第51章 Malthus(9)

Diseases are indications that we have broken a law of nature.The plague of London was properly interpreted by our ancestors as a hint to improve the sanitary conditions of the town.Similarly,we have to consider the consequences of obeying our instincts.The desire of food and necessaries is the most powerful of these instincts,and next to it the passion between the sexes.They are both good,for they are both natural;but they have to be properly correlated.To 'virtuous love'in particular we owe the 'sunny spots'in our lives,where the imagination most loves to bask.Desire of necessaries gives us the stimulus of the comfortable fireside;and love adds the wife and children,without whom the fireside would lose half its charm.Now,as a rule,the sexual passion is apt to be in excess.The final cause of this excess is itself obvious.We cannot but conceive that it is an object of 'the Creator that the earth should be replenished.'39To secure that object,it is necessary that 'there should be a tendency in the population to increase faster than food.'If the two instincts were differently balanced,men would be content though the population of a fertile region were limited to the most trifling numbers.Hence the instinct has mercifully been made so powerful as to stimulate population,and thus indirectly and eventually to produce a population at once larger and more comfortable.

On the one hand,'it is of the very utmost importance to the happiness of mankind that they should not increase too fast'40but,on the other hand,if the fission were weakened,the motives which make a man industrious and capable of progress would be diminished also.It would,of course,be simpler to omit the 'teleology';to say that sanitary regulations are made necessary by the plague,not that the plague is divinely appointed to encourage sanitary regulations.Malthus is at the point of view of Paley which becomes Darwinism when inverted;but the conclusion is much the same.

He reaches elsewhere,in fact,a more precise view of the value of the 'moral restraint.'In a chapter devoted for once to an ideal state of things,41he shows how a race thoroughly imbued with that doctrine would reconcile the demands of the two instincts.Population would in that case increase,but,instead of beginning by an increase,it would begin by providing the means of supporting.No man would become a father until he had seen his way to provide for a family.The instinct which leads to increasing the population would thus be intrinsically as powerful as it now is;but when regulated by prudence it would impel mankind to begin at the right end.

Food would be ready before mouths to eat it.

IV.SOCIAL REMEDIES

This final solution appears in Malthus's proposed remedies for the evils of the time.Malthus 42declares that 'an increase of population when it follows in its natural order is both a great positive good in itself,and absolutely necessary'to an increase of wealth.This natural order falls in,as he observes,with the view to which Mirabeau had been converted,that 'revenue was the source of population,'and not population of revenue.43Malthus holds specifically that,'in the course of some centuries,'the population of England might be doubled or trebled,and yet every man be 'much better fed and clothed than he is at present.'44He parts company with Paley,who had considered the ideal state to be 'that of a laborious frugal people ministering to the demands of an opulent luxurious nation.'45That,says Malthus,is 'not an inviting prospect.'Nothing but a conviction of absolute necessity could reconcile us to the 'thought of ten millions of people condemned to incessant toil,and to the privation of everything but absolute necessaries,in order to minister to the excessive luxuries of the other million.'But he denies that any such necessity exists.He wishes precisely to see luxury spread among the poorer classes.A desire for such luxury is the best of all checks to population,and one of the best means of raising the standard.It would,in fact,contribute to his 'moral restraint.'So,too,he heartily condemns the hypocrisy of the rich,who professed a benevolent desire to better the poor,and yet complained of high wages.46If,he says elsewhere,47a country can 'only be rich by running a successful race for low wages,I should be disposed to say,Perish such riches!'No one,in fact,could see more distinctly than Malthus the demoralising influence of poverty,and the surpassing importance of raising the people from the terrible gulf of pauperism.