第83章 Economic Heretics(7)

Hazlitt's writing,although showing the passions of a bitter partisan,hits some of Malthus's rather cloudy argumentation.His successor,Ensor,representing the same view,finds an appropriate topic in the wrongs of Ireland.Irish poverty,he holds,is plainly due not to over-population but to under-government,53meaning,we must suppose,misgovernment.But the same cause explains other cases.The 'people are poor and are growing poorer,'54and there is no mystery about it.The expense of a court,the waste of the profits and money in the House of Commons,facts which are in striking contrast to the republican virtues of the United States,are enough to account for everything;and Malthus's whole aim is to 'calumniate the people.'Godwin in 1820takes up the same taunts,Malthus ought,he thinks,to welcome war,famine,pestilence,and the gallows.55He has taught the poor that they have no claim to relief,and the rich that,by indulging in vice,they are conferring a benefit upon the country.The poor-laws admit a right,and he taunts Malthus for proposing to abolish it,and refusing food to a poor man on the ground that he had notice not to come into the world two years before he was born.56Godwin,whose earlier atheism had been superseded by a vague deism,now thinks with Cobbett that the poor were supported by the piety of the medieval clergy,who fed the hungry and clothed the naked from their vast revenues,while dooming themselves to spare living.57He appeals to the authority of the Christian religion,which indeed might be a fair argumentum ad hominem against 'Parson Malthus.'He declares that Nature takes more care of her work than such irreverent authors suppose,and 'does not ask our aid to keep down the excess of population.'58In fact,he doubts whether population increases at all.Malthus's whole theory,he says,rests upon the case of America;and with the help of Mr.Booth and some very unsatisfactory statistics,he tries to prove that the increase shown in the American census has been entirely due to immigration.Malthus safely declined to take any notice of a production which in fact shows that Godwin had lost his early vigour.The sound Utilitarian,Francis Place,took up the challenge,and exploded some of Godwin's statistics,He shows his Radicalism by admitting that Malthus,to whose general benevolence he does justice,had not spoken of the poor as one sprung like himself from the poor would naturally do;and he accepts modes of limiting the population from which Malthus himself had shrunk.For improvement,he looks chiefly to the abolition of restrictive laws,II.SOCIALISMThe arguments of Hazlitt and his allies bring us back to the Socialist position.Although it was represented by no writer of much literary position,Owen was becoming conspicuous,and some of his sympathisers were already laying down principles more familiar to-day.Already,in the days of the Six Acts,the government was alarmed by certain 'Spencean Philanthropists.'According to Place they were a very feeble sect,numbering only about fifty,and perfectly harmless.Their prophet was a poor man called Thomas Spence (1750-1815),59who had started as a schoolmaster,and in 1775read a paper at Newcastle before a 'Philosophical Society.'60He proposed that the land in every village should belong to all the inhabitants --a proposal which Mr.Hyndman regards as a prophecy of more thoroughgoing schemes of Land Nationalisation.

Spence drifted to London,picked up a precarious living,partly by selling books of a revolutionary kind,and died in 1815,leaving,it seems,a few proselytes.A writer of higher literary capacity was Charles Hall,a physician at Tavistock,who in 1805published a book on The Effects of Civilisation.61The effects of civilisation,he holds,are simply pernicious.Landed property originated in violence,and has caused all social evils.A great landlord consumes unproductively as much as would keep eight thousand people.62He gets everything from the labour of the poor;while they are forced to starvation wages by the raising of rents.Trade and manufactures are equally mischievous.India gets nothing but jewellery from Europe,and Europe nothing but muslin from India,while so much less food is produced in either country.63Manufactures generally are a cause and sign of the poverty of nations.64Such sporadic protests against the inequalities of wealth may be taken as parts of that 'ancient tale of wrong'which has in all ages been steaming up from the suffering world,and provoking a smile from epicurean deities.As Owenism advanced,the argument took a more distinct form.Mill 65mentions William Thompson of Cork as a 'very estimable man,'who was the 'principal champion'of the Owenites in their debates with the Benthamites.He published in 1824a book upon the distribution of wealth,66It is wordy,and is apt to remain in the region of 'vague generalities'just at the points where specific statements would be welcome.But besides the merit of obvious sincerity and good feeling,it has the interest of showing very clearly the relation between the opposing schools.Thompson had a common ground with the Utilitarians,though they undoubtedly would consider his logic to be loose and overridden by sentimentalism.In the first place,he heartily admired Bentham:'the most profound and celebrated writer on legislation in this or any other country.'67He accepts the 'greatest happiness principle'as applicable to the social problem.He argues for equality upon Bentham's ground.Take a penny from a poor man to give it to the rich man,and the poor man clearly loses far more happiness than the rich man gains.With Bentham,too,he admits the importance of 'security,'and agrees that it is not always compatible with equality.