CHAPTER XI.

THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY OF POPULATION CONSIDERED AND REFUTED.

THE laws of Political Economy, for the most part, it has been remarked, are inferences from the general fact, that individuals compete with each other in the pursuit of wealth. Rents, profits, wages, prices, are determined by competition; and as we are able to foresee what the effects of competition will be, we can show how these things will vary under given circumstances. Thus, profits tend to an equality in all employments, because capitalists compete with each other, and will withdraw their capital from a business which is less profitable, to invest it in one which is more so; this influx of capital into the more lucrative employment soon reduces the rate of profit in it to a level with the profits in other employments. The price of an article, of which there is a given quantity in the market, is determined by the demand for it, that is, by the competition of the buyers. And this demand, again, regulates the future supply of that article; for as the competition of the buyers becomes warm, the price is enhanced, the profits of those who produce the article are increased, more capital is attracted into the employment, the supply is enlarged, and the price falls again.

These principles are sufficiently obvious, and if there were not exceptional cases, if their application was not modified and restricted by a crowd of circumstances, political economy might be called a demonstrative, or even an intuitive, science. Its maxims might all be taken for granted, and men would act upon them without giving themselves the trouble of enunciating them in an abstract form. But there are numerous exceptions and modifying circumstances, which need to be carefully considered; and in this chapter I propose to examine the most important of them.

There are two things the supply of which is not regulated by the demand; and they are two very important things,

namely, land and population. Our wants and our desires do not, in these two cases, create, or even tend to create, the means of satisfying them; those means are wholly beyond our control. We cannot increase the quantity of surface of the habitable globe; we cannot, at will, either enlarge the population, or put limits to its growth, except by transgressing the moral laws which guard the sanctity of human life. It is conceivable that the well-being of a community may be greatly affected by these two inexorable facts. With all its labor and ingenuity, it cannot materially enlarge the limits of its territory, except by robbing its neighbors; it may reclaim a little land from the waters along the margin of a river, a lake, or an ocean; but it is obvious that its power in this respect is restricted within very narrow limits. And if its population should begin to waste away, or to increase with undue and inconvenient rapidity, the will of a monarch or the wishes of a people would not suffice to arrest either its decline or its growth. Still they are dependent for food upon the products of the land, the amount of which products must finally be limited by the extent of surface of the earth;— I say, must finally be so limited, because improvements in agriculture, the discovery of new means of increasing the product of a given surface of ground, may continually push the limit farther off, and open the way almost for an indefinite increase of the `present population of the globe.

Yet on this possible or conceivable increase of the numbers of mankind, united with the fact that the cultivable surface of the earth is determined by fixed boundaries, which cannot be overleaped, is founded the celebrated theory of Mr. Malthus, and the doctrines which that theory is usually made to support. We are not at liberty to put aside the discussion of this theory, as if it were, what at first sight it appears to be, a mere speculation, which can have no practical importance except in a contingency certainly very remote, and which may never be realized. It is dwelt upon and applied by nearly all the English economists as if it were a truth of great moment, immediate in its bearings, and fruitful in results. The whole subject of political economy is colored with it; it affects the doctrine of rent, profits, and wages, and leads to inferences in respect to each of them, which otherwise would be immediately rejected.

The professed followers of Malthus are somewhat dogmatic in their enunciation of the doctrine, and altogether impatient of any doubt or question as to its correctness. This positiveness arises from a perception of the unquestionable correctness of the data on which the theory is founded, and of the chief features of the theory itself; while the general reluctance to accept it proceeds from involuntary dread of the shocking conclusions that it has been made to support, and from disgust at the consequences of its practical application. The doctrine of Malthus is sometimes understood, in its extended sense, to comprise the whole body of these inferences from it, together with its immediate application as advice to men for the government of their conduct and the regulation of society; and it is when thus understood, that the common sense and natural feelings of mankind shrink from it with that strong aversion which the followers of the theory are apt to stigmatize as "sentimental horror." Taken in the more restricted meaning, which is always used when the theory is controverted or denied, Malthusianism contains only one or two truisms about the law of increase that is common to the human race with the whole animal creation, which have no practical importance whatever, except for the purpose to which they were first applied by Malthus himself, namely, to confute an absurd speculation by Godwin as to the perfectibility of the social state. Upon this ambiguity of meaning depends the whole controversy as to the law of population, and its consequences upon the well-being of society.

The proposition upon which the whole theory rests is this, - that the power of increase of any race of animals, the human species included, is indefinite, or incapable of exhaustion; and if it were exercised to the utmost, without any check from external circumstances or from the animal's power of self-control, the earth would not be large enough, I do not say merely, to afford subsistence, but even to give standing-room, to the beings who would claim a place upon it. The capacity of increase necessarily acts in a geometrical progression; for each pair being capable of procreation, if the race, under certain circumstances, increases within thirty years from ten thousand to twenty thousand, a mere continuance of the same cause and the same circumstances would enlarge the number, within the

next thirty years, to forty thousand; and the third period would carry it to eighty thousand. For example, a given rate of increase, in the ten years from 1790 to 1800, added but 1,200,000 to the white population of this country; but from 1830 to 1840, the same rate of increase added 3,600,000. The population was more than doubled from 1790 to 1820; it was again more than doubled from 1820 to 1850. But the former doubling added less than five millions to our numbers, while the latter doubling added over ten millions; and the next doubling, in 1880, will add twenty millions. This law of possible increase in a geometrical progression belongs to every species, both of the animal and vegetable kingdom, of which we have any knowledge; it is an immediate and logical inference from the self-evident fact, that every pair, whether of the earliest or the latest generation, whether forming part of a very small or a very numerous community, is equally capable of continuing and multiplying its kind. Its prolific power is not at all affected by the greater or smaller number of its fellowcreatures which may be already in being. If population should go on in this manner without check, it is evident that, within a few centuries, the earth might literally be overstocked with human beings; if they should stand shoulder to shoulder, as thickly as the stalks of wheat in a cultivated field at harvesttime, every plain, valley, and hill-top, the surface even of every sea and ocean, might be covered with them; and there would still be a call for room, for the next thirty years would inevitably double even this immense assemblage, which we have supposed to be already like the sands of the sea for multitude.

Observe that this law of increase by geometrical progression holds good, whether the annual rate of increase be fast or slow. In the United States, for instance, the annual rate, exclusive of the effects of immigration, is 2.39 per cent, and, as a consequence, the population is doubled in little over 32 years. In France, the annual rate is but 0.6 (six tenths of one per cent), and the population, therefore, is not doubled in less than 115 years. Still, it will be doubled in that time, and therefore, in 230 years, it will be quadrupled, thus following the law of increase by geometrical progression, if it increase at all. The theory of Malthus may be said to owe its plausibility, in great part, to the fact with which all arithmeticians are very famil

iar, that a number increasing by geometrical progression within a given period rises to a very formidable amount. Thus, McCulloch calculates that the population of the United States, if the present annual rate of increase should continue, in one century from this time will amount to 240 millions; and in two centuries, that is, in A. D. 2050, it will reach the very respectable sum of 3,840 millions, or nearly five times the present population of the globe. The possibility of such a result is certainly appalling, and at first sight, it may appear to justify the alarm expressed by the Malthusians.

Even without taking into view the ultimate check to the increase of the numbers of mankind that will be found in the limited extent of the earth's surface, Mr. Malthus undertakes to show, that the means of subsistence, under the most favorable circumstances, cannot increase so rapidly as the number of mouths calling for food. The race of population against food, he maintains, is like that of Achilles against a tortoise; it is too unequal, whatever may be the advantage at first possessed by the weaker party. Whatever may be the present superfluity of sustenance, or of the means of increasing sustenance, population multiplies so fast, that it must soon overtake and surpass the supply of nourishment. Looking at first only to Great Britain, he says:-"If it be allowed, that, by the best possible policy and great encouragements to agriculture, the average produce of the island could be doubled in the first twenty-five years, it will be allowing probably a greater increase than could with reason be expected. In the next twenty-five years, it is impossible to suppose that the produce could be quadrupled. It would be contrary to all our knowledge of the properties of land. The improvement of the barren parts would be a work of time and labor; and it must be evident to those who have the slightest acquaintance with agricultural subjects, that, in proportion as cultivation extended, the additions that could yearly be made to the former average produce must be gradually and regularly diminishing. 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 favorable to the power of production in the earth than any experience we have had of its qualities will warrant.