An Essay on the Principle of Population

Contents

1. Preface 4 min 7

   The anonymous author explains that the Essay grew out of a conversation with a friend about Godwin’s essay on avarice and profusion. Written in haste, it offers few facts but claims to identify the means by which population is kept to the level of subsistence, the chief obstacle to the improvement of society. He disclaims prejudice, admits the melancholy hue of his picture, and promises to retract if the difficulty is removed.

2. I Question Stated 15 min 8

   Malthus sets the question raised by the French Revolution: will humanity advance towards unlimited improvement, or oscillate forever between happiness and misery? He regrets that defenders of the existing order and speculative philosophers refuse to engage each other’s arguments, and says that Godwin and Condorcet have never answered the objection from population. Taking two postulata, that food is necessary and that the passion between the sexes will continue, he states his thesis: population, unchecked, grows geometrically and subsistence only arithmetically, so misery and vice must keep them equal, which is decisive against any society of equality.

3. II The Different Ratios in Which Population and Food Increase 18 min 6

   Using the American doubling of population every twenty-five years as the measure of unchecked growth, and allowing Britain’s produce to rise each period by its present amount, Malthus shows numbers outrunning food: 112 million people against food for 35 million within a century. He describes how the check works: population grows, wages fall and prices rise, marriage is discouraged, cultivation extends, and the cycle repeats. Histories of the higher classes hide this oscillation, as does the gap between nominal and real wages. He ends with three propositions to be tested against every state of society.

4. III The Savage or Hunter State 13 min 4

   Hunting peoples are thin on the ground because food is scarce; when they settle near Europeans their families grow. Their women live as drudges, and war and hardship keep numbers down, so misery is the check. Pastoral peoples multiply faster, being mobile and well fed, and when their pastures fail they send out swarms of warriors. Malthus traces the barbarian invasions of Rome and the conquests of Attila and Genghis Khan to this single cause: population outrunning the means of subsistence, checked by war and famine.

5. IV State of Civilized Nations 15 min 4

   Europe is more populous than in Caesar’s time because it produces more food, which is the best criterion of population. Malthus disputes Hume’s use of marriage customs as a measure of numbers and puzzles over Smith’s stationary China. Modern Europe grows slowly, and he names the two checks: the preventive check of foresight and the positive check of distress. Taking England as his example, he shows the preventive check acting on every rank, from the gentleman of small income through tradesmen and labourers to domestic servants.

6. V The Positive Check to Population in England 26 min 6

   The positive check falls mainly on poor children, stunted and dying from want. Malthus argues that England’s poor laws, costing nearly three million a year, cannot help, since money cannot create food and only raises prices; by encouraging marriage they create the poor they maintain and weaken independence. Dependent poverty should be held disgraceful. He condemns the settlement laws as tyranny and proposes abolishing parish relief, encouraging agriculture, and keeping hard county workhouses for extreme cases. All checks, he concludes, resolve into misery and vice.

7. VI New Colonies 9 min 4

   New colonies with plenty of cheap land grow fast even under bad government, as the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and French settlements show. The English North American colonies, adding liberty, divided property and light taxes, doubled every twenty-five years, and the back settlements every fifteen. Population increases as misery and vice are removed. Old states recover quickly from war, plague, famine and earthquakes, which proves that want of room and food, not vice, is the main check in settled countries.

8. VII A Probable Cause of Epidemics 24 min 8

   Using Süssmilch’s Prussian tables, Malthus argues that sickly seasons follow periods when population outgrew food and housing, so a few years’ ratio of births to burials is a poor guide to growth. The only true criterion is the increase of subsistence, though habits of living vary, as in frugal China. He rejects Pitt’s child allowance, argues that population should be encouraged only by promoting cultivation, and ends with famine as nature’s last resort, holding his three propositions established.

9. VIII Mr. Wallace 12 min 4

   Even Wallace, who saw that population would destroy equality, thought the difficulty remote. Malthus insists it is immediate. He turns to Condorcet’s Sketch, written under proscription, and rejects its schemes of social insurance as removing the spur to industry. Condorcet himself foresaw an oscillation between good and evil once numbers outran subsistence but placed it in the distant future; Malthus replies that it has always existed, and dismisses Condorcet’s hint at a remedy as unnatural vice.

10. IX Mr. Condorcet’s Conjecture on the Organic Perfectibility of Man 14 min 4

    Malthus answers Condorcet’s conjecture that human life may be prolonged indefinitely. There is no evidence that natural lifespan has increased, and inferring unlimited progress from partial improvement would destroy all reasoning from experience. Breeding sheep and growing flowers show improvement whose limit is undefined but real: no sheep will have a head as small as a rat’s, no carnation grow as large as a cabbage. Human breeding is possible only in a small degree, and he closes by noting Condorcet’s book as typical of French opinion in 1789.

11. X Mr. Godwin’s System of Equality 33 min 12

    Malthus admires Godwin’s system of equality as the most beautiful yet proposed, then supposes it fully realised in England: no war, no cities, equal shares and free unions. With population doubling every twenty-five years and food rising only arithmetically, want returns within a generation, benevolence gives way to self-love, and a convention reinvents private property and the obligation to maintain one’s own children. Inequality follows, with a fund for the maintenance of labour divided among the propertyless. Within thirty years the society has become one of proprietors and labourers again, through laws of nature rather than human institutions.

12. XI Mr. Godwin’s Conjecture on the Extinction of the Passion between the Sexes 8 min 4

    Malthus rejects Godwin’s conjecture that the passion between the sexes will die out as intellect improves. No progress towards it has been seen in all recorded history, and virtuous love, he argues, is consistent with reason and among life’s greatest pleasures. Reason may restrain the abuse of sensual enjoyment but will not extinguish it. Even if great minds feel the passion less, the mass of mankind would have to surpass today’s best before population was affected, and the lower classes can never be free enough from want and labour for that.

13. XII Mr. Godwin’s Conjecture on the Prolongation of Human Life 26 min 6

    Malthus examines Godwin’s and Condorcet’s speculation that the mind might prolong bodily life indefinitely. Godwin’s examples, such as good news curing illness or a motive banishing fatigue, show only that stimulants divert attention for a while. The body ultimately governs the mind, as long walks, hunting horses and the author’s own toothache illustrate. A philosophical conjecture must rest on past indications, and earthly immortality has none. Malthus ends by noting the inconsistency of sceptics who reject revelation’s promise of eternal life yet invent an unjust immortality of their own.

14. XIII Error of Mr. Godwin in Considering Man as a Being Merely Rational 13 min 3

    Godwin errs in treating man as a purely rational being. Bodily appetites act as disturbing forces on the decisions of the will, as the sun’s pull disturbs the moon’s orbit, so people may be convinced of a truth and still act against it. Godwin’s case against coercion therefore fails. Punishment aims at restraint and example, not conviction, and its certainty deters crime, as the contrast between England and Italy shows. Some truths, like the superiority of intellectual pleasures, cannot be communicated by argument at all.

15. XIV Mr. Godwin’s Five Propositions Respecting Political Truth 14 min 4

    Godwin’s five propositions, from the omnipotence of truth to the perfectibility of man, fall with the argument of the previous chapter. If character is formed by impressions and want keeps generating bad ones, universal virtue is as improbable as a hundred sixes in a row. Man is improvable, but the limit of improvement is merely unknown, not absent, as a florist breeding carnations knows; the French Revolution has burst the calyx of society. No sacrifice by the rich could raise Europe’s poor to the condition of colonial American labourers.

16. XV Models Too Perfect May Impede Improvement 20 min 6

    Placing an impossible model before us may hinder real improvement. Godwin’s essay on avarice and profusion prefers the miser to the spender, but Malthus sides with Adam Smith: saving becomes capital that employs labour, while hoarding employs none. Since a class of proprietors and a class of labourers must exist, labour is the poor man’s only property, and narrowing its market harms him. Dependence on charity debases more than hard labour, and manufactures brought liberty with them. The best use of wealth is to extend agricultural employment.

17. XVI Probable Error of Dr. Adam Smith 21 min 5

    Malthus questions Adam Smith’s assumption that every increase in a nation’s revenue or stock enlarges the funds for maintaining labour. Wealth from manufactures raises money wages, but unless food increases, prices follow and labourers gain nothing, while more of them work in unhealthy manufactories. England since 1688 illustrates the point: commerce has grown fast, but population slowly, with grazing replacing corn, cottages declining and poor rates rising. China, if opened to foreign trade, would grow richer while its poor grew worse off.

18. XVII The Proper Definition of the Wealth of a State 19 min 6

    Should wealth be measured by exchangeable value, as Smith does, or by the gross produce of land, as the French œconomists do? Malthus keeps Smith’s definition but judges manufacturing labour unproductive to the state, since it adds nothing to food. Europe has inverted the natural order by favouring towns over the land. Malthus then turns on Richard Price, whose evidence on rapid population growth first convinced him of his principle, yet who believed disease avoidable. Facing this obstacle squarely is better than pursuing a Sisyphean hope.

19. XVIII The Pressure of Distress Directs Our Hopes to the Future 22 min 7

    The pressure of distress points man’s hopes to a future state. Rather than a state of trial, Malthus proposes that the world is God’s process for awakening matter into mind. The wants of the body rouse the sluggish mind to exertion, and Locke’s view that uneasiness prompts action suggests that evil is needed to create exertion. General laws, including population increasing faster than food, compel cultivation and form reason despite partial evils. The middle ranks best foster intellect, and the difficulties of life call forth talents.

20. XIX The Sorrows of Life Necessary to Soften the Heart 22 min 4

    Sorrow softens the heart and awakens sympathy, and moral evil seems necessary to produce moral excellence. The infinite variety of nature and the obscurity of metaphysics keep the mind active; for the same reason scripture is left uncertain, since overpowering evidence would stifle virtue. Malformed minds will not suffer eternal torment but return to their original clay. Evil exists to provoke activity rather than despair, and it is each person’s duty to remove it as far as possible.