The Essay on Population
In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus published a superbly written polemic against the utopian visions of Condorcet and Godwin. He disliked their sentimental do-goodism and belief in the perfectibility of man.
Any improvement in the conditions of the poor, he argued in his Essay on Population, would be canceled out by the resulting population growth. An increase in the supply of labor would drive wages down below subsistence level.This view of future gloom and doom proved far less popular than Adam Smith's cheery confidence in the growing wealth of nations. Indeed, the intensity of critical responses to the Essay prompted later revisions with a more conciliatory, even hopeful tone.8
The long-lasting debate struck many dissonant chords, especially among members of the Anglican establishment. Religious doctrine offered a positive view of population growth: the Almighty would never bring more beings into the world than he prepares nourishment for.9 The Malthusian emphasis on scarcity, diminishing returns, and the inevitable downward pressure of population growth on wages seemed heretical. In 1803, Malthus offered an amendment to his argument that would ultimately diminish—if not entirely resolve—conflict between the religious doctrine and the new discipline of political economy.
Rather than standing by and watching population growth overwhelm economic progress, men could practice moral restraint by delaying mar- riage.10 No man should marry until he had gained sufficient means to support his family. The resulting decline in fertility would decrease the supply of labor and allow wages to gradually rise. Of even greater relevance to religious critics, the potential economic salvation offered by moral restraint evoked both the beneficence of God and the indispensable role of Christian virtue.11 But wasn't moral restraint exactly what Godwin and Condorcet had earlier described as an aspect of the perfectibility of man?
Malthus took pains to distinguish his argument from theirs.
The moral restraint he advocated relied less on benevolence than on self-interest.12 By delaying marriage, men would make themselves and their children better off—but only if the institutions of private property and marriage remained firmly in place, and public relief for the poor was eliminated. Continued guarantees of a subsistence income would undermine economic welfare and moral virtue by tempting men to breed too much too soon.In retrospect, this argument hardly seems persuasive. A delay in male marriage has little effect on fertility unless it is accompanied by a later age at marriage for women. Most British families, like most families in Northwestern Europe, already delayed marriage to a relatively late age.13 But Malthus vividly emphasized the influence of the passions:
The cravings of hunger, the love of liquor, the desire of possessing a beautiful woman will urge men to actions, of the fatal consequences of which, to the general interests of society, they are perfectly well convinced, even at the very time they commit them. Remove their bodily cravings, and they would not hesitate a moment in determining against such actions.14
From this point on in the text, the first two forms of sensuality (desire for food and drink) play a distinctly subsidiary role to lust. Malthus never invoked the corrupting influence of passions in the form of violence, war, or fraud. Irrationality was concentrated, specifically, in the passion between the sexes—a powerful, God-given, and natural force.
In the new Malthusian cosmology, the desire for money required no restraints beyond the rule of law. Economic self-interest acted through cool considered calculation. Sexual self-interest, on the other hand, was hot and reckless, requiring social regulation. A man who married despite considerable risk of being unable to support the resulting offspring was a selfish fool. A man who declined to offer assistance to the poor, by contrast, was both virtuous and enlightened.
More than thirty years elapsed between Malthus's condemnation of the English Poor Laws and their legislative overhaul. But he influenced the debate from the very outset, advocating not merely for reform but for elimination of public assistance to the poor. His views were colored by a distinct sympathy for fathers, who, he believed, would never abandon their children were they not confident the public would assume responsibility for them.15 He had less sympathy for dependents: ‘‘It may appear to be hard that a mother and her children, who had been guilty of no particular crime themselves, should suffer for the ill-conduct of the father; but this is one of the invariable laws of nature.''16 He went on to explain that it was evidently necessary for the sins of fathers to be visited upon their children.17
Malthus criticized the parish practice of pressuring men who had begotten children out of wedlock to marry, on two grounds. First, they would be likely to beget even more children within marriage, to unfortunate effect. Second, forced engagements profaned the true meaning of marriage. The best way to hold men accountable was not to impose rules upon them, but to deny their children any charity or assistance. Mothers who failed to marry before becoming pregnant were, in his view, heedless and immoral.18
Malthus conceded one reasonable objection to this argument that the poor were responsible for their own plight: poverty itself led to moral degradation. Reversing the traditional Catholic notion that poverty was ennobling, he described the miserable and disgusting habits of the poor. ‘‘When indigence does not produce overt acts of vice,” he wrote, ‘‘it palsies every virtue.”19 But this was no reason, he added, to give up the good fight. The responsible classes should at least try to encourage moral restraint among the poor.