Born, near Guildford, 17 Feb. 1766. Educated privately. To Jesus Coll., Camb., as Pensioner, 8 June 1784; B.A., 1788; M.A., 1791; Fellow, 10 June 1793 to March 1804. Ordained Curate of Albury, Surrey, 1795 [?]. Travelled in Northern Europe, 1799; in France and Switzerland, 1802. Married Harriet Eckersall, 13 March 1804. Prof. of Hist. and Polit. Econ. at Haileybury Coll., 1805; lived there till his death. Visit to Ireland, 1817. F.R.S., 1819. Associate of Royal Soc. of Literature, 1824. Travelled on Continent, 1825. Foreign Associate of Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, 1833. Mem. of Royal Acad. of Berlin, 1833. Mem. of Statistical Soc., 1834. Mem. of French Institute. Died, suddenly, at St. Catherine’s, near Bath, 23 Dec. 1834. Buried in Bath Abbey Church. Works: “Essay on the Principle of Population” (anon.), 1798; “An Investigation of the cause of the present High Price of Provisions” (anon.), 1800 (2nd edn. same year); “Letter to Samuel Whitbread, Esq., M.P.,” 1807; “Letter to … Lord Granville,” 1813; “Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws,” 1814 (2nd edn. same year); “Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn,” 1815; “An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent,” 1815; “Statements respecting the East India College,” 1817; “Principles of Political Economy,” 1820; “The Measure of Value,” 1823; “On the Measure of the Conditions necessary to the supply of Commodities,” 1825; “On the meaning … attached to the term Value of Commodities,” 1827; “Definitions in Political Economy,” 1827; “Summary View of the Principle of Population,” 1830. Life: “Malthus and his Work,” by J. Bonar, 1885.

Personal

  By-the-by that fellow has the impudence to marry, after writing upon the miseries of population.

  Since you left us, Malthus has been a day or two in town; and gave me a little of his society, enough to enable me to judge of him; and I am happy to say, that a more philosophic candour, calm love of truth, and ingenious turn for speculation in his important branch, I have seldom met with. It is quite delightful to find, how closely he has taught himself to examine the circumstances of the lower classes of society, and what a scientific turn he gives the subject. There is a new speculation of his, about the importance of the people being fed dear, which I wish you were here to discuss; it has the look of a paradox, and, like most of his views, is revolting to the common belief; but I have not yet detected the fallacy, if there is one.

  Malthus is, what anybody might anticipate, a plain man, with plain manners, apparently troubled by few prejudices, and not much by the irritability of authorship, but still talking occasionally with earnestness. In general, however, I thought he needed opposition, but he rose to the occasion, whatever it might be.

  Philosopher Malthus came here last week. I got an agreeable party for him of unmarried people. There was only one lady who had had a child; but he is a good-natured man, and, if there are no appearance of approaching fertility, is civil to every lady. Malthus is a real moral philosopher, and I would almost consent to speak as inarticulately, if I could think and act as wisely.

  Of all the people in the world, Malthus was the one whom I heard quite easily without it [trumpet];—Malthus, whose speech was hopelessly imperfect, from defect in the palate…. I could not decline such an invitation as this: but when I considered my own deafness, and his inability to pronounce half the consonants in the alphabet, and his hare-lip which must prevent my offering him my tube, I feared we should make a terrible business of it. I was delightfully wrong. His first sentence,—slow and gentle, with the vowels sonorous, whatever might become of the consonants,—set me at ease completely. I soon found that the vowels are in fact all that I ever hear. His worst letter was l: and when I had no difficulty with his question,—“Would not you like to have a look at the Lakes of Killarney?” I had nothing more to fear. It really gratified him that I heard him better than any body else; and whenever we met at dinner, I somehow found myself beside him, with my best ear next him; and then I heard all he said to every body at table.

  The personal aspect of Malthus, to those who had known him only through the “Essay on Population” (a book however more railed at than read), generally excited some surprise. With genial, even gentle expression of features, he had a tremulous stammering voice, seemingly little fitted for the utterance of any doctrine which could be deemed dangerous to social welfare.

  There is nothing in Mr. Malthus’s life which is worth mentioning, or which illustrated his doctrines. He was an estimable gentleman and clerical professor; “a mild pottering person,” I think, Carlyle would have called him. Neither his occupation nor his turn of mind particularly fitted him to write on money matters: he was not a man of business, nor had he, like Paley and similar clergymen, a hard-headed liking for and an innate insight into the theory of business. He was a sensible man educated in the midst of illusions; he felt a reaction against them, and devoted the vigor of his youth to disprove and dispel them: and he made many sensible and acute remarks on kindred topics. But he has been among the luckiest of authors, for he has connected his name with the foundation of a lasting science which he did not plan and would by no means have agreed in.

  Malthus was the student, of quiet settled life, sharing his domestic happiness with his friends in unobtrusive hospitality, and constantly using his pen for the good, as he believed, of the English poor, that in these wretched times they might have a family life as happy as his own. There never was a more curious delusion than the traditional belief in the hard-heartedness of Malthus. Besides the unanimous voice of private friends, he has left testimony enough in his own books to absolve him. While Adam Smith and others owe their errors to mere intellectual fallibility, Malthus actually owes most of his to his tender heart. His motive for studying political economy was no doubt a mixed motive; it was partly the interest of an intelligent man in abstract questions. But it was chiefly the desire to advance the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In his eyes the elevation of human life was much more important than the solution of a scientific problem.

  At all events, though Malthus still remains “the best abused man of the age,” it is pleasant to remember that he told Miss Martineau that except for the first fortnight after the publication of the essay, during which time he was somewhat grieved at the general misunderstanding, he remained wholly undisturbed by all the railings of his adversaries. It is pleasant to remember this, because Malthus was among the best of men.

Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798–1803–17

  “Go, my son,”—said a Swedish chancellor to his son,—“go and see with how little cost of wisdom this world is governed.” “Go,” might a scholar in like manner say after a thoughtful review of literature, “go and see how little logic is required to the composition of most books.” Of the many attestations to this fact, furnished by the history of opinions in our hasty and unmeditative age, I know of none more striking than the case of Mr. Malthus, both as regards himself and his critics. About a quarter of a century ago Mr. Malthus wrote his “Essay on Population,” which soon rose into great reputation. And why? Not for the truth it contained; that is but imperfectly understood even at present; but for the false semblance of systematic form with which he had invested the truth. Without any necessity he placed his whole doctrine on the following basis: man increases in a geometrical ratio—the food of man in an arithmetical ratio.

  There is this to be said for Mr. Malthus, that in speaking of him, one knows what one is talking about. He is something beyond a mere name—one has not to beat the bush about his talents, his attainments, his vast reputation, and leave off without knowing what it all amounts to—he is not one of those great men, who set themselves off and strut and fret an hour upon the stage, during a day-dream of popularity, with the ornaments and jewels borrowed from the common stock, to which nothing but their vanity and presumption gives them the least individual claim—he has dug into the mine of truth, and brought up ore mixed with dross! In weighing his merits we come at once to the question of what he has done or failed to do. It is a specific claim that he sets up. When we speak of Mr. Malthus, we mean the “Essay on Population;” and when we mention the Essay on Population, we mean a distinct leading proposition, that stands out intelligibly from all trashy pretence, and is a ground on which to fix the levers that may move the world, backwards or forwards. He has not left opinion where he found it; he has advanced or given it a wrong bias, or thrown a stumbling-block in its way.

  Into the Hofrath’s Institute, with its extraordinary schemes, and machinery of Corresponding Boards and the like, we shall not so much as glance. Enough for us to understand that Heuschrecke is a disciple of Malthus; and so zealous for the doctrine, that his zeal almost literally eats him up. A deadly fear of Population possesses the Hofrath; something like a fixed-idea; undoubtedly akin to the more diluted forms of Madness. Nowhere, in that quarter of his intellectual world, is there light; nothing but a grim shadow of Hunger; open mouths opening wider and wider; a world to terminate by the frightfullest consummation: by its too dense inhabitants, famished into delirium, universally eating one another. To make air for himself in which strangulation, choking enough to a benevolent heart, the Hofrath founds, or proposes to found, this Institute of his, as the best he can do.

  Mr. Malthus published his essay in June, 1798; and, in the revolutionary state of the world at the time, the importance of the principle on which he depended was instantly perceived, and it has formed the groundwork of the reasonings of all intelligent men on the affairs of mankind ever since.

  This work made, when published, a powerful impression, and was supposed, for a while, to have exhausted the important department of the science of which it treats. It had, however, but few claims to attention on the score of originality, the fundamental principle maintained by Mr. Malthus—that population never fails, without any artificial stimulus, to rise to the level of subsistence—having been already set in the clearest point of view by a great number of the most eminent writers. But Mr. Malthus did not stop here.

  His works will probably be little read henceforth; for the first and chief, his “Essay on Population,” has answered its purpose.

  Notwithstanding this fundamental error [respecting population], Malthus was a great political philosopher, and the very promulgation of his error was an important step in the advance to truth.

  It seemed to me probable that allied species were descended from a common ancestor. But during several years I could not conceive how each form could have been modified so as to become admirably adapted to its place in nature. I began therefore to study domesticated animals and cultivated plants, and after a time perceived that man’s power of selecting and breeding from certain individuals was the most powerful of all means in the production of new races. Having attended to the habits of animals and their relations to the surrounding conditions, I was able to realise the severe struggle for existence to which all organisms are subjected; and my geological observations had allowed me to appreciate to a certain extent the duration of past geological periods. With my mind thus prepared I fortunately happened to read Malthus’s “Essay on Population;” and the idea of a natural selection through the struggle for existence at once occurred to me. Of all the subordinate points in the theory, the last which I understood was the cause of the tendency in the descendants from a common progenitor to diverge in character.

  Mr. Malthus unquestionably committed some errors of statement and faults of reasoning in his original enunciation of the principles of population, as is likely to be the case on the first promulgation of great economical or social laws; and during his whole life he was closely followed up by criticism and abuse. Since Mr. Malthus’ death has taken all personal interest out of the controversy over the principles of population, and Malthusianism has come to be merely a name for a body of doctrine, the views here presented have been a butt for the headless arrows of beginners in economics and of sundry sentimental sociologists. The amount of cheap wit and cheaper logic which has been expended on this theme gives the student of the principles of population a new idea of the capabilities of the human intellect.

  Fawcett, in particular, was profoundly impressed by the teaching of Malthus. He always speaks of Malthus with especial respect, and retorts the scorn of the popular assailants of his vital principle. Malthus was not the first to call attention to the evils which he specially denounced. Nobody is ever first in such discoveries. Nor was he aware—no one is ever aware—of the full import of his own theories. But his theory was of the highest importance because it involved the implicit recognition of a cardinal truth.

  He investigated the economic aspects of population with a masterly idea of the right method for scrutinising the fundamental principle involved under all existing and widely-divergent cases by which it is exemplified. Thus he founded on solid ground a doctrine which, when stripped entirely of its pseudo-mathematical integument, and stated with greater precision statistically and psychologically, has held its own up to the present hour against a horde of cavils which turn for the most part upon a loose employment of terms; it has even weathered the shock given to it by certain incompetent friends who have fastened upon it the heavy burden of their own false conclusions, and have not shrunk from promoting the passage of laws aimed at the restriction of marriages. This was bad enough in all conscience; but what shall we say to men who have dared to call themselves “Neo-Malthusians,” and then have indulged in immoral disquisitions on “preventive intercourse?”… The essay of Malthus still remains the leading work on the economic problem of population, which is still far from any final solution. Not that flaws have not been found in the essay; on the contrary, its faults have been frequently adverted to in subtle arguments advanced by various writers, not a few of whom have been Italians.

  It is impossible, indeed, to overrate the importance of Malthus, viewed as a schoolmaster to bring men to Darwin, and to bring Darwin himself to the truth. Without the “Essay on the Principle of Population” it is quite conceivable that we should never have had the “Origin of Species” or the “Descent of Man.”

General

  The want of perspicuity and precision, and of thoroughness in following out the consequences of his doctrines, which has hindered the reception of the writings of Malthus, and caused him to be singularly misrepresented even to this day, was then perceived and lamented by those who knew how to value him: but he was in full career of social discovery; and it is a consolation, in the retrospect of that melancholy season, to see him meditating and speaking in the spirit of benevolence and candour, and the best men of the time listening to him with searching attention and earnest respect.

  Malthus, the economist, deserves a higher place than he generally receives, but it is as a practical reformer that he is most worthy of remembrance. The consequences of his teaching were fully appreciated in his own day, when the administration of the poor law was bidding fair to sap the strength of the people and to ruin the country. Pauperism was steadily increasing. The morals of the people were steadily deteriorating. Almost every incentive to prudence was removed, for the industrious and independent labourer could look forward to no better future than the idle and careless. It was in struggling against this iniquity that Malthus spent his life, and it was due to him more than to any other man that its causes were at length understood. Though other hands carried it out, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was his work.