
like manner become eight, and so on, namely because the
checks to it will increase in proportion; or though the
prospect of the inconveniences arising from doubling the
population in the first instance, the quantity of food
remaining the same, might not be sufficient to deter
people, or overcome this propensity, yet the prospect of
famine consequent upon the second doubling undoubtedly
would, because their regard to consequences is supposed
to remain the same, and the evils they have to dread in the
one case are greater, and unless we suppose them to have
become more stupid and brutal, must operate upon them
more forcibly than in the other. The strength of the passion

itself may be considered as always the same, or a given
quantity: but the motives to resist it arising from the
consequences of its indulgence are not always the same,
but may be either none at all, or very slight, or
considerable, or extreme, as the obstacles to its indulgence
may be either none at all, of a trifling inconvenience, or
poverty, or absolute famine. Now the degree of excess in
population, or the inconveniences to which we expose
ourselves by inconsiderate gratification will depend
entirely on the difference, be it more or less, between the
strength of the passion in each individual, and the strength
of moral restraint. If the latter principle is weak, it will
require to be stimulated by the immediate apprehension of
some very great inconvenience, before it will become a
match for the importunity of physical desire. If it is strong,
a general conviction of the propriety or prudence of self-
denial will be sufficient to incline the balance. But in no
case unless we suppose man to be degraded to the
condition of the brutes, will this principle be so low and
weak as to have no effect at all, so that no apprehension of
the last degree of wretchedness, as the consequence,
would take off or abate the edge of appetite. There is
therefore always a point at which the excess ceases, and
we have seen what this point at all times is. Thus if the
operation of rational motives is so much upon a level with
the physical impulse, as to keep population exactly or
nearly down to the means of subsistence, it will do so
equally whether that population is actually greater or less,
whether it is stationary or progressive, for it will increase
only with the means by which it is supported. On the other
hand if from the manners, the habits, and institutions of
society, there is a considerable tendency in population to
excess, this tendency to excess will not be greater or less in
proportion to the actual number of inhabitants, or the
actual quantity of food, nor will it depend on their being
progressive or stationary, but on the morals of the people

being retrograde, progressive, or stationary; for the
tendency of population itself to excess or to increase
excessively (a dubious kind of expression) is not a
perpetual, indefinite, invariable tendency to increase from
2 to 4, from 4 to 8, &c. (as I have just shewn) but a
tendency to increase beyond the means of subsistence to a
certain point or degree. This tendency to excess will
consequently be the same wherever we fix the point of
subsistence, because it is only a given tendency to outstrip
that limit whether nearer or farther off, whether advancing
or retreating.[9] It is true there is a tendency in population
in this case to increase faster than the means of
subsistence, but not to increase faster and faster, or to get
more and more a-head of it. It is in fact only a
disproportionate superiority in certain motives over others,
which subjects the community or certain classes of it to a
great degree of want and hardship: and as far as their
imprudence and folly will carry them, they will go, but they
will not go farther. They will submit to be pinched, but not
to be starved, unless this consequence may sometimes be
supposed to follow from the partial and unnatural
debasement of certain classes of the community, by driving
them to despair and rendering them callous to suffering.
But the general tendency in population to become
excessive can only be increased by the increased relaxation
of moral restraint, or by gradually weakening the motives
of prudence, reason, &c. I cannot make this matter plainer.
Mr. Malthus has not I conceive given this question of
increasing population and practical improvement fair play.
He has contrived to cover over its real face and genuine
features with the terrible mask of modern philosophy. His
readers having been prevailed upon to give up the fee-
simple of their understandings into his hands, that no
undue advantages might be taken of them by the
perfectibility school, they find it difficult to get it back out

of his hands, though they want it to go on again (the alarm
being over) in the old road of common sense, practical
improvement, and liberal discussion. He had persuaded
himself that population was such an enormous evil in
connection with a scheme of unlimited improvement, that
he can hardly reconcile himself to it, or tell whether to
think it a good or an evil in any shape, or according to any
scheme. By indulging his prejudices, he has so confounded
his perceptions, that he cannot judge rightly, even when he
wishes to do it. He found it most convenient, when he had
to confute Mr. Godwin, to describe reason as a principle of
no practical value whatever, as a mere negation. As
therefore by the removal of vice and misery the office of
checking population would devolve upon this principle,
which could do nothing, population would in fact have no
check left to it, and then certainly the most terrible
consequences would ensue. The only question would be,
how soon we should begin cutting one another’s throats, or
how many (whether a greater or a smaller number) had
better be employed on this kind of work. We perceive very
plainly that this must be the inevitable consequence of
increased population, if it can only be kept down by the
positive checks of vice and misery. We apply the theory very
clearly to a future stage of the progress; but though, if the
theory were true, exactly the same scenes ought to be
acting before our eyes at present on a smaller scale, yet as
we find that this is not the case, we leave this circumstance
out of the question, and conclude that there must be some
secret difference, some occult cause, something we cannot
very well explain, which makes the present state of things
preferable to all others: at least whatever might be the
consequences of population, if certain alterations and
improvements were to take place, we are sure that it
produces no such consequences at present. With respect to
the lower, or actual stages of population and improvement,
Mr. Malthus supposes the preventive checks to operate as

well as the positive, the fear of misery as well as the misery
itself, because we know that it does: but whenever you
suppose any alteration or improvement to take place in the
world, so that you have not the fact to confront him with,
he immediately assumes the positive checks, or actual vice
and misery, as the only checks to population; herein
trusting to his theory. Whenever you are found to be
advancing in the scale (which must be indeed from some of
the restraints being taken off) he directly supposes that you
are to be set free from all restraints whatever. He lets loose
his ratios upon you, and away they go like a clock running
down. This indeed would not be so well. Mr. Malthus thus
artfully makes the question of progressive improvement to
be, whether we are to be governed as now by mixed
motives, or to be released from all moral restraint, for he
supposes that if population once passes a certain bourne,
which he points out to you, it will then become perfectly
untractable, all its future excesses will be prevented only
by actual vice and misery. Thus though all the good of our
present situation, all wherein it differs from a state of
brutal violence or lingering want, is in fact owing to the
prevalence of a less degree of reason and foresight, yet
that if that principle were strengthened, and the
consequence were an increase of population, and a more
general diffusion of the comforts of life, this principle
would then be of no avail in preventing or correcting the
excesses to which the unrestrained indulgence of our
appetites would give rise. There is a degree of absurdity,
which staggers belief and almost challenges our conviction,
by making it incredible that if we ourselves do not labour
under some strong deception, the human understanding
should be capable of such extreme folly.
I shall conclude this letter by laying down two or three
general maxims, which appear to me to follow clearly from
the view which has been here taken of the subject.

First, while population goes on increasing at that
tremendous rate described by Mr. Malthus, it shews that
there is nothing to restrain it; that there is no need of any
thing to restrain it: that it is wanted, that its increase is a
thing to be desired, not to be dreaded, and that if it were
possible for it to increase ten times faster, it would be so
much the better.
Secondly, when it arrives at a certain point, that is,
where the population begins to press on the means of
subsistence, either from natural or artificial causes, or
when it threatens to become an evil from excess, it
naturally stops short of its own accord, the checks to it
from vice, misery and moral restraint taken all together
becoming stronger as the excess becomes greater. It
therefore produces its own antidote and produces it in
quantities exactly in proportion to its own extent. It is not
therefore (as Mr. Malthus would, when he pleases, have us
believe) like a stone hanging suspended over a precipice,
which if it once loses its balance will be hurled furiously
down, rolling and bounding from steep to steep with
increased velocity till it reaches the bottom, but like a
balance suspended by a check-weight, where you cannot
increase the pressure on one side without increasing the
resistance proportionably on the other. It may therefore at
worst be left very safely to itself, instead of being
considered as an evil against whose unforeseen ravages no
precautions are sufficient.
Thirdly, as the same quantity of vice and misery co-
operating with the same degree of moral restraint, will
always keep population at the same (relative) point, so a
less degree of actual vice and misery operating on a
greater degree of moral restraint, that is, of reason,
prudence, virtue, &c. will produce the same effect: and we
may always judge of the happiness of a people, and of the
beneficial effects of population by the prevalence of moral

restraint over vice and misery, instead of supposing that
vice and misery are the best pledges of the happiness of a
state, and the only possible security against excessive
population. Consequently, the object of the philosopher
must be to increase the influence of rational motives, and
lessen the actual operation of vice and misery. It is only in
proportion as he does this, that he does any thing; for not
only are vice and misery such cheap commodities that they
may be had at any corner merely with asking for (any
bungler may contract for them in the gross) but farther
though they undoubtedly operate as checks to population, I
must be excused from admitting that they remedy the evils
of population, unless the disease can be considered as its
own remedy, for in the degree in which they generally exist,
they are the only evils, that are ever likely to rise from it,
and as to those imaginary, unknown and unheard of evils,
with which Mr. Malthus is perpetually threatening us in
order to reconcile us to those we bear, I deny the possibility
of their existence upon any known principles of human
society, either in its improved, or unimproved state.
I do not mean to say that there is any thing in the
general principles here stated that Mr. Malthus is at
present disposed to deny, or that he has not himself
expressly insisted on in some part or other of his various
work; it is enough for my purpose that there are other parts
of his work in which he has contradicted them and himself,
and that the uniform tenor of his first work leans directly
the opposite way; and it is not my business so much to
inquire, how much Mr. Malthus retains of his old
philosophy, as how many of their old feelings his readers
retain on the subject, on which he will be able to build as
many false conclusions as he pleases, and with more safety
to himself, than if he still persevered in the direct and
unqualified assertion of exploded error. Plain, downright
consistent falsehood is not dangerous: it is only that

spurious mixture of truth and falsehood, that perpetual
oscillation between the two extremes, that wavering and
uncertainty that baffles detection by rendering it difficult to
know on what ground you are to meet your adversary, that
makes the sophist so formidable as he is. In order therefore
that Mr. Malthus may not avail himself of his
inconsistencies, I shall assume a right to contradict him as
often as he contradicts himself, and to consider the
peculiar doctrines of his work as its essential and only
important doctrines.

LETTER V
WHETHER VICE AND MISERY ARE THE
NECESSARY CONSEQUENCES OF, AND THE
ONLY CHECKS TO, THE PRINCIPLE OF
POPULATION

Sir—I have in my last letter taken more pains than, I
believe, was necessary to shew that the tendency of
population to increase is not a dangerous one; or at any
rate that the actual increase of population does not
increase the danger. The same proportionable quantity of
vice and misery would always be sufficient to keep down
the excess of population beyond the means of subsistence,
whether we suppose those means to be great or small:
there is another question, whether the same quantity of
vice and misery is always necessary for this purpose; and
further, whether all the vice and misery in the world are
not only necessary checks to, but the immediate effects of,
the principle of population, and of nothing else.
Before I proceed, I must stop to observe that I have just
been perusing the corrections, additions, &c. to the third
and last edition of the Essay; and I confess I have not much
heart to go on. The pen falls from my hand. For to what
purpose is it to answer a man, who has answered himself,
who has hardly advanced an opinion that he has not
retracted, who after all your pains to overturn the
extravagant assertions he had brought forward, comes and
tells you, Why I have given them up myself; so that you
hardly know whether to look upon him in the light of an
adversary or an ally. I do not like this shadow-fighting, any

more than Sancho liked his master’s fighting with
enchanters. When Don Quixote had to encounter the knight
of the Prodigious Nose, his valour was inflamed, and he
rushed fiercely on his antagonist, but when after having
unhorsed him, he found that it was his old friend and
neighbour the Batchelor Carrasco, the fury of his arm was
suspended, and he knew not what to say or do.[10] Till Mr.
Malthus lays aside his harlequin’s coat and sword, and
ceases to chase opinions through a rapid succession of
varying editions, it is not an easy matter to come up with
him or give him fair battle. It was thought a work of no
small labour and ingenuity to make a harmony of the
Evangelists. I would recommend it to some one (who thinks
himself equal to the task) to make a harmony of Mr.
Malthus’s different performances. Till this is done, it seems
impossible to collect the sense of his writings, and
consequently to answer them. It should not therefore be
the object of any one who would set himself to answer Mr.
Malthus, so much to say that such and such are the real
and settled opinions of that author, as that such opinions
are floating in different parts of his writings, that they are
floating or fixed in the minds of his readers, and that those
opinions are not so correct as they might be. If Mr. Malthus
had chosen to disclaim certain opinions with their
consequences, advanced in the first edition, instead of
denying that he ever held such opinions, though he may
still be detected with the manner, he would have saved me
the trouble of writing, and himself the disagreeable task of
reading, this rude attack upon them.
Mr. Malthus lays down as the basis of all his reasonings
the two following positions, viz. ‘First, that food is
necessary to the existence of man.’
‘Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is
necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state.’

‘These two laws,’ he adds, ‘ever since we have had any
knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of
our nature; and as we have not hitherto seen any alteration
in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever
cease to be what they are now, without an immediate act of
power in that Being who first arranged the system of the
universe. The best arguments for the perfectibility of man
are drawn from a contemplation of the great progress that
he has already made from the savage state, and the
difficulty of saying where he is to stop. But towards the
extinction of the passion between the sexes, no progress
whatever has hitherto been made. It appears to exist in as
much force at present as it did two thousand, or four
thousand years ago. There are individual exceptions now as
there always have been. But, as these exceptions do not
appear to increase in number, it would surely be a very
unphilosophical mode of arguing to infer merely from the
existence of an exception, that the exception would in time
become the rule, and the rule the exception.’
As to the first position here laid down that food is
necessary to the existence of man, I shall not certainly
dispute it. As to the second kind of necessity, the
gratification of the passion between the sexes, I must beg
leave to deny that this necessity is ‘like unto the first’ or to
be compared with it. Does Mr. Malthus really mean to say
that a man can no more abstain from the commerce of
women, than he can live without food? If so, he states what
is not the fact. Does he mean to assert, that the impulse to
propagate the species, call it lust, or love, is a principle as
strong, as ungovernable, as importunate, as uniform in its
effects, as incapable of being subjected to the control of
reason, or circumstances, in short as much an affair of
mere physical appetite, as hunger? One would suppose so,
for he makes no distinction between them, but speaks of
them both in the same terms, as equally necessary, as

equally fixed, and immutable laws of our nature, the
operation of which nothing short of a miracle can suspend
or alter. There are two circumstances, the mentioning of
which will however be sufficient to shew that the two kinds
of necessity here spoken of are not of the same order, or
cogency, and cannot be reasoned upon in the same manner,
namely, that there are many instances of persons who have
lived all their lives without any intercourse with the other
sex, whereas there is no instance of any person living
without food; in the second place, what makes a most
marked distinction between the two cases, is that the
longer we have been accustomed to do without the
indulgence of the one appetite, the more tractable we find
it, whereas the craving occasioned by the want of food, the
longer it continues, becomes more and more pressing, and
at last utterly ungovernable, and if not satisfied in time, is
sure in all cases whatever, without a single exception, to
destroy the person’s life. These two considerations are of
themselves quite sufficient to overturn the analogy which is
here pretended to be set up between love and hunger (a
delicate comparison)—to shew that the first of these
impulses is not an affair of mere physical necessity, that it
does not operate always in the same way, and that it is not
a thing, over which reason, or circumstances have no
power. What can be a stronger instance of the power of
reason, or imagination, or habit over this principle than the
number of single women, who in every country, till the
manners become quite corrupt, preserve either through
their whole lives, or the best part of them the greatest
purity and propriety of conduct? One would think that
female modesty had been a flower that blossomed only in
other climes (instead of being the peculiar growth of our
own time and country!) that Mr. Malthus in the heat of his
argument, and urged on by the ardour of his own feelings,
is blind to the example of so many of his fair
countrywomen, in whom the influence of a virtuous

education, of virtuous principles, and virtuous dispositions
prevails over the warmth of the passions and force of
temptation. Mr. Malthus’s doctrine is a most severe satire
against the modesty and self-denial of the other sex, and
ruins in one sweeping clause the unblemished reputations
of all those expecting or desponding virgins who had
hitherto been supposed to live in the daily, hourly practice
of this virtue. Trenched as he is behind history, philosophy,
and a knowledge of human nature, he laughs at all their
prudery and affectation, and tells them fairly that the thing
is impossible; and that unless a miracle could be worked in
their favour, they might as well pretend to live without
eating or drinking, or sleeping, as without the men. He
must be of opinion with Iago, that ‘their greatest merit is
not to leave it undone but keep it unknown.’ Surely, no
maid could live near such a man.—Though this is what Mr.
Malthus might say, it is not what he does say: on the other
hand, when he comes to particulars, (as he is rather a
candid man, and does not trouble himself much about
consistency) instead of representing real chastity as a kind
of miracle or monster in nature, he represents it as a very
common thing and bears honourable testimony to the
virtue of most women, particularly in the middle and higher
ranks of life, in this respect. But then this virtue is confined
entirely to the women; the men neither do, nor ever will be
able to practise it; and this again salves the objection to his
argument. But this is of all others the strongest proof of the
futility of Mr. Malthus’s reasoning: for to what is this
difference owing but to the opinion of the world respecting
their conduct, that is, to moral causes? It cannot be said I
presume that the greater command which the other sex
have over themselves is because their heads are stronger
and their passions weaker, (this would, I am sure, be out of
all anatomical proportion): it is owing solely to the
institutions of society, imposing this restraint upon them;
though these institutions, if we are to believe Mr. Malthus,

can never in any circumstances whatever have any effect
on this passion. It is impossible to add any thing to the
force and conclusiveness of this argument by enlarging
upon it: it speaks for itself. I can only say, that I am willing
to rest the whole controversy on this single fact. If the
passion is thus capable of being modified and influenced by
circumstances, opinion, and manners, and not merely
slightly modified, or for a short time, in one or two solitary
instances, as an exception to the general rule (though even
this would shew that the necessity is not absolute,
invincible, fatal) but actually kept under (as far as it has
any thing to do with population, or child-bearing) by one
half the sex in every well-regulated community, I conceive
Mr. Malthus can only be justified in saying, that no possible
circumstances will ever render this passion entirely subject
to the control of reason, by saying that no circumstances
will ever arrive in which it would be the imperious and
indispensable duty of every one to habituate himself to
such restraint, in which that necessity would be generally
felt and understood and enforced by the opinion of the
whole community, and in which nothing but a general
system of manners formed upon that opinion could save the
community from ruin, or from the evils of excessive
population, which is point-blank contrary to Mr. Malthus’s
whole doctrine. In short, Mr. Malthus’s whole book rests on
a malicious supposition, that all mankind (I hope the reader
will pardon the grossness of the expression, the subject is a
gross one) are like so many animals in season. ‘Were they
as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys, as salt as wolves in
pride, and fools as gross as ignorance made drunk,’ matters
could then be no worse than he represents them.
Population could then only be checked by vice and misery
and by nothing else. But I hope things are not quite so bad.
[11]
Mr. Malthus says, ‘that the passion between the sexes is
necessary, or at least that it will remain nearly in its
present state.’ To this I might perhaps assent, if I knew

what ‘its present state’ is. Does Mr. Malthus mean by its
present state its present state in England or in Scotland, or
in Italy, or in Asia, or in Africa, or America, for in all or
most of these places is its present state a very different
thing from what it is in the rest of them? One would
imagine from the easy complacency with which Mr.
Malthus treats the subject, that the present state of this
passion was a something really given, a fixed quantity, a
general rule like the relation between two and two and
four, or between food and the human stomach,[12] that it
was indulged universally and equally in all countries,
instead of being as various in itself and its effects as
climate and all other causes, natural and artificial, can
make it.—Thus to give an example as much in point as can
be, is the present state of this passion, i.e. of the
indulgence of it, the same in Lancashire, that it is in
Westmoreland, the very next county to it? In the one you
find the most profligate manners, and the most extreme
licentiousness, in the other there is hardly any such thing.
Mr. Malthus often says, he will never dispute any thing that
is proved by experience and a real observation of human
life. Now I conceive that the observation which I have just
stated is a fact. Yet Mr. Malthus seems to have been quite
insensible to this, and many other facts of the same kind.
But the truth is, that your practical reasoners, your matter-
of-fact men are the dullest of all mortals. They are like
justices of the peace who are bound to receive no evidence
unless it is given in upon oath, and who without descending
from the bench and forfeiting the dignity of their
pretensions cannot attend to any of those general surmises,
those obvious sources of information or casual impressions,
by which other people arrive at common sense, and human
feelings.—They shut their eyes to the general face of
nature, and trying to grope their way by the help of facts as
they call them, wander like blind men from pillar to post,
without either guide or object, and are lost in a labyrinth of

dates, names, capital letters, numeros, official documents,
authenticated copies of lying affidavits, curious records
that are nothing to the purpose, registers of births, deaths,
marriages, and christenings, voyages and travels.—Mr.
Malthus may perhaps mean, when he says that ‘the sexual
passion will remain nearly in its present state,’ that it will
remain in the same state in each country. To this I should
also assent, if I could agree with him, ‘that ever since we
have had any knowledge of mankind, the passion of which
we are speaking, appears to have been a fixed law of our
nature, and that as we have not hitherto seen any
alteration in it, we have no right to conclude that there will
ever be any.’ If Mr. Malthus in this passage meant to
confine him to the passion or impulse itself, I should not
certainly be at much pains to contradict him. But that is not
the question. The question relates solely to the irregular
indulgence of, or the degree of restraint imposed on the
passion; and in this respect his assertion is evidently false.
The difference in the state of manners in the same country
at different periods is as striking and notorious as that
between the manners of different countries. There is as
much difference between what England was in this respect
a hundred and sixty years ago, and what she is now, as
there is between England and Italy at the present day. Was
there no difference between the manners of ancient Rome
in the early periods of her history, and towards the decline
of the empire? May not the state of manners in Italy under
the republic, under the emperors, and under the popes, be
distinctly traced to the influence of religious or political
institutions, or to other causes, besides the state of
population, or the facility of gratifying the abstract
instinctive propensity to sexual indulgence? Was there not
a striking difference between the severity and restraint
which was required and undoubtedly practised under
Charles I. and in the time of the Puritans, and that torrent
of dissipation and undisguised profligacy which burst upon

the kingdom after the restoration of Charles II.? This
sudden transition from demure and saint-like or
hypocritical austerity to open shameless licentiousness
cannot assuredly be accounted for from the increasing
pressure of population. Nor can it be pretended to have
been owing to this principle that the tide afterwards turned
again at the Revolution with the habits and fashions of the
court, and with the views and maxims of that party who
had now got the ascendancy. A learned writer might easily
fill a volume with instances to the same purpose. But the
few which are here skimmed from the mere surface of
history, and which must be familiar to every one, are
sufficient to disprove Mr. Malthus’s assertion, not as a
metaphysical refinement, but as a practical rule, that the
passion between the sexes and the effects of that passion
have remained always the same. The indulgence of that
passion is so far from being a law antecedent to all other
laws, and paramount to all other considerations, that it is in
a manner governed almost entirely by circumstances, and
may be said to be the creature of the imagination. But Mr.
Malthus says, that no regular or gradual progress has
hitherto been made towards the extinction of this passion,
and that it exists in as much force at present, as it did two
thousand, or four thousand years ago. The question is
whether this passion is fixed and stationary, always
remaining at the same point, controuling circumstances,
but not controuled by them, not whether the change of
circumstances and lapse of time may not bring it back to
the same point again. I think it probable that if Mr. Malthus
had to preach a sermon on the truth and excellence of
revealed religion, he would be inclined to take for one of
his topics the benefit we have derived from it in the
government of our passions, and general purity of our
manners. He might launch out into a description shewing
how the contemplation of heavenly things weans the
affections from the things of the world, and mortifies our

carnal desires, how a belief in future rewards and
punishments strengthens our resolution, and is indeed the
only thing that can render us proof against every species of
temptation; he might enlarge on the general purity and
elevation which breathes through the sacred writings, on
the law confining the institution of marriage to pairs; he
might dwell on the grossness and pernicious tendency of
the Pagan mythology; he might glance at the epistle to the
Romans, or the preamble to the Jewish laws, and finding
that the practices there described are not common among
us, without travelling to Rome, or inquiring into the present
state of Chaldæa, conclude by felicitating his hearers on
the striking contrast between ancient and modern
manners, and on the gradual improvement of morals and
refinement of sentiment produced by the promulgation of
christianity. Though we in general reason very incorrectly
in comparing ancient and modern manners, (for we always
confound the former with eastern, and the latter with our
own manners) I am apt to think that some change has
taken place in this passion in the course of time. It seems to
be more modified by other feelings than it used to be; it is
less a boiling of the blood, an animal heat, a headlong,
brutal impulse than it was in past ages. The principle is
somewhat taken down and weakened, the appetite is not so
strong, we can stay our stomachs better than we used to
do, we do not gorge indiscriminately on every kind of food
without taste or decency. The vices of the moderns are
more artificial than constitutional. They do not arise so
much from instinct as from a depraved will. The spirit is
willing, but the flesh is weak. We stimulate ourselves into
affected passion: we are laborious imitators of folly, and
ape the vices of others in cold blood. But whatever may be
the result of an inquiry into the comparative state of
ancient and modern manners, I cannot allow that it has any
thing to do with the present question. I will allow that the
progress of refinement and knowledge has in ninety-nine

instances out of a hundred tended to deprave instead of
improving the morals of men, that at the same time that it
has taken away the gross impulse, it has introduced an
artificial and studied depravity, the operation of which is
more subtle, dangerous and universal; in short that nations
as they grow older like individuals grow worse, not from
constitution, but habit. Still this fact if granted (and I am
afraid it is too near the truth) will not at all prove Mr.
Malthus’s theory, that this passion remains always the
same, being influenced neither by time nor circumstances.
Secondly, it will not overturn the speculations respecting
the possibility of making an entire change in the passion ‘in
a state of society altogether different from any that has
hitherto existed,’ but will on the contrary render such a
change more desirable and necessary, as our only resource
against the general contagion of vice and profligacy. If this
vice is found to spread gradually wider and wider, clinging
to the support of institutions, which in all other respects
favour selfishness and sensuality, if it is not the only one
among the vices, which, while all others spread and
flourish and are fostered in the eye of the world, does not
hide its diminished head, this is not to be wondered at. But
it would be a singular way of defending the present
institutions of society, that from all our past experience we
find that their progress has been attended with the gradual
corruption of manners, and has uniformly ended in an utter
debasement of character and the relaxation of every moral
tie; and it would be a strange kind of inference to say that
no alteration in the circumstances or institutions of society
would ever make men different from what they are,
because as long as those circumstances and institutions
have been known to exist, mankind have remained always
the same, or have been growing worse instead of better.
Mr. Malthus denies that Mr. Godwin has any right to
conclude that because population has not produced the
dreadful effects he ascribes to it in any known state of

society, it would not therefore produce them in a state of
society quite different from any other; and in the same
manner I should deny that Mr. Malthus has any right to
infer because the progress of the human mind has not in
the past history of the world been productive of any very
beneficial consequences, that it will never be productive of
any such consequences under very different circumstances.
Knowledge, as I have shewn in a former letter, is not a
necessary, absolute good: neither is it a necessary evil. Its
utility depends on the direction which is given to it by other
things; e.g. in Scotland, the case before alluded to,
knowledge does not seem to be the enemy of sobriety and
good manners, but a support to them. The decay in the
purity and simplicity of Scotch manners, whenever it
arrives, will not I dare say be owing to the increase of
knowledge, but to the spread of luxury, or other external
causes. When the whole mass is tainted, it cannot be
expected that knowledge should escape the infection. All
therefore that the advocates for the future progressive
improvement of mankind have to prove in order to make
out a consistent case, is that the state of the passion
between the sexes depends not upon physical, but moral
causes; that where these latter causes have been
favourable to severity of manners, and the elevation of the
character, these effects have uniformly flowed from them,
and may be seen not in one or two singular exceptions, but
in large classes of people, in the prevailing manners of
whole ages and nations. Thus we do not merely know that
Scipio was chaste, and Nero profligate, but we know that
there was nothing singular in the chastity of the one, or the
profligacy of the other; it was little more than the
emanation of the character and circumstances of the times
in which they lived. The leaders of the republican party in
the time of Cromwell, such men as Milton, Hampden, Pym,
Marvel, Sydney, were not I believe in the command over
their passions exactly on a level with the young courtiers in

the following reign: but though the names of these men
stand out and ever will stand out in history, giving dignity
to our nature in all its parts, yet it is not to be supposed
that they alone drank of the pure waters of faith and
reason, which flowed freely at that time; but that the same
lofty thoughts, the same common exertions, and the same
passions, growing out of the circumstances of the times,
must have imparted a sort of severe and high-toned
morality to men’s minds in general, influencing the national
character in a very different way from the foreign fopperies
and foreign vices, from the train of strumpets, buffoons,
fiddlers, and obscene rhymers let loose upon the people in
the succeeding reign. It is not necessary to prove that
manners have always changed for the better, but that they
have always changed for the better, as far as those general
causes have operated in part, from the complete success of
which a total change is predicted. This passion as it runs
into licentiousness is certainly one great obstacle in the
way of improvement, and one of those passions which we
must conquer before we can hope to become perfectly
reasonable beings (if this is a thing either desirable or
possible). But to say, that we may get a complete mastery
over our passions, and that we shall still be in danger from
the principle of population is to me a paradox. Population is
only dangerous from the excess of this passion, and I see
no reason why its excesses may not be restrained as well as
those of any other passion. We find by uniform experience
that it is, like other passions, influenced by example,
institution, and circumstances, according to the degree of
strength they have; and if there is reason to suppose it
possible that any of the other passions should ever be
totally eradicated, or subjected to moral restraint, there is
no reason why this should not be so too. It does not form
any anomaly to the other prevailing passions of men. It is
not, like hunger, a necessary instinct. Its effects are more
like those of drunkenness: and we might as well make this

latter vice an insurmountable objection to the good order
and happiness of society, by saying that there will always
be as many drunken disputes, brawls and riots, as there are
at present, because there are as many instances of people
getting drunk now as there were two thousand years ago,
as pretend to deduce the same consequence from the
existence of such a passion as lust.—To judge from his
book, I should suppose Mr. Malthus to be a man of a warm
constitution, and amorous complexion. I should not hesitate
in my own mind, to conclude that this is ‘the sin that most
easily besets him.’ I can easily imagine that he has a
sufficient command over himself, in all other respects. I can
believe that he is quite free from the passions of anger,
pride, avarice, sloth, drunkenness, envy, revenge, and all
those other passions which create so much disturbance in
the world. He seems never to have heard of, or never to
have felt them; for he passes them over as trifles beneath
the notice of a philosopher. But the women are the devil.—
The delights and torments of love no man, he tells us, ever
was proof against: there all our philosophy is useless; and
reason but an empty name. ‘The rich golden shaft hath
killed the flock of all affections else,’ and here only he is
vulnerable. The smiles of a fair lady are to him irresistible;
the glimpse of a petticoat throws him into a flame; and all
his senses are up in arms, and his heart fails within him, at
the very name of love. His gallantry and devotion to the fair
sex know no bounds; and he not only answers for himself,
but undertakes to prove that all men are made of the same
combustible materials. His book reminds one of the title of
the old play, ‘All for love, or the world well lost.’ If Mr. M.’s
passions are too much for him, (though I should not have
the worse opinion of him on this account) I would advise
him to give vent to them in writing love-songs; not in
treatises of philosophy. I am aware, however, that it is
dangerous to meddle in such matters. As long as Mr.
Malthus gravely reduces the strength of the passion to a

mathematical certainty, he is sure to have the women on
his side; while I, for having the presumption to contradict
his amorous conclusions, shall be looked upon as a sour old
batchelor, and convicted of rebellion against the
omnipotence of love.
But to return. It is the direct object of Mr. Malthus’s
philosophy to draw our attention from the slight and
superficial influence which human institutions have had on
the happiness of man, to those ‘deeper-seated’ causes of
misery which arise out of the principle of population.
These, he says, are by far the most important, and the only
ones worth our attending to, because they are the only
ones on which all our reasonings and all our exertions will
have no effect. He very roundly taxes Mr. Godwin and
others as men who talked about what they did not
understand, because they did not perceive that social
institutions, and the different forms of government, and all
the other means in our power of affecting the condition of
human life are ‘but as the dust in the balance,’ compared
with a principle entirely out of our power, which renders
the vices of those institutions necessary, and any essential
improvement in them hopeless. He is also angry with Hume
for saying something about ‘indolence.’ We are in no case
to look beyond the principle of population, in accounting
for the state of man in society, if we would not fall under
Mr. Malthus’s displeasure, but are to resolve every thing
into that. In his hands, population is the Aaron’s rod which
swallowed up all the other rods. The piety of some of the
old divines led them to see all things in God. Mr. Malthus’s
self-complacency leads him to see all things in the Essay.
He would persuade us that his discovery supersedes all
other discoveries; that it is the category of political science;
that all other causes of human happiness and misery are
merged and sunk in that one, to which alone they owe their
influence, and their birth. So that we are in fact to consider

all human institutions, good, bad, and indifferent, all folly,
vice, wisdom, virtue, knowledge, ignorance, liberty and
slavery, poverty and riches, monarchy, aristocracy,
democracy, polygamy, celibacy, all forms and modes of life,
all arts, manufactures, and science, as resulting
mechanically from this one principle; which though simple
in itself, yet in its effects is a jumble, a chaos of
contradictions, a mass of inconsistency and absurdity,
which no human understanding can unravel, or explain.
Over this crew and medley of opinions, Mr. Malthus ‘sits
umpire, and by decision more embroils the fray by which
he reigns’: for he is not quite undetermined in his choice
between good and evil, but is always inclined to give the
preference to vice and misery, not only as the most natural,
but as the most safe and salutary effects of this principle,
as we prescribe a low diet and blisters to persons of too full
a temperament. ‘Our greatest good is but plethoric ill.’—
Mr. Malthus may perhaps plead in his own defence that at
the outset of his work (second edition) he professes to treat
only of one of the causes which have hitherto impeded the
progress of virtue and happiness, and that he was not
therefore, by the terms of the agreement, bound to take
cognizance of any of the other causes which have tended to
produce the same effect. He is like a man who takes it into
his head to make a huge map of Scotland, (larger than any
that ever was made of the whole world besides) and gives
you into the bargain as much or as little of Ireland or the
rest of Great Britain as he pleases. Any one else who
chuses, may make a map of England or Ireland on the same
scale. There is something fair and plausible in this. But the
fact really is, that Mr. Malthus will let nobody make a map
of the country but himself: he has put England, Wales, and
Ireland in the three corners of his great map (for the title
takes up one of the corners) and he insists upon it that this
is quite sufficient.—What he aims at in all his plans and
calculations of existing grievances is to magnify the evils of

population, to exonerate human institutions, and to throw
the whole blame on nature herself. I shall therefore try to
give such a sketch, or bird’s-eye view of the subject as may
serve to shew the unfairness of our author’s statement.
How little he has confined himself to his professed object,
and how little he can be considered in the light of a joint-
inquirer after truth, will be seen by quoting the following
passages at large.
‘The great error under which Mr. Godwin labours
throughout his whole work is, the attributing of almost all
the vices and misery that prevail in civil society to human
institutions. Political regulations, and the established
administration of property are with him the fruitful sources
of all evil, the hotbeds of all the crimes that degrade
mankind. Were this really a true state of the case, it would
not seem an absolutely hopeless task to remove evil
completely from the world; and reason seems the proper
and adequate instrument for effecting so great a purpose.
But the truth is, that though human institutions appear to
be the obvious and obtrusive causes of much mischief to
mankind, they are, in reality, light and superficial, in
comparison with those deeper-seated causes of evil which
result from the laws of nature.’
Now by ‘the laws of nature,’ of which human
institutions are here made only a sort of cat’s-paw, our
author means neither more nor less than the principle of
population. For after supposing in compliment to Mr.
Godwin, a state of society in which the spirit of oppression,
the spirit of servility, and the spirit of fraud, in which envy,
malice, and revenge, in which every species of narrowness
and selfishness are banished from the world, where war
and contention have ceased to exist, where unwholesome
trades and manufactures are no longer encouraged, &c., he
breaks out into his usual cant of, ‘I cannot conceive a form
of society so favourable upon the whole to population.’ He

then proceeds gravely to shew, by a train of reasoning
which has been already recapitulated, and which need not
surely be refuted twice, how in such a state of happy
equality population would go on increasing without limit,
because all obstacles to it, ‘all anxiety about the future
support of children,’ would be entirely removed, though it
would at the same time be attended in every stage of the
progress with increasing and aggravated wretchedness,
because those very obstacles, and the same difficulty of
providing for the support of children would still remain.
‘Here then,’ he says, ‘no human institutions existed, to
the perverseness of which Mr. Godwin ascribes the original
sin of the worst men. No opposition had been produced by
them between public and private good. No monopoly had
been created of those advantages which reason directs to
be left in common. No man had been goaded to the breach
of order by unjust laws. Benevolence had established her
reign in all hearts. And yet in so short a period as fifty
years, violence, oppression, falsehood, misery, every hateful
vice, and every form of distress, which degrade and sadden
the present state of society, seem to have been generated
by the most imperious circumstances, by laws inherent in
the nature of man, and absolutely independent of all human
regulations.’
‘It is a perfectly just observation of Mr. Godwin, that
there is a principle in human society by which population is
perpetually kept down to the level of the means of
subsistence. The sole question is, what is this principle? Is
it some obscure and occult cause? Is it some mysterious
interference of heaven, which at a certain period strikes
the men with impotence, and the women with barrenness?
Or is it a cause open to our researches, within our view; a
cause which has constantly been observed to operate,
though with varied force, in every state in which man has
been placed? Is it not misery and the fear of misery,’

[certainly two very different things] ‘the necessary and
inevitable results of the laws of nature, which human
institutions, so far from aggravating, have tended
considerably to mitigate, though they can never remove?’
He then proceeds to shew how the distinctions of property
and the other regulations of society would necessarily
result from the principle of population, and adds, that
‘certainly if the great principle of the Essay be admitted, it
affects Mr. Godwin’s whole work, and essentially alters the
foundations of political justice. A great part of his book
consists of an abuse of human institutions’ [very sad
indeed] ‘as productive of all or most of the evils which
afflict society. The acknowledgement of a new and totally
unconsidered cause of misery must evidently alter the state
of these arguments,’ [comfortable again] ‘and make it
absolutely necessary that they should be either newly
modified, or entirely rejected.’—How fortunate to have
discovered that the evils in society are not owing to a cause
which might be remedied, but to one that renders their
removal absolutely hopeless!
I might here, if I were to follow the impulse of my own
levity, say that the yellow fever has I believe made its
appearance since the first edition of Political Justice,
though I do not know that this circumstance would make it
necessary entirely to new-model the arguments. As to Mr.
Malthus’s ‘new and unconsidered cause of misery,’ I deny
that the necessity of providing a proportionable quantity of
food for an increase of people was new or unconsidered. All
that Mr. Malthus has discovered is that the population
would go on increasing, though there was nothing to
support it!—Our author has chosen to justify or palliate the
real disorders which prevail in society by supposing a case
of fictitious distress; by which means he proves
incontestably that the present vices and defects of political
institutions, &c. are comparative blessings. He supposes

that in a state of society where the public good was the
constant guide of action, men would entirely lay aside the
use of their reason, and think of nothing but begetting
children, without considering in the least how they were to
be maintained. Now I will also for a time take a license
from common sense, and make a supposition as wise as Mr.
Malthus’s. I will suppose all the inhabitants of this town to
come to a determination to live without eating, and do
nothing but drink gin. What would be the consequence?
Perpetual intoxication, quarrels, the fierceness of hunger,
disease, idleness, filth, nakedness, maudlin misery, sallow
faces, sights of famine and despair, meagre skeletons, the
dying, and the dead. But why need I attempt to describe
what has been already so much better described by
Hogarth? Here then, I might exclaim, no human institutions
existed, no unjust laws, no excessive labour, no
unwholesome trades, no inequality, no malice, envy, lust, or
revenge, to produce the dreadful catastrophe we just have
witnessed: yet in the short space of a single month or
fortnight we see that scenes of distress, shocking beyond
any thing of which we can at present form even a
conception, would arise out of the most imperious
circumstances, from laws inherent in the nature and
constitution of man, and absolutely independent of all
human regulations, namely, from the unrestricted use of
gin. The inference is direct and unavoidable, that we ought
to submit patiently and thankfully to all the abuses, vices,
and evils that are to be found in this great city, and flatter,
excuse, and encourage them by all the means in our power,
because they all of them together do not amount to a tenth
part of the mischief that would be the consequence of the
unrestrained indulgence of a single pernicious habit. This is
something the way in which Mr. Malthus reasons about the
unrestricted increase of population. But the absurdity is too
gross even for burlesque.

The following is, I conceive, a fair summary of Mr.
Malthus’s theory. First, that the principle of population is a
necessary, mechanical thing, that it is the ‘grinding law of
necessity,’ unavoidably leading to a certain degree of vice
and misery, and in fact accounting for almost all the evils in
human life. Secondly, that all the other sources of vice and
misery which have been so much and idly insisted on, have
no tendency to increase the necessary evils of population,
but the contrary, or that the removal of those different
sources of evil would instead of lessening the evils of
population, which are much the most important, really
aggravate them. Here then three questions naturally
present themselves.
First, how much of the vice and misery in society is
actually owing to human institutions, or the passions,
follies, imperfections, or perversities of human nature,
independently of the principle of population.
Secondly, whether the removing or diminishing the
evils produced by those causes would necessarily increase
the evils of population, and open a door to the influx of
more vice and misery than ever.
Thirdly, whether the tendency of population to excess is
the effect of a simple principle operating mechanically,
whether it is to be looked upon as one of the laws inherent
in our very nature, or whether the state of morals in every
country does not depend greatly and principally on the
state of society, on the condition of the people, on public
opinion, and on a variety of other causes which are more or
less within our power; that is, whether human institutions,
laws, &c. instead of being the mere blind instruments of
this principle, do not re-act very powerfully upon it, and
give it its direction and limits.—If it can be shewn under
this last head, that there is some connection between the
form of government and the state of morals, and that the
better the government, the better the morals, the evils of

population instead of forming an excuse for bad
governments will only aggravate their mischief, and
increase the necessity of getting rid of them. Again, if it can
be made to appear that there is no necessary, or general
proportion between the degree of vice in any country, and
the pressure of population on the means of subsistence,
that it is not always the effect of want, but constantly
outruns the occasion, being self-propagated, and often
spreading like a contagion through those countries and
those ranks in life, where the difficulty of providing for a
family is least felt, this will shew that the mere existence of
vice is no proof of its being necessary, or that it is to be
considered as a test of the excessive increase of population.
Farther, if on the other hand, improving the condition of
the lower classes of the people is generally found, instead
of leading to an unrestrained increase of population, and
thus adding to their misery, to give them a greater
attachment to the decencies and comforts of life, to make
them more cautious how they part with them, to open their
ideas and prospects, to strengthen the principle of moral
restraint, and so confine population within reasonable
limits, this will be an additional motive for improving their
condition (really and truly, not by taking from them the
comforts and privileges they already possess). Again, if it
should be found that independently of the immediate acts
of tyranny exercised by particular governments, and the
poverty and wretchedness experienced by certain classes
of the community there is a tendency in some governments
to keep population down infinitely below the level to which
it might rise by a proper encouragement of agriculture, and
the methods of industry by which population is supported,
it will be but a poor defence of the folly or tyranny of such
governments to say, that they are a necessary expedient to
prevent the excess of population.

Lastly, if those states or communities, where the
greatest equality prevails, are those which maintain the
greatest number of inhabitants, and where the principle of
moral restraint is likely to operate with most effect, that is,
where population is soonest able to reach its utmost limits,
and goes the least beyond them, certainly those institutions
which favour the greatest disparity of conditions, the
extremes of poverty and the extremes of luxury, will receive
no very striking support from the principle of population.
These are I think the chief points and inferences to which I
wish to direct the reader’s attention in the few slight
remarks which I have to make upon the subject.
It may be proper to observe, in the first place, that Mr.
Malthus by making vice and misery the necessary
consequences of his favourite principle lays himself open to
a very obvious objection. For if he means to prove any thing
by his theory, the question immediately is, what degree of
vice and misery is rendered necessary by this principle, or
by the physical constitution of man? Are we to suppose that
only so much evil is necessary as naturally grows out of the
British constitution? Or does this principle also prove that
all the evils that are suffered under the Turkish
government, or that were suffered under the old
government of France, or that may arise out of its present
government are equally necessary and salutary? How far
are we to go? Where are we to stop? Are we to consider
every evil and abuse as necessary, merely because it exists,
or only as much of the thing as we cannot get rid of? But
how much can we really get rid of? Are vice and misery
uniformly owing to the development of this principle in
certain situations, or are they to be in part ascribed to the
intervention of other arbitrary, and gratuitous causes, the
operation of which may be more easily set aside? In what
manner are we to distinguish between what is necessary,
and what is not? All these questions require to be asked

before we can proceed to build any practical conclusions on
Mr. Malthus’s theory of the evils of population. The vague,
general term, ‘vice and misery,’ gives us no clue. It is mere
cant; and applies equally to the best and worst of all
possible governments. It proves either nothing, or it proves
a great deal more than I conceive Mr. Malthus would in all
cases wish to prove by it.
There is no species of vice or oppression that does not
find a ready excuse in this kind of reasoning. And besides,
by leaving the quantity of vice and misery always
uncertain, we never subject ourselves to the necessity of
following a general principle into any obnoxious
conclusions; and are always at liberty to regulate our
opinions according to our convenience by saying—I would
have no more vice and misery than at present prevails: but
that degree of vice and misery which is inwoven with the
present constitution of things, I would by no means have
removed, it might endanger the whole fabric. This is a
double advantage. We thus sacrifice to the powers that be,
without violating decorum, or being driven off our guard by
an inflexible and pedantic logic. 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.
I do not know that I can go so far as with Mr. Godwin to
ascribe the original sin of the worst men to social
institutions, but of this I am very sure that that original sin
and those institutions do not proceed entirely from the
principle of population. There are other vices and
mischievous propensities inherent in our nature, besides
the love of pleasure. We are troubled with a complication of
disorders, and it is bad advice to say, that we ought to
direct all our attention to the one that is perhaps the most

inveterate, or because we despair of doing any thing with
that, make no attempts to counteract the progress of the
others, either by palliatives or otherwise. If we are
deceived with respect to the real extent, and sources of our
disorders, it is impossible we should hit upon the right
method of cure, whatever might be the case, if we were
informed of our true situation.—The principle of population
alone, according to the description Mr. Malthus gives of it
as a principle of unbridled and insatiable lust, would indeed
be sufficient to account for all the vice and misery in the
world, and for a great deal more than there is in the world.
It would soon overturn every thing. But we have seen that
that account is not just. It is in fact only one of the
principles or passions by which the conduct of mankind is
influenced; and he would be a bold man who should assert
that neither ambition, nor avarice, nor sloth, nor ignorance,
nor prejudice have had any share in producing the various
evils that abound in civil society. The other passions are
sturdy claimants and know how to bustle for themselves,
and will not be so easily pushed out of the world. Let any
one write the words, ambition, pride, cruelty, hatred,
oppression, falsehood, selfishness, indolence, lust, and
hunger in the same line, and let him see if there is any
peculiar charm in the two last, which draws all their virtue
and meaning out of the rest. Yet this is the impression
which Mr. Malthus seems anxious to leave on the minds of
his readers. Indeed all the others appear to owe their
efficacy and their sting to lust alone. If it were not for this
one principle, the world might go on very well.
Mr. Malthus charges it as a great error on Mr. Godwin’s
system that ‘political regulations and the established
administration of property are with him the fruitful sources
of all evil, the hotbeds of all the crimes that degrade
mankind.’ Be it so, that this is an error. The next question
is, as Mr. Malthus does not deny that these institutions are

the immediate causes of many of the evils that exist, to
what principle they really owe their rise. Mr. Malthus says,
they are the necessary results of laws inherent in our
nature, and that though all the other passions and vices of
men could be got rid of altogether, the principle of
population alone would still render those institutions with
all the abuses belonging to them as necessary as ever. This
I take upon me to dispute. Will he say, that (leaving the
principle of population entirely out of the question) pride,
avarice, and indolence have had no share in the
establishment, or continuance of the inequality of property,
in goading men on to the accumulation of immense riches
by oppression, extortion, fraud, perjury, and every species
of villainy, or in making them undergo every kind of
distress, sooner than apply themselves to some regular and
useful occupation. If I were inclined to maintain a paradox
on the subject, I might take up Hume’s assertion, ‘that
indolence is the source of all mischief in the world.’ For if
men had not been averse to labour, if there had been no
idlers to take advantage of, to offer temptation to, and
enlist upon any terms in any lawless enterprize, that
promised an easy booty, the tyrant would have been
without his slaves, the robber without his gang, and the
rich man without his dependents. But these smart points
and pithy sayings are soon found to be fallacious, if we
attend a little closely to the subject. For instance, it may be
true that if there had been no idle people, there would have
been no one to take advantage of, but if there had been no
pride, rapacity, or selfishness, there would have been no
one to take an undue advantage of them, or foment the
mischief. The fellows that generally compose a gang of
robbers only wish to gain a cheap livelihood by acts of
violence; the captain of the gang is also actuated by vanity,
revenge, the spirit of adventure, and the desire to keep the
country for twenty or thirty miles round in awe of him. The
common soldier is glad of sixpence a-day to be shot at

every now and then, and do nothing the rest of his time: the
general is not easy, unless he can lay waste provinces,
overrun kingdoms, and make the world ring with the terror
of his name. The lazy and unthinking would not do half the
mischief, of which they are capable, without the active, the
enterprizing and turbulent: fools and knaves are as
necessary to the body politic, as the head and limbs are to
the human body. The Romans might have staid quietly
within their own walls, but for the plotting heads at home
that sent them out to victory; and his thirty thousand
followers would no more have thought of setting out to
India of their own accord, than Alexander would have
thought of marching there by himself.
It is to me pretty clear that as long as there are such
passions as sloth and rapacity, these will be sufficient to
account for the unequal division of property, and will
render the laws relating to it necessary: and it is equally
clear to my mind that if these passions could be completely
subdued, so that no one would refuse his share in the
common labour, or endeavour to take an unfair advantage
of others either by force or fraud, that the established
administration of property would be no longer necessary.[13]
If, as Mr. Malthus supposes, ‘Benevolence had so far
established her reign in all hearts,’ that every one was
ready to give up the enjoyments of ease and luxury as far
as related to himself, I do not think that in such a state of
unparalleled disinterestedness and heroic virtue, any
madman would be found to violate the public happiness,
and begin the work of contention anew, for the sake of
transmitting a contingent inheritance of vice and misery to
his heirs! If reason and virtue are at present no match for
the principle of population, neither are they a match for the
principle of selfishness, or for any of our other passions.
But truly, if benevolence had once established her reign in
all hearts, we should see wonders, she would perform the

part of vice and misery to a miracle.—It is evident then that
the seeds of inequality, of vice and misery are not sown
entirely in the principle of population; that the same
untoward passions which first rendered civil
establishments necessary, have continued to operate ever
since, that they have produced most of the disorders in the
world, and are still in as much force as ever; that they very
well deserve a chapter by themselves in the history of
human nature, and ought not to come in as a note or
parenthesis to Mr. Malthus’s great work.
But whatever account we may chuse to give of the
origin of the establishment of property or government in
general, this has nothing to do with the real question,
unless it could be shewn that the same form of government,
the same inequality of conditions, and the same degree of
vice and misery are to be found alike in every country. Mr.
Malthus’s system goes to the support of all political
regulations and existing evils, or it goes to the support of
none. Let us cast our eyes over the map of Europe, and ask
whether all that variety of governments and manners by
which it is distinguished took their rise solely from the
principle of population. A principle common to human
nature, a law inherent in the physical constitution of man,
may in its progress be necessarily attended with a certain
degree of vice and misery; but it cannot be productive of
different degrees of vice and misery in different countries;
as the stern law of necessity, it must operate every where
alike. If it does not do so, this of itself shews that it is not
the sole moving spring in all human institutions, that it is
not beyond the reach of all regulation and control, and that
there are other circumstances, accidents, and principles on
which the happiness of nations depends. Whatever
difference there is, then, between one government and
another, whether that government is despotic, or mixed, or
free; whatever difference there is in the administration of

that government, whether it is cruel, oppressive, and
arbitrary in the extreme, or mild, just, and merciful;
whatever difference there is between the manners of one
nation and those of another, whether the most licentious
that can be, or strict and exemplary; whatever difference
there is in the arts and conveniences of life, in the
improvements of trade and agriculture in various countries,
whatever differences are produced by religion, by
contrarieties of opinion, by the state of knowledge, by
useful or mischievous regulations of all kinds, all these
cannot be owing to one and the same cause.
Will Mr. Malthus say that all these differences are as
nothing, that they are not worth insisting on, or contending
about, that they are nominal, rather than real, or at any
rate that what is gained in one way is lost in another, for
that the principle of population still requires the same vent,
and produces first or last the same quantity of vice and
misery of one sort or other in every country? He must
assert on the one hand that all other causes put together do
not materially affect the happiness of a people, or on the
other hand that the state of all those other causes depends
on, and arises out of the state of population, though they do
not in the least influence the principle of population itself.
These absurdities, than which it would be difficult to
advance greater, are however necessary to bear out the
author’s conclusion, that arts, knowledge, liberty and
virtue, and the best institutions can do little for the
happiness of mankind. For instance, if it is true that
religion or opinion of any kind exerts a direct influence
over morals, then it is not true that morals depend entirely
on the state of population. Or if it is true, that the invention
of a useful art, which is accident, or the public
encouragement of it, which is design, may contribute to the
support of a larger population without multiplying its
inconveniences, then it is not true that all human happiness

or misery can be calculated according to a mechanical
ratio. But these matters are, I confess, set in the clearest
light by a reference to facts, and I can quote no better
authority than Mr. Malthus himself.
He says, ‘It will not be difficult, from the accounts of
travellers, to trace the checks to population, and the causes
of its present decay [in Turkey]; and as there is little
difference in the manners of the Turks, whether they
inhabit Europe or Asia, it will not be worth while to make
them the subject of distinct consideration.’ [I shall presume
that I have so far reconciled the reader’s mind to the
bugbear, population, that he will not regard depopulation
as one of the most beautiful features in the economy of a
state.]
Our author then proceeds, ‘The fundamental cause of
the low state of population in Turkey, compared with its
extent of territory, is undoubtedly the nature of its
government. Its tyranny, its feebleness, its bad laws and
worse administration of them, with the consequent
insecurity of property, throw such obstacles in the way of
agriculture, that the means of subsistence are necessarily
decreasing yearly, and with them, of course, the number of
people. The miri or general land-tax, paid to the sultan, is
in itself moderate; but by abuses inherent in the Turkish
government, the pachas, and their agents have found out
the means of rendering it ruinous. Though they cannot
absolutely alter the impost which has been established by
the sultan, they have introduced a number of changes,
which, without the name, produce all the effect of an
augmentation. In Syria, according to Volney, having the
greatest part of the land at their disposal, they clog their
concessions with burthensome conditions, and exact the
half, and sometimes even two-thirds of the crop. When the
harvest is over, they cavil about losses, and, as they have
the power in their hands, they carry off what they think

proper.’ [What they leave behind them, is what Mr. Malthus
when he gets into his abstractions calls ‘the fund
appropriated to the maintenance of labour,’ or, ‘the
aggregate quantity of food possessed by the owners of land
beyond their own consumption.’] ‘If the season fail, they
still exact the same sum, and expose every thing that the
poor peasant possesses to sale. To these constant
oppressions are added a thousand accidental extortions.
Sometimes a whole village is laid under contribution for
some real or imaginary offence. Arbitrary presents are
exacted on the accession of each governor; grass, barley,
and straw are demanded for his horses’; [Mr. Malthus
thinks, farther on in his book, that ‘the waste of the rich,
and the horses kept for pleasure’ in this country are no
detriment to the poor here, but rather a benefit, page 478.]
‘and commissions are multiplied, that the soldiers who
carry the orders may live upon the starving peasants,
whom they treat with the most brutal insolence and
injustice. The consequence of these depredations is, that
the poorer class of inhabitants, ruined, and unable any
longer to pay the miri, become a burden to the village,’
[something I suppose in the same way that the poor among
us become a burden to the parish] ‘or fly into the cities; but
the miri is unalterable, and the sum to be levied must be
found somewhere. The portion of those who are thus driven
from their homes falls on the remaining inhabitants, whose
burden, though at first light, now becomes insupportable. If
they should be visited by two years of drought and famine,
the whole village is ruined and abandoned; and the tax,
which it should have paid, is levied on the neighbouring
lands. The same mode of proceeding takes place with
regard to the tax on Christians, which has been raised by
these means,’ [by what means, by the principle of
population?] ‘from three, five, and eleven piastres, at which
it was first fixed, to thirty-five and forty, which absolutely
impoverishes those on whom it is levied, and obliges them

to leave the country. It has been remarked that these
exactions have made a rapid progress during the last forty
years, from which time are dated the decline of agriculture,
the depopulation of the country, and the diminution in the
quantity of the specie carried to Constantinople. The
peasants are every where reduced to a little flat cake of
barley, or doura, onions, lentils, and water. Not to lose any
part of their corn they leave in it all sorts of wild grain,
which often produces bad consequences. In the mountains
of Lebanon and Nablous, in time of dearth, they gather the
acorns from the oak which they eat after boiling or roasting
them on the ashes. By a natural consequence of this misery,
the art of cultivation is in the most deplorable state. The
husbandman is almost without instruments, and those he
has are very bad. His plough is frequently no more than the
branch of a tree cut below a fork and used without wheels.
The ground is tilled by asses and cows, rarely by oxen,
which would bespeak too much riches. In the districts
exposed to the Arabs, as in Palestine, the countryman must
sow with his musket in his hand, and scarcely does the corn
turn yellow before it is reaped and concealed in
subterraneous caverns. As little as possible is employed for
seed corn, because the peasants sow no more than is
barely necessary for their subsistence. Their whole industry
is limited to the supply of their immediate wants, and to
procure a little bread, a few onions, a blue shirt, and a bit
of woollen, much labour is not necessary. The peasant lives
therefore in distress, but at least he does not enrich his
tyrants, and the avarice of despotism is its own
punishment.’ [Note.—These are the unhappy persons, as
our author expresses it in a passage, which may hereafter
be quoted at length, ‘who in the great lottery of life have
drawn a blank; and with whose exorbitant and
unreasonable demands the owners of the aforesaid surplus
produce neither think it just nor natural to comply.’ I
confess, I cannot account for all the contention and distress

which is here implied, for the conflict between famine and
riches, when I seriously consider with Mr. Malthus, ‘that
the quantity of food, which one man can consume, is
necessarily limited by the narrow capacity of the human
stomach; that it is not certainly probable that he should
throw away the rest; or if he exchanged his surplus
produce for the labour of others, that this would be better
than that these others should absolutely starve.’ But human
life, as well as our reasonings about it, is a mystery, a
dream.] ‘This picture which is drawn by Volney, in
describing the state of the peasants in Syria, seems to be
confirmed by all the other travellers in these countries, and
according to Eton, it represents very nearly the condition of
the peasants in the greater part of the Turkish dominions.
Universally the offices of every denomination are set up to
public sale, and in the intrigues of the seraglio, by which
the disposal of all places is regulated, every thing is done
by means of bribes. The pachas in consequence, who are
sent into the provinces, exert to the utmost their power of
extortion, but are always outdone by the officers
immediately below them, who, in their turn, leave room for
their subordinate agents. The pacha must raise money to
pay the tribute, and also to indemnify himself for the
purchase of his office; support his dignity, and make a
provision in case of accidents; and as all power, both civil
and military, centers in his person, from his representing
the sultan, the means are at his discretion, and the quickest
are invariably considered as the best. Uncertain of to-
morrow, he treats his province as a mere transient
possession, and endeavours to reap, if possible, in one day,
the fruit of many years, without the smallest regard to his
successor, or the injury that he may do to the permanent
revenue. The cultivator is necessarily more exposed to
these extortions than the inhabitants of the towns. From
the nature of his employment, he is fixed to one spot, and
the productions of agriculture do not admit of being easily

concealed. The tenure of the land and the right of
succession are besides uncertain. When a father dies, the
inheritance reverts to the sultan, and the children can only
redeem the succession by a considerable sum of money.
These considerations naturally occasion an indifference to
landed estates. The country is deserted, and each person is
desirous of flying to the towns, where he will not only in
general meet with better treatment, but may hope to
acquire a species of wealth, which he can more easily
conceal from the eyes of his rapacious masters. To
complete the ruin of agriculture, a maximum is in many
cases established, and the peasants are obliged to furnish
the towns with corn at a fixed price. It is a maxim of
Turkish policy, originating in the feebleness of the
government, and the fear of popular tumults, to keep the
price of corn low in all the considerable towns. In the case
of a failure in the harvest, every person who possesses any
corn is obliged to sell it at the price fixed, under pain of
death: and if there be none in the neighbourhood, other
districts are ransacked for it. When Constantinople is in
want of provisions, ten provinces are perhaps famished for
a supply. At Damascus, during a scarcity in 1784, the
people paid only one penny farthing a pound for their
bread, while the peasants in the villages were absolutely
dying with hunger. The effect of such a system of
government on agriculture, need not be insisted on. The
causes of the decreasing means of subsistence are but too
obvious; and the checks which keep the population down to
the level of these decreasing resources, may be traced with
nearly equal certainty, and will appear to include almost
every species of vice and misery.’ Happy country, secured
by the very nature of its government from the terrors of
increasing population, and where every species of vice and
misery, wisely anticipated, on the principle that the
imagination of a thing is worse than the reality, takes away
all fear of any greater evils than those they already endure!

In the same chapter, he says, that in Persia ‘the lower
classes of people are obliged to defer marriage till late; and
that it is only among the rich that this union takes place
early. The dreadful convulsions to which this country has
been subject for many hundred years, must have been fatal
to her agriculture. The periods of repose from external
wars, and internal commotions have been short and few,
and even during the times of profound peace, the frontier
provinces have been constantly subject to the ravages of
the Tartars.—The effect of this state of things is such as
might be expected. The proportion of uncultivated to
cultivated land, Sir John Chardin states to be, ten to one;
and the mode in which the officers of the state and private
owners let out their lands to husbandmen, is not that which
is best calculated to reanimate industry. The other checks
to population in Persia are nearly the same as those in
Turkey. The superior destruction of the plague in Turkey is
perhaps nearly balanced by the greater frequency of
internal commotions in Persia.’
These extracts furnish, I think, a tolerably clear idea of
the manner in which it is possible for human institutions to
aggravate instead of mitigating the necessary evils of
population. We have a sufficient specimen of the effects of
bad government, of bad laws, of the worse execution of
them, of feeble and selfish policy, of wars and commotions,
or of diseases probably occasioned for the most part by the
numbers of people who are huddled together in dirt and
poverty in the great towns in the manner we have seen—in
altering the natural proportion between the produce of the
soil, and the maintenance of the inhabitants; in wantonly
diminishing the means of subsistence by a most unjust and
unequal distribution of them; in diverting the produce of
industry from its proper channels, in drying up its sources,
in causing a stagnation of all the motives and principles
which animate human life, in destroying all confidence,

independence, hope, cheerfulness, and manly exertion, in
thwarting the bounties of nature by waste, rapacity,
extortion and violence, and spreading want, misery, and
desolation in their stead. How admirably does Mr. Malthus
balance his checks! What the plague does in Turkey, is in
Persia happily effected by means of civil commotions.
Population is thus kept down to the level of the means of
subsistence. But it seems, that wars, and intestine
commotions, those blind drudges of Providence in clearing
away the filth, rubbish, and other evils of a too crowded
population, sometimes go beyond their errand, or do their
work the wrong way, by striking at the root of population
instead of lopping off its superfluous branches. According
to our author’s general system, the killing ten, or twenty, or
a hundred thousand men is an evil of a very trifling
magnitude, if it is to be looked upon as an evil at all.
Population will only go on with the greater alacrity,
marriage will be rendered more practicable, and the
deficiency will soon be supplied from the sprightly and
ever-teeming source of nature. The dreadful convulsions,
however, to which Persia has been subject for so many
hundred years have not been merely vents to carry off the
excess of population beyond the means of subsistence, but
they have further been fatal to agriculture itself, or to those
very means of subsistence. The proportion of uncultivated,
to cultivated land, we find, is ten to one; so that the
population is not only reduced to a level with the means of
subsistence, but reduced ten times lower than it need be.[14]
I beg leave to accompany this description of the effects
of political regulations and the established administration
of property in Turkey, with the following critical
commentary, taken from another part of the same work,
which will throw considerable light on the necessity of
those institutions to prevent the evils of population. Mr.
Malthus’s usual plea for ‘vice and misery,’ is that nothing

else can put a stop to the excesses of population; which
they do in the most effectual and eligible manner. But he
has here deserted his idols.
‘It has appeared, I think, clearly, in the review of
different societies given in the former part of this work,
that those countries, the inhabitants of which were sunk in
the most barbarous ignorance, or oppressed by the most
cruel tyranny, however low they might be in actual
population, were very populous in proportion to their
means of subsistence; and upon the slightest failure of the
seasons, generally suffered the severities of want.’ [Yet it
was the sole object of Mr. Malthus’s discovery to prove the
converse proposition, that the highest degree of
knowledge, and a perfect exemption from every species of
tyranny would only lead to the lowest state of human
wretchedness.]—‘Ignorance and despotism seem to have no
tendency to destroy the passion which prompts to increase;
but they effectually destroy the checks to it from reason
and foresight. The improvident barbarian who thinks only
of his present wants, or the miserable peasant, who from
his political situation feels little security of reaping what he
has sown, will seldom be deterred from gratifying his
passions by the prospect of inconveniences which cannot
be expected to press on him under three or four years. But
though this want of foresight, which is fostered by
ignorance and despotism, tend thus rather to encourage
the procreation of children, it is absolutely fatal to the
industry which is to support them. Industry cannot exist
without foresight and security. The indolence of the savage
is well known; and the poor Egyptian or Abyssinian farmer,
without capital, who rents land, which is let out yearly to
the highest bidder and who is constantly subject to the
demands of his tyrannical masters, to the casual plunder of
an enemy, and not unfrequently to the violation of his
miserable contract, can have no heart to be industrious,

and if he had, could not exercise that industry with success.
Even poverty itself, which appears to be the great spur to
industry, when it has once passed certain limits, almost
ceases to operate. The indigence which is hopeless,
destroys all vigorous exertion, and confines the efforts to
what is sufficient for bare existence. 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.’
What a pity that a man, who writes so well at times,
should, for the sake of an hypothesis, involve ‘himself in
absurdities and contradictions that would disgrace the lips
of an ideot.’ Mr. Malthus will excuse me, if I make use of
some of the hints contained in this excellent passage, for
the benefit of our English poor, who I think should not have
harder measure dealt them than others, and try to soften
some of the harshest constructions of the grinding law of
necessity in their favour. I do not see why they alone are to
be the martyrs of an abstraction. But Mr. Malthus reserves
the application of his theory in its purity for his own
countrymen. He has some natural feelings, and a certain
degree of tender weakness for the distresses of other
countries, but he will not suffer his feelings for a moment
to get the better of his reason, with regard to those to
whom he is bound by stronger ties, and over whose
interests he watches with a paternal anxiety. He will hear
of no palliations, no excuses, no shuffling temporary
expedients to put off the evil day, he insists upon their
submitting to the full operation of the penalty incurred by
the laws of God and of nature, nothing short of the utmost
severity will satisfy him, (’tis death to spare) he will not
bate them a jot of his argument, he makes them drain the
unsavoury cup of misery to the very dregs.

In the same chapter, which is entitled ‘Of the principal
sources of the prevailing errors on population,’ he says, ‘It
has been observed that many countries at the period of
their greatest populousness have lived in the greatest
plenty, and have been able to export corn; but at other
periods, when their population was very low, have lived in
continual poverty and want, and have been obliged to
import corn. Egypt, Palestine, Rome, Sicily, and Spain are
cited as particular exemplifications of this fact; and it has
been inferred, that an increase of population in any state,
not cultivated to the utmost, will tend rather to augment
than diminish the relative plenty of the whole society,’ &c.
After contradicting this inference without giving any
reasons against it, he goes on, ‘Scarcity and extreme
poverty, therefore, may or may not accompany an
increasing population, according to circumstances. But
they must always accompany a permanently declining
population; because there has never been, nor probably
ever will be, any other cause than want of food, which
makes the population of a country permanently decline. In
the numerous instances of depopulation which occur in
history, the causes of it may always be traced to the want of
industry, or the ill-direction of that industry, arising from
violence, bad government, ignorance, &c. which first
occasions a want of food, and of course depopulation
follows. When Rome adopted the custom of importing all
her corn, and laying all Italy into pasture, she soon
declined in population. The causes of the depopulation of
Egypt and Turkey have already been alluded to; and in the
case of Spain, it was certainly not the numerical loss of
people, occasioned by the expulsion of the Moors; but the
industry and capital thus expelled, which permanently
injured her population.’ [I do not myself see, how the
expulsion of capital could permanently injure the
population.] ‘When a country has been depopulated by
violent causes, if a bad government, with its usual

concomitant, insecurity of property, ensue, which has
generally been the case in all those countries which are
now less peopled than formerly; neither the food nor the
population, will recover themselves, and the inhabitants
will probably live in severe want,’ &c. Yet Mr. Malthus
elsewhere affects to consider all human institutions and
contrivances as perfectly indifferent to the question. We
have here, however, a truer account of the matter. The
state of population is evidently no proof of what it might be:
to judge whether it is more or less than it might or ought to
be, we must take into consideration good and bad
government, the progress of civilization, &c. It is a thing de
facto, not de jure. It is not that rock, against which
whosoever sets himself shall be dashed to pieces, but the
clay moulded by the potter into vessels of honour or
dishonour. With respect to Spain, it is allowed that her
population is deficient, or short of what it might be. The
problem of political economy I take to be, how far this is
the case with respect to all other countries, and how to
remedy the defect; or how to support the greatest number
of people in the greatest degree of comfort. But I have said
this more than once before.
To the same purpose I might quote Algernon Sydney,
who in his Discourses on government gives the following
account of the decline and weakness of many of the modern
states from the loss of liberty.[15]
‘I take Greece to have been happy and glorious, when it
was full of populous cities, flourishing in all the arts that
deserve praise among men; when they were courted and
feared by the greatest kings, and never assaulted by any
but to his own loss and confusion; when Babylon and Susa
trembled at the motion of their arms: and their valour,
exercised in those wars and tumults, which our author
[Filmer] looks upon as the greatest evils, was raised to
such a power, that nothing upon earth was found able to

resist them. And I think it now miserable, when peace
reigns within their empty walls, and the poor remains of
those exhausted nations, sheltering themselves under the
ruins of the desolated cities, have neither any thing that
deserves to be disputed among them, nor spirit or force to
repel the injuries they daily suffer from a proud and
insupportable master.’
‘The like may be said of Italy. Whilst it was inhabited by
nations governing themselves by their own will, they fell
sometimes into domestic seditions, and had frequent wars
with their neighbours. When they were free, they loved
their country and were always ready to fight in its defence.
Such as succeeded well, increased in vigour and power;
and even those which were the most unfortunate in one
age, found means to repair their losses, if their government
continued. While they had a property in their goods, they
would not suffer the country to be invaded, since they knew
they could have none, if it were lost. This gave occasion to
wars and tumults; it sharpened their courage, kept up a
good discipline, and the nations that were most exercised
by them, always increased in power and number: so that no
country seems ever to have been of greater strength than
Italy was when Hannibal invaded it, and after his defeat the
rest of the world was not able to resist their valour and
power. They sometimes killed one another; but their
enemies never got any thing but burying-places within their
territories. All things are now brought into a very different
method by the blessed governments they are under. The
fatherly care of the king of Spain, the pope, and other
princes has established peace among them. We have not in
many ages heard of any sedition among the Latins,
Sabines, Volsci, Equi, Samnites, and others. The thin, half-
starved inhabitants of walls supported by ivy fear neither
popular tumults, nor foreign alarms; and their sleep is only
interrupted by hunger, the cries of their children, or the

howling of wolves. Instead of many turbulent, contentious
cities, they have a few scattered, silent cottages; and the
fierceness of those nations is so tempered, that every
rascally collector of taxes extorts, without fear, from every
man, that which should be the nourishment of his family.
And if any of those countries are free from these pernicious
vermin, it is through the extremity of their poverty.’
[How differently do people see things! According to Mr.
Malthus, this rascally tax-gatherer, this vile nuisance, is a
very sacred sort of character, a privileged person, one of
the most indispensable and active instruments in the
procession of vice and misery, those harbingers of human
happiness; and all our reproaches and indignation should
fall on the poor peasant, for bringing beings into the world
whom he could not maintain, in ‘the face of the clearest
warning, and in defiance of the express command of God,’
as proved by the tax-book. Our superficial politician was
not aware (Mr. Malthus tells us that first appearances are
very deceitful) that the produce of the husbandman’s
labour was much better employed in supporting the waste
and extravagance of the rich, than in affording nourishment
to his family, as this would only enable him to rear his
family, which must operate as an encouragement to
marriage, and this again would produce other marriages,
and so on ad infinitum, to which unrestricted increase of
population it is necessary to put a timely stop.]

‘Even in Rome a man may be circumvented by the fraud
of a priest, or poisoned by one, who would have his estate,
wife, whore, or child; but nothing is done that looks like
violence or tumult. The governors do as little fear Gracchus
as Hannibal; and instead of wearying their subjects in
wars,’ [We have not yet reached this pitch of perfection]
‘they only seek by perverted laws, corrupt judges, false
witnesses, and vexatious suits, to cheat them of their
money and inheritance. This is the best part of their
condition. Where these arts are used, there are men, and
they have something to lose; but for the most part, the
lands lie waste; and they who were formerly troubled with
the disorders incident to populous cities, now enjoy the
quiet and peaceable estate of a wilderness.—Again, there is
a way of killing worse than that of the sword; for as
Tertullian says upon a different occasion, vetare nasci est
interficere; those governments are in the highest degree
guilty of blood, which by taking from men the means of
living, bring some to perish through want, drive others out
of the country, and generally dissuade men from marriage,
by taking from them all ways of supporting their families.’
[Our author, we see, has not here put the cart before the
horse. He seems to have understood the necessity of food
to population, though Mr. Malthus’s essay had not then
been heard of.] ‘Notwithstanding all the seditions of
Florence, and other cities of Tuscany, the horrid factions of
Guelphs and Gibelines,[16] Neri and Bianchi, nobles and
commons, they continued populous, strong, and exceeding
rich; but in the space of less than a hundred and fifty years,
the peaceable reign of the Medici is thought to have
destroyed nine parts in ten of the people of that province.
Among other things it is remarkable, that when Philip the
second of Spain gave Sienna to the Duke of Florence, his
embassador then at Rome sent him word, that he had given
away more than six hundred and fifty thousand subjects;

and it is not believed there are now twenty thousand souls
inhabiting that city and territory. Pisa, Pistoia, Arezzo,
Cortona, and other towns, that were then good and
populous, are in the like proportion diminished, and
Florence more than any. When that city had been long
troubled with seditions, tumults, and wars, for the most
part unprosperous, it still retained such strength, that
when Charles the eighth of France, being admitted as a
friend with his whole army, which soon after conquered the
kingdom of Naples, thought to master them, the people,
taking up arms, struck such a terror into him, that he was
glad to depart upon such conditions as they thought fit to
impose. Machiavel reports, that in the year 1298 Florence
alone, with the Val d’Arno, a small territory belonging to
that city, could, in a few hours, by the sound of a bell, bring
together a hundred thousand well-armed men. Whereas
now that city, with all the others in that province, are
brought to such despicable weakness, emptiness, poverty,
and baseness, that they can neither resist the oppressions
of their own prince, nor defend him or themselves, if they
were assaulted by a foreign enemy. The people are
dispersed or destroyed, and the best families sent to seek
habitations in Venice, Genoa, Rome, and Lucca. This is not
the effect of war or pestilence: they enjoy a perfect peace,
and suffer no other plague than the government they are
under. But he who has thus cured them of disorders and
tumults does in my opinion deserve no greater praise than
a physician, who should boast there was not a sick person
in a house committed to his care, when he had poisoned all
that were in it. The Spaniards have established the like
peace in the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, the West Indies,
and other places. The Turks by the same means prevent
tumults in their dominions. And they are of such efficacy in
all places, that Mario Chigi, brother to pope Alexander the
seventh, by one sordid cheat upon the sale of corn, is said
within eight years to have destroyed above a third part of

the people in the ecclesiastical state. And that country,
which was the strength of the Romans in the time of the
Carthaginian wars, suffered more by the covetousness and
fraud of that villain, than by all the defeats received from
Hannibal, &c. Chap. ii. p. 223.
It will be worth the reader’s while to turn to Lord
Kaims’s account of the kingdom of Siam, which, though one
of the most fertile countries in the world, is reduced to the
lowest state of poverty and wretchedness by the absurd
and tyrannical policy of its government. Some of the finest
districts that were formerly cultivated, are now inhabited
only by wild beasts. One of the arts by which they preserve
the balance of population in that country is, that the keeper
of the king’s menagerie is authorized to let loose the
elephants into the gardens of all those within a given
distance of the capital, who do not pay him a large fine
yearly to be excused from this intrusion. Yet according to
our Essayist, human institutions have a very slight
influence on the happiness of a people, because they
cannot alter the necessary ratios of the increase of food
and population. It is probable, however, that some of the
cases here cited, which seem to bear rather hard on Mr.
Malthus’s rule, might have led those hasty writers, whom
he censures for their want of a due insight into the subject,
to conceive an unjust prejudice against human institutions;
and perhaps some of my readers may also be led to
suspect, from not comprehending fully the scope and
connection of his arguments, that bad governments are not
quite such innocent things, as Mr. Malthus would
sometimes represent them. Is it necessary to press this
subject any farther? I do not pretend to be very deep-read
in history, in the constitution of states, the principles of
legislation, the progress of manners, or the immediate
causes of the revolutions that have taken place in different
countries. All that I can presume to bring to this question is

a little stubborn common sense, an earnestness of feeling,
and a certain familiarity with abstruse subjects, that is not
willingly or easily made the dupe of flimsy distinctions. But
without much learning in one’s self, it is easy to take
advantage of the learning of others. By the help of a
common-place book, which is all that is wanted in these
cases (and I am fortunate enough to have such a one by me
in the collections of ‘that honest chronicler,’ James Burgh) I
might soon swell the size of these letters to a bulk, which
the bookseller would not like, by a number of striking
illustrations from the most celebrated authors. I might
make myself a splendid livery of the wisdom of others. But I
have no taste for this pompous drudgery. However, to
satisfy those readers who are unable to discern the truth
without the spectacles of facts, it will not be amiss to refer
to the opinions of a few of the writers, who seem with
sufficient clearness to have traced the causes of the rise
and fall of particular states to principles quite independent
of, which were neither first set in motion nor afterwards
regulated by the principle of population, and the effects of
which were utterly disproportionate to the actual operation
of that principle. After all, it is impossible to answer a
paradox satisfactorily. The real answer consists of the
feelings and observations of our whole lives; and of course,
it must be impossible to embody these in any single
statement. All that can be done in these cases is to set the
imagination once more in its old track.
‘Hear,’ says my authority, ‘the excellent Montague on
the prevalence of luxury among the Romans.’
‘If we connect the various strokes interspersed through
what we have remaining of the writings of Sallust, which
were levelled at the vices of his countrymen, we shall be
able to form a just idea of the manners of the Romans in his
time. From this picture, we must be convinced, that not
only those shocking calamities, which the republic suffered

during the contest between Marius and Sylla, but those
subsequent and more fatal evils, which brought on the
utter extinction of the Roman liberty and constitution, were
the natural effects of that foreign luxury, which first
introduced venality and corruption.’ [Now by luxury we
may understand a very great superabundance of the good
things of this life, either in the community at large or in
certain classes of it, but it cannot by any construction be
made to signify the general and absolute want of them.
Luxury in some classes may produce want in others, but
poverty is in this case the effect of the unequal distribution
of the produce of the earth, not of its real deficiency. Or if
by luxury we understand only certain exterior decorations
or artificial indulgences, which have nothing to do with the
real support of life, such as dress, furniture, buildings,
pictures, gold and silver, rarities, delicacies of all kinds,
every thing connected with shew and expence (though all
these things among the Romans being the effects not
merely of leisure or of supernumerary hands, but of power,
and foreign dominion, must imply a command over the
more substantial necessaries of life) yet even in this sense
the passion for luxury or for those indulgences (which is
here said to have been one great instrument in the
overthrow of the state) is certainly a very different thing
from the passion of hunger, or want of food, Mr. Malthus’s
key to the solution of all problems of a political nature.]
‘Though the introduction of luxury from Asia preceded the
ruin of Carthage in point of time, yet as Sallust informs us,
the dread of that dangerous rival restrained the Romans
within the bounds of decency and order. But as soon as
ever that obstacle was removed, they gave a full scope to
their ungoverned passions. The change in their manners
was not gradual, and by little and little as before, but rapid
and instantaneous. Religion, justice, modesty, decency, all
regard for divine or human laws, were swept away at once
by the irresistible torrent of corruption. The nobility

strained their privileges, and the people their liberty, alike
into the most unbounded licentiousness. Every one made
the dictate of his own will, his only rule of action. Public
virtue, and the love of their country, which had raised the
Romans to the empire of the universe, were extinct. Money,
which alone could enable them to gratify their darling
luxury, was substituted in its place. Power, dominion,
honours, and universal respect were annexed to the
possession of money. Contempt, and whatever was the most
reproachful was the bitter portion of poverty; and to be
poor, grew to be the greatest of all crimes, in the
estimation of the Romans. Thus wealth and poverty
contributed alike to the ruin of the republic. The rich
employed their wealth in the acquisition of power, and their
power in every kind of oppression and rapine for the
acquisition of more wealth. The poor, now dissolute and
desperate, were ready to engage in every seditious
insurrection, which promised them the plunder of the rich,
and set up both their liberty and country to sale, to the best
bidder. The republic, which was the common prey to both,
was thus rent to pieces between the contending factions.—
A state so circumstanced must always furnish an ample
supply of proper instruments for faction. For as luxury
consists in an inordinate gratification of the sensual
passions, and as the more they are indulged, the more
importunate they grow, the greatest fortune must at last
sink under their insatiable demands. Thus luxury
necessarily produces corruption. As wealth is necessary to
the support of luxury, all those who have dissipated their
private fortunes in the purchase of pleasure, will be ever
ready to enlist in the cause of faction for the wages of
corruption. And when once the idea of respect and homage
is annexed to the possession of wealth alone, honour,
probity, every virtue and every amiable quality will be held
cheap in comparison and looked upon as awkward, and
quite unfashionable. But as the spirit of liberty will yet exist

in some degree, in a state which retains the name of
freedom, even though the manners of that state should be
generally depraved, an opposition will arise from those
virtuous citizens, who know the value of their birth-right,
liberty, and who will not submit tamely to the chains of
faction. Force will then be called in to the aid of corruption,
a military government will be established on the ruins of
the civil, and all commands and employments will be at the
disposal of arbitrary, lawless power. The people will be
fleeced to pay for their own fetters, and doomed, like the
cattle, to unremitting toil and drudgery, for the support of
their tyrannical masters.’ [All this is evidently erroneous,
when we apply to it the touch-stone of the theory of
population. The people are not fleeced and worked in this
manner for the benefit of those who fleece and work them,
to gratify any appetites or passions of theirs, it is out of
pure good-will to the poor wretches themselves, that they
may live more at their ease, and in a greater degree of
affluence than they would without this timely warning of
the evils of poverty.] ‘Or if the outward form of civil
government should be permitted to remain, the people will
be compelled to give a sanction to tyranny by their own
suffrages, and to elect oppressors instead of protectors.—
From this genuine portrait of the Roman state it is evident
that the fatal catastrophe of that republic, of which Sallust
himself was an eye-witness, was the natural effect of the
corruption of their manners; and again, that this corruption
was the effect of the introduction of foreign wealth and
luxury. This fatal tendency was too obvious to escape the
notice of those who had any regard for liberty and their
ancient constitution. Many sumptuary laws were made to
restrain the excesses of luxury; but these efforts were too
feeble to check the over-bearing violence of the torrent.
Cato proposed a severe law, enforced by the sanction of an
oath, against bribery and corruption at elections; where the
scandalous traffic of votes was established by custom, as at

a public market. But he only incurred the resentment of
both parties by that salutary measure. The rich, who had no
other merit to plead but what arose from their superior
wealth, thus found themselves precluded from all
pretensions to the highest dignities. The electors abused,
cursed and even pelted him as the author of a law which
reduced them to the necessity of subsisting by labour.
Corruption was arrived at its height, and those excesses
which were formerly esteemed the vices of the people were
now, by the force of custom, become the manners of the
people. To pilfer the public money and to plunder the
provinces by violence, though state crimes of the most
heinous nature, were grown so familiar, that they were
looked upon as no more than mere office perquisites.’
Really I am afraid that the reader will suspect me of
falsifying the historical record to write a satire against our
own times. Some of these remarks are I confess home
truths. To a person who has not that mysterious kind of
penetration which the author of the Essay possesses, they
carry more weight, and give a clearer insight into the
principles that operate in the decomposition of states, than
all Mr. Malthus’s indiscriminate and shadowy reasonings on
the evils of population, which can no more prove anything
decisively on the subject, than we can account for the
inequalities in the surface of the earth from its being
round.
The same author adds, ‘Though there is a concurrence
of several causes in the ruin of a state, yet where luxury
prevails, that parent of all our fantastic wants, ever
craving, and ever unsatisfied, we may safely assign it as the
leading cause; since it ever was and ever will be the most
baneful to public virtue. As luxury is contagious from its
very nature, it will gradually descend from the highest to
the lowest ranks till it has ultimately affected a whole
people.—We see luxury gradually increasing and prevailing

over the Roman spirit and virtue, till at length the
contagion even reached ladies of the greatest distinction,
who in imitation of the prince and his court, had their
assemblies and representations in a grove, planted by the
Emperor, where booths were built, and in them sold
whatever incited to sensuality and wantonness. Thus was
even the outward appearance of virtue banished the city,
and all manner of avowed lewdness, depravity and
dissoluteness introduced in its room, men and women
being engaged in a contention to outvie each other in
glaring vices, and scenes of impurity. Again.—About the
time that the Roman republic was tottering to its fall, it was
observed that there was an universal degeneracy of
manners prevailing, particularly that the women were very
scandalous in their behaviour at Rome, while those of the
countries called by them barbarous were remarkably
exemplary in this respect.’ Was this difference wholly owing
to the difference in the state of population? Or shall we
believe that the ladies of Roman knights, that the wives and
daughters of Emperors, that the mistresses of those to
whom the world was tributary, who scattered pearls and
gold among their followers, who gave largesses of corn to
the people, and entertained them at ten thousand tables at
a time, who ate the tongues of peacocks and nightingales,
and the brains of parrots, whose dogs were fed with the
livers of geese, their horses with raisins, and their wild
beasts with the flesh of partridges and pheasants, shall we
believe that these delicate creatures, who dreamt of
nothing but pleasure and feasting, who reclined on silken
couches, whose baths were made of rose-water and wine,
who scented the air with all the perfumes of the East,
whose rich dresses were upborne by a train of waiting-
women, and idle boys, were driven to the necessity of
stimulating their passions by lewd exhibitions, and wanton
dances, and lascivious songs, and soft music and obscene
practices, because they were hindered from gratifying their

honest desires in a lawful way by the difficulty of providing
for their future offspring, or the pressure of population on
the means of subsistence? Yet this is what we must be led
to suppose from Mr. Malthus’s theory, according to whom
vice is the natural consequence of want, and want the
effect of increasing population. For any one who is
acquainted with the state of manners, and the mode of
living among the great at Rome at this time to pretend that
all this was owing to nothing but the advanced state of
population, just as the rising or falling of the weather-glass
depends on the pressure of the air outside, betrays a most
astonishing ignorance of human nature. I think I am
warranted in laying down the two following maxims; that
luxury is itself an immediate cause of dissoluteness of
manners; secondly, that example, particularly that of the
great, has a powerful influence over manners.
Before I quit this subject of Roman luxury, I shall just
mention a fact quoted by my author, which seems to
contradict Mr. Malthus’s notion that the luxuries of the rich
do not in the least affect the condition of the poor. ‘The
good Emperor Aurelius,’ says Burgh, ‘sold the plate,
furniture, jewels, pictures and statues of the imperial
palace, to relieve the distresses of the people, occasioned
by the invasion of barbarians, pestilence, famine, &c. the
value of which was so great, that it maintained the war for
five years, beside other inestimable expences.’ If according
to Mr. Malthus’s reasoning on this subject in different parts
of his work, every man’s stomach can hold only a certain
quantity of food, and what does not go into one man’s
stomach necessarily goes into some other’s, that is, if every
person has as large a share as it is possible he should have
of the necessaries of life, I do not see what this moving of
pictures or statues about, or setting them up to auction
should have to do with the state of provisions, or how it
should relieve the necessities of the poor. Mr. Malthus’s

reasonings are sometimes as remarkable for their
simplicity as they are at others for their complexity. He
sees things in the most natural or in the most artificial
point of view, as he pleases. At one time, every thing comes
round by a labyrinth of causes, and all the intricate
secretions of the state; at another time the whole science of
political economy is reduced to a flat calculation of the size
of a quartern loaf, and the size of the human stomach.
All authors (but Mr. Malthus) seem agreed that luxury
has been fatal to the spirit of liberty, and that the loss of
liberty has led to the loss of independence. ‘The welfare of
every country depends upon the morals of the people.
Though a nation may become rich by trade, thrift, and
industry, or from the advantages of soil and situation, or
may attain to great eminence and power either by force of
arms, or by the sagacity of their councils; yet when their
manners are depraved, they will decline insensibly, and at
last come to utter destruction. When a country is grown
vicious, industry decays, and the people become unruly,
effeminate, and unfit for labour. Luxury, when introduced
into free states, and suffered to spread through the body of
the people was ever productive of that degeneracy of
manners, which extinguishes public virtue, and puts a final
period to liberty. Thus the Assyrian empire sunk under the
arms of Cyrus with his poor but hardy Persians. The
extensive and opulent empire of Persia fell an easy prey to
Alexander and a handful of Macedonians. And the
Macedonian empire, when enervated by the luxury of Asia,
was compelled to receive the yoke of the victorious
Romans. The descendants of the heroes, philosophers,
orators, and free citizens of Greece are now the slaves of
the Grand Turk. The posterity of the Scipios and Catos of
Rome are now singing operas, in the shape of Italian
eunuchs, on the English stage.’[17] It should seem from the
length of time which these countries have remained in the

same degraded condition without a single effort or even
wish to relieve themselves from it, that there must be other
causes of the permanent depression of states, and other
channels of transmission, by which the habits, and
characters of the people, their customs and institutions, are
handed down through successive generations without any
hope of a change for the better, besides the mechanical
fluctuations in the principle of population. If all laws,
institutions, manners, and customs were only so many
expressions (as I may say) of the power of that principle,
kingdoms would rise and fall with the operation of the
checks provided for it; their alternate renovation and decay
would be as regular as the ebbing and flowing of the tide;
in proportion as they sank deep in wretchedness, they
would tower to greater happiness and splendour; the
foundation of their future prosperity would be laid in the
lowness of their fortune; the exhausted state would rise,
like the phœnix, out of its own ashes, and enter the career
of liberty and glory in all its pristine vigour. But we do not
find that the accounts in history correspond with the
oscillations of Mr. Malthus’s theory. We find through a long,
dreary tract of time, during which our author’s ratios must
have been ascending and descending like buckets in a well,
that the inhabitants of those devoted countries have
remained just where they were,—in the lowest scale of
human being. They have for a great many hundred years
been undergoing the wholesome discipline of vice and
misery without being the better for it, the iron yoke of
necessity to which they have so long and patiently
submitted does not seem ever to have been relaxed in their
favour, and they have reaped none of those reversionary
benefits which might be expected from slavery and famine.
These powerful principles have not done much to rekindle
in their breasts their ancient love of liberty, the glow of
genius,—or to open a new field for the rapid increase of
population. They have not been favoured with any of those

ups and downs, those pretty whirls and agreeable
vicissitudes of good and evil, which Mr. Malthus describes
as the natural consequence of the principles on which his
machine of population is constructed. This is a radical
objection to his machine; it shews plainly that it is not
constructed on true principles, that we cannot safely trust
ourselves in it, and will I hope deter us from getting up into
it.
‘The Swiss keep the same unchanged character of
simplicity, honesty, frugality, modesty, bravery. These are
the virtues which preserve liberty. They have no corrupt
court, no blood-sucking placemen, no standing army, the
ready instruments of tyranny, no ambition for conquest, no
debauching commerce, no luxury, no citadels against
invasions and against liberty. Their mountains are their
fortifications, and every householder is a soldier, ready to
fight for his country.’ This is the account which Voltaire
gives of that country. Since that time, it has fallen by a
power greater than its own, and paid with its liberty for the
folly and madness of the rest of Europe. I hope I shall not
offend any of the sycophants of power, any of the
enlightened patriots of the day who regard the general
distinctions of liberty and slavery as slight and evanescent,
by adding to my list of political grievances foreign conquest
as an evil, and an evil that tends to no certain good.—I
would fain know from the adepts in the science of
population whether according to that system it would be an
advantage to this country to be conquered by the French.
The necessary ratios of the increase of food and population
(which according to our author are every thing,—he utterly
rejects the idea that established governments can do any
mischief) would of course remain the same; and as to the
practical part, population would, if any thing, go on slower
than before. I cannot but think however that most of my
readers would in such a case anticipate the consequences

which our political reformer describes in his croaking old-
fashioned way as proceeding from another cause, the
corruption of the people, and the abuses of government at
home. ‘I see’ he says, ‘my wretched country in the same
condition as France is now.’ [This was written at a time
when it was the fashion for the English to reproach all
other countries for their misery and slavery, as they have
since been in the habit of hunting them down for their
attempts at liberty.] ‘Instead of the rich and thriving
farmers, who now fill or who lately filled, the country with
agriculture, yielding plenty for man and beast, I see the
lands neglected, the villages and farms in ruins, with here
and there a starveling in wooden shoes, driving his plough,
his team consisting of an old goat, a hide-bound bullock,
and an ass, value in all forty shillings. I see the once rich
and populous cities of England in the same condition with
those of Spain; whole streets lying in rubbish, and the
grass peeping out between the stones in those which
continue still inhabited. I see the harbours empty, the
warehouses shut up, and the shop-keepers playing at
draughts, for want of customers. I see our noble and
spacious turnpike roads covered with thistles and other
weeds, and hardly to be traced out. I see the studious men
reading the Political Disquisitions, and the histories of the
eighteenth century, and execrating the stupidity of their
fathers, who in spite of the many faithful warnings given
them, sat still, and suffered their country to be ruined by a
set of wretches, whom they could have crushed. I see the
country devoured by an army of 200,000 men. I see justice
trodden under foot in the courts of justice. I see Magna
Charta, the Habeas Corpus act, the bill of rights, and trial
by jury, obsolete, and royal edicts and arrets set up in their
place. I see the once respectable land-owners, tradesmen,
and manufacturers of England sunk into contempt, and
placemen and military officers the only persons of
consequence, &c.’ I do not know but there may be some

staunch adherents to the new philosophy, some hyper-
graduates in the school, who would think such a state of
things ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished.’ But it is
happy that where our reason leaves us, our prejudices
often come to our aid. Though there may be some persons
in this country who would not care a fig for the Bastile, or
letters de cachet, there is no one who has not a just dread
of Buonaparte; or who would not indignantly spurn at the
wretch who told him that so long as the disproportion in
the increase of food and the increase of mankind continued,
it was of little consequence to him whether he was subject
to the yoke of a foreign tyrant, or governed by a mild and
lawful sovereign.—It has always been the custom for the
English to extol themselves to the skies as the freest and
happiest nation on the face of the earth. Ever since I was a
boy, I remember to have heard of the trial by jury, Magna
Charta, and the bill of rights, of the Bastile in France, and
the Inquisition in Spain, and the man in the Iron mask. Now
whether it is that I was a boy when I first heard of these
things, or that they carry some weight and meaning in
themselves, certain it is that they have made such a strong
and indelible impression on my mind as totally to preclude
the effects of Mr. Malthus’s philosophy. Whether it is owing
to the strength of my reason or my prejudices, I cannot
receive the benefit of his new light. As these are some of
the strongest feelings I have, (though they may perhaps be
just as childish as those which I still have in reading the
story of Goody Two-Shoes, or the Little Red Riding-hood) it
occurred to me to make some use of them in answer to Mr.
Malthus’s challenge to shew that there is no difference
between one government and another in the essentials of
liberty and happiness. Or I thought I might contrast the
constitution of this country with that of Denmark, where
(says Lord Molesworth) the peasants are as absolute slaves
as the negroes in Jamaica, and worse fed. This seemed to
be strong ground. But then I recollected that the very same

expression had been applied by a person, whom it would be
unbecoming in me to contradict, to the peasants in this
country.[18] I also met with a passage something to the same
purpose in the Political Disquisitions, which a little damped
my patriotic eagerness. ‘A poor hard-working man, who has
a wife and six children to maintain’ [what a wicked
wretch!] ‘can neither enjoy the glorious light of heaven, nor
the glimmering of a farthing candle, without paying the
window tax and the candle tax. He rises early and sits up
late; he fills the whole day with severe labour; he goes to
his flock-bed with half a belly-full of bread and cheese
denying the call of natural appetite, that his wife and little
starvelings may have the more.’ [Why he is very justly
punished to be sure. True; but mark the sequel.] ‘In the
mean while the exactors of these taxes are revelling at the
expence of more money for one evening’s amusement, than
the wretched hard-working man (who is obliged to find the
money for them to squander) can earn by half a year’s
severe labour.’ On the whole, I was obliged to relinquish my
project. I found that my picture must either want effect, or
be out of all keeping. And besides the relations of things
had not only changed, but men’s opinions had changed
with them. An overcharged description of English liberty
and continental slavery would not be at all to the taste of
the times. It would sound like mere rant, and would come
to nothing. But when I came to that fine representation of
the effects of slavery, which Burgh has left us, with those
exquisite figures of the old goat, the bullock and the ass,
and the group of shop-keepers playing at draughts for want
of something to do, I was determined to bring it in, cost
what it would. At last, I bethought me of the expedient of
an invasion,—at that word I knew that every true friend of
his country would grow pale, would see the odious
consequences of slavery in their native deformity, and turn
with disdain from those vile panders to vice and misery,
those sanguine enthusiasts of mischief, who would artfully

reconcile them to every species of want, oppression, and
unfeeling barbarity, as the necessary consequences of the
principle of population. So much more credit do we attach
to names, than things!—The whole of the account of
Denmark to which I have just referred, is well worthy of
attention: I cannot forbear giving the following extract.
‘The consequence of this oppression is that the people of
Denmark finding it impossible to secure their property’
[from the tax-gatherers] ‘squander their little gettings, as
fast as they can, and are irremediably poor. Oppression and
arbitrary sway beget distrust and doubts about the security
of property; doubts beget profusion, men chusing to
squander on their pleasures what they apprehend may
excite the rapaciousness of their superiors; and this
profusion is the legitimate parent of that universal
indolence, poverty and despondency, which so strongly
characterize the miserable inhabitants of Denmark. When
Lord Molesworth resided in that country, the collectors of
the poll-tax were obliged to accept of old feather-beds,
brass and pewter pans, &c. instead of money, from the
inhabitants of a town, which once raised 200,000 rix dollars
for Christiern IV. on twenty-four hours’ notice. The
quartering and paying the king’s troops is another
grievance no less oppressive. The boors are obliged to
furnish the king and every little insolent courtier with
horses and waggons in their journeys, and are beaten like
cattle. Consequently, Denmark, once very populous, is
become thin of inhabitants; as poverty, oppression, and
meagre diet do miserably check procreation, besides
producing diseases which shorten the lives of the few who
are born.’ [How miserably short-sighted must our author
have been not to perceive that these were great
advantages!] ‘All this the rich and thriving and free people
of England may bring themselves to, if they please’ [by
following up Mr. Malthus’s theory.] ‘It is only letting the
court go on with their scheme of diffusing universal

corruption through all ranks, and it will come of course.’—
There is one passage in this account, which malevolence
itself cannot apply to the history of this country. ‘Before the
government of Denmark was made hereditary and absolute
in the present royal family, by that fatal measure in 1660,
the nobility lived in great splendour and affluence. Now
they are poor and their number diminished.’
I shall conclude these extracts with the following
passages, taken at random, which will at least serve to
shew the strange prejudices that prevailed on the subject,
before Mr. Malthus, like the clown in Shakespear,
undertook to find out an answer that should explain all
difficulties. ‘It must indeed be an answer of most monstrous
size that fits all demands.’ But perhaps Mr. Malthus is by
this time convinced, that ‘a thing may serve long, and not
serve ever.’
‘The richest soil in Europe, Italy, is full of beggars;
among the Grisons, the poorest country in Europe, there
are no beggars. The bailage of Lugane is the worst country,
the least productive, the most exposed to cold and the least
capable of trade of any in all Italy, and yet is the best
peopled. If ever this country is brought under a yoke like
that which the rest of Italy bears, it will soon be
abandoned, for nothing draws so many people to live in so
bad a soil, when they are in sight of the best soil in Europe,
but the easiness of the government.’ Burnet’s Travels.
‘Italy shews, in a very striking light, the advantages of
free government.[19] The subjects of the Italian republics are
thriving and happy. Those under the Pope, the dukes of
Tuscany, Florence &c. wretched in the extreme.—Lucca, to
mention no other, is a remarkable instance of the happy
effects of liberty. The whole dominion is but thirty miles
round, yet contains, besides the city, 150 villages, 120,000
inhabitants, and all the soil is cultivated to the utmost.
Their magistrates are re-elected every two months out of a

body of nobility, who are chosen every two years.’ Modern
Universal History. See also A. Sydney as before quoted.—
These differences cannot be accounted for by the length of
time or the force with which the principle of population has
operated in these states. The countries are equally old, and
the climate very nearly the same.
‘In England an industrious subject has the best chance
for thriving, because the country is the freest. In the
Mogul’s dominions the worst, because the country is the
most effectually enslaved.’
‘The title of freemen was formerly confined chiefly to
the nobility and gentry, who were descended of free
ancestors. For the greatest part of the people was
restrained under some species of slavery, so that they were
not their own masters.’ Spelman’s Glossary.[20]—On this
passage my author remarks very gravely, ‘What has been in
England may be again. If liberty be on the decline, no one
knows how low it may sink, and to what pitch of slavery
and cruelty it may grow.’ Mr. Malthus’s theory tends to
familiarise the mind to such a change as the necessary
effect of the progress of population. But this pretext is here
clearly done away, as we have fought up to our present
free, and flourishing state, in the teeth of this principle.
Our progress has not been uniformly retrograde, as it
ought to have been to make any thing of the argument.
‘It is constantly (said a member in Queen Elizabeth’s
time) in the mouths of us all, that our lands, goods and laws
are at our prince’s disposal.’ We do not at present come
quite up to the loyalty of this speaker.
‘Nations have often been deceived into slavery by men
of shining abilities.’ Perhaps the late Mr. Burke was an
instance of this. I by no means insist that he was, because
there may be differences of opinion on that point. But of
this I am sure, that the effect of his writings, good or bad,
cannot be measured—by the principle of population.

‘A single genius changes the face and state of a whole
country, as Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, and Peter the
great of Russia. Confucius produced a reformation in one of
the oriental kingdoms in a few months.’
‘Commerce introduced by the czar Peter introduced
luxury. Universal dissipation took the lead, and profligacy
of manners succeeded. Many of the lords began to squeeze
and grind the peasants to extort fresh supplies from them
for the incessant demands of luxury’—not of population.
‘The extreme poverty occasioned by idleness and luxury
in the beginning of Lewis XIII. of France filled the streets of
Paris with beggars. The court disgusted at the sight, which
indeed was a severe reproach on them, issued an order,
forbidding all persons, on severe penalties, to relieve them,
intending thereby to drive them out of the town, and not
caring though they dropped down dead, before they could
reach the country towns and villages.’ This was a project
worthy of the genius of Mr. Malthus.
‘Government, according to Plato, is the parent of
manners. One judicious regulation will often produce a very
salutary effect on a whole people, as experimental
philosophy shews us, that a wire will secure a castle from
the once irresistible force of lightning.—Mankind may be
brought to hold any principles and to indulge any practices,
and again to give them up.—Is there any notion of right and
wrong, about which mankind are universally agreed? Is it
not evident that mankind may be moulded into any shape?
How come we to know that antimony or quicksilver may, by
chemical processes, be made to pass through twenty
different states, and restored again to their original state?
Is it not by experiment? Are not the various legislations,
institutions, regulations of wise or designing statesmen,
priests, and kings, a series of experiments, shewing that
human nature is susceptible of any form or character?’
According to the most modern discovery, these things never

did, nor ever will have any effect at all. The question is
simply whether the state of food and the state of population
being the same, the different causes here alluded to have
not produced very different results with respect to the
degree both of vice and misery existing in the world.[21]
‘The great difference we see between the behaviour of
the people called Quakers, and all others; between English,
Scotch, Irish, French, Spanish, Heathens, Mahometan,
Christian, Popish, Protestant manners and characters, &c.
the regular and permanent difference we see between the
manners of all these divisions of mankind, shews beyond all
doubt that the principles and habits of the people are very
much in the power of able statesmen.’
‘Among the Lacedemonians there was no such crime as
infidelity to the marriage-bed: yet Lycurgus in framing his
laws had used no precaution against it, but the virtuous
and temperate education he prescribed for the youth of
both sexes.—The influence which education has on the
manners of a people is so considerable that it cannot be
estimated. But by education it is to be observed, we must
understand not only what is taught at schools and
universities, but the impressions young people receive from
parents, and from the world, which greatly outweigh all
that can be done by masters and tutors. Education, taken in
this enlarged sense, is almost all that makes the difference
between the characters of nations; and it is a severe satire
on our times, that the world makes most young men very
different beings from what those who educated them
intended them to be.’ This last remark is I think of the
utmost force and importance; and has never been
sufficiently attended to by those who prate most fluently
and triumphantly about the inherent perversity of human
nature. A young man is seldom tainted by the world, till he
becomes dependent on it. I have known several persons
who I am sure have set out in life with the utmost purity of

intention, and a noble ingenuousness of mind, and were
prepared to act on very different principles from those,
which they found prevailing in the world. Is the fault in this
case in the wood, or in the carver? Is it in the stuff, or in
the mould, in which it is cast? The difficulty seems to be,
how to get a better mould.
‘Aristotle lays down very strict rules concerning the
company young people may be allowed to keep, the public
diversions they may attend; the pictures they may see, and
against obscenity, intemperance, &c. And the eighth book
of his politics is employed wholly on education, in which he
shews, that youth ought to be strongly impressed with the
idea of their being members of a community, whose good
they are to prefer to their private advantage in all cases
where they come in competition. He commends the wisdom
of the Spartans in paying such attention to this great
object. Such is the delicacy of this old Heathen, that he
hesitates about the propriety of young men’s applying to
music, as being likely to enervate the mind.’
‘Lycurgus did not allow the Spartans to travel, lest they
should be tainted by the manners of other nations.’ I do not
chuse to name all the vices that have been imported into
this country within the last fifty years by the aid of foreign
travel. Vice is unfortunately of a very tenacious quality, and
there is no quarantine against the epidemics of the mind. In
return, however, we have learned to converse, to dress, and
dance better than we used to do.
‘At Sparta, the poets could not publish any thing
without a license; and all immoral writings were prohibited.
A very wise man[22] said he believed, if a man were
permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who
made the laws of a nation. The ancient legislators did not
pretend to reform the manners of the people without the
help of the poets.’

‘The grave Romans did not allow a person of character
to dance! It was a saying among them, no one dances
unless he is drunk or mad.’
‘In the old English laws, we find punishments for
wanton behaviour, as touching the breasts of women, &c.—
By the ancient laws of France, the least indecency of
behaviour to a free woman, as squeezing the hand,
touching the arm or breast, &c. was punishable by fire.’[23]
What odd, sour, crabbed notions must have prevailed in
those days! Not squeeze a lady’s hand! No—a much more
agreeable latitude of behaviour is allowed at present: we
are as much improved in our notions of gallantry as of
liberty. The polite reader will not suspect me of a design to
hold up the shocking manners of our ancestors as models
of imitation in the present day; I only mention them to shew
what a wide difference there may be in the notions of
decency and propriety at different times!
If a stranger, on entering a large town, London for
example, should be struck with that immense number of
prostitutes, ‘who elbow us aside in all our crowded streets,’
and not well knowing how to account for this enormous
abuse, should apply to a disciple of the modern school for
some explanation of it, he would probably be told with
great gravity, That it was a necessary consequence of the
progress of population, and the superior power of that
principle over the increase in the means of subsistence.—If
Mr. Malthus, contented to follow in the track of common
sense, and not smitten with the love of dangerous novelty,
had endeavoured to trace the torrent of vice and
dissipation which threatens to bear down every principle of
virtue and decency among us to the chief sources pointed
out by other writers, to the particular institutions of society,
to the prevalence of luxury, the inequality of conditions, the
facility of gratifying the passions from the power of offering
temptation, and inducements to accept it, the disproportion

between the passions excited in individuals, and their
situation in life, to books, to education, the progress of arts,
the influence of neighbouring example, &c. these are all
causes, which, as they are arbitrary and variable, seem as
if they could be counteracted or modified by other causes;
they are the work of man, and what is the work of man it
seems in the power of man to confirm or alter. We see
distinctly the source of the grievance, and try to remedy it:
hope remains, the will acts with double energy, the spirit of
virtue is not broken. Our vices grow out of other vices, out
of our own passions, prejudices, folly, and weakness: there
is nothing in this to make us proud of them, or to reconcile
us to them; even though we may despair, we are not
confounded. We still have the theory of virtue left: we are
not obliged to give up the distinction between good and evil
even in imagination: there is some little good which we may
at least wish to do. Man in this case retains the character
of a free agent; he stands chargeable with his own conduct,
and a sense of the consequences of his own presumption or
blindness may arouse in him feelings that may in some
measure counteract their worst effects; he may regret what
he cannot help: the life, the pulse, the spring of morality is
not dead in him; his moral sense is not quite extinguished.
But our author has chosen to stagger the minds of his
readers by representing vice and misery as the necessary
consequences of an abstract principle, of a fundamental
law of our nature, on which nothing can be effected by the
human will. This principle follows us wherever we go; if we
fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there: whether
we turn to the right or the left, we cannot escape from it. O
rather for that warning voice, that once cried aloud,
Insensés qui vous plaignez, sans cesse de la nature,
apprenez que tous vos maux vous viennent de vous! As
however I deny the sufficiency of our author’s all-pervading
principle, I may be required to point out more particularly
what I conceive to be the real and determining causes of

the decay of manners. I do not know that I can mention any
that do not come under the heads already alluded to, but if
I must give a short answer, I should say,—Great towns,
great schools, dress, and novels. These things are not
regulated exactly by the size of the earth, and yet must be
allowed to have some influence on manners. To instance
only the two last. Is it to be wondered at that a young raw
ignorant girl, who is sent up from the country as a
milliner’s or mantua-maker’s apprentice, and stowed into a
room with eight or ten others, who snatch every moment
they can spare from caps and bonnets, and sit up half the
night to read all the novels they can get, and as soon they
have finished one, send for another, whose heart, in the
course of half a year, has been pierced through with twenty
beaux on paper, who has been courted, seduced, run away
with, married and put to bed under all the fine names that
the imagination can invent to as many fine gentlemen, who
has sighed and wept with so many heroes and heroines that
her tears and sighs have at last caused in her a defluction
of the brain, and a palpitation of the heart at the sight of
every man, whose fancy is love-sick, and her head quite
turned, should be unable to resist the first coxcomb of real
flesh and blood, who in shining boots and a velvet collar
accosts her in the shape of a lover, but who has no thoughts
of marrying her, because if he were to take this imprudent
step, he must give up his shining boots and velvet collar,
and the respect they procure him in the world? Zaleucus
ordained that no woman should dress herself gorgeously,
unless she was a prostitute. If I were a law-giver, and chose
to meddle in such matters, I would ordain that no woman
should expose her shape publicly, unless she were a
prostitute.—The female form is more proper for child-
bearing, than for public exhibition; this secret analogy,
when coupled with modesty and reserve, is however its
greatest charm. The strange fancy-dresses, the perverse
disguises, the counterfeit shapes, the stiff stays, and

enormous hoops worn by the women in the time of the
Spectator gave an agreeable scope to the imagination. The
greedy eye and rash hand of licentiousness were repressed.
The senses were never satisfied in an instant. Love was
entangled in the folds of the swelling handkerchief, and the
desires might wander for ever round the circumference of a
quilted petticoat, or find a rich lodging in the flowers of a
damask stomacher. There was room for years of patient
perseverance, for a thousand thoughts, fancies,
conjectures, hopes, fears, and wishes. There seemed no
end to difficulties and delays: to overcome so many
obstacles was the work of ages. A wife had then some
meaning in it: it was an angel concealed behind whalebone,
flounces, and brocade. The transition from a mistress in
masquerade to a wife in wedding sheets was worth
venturing for: now it is nothing, and we hear no more of
faithful courtships, and romantic loves. A woman can be
but undressed.—The young ladies we at present see with
the thin muslin vest drawn tight round the slender waist,
and following with nice exactness the undulations of the
shape downwards, disclosing each full swell, each coy
recess, obtruding on the eye each opening charm, the play
of the muscles, the working of the thighs, and by the help
of a walk, of which every step seems a gird, and which
keeps the limbs strained to the utmost point, displaying all
those graceful involutions of person, and all those powers
of fascinating motion, of which the female form is
susceptible—these moving pictures of lust and nakedness,
against which the greasy imaginations of grooms and
porters may rub themselves, running the gauntlet of the
saucy looks and indecent sarcasms of the boys in the street,
staring at every ugly fellow, leering at every handsome
man, and throwing out a lure for every fool (true Spartan
girls, who if they were metamorphosed into any thing in the
manner of Ovid, it would certainly be into valerian!) are the
very same, whose mothers or grand-mothers buried

themselves under a pile of clothes, whose timid steps
hardly touched the ground, whose eyes were constantly
averted from the rude gaze of the men, and who almost
blushed at their own shadows. ‘Of such we in romances
read.’ It does not require any great spirit of divination to
perceive that this change in appearance must imply some
change in manners. Is this change then owing entirely to
the increased pressure of the principle of population, or
have not French fashions, French milliners, and French
dancing-masters had some hand in producing it?[24]—Mr.
Malthus inveighs with great severity against squalid
poverty, and the vices produced by filth and rags. I allow
the justice of his remarks, and think that the condition of
the poor in this respect is one of the chief nuisances of
society. After giving the poor a scrubbing with a coarse
towel in the manner he has done, it would not have been
amiss if he had taken a clean white clerical pocket-
handkerchief, and applied it to wipe off the rouge from the
cheeks of painted prostitution, or thrown it as a covering
over the polished neck and ivory shoulders of ladies of high
quality. The bishop of London would have praised the
attempt. Mr. Malthus might have distinguished between the
involuntary rents, and the unlucky loop-holes which
sometimes appear in a poor girl’s petticoat, and the elegant
dishabille and studied nakedness of high life. The dirt that
sticks to a wench’s face in cleaning a saucepan is I think
likely to have less effect on the character than the red
paste daubed on the cheeks before a looking-glass, to give
animation to the eyes. The contempt which dirt and poverty
excite must destroy all moral sensibility. Must not the glare
of fashion and the perpetual intoxication of personal vanity
have the same effect? The poor grovel in disagreeable
sensations, the rich wanton in voluptuous ones. The
passions are not more likely to be inflamed by stale porter,
the screams of a fiddle, and the clattering of a hornpipe at
a hop in St. Giles’s, than by the elegant liqueurs, the soft

sounds of the clarionet and hautboy, and the languishing
movements of walses, allemandes, and minuets de la cour
at a ball in St. James’s. A fair, or an opera may equally turn
the head of any silly girl that goes to one. Of the two, a
tune on the salt-box would be got over sooner than
Narcissus and the Graces. The tawdry prints to be seen in
garrets, and the ballads sung at the corners of streets do
not much improve the morals of the people: but I put it to
the conscience of our sentimental divine, whether the
Wanton Wife of Bath, or the tall captain with his arm round
the chambermaid’s waist, or Jemmy Jessamy lolling on the
sofa with his mistress, may be expected to produce more
accidents than those luscious collections of the poets, or
those grave scripture-pieces, or classical chef-d’œuvres of
Venus and Adonis, of Leda with her Swan, Nymphs, Fawns,
and Satyrs, which gentlemen of fortune keep in their
houses for the instruction of their wives and daughters. Mr.
Malthus is convinced that no young woman brought up in
nastiness and vulgarity, however virtuous she may seem,
can be good for any thing at twenty: I confess I have the
same cynical opinion of those, who have the good fortune
to be brought up in the obscene refinements of fashionable
life.
I never fell in love but once; and then it was with a girl
who always wore her handkerchief pinned tight round her
neck, with a fair face, gentle eyes, a soft smile, and cool
auburn locks. I mention this, because it may in some
measure account for my temperate, tractable notions of
this passion, compared with Mr. Malthus’s. It was not a
raging heat, a fever in the veins: but it was like a vision, a
dream, like thoughts of childhood, an everlasting hope, a
distant joy, a heaven, a world that might be. The dream is
still left, and sometimes comes confusedly over me in
solitude and silence, and mingles with the softness of the
sky, and veils my eyes from mortal grossness. After all, Mr.

Malthus may be right in his opinion of human nature.
Though my notions of love have been thus aerial and
refined, I do not know that this was any advantage to me,
or that I might not have done better with a few of our
author’s ungovernable transports, and sensual oozings.
Perhaps the workings of the heart are best expressed by a
gloating countenance, by mawkish sentiments and lively
gestures. Cupid often perches on broad shoulders, or on
the brawny calf of a leg, a settlement is better than a love-
letter, and in love not minds, but bodies and fortunes meet.
I have therefore half a mind to retract all that I have said,
and prove to Mr. Malthus that love is not even so
intellectual a passion as he sometimes admits it to be, but
altogether gross and corporal.
I have thus attempted to answer the different points of
Mr. Malthus’s argument, and give a truer account of the
various principles that actuate human nature. There is but
one advantage that I can conceive of as resulting from the
admission of his mechanical theory on the subject, which is
that it would be the most effectual recipe for indifference
that has yet been found out. No one need give himself any
farther trouble about the progress of vice, or the extension
of misery. The office of moral censor, that troublesome,
uneasy office which every one is so ready to set up in his
own breast, and which I verily believe is the occasion of
more unhappiness than any one cause else, would be at an
end. The professor’s chair of morality would become
vacant, and no one would have more cause than I to rejoice
at the breaking up for the holidays; for I have plagued
myself a good deal about the distinctions of right and
wrong. The pilot might let go the helm, and leave the vessel
to drift carelessly before the stream. When we are once
convinced that the degree of virtue and happiness can no
more be influenced by human wisdom than the ebbing and
flowing of the tide, it must be idle to give ourselves any

more concern about them. The wise man might then enjoy
an Epicurean languor and repose, without being conscious
of the neglect of duty. Mr. Malthus’s system is one, ‘in
which the wicked cease from troubling, and in which the
weary are at rest.’ To persons of an irritable and nervous
disposition, who are fond of kicking against the pricks, who
have tasted of the bitterness of the knowledge of good and
evil, and to whom whatever is amiss in others sticks not
merely like a burr, but like a pitch-plaister, the advantage of
such a system is incalculable.—
Happy are they, who live in the dream of their own
existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds;
who walk by faith and hope, not by knowledge; to whom
the guiding-star of their youth still shines from afar, and
into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They
have not been ‘hurt by the archers,’ nor has the iron
entered their souls. They live in the midst of arrows, and of
death, unconscious of harm. The evil thing comes not nigh
them. The shafts of ridicule pass unheeded by, and malice
loses its sting. Their keen perceptions do not catch at
hidden mischiefs, nor cling to every folly. The example of
vice does not rankle in their breasts, like the poisoned shirt
of Nessus. Evil impressions fall off from them, like drops of
water. The yoke of life is to them light and supportable. The
world has no hold on them. They are in it, not of it; and a
dream and a glory is ever about them.

EXTRACTS FROM THE ESSAY ON POPULATION
WITH A COMMENTARY, AND NOTES

I intended to have added another Letter on the
principle of population as affecting the laws of property,
and the condition of the poor. But I found it impossible to
combat some of Mr. Malthus’s opinions without bringing
vouchers for them. I might otherwise seem to be combating
the chimeras of my own brain. There are some instances of
perverse reasoning so gross and mischievous, that without
seeing the confidence with which they are insisted on, it
seems a waste of time to contradict them. The reader may
perhaps have had something of this feeling already. By
throwing the remainder of the work into the form of
Extracts with notes I shall at least avoid the imputation of
ascribing to Mr. Malthus singularities he never dreamt of,
and have an opportunity of remarking upon some incidental
passages, which appeared to me liable to objection in the
perusal. My remarks will be confined almost entirely to the
two last books of the work.
‘M. Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des
progres de l’esprit humain, was written, it is said, under
the pressure of that cruel proscription which terminated in
his death. If he had no hopes of its being seen during his
life, and of its interesting France in his favour, it is a
singular instance of the attachment of a man to principles,
which every day’s experience was, so fatally for himself,
contradicting. To see the human mind, in one of the most
enlightened nations of the world, debased by such a
fermentation of disgusting passions, of fear, cruelty, malice,
revenge, ambition, madness, and folly, as would have

disgraced the most savage nations in the most barbarous
age, must have been such a tremendous shock to his ideas
of the necessary and inevitable progress of the human
mind, that nothing but the firmest conviction of the truth of
his principles, in spite of all appearances, could have
withstood.’
Mr. Malthus in his pick-thank way, here takes occasion
to sneer at Condorcet for his attachment to principles,
which, he asserts, every day’s experience was
contradicting. As this of mine is not a pick-thank work, I
must take the liberty of observing, as I have never read M.
Condorcet’s work, that if his ideas of the future progress of
the human mind were the same as those of other writers on
the subject, that debasement of character, and that mass of
disgusting passions, which developed themselves in the
events to which Mr. Malthus here alludes, were the
strongest confirmation of the necessity of getting rid of
those institutions which had thus degraded the human
character, and under which such passions had been
fostered: for to say that the progress of the human mind, in
spite of those institutions, was necessary and inevitable, or
that there were no such passions as fear, cruelty, malice,
revenge, &c. belonging to the character generated by the
old system in France (in which an immediate change could
not be expected without a miracle) would have been such a
contradiction to common sense, and to all their own
favourite schemes of reform, as no madman in the height of
revolutionary madness was ever guilty of. All that could
ever be pretended by the advocates of reform was that
there were capacities for improvement in the mind, which
had hitherto notwithstanding the advantages of knowledge
been thwarted by human institutions. The contradiction
rests therefore not with Condorcet, but with our author.
The same objection has been often made, and often
refuted. But there are some reasoners who care little how

often a fallacy has been exposed, if they know there are
people who are still inclined to listen to it.
‘This posthumous publication is only a sketch of a much
larger work which he proposed should be executed. It
necessarily wants, therefore, that detail and application,
which can alone prove the truth of any theory.’ [This
remark I cannot admit. I do not think for instance that any
detail or application is necessary to prove the truth of Mr.
Malthus’s general principle of the disproportion between
the power of increase in population, and in the productions
of the earth, or to shew the bad consequences of an
unrestricted increase of population.] ‘A few observations
will be sufficient to shew how completely this theory is
contradicted, when it is applied to the real and not to an
imaginary state of things.’ [The contre-sens implied in this
expression is not a slip of the pen, but a fixed principle in
Mr. Malthus’s mind.] He has a very satisfactory method of
answering all theories relating to any imaginary alterations
or improvements in the condition of mankind, by shewing
what would be the consequences of a certain state of
society, if no such state of society really existed, but if
every thing remained just as it is at present. He thinks it
sound sense and true philosophy to judge of a theory which
is confessedly imaginary or has never been realized by
comparing it ‘with the real and not with an imaginary state
of things.’ That is, he does not adopt the necessarian
maxim that men will be always the same while the
circumstances continue, but he insists upon it that they will
be always the same, whether the circumstances are the
same or not. Some instances have already appeared of this
in the foregoing work. The following passage may serve as
another instance. After supposing Mr. Godwin’s system of
equality to be realized to its utmost extent, and the most
perfect form of society established, he exclaims, ‘this would
indeed be a happy state; but that it is merely an imaginary

state with scarcely a feature near the truth, the reader, I
am afraid, is already too well convinced.’ Mr. Godwin
himself was I apprehend very well convinced that this
imaginary state was very different from the truth or from
the present state of things, when he wrote his book to shew
how much better the one would be than the other is. He
then goes on, ‘Man cannot live in the midst of plenty. All
cannot share alike the bounties of nature. Were there no
established administration of property, every man would be
obliged to guard with force his little store. Selfishness
would be triumphant. The subjects of contention would be
perpetual,’ &c. If there were no established administration
of property, while men continued as selfish as they are at
present, (which is I suppose what Mr. Malthus means by
applying the theory to the real state of things‘) the
consequences here mentioned would no doubt follow. But it
is supposed that there is no established administration of
property, because the necessity for it has ceased or
because selfishness is not triumphant, but vanquished. This
is the supposition. Mr. Malthus however persists, that were
there no established administration of property, ‘every man
would be obliged to guard with force his little store since
selfishness would still be as triumphant as ever.’ This is
contrary to all the received rules of reasoning. He then
proceeds to examine, how long Mr. Godwin’s theory if once
realized might be expected to last, and how soon the
present vices of men would discompose this perfect form of
society, concluding very wisely that ‘a theory that will not
admit of application cannot possibly be just.’ True: if a man
tells you that a triangle has certain properties, he is bound
to make good this theory with respect to a triangle, but not
with respect to a circle.—The outcry which Mr. Malthus
here makes about experience is without any meaning. It is
evident that we cannot make this word a rule in all cases
whatever. For instance, if a man who is in the habit of
drinking a bottle of brandy every day of his life and

consequently enjoys but an indifferent state of health, is
advised by his physician to leave off this practice, and told
that on this condition he may recover his health and
appetite, it would not be considered as a proof of any great
wisdom in the man, if he were to answer this reasoning of
his physician by applying it to the real, and not to an
imaginary state of things, or by saying, ‘The consequences
you promise me from submitting to your regimen are
indeed very desirable; but I cannot expect any such
consequences from it: I have always been in very bad
health from the habit I have constantly been in of drinking
brandy; and it would be contrary to the experience of my
whole life to suppose, that I should receive any benefit from
leaving it off.’ In like manner, I conceive that it is not from
any great depth of philosophy, but from the strength of his
attachment to the good things of this life, that Mr. Malthus
makes so many ill-judged appeals to experience. He is
afraid of launching into the empty regions of abstraction,
he stands shivering on the brink; or if he ventures a little
way, soon turns back again, frightened out of his wits, and
muttering something about population. His imagination
cannot sustain for a moment the idea of any real
improvement or elevation in the human character, but
instantly drops down into the filth of vice and misery, out of
which it had just crawled. His attempts at philosophy put
me in mind of the exploits of those citizens who set out on a
Sunday morning to take an excursion into the country,
resolved to taste the fresh air, and not be confined for ever
to the same spot, but who get no farther than Paddington,
White Conduit-house, or Bagnigge-wells, unable to leave
the smoke, the noise and dust, to which they have so long
been used! Mr. Malthus is a perfect cockney in matters of
philosophy.
M. Condorcet, allowing that there must in all stages of
society be a number of individuals who have no other

resource than their industry, or that ‘there exists a
necessary cause of inequality, of dependence and even of
misery,[25] which menaces without ceasing the most
numerous and active class of the community,’ proposes to
establish a fund, which should assure to the old an
assistance, produced in part by their own former savings,
and partly by the savings of others, who die before they
reap the benefit of it; and that this fund might extend to
women and children, who had lost their husbands or
fathers, and afford a capital to young beginners, sufficient
for the developement of their industry. To those who have
not fathomed all the depths and shoals of the principle of
population, this plan seems feasible enough. Mr. Malthus’s
cautious reserved humanity, his anxious concern about the
support of the aged, the infirm, the widow, and the orphan,
his wish to give every encouragement to industry, and
above all, his regard for the rights and independence of his
fellows, lead him to see nothing but difficulties and
objections in the way of such a plan.
‘Such establishments may appear very promising upon
paper; but when applied to real life, they will be found to
be absolutely nugatory. M. Condorcet allows, that a class of
people which maintains itself entirely by industry is
necessary to every state. Why does he allow this? No other
reason can well be assigned, than because he conceives,
that the labour necessary to procure subsistence for an
extended population, will not be performed without the
goad of necessity. If by establishments, upon the plans that
have been mentioned, this spur to industry be removed; if
the idle and negligent be placed upon the same footing
with regard to their credit, and the future support of their
wives and families, as the active and industrious, can we
expect to see men exert that animated activity in bettering
their condition, which now forms the master-spring of
publick prosperity. If an inquisition were to be established

to examine the claims of each individual, and to determine
whether he had, or had not, exerted himself to the utmost,
and to grant or refuse assistance accordingly, this would be
little else than a repetition upon a larger scale, of the
English poor laws, and would be completely destructive of
the true principles of liberty and equality.’
This passage only shews the shyness of our author’s
benevolence. He will hear of no short-cuts or obvious
expedients for bettering the condition of the poor. All his
benefits are extracted by the Cæsarean operation.—In the
first place, he contradicts himself. He first supposes that
labour cannot be performed without the goad of necessity,
and then affirms that it is the prospect of bettering their
condition, that makes men exert themselves, and forms the
master-spring of public prosperity. But why is it necessary
that the idle and negligent should be put upon the same
footing with the industrious, with respect to their credit,
the support of their families, &c.? As to the first of these, it
is proposed to be only temporary, to serve as a beginning,
and if a proper use is not made of it, the goad of necessity,
to which Mr. Malthus is so ready to resort on all occasions,
will soon begin to do its office. As to the second object, the
support of a surviving family, in case of accidents, did Mr.
Malthus never hear of any distress produced in this way,
but in consequence of the idleness and negligence of the
deceased? Is not a poor family necessarily reduced to
distress by the death of the husband, let his industry and
sobriety have been never so great, and even reduced to
greater distress in proportion to his industry, as they must
miss his help the more? Besides, it is not likely that the
withholding this assistance from a man’s family after his
death will be any inducement to the idle and negligent to
exert themselves, when the sight of the actual distress in
which their families are involved by their ill conduct has no
effect upon them. I see no objection to proportioning the

allowance to the old, or to those who have had time to
make a provision for themselves, to the contributions they
have really made to the fund in a given length of time. This
would be a sufficient test of the validity of their
pretensions, as they could not contribute largely, without
proportionably straitening themselves, and the idle and
profligate are not very apt to part with their present gains
to provide for any speculative uncertainties or future
difficulty. (Mr. Malthus may measure the support allotted to
their families in the same way.) While the distinction of the
idle and industrious continued, and while it was necessary
to encourage the one and discountenance the other, I do
not understand what objection there can be to this mode,
or how it would trench upon the true principles of liberty
and equality. True equality supposes equal merit and virtue.
But Mr. Malthus is alarmed at this scheme, because, he
says, it is little else than a repetition on a larger scale of
the English poor laws. If the English poor laws are formed
upon this principle, I should, I confess, be very sorry to see
them abolished.
‘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.’
This is an utter falsification of the argument, as I have
already shewn. Every man could not be sure of a
comfortable provision for a family, unless this provision
existed, and I see no reason why the rising generation
should not be free from the killing frost of misery, at least
while they can. To argue that our enlightened posterity will
feel ‘secure that the general benevolence will supply every
deficiency,’ is to suppose them strangely unacquainted with
the principles of Mr. Malthus’s Essay.
‘The period when the number of men surpass their
means of subsistence has long since arrived.’ p. 357.

This I must deny. That the period of the utmost degree
of populousness would have arrived long ago, if nothing
had prevented it, I am very ready to grant. But that it has
ever actually arrived, is another question. Because
population would have arrived at its greatest possible or
desirable height long before our time, if it had not been
kept back by any artificial and arbitrary checks, is that any
reason why it should never attain that height, or should not
now be suffered to go on, though those checks have always
operated to keep it back much more than was necessary,
viz. below the level not only of the possible, but of the
actual means of subsistence or produce of the earth? As to
the period when the world is likely to maintain the greatest
possible number of inhabitants in the greatest possible
comfort, I have no notion that it will ever arrive at all. If
however it should ever arrive, it must be in consequence
either of a gradual or immediate complete improvement in
the state of society. If this improvement is gradual, the
increase in population will be so too, and will not reach its
farthest limit till a considerably remote period; if the
improvement is sudden and rapid, still it must be some
time before the operation of the new system of things will
have overcome all obstacles, and completely peopled the
earth. So that in either case the event seems a good way
off. The danger of arriving at this point does not therefore
appear to be ‘immediate or imminent,’ but doubtful and
distant.
Mr. Malthus in his examination of Condorcet’s
arguments, in favour of the indefinite prolongation of
human life, (one of those absurdities against which no good
reason can be given, but that it shocks all common sense)
shews considerable ingenuity, mixed up with a great deal of
that minute verbal logic, to which he seems to have
accustomed his mind, and which is perpetually leading him
into erroneous methods of reasoning, even when he

happens to be right in his conclusions. As in the following
passages.
‘Variations from different causes are essentially distinct
from a regular and unretrograde increase. The average
duration of human life will, to a certain degree, vary, from
healthy or unhealthy climates, from wholesome or
unwholesome food, from virtuous or vicious manners, and
other causes; but it may be fairly doubted, whether there
has been really the smallest perceptible advance in the
natural duration of human life, since first we had any
authentic history of man. The prejudices of all ages have,
indeed, been directly contrary to this supposition.’
Now this statement is very unsatisfactory, to say the
least. For the only reason that can be given why the causes
here mentioned, on which Mr. M. allows that the duration
of human life depends, have not produced a regular and
permanent effect must be, that they themselves have
neither been regular nor permanent. The mere fact,
therefore, of the variableness in the length of human life
proves nothing but the variableness of those moral and
artificial causes, which are supposed to have some
influence on our physical constitution. But Condorcet
supposes a regular advance to be made in these causes,
and that an indefinite advance in some of them (as the
knowledge of medicine for instance) is probable, will hardly
be disputed. The question (in this point of view) of the
necessary duration of human life is not properly a question
of fact, or history, but depends on a comparison of the
present circumstances of mankind with their past
circumstances, and on the probability that may thence
appear of preventing or counteracting those maladies and
passions which are most unfavourable to long life. That our
reason may sometimes get the start of our experience is
what no one can deny. Thus when the art of printing was
first discovered it required no great stretch of thought to

perceive that knowledge and learning would soon become
more generally diffused than they had hitherto been,
though till this event no perceptible or regular progress
had ever been made. Those who reason otherwise are a
kind of stereographic reasoners who take things in the
lump without being able to analyse or connect their
different principles. Experience is but the alphabet of
reason. With respect to the general shortness of human life
compared with what it was in the first ages of mankind, this
fact seems rather against Mr. Malthus, for if there is no
certain date, no settled period to human life, beyond which
it cannot hold out, but that it has varied from a thousand to
a hundred years, so far there is no reason why we should
not tread back our steps, or even go beyond the point from
which we set out. There is no fixed limit; the present length
of human life is not evidently a general law of nature. The
mere naked fact of its never exceeding a certain length at
present is just as decisive against its ever having been
longer, as it is against its ever being longer in future. Mr.
Malthus argues about human life, as Hume argues about
miracles.
‘It will be said, perhaps, that the reason why plants and
animals cannot increase indefinitely in size, is, that they
would fall by their own weight. I answer, how do we know
this but from experience? from experience of the degree of
strength with which these bodies are formed. I know that a
carnation, long before it reached the size of a cabbage,
would not be supported by its stalk; but I only know this
from my experience of the weakness, and want of tenacity
in the materials of a carnation stalk. There are many
substances in nature, of the same size, that would support
as large a head as a cabbage.
‘The reasons of the mortality of plants are at present
perfectly unknown to us. No man can say why such a plant
is annual, another biennial, and another endures for ages.

The whole affair in all these cases, in plants, animals, and
in the human race, is an affair of experience; and I only
conclude that man is mortal, because the invariable
experience of all ages has proved the mortality of those
materials of which his visible body is made.
‘What can we reason but from what we know.’

This is making use of words without ideas. It is
endeavouring to confound two things essentially distinct,
because the same lax expression may be applied to them
both. It is an attempt to deprive men of their
understanding, and leave them nothing but the use of their
senses, by a trick of language. Does it follow because all
our knowledge may be traced in some way to something
which may be called experience, that all our conclusions
are nothing but an affair of memory? Does Mr. Malthus
know of only one sort of experience? Is there not a blind
and a rational experience? Is it not one thing merely to
know a fact, or a number of facts, and another to know the
reason of them? Or if our philosopher is determined to
intrench himself behind a word, is there not a knowledge
founded on the experience of certain positive results,
(which often extends no further than those results) and a
knowledge founded on the experience of certain general
principles or laws, to which all particular effects are
subject? Mr. Malthus seems to insinuate that the
knowledge of the general law or principle adds nothing to
the knowledge of the fact, because both are equally an
affair of experience. He might as well assert that a ligature
of iron would not strengthen a deal plank, because they are
both held together by the same law of cohesion. The fact
expresses nothing more than the actual co-existence of
certain things in certain circumstances, and while all those
circumstances continue, no doubt the same consequences
will follow. But we know that they are hardly ever the same,

and the question is, which of them is necessary to produce
the effect talked of. This the reason points out, that is, it
points out a relation between certain things, which has
been found to hold not merely in the given circumstances,
but in all others, which is properly the relation of cause and
effect. Our idea of cause and effect is not derived from our
immediate but from our comparative experience: it is only
by taking our experience to pieces, by seeing what things
are, or are not necessarily connected together in different
circumstances, that we learn to reason with clearness and
confidence on the succession of events.
The succession of events is not the same thing as the
succession of cause and effect. By assigning a reason for a
thing, I mean then being able to refer it to a general rule or
principle collected from and proved by an infinite number
of collateral instances, and confirming the particular fact or
instance to which it is applied. It is drawing together the
different ramifications of our experience, and winding them
round a particular bundle of things, and tying them fast
together. Thus suppose we have never seen a carnation of
the size of a cabbage: does it follow that we never shall, or
that there can be no such thing? We might say, I know no
reason why a flower of a certain shape, colour, &c. should
not reach a certain size, but that it has never been so
within my knowledge. This might however be owing to the
soil, culture, or a thousand circumstances, which are not
invariable.—But the moment the reason is given (supposing
it to be a good one) namely, the connection between the
contexture and weight, (though this reason is also derived
indirectly from the general fund of our experience) there is
an end at once of the question. To suppose a flower to grow
to a greater height than it could support from the
slenderness of the stalk would be to suppose what never
happened not only with respect to that particular flower,
the carnation, but with respect to any other flower, or

plant, or animal, or any other body whatever. We know that
climate has such an effect that what are plants with us, in
the tropical climates become large trees: but the necessary
proportion between the size or weight of the plant, and the
strength of the stalk that is to support it, is what no change
of soil or climate can supersede, unless we could supersede
the law of gravitation itself. The mere experimental or
historical proof is here then buttressed up by the general
rule, or reason of the thing.—I have always seen a stone fall
to the ground; I remember a house always to have stood
where it does; a hill has never stirred from the place where
I first saw it. Is the inference to be drawn from these
different cases equally certain? Am I to conclude that the
house will last as long as the mountain, because I have the
same positive evidence of their permanence? No: because
though I have never seen any alteration in that particular
house, I have seen other houses pulled down and built up;
and besides, from the size of the objects, the shape and
nature of the materials, I know that one of them may be
very easily destroyed, whereas nothing but some great
convulsion in nature is ever likely to destroy the other or
remove it from its place. Our particular experience is only
to be depended on, as it is explained and confirmed by
analogy to other cases, viz. by a number of other facts of
the same kind, or by general observation. Secondly, the
aggregate of our experience with respect to any given class
of events is constantly over-ruled by the reason of the case,
viz. by our knowledge of cause and effect, by the
intelligible, explicit connections of things, and by
considering whether the principles concerned in the
production of a series of events, (forming a body of facts, or
the concrete mass of our experience) are resolvable into a
simple law of nature operating universally, unchangeably,
without ever being suspended for a moment, (as for
instance, the law of gravitation which holds equally of all
bodies in all cases, and can never be separated from our

reasonings upon them) or whether the event has been
owing to a combination of mixed causes, which do not
always act alike and with equal force, or the effect of which
depends upon circumstances, which we know may be
altered, (as in the case of soils, climates, methods of
culture,[26] &c. to return to the former example). Suppose a
rock to have stood for ages on the summit of a mountain.
Am I sure that it will stand there always? Yes, if nothing
happens to prevent it. But can I be sure that nothing will
ever remove it, because nothing has ever done so hitherto?
On the contrary, I know that if a man points a cannon
against it, it will be shattered to pieces in an instant,
though it has stood there for ages, and though there is not
at present the least appearance of a change in it. Here then
my experience is of no avail against my reason. In one
sense of the word, it is all thrown away, and goes for
nothing. To judge rationally, I must take other
circumstances into the account, the effects of gunpowder,
&c. The resistance made by the rock will depend upon its
hardness, not upon the length of time it had stood there.
Our experience then is not one thing, or any number of
things, taken absolutely or blindly by themselves, but a vast
collection of facts, and what is of infinitely more
importance, of rules, founded upon those facts, bearing one
upon another, and perpetually modified by circumstances.
It is not upon any single fact or class of facts, or on any
single rule, but on the combination of all these, and the
manner in which they balance and control one another, that
our decisions must ultimately rest. It is from this rational
and abstracted experience that we obtain any certain
results, and infer from the altered relation of causes and
events, that things will happen which never happened
before. The future is contained in the past, only as it grows
out of the same powers in nature, but acting in different
situations, and producing different practical results by
invariable laws. To apply all this to the question. If it is

allowed that the improvements in physic have an influence
on the duration of human life, and that these improvements
may go on indefinitely, I do not think Mr. Malthus’s answer
a conclusive one that no considerable progress will ever be
made in this respect, because none has hitherto been
made. If the improvements in science have not hitherto
been regular and permanent, it cannot be expected that
any advantages depending on them should have been so:
nor does the past history of mankind in this instance
furnish a rule for our future conjectures, inasmuch as in all
that relates to the permanence and general diffusion of
knowledge, a new turn has been given to the question (as
before observed) by the invention of printing. This single
circumstance, which was matter of mere accident, may be
said in many respects to have given a new aspect to human
affairs; to say that it has not yet produced the effects
predicted from it, when it has had no time to produce them,
is like saying, that the repeated blows of a battering-ram
will not break down a stone-wall, because for the two or
three first blows it does not begin to move. The true
question is, whether the cause is adequate to the effect
ascribed to it, that is, whether its operation is of a
sufficiently general and powerful nature to produce a
correspondent general change in the circumstances of
mankind. I think it will hardly be denied that printing may
be applied with great success as an instrument for the
propagation of vice: may it not then be made use of to give
currency to the principles of virtue? At any rate, to deny
that it is a means of diffusing and embodying knowledge is
to deny that such a contrivance exists at all, or that books
will be more generally read, or less liable to be lost from
the facility with which they are multiplied. While therefore
Mr. Malthus allows certain moral habits, and the state of
physical knowledge in a great measure to determine the
length of human life, he cannot object on any allowed
principles of philosophy to M. Condorcet’s employing these

causes as intermediate links in a chain of argument to
establish the probability of the gradual approach of
mankind—to a state of immortality. The error does not lie in
M. Condorcet’s general principles of reasoning, but in the
wrong application of them; though I do not know that I
could detect the error better than Mr. Malthus has done.
What I have endeavoured to shew in these hasty remarks is
that the admission of the rule laid down by our author, that
in our calculations of the future, we are to attend to
nothing but the general state of the fact hitherto, without
giving any weight to the actual change of collateral
circumstances, or the existence of any new cause which
may influence the state of that fact, would overturn every
principle, not only of sound philosophy, but of the most
obvious common sense.[27] I dissent equally from M.
Condorcet’s paradoxical speculations and from Mr.
Malthus’s paradoxical answers to them. It would be unfair
not to add that Mr. Malthus has made one good distinction
on the subject, between an unlimited and an indefinite
improvement. It is the old argument of the Heap, and is
here stated with considerable effect, and novelty of
appearance. The conclusion of Mr. Malthus’s argument on
this idle question is a sensible and pleasant account of the
matter. After all, I do not quite dislike a man who quotes
Bickerstaff so well.
‘It does not, however, by any means, seem impossible,
that by an attention to breed, a certain degree of
improvement, similar to that among animals, might take
place among men. Whether intellect could be
communicated may be a matter of doubt: but size, strength,
beauty, complexion, and perhaps even longevity, are in a
degree transmissible. The error does not seem to lie, in
supposing a small degree of improvement possible, but in
not discriminating between a small improvement, the limit
of which is undefined, and an improvement really

unlimited. As the human race, however, could not be
improved in this way, without condemning all the bad
specimens to celibacy, it is not probable, that an attention
to breed should ever become general; indeed, I know of no
well-directed attempts of the kind, except in the ancient
family of the Bickerstaffs, who are said to have been very
successful in whitening the skins, and increasing the height
of their race by prudent marriages, particularly by that
very judicious cross with Maud the milk-maid, by which
some very capital defects in the constitutions of the family
were corrected.’
Mr. Malthus afterwards adds, ‘When paradoxes of this
kind are advanced by ingenious and able men, neglect has
no tendency to convince them of their mistakes. Priding
themselves on what they conceive to be a mark of the reach
and size of their own understandings, of the extent and
comprehensiveness of their views; they will look upon this
neglect merely as an indication of poverty, and narrowness,
in the mental exertions of their contemporaries; and only
think, that the world is not yet prepared to receive their
sublime truths.’—This is said bitingly enough. For my own
part, I conceive that the world is neither prepared to
receive, nor reject, nor answer them, nor decide any thing
about them but that they are contrary to all our notions of
things, which, till we know more about the matter, is
perhaps a sufficient answer.
‘Mr. Godwin at the conclusion of the third chapter of
his eighth book, speaking of population, says, “There is a
principle in human society, by which population is
perpetually kept down to the level of the means of
subsistence. Thus, among the wandering tribes of America
and Asia, we never find, through the lapse of ages, that
population has so increased as to render necessary the
cultivation of the earth.” This principle, which Mr. Godwin
thus mentions as some mysterious and occult cause, and

which he does not attempt to investigate, has appeared to
be the grinding law of necessity—misery, and the fear of
misery.’
There is a want of clearness here. The cause which Mr.
Malthus thus explains so accurately has still something
dark and mysterious about it. With respect to the savage
tribes Mr. Malthus states in another place, that it is not
owing to the backwardness of population that agriculture
has never become necessary, but to the want of agriculture
that population has never increased among them. The
passage is worth quoting. ‘It is not, therefore,’ he says, ‘as
Lord Kaimes imagines, that the American tribes have never
increased sufficiently to render the pastoral or agricultural
state necessary to them; but, from some cause or other,’
[Mr. Malthus also deals in occult causes] ‘they have not
adopted in any great degree these more plentiful modes of
procuring subsistence, and therefore, cannot have
increased so as to have become populous. If hunger alone
could have prompted the savage tribes of America to such a
change in their habits, I do not conceive that there would
have been a single nation of hunters and fishers remaining;
but it is evident, that some fortunate train of
circumstances, in addition to this stimulus, is necessary for
this purpose; and it is undoubtedly probable, that these
arts of obtaining food, will be first invented and improved
in those spots that are best suited to them, and where the
natural fertility of the situation,’ [Is not the soil of America
sufficiently fertile?] ‘by allowing a greater number of
people to subsist together, would give the fairest chance to
the inventive powers of the human mind.’—Here then we
see ‘the grinding law of necessity’ converted into a
‘fortunate train of circumstances,’ so that we have a fact
arising from a necessary cause, and that necessary cause
depending on an accident. The population is kept down to
the level of the means of subsistence, but not to what it is,

by the law of necessity; since there are ways and means of
raising that level, and the population along with it.
Notwithstanding all the misery, and all the fear of misery,
which Mr. Malthus describes as thus operating to keep
population down to its proper level, he is altogether
unwilling to lighten their pressure, or to extend the
benefits of that fortunate train of circumstances and of
those more plentiful modes of obtaining food beyond their
present necessary limits. Nothing can exceed his jealousy
on this point. He is apprehensive lest some speculative
philosopher should take it into his head ‘to exterminate the
inhabitants of the greatest part of Asia and Africa’ on a
principle of humanity. He proposes rather ‘to civilize and
direct the industry of the various tribes of Tartars and
Negroes, as a work of considerable time, and as having
little chance of success.’ He looks with an enlightened
concern at the encroachments daily made by the thriving
population of the colonies on the deserts and uncultivated
plains of North America, grieving to see the few scattered
inhabitants driven ‘from their assigned and native dwelling-
place,’ and foreseeing that by this means the whole
population of that vast continent will be some time or other
completely choaked up! It is, I know, a painful object to Mr.
Malthus (I cannot tell how it happens) to see plenty,
comfort, civilisation and numerous swarms of people
succeed to want, ignorance, famine, misery, and desolation.
Those who are the well-wishers of the happiness of
mankind (among which number I reckon Mr. Malthus one)
are always diverted from their projects by their own
delicacy and scruples. Those who wish to enslave or
destroy them never boggle at difficulties, or stand upon
ceremony!
Mr. Malthus says that the principle, by which
population is perpetually kept down to a certain level is the
grinding law of necessity—misery and the fear of misery.

This may be true of the savage tribes there spoken of, but if
he means to apply it generally, ‘it is not in any degree near
the truth.’ At this rate, all those who do not formally set
about propagating their species ought to be restrained by
want or the fear of it. Is this the fact? Misery or the fear of
misery may be the check to population among the poor, but
it cannot be the check to it among the rich. Yet we do not
find that the rich, any more than the poor, regularly marry
and get children. If this were the case, the rich would long
ago have multiplied themselves into beggars. They would
all have descendants, and those descendants would have
others, till the world would not have room for such a
number of poor gentlemen. All their wealth would be
turned into rags, and they would be glad of a crust of
bread. The world would be one great work-house.[28] There
must therefore be some other principle which checks
population among the higher classes, and makes them stop
short within many degrees of actual poverty, besides
‘misery and the fear of misery.’ They do not even come
within sight of misery: the fact is that they are as unwilling
to descend from the highest pitch of luxury as the poor are
to sink into the lowest state of want.—Mr. Malthus by
asserting in this careless manner that population can only
be checked by misery or the fear of misery, gains a main
point. He has always a certain quantity of misery in bank,
as you must put so much salt in your porridge, and so many
poor devils standing on the brink of wretchedness, as a sort
of out-guard or forlorn hope, to ward off the evils of
population from the society at large. Thus the enemy is
sure to be defeated, before it can make any impression on
the body of the community. This would be very well if we
had to deal with an external, and not with an internal
enemy. But is it the poor then only, who are subject to this
disease of population? Are the rich quite proof against the
evils of this all-pervading principle, this inevitable law of
nature? If the account which Mr. Malthus gives of that

principle were true, its ravages could no more be checked
by devoting a certain class of the community to glut ‘its
ravenous maw,’ than you could keep the plague out of a
house by placing some one at the door to catch it. Either
misery and the dread of misery are not absolutely
necessary to keep population within due bounds, or nothing
short of the general spread of misery and poverty through
the whole community could save us from it. Mr. Malthus
tries to shut the gates of mercy on mankind by an ill-
natured manœuvre! From the little trouble our author gives
himself about the application of his arithmetical and
geometrical ratios to the rich, and his confidence in the
method of inoculating the poor only by way of prevention,
one would suppose that the former had no concern in the
affair: that ‘they neither marry nor are given in marriage’;
but leaving the vulgar business of procreation to their
inferiors, only look on to see that they do not overstock the
world. Why no, says Mr. Malthus, I have always insisted on
vice as one of the necessary checks to population; and
though in the upper ranks of life, the restraints on
marriage cannot be said to be imposed by misery or the
fear of misery, yet it cannot be denied that these restraints
lead to a great deal of vice and profligacy, which answer
the purpose just as well.—There is one merit I shall not
deny to Mr. Malthus, which is, that he has adapted his
remedies with great skill and judgment to the different
tempers, habits, and circumstances of his patients. In his
division of the evils of human life, he has allotted to the
poor all the misery, and to the rich as much vice as they
please! These last will I daresay be very well satisfied with
this distribution.—These remarks sufficiently shew that we
cannot apologize for all the misery there is in the world by
saying, that nothing else can put a stop to the evils of
population; nor for all the vice, by saying that it is the
alternative of misery. It cannot be pretended, that no one
would ever indulge in vicious gratifications, but from the

apprehension of reducing himself to want by having a
family.—‘But he cannot maintain them in a certain style.’—
True: vice is then a very convenient auxiliary to pride,
vanity, luxury, artificial distinctions, &c. but it is not a
resource against want. I once knew an instance of a
gentleman and lady who had a very romantic passion for
each other, but who could not afford to marry because they
could only muster seven thousand pounds between them.
Were they not to be pitied? What could they do in this case?
Why, the lady no doubt would behave with all the wonted
fortitude of her sex on the occasion: but the poor man must
certainly be driven into vicious courses. Oh! no: I had
forgot he was a clergyman; and his cloth would not admit
of any such thing. Vice does not therefore seem to be
always a necessary consequence of the obstacles to
marriage. Moral restraint is always practicable, where the
opinion of the world renders it necessary. At all events, I
conceive that either one or the other of Mr. Malthus’s
remedies may be dispensed with: they are not both
necessary. By his own account, (as formerly seen) extreme
poverty is a very ineffectual bar to population; and as to
vice, if it could be administered in doses, proportioned to
the occasion, so much and no more, it might be an
excellent cure; but the misfortune is, that when it once
begins, there is no end of it. To change my metaphor, it
takes the bit in its mouth, and sets off at a glorious rate,
without the least spur from necessity, always keeping as
much a-head of the occasion as Mr. Malthus’s geometrical
series keeps a-head of his arithmetical one. Some persons
may perhaps argue, that there is a natural connection
between vice and misery, inasmuch as without the
temptation of want among the poor, the vices of the rich
would lack proper objects to exercise themselves upon: so
that, there being no one to offer temptation to, and no one
having any very great temptations to offer, people would be
forced to marry among their equals, unless the trifling

consideration of not being able to provide immediately for a
large family should induce them to moderate their passions
for a while. This is an argument which I shall not
controvert: the disturbing that beautiful harmony and
dependence which at present subsists between vice and
misery would certainly lead us back in a great measure to
all the evils which Mr. Malthus anticipates as arising out of
a state of excessive virtue and happiness, and the most
perfect form of society.
I shall here quote at large Mr. Malthus’s account of the
origin of the distinctions of property as necessarily arising
from the pressure of population on the means of
subsistence, and from that principle solely. I shall mark
what I think the most noticeable parts in italics, and make
some observations at the end.
‘It may be curious to observe in the case that we have
been supposing, how some of the principal laws, which at
present govern civilized society, would be successively
dictated by the most imperious necessity. As man,
according to Mr. Godwin, is the creature of the impressions
to which he is subject, the goadings of want could not
continue long before some violations of public or private
stock would necessarily take place. As these violations
increased in number and extent, the more active and
comprehensive intellects of the society would soon
perceive, that while population was fast increasing, the
yearly produce of the country would shortly begin to
diminish. The urgency of the case would suggest the
necessity of some immediate measures being taken for the
general safety. Some kind of convention would then be
called, and the dangerous situation of the country stated in
the strongest terms. It would be observed, that while they
lived in the midst of plenty it was of little consequence who
laboured the least, or who possessed the least, as every
man was perfectly willing and ready to supply the wants of

his neighbour. But that the question was no longer whether
one man should give to another that which he did not use
himself; but whether he should give to his neighbour the
food which was absolutely necessary to his own existence.
It would be represented that the number of those who were
in want very greatly exceeded the number and means of
those who should supply them; that these pressing wants,
which from the state of the produce of the country, could
not all be gratified, had occasioned some flagrant violations
of justice; that these violations had already checked the
increase of food, and would, if they were not by some
means or other prevented, throw the whole community into
confusion: that imperious necessity seemed to dictate, that
a yearly increase of produce should, if possible, be obtained
at all events; that in order to effect this first great and
indispensable purpose it would be advisable to make a
more complete division of land, and to secure every man’s
property against violation by the most powerful sanctions.
‘It might be urged perhaps, by some objectors, that as
the fertility of the land increased, and various accidents
occurred, the shares of some men might be much more
than sufficient for their support; and that when the reign of
self-love was once established, they would not distribute
their surplus produce without some compensation in
return. It would be observed in answer, that this was an
inconvenience greatly to be lamented; but that it was an
evil which would bear no comparison to the black train of
distresses which would inevitably be occasioned by the
insecurity of property; that the quantity of food which one
man could consume, was necessarily limited by the narrow
capacity of the human stomach; that it was not certainly
probable that he should throw away the rest; and if he
exchanged his surplus produce for the labour of others, this
would be better than that these others should absolutely
starve.

‘It seems highly probable therefore, that an
administration of property not very different from that
which prevails in civilized states at present would be
established as the best though inadequate remedy for the
evils which were pressing on the society.
‘The next subject which would come under discussion,
intimately connected with the preceding, is the commerce
of the sexes. It would be urged by those who had turned
their attention to the true cause of the difficulties under
which the community laboured, that while every man felt
secure that all his children would be well provided for by
general benevolence, the powers of the earth would be
absolutely inadequate to produce food for the population
which would inevitably ensue; that even if the whole
attention and labour of the society were directed to this
sole point, and if by the most perfect security of property,
and every other encouragement that could be thought of,
the greatest possible increase of produce were yearly
obtained; yet still the increase of food would by no means
keep pace with the much more rapid increase of
population; that some check to population therefore was
imperiously called for; that the most natural and obvious
check seemed to be to make every man provide for his own
children; that this would operate in some respect as a
measure and a guide in the increase of population, as it
might be expected that no man would bring beings into the
world for whom he could not find the means of support;
that where this notwithstanding was the case, it seemed
necessary for the example of others, that the disgrace and
inconvenience attending such a conduct should fall upon
that individual who had thus inconsiderately plunged
himself and his innocent children into want and misery.
‘The institution of marriage, or at least of some express
or implied obligation on every man to support his own
children, seems to be the natural result of these reasonings

in a community under the difficulties that we have
supposed.
‘When these two fundamental laws of society, the
security of property, and the institution of marriage were
once established, inequality of conditions must necessarily
follow. Those who were born after the division of property
would come into a world already possessed. If their parents
from having too large a family were unable to give them
sufficient for their support, what could they do in a world
where every thing was appropriated? We have seen the
fatal effects that would result to society if every man had a
valid claim to an equal share of the produce of the earth.
The members of a family which was grown too large for the
original division of land appropriated to it, could not then
demand a part of the surplus produce of others as a debt of
justice. It has appeared that from the inevitable laws of
human nature some human beings will be exposed to want.
These are the unhappy persons who in the great lottery of
life have drawn a blank. The number of these persons
would soon exceed the ability of the surplus produce to
supply. Moral merit is a very difficult criterion except in
extreme cases. The owners of surplus produce would in
general seek some more obvious mark of distinction; and it
seems to be both natural and just, that except upon
particular occasions their choice should fall upon those
who were able, and professed themselves willing to exert
their strength in procuring a further surplus produce,
which would at once benefit the community, and enable the
proprietors to afford assistance to greater numbers. All
who were in want of food would be urged by imperious
necessity to offer their labour in exchange for this article,
so absolutely necessary to existence. The fund appropriated
to the maintenance of labour would be the aggregate
quantity of food possessed by the owners of land beyond
their own consumption. When the demands upon this fund

were great and numerous it would naturally be divided into
very small shares. Labour would be ill paid. Men would
offer to work for a bare subsistence; and the rearing of
families would be checked by sickness and misery. On the
contrary, when this fund was increasing fast; when it was
great in proportion to the number of claimants, it would be
divided in much larger shares. No man would exchange his
labour without receiving an ample quantity of food in
return. Labourers would live in ease and comfort, and
would consequently be able to rear a numerous and
vigorous offspring.
‘On the state of this fund the happiness or the degree of
misery, prevailing among the lower classes of people in
every known state, at present chiefly depends; and on this
happiness or degree of misery depends principally the
increase, stationariness, or decrease of population.
‘And thus it appears, that a society constituted
according to the most beautiful form that imagination can
conceive, with benevolence for its moving principle instead
of self-love, and with every evil disposition in all its
members corrected by reason, not force, would from the
inevitable laws of nature, and not from any original
depravity of man, or of human institutions, degenerate in a
very short period into a society constructed upon a plan not
essentially different from that which prevails in every
known state at present; a society divided into a class of
proprietors and a class of labourers, and with self-love for
the mainspring of the great machine; we may, therefore,
venture to pronounce with certainty, that if Mr. Godwin’s
system of society were established in its utmost perfection,
instead of myriads of centuries, not thirty years could
elapse before its utter destruction from the simple principle
of population.’
Not to insist on the absurdity, with which Mr. Malthus
seems to be enamoured, of believing that the change here

predicted would be the consequence of the inevitable laws
of nature, not of any inherent depravity in the human mind,
when it is evident that the whole mischief originates in the
folly and headstrong passions of the individuals composing
this extraordinary society, all the members of which are
actuated by the purest motives of reason and virtue, I shall
at once suppose a state of society not indeed perfect, but
equal, and with self-love, and a little common sense,
instead of benevolence and perfect wisdom, for its moving
principles; and see whether it would not be possible for
such a state of practical equality, admitting neither poverty
nor riches, to last more than ‘thirty years, before its utter
destruction from the simple principle of population.’ The
question is, if I understand it rightly, how that principle
alone (I do not enter into the general structure,
foundations, or purposes of civil society, I propose to
examine the question only as a branch of political economy,
or as it relates to the physical sustenance of mankind,
which is the point of view in which Mr. Malthus has treated
it) how I say that principle imperiously requires, that there
should be one class of the community, ready to perish of
want except as they are kept from it by severe and
unremitting exertion, and another class living in ease and
luxury for no other purpose than to keep the good things of
this life from the first class, because if they were admitted
to a share of them they would be immediately subjected to
greater want and hardships than ever. It is to be
remembered that Mr. Malthus here pretends to bring
forward a new theory of property; to have added the key-
stone to the arch of political society, which, he says, was in
danger of falling without it; to enforce the rights of the
rich, and set aside the claims of the poor as false and
unfounded; and by shewing how the distinctions of
property are immediately connected with the physical
nature and very existence of mankind in a way that had not
been supposed before, to point out the necessity of arming

the law with new rigour, and steeling the heart with fresh
obduracy to second the decisions of his pragmatical
philosophy. The laws of England recognize the right of the
poor man to live by his labour; Mr. Malthus denies this
right, and holds it up to ridicule. The question is, which of
them we shall believe. I shall therefore examine the subject
freely, having so good an authority on my side.
All that I can find Mr. Malthus has discovered is, that it
would be necessary in the progress of society, in order to
stave off the evils of population, to make a regulation, that
every man should be obliged to work for a subsistence, and
to provide for his own children. A great matter truly! But
having allowed to Mr. Malthus that these two regulations
would be necessary in the common course of things, I
cannot at the same time help thinking that they would also
be sufficient—to avert the approach of famine, which is the
point at issue. I can easily understand if every man had a
valid claim to an equal share of the produce of the earth,
that this abstract unqualified right would lead to great
inconveniences—but not when that abstract right is
clogged with the condition, that he should work for his
share of it. I can also admit that I can have no claim to the
surplus produce of another without some compensation in
return. This would certainly be hard. But it does not appear
(upon the face of the argument) how I should therefore
have no claim to the produce of my own industry; or how
any other person has a right to force me to work for him
without making me what compensation I think fit. He has a
right to his estate, I have a right to my labour. As to any
produce, whether surplus or not, which he may raise from
it, he has a right to keep it to himself; as to that which I
raise for him, it seems to be a subject of voluntary
agreement. Again, if a man who is as industrious as myself,
and equally reaps the benefit of his industry chuses to have
the additional solace of a wife and family, as he has all the

fun, I see no reason why he should not have all the trouble;
it is neither fair nor equal that I should make a drudge of
myself, or be put to inconvenience for the sake of his
amusements. Let us see then how the argument stands in
this stage of it. The reason which appeared for not allowing
to every man a valid claim to an equal share of the produce
of the earth was, that the admission of such a claim would
only be an excuse for idleness. The extravagant, the
worthless, and indolent would thus prey upon the honest
and laborious part of the community. (We are supposing a
case where every evil disposition and original depravity
had not been completely eradicated by reason and
philosophy.) Even if no such characters existed, they would
hardly fail to be produced by having such fine
encouragement given them. On the other hand, if every one
was at liberty to saddle his neighbour or the community
with as many children as he pleased, there would either be
no sufficient check to the inordinate increase of population,
or at least any one person who got the start in the race of
matrimony would have it in his power to deprive the others
of their right to the surplus produce of their labour by
claiming it for his family. It is necessary then to prevent the
imposition of any one’s fastening himself and children on
another for support, that there should be a certain
appropriation of the common stock; that is, that each man’s
claim upon it should be in proportion to the share he had in
increasing it. The next consideration is whether with this
hold upon him, you would not be able to make him
effectually exert himself, and at the same time prevent him
from having more children than he could maintain, the
same all-powerful stimulus of self-interest equally
counteracting his indolence and his indiscretion. Mr.
Malthus says that the true cause of the difficulties under
which the community would labour, would be the excessive
tendency to population, arising from the security felt by
every man that his children would be well provided for by

the general benevolence: by taking away this security then,
and imposing the task of maintaining them upon himself,
you remove the only cause of the unavoidable tendency of
population to excess, and of all the confusion that would
ensue, by making his selfishness and his indolence operate
as direct checks on his sensual propensities. He would be
tied to his good behaviour as effectually as a country fellow
is at present by being bound in a penalty of twenty pounds
to the parish for every bastard child that he gets. If every
man’s earnings were in proportion to his exertions, if his
share of the necessaries, the comforts, or even the
superfluities of life were derived from the produce of his
own toil, or ingenuity, or determined by equitable
compensation, I cannot conceive how there could be any
greater security for regularity of conduct and a general
spirit of industry in the several members of the community,
as far as was consistent with health and the real enjoyment
of life. If these principles are not sufficient to ensure the
good order of society in such circumstances, I should like
to know what are the principles by which it is enforced at
present. They are nothing more than the regular
connection between industry and its reward, and the
additional charge or labour to which a man necessarily
subjects himself by being encumbered with a family. The
only difference is in the proportion between the reward,
and the exertion, or the rate at which the payment of
labour is fixed. So far then we see no very pressing
symptoms of the dissolution of the society, or of any violent
departure from this system of decent equality, from the sole
principle of population. Yet we have not hitherto got (in the
regular course of the argument) so far as the distinction of
a class of labourers, and a class of proprietors. It may be
urged perhaps that nothing but extreme want or misery
can furnish a stimulus sufficiently strong to produce ‘the
labour necessary for the support of an extended
population,’ or counteract the principle of population. But

Mr. Malthus himself admits that ‘the most constant and
best directed efforts of industry are to be found among a
class of people above the class of the wretchedly poor,’
among those who have something to lose, and something to
gain, and who, happen what will, cannot be worse off than
they are. He also admits that it is among this middling class
of people, that we are to look for most instances of self-
denial, prudence, and a competent resistance to the
principle of population. I do not therefore understand
either the weight or consistency of the charge which he
brings against Paine of having fallen into the most
fundamental errors respecting the principles of
government by confounding the affairs of Europe with
those of America. If the people in America are not forced to
labour (and there are no people more industrious) by
extreme poverty, if they are not forced to be prudent (and
their prudence is I believe equal to their industry) by the
scantiness of the soil, or the unequal distribution of its
produce, no matter whether the state is old or new,
whether the population is increasing or stationary, the
example proves equally in all cases that wretchedness is
not the sine qua non of industry, and that the way to hinder
people from taking desperate steps is not to involve them in
despair. The current of our daily life, the springs of our
activity or fortitude, may be supplied as well from hope as
fear, from ‘cheerful and confident thoughts’ as the
apparition of famine stalking just behind us. The merchant
attends to his business, settles his accounts, and answers
his correspondents as diligently and punctually as the shop-
keeper. The shop-keeper minds his customers, and puffs off
his goods, tells more lies, is a greater drudge, and gets less
for his pains than the merchant. The shoeblack piques
himself upon giving the last polish to a gentleman’s shoes,
and gets a penny for his trouble. In all these cases, it is not
strictly the proportion between the exertion and the object,
neither hope nor fear in the abstract, that determines the

degree of our exertions, but the balance of our hopes and
fears, the difference that it will make to us in our situation
whether we exert ourselves to the utmost or not, and the
impossibility of turning our labour to any better account
that habitually regulates our conduct.[29] We all do the best
for ourselves that we can. This is at least a general rule.—
But let us suppose, though I do not think Mr. Malthus has
thrown any new or striking light on the way, in which such
a change would be brought about, that it is found
necessary to make a regular division of the land, and that a
class of proprietors and a class of labourers is consequently
established. Let us see in this case what proportion of the
surplus produce of the ground might be supposed to fall to
the share of the labourer, or whether if any thing more was
allowed him than what was just enough to keep him alive
and enable him to stagger through the tasks of the day,
both rich and poor (but especially the latter) would not
suffer grievously from all such impious and inhuman
attempts, as our author afterwards calls them, to reverse
the laws of nature, or decrees of Providence (which you
please) ‘by which some human beings are inevitably
exposed to want.’ I shall argue the question solely on the
ground stated by Mr. Malthus. I shall suppose that every
proprietor has an absolute right to his property, and to the
whole produce of his own exertions. There are two other
questions to be considered, namely, whether the right to
the labour of others and to the produce of their labour
attaches to the possession of the soil, secondly, if that is not
the case, to what proportion of the produce of the ground
the labourer is naturally entitled by his exertions. Mr.
Malthus infers that from the establishment of the two
fundamental laws, security of property, and the institution
of marriage, inequality of conditions must necessarily
follow. I confess I do not see this necessary consequence. I
would ask, upon what plea Mr. Malthus succeeded in
establishing these two fundamental laws, but because they

were necessary and competent to stimulate the exertions
and restrain the passions of the community at large, that is,
to maintain a general practical equality, to regulate each
person’s indulgences according to their industry, to lay an
even tax upon every man, and thus prevent the return of
fraud, violence, confusion, want and misery. Grant that the
most fatal effects would result to society, if every man had a
valid claim to an equal share of the produce of the earth; it
by no means follows that the same fatal effects would result
to society from allowing to every man a valid claim to a
share of the produce of the earth proportioned to his
labour. Yet I doubt whether any great inequality could
subsist, while each man had this valid claim. It is one thing
to have a right to the produce of your own exertions, and
another to have a right to the produce of the earth, that is,
of the labour of others. It is so far from being fair to apply
the same reasoning to these two things, that the evils
which would be the necessary consequences of the one,
cannot possibly result from the other. The one is a direct
contradiction to the other. It is on this distinction in fact,
that all property and all society is originally founded. By
making it equally the interest of each individual to exert
himself, you in all probability secure an equal degree of
industry and comfort in each individual. At least, a society
formed upon this plan would have as fair a chance of
realising all the advantages of which it was capable, with
as few deviations from the original direction and design, as
a society, where only a less degree of equality was possible,
would have of coming up to its original idea. Industry and
regularity of behaviour must gain ground, where these
habits were enforced by the general example of the whole
society, and where the sacrifice to be made was less, and
the reward more certain. I might appeal to the history of all
countries in proof of this. Industry flourishes most in those
countries, where there is the greatest equality of
conditions, and where in consequence instances of extreme

distress can rarely occur. The excessive depression of the
lower class of the community can only (by taking away the
spring of hope, and making it nearly impossible for them to
fall lower,) dishearten industry, and make them regardless
of consequences. It cannot be laid down as an axiom, that
you animate industry, in proportion as you take away its
reward. It may be said that the poor will not go through
extreme hardships but from the fear of starving. I know no
reason why such hardships are necessary but because one
man is obliged to do the work of several.—These general
observations are not set aside by supposing the right of
property to be established. All that I can understand by a
right of property is a right in any one to cultivate a piece of
land, be it more or less, and a right at the same time to
prevent any one else from cultivating it, or reaping the
produce. This, in whatever way a man comes by it, is the
utmost extent of this right. ‘Those who were born after the
division of property,’ says Mr. Malthus, ‘would come into a
world already possessed.’ [How the whole world should
come to be possessed immediately after the division of
property I do not understand.] ‘If their parents, from
having too large a family, were unable to give them
sufficient for their support, what could they do in a world,
where every thing was appropriated?’ [Just now the world,
and at present, every thing in it is appropriated.] ‘We have
seen the fatal effects that would result to society, if every
man had a valid claim to an equal share of the produce of
the earth.’ [This has been answered.] ‘The members of a
family which was grown too large for the original division
of land appropriated to it could not then demand a part of
the surplus produce of others as a debt of justice.’
[Certainly not. They would have no right to it, because one
man would have no right to another man’s property; but
that right, as far as relates to the surplus produce, is not
backed by the necessity of the case, as Mr. Malthus would
lead us to suppose, or because every thing is already

appropriated.] ‘It has appeared that, from the inevitable
laws of human nature, some beings will be exposed to
want.’ [That is the question.] ‘The number of those persons
would soon exceed the ability of the surplus produce to
supply.’ I believe so, if they depended on the surplus
produce of the labour of the rich to supply them. But the
long and the short of it is that these laborious landholders,
these owners of surplus produce, finding that their own
exertions could not supply all their own wants, and at the
same time keep pace with their benevolence to those
unhappy persons, who in the great lottery of life had drawn
a blank, would call to their aid such of these as professed
themselves able and willing to exert their strength in
procuring a further surplus produce, which would enable
the proprietors to afford assistance to greater numbers,
that is, out of the produce of their own labour, not out of
that of the proprietors. To hear Mr. Malthus talk, one would
suppose that the rich were really a very hard-working, ill-
used people, who are not suffered to enjoy the earnings of
their honest industry in quiet by a set of troublesome,
unsatisfied, luxurious, idle people called the poor. Or one
might suppose that a landed estate was a machine that did
its own work; or that it was like a large plum-cake, which
the owner might at once cut up into slices, and either eat
them himself, or give them away to others, just as he
pleased. In this case I grant that the poor might be said to
depend entirely upon the bounty or surplus produce of the
rich; and as they would have no trouble in procuring their
share but merely that of asking for it, their demands would
no doubt be a little unreasonable, and in short, if they were
complied with, the estate, the surplus produce, or the
plumb-cake (call it which you will) would soon be gone. The
question would no longer be ‘whether one man should give
to another that which he did not use himself: but whether
he should give to his neighbour the food which was
absolutely necessary to his own existence.’ But I cannot

admit that they would be reduced to any such necessity
merely from allowing to the labourer as much of the
additional produce of the ground as he himself had really
added to it. I repeat that I do not see how a man’s reaping
the produce, and no more than the produce of his industry,
can operate as an inducement to idleness, or to the
excessive multiplication of children, when notwithstanding
all his industry it is impossible he should provide for them
without either diminishing his own comforts, or if the
population is already full, plunging them and himself into
want and misery. This addition to the argument is like a foil
to a sword—it prevents any dangerous consequences. If I
say to a number of people, that they may each of them have
as much of a heap of corn as they desire, the whole of it
would very soon be bespoke, but if I tell them that they may
each of them have as much as they can carry away
themselves, there might be enough to load them all, and I
might have plenty left for my own consumption. The ability
and the willingness of a man to labour, (when these are
made the general foundation of his claim to the produce of
the earth) at once set bounds to his own rapacious
demands, and effectually limit the population.—If Mr.
Malthus had shewn that nothing but extreme misery can
excite to industry or check population, he would then have
shewn the necessity of such a state. But if it has appeared
in various ways that there is no connection between these
things, or that if there is, it is directly contrary to what Mr.
Malthus supposes it, then he has failed in his attempt to
regulate the price of labour by the principle of population,
or to prove that this should be fixed so low, as only just to
keep the labourer from starving. Certainly any advance in
the price of labour, or a more equal distribution of the
produce of the earth would enable a greater number of
persons to live in comfort, and would increase population;
but it is the height of absurdity, as I have shewn over and
over again, to suppose that it would lead to an excessive or

unrestricted increase; as if by making people acquainted
with comfort and decency, you were teaching them to fall in
love with misery. This is the real jut and bearing of the
question. The author of the Essay, to assist his argument,
transposes the question. He represents the labouring class
of the community as a set of useless, supernumerary
paupers, living on charity, or on the labour of the
industrious proprietor. If this representation had any
foundation, I should be ready to admit that these
interlopers had no claim on any part of the surplus produce
of others as a debt of justice. They must owe every thing to
favour, and would be entirely at the mercy of their
benefactors. Every reader must perceive, how little this
account is in any degree near the truth. The case is not that
of a person both willing and able to labour for himself, and
imparting freely to another, who had done nothing to
deserve it, a part of the surplus produce of the soil, but of a
person bargaining with another to do all his work for him,
and allowing him as a bribe part of the produce of his own
labour in return. It is not therefore a question of right any
more than it is a question of expediency, but a question of
power on one side, and of necessity on the other. On the
degree of power, or on that of the necessity, and on nothing
else, will the price of labour depend. Mr. Malthus
somewhere talks of a man’s having no right to subsistence
when his labour will not fairly purchase it. This word
fairness conveys to my ears no meaning but that of the
struggle between power and want, just spoken of. ‘A man,’
he says, ‘born into a world already possessed, if the society
do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest
portion of food.’ This is, as if the question was of an
individual, pestering a laborious community for a job, when
they do not want his assistance, and not of the laborious
part of the community demanding a small portion of food or
the means of subsistence out of the surplus produce of
their labour as a fair compensation for their trouble! I

sometimes think that abstruse subjects are best illustrated
by familiar examples, and I shall accordingly give one.
Suppose I have got possession of an island which I either
took from somebody else, or was the first to occupy. But no
matter how I came by it, I am in possession of it, and that is
enough. Suppose then I see another person coming
towards it either in a canoe (these questions are always
first decided in a state very nearly approaching a state of
nature) or swimming from some other island as I conceive
either with intent to drive me from it, or to defraud me of
the produce of my labour. Now even allowing that I had
more than enough for myself, that part of my surplus
produce was devoured by fowls or wild beasts, or that I
threw it for sport into the sea, yet I should contend that I
have a right, a strict right in one sense of the word, to take
out a long pole, and push this unfair intruder from the
shore, and try to sink his boat or himself in the water to get
rid of him, and defend my own right. But suppose that
instead of his coming to me, I go to him, and persuade him
to return with me; and that when I have got him home, I
want to set him to work to do either part or the whole of my
business for me. In this case I should conceive that he is at
liberty either to work or refuse working just as he thinks
proper, to work on what terms he thinks proper, to receive
only a small part, or the half, or more than half the produce
as he pleases; or if I do not chuse to agree to his terms, I
must do my work myself. What possible right have I over
him? His right to his liberty is just as good as my right to
my property. It is an excellent cheveux-de-fris, and if he is
as idle as I am lazy, he will make his market of it. I say then
that this original right continues in all stages of society,
unless where it has been specifically given up; and acts as a
counterpoise to the insolence of property. If indeed the
poor will work for the rich at a certain rate, they are not
bound to employ others who demand higher wages, or a
greater number than they want: but as it is plain that they

must either work themselves, or get others to work for
them, over whom they have no right whatever, I contend
that the mass of the labouring community have always a
right to strike, to demand what wages they please; the least
that they can demand is enough to support them and their
families; and the real contest will be between the aversion
of the rich to labour, and of the poor to famine. This seems
to be the philosophy of the question. It is also the spirit of
the laws of England, which have left a provision for the
poor; wisely considering, no doubt, that they who received
their all from the labour of others were bound to provide
out of their superfluities for the necessities of such as were
in want. If it be said that this principle will lead to extreme
abuse in practice, I answer, No, for there is hardly any one,
who will live in dependence, or on casualties, if he can help
it. The check to the abuse is sufficiently provided in the
miserable precariousness and disgusting nature of the
remedy. But if from the extreme inequality of conditions,
that is, from one part of the community having been able to
engross all the advantages of society to themselves, so that
they can trample on the others at pleasure, the poor are
reduced so low in intellect and feeling as to be indifferent
to every consideration of the kind, neither will they be
restrained from following their inclinations by Mr.
Malthus’s grinding law of necessity, by the abolition of the
poor laws, or by the prospect of seeing their children
starving at the doors of the rich. It is not by their own fault
alone that they have fallen into this degradation; those who
have brought them into it ought to be answerable for some
of the consequences. The way to obviate those
consequences is not by obstinately increasing the pressure,
but by lessening it. It is not my business to inquire how a
society formed upon the simple plan above-mentioned
might be supposed to degenerate in consequence of the
different passions, follies, vices, and circumstances of
mankind, into a state of excessive inequality and

wretchedness: it is sufficient for my purpose to have shewn,
that such a change was not rendered necessary by the sole
principle of population, or that it would not be absolutely
impossible for a state of actual equality to last ‘thirty years’
without producing the total overthrow and destruction of
the society. Equality produces no such maddening effects
on the principle of population, nor is it a thing, any
approaches to which must be fatal to human happiness,
and are universally to be dreaded. The connection
therefore between that degree of inequality, which
terminates in extreme vice and misery, and the necessary
restraints on population, is not so obvious or indissoluble,
as to give Mr. Malthus a right to ‘qualify’ the luxuries of the
rich, and the distresses of the poor as the inevitable
consequences of the fundamental laws of nature, and as
necessary to the very existence of society. I shall here take
the liberty of quoting the two following passages from Mr.
Malthus’s Essay, which seem exactly to confirm my ideas on
the subject, only better expressed, and stated in a much
neater manner. ‘In most countries, among the lower classes
of people, there appears to be something like a standard of
wretchedness, a point below which, they will not continue
to marry and propagate their species. This standard is
different in different countries, and is formed by various
concurring circumstances of soil, climate, government,
degree of knowledge, and civilization, &c. The principal
circumstances which contribute to raise it, are, liberty,
security of property, the spread of knowledge, and a taste
for the conveniences and the comforts of life. Those which
contribute principally to lower it are despotism and
ignorance.’ For what purpose did Mr. Malthus write his
book? ‘In an attempt to better the condition of the lower
classes of society, our object should be to raise this
standard as high as possible, by cultivating a spirit of
independence, a decent pride, and a taste for cleanliness
and comfort among the poor. These habits would be best

inculcated by a system of general education and, when
strongly fixed, would be the most powerful means of
preventing their marrying with the prospect of being
obliged to forfeit such advantages; and would consequently
raise them nearer to the middle classes of society.’ Yet Mr.
Malthus elsewhere attempts to prove that the pressure of
population on the means of subsistence can only be kept
back by a system of terror and famine, as the pressure of a
crowd is only kept back by the soldiers’ bayonets. I have
thus endeavoured to answer the play of words, by which
Mr. Malthus undertakes to prove that the rich have an
absolute right to the disposal of the whole of the surplus
produce of the labour of others. After this preparation, I
shall venture to trust the reader’s imagination with the
passages, in which he tries to put down private charity, and
to prove the right of the rich (whenever they conveniently
can) to starve the poor. They are very pretty passages.
‘There is one right, which man has generally been
thought to possess, which I am confident he neither does,
nor can, possess, a right to subsistence when his labour
will not fairly purchase it. Our laws indeed say, that he has
this right, and bind the society to furnish employment and
food to those who cannot get them in the regular market;
but in so doing, they attempt to reverse the laws of nature;
and it is, in consequence, to be expected, not only that they
should fail in their object, but that the poor who were
intended to be benefited, should suffer most cruelly from
this inhuman deceit which is practised upon them.
‘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. If these
guests get up and make room for him, other intruders
immediately appear demanding the same favour. The report
of a provision for all that come, fills the hall with numerous
claimants. The order and harmony of the feast is disturbed,
the plenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and
the happiness of the guests is destroyed by the spectacle of
misery and dependence in every part of the hall, and by the
clamorous importunity of those, who are justly enraged at
not finding the provision which they had been taught to
expect. The guests learn too late their error, in
counteracting those strict orders to all intruders, issued by
the great mistress of the feast, who, wishing that all her
guests should have plenty, and knowing that she could not
provide for unlimited numbers, humanely refused to admit
fresh comers when her table was already full.’ This is a
very brilliant description, and a pleasing allegory. Our
author luxuriates in the dearth of nature: he cannot contain
his triumph: he frolics with his subject in the gaiety of his
heart, and his tongue grows wanton in praise of famine.
But let us examine it not as a display of imagination, but as
a piece of reasoning. In the first place, I cannot admit the
assertion that ‘at nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant
cover for the poor man.’ There are plenty of vacant covers
but that the guests at the head of the table have seized
upon all those at the lower end, before the table was full.
Or if there were no vacant cover, it would be no great
matter, he only asks for the crumbs which fall from rich
men’s tables, and the bones which they throw to their dogs.
‘She (nature) tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute
her own orders, if he do not work on the compassion of
some of the guests.’ When I see a poor old man, who after a
life of unceasing labour is obliged at last to beg his bread,
driven from the door of the rich man by a surly porter, and
half a dozen sleek well-fed dogs, kept for the pleasure of
their master or mistress, jumping up from the fireside, or

bouncing out of their warm kennels upon him, I am,
according to Mr. Malthus, in the whole of this scene, to
fancy nature presiding in person and executing her own
orders against this unwelcome intruder, who as he is bent
fairly double with hard labour, and can no longer get
employment in the regular market, has no claim of right (as
our author emphatically expresses it) to the smallest
portion of food, and in fact has no business to be where he
is. The preference which is often given to the inferior
animals over the human species by the institutions and
customs of society is bad enough. But Mr. Malthus wishes
to go farther. By the institutions of society a rich man is at
liberty to give his superabundance either to the poor or to
his dogs. Mr. Malthus will not allow him this liberty, but
says that by the laws of nature he is bound to give it to his
dogs, because if we suffer the poor to work upon our
compassion at all, this will only embolden their importunity,
‘and the order and harmony that before reigned at nature’s
feast will be disturbed and changed into want and
confusion.’ This might probably be the consequence, if the
rich, or the chief guests had provided the entertainment for
themselves; or if nature, like a liberal hostess, had kindly
provided it for them, at her own proper cost and expence,
without any obligations to the poor. It might be necessary
in this case for those who had either provided the feast, or
been expressly invited to it, to keep a pretty strict hand
over those idle and disorderly persons, to whose
importunity there was no end. But the question really is,
not whether all those should be supplied who press forward
into the hall without having contributed any thing to the
plenty that abounds, but whether after the different guests
have contributed largely, each of them having brought his
share and more than his share, the proprietors of the
mansion have a right to turn them all out again, and only
leave a few scraps or coarse bits to be flung to them out of
the windows, or handed to them outside the door. Or

whether if every man was allowed to eat the mess which he
had brought with him in quiet, he would immediately go
out, and bring in half a dozen more, so that he would have
nothing left for himself, and the hall would be instantly
overcrowded. This statement is, I believe, considerably
nearer the truth than Mr. Malthus’s. And if so, we can have
little difficulty in deciding whether there is any ground for
Mr. Malthus’s apprehensions of the danger of raising the
condition of the poor, or relieving the distresses to which,
in their present unnatural and unnecessary state of
degradation, they are unavoidably subject. ‘The spectacle
of misery and dependence’ never arises from the scantiness
of the provision, or from the nearly equal shares, in which
it is divided, giving encouragement to a greater number of
applicants; for those helpless intruders, against whom Mr.
Malthus issues such strict orders, namely the rising
generation, never come into the world till they are sent for,
and it is not likely that those who find themselves warm in
their seats with every thing comfortable about them and
nothing to complain of, should when there is really no room
for fresh comers, send for more people to shove them out of
their places, and eat the victuals out of their mouths. ‘The
Abbé Raynal has said that, “Avant toutes les loix sociales
l’homme avoit le droit de subsister.” He might with just as
much propriety have said, that before the institution of
social laws, every man had a right to live a hundred years.
Undoubtedly he had then, and has still, a good right to live
a hundred years, nay a thousand if he can, without
interfering with the right of others to live; but the affair, in
both cases, is principally an affair of power, not of right.
Social laws very greatly increase this power, by enabling a
much greater number to subsist than could subsist without
them, and so far very greatly enlarge le droit de subsister;
but neither before nor after the institution of social laws,
could an unlimited number subsist; and before, as well as
since, he who ceased to have the power, ceased to have the

right.’ In this passage Mr. Malthus ‘sharpens his
understanding upon his flinty heart.’ The logic is smart and
lively and unembarrassed: it is not encumbered with any of
the awkward feelings of humanity. After all, he misses his
aim. For his argument proves that the right of subsistence
or one man’s right to live is only limited by its interfering
with the right of others to live: that is, that a man has then
only no right to live, when there is nothing for him to live
upon; in which case the question becomes an affair of
power, not of right. But it is not the question whether the
proprietor should starve himself in order that the labourer
may live; but whether the proprietor has a right to live in
extravagance and luxury, while the labourer is starving. As
to his absolute right to the produce of the soil, that is to
say, of the labour of others, we have seen that he has no
such right either to the whole of the surplus produce, or to
as much of it as he pleases. With respect then to the share
of the produce which the labourer has a right to demand, ‘it
is not likely that he should exchange his labour, without
receiving a sufficient quantity of food in return,’ to enable
him to live, unless the right of the proprietor to exact the
labour of others on what terms he chuses, is seconded by a
kind of power, which has very little connection with the
power of the earth to bring forth no more produce. As to
the right of the rich, in a moral point of view, wantonly to
starve the poor, it is I think best to say nothing about it.
Social institutions, on which our author lays great stress as
enlarging the power of subsistence and the right along with
it, do not deny relief to the poor. For this very reason Mr.
Malthus wishes to shoulder them aside, in order to make
room for certain regulations of his own, more agreeable to
the laws of nature and the principle of population. A little
farther on he says, ‘As a previous step even to any
considerable alteration in the present system, which would
contract or stop the increase of the relief to be given, it
appears to me that we are bound in justice and honour

‘formally to disclaim the right of the poor to support.’ It
would be more modest in Mr. Malthus to let them disclaim
it for themselves. But it appears that the reason for
contracting the relief afforded them by the present system,
and denying the right altogether, is that there is no
subsistence for an unlimited number. As to the point at
which it may be prudent or proper for the rich to withhold
assistance from the poor, I shall not enquire into it. But I
shall dispute Mr. Malthus’s right to thrust the poor man out
of existence because there is no room for him ‘at nature’s
mighty feast,’ till he can give some better reason for it than
that there is not room for an unlimited number!—The
maintainance of the needy poor is a tax on the inequality of
conditions and the luxuries of the rich, which they could
not enjoy but in consequence of that general depression of
the lower classes which continually subjects them to
difficulties and want. It is a douceur to keep them quiet,
and prevent them from enforcing those more solid, and
important claims, not interfering with the right of property,
but a direct consequence of the right of personal freedom,
and of their right to set their own price on their own
exertions, which would raise them above the reach of want,
and enable them to maintain their own poor. But they
cannot do this without a general combination of the
labouring part of the community; and if any thing of this
kind were to be attempted, the legislature we know would
instantly interfere to prevent it. I know indeed that the
legislature assumes a right to prevent combinations of the
poor to keep themselves above want, though they disclaim
any right to meddle with monopolies of corn, or other
combinations in the regular course of trade, by which the
rich and thriving endeavour to grind the poor. But though
the men of property have thus retained the legislature on
their side, Mr. Malthus does not think this practical
security sufficient: he thinks it absolutely necessary to
recur to first principles; and that they may see how well

qualified he is to act as chamber counsel in the business, he
makes them a present of his Essay, written expressly for
the purpose, and containing a new institute of the laws of
nature, and a complete theory of population, in which it is
clearly proved that the poor have no right to live any longer
than the rich will let them. In this work which those to
whom it is addressed should have bound in morocco, and
constantly lying by them as a text-book to refer to in all
cases of difficulty, it is shewn that there is no injustice in
forcing the poorer classes to work almost for nothing,
because they have no right to the produce of their labour,
and no inhumanity in denying them assistance when they
happen to be in want, because they ought not to be
encouraged in idleness. Thus armed with ‘metaphysical
aid,’ and conscience-proof, the rich will I should think be
able very successfully to resist the unjust claims of the poor
—to a subsistence!
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. What shews that there
must be some radical defect in our author’s reasoning is,
that a substantial equality does really prevail in several
countries, where the right of property is established, and
where the principle of population has been known to exist
for a great length of time. Property may certainly be made
a handle for power; and that power may, and does almost
constantly lead to abuse, I mean to want and wretchedness.
But neither the power nor the abuse is any part of the
original right; and the original end and design of the right
itself, namely to procure a sufficient supply for the actual
population, and to prevent an unlimited increase of
population, is just as well, or indeed much better answered
without, than with the abuse.—But perhaps we have

mistaken Mr. Malthus all this while. Perhaps he only wishes
to secure to the rich their original right, which is to reserve
a certain share of the produce for their own use; and to
prevent their being driven out of house and home by the
poor, under pretence of population. He seems to say in one
place, that the fund appropriated to the maintenance of
labour is the aggregate quantity of food possessed by the
owners of land beyond what is necessary for their own
immediate consumption. He says this, or something like it.
In this case, it is evident, that ‘no man would be forced to
exchange his labour without receiving an ample quantity of
food in return.’ At this rate the labourer would be as rich,
only not so idle as the proprietor. The only difference
between them would be that one of them would get his
share for nothing, and the other would be obliged to work
for it. It would in fact be a common fund divided equally
between the rich and poor, or more properly speaking,
between the sleeping and the acting partners in this joint-
concern. If so, I do not see what the poor could have to
complain of, as, if they were ever in want, it must be owing
to their own idleness, extravagance, and imprudence, and
they would deserve to be punished. Now Mr. Malthus is
ready to prove with a pair of compasses that this is always
the state of the case. The poor are always just as well off as
the rich, if it is not their own fault, and the want in which
they are sometimes plunged is not owing to an unequal
division of the shares among as many as can possibly
subsist, but to the folly of pushing population beyond the
verge of subsistence. By this means there is nothing left for
those who come last, who have consequently no right to be
where they are, because there is nothing for them. ‘The
quantity of food’ (says Mr. Malthus) ‘which one man can
consume is necessarily limited by the narrow capacity of
the human stomach; it is not certainly probable that he
should throw away the rest; and if he exchange his surplus
produce for the labour of others, this is better than that

these others should absolutely starve.’ Here then we see
the necessary limits of the inequality of conditions, or of
the almost imperceptible difference in the advantages
which the rich have over the poor. But is there really then
no difference between being gorged and not being starved,
between eating venison and turtle-soup, and drinking three
bottles of wine a-day, and living on crusts of bread and
water? Is it physically impossible that one man should eat
more than does him good, or that another should not get
his full share? But it may be asked, what advantage can it
be to the rich to consume more than they want? None. But
the food which is thus misapplied, might be of great use to
the poor. Is there no such thing as waste in great houses,
which must considerably diminish the disproportion
between the quantity of food, and the narrow capacity of
the human stomach? When I consider that the rich are
neither a bit taller, nor stouter, nor born with larger
stomachs than other men, it does indeed seem at first sight
a little extraordinary that they should make such havoc in
the world as they do. But the wonder vanishes the instant
we recollect that crowd of dependents always dangling
about them, who intercept the surplus produce long before
it can reach the labourer, and who instead of dividing his
toil with the husbandman, or sharing in other tasks not less
useful or necessary are maintained by the distresses and
hardships of the poor. A rich man has not only himself and
his family to keep, but he has to keep his gentlemen, his
valet, his butler, his cook, his coachman, his groom, his
horses, his hounds, his ornamental gardener, his architect,
his upholsterer, his jeweller, his silversmith, his man’s-
mercer, and haberdasher, his pimps, parasites, and players,
his poets, painters, and musicians, not to mention a
hundred more, who are of no service on the face of the
earth, nor have any mortal thing to do—but to tend upon
his person, to dress his hair, to brush his clothes, or air his
shirt, to run on his errands, to do his jobs, to manage his

affairs, to please his taste, to pamper his appetites, to study
his humours, to follow his steps, to fawn and cringe and
bow and smile as he directs. All these persons depend
entirely on the bounty of their patron; and though they do
nothing to increase the produce of the ground, they do not
devour it the less eagerly, and it may be supposed that they
make a good gap in it. In the mean time, the productive
labourer, and hard-working mechanic are straitened in
their circumstances, and doomed to unremitting toil and
drudgery, that these hangers-on of the rich may live at their
ease, or contribute only to the vanity and convenience of
their employers. This as I understand it is the pinch of the
grievance.—The rich man has not only to supply his own
wants, but the wants of those who depend upon him, and
who do nothing to support either him or themselves. He is
something in the situation of a balance-master, who
undertakes to support twenty men, some on his head, some
on his shoulders, and others suspended from different parts
of his body: his own weight is nothing: it is the weight of
those who hang upon him that makes the rich man a
burthen to the poor. I see a little old emaciated man riding
on a poney along the street, and a stout healthy, well
looking man riding behind him at some distance, who
follows him like his puppet, who turns as he turns, and
whenever he passes him touches his hat in a respectful
manner. What is the meaning of this? It is a nobleman, and
his servant. The man is as well-fed, as comfortably clothed,
and as well-mounted as his master: what makes all the
difference is, that there are thirty or forty gradations of
society between them, each looking up with envy, or down
with contempt on the other, as they have more or less
power over the necessaries and conveniences of life not for
themselves, but others, and so can hire the respect of a
certain number of dependents. So little can we judge of the
state of society in the mechanical way pointed out by Mr.
Malthus. But it is time to proceed with my author.

‘As Mr. Godwin seems disposed to understand, and
candidly to admit the truth of, the principal argument in
the essay, I feel the more mortified, that he should think it a
fair inference from my positions, that the political
superintendents of a community are bound to exercise a
paternal vigilance and care over the two great means of
advantage and safety to mankind, misery and vice; and that
no evil is more to be dreaded than that we should have too
little of them in the world, to confine the principle of
population within its proper sphere.’ [This I think a fair
statement of the argument.] ‘I am at a loss to conceive
what class of evils Mr. Godwin imagines is yet behind,
which these salutary checks are to prevent.’ [It is not Mr.
Godwin’s business, but our author’s to find out such a class
of evils.] ‘For my own part, I know of no stronger or more
general terms than vice and misery; and the sole question
is, respecting a greater or less degree of them. The only
reason why I object to Mr. Godwin’s system, is, my full
conviction that an attempt to execute it, would very greatly
increase the quantity of vice and misery in society.’
Be it so. But still Mr. Malthus thinks a less degree of
them necessary to prevent a greater; and it therefore
seems a fair inference from his positions to say, that the
greatest care ought to be taken, not to diminish the
necessary quantity. He approves much of the things in his
own mind, but he does not like to hear them called by their
names in a disrespectful way. He does not like the odium
attached to them.
‘Mr. Godwin observes, that he should naturally be
disposed to pronounce that man strangely indifferent to
schemes of extraordinary improvement in society, who
made it a conclusive argument against them, that, when
they were realized, they might peradventure be of no
permanence and duration. And yet, what is morality,
individual or political, according to Mr. Godwin’s own

definition of it, but a calculation of consequences?’ [This, I
must say, is a very abortive kind of argument]. ‘Is the
physician the patron of pain, who advises his patient to
bear a present evil, rather than betake himself to a remedy,
which, though it might give momentary relief, would
afterwards greatly aggravate all the symptoms?’ [The real
case is of a physician, who tells his patient he must not get
well, and endeavours to keep him from doing so, because if
he were once in perfect health, he would be subject to
more violent returns of his disorder]. ‘Is the moralist to be
called an enemy to pleasure, because he recommends to a
young man just entering into life, not to ruin his health and
patrimony in a few years, by an excess of present
gratifications, but to economize his enjoyments, that he
may spread them over a longer period?’ [Our Essayist
would advise the young man to neglect his affairs, and ruin
his health, because by a contrary method his estate would
increase so that he would not be able to manage it, and it
would be thrown into complete and total disorder, at the
same time that his improved health and spirits would urge
him to plunge into much greater excesses, than, if his
constitution were debilitated in time, he would be capable
of committing]. ‘Of Mr. Godwin’s system, according to the
present arguments by which it is supported, it is not
enough to say, peradventure it will be of no permanence:
but we can pronounce with certainty that it will be of no
permanence: and under such circumstances an attempt to
execute it would unquestionably be a great political
immorality.’ According to the present arguments against it,
this has not appeared to be the case.
‘The permission of infanticide is bad enough, and
cannot but have a bad effect on the moral sensibility of a
nation; but I cannot conceive any thing much more
detestable, or shocking to the feelings, than any direct
regulation of this kind, although sanctioned by the names

of Plato and Aristotle.’ Mr. Malthus in this passage very
properly gives way to his feelings, which are, in my opinion,
a much better test of morality than a calculation of
consequences. At the same time, he would himself make a
law to starve the children of the poor, because their parents
are not able to maintain them. Mr. Malthus’s humanity is of
the intermittent sort. The mention of the Chinese, of Plato
or Aristotle, has a great effect in bringing the fit on: at the
mention of population or the poor-laws it vanishes in an
instant, and ‘he is himself again.’—I hope I shall sometimes
be allowed to appeal to my feelings against Mr. Malthus’s
authority, as he dissents from that of Plato and Aristotle on
the same unphilosophical plea, and to look upon those
arguments as narrow and superficial, which pay no regard
to ‘the moral sensibility of a nation’; the more so as the
system of morality prevailing at present is built upon the
natural affections and common feelings and habitual
prejudices of mankind, not, as Mr. Malthus pretends, on
pure reason, or a dry calculation of consequences. Our
author’s plan is addressed neither to the head, nor heart. It
retains the common sympathies of our nature only to shock
and insult them, and engrafts the vices of a bad heart on a
perverted understanding.
Mr. Malthus defies Mr. Godwin to point out a method,
by which it is possible ‘to limit the number of children to
each prolific marriage.’ According to his theory, there
seems no way but by having a constable in the room, and
converting bed-chambers into a kind of lock-up houses.—
Speaking of the possibility of delaying the gratification of
the passion between the sexes, he says,
‘If the whole effect were to depend merely on a sense of
duty, considering the powerful antagonist that is to be
contended with, in the present case, I confess that I should
absolutely despair. At the same time, I am strongly of
opinion that a sense of duty, superadded to a sense of

interest, would by no means be without its effect. There are
many noble and disinterested spirits, who, though aware of
the inconveniences which they may bring upon themselves
by the indulgence of an early and virtuous passion, feel a
kind of repugnance to listen to the dictates of mere worldly
prudence, and a pride in rejecting these low
considerations. There is a kind of romantic gallantry in
sacrificing all for love, naturally fascinating to a young
mind; and, to say the truth, if all is to be sacrificed, I do not
know, in what better cause it can be done. But if a strong
sense of duty could, in these instances, be added to
prudential suggestions, the whole question might wear a
different colour. In delaying the gratification of passion,
from a sense of duty, the most disinterested spirit, the most
delicate honour, might be satisfied. The romantic pride
might take a different direction, and the dictates of worldly
prudence might be followed with the cheerful
consciousness of making a virtuous sacrifice.’
I am happy to learn that Mr. Malthus has been able to
reconcile the sense of duty and interest with the
gratification of his favourite passion. By preaching the
virtue of celibacy with such success to others, he found it
no longer necessary to practise it himself. He is not the first
philosopher who extracted the flames of love out of ice. We
read of such a one in Hudibras. I should be sorry to
scandalize the modest reader; but really whenever I think
of our author’s escape from the consequences of his own
doctrine in a wife, it puts me in mind of St. Francis’s
triumph over his desires,

‘Which after in enjoyment quenching,
He hung a garland on his engine.’

This St. Francis was as great an adept as our author in the
cold-sweat of the passions.
There is no end of Mr. Malthus’s paradoxes. I come now
to his attempts to prove that in proportion as you raise the
wages of the poor, you take away their livelihood.
‘Suppose, that by a subscription of the rich, the
eighteen-pence, or two shillings, which men earn now, were
made up five shillings, it might be imagined, perhaps, that
they would then be able to live comfortably, and have a
piece of meat every day for their dinner. But this would be
a very false conclusion. The transfer of three additional
shillings a day to each labourer would not increase the
quantity of meat in the country. There is not at present
enough for all to have a moderate share. What would then
be the consequence? The competition among the buyers in
the market of meat, would rapidly raise the price from
eight pence or nine pence, to two or three shillings in the
pound, and the commodity would not be divided among
many more than it is at present. When an article is scarce,
and cannot be distributed to all, he that can shew the most
valid patent, that is, he that offers the most money,
becomes the possessor. When subsistence is scarce in
proportion to the number of people, it is of little
consequence, whether the lowest members of the society
possess two shillings or five. They must, at all events, be
reduced to live upon the hardest fare, and in the smallest
quantity.’
Again, some pages after he says, ‘The question is, how
far wealth has a tendency to better the condition of the
labouring poor. It is a self-evident proposition that any
general advance in the price of labour, the stock of
provisions remaining the same, can only be a nominal

advance, as it must shortly be followed by a proportional
rise in provisions. The increase in the price of labour which
we have supposed, would have no permanent effect
therefore in giving to the labouring poor a greater
command over the necessaries of life.’
On these two passages which explain the drift of our
author’s reasonings pretty clearly, I shall remark, first, that
wealth is nothing but the power of securing to yourself the
fruits of the earth, or commanding the labour of others. The
more equal distribution of wealth, or the throwing a
greater quantity of money (bona fide) into the hands of the
poor must therefore enable them to procure either a
greater share of provisions or of the labour of others, or
both. This I hold to be an axiom, as far as I can comprehend
the subject. But Mr. Malthus says that if the wages of the
poor were raised to double or treble what they are at
present, this in the first place would not increase the
quantity of meat in the market, nor the share which the
labourer would have of it, because any advance in the price
of labour must be followed by a proportional rise in
provisions. This word is equivocal. To make out the
argument, the rise ought to be not only proportional but
equal to the rise of wages, which it evidently would not be.
But Mr. Malthus is willing to exclude the possibility of
bettering the condition of the poor, even in theory, by an
equivoque, or any thing else. But to put an end to this
miserable quackery, I would ask, whether if the rich were
to divide their incomes with the poor, the latter would be
any the richer for it. To say in this case, that the good
things of the world would not be shared more equally
among them, is flat nonsense. But any approach to a more
equal division of wealth must lessen the difference between
the rich and the poor proportionally. It is true that the
lowest members of the community will still live upon the
hardest fare, and in the smallest quantity: but their fare

will be less hard and in larger quantities than it used to be,
in proportion to the advance in the price of labour.
‘It may at first appear strange, but I believe it is true,
that I cannot by means of money, raise the condition of a
poor man, and enable him to live much better than he did
before, without proportionably depressing others in the
same class. If I retrench the quantity of food consumed in
my house, and give him what I have cut off, I then benefit
him without depressing any but myself and family, who
perhaps may be well able to bear it. If I turn up a piece of
uncultivated land, and give him the produce, I then benefit
both him and all the members of society, because what he
before consumed is thrown into the common stock, and,
probably, some of the new produce with it. But if I only give
him money, supposing the produce of the country to remain
the same, I give him a title to a larger share of that produce
than formerly, which share he cannot receive without
diminishing the shares of others. It is evident, that this
effect in individual instances must be so small as to be
totally imperceptible; but still it must exist, as many other
effects do, which, like some of the insects that people the
air, elude our grosser perceptions.’
It will be sufficient to ask in answer to this passage,
whether when I give away my money to another, I do not
necessarily retrench the quantity of food or other things
consumed in my own house, and give him what I have cut
off. I give him a title to a larger share of the common
produce by diminishing my own share. It does not matter to
the community whether he or I spend the money: the only
difference that it makes is between ourselves.—Mr. Malthus
seems to have a notion that the rich are never the worse for
their charities.
‘Supposing the quantity of food in any country, to
remain the same for many years together, it is evident, that
this food must be divided according to the value of each

man’s patent, or the sum of money which he can afford to
spend in this commodity so universally in request. It is a
demonstrative truth, therefore, that the patents of one set
of men could not be increased in value, without diminishing
the value of the patents of some other set of men.’
At any rate, then, the poor would be enabled to contend
with the rich. The increased value of the patents of the
poor would necessarily diminish the value of the patents of
the rich. In order to out-bid them, they must make some
other sacrifices, which they will not always be willing to do.
Food to the rich is in a great measure an article of luxury:
to the poor it is a necessary; and the one, about which they
are chiefly concerned. Many a petit-maître, and ape of
fashion goes without his dinner to pay for his coat, or go to
the play, ‘where he picks clean teeth,’ &c.
‘No person, I believe, will venture to doubt, that, if we
were to give three additional shillings a day to every
labouring man in the kingdom, as I before supposed, in
order that he might have meat for his dinner, the price of
meat would rise in the most rapid and unexampled
manner.’
Mr. Malthus here creeps on. He first spoke of a number
of individuals as having a certain sum given them. He now
includes every labouring man in the kingdom. Because if
we were to give five shillings a day to five hundred
thousand men, the remaining five hundred thousand might
be the worse for it, therefore he would have us suppose
that the same or greater mischiefs would follow from giving
the same sum to the whole number, or in fact from doing
away that very inequality, which was the only source of the
mischief. To suppose that we can allow five shillings a-day
to five hundred, or ten hundred thousand people without
retrenching from our own superfluities, or that we can
distribute our own patents among others without
diminishing our own number, is one of those perversities

which I shall not attempt to answer. If the labourer with his
three shillings extra is only able to purchase an ounce of
meat, this will be an advantage to him. Let the rise be what
it will, the rich man will evidently be less able to out-bid
him than he is at present, and the rise can only be in
proportion to his capacity to out-bid him. Besides, it is not
to be supposed that his additional gains would all be laid
out in meat, but in articles of trade, &c. which would be
rendered cheaper by the neglect of the rich, or in
proportion to the run upon provisions. To assert generally
that increasing the wages of the poor does not give them a
greater command over the necessaries of life, is as much as
to say that if they were forced to work for nothing, and
could get nothing to eat, this would lower the markets, and
they would be much better off than they were before. It
would be looked upon as an insult, rather than a
consolation, to tell them that they ought to be contented
with the cheapness of provisions, and to consider that
allowing them any thing for their labour, would only raise
the price of meat by enabling them to buy some of it to
satisfy their hunger.
How things being cheap or dear, or how there being
much or little to spare, proves that that much, or little will
not be divided according to the ability of different people to
pay for it, is beyond my comprehension. It is ridiculous. It is
saying that the money of a poor man will not pass, even
when he has it. If the poor in consequence of having more
money, or being richer could not draw to themselves a
greater portion of food, there could be no room for
competition, nor for an increase in the price or the demand.
‘The poor who were assisted by their parishes had no
reason whatever to complain of the high price of grain;
because it was the excessiveness of this price, and this
alone, which, by enforcing such a saving, left a greater
quantity of corn, for the consumption of the lowest classes,

which corn, the parish allowances enabled them to
command.’ [Yet Mr. Malthus has just tried to persuade us,
that the increased price of provisions, occasioned by the
competition of the poor, does not enforce any retrenchment
of the superfluities of the higher classes, or leave a greater
quantity of corn, for the consumption of the lower classes.]
‘The greatest sufferers in the scarcity were undoubtedly
the classes immediately above the poor; and these were in
the most marked manner depressed by the excessive
bounties given to those below them.’ [It is better that these
classes should be depressed than those below them,
because they can bear it better. Is it an argument that
because the pressure of a scarcity does not fall directly
upon those who can bear it best, viz. the very rich, that it
should therefore fall upon those, who can bear it least, viz.
on the very poor? Unless Mr. Malthus can contrive to starve
some one, he thinks he does nothing.] ‘This distribution by
giving to the poorer classes a command of food, so much
greater than their degree of skill and industry entitled them
to, in the actual circumstances of the country, diminished,
exactly in the same proportion, that command over the
necessaries of life, which the classes above them, by their
superior skill and industry, would naturally possess.’ [Is a
man then to starve on account of his want of skill? To tack
industry to skill as if the lowest classes did not work the
hardest is impudence indeed.] ‘And it may be a question,
whether the degree of assistance which the poor received,
and which prevented them from resorting to the use of
those substitutes, which, in every other country, on such
occasions, the great law of necessity teaches, was not more
than overbalanced by the severity of the pressure on so
large a body of people from the extreme high prices, and
the permanent evil which must result from forcing so many
persons on the parish, who before thought themselves
almost out of the reach of want.’

It is a contradiction to say, that the poor were forced on
the parish by the assistance they received from it. If they
were to be denied this assistance from a tender regard for
their morals and independence, it is a pity that the same
disinterested motives, joined to the ‘severe pressure’ of the
high prices on the classes above the poor, did not induce
some of them to condescend to the use of those cheap and
wholesome substitutes recommended by Mr. Malthus, by
which means they would have saved their own pockets, and
not have ‘forced so many persons on the parish.’
‘If we were to double the fortunes of all those who
possess above a hundred a year, the effect on the price of
grain would be slow and inconsiderable; but if we were to
double the price of labour throughout the kingdom, the
effect, in raising the price of grain, would be rapid and
great.’
I do not see the harm of this rise. It would be in
consequence of, and would denote the number of bellies
that were filled that had not been filled before. Mr. Malthus
in this passage seems to prefer a little evil to a great good.
‘The parish rates and the prodigious sum expended in
voluntary charity, must have had a most powerful effect in
raising the price of the necessaries of life, if any reliance
can be placed on the clearest general principles, confirmed
as much as possible by appearances. A man with a family,
has received, to my knowledge, fourteen shillings a week
from the parish.’ [Shocking to be sure.] ‘His common
earnings were ten shillings a week, and his weekly
revenue, therefore, twenty-four. Before the scarcity, he had
been in the habit of purchasing a bushel of flour a week
with eight shillings perhaps, and consequently had two
shillings out of his ten, to spare for other necessaries.
During the scarcity, he was enabled to purchase the same
quantity at nearly three times the price. He paid twenty-
two shillings for his bushel of flour, and had, as before, two

shillings remaining for other wants.’ [Good: but does Mr.
Malthus deny that the scarcity would of itself have raised
the price of wheat? And in that case if the labourer had had
no addition to his ‘weekly revenue,’ instead of having the
large sum of two shillings at the end of the week to lay out
in other necessaries, he would have had nothing. Perhaps
Mr. Malthus is ready to prove, that half a bushel of corn
will go farther with a poor family in a time of scarcity than
a whole one, because they would husband it more
carefully.] ‘Such instances could not possibly have been
universal, without raising the price of wheat much higher
than it really was during any part of the dearth. But similar
instances were by no means infrequent, and the system
itself, of measuring the relief given by the price of grain,
was general.’
I cannot conceive of any better rule. But the gentleman
is alarmed at the voluntary contributions extorted from the
rich. After all, I do not see how the rich would suffer by
their great charity, if, as our author says, the poor got
nothing by it. I would ask, were the rich ever in danger of
starving in the late scarcity, and were not the poor in
danger of it, and would they not have starved, but for the
assistance given to them? Is it better that the poor should
starve than that the rich should be at the expence of
relieving them? Or if the pressure in scarce times falls on
the middle classes, have they to complain, that they, in
whom ‘life and death may always be said to contend for
victory,’ are still just kept alive, or that the sleek and
pampered continue to fatten on the distresses of others?
The false feeling which runs through all Mr. Malthus’s
reasonings on this subject is, that the upper classes cannot
be expected to retrench any of their superfluities, to lie at
the mercy of the seasons, or to contribute any thing to the
general necessity, but that the whole burthen of a scarcity
ought to fall on those whom Mr. Malthus calls ‘the least

fortunate members of the community,’ on those who are
most used to distress, and in whom the transition is easy
and natural from poverty to famine! ‘They lay heavy
burthens on the poor and needy, which they will not touch
with one of their fingers.’ Would it not be worth our
author’s while to comment on this text, and shew how little
it has been understood?—I remember to have heard of but
one instance of a real, effectual, and judicious
determination in the rich to retrench idle and superfluous
waste and expence, some years ago at a time when the
poor were in want of bread. It originated in a great and
noble family, where seventy or eighty servants were kept,
and where twenty or thirty guests of the first distinction
‘fared sumptuously every day.’ These humane and
enlightened persons, struck with the difference between
their own good fortune, and the necessities of others, came
to a resolution that the pieces of bread which they left at
dinner should neither be thrown nor given away, but that
the bread-baskets should be divided into little
compartments with each person’s name affixed to them,
where he could conveniently put the piece of bread which
he left, and have it saved till the next day. This humane
example was much talked of in the neighbourhood, and
soon after followed by several of the gentry, who got their
bread-baskets divided into little compartments with the
different names affixed, and eat the pieces of bread which
they left one day, the day after—so that the poor were thus
placed completely out of the reach of want!
Mr. Malthus next talks about the embarrassments of
commerce, returning cheapness, &c. Now I do not see,
according to his doctrine, what cheapness has to do with
the question. He says, every thing depends on the quantity
of provisions in the country, and that this being given, all
the rest follows as a matter of course. What then does it
signify whether you call a piece of paper one pound or two

if you can get a proportionable quantity of food for your
money?
‘If instead of giving the temporary assistance of parish
allowances, which might be withdrawn on the first fall of
price, we had raised universally the wages of labour, it is
evident, that the obstacles to a diminution of the
circulation, and to returning cheapness, would have been
still further increased; and the high price of labour would
have become permanent, without any advantage whatever
to the labourer,’—or disadvantage to the proprietor.
‘There is no one that more ardently desires to see a
real advance in the price of labour than myself; but the
attempt to effect this object by forcibly raising the nominal
price, which was practised to a certain degree, and
recommended almost universally during the late scarcities,
every thinking man must reprobate as puerile and
ineffectual.’
‘The price of labour, when left to find its natural level,
is a most important political barometer, expressing the
relation between the supply of provisions, and the demand
for them; between the quantity to be consumed, and the
number of consumers; and taken on the average,
independently of accidental circumstances, it further
expresses, clearly, the wants of the society respecting
population; that is, whatever may be the number of
children to a marriage necessary to maintain exactly the
present population, the price of labour will be just
sufficient to support this number, or be above it, or below
it, according to the state of the real funds for the
maintainance of labour, whether stationary, progressive, or
retrograde. Instead, however, of considering it in this light,
we consider it as something which we may raise or depress
at pleasure, something which depends principally upon his
majesty’s justices of the peace. When an advance in the
price of provisions already expresses that the demand is

too great for the supply, in order to put the labourer in the
same condition as before, we raise the price of labour, that
is, we increase the demand, and are then much surprised
that the price of provisions continues rising. In this, we act
much in the same manner, as if, when the quicksilver in the
common weather-glass stood at stormy, we were to raise it
by some forcible pressure to settled fair, and then be
greatly astonished that it continued raining.’
This is certainly a most excellent illustration. As to the
argument itself, it is all false and hollow. With respect to
the rise in the price of provisions consequent on the rise of
wages, I am not I confess at all concerned about it, so that
the labourer is still enabled to purchase the same
necessary quantity as before. All that is wanted is that the
one should keep pace with the other. What the natural level
of the price of labour is, otherwise than as it is regulated by
the positive institutions of society, or as I have before
stated, by the power of one set of men, and the wants of
another is—like many other things in this book of Mr.
Malthus’s—what I do not understand. If we are to believe
him, the whole is a trick. There is a pretence of sacrificing
something for the relief of the poor in hard times, and then
the next thing is to render that relief ineffectual, by out-
bidding them, by lowering the value of money, by creating
artificial wealth, and other methods. If then the rich are so
entirely masters of the price of labour that they can render
it real or nominal as they please, and take good care never
to lose by it in the end, I should like to know how this most
important political barometer has any relation to real
plenty or want: how it expresses any thing more than the
will of the rich and great; or the miserable pittance they
are willing to allow out of the support of their own
extravagant and ostentatious establishments to the
maintainance of the mass of the people. It does indeed
express the relation between the supply of provisions, and

the demand for them, &c. supposing that a certain number
of people are to consume four or five times as much (either
in quantity or quality) as the others: and that this
proportion is unalterable and one of the laws of nature. It
further expresses the wants of the society respecting
population, while this division continues, or that degree of
poverty beyond which it is impossible for people to subsist
at all. The object in a scarcity is not however to stop the
ordinary process of population, but to alleviate the
distresses of those already in existence, by a more equal
distribution of the real funds for the maintainance of
labour. By these funds Mr. Malthus means any arbitrary
division of the produce of the ground, which the rich find it
convenient to make, and which the poor are forced to take
up with as better than nothing. But the real funds for the
maintenance of labour are the produce of labour. According
to Mr. Malthus, they are not the produce itself, but what
happens to be left of it, as the husks only and not the corn
are given to the swine.
‘The number of servants out of place, and of
manufacturers wanting employment during the late
scarcities, were melancholy proofs of the truth of these
reasonings. If a general rise in the wages of labour had
taken place proportioned to the price of provisions, none
but farmers and a few gentlemen could have afforded to
employ the same number of workmen as before. Additional
crowds of servants and manufacturers would have been
turned off; and those who were thus thrown out of
employment, would, of course, have no other refuge than
the parish. In the natural order of things, a scarcity must
tend to lower, instead of to raise, the price of labour.’
This natural order has been already explained to mean
a very artificial order. Our ingenious author is a great
admirer of moral analogies. He sticks to the old proverb,
those that have little shall have less. ‘The most laborious