THE MALTHUSIAN IDEA.1

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1 I have treated this subject briefly in The Ethics of Marriage (Funk & Wagnalls, New York). This more extended consideration of it is intended to meet the criticisms of Malthusians. I have used such material from the book as best suited my purpose without indicating quotation, and, indeed, without attempting direct quotation at all. This article will appear as a reprint, enlarged by the fuller discussion of some topics from a medical point of view.

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THERE lies before me, as I write, a little pamphlet which bas been sent out by the tens of thousands during the past few years, and which has either directly or indirectly exerted an influence so wide, that it is well-nigh impossible for the American physician in general practice to escape the evidence of it for a single day. For several reasons I refrain from indicating its title; it is literature of the kind which the law of our land forbids

one to publish, or send through the mails. The opening sentence of the pamphlet is this: "The law of population first laid down in this country by the Rev. T. R. Malthus in his great work entitled • The Principle of Population' has long been known to every student, and accepted by every thinker." On the next page we find Malthus's law quoted: "The constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it;" and again, a few lines farther on, he is quoted as saying, "Population when unchecked goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years." On the next page we read: "The power of increase of the human species, according to John Stuart Mill, is indefinite, and actual multiplication would be extraordinarily rapid, if the power were exercised to the utmost. It never is exercised to the utmost, and yet, in the most favorable circumstances known to exist, which are those of a fertile region colonized from an industrious and civilized community, population has continued for several generations, independently of fresh immigration, to double itself in not much more than twenty years. It is a very low estimate of the capacity of increase, if we only assume that in a good sanitary condition of the people, each generation may be double the number of the generation which preceded it."

The author adds on the same page: "We shall take but a harrow view of the law of population if we confine ourselves exclusively to human beings. Man is but the highest in the animal kingdom, not a creature apart from it, and the law of population runs through the animal and the vegetable worlds."1 Then follows a long quotation from Darwin showing the naturally rapid increase of plant life, and then we have the following quotation from John Stuart Mill: "The power of multiplication inherent in all organic life may be regarded as infinite. There is no species of vegetable or animal which, if the earth were entirely abandoned to it and to the things on which it feeds, would not in a small number of years overspread every region of the globe of which the climate was compatible with its existence." And again, "From a consideration of the law of agricultural industry, and an estimate of the rate at which the means of subsistence could be increased in old countries even under the most favorable circumstances, it may be inferred with certainty that these means of subsistence could not possibly be increased so fast as to permit population to increase at its natural rate." The chapter closes with these words: 1 The italics are mine.

"Wherever, then, we

look throughout Nature we find proofs of the truth of the law, that there is a tendency in all animated existence to increase faster than the means of subsistence.' This is the law of which Miss Martineau said that it could be no more upset than a law of arithmetic; this is the law which John Stuart Mill regarded as axiomatic; this is the law which the Lord Chief Justice designated an irrefragable truth.' Controversialists may quarrel as to its consequences, and may differ as to man's duty in regard to them, but no controversy can arise on the law itself, any more than on the sphericity of the earth."

Notwithstanding this formidable array of authorities, I shall take the liberty of controverting their view of the law of population and food supply. There is by no means the consent among sociologists in the acceptance of Malthus's theory which is here indicated; and the proof of it is in many ways lessened by the incoming of new facts. Malthus could not prove permanently his theory, because proof lay hidden away in the undiscovered resources of the material world and in the undeveloped potentiality of the human brain, and how many hundreds, or thousands, of years it will require to complete the proof no one may venture to predict. The facts as to human life since his time clearly militate against his theory, and there is no good ground for believing that they will not continue to do so. In this matter of food and population Malthus, and John Stuart Mill after him, mistook eddies for currents. On the one hand they observed the rapid reproduction of human life where a hardy, virtuous yeomanry emigrated to a new country and lived simply but abundantly on the accumulated capital of virgin soil; and on the other they noticed the poverty, crime, and high death rate in large cities; and, mistaking these eddies in the stream of human life for the stream itself, they evolved their law of over-increase and consequent poverty. In common with nearly all political economists, John Stuart Mill assumes that a simple, virtuous yeomanry living on fertile virgin soil constitutes a normal phase of human existence; but this is not true; it is but a temporary matter, little more than an anomaly, indeed; and Nature, ever jealous for the preservation of "divine discontent" in her highest creation, man, soon crowds him into "moving on "or out. The hardy, virtuous yeomanry tilling a rich virgin soil has less care compared with its creature comforts than almost any other class of men, but is not in an ideal position because the conditions are too primitive and too easy; they have been found to conduce to multiplication of the species beyond the

local supply of food, raiment, and other factors in human weal, and the surplus of population has been obliged to go elsewhere. This phase of over-population and of exhaustion of Nature's resources has taken place in many localities in our own New England; the whole process requiring, in some instances, no more than the time of two or three generations; I was myself born and bred in one of these sections, and have studied the matter closely. These phases of civilization are misleading, and have more or less misled the political economist always.

If Malthus and John Stuart Mill and some other political economists are right in their theory of population and food supply, then this world has for thousands of years had a "tendency" towards bankruptcy, that is, has been gradually growing poorer in the ability to support the human life which it has produced. Is this true? It most certainly is not. Judged by the ability of a day's human labor to purchase staple human food and clothing, this decade has seen the easiest conditions of human life within the range of authentic history, and the world contains, today, more and better food, clothing, and other creature comforts per capita of the human family than ever before. In other words, food has multiplied more rapidly than mouths. It may be claimed that this advantage is not a real, but only an apparent one. That man has simply been possessing himself of Nature's supply, and that while he is actually now in possession of a greater abundance than ever before, he has discounted the resources of those who are to come after him. This is not true. Man's food is derived but partially from Nature's ready-made supply. The most of it comes from his own adaptation of means to ends, and represents that which Nature would never herself prepare for him.

It is absurd and almost puerile to lump man and his food supply with the lower forms of organic life and their food supply. There is really no just comparison between them. Malthus's law, "The constant tendency in all animal life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it," is clearly proved to have no serious bearing upon man, for he, long ago, got beyond where he could safely and comfortably depend upon the food Nature had "prepared" for him; he solved the problem just as Nature intended he should — by "preparing" food for himself. And the farther man gets from Nature's prepared nourishment, the better off he is both as to quantity and quality. John Stuart Mill admitted that improvement in agricultural science might be expected

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