The Essay on the Principle of Population and the Poor Laws
The six successive editions of the Essay on the Principle of Population, from 1798 to 1826, illustrate Malthus’s willingness to acknowledge when he was wrong. Malthus wrote the first edition of the Essay, which was published anonymously, mainly in order to attack the utopian ideas of Godwin and Condorcet.
Population, when unchecked, has a tendency to increase at a higher rate than subsistence to support it: “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio” (Malthus 1798 [1970]: 71). This implies the operating of checks, either preventive, reducing the birth rate, or positive - increasing the death rate (because of diseases, plague, famine and war) and entailing “misery and vice”. Accordingly, the poor laws may be said “in some measure to create the poor which they maintain” (1798: 97): by contributing to increase the price of subsistence - an increased demand facing a constant supply - they “impoverish that class of population whose only possession is labour” (1798: 98); and “though they may have alleviated a little the intensity of individual misfortune... have spread the evil over a larger surface” (1798: 94). A chapter is also devoted to set out the “probable error of Dr Adam Smith in representing every increase of the revenue or stock of a society as an increase in the funds for the maintenance of labour” and to stress that “an increase of wealth can have no tendency to better the condition of the labouring poor” (1798: 183). According to Keynes, Malthus’s first Essay is “a work of youthful genius.... He believed that he had found the clue to human misery” (1933 [1972]: 86).Partly in order to collect further information concerning the principle of population, Malthus undertook two study tours: one of Norway, Sweden and Finland in 1799, and one of France and Switzerland in 1802.
In August 1800, he published, again anonymously, a pamphlet, An Investigation of the Cause of the Present High Price of Provisions, in order to explain why the price of provisions had risen much more than could be explained by the actual deficiency in the harvest. He relates this fact to the poor laws and not to the increased quantity of money: “I should be inclined to consider it rather as the effect than the cause of the high price of provisions. This fullness of circulating medium, however, will be one of the obstacles in the way to returning cheapness” (Malthus 1800 [1970]: 25). According to Keynes “in this Pamphlet, Malthus’s conception of ‘effective demand’ is brilliantly illustrated” (1933 [1972]: 88). It is known that Malthus was so struck by this idea while riding from Hastings to London that he worked solidly “sitting up till two o’clock to finish [this pamphlet] that it might come out before the meeting of parliament” (ibid.).In the Preface to the second edition of the Essay on Population published in 1803, Malthus writes that “it may be considered as a new book” (Malthus 1803 [1989]: I, 2). The introduction of the “moral restraint”, consisting of postponing marriage until people could support a family, is presented as an important change since it consists of a check to population “which does not come under the head of either vice or misery” (1803 [1989]: I, 3). Malthus emphasizes also his endeavour “to soften some of the harshest conclusions of the first Essay” (1803 [1989]: I, 3): particularly, he proposes a plan for a “gradual” abolition of the poor laws, underlining in a letter to Whitbread published in 1807 that this abolition should not be undertaken carelessly “till the poor themselves could be made to understand that they had purchased their right to a provision by law, by too great and extensive a sacrifice of their liberty and happiness” (1807b [1970]: 34); hence the necessity of education.
In the third edition published in 1806, he emphasizes that “both humanity and true policy imperiously require that we should give every assistance to the poor” (1806 [1989]: I, 357) in case of bad harvest.
In the fourth edition published in 1807, Malthus admits that, under the present circumstances, the poor laws should not be said to encourage early marriages and population and adds in a note: “should this be true, many of the objections which have been urged in the Essay against the poor laws will of course be removed” (1807a [1989]: II, 226). Malthus was not reluctant to admit his errors: Donald Winch deplores that this acknowledgment has not been regarded as “an example of honesty in the face of the facts that ran contrary to one of his predictions” (1987: 97). In his Principles, Ricardo wrote: “Of Mr. Malthus’s Essay on Population, I am happy in the opportunity here afforded me of expressing my admiration. The assaults of the opponents of this great work have only served to prove its strength” (Ricardo 1951-73, I: 398).