Anonymous - The Malthusian Handbook

PRICE SIXPENCE.
LONDON:
W. H. REYNOLDS, NEW CROSS, S.E.
4th Edition. 1898.

In every civilised State the problem of poverty is one which presses for solution. In some European countries it has, at times, locally assumed a critical and menacing form, threatening the very foundations upon which society is based. Revolutions have sprung from the fact that people needed food and could not obtain it; and, even in our own highly favored land, honest, industrious men are often driven to despair because they can neither get work nor food.

Occasional outbreaks and demonstrations, however, are by no means the true measure of national poverty. Beneath the glittering surface of society there lies a seething mass of want and misery. The victims suffer in silence and make no sign, but their existence constitutes a permanent danger to the general welfare. Destitution is in numberless instances the parent of crime and prostitution, with their chain of disastrous consequences; overcrowding, semi-starvation and squalor are the fruitful sources of disease which scruples not to travel beyond its birthplace and to infect the homes of the wealthy. Modern society may be fitly compared to a magnificent palace reared in a miasmatic swamp, which fills the air with its death-dealing exhalations. No cunning artifices of builders or engineers can afford protection in such a case. In like manner, society cannot hope to escape from the influences which make for corruption and ultimate dissolution whilst it suffers poverty to remain in its midst.

It is, indeed, unnecessary to insist upon the evils and the national dangers arising from poverty; for they are admitted upon all hands. The problem is: How can poverty be abolished? Upon this vital point opinions differ widely. The evil is so complex and many-sided that observers are apt to be misled by a partial view of the symptoms. For example, a total abstainer, concentrating his attention upon instances in which poverty has been brought about by excessive indulgence in alcoholic liquors, urges that drink is the cause of poverty. The Socialist asks Why are the many poor? and answers that the remedy consists in the nationalisation of land and the instruments of production, the abolition of competition, etc. Others attribute the existence of poverty to idleness or to want of thrift amongst the workers. In no case, however, is the alleged cause equal to the palpable effect; and it is necessary to extend the enquiry in another direction if we are to discover the cause which, above and beyond all others, produces the want and misery that everybody desires to remove.

The purpose of this little work is, first, to show that an excessive increase of population is the source from which these evils arise. In the second place, the means by which population may be kept under control will be explained, for it is useless to warn people of a danger if they are kept in ignorance of the means by which it may be avoided. Above all, it is to the poor that this knowledge must be conveyed, for, as we shall show in the following pages, the indigent class multiplies far more rapidly than the well-to-do, and it is upon themselves that the consequent misery necessarily falls.

Experience teaches that almost all the ills which afflict mankind can be obviated by a careful study of nature and by conduct based upon due observance of natural laws. In the darkness of ignorance men must stumble into many pitfalls; but in the clear light of reason and knowledge they can discern the path which leads to freedom and happiness.

If it be desired to discover a remedy for an admitted evil, the first step must necessarily be to ascertain its cause. All schemes for the mitigation of the effects of poverty must in the long run end in failure, no matter how ambitious may be the undertakings of those who engage in this futile work. The captain of a sinking vessel does not confine his attention to the pumps, he seeks without delay to stop the inrush of water. And in dealing with the question of poverty it is essential that its root-cause be discovered before any hope of arriving at a solution of the problem can reasonably be entertained.

An enquiry into the facts of nature will show that all forms of vegetable and animal life are capable of reproducing themselves in almost boundless profusion. Darwin, in his work on The Origin of Species, points this out with the greatest clearness. He says: There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered with the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years; and at this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing-room for his progeny. Linnus has calculated that if an annual plant produced only two seedsand there is no plant so unproductive as thisand their seedlings next year produced two, and so on, then, in twenty years there would be a million plants. After giving the example of the slow-breeding elephant, he continues: Still more striking is the evidence from our domestic animals of many kinds which have run wild in many parts of the world; if the statements of the rate of increase of slow-breeding cattle and horses in South America, and latterly in Australia, had not been well authenticated, they would have been incredible. So it is with plants: cases could be given of introduced plants which have become common throughout whole islands in less than ten years. Several of the plants, such as the cardoon and a tall thistle, now most numerous over the wild plains of La Plata, clothing square leagues of surface almost to the exclusion of all other plants, have been introduced from Europe; and there are plants which now range in India, as I hear from Dr. Falconer, from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas, which have been imported from America since its discovery. In such cases, and endless instances could be given, no one supposes that the fertility of these animals or plants has been suddenly and temporarily increased in any sensible degree. The obvious explanation is that the conditions of life have been very favorable, and that there has consequently been less destruction of the old and young, and that nearly all the young have been able to breed. In such cases, the geometrical rate of increase, the result of which never fails to be surprising, simply explains the extraordinarily rapid increase and wide diffusion of naturalised productions in their new homes. In a state of nature, almost every plant produces seed, and among animals there are very few that do not annually pair. Hence we may confidently assert that all plants and animals are tending to increase at a geometrical ratio; that all would most rapidly stock every station in which they could anyhow exist, and that the geometrical tendency to increase must be checked by destruction at some period of life.

It was the observation of this striking fact in nature which led an English clergyman, the Rev. Thomas B. Malthus, to study deeply the question of poverty, and to formulate as the principle of population that which is now almost universally regarded as a law of nature. Before he published his great work the view was generally accepted that the wealth of a country was in proportion to its population; and statesmen frequently attempted to stimulate, by the distribution of bounties to the parents of excessively large families, the natural rate of increase. A few far-sighted men, such as the elder Mirabeau, Quesnay, and Adam Smith, partially perceived the true doctrine; but it remained for Malthus to examine the question in all its bearings, and to collect patiently and laboriously an overwhelming array of facts which established his contention beyond all reasonable doubt. It will be well here to give some account of this remarkable man and of the work with which his name is indissolubly associated.