1798 2026
This is an AI modernization of An Essay on the Principle of Population into contemporary English. The original is available on Project Gutenberg.
This essay started as a conversation with a friend about Mr. Godwin's essay on avarice and extravagance in his Enquirer. Our discussion turned to the broader question of whether society can be perfected, and I originally sat down just to put my thoughts on paper more clearly than I felt I could express them in conversation. But as I dug deeper into the subject, some ideas came to me that I didn't recall encountering before. And since I believed that even the smallest bit of light on a topic of such wide interest might be welcomed with an open mind, I decided to put my thoughts into a form worth publishing.
This essay could undoubtedly have been made much more thorough by gathering a larger collection of facts to support the general argument. But a long and nearly total interruption from other pressing obligations, combined with a desire — perhaps an unwise one — not to delay publication much beyond my original timeline, prevented me from giving the subject my undivided attention. I trust, however, that the evidence I have presented will amount to a substantial case for the truth of my views on the future improvement of humanity. As I see it right now, little more seems necessary than a straightforward explanation, paired with even the most basic survey of society, to establish my argument.
It is an obvious truth, noted by many writers, that population must always be kept down to the level of available food and resources. But no writer that I can recall has looked closely into the specific ways this balance is maintained. And it is precisely this examination of those mechanisms that presents, in my view, the strongest obstacle to any dramatic future improvement of society. I hope it will be clear that in discussing this important subject, I am driven solely by a love of truth — not by any bias against any particular group of people or set of ideas. I can honestly say that I read some of the grand visions for society's future improvement in a spirit very different from wanting to find them unrealistic. But I have not achieved such mastery over my own reasoning that I can believe what I wish to believe without evidence, or reject what may be unwelcome when the evidence supports it.
The picture I have painted of human life has a melancholy tint to it, but I am confident that I have drawn these dark shades from a genuine conviction that they truly belong in the picture — not from a cynical eye or a naturally gloomy temperament. The theory of the mind that I have sketched out in the final two chapters explains, at least to my own satisfaction, why most of the evils of life exist. Whether it will have the same effect on others, I must leave to the judgment of my readers.
If I should succeed in drawing the attention of more capable thinkers to what I believe is the principal difficulty standing in the way of society's improvement, and should then see this difficulty removed — even in theory — I will gladly take back my current views and rejoice in being proven wrong.
7 June 1798
The question at hand -- Why neither side is making progress in the debate -- The strongest argument against human perfectibility has never been properly answered -- The fundamental problem of population -- An outline of this essay's central argument
The remarkable and unexpected discoveries in science in recent years, the spread of knowledge thanks to the printing press, the bold and unfettered spirit of inquiry that now runs through the educated world and even beyond it, the startling new light that has been thrown on political questions — dazzling the mind — and above all that tremendous event on the political horizon, the French Revolution, which like a blazing comet seems destined either to breathe fresh life and energy into civilization or to scorch and destroy the cowering inhabitants of the earth: all of these things have led many brilliant people to believe that we are on the brink of a period pregnant with the most important changes, changes that would in large part determine the future fate of humanity.
It has been said that the great question is now before us: whether humanity will from this point surge forward with ever-increasing speed toward limitless, previously unimaginable improvement — or whether we are condemned to swing forever between happiness and misery, and after every effort still find ourselves impossibly far from the goal we long for.
And yet, as anxiously as every friend of humanity looks forward to settling this agonizing question, and as eagerly as any inquiring mind would welcome any ray of light that might help us see the future more clearly, it is deeply unfortunate that the writers on each side of this momentous debate still refuse to engage with each other. Their arguments never actually meet. The question never narrows to fewer points. Even in theory, it barely seems to be getting closer to a resolution.
Those who defend the current state of affairs tend to treat the idealist philosophers as either a pack of clever, scheming con artists — people who preach passionate compassion and paint captivating pictures of a better world only to tear down existing institutions and advance their own hidden agendas — or as wild, reckless dreamers whose ridiculous speculations and absurd contradictions aren't worth any reasonable person's attention.
Those who believe in the perfectibility of humanity fire back with equal contempt. They brand the defender of the status quo as either a slave to the most pitiful and small-minded prejudices, or as someone who defends the abuses of society only because he profits from them. They paint him as either a person who sells out his intellect to serve his self-interest, or as someone whose mind simply isn't large enough to grasp anything great and noble — someone who can't see five yards in front of him and therefore couldn't possibly comprehend the vision of an enlightened benefactor of humanity.
In this hostile contest, truth inevitably suffers. The genuinely good arguments on each side never get their proper weight. Each side chases its own theory, with little concern for correcting or improving it by paying attention to what the opposition has to say.
The defender of the current order dismisses all political speculation wholesale. He won't even bother to examine the grounds on which human perfectibility is supposed to rest, let alone make a fair and honest effort to expose its flaws.
The idealist philosopher sins equally against truth. With his eyes fixed on a better world, whose blessings he paints in the most captivating colors, he lets himself launch the bitterest attacks on every existing institution — without using his talents to consider the best and safest means of actually fixing what's broken, and without seeming to realize the enormous obstacles that threaten, even in theory, to block humanity's path toward perfection.
It's an accepted truth in philosophy that a sound theory will always be confirmed by experiment. But so much friction and so many tiny, unpredictable circumstances come up in practice — factors that even the most brilliant and far-sighted mind could hardly foresee — that very few theories can be declared sound until all the arguments against them have been carefully weighed and clearly, consistently refuted.
I have read some of the writings on the perfectibility of humanity and society with great pleasure. I have been warmed and delighted by the enchanting picture they paint. I passionately wish for such happy improvements. But I see great — and to my mind, unconquerable — difficulties standing in the way. It is my purpose here to lay out those difficulties, while declaring at the same time that, far from celebrating them as a victory over the friends of progress, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see them completely overcome.
The most important argument I will present is certainly not new. The principles behind it have been explained in part by Hume, and at greater length by Dr. Adam Smith. It was put forward and applied to this subject — though without its full force, or in the most compelling way — by Mr. Robert Wallace, and it has probably been made by many writers I've never come across. I would certainly not bother raising it again, though I do intend to frame it somewhat differently than anything I've seen before, if it had ever been fairly and satisfactorily answered.
Why the advocates of human perfectibility have neglected this argument is hard to explain. I cannot doubt the talents of men like William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet. I am reluctant to doubt their honesty. To my mind — and probably to most people's — the difficulty appears impossible to overcome. Yet these men of acknowledged brilliance and insight barely bother to notice it, and press on with their speculations with undiminished enthusiasm and unshaken confidence. I certainly have no right to say they deliberately shut their eyes to such arguments. I should instead question my own reasoning when it's ignored by such minds, no matter how powerfully the truth of it strikes me. Yet we must admit that we are all prone to error in this regard. If I saw a glass of wine repeatedly offered to a man and he took no notice of it, I would naturally assume he was either blind or rude. A wiser perspective might teach me that perhaps my own eyes were deceiving me, and the offer wasn't really what I thought it was.
Before diving into the argument, I should say upfront that I am setting aside all mere speculation — that is, all assumptions whose realization cannot be justified on any sound philosophical grounds. A writer may tell me he thinks humans will one day turn into ostriches. I can't technically prove him wrong. But before he can expect to win over any reasonable person, he ought to show that human necks have been gradually getting longer, that our lips have grown harder and more prominent, that our legs and feet are daily changing shape, and that our hair is starting to turn into little stubs of feathers. And until the probability of such a marvelous transformation can be demonstrated, it is surely a waste of time and eloquence to go on about how happy people would be in such a condition — to describe their powers of both running and flying, to imagine them in a state where all petty luxuries would be scorned, where they would spend their time only gathering the necessities of life, and where, as a result, each person's share of labor would be light and their leisure abundant.
I think I can fairly start with two basic assumptions.
First, that food is necessary for human survival.
Second, that sexual desire is a permanent part of human nature and will remain roughly as strong as it is now.
These two laws, for as long as we have known anything about humanity, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature. And since we have never seen any change in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever stop being what they are now — not without a direct act of power from the Being who first set up the universe and who still carries out all its operations according to fixed laws, for the benefit of His creatures.
I don't know of any writer who has claimed that humans will someday be able to live without food. But Godwin has speculated that sexual desire might eventually die out. Since he himself calls this part of his work "a deviation into the land of conjecture," I won't spend more time on it right now than to say this: the best arguments for human perfectibility come from looking at the enormous progress we've already made from the savage state, and the difficulty of saying where that progress will stop. But toward the extinction of sexual desire, no progress whatsoever has been made. It appears to be just as powerful today as it was two thousand or four thousand years ago. There are individual exceptions now, as there always have been. But since these exceptions don't appear to be growing more common, it would be deeply unscientific to argue that simply because an exception exists, it will eventually become the rule, and the rule the exception.
Taking my two assumptions as given, then, I say this: the power of population growth is incomparably greater than the power of the earth to produce enough food for everyone.
Population, when unchecked, grows at a geometric ratio — that is, exponentially. The food supply grows only at an arithmetic ratio — that is, linearly. Even a basic familiarity with numbers will show you the overwhelming power of the first compared to the second.
Because of the law of nature that makes food essential to human life, the effects of these two unequal forces must be kept in balance.
This means there is a strong and constantly operating check on population, driven by the difficulty of feeding everyone. This pressure has to land somewhere, and it inevitably falls hard on a large portion of humanity.
Throughout the animal and plant kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life with the most generous and lavish hand. But she has been comparatively stingy with the space and nourishment needed to sustain them. The seeds of life contained in this one small planet, given unlimited food and unlimited room to expand, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity — that absolute, all-pervading law of nature — holds them within their prescribed limits. Plants shrink under this great restricting law. Animals shrink under it. And the human race cannot, by any effort of reason, escape it. Among plants and animals, the effects are wasted seed, disease, and premature death. Among humans, the effects are misery and vice. Misery is an absolutely unavoidable consequence. Vice is a highly probable one — and so we see it everywhere — but it should perhaps not be called absolutely unavoidable. The true test of virtue is to resist every temptation to do wrong.
This fundamental inequality between the two powers — population growth and food production — and the great law of nature that constantly forces their effects into balance: these form the enormous difficulty that, to me, appears impossible to overcome on the path to a perfect society. Every other argument is minor by comparison. I see no way for humanity to escape the weight of this law, which governs all living things. No imagined equality, no redistribution of land pushed to its absolute limit, could relieve the pressure of it even for a single century. It seems, therefore, to be a decisive argument against the possibility of any society in which all members could live in comfort, happiness, and relative leisure, free from anxiety about providing for themselves and their families.
If the premises are sound, then the conclusion is inescapable: the perfection of the whole of humanity is impossible.
I have sketched the general outline of the argument here, but I will examine it in more detail in the chapters to come. And I believe it will be found that experience — the true source and foundation of all knowledge — invariably confirms its truth.
The different rates at which population and food supply grow -- The inevitable consequences of these different growth rates -- The oscillation they produce in the living conditions of the lower classes -- Reasons why this oscillation hasn't been as widely noticed as you might expect -- Three propositions on which the entire argument of this essay depends -- A proposal to examine the different states of human society with reference to these three propositions.
I said in the last chapter that population, when unchecked, grows at a geometric rate, while the food supply for humanity grows only at an arithmetic rate.
Let's examine whether this claim holds up. I think everyone will agree that no society has ever existed — at least none that we have any record of — where customs were so pure and simple, and food so abundant, that there was absolutely no check on early marriage. Among the lower classes, there has always been some fear of not being able to provide for a family; among the upper classes, some fear of losing their social standing. As a result, in no society we've ever observed has the full power of population growth been allowed to operate with complete freedom.
Whether or not a society has formal marriage laws, the natural and virtuous impulse seems to be an early, committed attachment to one person. Even allowing for the freedom to leave a bad match, this freedom wouldn't significantly affect population growth unless promiscuity became extremely widespread — and we're imagining here a society where vice is nearly nonexistent.
So picture a society of great equality and virtue, where people live simply and wholesomely, and where food is so abundant that no one worries about providing for a family. In such a society, with no checks on population at all, the growth of the human species would clearly be far greater than anything we've ever actually observed.
The United States of America comes closest to this ideal. There, the food supply has been more plentiful, the customs of the people more wholesome, and the barriers to early marriage fewer than in any modern European nation. And in America, the population has been found to double every twenty-five years.
This rate of increase, though still short of what population could theoretically achieve, is based on actual observed experience. So let's use it as our benchmark and say that population, when unchecked, doubles every twenty-five years — that is, it grows at a geometric rate.
Now let's take any piece of land — this island of Britain, for example — and ask at what rate its food production can realistically grow. We'll start from its current state of farming.
If I assume that with the best possible policies — breaking new ground for farming, offering strong incentives for agriculture — the total produce of this island could be doubled in the first twenty-five years, I think that's as generous an assumption as anyone could reasonably make.
In the next twenty-five years, it's impossible to imagine the produce being quadrupled. That would contradict everything we know about how land works. The absolute most we can imagine is that the increase in the second twenty-five years might equal the current level of production. So let's use that as our rule — though it's certainly far more optimistic than reality — and assume that with enormous effort, the island's total produce could be increased every twenty-five years by an amount equal to what it currently produces. Even the most enthusiastic optimist couldn't assume more than this. In just a few centuries, it would mean turning every acre of land on the island into a garden.
And yet this rate of increase is clearly arithmetic — it grows by a fixed amount each period.
So it's fair to say that the food supply increases at an arithmetic rate. Now let's bring these two rates of growth together and see what happens.
The population of the island is estimated at about seven million, and we'll assume the current food production is just enough to support that number. In the first twenty-five years, the population would grow to fourteen million, and since food production would also double, supply would keep pace with demand. In the next twenty-five years, the population would reach twenty-eight million, but the food supply would only support twenty-one million. In the next period, the population would hit fifty-six million, but there would only be enough food for half that number. And by the end of the first century, the population would be 112 million, while the food supply could only support thirty-five million — leaving seventy-seven million people with nothing to eat.
Now, large-scale emigration always implies some kind of unhappiness in the country people are leaving. Very few people will abandon their families, friends, and homeland to seek a new life in unfamiliar places unless they have strong reasons for wanting to leave or great hopes for where they're going.
But to make this argument more universal and less complicated by the specifics of emigration, let's think about the entire earth instead of just one country. Suppose all restraints on population were removed everywhere. If the earth's food supply were increased every twenty-five years by an amount equal to what the whole world currently produces, that would mean assuming the earth's productive capacity is absolutely unlimited — growing at a rate far greater than any conceivable human effort could achieve.
Starting with the world's population at any number — say one billion — the human species would increase at the rate of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, and so on, while the food supply would increase at the rate of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and so on. In two and a quarter centuries, the ratio of population to food supply would be 512 to 10. In three centuries, it would be 4,096 to 13. And in two thousand years, the gap would be almost beyond calculation — even though food production by that point would have increased to an enormous extent.
No limits whatsoever are placed on the earth's productive capacity in this scenario. Food production could keep increasing forever and grow to any amount imaginable. And yet the power of population, being of a higher order of growth, means that the increase in the human species can only be kept in line with the increase in food supply through the constant operation of a powerful law of necessity, acting as a check on population's greater power.
The effects of this check are what we need to examine next.
Among plants and animals, the picture is straightforward. They are all driven by a powerful instinct to reproduce, and this instinct is never interrupted by worries about providing for their offspring. Wherever there is room and freedom, this reproductive power is fully exerted, and the excess is kept in check afterward — by a lack of space and food (which affects both plants and animals), and by predation (which affects animals specifically).
For humans, the effects of this check are far more complicated. Driven by an equally powerful instinct to reproduce, a person is nonetheless interrupted by reason, which asks: can I bring children into the world if I can't provide for them? In a society of equals, this would be the only question. But in society as it actually exists, other concerns come into play. Will I lower my social standing? Will I face greater hardships than I do now? Will I have to work harder? And if I have a large family, will even my best efforts be enough to support them? Might I watch my children in rags and misery, crying for bread I can't give them? Might I be reduced to the humiliating necessity of giving up my independence and relying on the grudging hand of charity?
These concerns do prevent — and are clearly designed to prevent — a great many people in every civilized nation from following nature's impulse toward an early attachment to one partner. And this restraint almost inevitably, though not absolutely always, leads to vice. Yet in every society, even the most corrupt ones, the pull toward committed partnership is so strong that there is always a constant push toward population growth. And this constant push just as constantly tends to keep the lower classes in a state of hardship, preventing any lasting improvement in their condition.
Here's how this process seems to work. Imagine that a country's food supply is just barely enough to comfortably support its population. The constant pressure toward population growth — which operates even in the most corrupt societies — pushes the number of people up before the food supply has had a chance to increase. Food that previously supported seven million people now has to be divided among seven and a half or eight million. The poor are therefore forced to live much worse, and many are driven into severe hardship. At the same time, since there are now more workers than there are jobs, wages tend to fall, while food prices tend to rise. Workers must therefore labor harder just to earn what they earned before. During this period of distress, the discouragements to marriage and the difficulty of raising a family are so great that population growth comes to a halt. Meanwhile, the cheapness of labor, the abundance of workers, and the necessity for greater effort among them encourage landowners to hire more help, plow new fields, and improve the land already under cultivation — until eventually, the food supply comes back into the same proportion with the population as it was at the start. When workers are once again reasonably comfortable, the restraints on population loosen somewhat, and the same backward-and-forward cycle of hardship and recovery repeats itself.
This kind of oscillation won't be noticed by casual observers, and even the most perceptive mind would find it difficult to calculate its timing. Yet any thoughtful person who considers the subject carefully can hardly doubt that in all long-established societies, some version of this cycle does exist — though, due to various cross-cutting causes, it operates in a much less clear-cut and much more irregular way than I've described.
There are several reasons why this oscillation has been less obvious and less clearly confirmed by experience than you might naturally expect.
One main reason is that the histories available to us are primarily histories of the upper classes. We have very few reliable accounts of the customs and conditions of the people among whom these backward-and-forward movements mainly take place. A satisfactory history of this kind, covering even one people during one period, would require a lifetime of careful, detailed observation by a keen mind. Some of the questions such a history would need to answer: What proportion of adults got married? How widespread was immoral behavior as a consequence of the barriers to marriage? What was the difference in child mortality between the most impoverished families and those who were somewhat better off? What were the fluctuations in the real price of labor? And what observable differences existed in the ease and happiness of the lower classes at different times within a given period?
A history like that would go a long way toward clarifying exactly how the constant check on population operates. It would probably confirm the existence of these backward-and-forward cycles, though the timing of each cycle would naturally be made irregular by many disrupting factors — things like the rise or decline of certain industries, a greater or lesser spirit of agricultural enterprise, years of plenty or years of scarcity, wars and epidemics, the Poor Laws, the invention of labor-saving technologies that aren't matched by a proportional expansion of the market for what they produce, and particularly the gap between nominal wages and real wages. This last factor has perhaps done more than anything else to hide this oscillation from public view.
It very rarely happens that nominal wages actually fall across the board. But we know perfectly well that they often stay flat while food prices gradually climb. This is, in effect, a real pay cut, and during such periods the condition of the working poor must steadily deteriorate. But at the same time, farmers and business owners are growing rich off the real cheapness of labor. Their increased capital allows them to hire more workers. Jobs therefore become plentiful, and wages would naturally tend to rise. But the lack of a free labor market — which exists to some degree in all societies, whether from local regulations or, more generally, from the ease with which the wealthy can coordinate among themselves compared to the difficulty the poor face in doing the same — prevents wages from rising when they naturally should. Wages are held down longer than they should be, perhaps until a year of scarcity, when the outcry is too loud and the suffering too obvious to ignore.
The true reason for the wage increase is thus hidden from view. The wealthy pretend to grant it as an act of generosity and compassion during a difficult year. And when prosperity returns, they indulge in the most unreasonable complaint of all — that wages don't fall back down again — when a moment's honest reflection would show them that wages should have risen long ago, and only failed to do so because of their own unjust collusion.
But even though the wealthy do frequently use unfair coordination to prolong periods of hardship for the poor, no possible form of society could prevent the nearly constant action of misery on a large portion of humanity under conditions of inequality — or on everyone, if all were made equal.
The theory behind this claim seems so extraordinarily clear to me that I'm genuinely at a loss to imagine which part of it could be denied.
That population cannot grow without an adequate food supply is a statement so obvious it needs no further explanation.
That population does invariably grow wherever the means of subsistence exist is a fact that the history of every people who have ever lived will abundantly prove.
And that the superior power of population growth cannot be held in check without producing misery or vice — well, the generous portion of these two bitter ingredients in the cup of human life, and the persistence of the causes that seem to produce them, offer testimony that is all too convincing.
But to more fully test the validity of these three propositions, let's examine the different states in which human societies have been known to exist. Even a brief survey will, I believe, be enough to convince us that these propositions are undeniable truths.
A brief look at the hunter-gatherer stage of society -- The pastoral stage, and the barbarian tribes that overran the Roman Empire -- The superior power of population growth over the food supply -- The cause of the great tide of northern migration.
In the most basic stage of human society, where hunting is the main occupation and the only way to get food, the food supply is spread thinly across a vast territory, so the population is necessarily sparse. It has been said that sexual desire is weaker among the North American Indians than among any other group of people. Yet despite this lower drive, the push toward population growth — even among these people — still seems to outstrip their ability to feed themselves. The evidence for this shows up whenever any of these tribes happen to settle in a fertile area and start drawing nourishment from richer sources than hunting alone. It has often been observed that when an Indian family settles near a European colony and adopts a more comfortable, settled way of life, a single woman may raise five, six, or more children — even though in the hunter-gatherer state, it is rare for more than one or two children per family to survive to adulthood. The same pattern has been observed among the Hottentots near the Cape. These facts prove that the power of population growth exceeds the food supply among hunter-gatherer peoples, and that this power reveals itself the moment it is given room to operate freely.
The question that remains is this: can this power be held in check, and its effects kept in balance with the food supply, without vice or misery?
The North American Indians, considered as a people, cannot fairly be called free and equal. In every account we have of them — and indeed of most other hunter-gatherer societies — women are depicted as far more completely enslaved to men than the poor are to the rich in civilized countries. Half the nation effectively serves as slaves to the other half, and the misery that holds population in check falls hardest — as it always must — on those at the very bottom of the social ladder. Caring for infants in the most basic state of society requires a great deal of attention, but the women cannot provide this attention. They are condemned to the inconvenience and hardship of constantly moving from place to place, and to the relentless, backbreaking labor of preparing everything for their tyrannical masters. These exertions — sometimes undertaken during pregnancy or while carrying children on their backs — must cause frequent miscarriages and prevent all but the hardiest infants from surviving to adulthood. Add to the women's hardships the constant warfare that rages among these peoples, and the painful necessity they often face of abandoning their elderly and helpless parents — violating the most basic human instinct — and the picture looks far from free of misery. When we evaluate how happy a hunter-gatherer society really is, we must not focus only on the warrior in the prime of life. He is one in a hundred. He is the gentleman, the man of fortune. The odds were in his favor, and many others failed along the way before this lucky individual was produced — one whose guardian angel happened to carry him through the countless dangers that surrounded him from infancy to manhood. The real way to compare two societies is to match up the classes that most closely correspond to each other. Viewed this way, I would compare the warriors in their prime to the gentlemen of civilized nations, and the women, children, and elderly to the lower classes.
Can we not fairly conclude from this brief survey — or rather, from the broader accounts available of hunter-gatherer peoples — that their populations are thin because food is scarce? That population would immediately increase if food were more plentiful? And that, setting vice aside for the moment, misery is the check that holds down the superior power of population and keeps its effects in line with the food supply? Real-world observation and experience tell us that this check, with a few local and temporary exceptions, is constantly operating on all hunter-gatherer societies right now. Theory tells us it probably operated with nearly equal force a thousand years ago, and it may not be much different a thousand years from now.
When we turn to the customs and habits of pastoral peoples — the next stage of human society — we know even less than we do about the hunter-gatherer stage. But the fact that these nations could not escape the universal misery caused by food shortages is testified to by Europe and all the fairest countries in the world. Hunger was the whip that drove the Scythian herders from their native lands, like so many starving wolves in search of prey. Set in motion by this all-powerful force, clouds of barbarians seemed to gather from every point of the northern hemisphere. Growing darker and more terrifying as they rolled forward, these massed hordes eventually blotted out the sun of Italy and plunged the entire world into darkness. These devastating effects, felt so long and so deeply across the most beautiful regions of the earth, can all be traced back to a single, simple cause: the superior power of population growth over the food supply.
It is well known that land used for grazing cannot support as many people as land used for farming. But what made pastoral nations so formidable was their ability to move together as one body, combined with the frequent necessity of doing so in search of fresh pasture for their herds. A tribe rich in cattle had an immediate abundance of food — in a case of absolute necessity, they could even slaughter the breeding stock itself. Women lived more comfortably than among hunter-gatherer peoples. The men, confident in their collective strength and trusting in their ability to find new pastureland simply by moving on, probably felt little anxiety about providing for a family. These factors combined to produce their natural and inevitable result: a growing population. More frequent and more rapid moves became necessary. An ever-wider territory was occupied. A broader zone of devastation spread around them. Want squeezed the less fortunate members of the society, and eventually the impossibility of supporting such numbers together became too obvious to ignore. Young branches were then pushed out from the parent tribe, instructed to explore new regions and win better lands for themselves by the sword. "The world was all before them where to choose." Driven by present hardship, energized by the hope of better prospects, and fired with a spirit of bold adventure, these daring migrants were bound to become fearsome opponents to anyone who stood in their way. The peaceful inhabitants of the lands they invaded could not long resist the energy of men driven by such powerful motives. And when they clashed with tribes like their own, the contest became a fight for survival — they battled with a desperate courage, knowing that death was the price of defeat and life the reward of victory.
In these brutal conflicts, many tribes must have been completely wiped out. Some probably perished from hardship and famine. Others, whose guiding star had sent them in a luckier direction, became great and powerful tribes, and in their turn sent out fresh waves of adventurers in search of even more fertile lands. The enormous waste of human life caused by this perpetual struggle for territory and food was more than replaced by the mighty power of population, which operated with fewer restraints thanks to the constant habit of emigration. The tribes that migrated southward, though they won these richer regions through endless warfare, rapidly grew in number and strength thanks to the increased food supply. Eventually, the entire territory from the borders of China to the shores of the Baltic was populated by a diverse array of barbarian peoples — brave, tough, and enterprising, hardened by adversity, and delighting in war. Some tribes maintained their independence. Others rallied behind some barbarian chieftain who led them to victory after victory and — more importantly — to regions overflowing with grain, wine, and oil: the long-hoped-for promised land and the great reward for all their suffering. An Alaric, an Attila, or a Genghis Khan, and the chiefs around them, might have fought for glory and the fame of far-flung conquests. But the true cause that set in motion the great tide of northern migration — the force that kept pushing it forward until it crashed at different times against China, Persia, Italy, and even Egypt — was a shortage of food: a population that had grown beyond the means of supporting it.
The total population at any given time, relative to the size of the territory, could never have been very large, because some of the regions they occupied were simply unproductive. But there appears to have been a rapid succession of human lives: as fast as some were cut down by the scythe of war or famine, others rose in greater numbers to take their place. Among these bold and reckless barbarians, population growth was probably held back far less than in modern nations by any worry about future hardship. A widespread hope of improving their situation by moving somewhere new, a constant expectation of plunder, the ability — if things got desperate — to sell their own children into slavery, combined with the natural carelessness of the barbarian character: all of these factors conspired to drive population growth that could only be beaten back afterward by famine or war.
Wherever inequality exists — and among pastoral peoples it develops quickly — the suffering caused by food shortages must fall hardest on the least fortunate members of society. This suffering must also have been frequently felt by the women, who were vulnerable to raids while their husbands were away and subject to the constant disappointment of hoped-for returns that never came.
But without knowing enough about the detailed, day-to-day history of these peoples to pinpoint exactly who bore the brunt of food shortages, or how widely the suffering was felt, I think we can fairly say this: based on every account we have of pastoral peoples, population always grew whenever emigration or some other cause increased the food supply. And any further population growth was held in check, keeping the actual population in line with the food supply, by misery and vice.
For even setting aside whatever harmful customs may have existed among them regarding women — customs that always act as checks on population — I think we have to acknowledge that the waging of war is a form of vice, and its result is misery. And no one can doubt that the misery of going without food is real.
The state of civilized nations -- Europe is probably much more populous now than in the time of Julius Caesar -- The best measure of population -- A probable error in one of the criteria Hume proposes for estimating population -- The slow growth of population in most European states today -- The two principal checks to population -- The first, or preventive check, examined with regard to England.
When we look at the next stage of human society as it relates to our question — the stage of mixed farming and livestock, which in varying proportions is where the most civilized nations have always remained — we can draw on what we see around us every day: actual experience and facts within reach of any observer.
Despite the exaggerations of some ancient historians, no reasonable person can doubt that the population of the major countries of Europe — France, England, Germany, Russia, Poland, Sweden, and Denmark — is much greater now than it ever was in earlier times. The obvious reason for those exaggerations is the terrifying spectacle that even a thinly populated nation presents when its people gather together and move all at once in search of new land. If you add to that fearsome sight a series of similar migrations arriving at intervals, it is no surprise that the frightened nations of Southern Europe came to imagine the North as a region absolutely teeming with people. A closer and fairer view of the subject today lets us see that this conclusion was as absurd as if someone in England, who kept running into herds of cattle being driven down from Wales and the North, immediately concluded that those regions must be the most productive parts of the whole kingdom.
The reason most of Europe is more populous now than in earlier times is straightforward: the labor of its inhabitants has made these countries produce a greater quantity of food. I believe it can be stated as an undeniable principle that — taking a large enough area to account for imports and exports, and allowing some variation for whether luxury or frugal habits prevail — population always maintains a regular proportion to the food the land is made to produce. In the long-running debate about whether ancient or modern nations were more populous, if it could be clearly established that the average agricultural output of the countries in question, taken as a whole, is greater now than it was in the time of Julius Caesar, the dispute would be settled immediately.
When we are told that China is the most fertile country in the world, that nearly all its land is under cultivation, that much of it yields two crops a year, and furthermore that the people live very frugally, we can conclude with certainty that the population must be enormous — without needing to dig into the habits and customs of the lower classes or the incentives for early marriage. But these inquiries are extremely important. A detailed history of the customs of the poorest Chinese people would be invaluable for understanding how the checks to further population growth actually operate — what forms of vice and what kinds of hardship prevent the population from growing beyond what the country can support.
Hume, in his essay on the populousness of ancient and modern nations, mixes an inquiry into causes with an inquiry into facts. In doing so, he does not seem to see — with his usual sharpness — how very little some of the causes he points to could actually help him judge the real population of ancient nations. If any conclusion can be drawn from those causes, it should perhaps be the exact opposite of what Hume concludes, though I should certainly speak with great caution when disagreeing with a thinker who, on subjects like these, was the least likely of anyone to be fooled by surface appearances. Here is my reasoning: if I find that at a certain period in ancient history, the incentives to start a family were strong, that early marriages were therefore very common, and that few people remained single, I would conclude with certainty that population was growing rapidly — but by no means that it was already very large. Quite the contrary: I would infer that it was still thin, and that there was room and food for many more people. On the other hand, if I find that at some period the difficulties of supporting a family were very great, that few early marriages took place, and that a large number of both men and women remained single, I would conclude with certainty that population growth had stalled — and probably because the actual population was already very large relative to the fertility of the land, leaving scarcely any room or food for more. Hume acknowledges that the number of footmen, housemaids, and other people who remain unmarried in modern nations is, if anything, an argument against their population being large. I would draw exactly the opposite conclusion, and see it as evidence that these nations are full — though this inference is not certain, because there are many thinly populated countries that are nonetheless standing still in their growth. To put it precisely, then: the proportion of unmarried people at different periods, in the same or different countries, can tell us whether population at those times was increasing, stagnant, or declining — but it cannot tell us the actual size of the population.
There is, however, one detail noted in most accounts of China that seems hard to square with this reasoning. It is said that early marriage is widespread across all levels of Chinese society. Yet Adam Smith assumes that China's population is stationary. These two facts appear impossible to reconcile. It certainly seems very unlikely that China's population is growing rapidly. Every acre of land has been cultivated for so long that it is hard to imagine any significant yearly increase in average production. Perhaps the supposed universality of early marriage has not been firmly established. But if we accept it as true, the only way to explain the contradiction — given what we currently know — seems to be this: the excess population that early marriage inevitably produces must be kept down by periodic famines and by the practice of abandoning unwanted children, which in times of hardship is probably far more common than anyone ever admits to Europeans. On this horrifying practice, it is hard to avoid pointing out that there can be no stronger proof of the suffering humanity has endured from lack of food than the existence of a custom that so violates the most basic instinct of the human heart. It appears to have been widespread among ancient nations and, ironically, probably tended to increase population rather than reduce it.
When we look at the major states of modern Europe, we find that although they have grown considerably since the days when they were nations of shepherds, their growth today is very slow. Instead of doubling their numbers every twenty-five years, they need three or four hundred years — or more — to accomplish that. Some may be completely stagnant, and others may actually be shrinking. The cause of this slow growth cannot be traced to any weakening of sexual desire. We have every reason to believe that this natural drive still exists in full force. So why don't its effects show up as rapid population growth? A close look at the state of society in any one European country — which can stand as an example for all the rest — will answer this question. Anticipating the difficulties of raising a family acts as a preventive check, while the actual hardships suffered by the poorest members of society — hardships that leave them unable to give their children proper food and care — act as a positive check on the natural increase of population.
England, as one of the most prosperous states in Europe, can fairly be taken as our example, and the observations we make will apply with little variation to any other country where population growth is slow.
The preventive check appears to operate to some degree through all levels of society in England. There are men even in the highest class who are discouraged from marrying by the thought of the expenses they would have to cut back on and the pleasures they would have to give up if they had a family. These concerns are admittedly trivial, but this kind of cautious foresight takes on much weightier considerations as we move down the social ladder.
A man with a good education but an income only just large enough to let him move in the circles of a gentleman must feel absolutely certain that if he marries and has a family, he will — if he continues to socialize at all — find himself on the same level as modest farmers and the lower tier of shopkeepers. The kind of woman an educated man would naturally choose as a partner would be someone raised with the same tastes and values, someone accustomed to the social world of her own class — a world entirely different from the one she would be reduced to by marriage. Can a man really bring himself to place the woman he loves in a situation so out of step with her tastes and expectations? A drop of two or three rungs on the social ladder — especially at the level where education ends and ignorance begins — is not some imagined or far-fetched hardship, but a real and serious one. If social life is worth having, it surely must be the kind shared among equals, where respect flows both ways and favors are given as well as received — not the kind a dependent endures with his patron, or a poor person with a rich one.
These considerations undoubtedly keep a great number of people in this class from following their hearts into an early attachment. Others, driven by stronger passion or weaker judgment, break through these barriers. And it would be harsh indeed if the fulfillment of something as wonderful as genuine love did not, at least sometimes, more than outweigh all the troubles that come with it. But I am afraid we have to admit that the more common results of such marriages tend to justify the caution of the prudent rather than prove them wrong.
The sons of shopkeepers and farmers are urged not to marry, and they generally find it necessary to follow this advice until they have established themselves in some business or found a farm that can support a family. These milestones may not come until they are well along in years. The scarcity of available farms is a widespread complaint in England, and competition in every line of business is so fierce that not everyone can hope to succeed.
The laborer who earns eighteen pence a day and lives with some degree of comfort as a single man will think twice before dividing that small income among four or five mouths when it barely seems enough for one. He would willingly accept worse food and harder work for the sake of living with the woman he loves, but if he thinks about it at all, he must realize that if he ends up with a large family and any bad luck whatsoever, no amount of thrift, no possible effort of his physical strength, could save him from the heartbreaking sight of watching his children go hungry — or from losing his independence and having to turn to the parish for support. The love of independence is a feeling that surely no one would want to see wiped from the human heart. And yet the parish relief system in England, we have to admit, is a system more likely than any other to gradually erode that feeling — and in the end may destroy it completely.
The servants who live in the households of wealthy families face even stronger barriers to marriage. They enjoy the necessities and even the comforts of life in nearly the same abundance as their employers. Their work is easy and their food generous compared with that of the laboring class. And their sense of dependence is softened by the knowledge that they can always leave and find a new employer if they feel mistreated. So there they are, comfortably settled for the present — but what are their prospects if they marry? Without skills or savings for business or farming, and unaccustomed to and therefore unable to earn a living through daily manual labor, their only option seems to be a run-down tavern — which is hardly an enchanting vision of a happy later life. The great majority, therefore, put off by this unappealing picture of their future, resign themselves to staying single where they are.
If this sketch of English society is close to the truth — and I do not think it is exaggerated — then it should be clear that the preventive check to population operates in this country, with varying force, through every class of society. The same observation holds true for all long-established nations. The effects of these restraints on marriage are, unfortunately, all too visible in the vices they produce in nearly every part of the world — vices that continually drag both men and women into deep and inescapable unhappiness.
The second, or positive, check to population examined in England -- The real reason why the enormous sum collected for the poor in England doesn't actually improve their condition -- The powerful tendency of the Poor Laws to defeat their own purpose -- A proposed partial remedy for the suffering of the poor -- The absolute impossibility, given the fixed laws of human nature, that the pressure of poverty can ever be completely removed from the lower classes of society -- All checks to population can ultimately be traced back to misery or vice.
The positive check to population — by which I mean the forces that cut short lives that have already begun — falls mainly, though perhaps not entirely, on the lowest levels of society.
This check isn't as easy to see as the preventive check I discussed earlier, and proving exactly how powerful and widespread it is would probably require more data than we currently have. But it has been widely observed by people who study death records that, of all the children who die each year, a disproportionate number belong to families too poor to give their children proper food and care — families exposed to occasional severe hardship, often living in unhealthy housing and working backbreaking jobs. This high death rate among the children of the poor has been noted consistently in every town. It certainly isn't as bad in the countryside, but the subject hasn't received enough attention for anyone to confidently say that even in rural areas, the children of the poor don't die at higher rates than those of the middle and upper classes. When you think about it, this is hardly surprising. It's hard to imagine that a laborer's wife with six children, who sometimes lacks even bread, could always provide them with the food and care they need to survive. The sons and daughters of peasants in real life are nothing like the rosy-cheeked cherubs you find described in romance novels. Anyone who spends much time in the countryside can't help but notice that the sons of laborers tend to be stunted in their growth and take a long time reaching maturity. Boys you'd guess to be fourteen or fifteen turn out, when you ask, to be eighteen or nineteen. And the young men who drive the plow — which should certainly be healthy exercise — almost never have any real muscle on their legs. This can only be explained by a lack of proper or sufficient nourishment.
To address the constant hardships of ordinary people, England's Poor Laws were created. But unfortunately, while they may have slightly eased the intensity of individual suffering, they have spread the overall problem across a much wider surface. It's a topic that comes up regularly in conversation, and people always express great surprise that, despite the enormous sum collected annually for the poor in England, there is still so much suffering among them. Some suspect the money is being embezzled. Others think the churchwardens and overseers spend most of it on dinners for themselves. Everyone agrees it must somehow be terribly mismanaged. In short, the fact that nearly three million pounds are collected every year for the poor and yet their suffering continues is a source of constant astonishment. But anyone who looks a little below the surface would actually be far more astonished if the outcome were any different — or even if a tax of eighteen shillings in the pound, instead of four, would meaningfully change it. Let me explain what I mean with an example.
Suppose that, through a fund raised by the rich, the eighteen pence a day that workers currently earn were topped up to five shillings. You might imagine that they'd then be able to live comfortably, with a piece of meat for dinner every day. But this would be a completely false conclusion. Transferring an extra three shillings and sixpence a day to every laborer would not increase the total amount of meat in the country. There isn't enough right now for everyone to have a decent share. So what would actually happen? The competition among buyers in the meat market would quickly drive the price up from sixpence or sevenpence to two or three shillings per pound, and the meat would end up being divided among roughly the same number of people as before. When something is scarce and can't be given to everyone, the person with the strongest claim — that is, the person who offers the most money — gets it. If we imagine this increased competition for meat continuing long enough for farmers to raise more cattle each year, this could only happen at the expense of grain production — a very poor trade-off, because it's well established that the country couldn't then support as many people. And when food is scarce relative to the population, it makes little difference whether the poorest members of society earn eighteen pence or five shillings. Either way, they end up eating the cheapest food in the smallest amounts.
Some might object that the increased number of buyers for every product would spur productive industry, and that the country's total output would grow. This might happen to some degree. But the boost that this imagined wealth would give to population growth would more than cancel it out, and the increased output would have to be divided among a disproportionately larger number of people. This whole time, I'm assuming the same amount of work would get done as before. But that wouldn't actually be the case. Receiving five shillings a day instead of eighteen pence would make every man feel comparatively rich and tempted to spend more hours or days in leisure. This would deliver a sharp and immediate blow to productive industry, and in short order, not only would the nation as a whole be poorer, but the lower classes themselves would be far worse off than when they earned only eighteen pence a day.
A tax on the rich of eighteen shillings in the pound, even distributed in the wisest possible way, would have roughly the same effect as the scenario I just described. No amount of contributions or sacrifices from the rich, especially in the form of money, could prevent hardship from returning to the poorest members of society, whoever they might be. Great upheavals could certainly happen. The rich might become poor, and some of the poor might become rich. But some portion of society would inevitably struggle to get by, and this struggle would naturally fall on the least fortunate.
It may seem strange at first, but I believe it's true: I cannot use money alone to lift a poor man up and help him live much better than before without proportionally pushing others in the same class down. If I cut back on the food consumed in my own household and give him what I've saved, then I help him without hurting anyone except myself and my family — who can probably bear it. If I plow up a piece of unused land and give him the produce, I help both him and everyone else, because what he previously consumed goes back into the common supply, probably along with some of the new produce as well. But if I simply give him money, while the country's total output stays the same, I'm giving him a claim to a larger share of that output than he had before — a share he can't receive without reducing the shares of others. In any individual case, this effect is so small as to be totally invisible. But it still exists, much like those tiny insects filling the air that escape our notice.
If we suppose the total food supply of any country to remain constant over many years, it's clear that this food must be divided according to the value of each person's claim — that is, the amount of money they can afford to spend on this universally needed commodity. (Godwin calls the wealth a person inherits from their ancestors a "moldy patent." It can, I think, quite properly be called a patent, but I hardly see the point of calling it "moldy," since it's an item in such constant use.) It's therefore a demonstrable truth that the claims of one group of people cannot increase in value without reducing the value of the claims held by some other group. If the rich were to subscribe and give five shillings a day to 500,000 men without cutting back on their own consumption, there can be no doubt that, as these men would naturally live more comfortably and consume a greater quantity of food, there would be less food left for everyone else. Consequently, each person's claim would be worth less — the same number of coins would buy a smaller quantity of food.
An increase in population without a proportional increase in food will obviously have the same effect of reducing the value of each person's claim. The food must necessarily be divided into smaller portions, and consequently a day's labor will buy less food. A rise in food prices can come from either of two sources: population growing faster than the food supply, or a shift in how money is distributed throughout society. The food supply of a long-settled country, if it's growing at all, grows slowly and steadily. It can't be ramped up to meet sudden spikes in demand. But shifts in the distribution of money within a society happen fairly often, and they are undoubtedly among the causes behind the constant fluctuations we observe in food prices.
The Poor Laws of England tend to worsen the general condition of the poor in two ways. First, their most obvious effect is to increase the population without increasing the food to support it. A poor man may marry with little or no prospect of being able to support a family on his own. The Poor Laws can therefore be said, in some measure, to create the very poverty they are meant to relieve. And as the country's food supply must, because of this increased population, be divided into smaller portions for everyone, it's clear that the labor of those who don't receive parish assistance will buy less food than before — and consequently, more of them will be driven to ask for support.
Second, the food consumed in workhouses by a segment of the population that generally cannot be considered the most productive reduces the shares that would otherwise go to more industrious and more deserving members of society, forcing more people into dependency in exactly the same way. If the poor in the workhouses were to live better than they currently do, this new distribution of society's money would even more visibly worsen the condition of those outside the workhouses by driving up food prices.
Fortunately for England, a spirit of independence still survives among the rural working class. The Poor Laws are strongly designed to stamp out this spirit. They have partly succeeded, but had they succeeded as completely as one might have expected, their destructive effects would not have remained hidden for so long.
As harsh as it may sound in individual cases, dependent poverty ought to be considered disgraceful. This kind of social pressure seems to be absolutely necessary for promoting the happiness of the great majority of people, and every broad attempt to weaken it — however kind-hearted its apparent intention — will always defeat its own purpose. If men are tempted to marry because they expect parish support, with little or no chance of maintaining their families independently, they are not only unfairly lured into bringing unhappiness and dependency upon themselves and their children — they are also, without knowing it, doing harm to everyone else in their class. A laborer who marries without being able to support a family can in some respects be considered an enemy to all his fellow laborers.
I have no doubt whatsoever that England's parish laws have helped drive up food prices and drive down real wages. They have therefore helped to impoverish the very class of people whose only possession is their labor. It's also hard to believe they haven't powerfully contributed to the carelessness and lack of thrift so often observed among the poor — an attitude strikingly different from the careful habits you typically see among small shopkeepers and family farmers. The working poor, to put it bluntly, seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present needs consume all their attention, and they rarely think about the future. Even when they have a chance to save, they seldom do. Whatever goes beyond their immediate needs generally ends up at the alehouse. England's Poor Laws can therefore be said to reduce both the ability and the desire to save among ordinary people, weakening one of the strongest incentives to sobriety and hard work — and consequently, to happiness.
It's a common complaint among factory owners that high wages ruin their workers. But it's hard to believe these workers wouldn't save some of their high wages for the future support of their families, instead of spending them on drinking and reckless living, if they didn't count on parish assistance to bail them out in case of accidents. And the evidence that the manufacturing poor do treat this assistance as a reason to spend everything they earn and enjoy themselves while they can is clear from how many families, the moment a large factory shuts down, immediately fall on the parish — even when the wages earned at that factory while it was running were high enough above normal country wages to have let them save enough to get by until they found other work.
A man who might not be deterred from going to the alehouse by the thought that if he fell sick or died, his wife and children would end up on the parish — that same man might well think twice about wasting his earnings if he knew that, in either case, his family would have to starve or depend on whatever charity strangers might offer. In China, where both the real and nominal price of labor is very low, sons are still required by law to support their aging and helpless parents. Whether such a law would be wise in this country, I won't pretend to say. But it certainly seems highly improper to use public institutions that make dependent poverty so widespread as to weaken the disgrace that, for the best and most humane reasons, ought to be attached to it.
The overall happiness of ordinary people can only be diminished when one of the strongest deterrents to idleness and reckless spending is removed in this way, and when men are lured into marrying with little or no prospect of supporting a family on their own. Every obstacle in the way of marriage must certainly be considered a form of unhappiness. But since the laws of our nature require some check on population, it is better for that check to come from a clear-eyed awareness of the difficulties of raising a family and the fear of dependent poverty, than for people to be encouraged to have families only to be crushed afterward by want and sickness.
We should always remember that there is a fundamental difference between food and manufactured goods whose raw materials are abundant. Demand for manufactured goods will reliably produce them in whatever quantity is needed. Demand for food has nothing like the same creative power. In a country where all the fertile land has already been claimed, large incentives are needed to persuade farmers to invest in land from which they can't expect a profitable return for years. And before the prospect of profit is great enough to encourage this kind of agricultural investment, and while the new crops are still growing, people may suffer terribly from the lack of food. The demand for more food is, with few exceptions, constant everywhere — yet we see how slowly it is answered in every long-settled country.
England's Poor Laws were undoubtedly created with the most generous intentions, but there is strong reason to believe they have not achieved their goal. They certainly ease some cases of very severe hardship that might otherwise occur. Yet the condition of the poor who are supported by parishes, when you consider it in all its aspects, is very far from being free of misery. But one of the main objections to the Poor Laws is this: in exchange for assistance that some of the poor receive — assistance that is itself almost a mixed blessing — the entire working class of England is subjected to a set of harsh, intrusive, and tyrannical regulations, completely at odds with the true spirit of the constitution. The whole system of settlement laws, even in its current reformed state, is utterly contradictory to any notion of freedom. The parish harassment of men whose families might become a burden on the system, and of poor women who are about to give birth, is a deeply disgraceful and repulsive form of tyranny. And the barriers these laws constantly throw up in the labor market have an ongoing tendency to make things harder for those who are struggling to support themselves without help.
These problems built into the Poor Laws are, to some degree, unfixable. If assistance is going to be distributed to a certain class of people, someone has to be given the power to decide who qualifies and to manage the necessary institutions. But any major interference in other people's affairs is a form of tyranny, and in the ordinary course of things, the exercise of this power can be expected to become oppressive to those who are forced to ask for help. The tyranny of justices, churchwardens, and overseers is a common complaint among the poor. But the fault lies not so much with these individuals — who were probably no worse than anyone else before they got their positions — as with the nature of all such institutions.
The damage may have gone too far to undo. But I have little doubt that if the Poor Laws had never existed, though there might have been a few more cases of very severe hardship, the total happiness of ordinary people would have been far greater than it is now.
Mr. Pitt's Poor Bill appears to have been framed with kind intentions, and the outcry raised against it was in many ways misguided and unreasonable. But we have to admit that it shares, to a high degree, the great and fundamental flaw of all such systems: the tendency to increase population without increasing the means to support it, thereby worsening the condition of those who don't receive parish aid, and consequently creating more poverty.
Eliminating the hardships of the lower classes is indeed a monumental task. The truth is that the pressure of poverty on this part of the community is a problem so deeply rooted that no human ingenuity can reach it. If I were to propose a partial remedy — and partial remedies are all that the nature of the situation allows — it would be, first, the total abolition of all existing parish laws. This would at the very least give the working people of England the liberty and freedom of movement that they can hardly be said to have now. They would then be able to settle wherever they chose, without interference, wherever the work was more plentiful and the wages were higher. The labor market would then be free, and those obstacles would be removed which, as things currently stand, often prevent wages from rising in response to demand for a considerable time.
Second, incentives could be offered for bringing new land under cultivation, and where possible, encouragement given to agriculture over manufacturing, and to crop farming over grazing. Every effort should be made to weaken and dismantle those institutions — guilds, apprenticeship requirements, and so on — that cause agricultural labor to be paid less than work in trades and manufacturing. A country can never produce its full capacity of food while these imbalances persist in favor of tradespeople. Such encouragements to agriculture would tend to fill the labor market with a growing supply of healthy work, and at the same time, by increasing the country's total output, would raise the relative value of wages and improve the condition of the laborer. Being now in better circumstances and seeing no prospect of parish assistance, workers would be both more able and more inclined to join mutual aid societies to prepare for sickness in themselves or their families.
Finally, for cases of extreme hardship, county workhouses could be established, funded by taxes collected across the entire kingdom, and open to people from all counties — indeed, from all nations. The conditions should be austere, and those who were able should be required to work. It would be important that these places not be seen as comfortable refuges from every difficulty, but merely as places where severe suffering could find some relief. Part of these facilities could be set aside, or separate ones built, for a highly beneficial purpose that has often been suggested: providing a place where any person, whether native or foreign, could come at any time to do a day's work and receive the market rate for it. Many cases would undoubtedly still be left to individual charity and generosity.
A plan along these lines — beginning with the abolition of all existing parish laws — seems best designed to increase the overall happiness of England's working people. To prevent the return of hardship is, sadly, beyond human power. In our futile attempt to achieve what is by nature impossible, we currently sacrifice not only possible but certain benefits. We tell ordinary people that if they submit to a code of tyrannical regulations, they will never be in want. They do submit to these regulations. They hold up their end of the bargain — but we do not, and indeed cannot, hold up ours. And so the poor sacrifice the precious blessing of liberty and receive nothing that could be called fair compensation in return.
Despite the existence of the Poor Laws in England, then, I think it will be granted that when we consider the condition of the lower classes as a whole — both in the towns and in the countryside — the suffering they endure from a lack of proper and sufficient food, from hard labor, and from unhealthy living conditions must act as a constant check on population growth.
To these two great checks on population in all long-settled countries — which I have called the preventive check and the positive check — we may add harmful customs regarding women, large cities, unhealthy factory work, luxury, plague, and war.
All these checks can ultimately be traced back to misery and vice. And that these are the true causes of the slow population growth across the nations of modern Europe will be clear enough from the comparatively rapid growth that has always occurred whenever these causes have been significantly reduced.
New colonies -- Why they grow so fast -- The North American colonies -- An extraordinary example of growth in the frontier settlements -- How quickly even old nations bounce back from war, plague, famine, or natural disasters.
It has been widely observed that all new colonies established in healthy regions, where there was plenty of space and food, have consistently grown at astonishing rates. Some of the colonies founded by ancient Greece — city-states that sent settlers to places like Sicily and southern Italy — surpassed their parent states in population and power in a remarkably short time. And without dwelling on such distant examples, the European settlements in the New World offer overwhelming proof of a point that, as far as I know, no one has ever seriously disputed: an abundance of rich land, available for little or nothing, is such a powerful driver of population growth that it overwhelms every other obstacle.
No colonies could have been worse managed than Spain's settlements in Mexico, Peru, and Quito. The tyranny, superstition, and corruption of the mother country were exported in generous quantities to her colonies. The Crown extracted exorbitant taxes. The most arbitrary restrictions were placed on colonial trade. And the colonial governors were every bit as greedy and extortionate on their own behalf as they were on behalf of their king. Yet even under all these handicaps, the colonies grew rapidly. The city of Lima, founded after the Spanish conquest, was described by the explorer Ulloa as containing 50,000 inhabitants about fifty years ago. Quito, which had been nothing more than a small Indigenous village, was described by the same author as equally populous in his time. Mexico City is said to have held 100,000 inhabitants — which, even allowing for the exaggerations of Spanish writers, is thought to be five times larger than it was in the time of Montezuma.
In the Portuguese colony of Brazil, governed with almost equal tyranny, the population of European descent was estimated at 600,000 about thirty years ago.
The Dutch and French colonies, though ruled by exclusive trading companies — which, as Adam Smith rightly observed, is the worst form of government imaginable — still managed to thrive despite every disadvantage.
But the English colonies in North America — now the powerful nation of the United States of America — made by far the most rapid progress of all. In addition to the abundant good land they shared with the Spanish and Portuguese settlements, they enjoyed a much greater degree of liberty and equality. Although they faced some restrictions on foreign trade, the colonists were given complete freedom to manage their own internal affairs. Their political institutions encouraged the breakup and distribution of property. Land that a proprietor left uncultivated beyond a set time period could be claimed by anyone else. In Pennsylvania, there was no right of primogeniture — the rule that gave everything to the eldest son. And in the New England provinces, the eldest child received only a double share. There were no tithes in any of the states and almost no taxes. And because good land was so extraordinarily cheap, the most profitable use of capital was in agriculture — which happened to be the activity that both provided the most healthy work and produced the most valuable goods for society.
The result of all these favorable conditions combined was a rate of population growth probably unmatched in history. Across all the northern colonies, the population was found to double every twenty-five years. The original number of settlers in the four New England provinces in 1643 was 21,200. (I take these figures from Dr. Price's two volumes of Observations, not having Dr. Stiles' pamphlet, from which he quotes, at hand.) After that initial settlement, it appears that more people actually left these provinces than arrived. Yet by 1760, the population had grown to half a million. They had therefore been doubling their own numbers every twenty-five years the entire time. In New Jersey, the doubling period appeared to be just twenty-two years, and in Rhode Island it was even shorter. In the frontier settlements, where the inhabitants devoted themselves entirely to farming and luxury was unheard of, the population doubled every fifteen years — a truly extraordinary rate of increase. Along the seacoast, which would naturally have been settled first, the doubling period was about thirty-five years. And in some of the port towns, the population had stopped growing entirely.
(In cases like this, the productive power of the land appears fully capable of meeting the demands for food that people can place on it. But we would be making a mistake if we concluded that population and food ever actually increase at the same rate. One still grows geometrically — that is, by multiplication — and the other arithmetically — that is, by addition. Where there are few people and a great quantity of fertile land, the earth's capacity to produce more food each year can be compared to a large reservoir of water fed by a moderate stream. The faster the population grows, the more hands are available to draw water from the reservoir, and so an increasing quantity will be taken every year. But the sooner, of course, the reservoir will be drained, and only the modest stream will remain. Once acre after acre has been added until all the fertile land is occupied, the yearly increase in food will depend on improving the land already under cultivation — and even that moderate stream will gradually diminish. But population, if it could be supplied with food, would keep growing with undiminished energy. The increase from one generation would fuel an even greater increase in the next, and the next — without any limit.)
These facts seem to show that population increases in exact proportion to the removal of the two great checks upon it — misery and vice — and that there is no truer measure of a people's happiness and innocence than how rapidly they multiply. The unhealthiness of cities, where some people are forced to live by the nature of their work, must be counted as a form of misery. And even the slightest discouragement to marriage, arising from the prospect of struggling to feed a family, can fairly be classified under the same heading. In short, it is hard to imagine any check on population that does not fall under the category of either misery or vice.
The population of the thirteen American states before the Revolutionary War was estimated at about three million. Nobody imagines that Great Britain is less populous today because of the small group of original emigrants who produced those numbers. On the contrary, a certain degree of emigration is known to actually benefit the population of the mother country. It has been specifically noted that the two Spanish provinces that sent the most emigrants to America actually became more populous as a result. So here is the question: whatever the original number of British emigrants who multiplied so rapidly in the North American colonies, why doesn't an equal number produce an equal increase in the same time period back in Great Britain? The great and obvious answer is the lack of room and food — or in other words, misery. And that misery is an even more powerful check than vice becomes clear enough from the remarkable speed with which even old nations recover from the devastation of war, plague, or natural disaster. After such catastrophes, these countries are temporarily placed in something like the situation of new colonies — and the result is always exactly what you would expect. As long as the surviving population's willingness to work has not been crushed by fear or tyranny, the food supply will soon grow beyond what the reduced population needs, and the inevitable consequence is this: a population that had perhaps been nearly stagnant will immediately begin to grow again.
The fertile province of Flanders — in what is now Belgium — which had so often been the battleground for Europe's most destructive wars, always appeared just as productive and just as populous as ever after only a few years of peace. Even the Palatinate region of Germany recovered after the horrific devastation inflicted by Louis XIV. The effects of the catastrophic plague that struck London in 1666 were no longer detectable just fifteen or twenty years later. The traces of the most devastating famines in China and India are, by all accounts, erased remarkably quickly. It is even debatable whether Turkey and Egypt are, on average, much less populous because of the plagues that periodically sweep through them. If their populations are smaller today than in earlier times, the cause is probably the tyranny and oppression of their governments — and the resulting discouragement of agriculture — rather than the losses from plague. The most tremendous upheavals of nature — volcanic eruptions and earthquakes — have only a minor effect on a country's long-term population, so long as they do not occur so frequently that they drive the inhabitants away or crush their spirit of industry. Naples and the countryside around Vesuvius remain densely populated despite that volcano's repeated eruptions. And Lisbon and Lima are now probably in much the same state, population-wise, as they were before their last great earthquakes.
A probable cause of epidemics -- Excerpts from Suessmilch's tables -- Periodical returns of sickly seasons should be expected in certain cases -- The ratio of births to deaths over a short period is an inadequate measure of a country's real average population growth -- The best measure of a permanent increase in population -- Extreme frugality of living as one of the causes of the famines in China and India -- The harmful tendency of one clause in Pitt's Poor Bill -- The only proper way to encourage population growth -- The causes of national happiness -- Famine, the last and most dreadful way nature keeps a surplus population in check -- The three propositions considered as established.
Thanks to careful attention to cleanliness, the plague seems to have been completely driven out of London at last. But it is not unlikely that overcrowding and unwholesome or insufficient food should be counted among the underlying causes that produce sickly seasons and epidemics. I was led to this thought by looking over some of the tables compiled by Suessmilch, which Dr. Price excerpted in one of his notes to the postscript on the controversy about England and Wales's population. These tables are considered very accurate, and if such records were kept everywhere, they would shed great light on the different ways population is held in check and kept from outgrowing the means of subsistence in any country. I will quote part of the tables along with Dr. Price's remarks.
IN THE KINGDOM OF PRUSSIA AND DUKEDOM OF LITHUANIA
Proportion Proportion
Births Burials Marriages of Births to of Births to
Marriages Burials
10 Yrs to 1702 21,963 14,718 5,928 37 to 10 150 to 100
5 Yrs to 1716 21,602 11,984 4,968 37 to 10 180 to 100
5 Yrs to 1756 28,392 19,154 5,599 50 to 10 148 to 100
"N.B. In 1709 and 1710, a pestilence carried off 247,733 of the inhabitants of this country, and in 1736 and 1737, epidemics prevailed, which again checked its increase."
Notice that the greatest proportion of births to deaths came in the five years right after the great pestilence.
DUCHY OF POMERANIA
Proportion Proportion
Annual Average Births Burials Marriages of Births to of Births to
Marriages Burials
6 yrs to 1702 6,540 4,647 1,810 36 to 10 140 to 100
6 yrs to 1708 7,455 4,208 1,875 39 to 10 177 to 100
6 yrs to 1726 8,432 5,627 2,131 39 to 10 150 to 100
6 yrs to 1756 12,767 9,281 2,957 43 to 10 137 to 100
"In this instance the inhabitants appear to have nearly doubled in fifty-six years, no very bad epidemics having once interrupted the increase, but the three years immediately following the last period (to 1759) were so sickly that births fell to 10,229 and deaths rose to 15,068."
Isn't it likely that in this case the population had grown faster than the food supply and the living conditions needed to keep people healthy? Under this assumption, most people would have been forced to eat worse and live more crowded — more of them packed into each house — and it is surely plausible that these were among the natural causes that produced those three sickly years. These causes can produce such an effect even if the country, taken as a whole, is not extremely crowded or densely populated. Even in a thinly settled country, if population increases before more food is grown and more housing is built, people will inevitably be squeezed for both room and subsistence. If marriages in England over the next eight or ten years were more productive than usual, or even if a greater number of marriages than usual took place with the same number of houses, you would need to fit seven or eight people in a cottage instead of five or six. That overcrowding, combined with the necessity of living on less, would probably have a very harmful effect on the health of ordinary people.
NEUMARK OF BRANDENBURG
Proportion Proportion
Annual Average Births Burials Marriages of Births to of Births to
Marriages Burials
5 yrs to 1701 5,433 3,483 1,436 37 to 10 155 to 100
5 yrs to 1726 7,012 4,254 1,713 40 to 10 164 to 100
5 yrs to 1756 7,978 5,567 1,891 42 to 10 143 to 100
"Epidemics prevailed for six years, from 1736 to 1741, which checked the increase."
DUKEDOM OF MAGDEBURG
Proportion Proportion
Annual Average Births Burials Marriages of Births to of Births to
Marriages Burials
5 yrs to 1702 6,431 4,103 1,681 38 to 10 156 to 100
5 yrs to 1717 7,590 5,335 2,076 36 to 10 142 to 100
5 yrs to 1756 8,850 8,069 2,193 40 to 10 109 to 100
"The years 1738, 1740, 1750, and 1751 were particularly sickly."
For more on this subject, I refer the reader to Suessmilch's tables. The excerpts I have included are enough to show the periodic — though irregular — return of sickly seasons, and it seems highly probable that a shortage of living space and food was one of their main causes.
It is clear from the tables that these countries were growing rather fast for long-established states, despite the occasional epidemics. Agriculture must have been improving, and marriages were consequently being encouraged. The checks to population appear to have been more of the positive kind than the preventive kind. When the weight that holds population down is lifted somewhat — because a country's food supply is growing and prospects look brighter — it is highly likely that the upward momentum will continue beyond the conditions that first set it in motion. To be more specific: when a country's increasing production and increasing demand for labor improve workers' conditions enough to strongly encourage marriage, early marriage will probably become the custom and persist until the population has outgrown the increased food supply. At that point, sickly seasons appear to be the natural and necessary consequence. I would therefore expect that countries where food supply was increasing enough to encourage population growth from time to time — but not enough to meet all the demand it created — would be more prone to periodic epidemics than countries where population could more fully adjust itself to the average level of production.
The reverse observation will probably also prove true. In countries that are subject to periodic waves of sickness, population growth — measured by the excess of births over deaths — will be greater in the intervals between those episodes than it typically is, all else being equal, in countries not so afflicted by such outbreaks. If Turkey and Egypt have been roughly stationary in their average population over the past century, then in the intervals between their periodic plagues, births must have exceeded deaths by a much greater margin than in countries like France and England.
The average ratio of births to deaths in any country over a five- or ten-year period will therefore prove to be a very unreliable measure of its real population growth. That ratio certainly shows the rate of increase during those five or ten years, but we cannot in any way conclude from it what growth had been like for the twenty years before, or what it would be for the twenty years after. Dr. Price observes that Sweden, Norway, Russia, and the Kingdom of Naples are all growing quickly. But the excerpts from records he provides do not cover long enough periods to prove the point. It is highly probable, however, that Sweden, Norway, and Russia really are growing in population — just not at the rate that the birth-to-death ratios for the short periods Dr. Price selected would seem to indicate. (See Dr. Price's Observations, Vol. II, postscript to the controversy on the population of England and Wales.) For five years ending in 1777, the ratio of births to deaths in the Kingdom of Naples was 144 to 100. But there is good reason to think this ratio points to a growth rate much higher than what actually took place in that kingdom over the course of a hundred years.
Dr. Short compared the church records of many villages and market towns in England over two periods: the first running from Queen Elizabeth's reign to the middle of the last century, and the second from various years at the end of the last century to the middle of the present one. From comparing these records, it appears that in the earlier period, births exceeded deaths in the ratio of 124 to 100, but in the later period, only 111 to 100. Dr. Price thinks the earlier records are unreliable, but in this case they probably do give roughly accurate proportions. There are, at any rate, many reasons to expect a greater excess of births over deaths in the earlier period than in the later one. In the natural progress of any country's population, all else being equal, more good land will be brought under cultivation in the earlier stages than in the later ones. (I say "all else being equal" because a country's agricultural output will always depend enormously on the prevailing spirit of enterprise and how it is directed. The knowledge and habits of the people, along with other temporary factors — especially the degree of political freedom and equality at the time — will always have a powerful influence in sparking and directing that spirit.) A greater proportional yearly increase in production will almost always be followed by a greater proportional increase in population. But beyond this major factor — which alone would naturally make the excess of births over deaths greater in Queen Elizabeth's time than in the mid-1700s — I cannot help thinking that the occasional ravages of the plague during the earlier period must have tended to inflate this ratio further. If someone had taken a ten-year average during the intervals between outbreaks of that terrible disease, or simply thrown out the plague years as anomalies, the records would certainly show a birth-to-death ratio too high to represent the real average population growth. For a few years after the Great Plague of 1666, there was probably an unusually large excess of births over deaths — especially if Dr. Price is right that England was more populous at the time of the Revolution (which happened just twenty-two years later) than it is today.
Mr. King, in 1693, stated that the ratio of births to deaths across the kingdom, excluding London, was 115 to 100. Dr. Short puts it at 111 to 100 in the middle of the present century, including London. The ratio in France for five years ending in 1774 was 117 to 100. If these figures are close to the truth, and if there are no major swings at particular periods, it would appear that the populations of France and England have adjusted themselves very closely to the average food production of each country. The discouragements to marriage, the resulting immoral habits, war, luxury, the silent but certain depopulation of large cities, and the cramped housing and inadequate food of many of the poor — all of these prevent population from growing beyond the means of subsistence. And, if I may use an expression that certainly sounds strange at first, they eliminate the need for great and devastating epidemics to cut back what would otherwise be a surplus population. If a catastrophic plague were to kill off two million people in England and six million in France, there can be no doubt that once the survivors had recovered from the shock, the ratio of births to deaths would be far higher in both countries than it is at present.
In New Jersey, the ratio of births to deaths over a seven-year average ending in 1743 was 300 to 100. In France and England, taking the highest figure, it is only 117 to 100. As great and astonishing as this difference is, we should not be so amazed as to chalk it up to miraculous divine intervention. The causes are not remote, hidden, or mysterious. They are right in front of us, all around us, and open to the investigation of any curious mind. It is perfectly consistent with the most open-minded philosophy to suppose that not a stone can fall or a plant can grow without the direct hand of divine power. But we know from experience that these operations of what we call nature have been carried out almost invariably according to fixed laws. And since the world began, the causes of population growth and decline have probably been as constant as any of the laws of nature we know.
Sexual desire has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same that it can always be treated, in mathematical terms, as a constant. The great law of necessity that prevents population from growing beyond the food a country can either produce or acquire is so plain to see, so obvious to our understanding, and so completely confirmed by the experience of every age, that we cannot doubt it for a moment. The different methods nature uses to prevent or suppress a surplus population do not, it is true, seem quite so predictable or regular to us. But even though we cannot always predict the method, we can predict the outcome with certainty. If the ratio of births to deaths for a few years points to population growth far beyond the proportional increase in food produced or imported, we can be perfectly certain that — unless emigration occurs — deaths will soon exceed births, and that the growth observed over those few years cannot represent the real average population growth of the country. If there were no other depopulating forces at work, every country would without a doubt suffer periodic pestilences or famines.
The only true measure of a real and permanent increase in a country's population is an increase in its means of subsistence. But even this measure is subject to some slight variations — variations that are, however, fully open to observation. In some countries, population appears to have been forced: that is, the people have been gradually accustomed to living on the smallest possible quantity of food. There must have been periods in such countries when population grew permanently without any increase in the means of subsistence. China seems to fit this description. If the accounts we have are to be trusted, the lowest classes are in the habit of surviving on the bare minimum of food and are glad to eat putrid scraps that European workers would rather starve than touch. The Chinese law that permits parents to abandon their children has mainly served to force population growth in this way. A nation in this condition is inevitably subject to famines. When a country is so heavily populated relative to its means of subsistence that its average production barely keeps its people alive, any shortfall from a bad growing season must be fatal. It is likely that the extremely frugal way the people of India are accustomed to living contributes in some degree to the famines of that region.
In America, where wages are currently so generous, the working classes could cut back considerably in a year of scarcity without being seriously distressed. Famine there seems almost impossible. But as America's population grows, we can expect that workers will eventually be rewarded much less generously. In that case, population will grow permanently without a proportional increase in the means of subsistence.
Across the different states of Europe, there must be some variation in the ratio between the number of inhabitants and the quantity of food consumed, owing to the different living habits that prevail in each state. The workers of southern England are so accustomed to eating fine white bread that they will let themselves go half-starved before they will stoop to living like Scottish peasants. They might in time, through the relentless pressure of hard necessity, be reduced to living even like the poorest Chinese — and the country would then, with the same quantity of food, support a larger population. But to bring this about must always be an extremely difficult undertaking, and every friend of humanity will hope it remains an unsuccessful one. Nothing is so common as hearing about incentives that should be given to encourage population growth. If the human tendency to multiply is as powerful as I have described it, it may seem strange that this increase does not happen when it is so eagerly called for. The real reason is that the demand for a larger population is made without preparing the resources needed to support it. Increase the demand for farm labor by promoting cultivation, and you will consequently increase the country's food production and improve the condition of its workers. Once you do that, you need have no worries whatsoever about a proportional increase in population. Any attempt to achieve this goal in some other way is cruel, immoral, and tyrannical — and in any state that enjoys a reasonable degree of freedom, it therefore cannot succeed. It may seem to be in the interest of rulers and the wealthy to force population growth, thereby driving down the price of labor and consequently the cost of armies, navies, and manufactured goods for export. But every such attempt should be carefully watched and firmly resisted by those who care about the poor — particularly when it comes disguised in the appealing costume of charity and is therefore likely to be cheerfully and warmly embraced by ordinary people.
I completely clear Pitt of any underhanded motive in that clause of his Poor Bill which grants a shilling a week to every worker for each child above three. I admit that before the bill was introduced in Parliament, and for some time after, I thought such a provision would be highly beneficial. But further reflection has convinced me that if its goal is to improve the condition of the poor, it is destined to defeat the very purpose it aims to serve. It has no tendency that I can see to increase the country's food production, and if it tends to increase the population without increasing production, the necessary and inevitable result is clear: the same amount of food must be divided among more people. A day's labor will therefore buy a smaller quantity of food, and the poor in general will be worse off than before.
I have mentioned some cases where population may grow permanently without a proportional increase in the means of subsistence. But it is obvious that the variation between food and the number of people it supports is limited — it cannot stretch beyond a certain point. In every country whose population is not actually declining, the food must necessarily be enough to sustain and perpetuate the workforce.
All other things being equal, we can say that countries are populous in proportion to the amount of food they produce, and happy in proportion to how generously that food is distributed — or, put another way, how much food a day's labor will buy. Grain-growing countries are more populous than livestock countries, and rice-growing countries are more populous than grain-growing countries. England's land is not suited to rice, but it could all grow potatoes. Adam Smith observes that if potatoes were to become the favorite food of ordinary people, and if the same amount of land now devoted to grain were planted with potatoes instead, the country could support a much larger population — and would very quickly have one.
A country's happiness does not depend, in absolute terms, on whether it is poor or rich, young or old, thinly settled or fully inhabited. It depends on how rapidly it is growing — on how closely the yearly increase in food keeps pace with the yearly increase of an unchecked population. This gap is always smallest in new colonies, where the knowledge and industry of an established civilization are applied to the fertile, unclaimed land of a new one. In other cases, whether a country is young or old does not matter all that much. It is likely that the food of Great Britain is divided among its inhabitants just as generously today as it was two thousand, three thousand, or four thousand years ago. And there is reason to believe that the poor, thinly inhabited tracts of the Scottish Highlands are as hard-pressed by an overcrowded population as the rich and densely populated province of Flanders.
If a country were never overrun by a more advanced people, but left to its own natural progress in civilization — from the time its total output might be reckoned as one unit to the time it might be reckoned as a million, over the course of many hundreds of years — there would not be a single period when the mass of the people could be said to be free from hardship, either directly or indirectly, for want of food. In every state in Europe, for as far back as we have records, millions upon millions of human lives have been cut short by this simple cause — even though in some of these states an outright famine may never have occurred.
Famine seems to be nature's last, most terrible resort. The power of population is so much greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for humanity that premature death must, in one form or another, visit the human race. The vices of humankind are active and capable agents of depopulation. They are the advance guard in the great army of destruction, and they often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fall short in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in their terrifying ranks and sweep away their thousands and tens of thousands. And should even that prove insufficient, gigantic, inevitable famine stalks in the rear and, with one mighty blow, levels the population with the food supply of the world.
Must it not then be acknowledged by any careful student of human history that in every age and in every state in which people have lived or now live:
That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence.
That population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase.
And that the superior power of population is held in check, and actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice.
Wallace's error -- The mistake of assuming that population pressures are a distant problem -- Condorcet's Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind -- When the oscillation Condorcet describes should actually be applied to the human race.
For anyone who draws the obvious conclusions from everything we have seen about the past and present state of humanity, it must be truly astonishing that all the writers on human perfectibility and the improvement of society who have noticed the population argument treat it so casually. They invariably present the difficulties arising from population pressure as something enormously far off — almost immeasurably distant. Even Robert Wallace, a Scottish clergyman who took the argument seriously enough that he believed it would ultimately destroy his entire system of equality, did not seem to realize that any difficulty from this cause would arise until the entire earth had been cultivated like a garden and was physically incapable of producing any more food. If that were really the case — if population pressure truly would not become a problem until every last acre on earth had been farmed to its limit — and if a beautiful system of equality were otherwise workable, then I do not think our enthusiasm for pursuing such a plan should be dampened by worrying about such a remote difficulty. Something that far off could reasonably be left to providence. But the truth is this: if the argument laid out in this essay is correct, the difficulty is not remote at all. It is immediate and pressing. At every stage of agricultural progress, from the present moment all the way to the point when the whole earth might become like a garden, the suffering caused by lack of food would be constantly bearing down on all of humanity — if people were truly equal. Even if the earth's total output were increasing every year, population would be increasing much faster, and the excess would inevitably be cut back by the periodic or constant pressure of misery and vice.
Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind was written, it is said, while he was under the shadow of the brutal persecution that would ultimately end in his death. If he had no hope of the work being published during his lifetime, and no expectation that it might rally France to his defense, then it stands as a remarkable example of a man's devotion to principles that his own daily experience was so fatally contradicting. To watch the human mind — in one of the most enlightened nations on earth, after thousands of years of civilization — debased by such a disgusting storm of passions: fear, cruelty, malice, revenge, ambition, madness, and folly that would have disgraced the most savage people in the most barbarous age — that must have been a tremendous shock to his belief in the necessary and inevitable progress of the human mind. Nothing but the firmest conviction in the truth of his principles, despite all appearances to the contrary, could have withstood it.
This posthumous publication is only a sketch of a much larger work that Condorcet had planned to write. It necessarily lacks the detail and real-world application that are the only things that can truly prove any theory. A few observations will be enough to show how completely the theory falls apart when it is applied to the real world rather than an imaginary one.
In the final section of the work, which deals with the future progress of humanity toward perfection, Condorcet says that if we compare the actual population of the various civilized European nations with the size of their territories, and look at their farming methods, their industries, their division of labor, and their means of subsistence, we will see that it would be impossible to maintain the same food supply — and therefore the same population — without a large class of people whose only way to meet their needs is through their own labor. Having acknowledged the necessity of such a working class, and then considering how precarious the income of those families would be — depending entirely on the life and health of the primary earner — he says, quite rightly: "There exists, then, a necessary cause of inequality, dependence, and even misery, which constantly threatens the most numerous and active class of our societies." (To save time and avoid lengthy quotations, I will sometimes give the substance of Condorcet's ideas rather than his exact words, and I hope I will not misrepresent them. But I encourage the reader to look at the work itself, which will be entertaining even if it is not convincing.) The problem is stated accurately and well, and I am afraid that the solution he proposes will turn out to be ineffective.
Using calculations based on life expectancy probabilities and interest rates on money, Condorcet proposes that a fund should be established to provide assistance to the elderly — funded partly by their own earlier savings, and partly by the savings of people who contributed to the same fund but died before they could collect the benefits. A similar fund would provide support to women and children who lost their husbands or fathers, and would give young people who were old enough to start a family enough capital to properly develop their skills and trades. These institutions, he notes, could be established in the name and under the protection of the state. Going even further, he says that through the right application of financial calculations, ways could be found to better preserve equality — by preventing access to credit from being the exclusive privilege of the very wealthy, while still giving it an equally solid foundation, and by making industrial progress and commercial activity less dependent on big capitalists.
These kinds of institutions and calculations may look very promising on paper, but when applied to real life, they turn out to be completely useless. Condorcet himself admits that a class of people who support themselves entirely through their own labor is necessary in every society. Why does he admit this? The only reasonable explanation is that he understands the work needed to produce food for a large population will not get done without the pressure of necessity driving it. If institutions like these remove the spur to hard work — if the lazy and the careless are put on the same footing as the active and industrious when it comes to their credit standing and the future support of their wives and children — can we really expect people to show the kind of energetic effort to improve their condition that is currently the driving force behind public prosperity? And if some kind of investigation board were set up to examine each person's claims, to determine whether they had truly done their best, and to grant or deny assistance accordingly — well, that would be little more than a larger-scale version of the English Poor Laws, and it would be completely destructive of the true principles of liberty and equality.
But even setting aside this major objection to these proposed institutions, and assuming for the moment that they would not discourage productive work, by far the greatest difficulty still remains.
If every man were guaranteed a comfortable provision for his family, almost every man would start one. And if the next generation were free from the "killing frost" of misery, population would increase rapidly. Condorcet seems fully aware of this himself, and after describing further improvements, he writes:
But in this process of industry and happiness, each generation will be called to more extensive enjoyments, and as a result — by the physical nature of the human body — to an increase in the number of individuals. Must there not eventually arrive a time when these equally necessary laws work against each other? When the increase in the number of people outpaces their means of subsistence, the inevitable result must be either a continual decline in happiness and population — a truly backward movement — or at best a kind of oscillation between good and evil. In societies that have reached this point, will not this oscillation be a constantly present cause of periodic misery? Will it not mark the limit beyond which all further improvement becomes impossible, and point to a ceiling that human perfectibility may approach over the centuries but can never break through?
He then adds:
No one can fail to see how very distant such a time is from us. But will we ever actually reach it? It is equally impossible to say yes or no about the future occurrence of an event that cannot happen until the human race has achieved advances that we can barely imagine today.
Condorcet's picture of what will happen when the number of people outgrows the means of feeding them is accurately drawn. The oscillation he describes will certainly happen, and it will without doubt be a constantly present cause of periodic misery. The only point where I differ from Condorcet is about when this picture applies to the human race. Condorcet thinks it cannot possibly apply until some extremely distant era. But if the ratio I have described between the natural increase of population and the increase of food is anywhere close to the truth, then the opposite conclusion follows: the time when the number of people outgrows their means of subsistence arrived long ago. This necessary oscillation — this constantly present cause of periodic misery — has existed ever since we have had any recorded history of humanity. It exists right now. And it will continue to exist forever, unless some fundamental change takes place in the physical nature of our species.
Condorcet, however, goes on to say that even if the period he considers so distant were ever to arrive, the human race and the advocates of human perfectibility need not be alarmed by it. He then proceeds to remove the difficulty in a way that, I have to confess, I do not understand. Having observed that by that time the ridiculous prejudices of superstition would have stopped casting their corrupt and degrading shadow over morality, he seems to be suggesting either some form of casual sexual relationships that would prevent reproduction, or something else equally unnatural. Removing the difficulty this way would surely, in most people's opinion, destroy the very virtue and moral standards that the advocates of equality and human perfectibility claim to be the ultimate goal of their vision.
Condorcet's conjecture about the biological perfectibility of the human body and the indefinite extension of human life -- The fallacy of arguing that because partial improvement has occurred and its upper limit is unknown, progress must be unlimited -- Illustrated by the breeding of animals and the cultivation of plants.
The last question Condorcet raises for examination is the biological perfectibility of human beings. He argues that if the evidence already presented — evidence that will grow even stronger in his full work — is enough to prove humanity's indefinite perfectibility assuming we keep the same natural abilities and physical makeup we have now, then how much more certain and far-reaching our hopes become if those abilities and that very physical makeup are themselves capable of improvement.
From advances in medicine, from healthier food and housing, from ways of living that strengthen the body through exercise without wearing it down through excess, from eliminating the two great causes of human degradation — poverty and extreme wealth — and from the gradual conquest of transmissible and contagious diseases through better medical knowledge made more effective by the progress of reason and social organization, Condorcet concludes that although humans will not literally become immortal, the span between birth and natural death will keep increasing without end, will have no fixed limit, and can properly be called "indefinite." He then defines this word to mean either a constant approach toward an unlimited extent without ever actually reaching it, or an increase that over vast stretches of time exceeds any quantity you could name.
But applying this term in either of these senses to the length of human life is deeply unscientific and completely unsupported by anything we observe in the laws of nature. Variations caused by different factors are fundamentally different from a steady, irreversible increase. The average human lifespan will certainly vary to some degree depending on healthy or unhealthy climates, wholesome or unwholesome food, virtuous or destructive habits, and other causes. But it is fair to question whether there has been even the tiniest real advance in the natural length of human life since we first had any reliable record of it. The common assumptions of every age have actually pointed in the opposite direction, and though I would not put too much weight on those assumptions, they do at least suggest there has been no obvious trend the other way.
Someone might say that the world is still so young, so completely in its infancy, that we should not expect any difference to show up this early.
If that is the case, it is the end of all science. The entire chain of reasoning from effects to causes falls apart. We might as well close the book of nature, since reading it would no longer be useful. The wildest and most improbable guesses could be put forward with as much confidence as the most rigorous and well-founded theories based on careful, repeated experiments. We might as well go back to the old way of doing philosophy and force facts to fit our systems, instead of building systems on facts. Newton's grand and consistent theory would be placed on the same footing as the wild and eccentric hypotheses of Descartes. In short, if the laws of nature are that fickle and unreliable — if we can seriously claim they will change when for age after age they have appeared unchanging — then the human mind would have no reason to investigate anything at all. It would have to sit in idle paralysis, or entertain itself with nothing but confused fantasies and extravagant daydreams.
The constancy of natural laws and of the relationship between cause and effect is the foundation of all human knowledge — though far be it from me to say that the same power that designed and carries out the laws of nature could not change them all "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye." Such a change could certainly happen. All I mean to say is that it is impossible to predict it through reasoning. If we can claim that a change will occur without any prior observable symptoms or signs of it, then we might as well make any claim at all. It would be just as unreasonable to contradict someone who says the moon will crash into the earth tomorrow as someone who says the sun will rise at its usual time.
When it comes to the length of human life, there does not appear to have been — from the earliest ages of the world to the present moment — even the smallest lasting sign or indication that lifespans are getting longer. The observable effects of climate, habits, diet, and other factors on how long people live have given people the excuse to assert that human life can be extended indefinitely. And the sandy foundation this argument rests on is this: because the limit of human life is undefined — because you cannot mark its precise boundary and say "this far exactly, and no further" — therefore its length can keep increasing forever and may properly be called indefinite or unlimited. But the fallacy and absurdity of this argument become clear enough from a brief look at what Condorcet calls the organic perfectibility, or degeneration, of plants and animals, which he says can be considered one of the general laws of nature.
I am told that it is a principle among cattle breeders that you can breed for any quality to any degree of refinement you like, and they base this principle on another one: that some of the offspring will possess the desirable traits of the parents to an even greater degree. In the famous Leicestershire breed of sheep, for example, the goal is to produce animals with small heads and small legs. Following these breeding principles, it is obvious that you could keep going until the heads and legs shrank to almost nothing — but this is such a clear absurdity that we can be quite sure the premise is wrong and that there really is a limit, even though we cannot see it or say exactly where it is. In this case, the point of greatest improvement — the smallest possible head and legs — may be called undefined, but that is very different from unlimited, or from "indefinite" in Condorcet's sense of the word. Though I may not be able to mark the exact limit beyond which no further improvement is possible, I can very easily name a point it will never reach. I would not hesitate to say that even if the breeding continued forever, the heads and legs of these sheep would never become as small as the head and legs of a rat.
It cannot be true, therefore, that among animals some of the offspring will always surpass their parents in the desired traits, or that animals are indefinitely perfectible.
The transformation of a wild plant into a beautiful garden flower is perhaps even more dramatic and striking than anything that happens among animals. Yet even here, it would be the height of absurdity to claim that the progress is unlimited or indefinite.
One of the most obvious signs of improvement is the increase in size. The flower has gradually grown larger through cultivation. If the progress were really unlimited, it could be enlarged infinitely — but this is such a ridiculous idea that we can be quite sure there is a limit to improvement among plants just as there is among animals, even if we do not know exactly where it is. Gardeners who compete for flower prizes have probably often tried applying stronger fertilizer without success. At the same time, it would be wildly presumptuous for anyone to say they had seen the finest carnation or anemone that could ever be grown. But you could say, without the slightest chance of being proven wrong, that no carnation or anemone could ever be cultivated to the size of a large cabbage — and yet there are perfectly real quantities much larger than a cabbage. No one can say they have seen the largest ear of wheat or the largest oak that could ever grow. But anyone could easily, and with perfect certainty, name a size they would never reach. In all these cases, then, a careful distinction should be made between unlimited progress and progress whose limit is merely undefined.
Someone might argue that the reason plants and animals cannot grow indefinitely larger is that they would collapse under their own weight. My answer: how do we know that, except from experience? From experience of how strong these organisms actually are. I know that a carnation, long before it reached the size of a cabbage, would not be supported by its stalk — but I only know this from my experience of the weakness and fragility of carnation stalks. There are plenty of substances in nature, of the same size, that could support a head as large as a cabbage.
The reasons why plants die are at present completely unknown to us. No one can explain why one plant is annual, another biennial, and another lives for centuries. The whole matter — in plants, in animals, and in the human race — comes down to experience. And I conclude that human beings are mortal only because the unvarying experience of every age has proven the mortality of the materials our visible bodies are made of:
"What can we reason, but from what we know?"
Sound reasoning will not let me change my view about human mortality on earth until it can be clearly shown that the human race has made, and is making, a definite move toward an unlimited lifespan. And the main reason I brought up those two particular examples from animals and plants was to expose and illustrate, as best I could, the fallacy of the argument that infers unlimited progress simply because some partial improvement has occurred and the upper limit of that improvement cannot be precisely determined.
That plants and animals can be improved to a certain degree, no one can possibly doubt. Clear and definite progress has already been made. And yet, I think it is obvious that it would be absurd to say this progress has no limits. In human life, although there are wide variations from different causes, it is doubtful whether any biological improvement in the human body can be clearly identified since the world began. The foundations on which the argument for human biological perfectibility rests are therefore unusually weak and can only be considered pure speculation. That said, it does not seem at all impossible that with careful attention to breeding, some degree of improvement — similar to what we see among animals — might take place among humans. Whether intelligence could be passed on through breeding may be debatable, but size, strength, beauty, complexion, and perhaps even longevity are to some extent hereditary. The mistake is not in thinking a small degree of improvement is possible, but in failing to distinguish between a small improvement whose limit is undefined and an improvement that is truly unlimited. However, since the human race could not be improved this way without condemning everyone with undesirable traits to a life without children, it is unlikely that selective breeding would ever be widely adopted. Indeed, I know of no well-directed efforts of this kind, except among the ancient Bickerstaff family, who are said to have been very successful in lightening the skin and increasing the height of their line through prudent marriages — particularly through that very shrewd match with Maud the milkmaid, which corrected some serious defects in the family's constitution.
I do not think it is necessary, in order to more fully demonstrate how unlikely it is that humans will ever approach immortality on earth, to emphasize the enormous additional pressure that longer lifespans would place on population.
Many people, I have no doubt, will think that trying seriously to refute something as absurd as the idea of human immortality on earth — or even the perfectibility of humanity and society — is a waste of time and words, and that such baseless theories are best answered by simply ignoring them. I freely admit, however, that I disagree. When paradoxes of this sort are put forward by clever and talented people, ignoring them does nothing to show them their mistakes. Priding themselves on what they see as proof of the reach and scope of their own intellects and the breadth of their vision, they will interpret the silence as merely a sign of intellectual poverty and narrow-mindedness among their contemporaries — and simply conclude that the world is not yet ready to receive their brilliant truths.
On the other hand, a fair and open investigation of these subjects — carried out with a genuine willingness to accept any theory that sound reasoning supports — may actually convince them that by constructing improbable and baseless theories, far from expanding the boundaries of human knowledge, they are shrinking them. Far from advancing the development of the human mind, they are holding it back. They are throwing us almost back into the infancy of knowledge and weakening the foundations of the very method of inquiry that has driven science's remarkable recent progress. The current mania for sweeping and unrestrained speculation seems to be a kind of intellectual intoxication, arising perhaps from the great and unexpected discoveries that have been made in recent years across various branches of science. To people made giddy by such successes, everything seemed within the grasp of human powers. Under this illusion, they confused subjects where no real progress could be demonstrated with those where progress had been clear, certain, and widely acknowledged. If they could be persuaded to sober up with a little rigorous and disciplined thinking, they would see that the cause of truth and sound inquiry can only suffer when wild flights of fancy and unsupported claims are substituted for patient investigation and well-documented evidence.
Condorcet's book can be considered not only as a sketch of one celebrated thinker's opinions, but as representative of the views held by many of the intellectual leaders in France at the beginning of the Revolution. As such, even though it is merely a sketch, it deserves serious attention.
Godwin's system of equality -- The mistake of blaming all human vice on institutions -- Godwin's first answer to the population problem, completely inadequate -- Godwin's beautiful vision of equality, imagined as reality -- Its total destruction by the principle of population alone, in as little as thirty years.
When you read Godwin's ingenious and powerful work on political justice, it is impossible not to be struck by the spirit and energy of his writing, the force and precision of his reasoning, the passionate tone of his ideas, and especially that impressive earnestness that gives an air of truth to everything he says. At the same time, we have to admit that he has not pursued his inquiries with the caution that sound thinking seems to require. His conclusions often go beyond what his premises support. He sometimes fails to answer the very objections he himself raises. He relies too heavily on general and abstract principles that cannot actually be applied. And his speculations certainly outrun what nature will allow.
The system of equality that Godwin proposes is, without doubt, by far the most beautiful and appealing that anyone has ever put forward. A transformation of society brought about purely through reason and persuasion holds much more promise of lasting than any change forced into being and maintained by violence. The unlimited exercise of individual judgment is a doctrine of breathtaking grandeur and attraction, vastly superior to those systems where every person is essentially a slave to the state. The replacement of self-interest by benevolence as the driving force of society is a goal devoutly to be wished. In short, it is impossible to look at this whole magnificent vision without feelings of delight and admiration, accompanied by a burning desire for its fulfillment. But, alas! That moment can never arrive. The whole thing is little better than a dream, a beautiful phantom of the imagination. These "gorgeous palaces" of happiness and immortality, these "solemn temples" of truth and virtue will dissolve, "like the baseless fabric of a vision," when we wake up to real life and face the true situation of humanity on earth. Godwin, at the end of the third chapter of his eighth book, speaking of population, says:
"There is a principle in human society by which population is perpetually kept down to the level of the means of subsistence. Thus among the wandering tribes of America and Asia, we never find through the passage of ages that population has increased so much as to make farming necessary."
This principle, which Godwin mentions as some mysterious and hidden force and which he makes no attempt to investigate, turns out to be the grinding law of necessity, misery, and the fear of misery.
The great mistake that runs through Godwin's entire work is blaming almost all the vice and misery in civilized society on human institutions. For him, political systems and the established rules of property are the fertile sources of all evil, the breeding grounds of every crime that degrades humanity. If this were actually true, it would not seem hopeless to eliminate evil from the world entirely, and reason would appear to be the right tool for accomplishing such a grand purpose. But the truth is that although human institutions appear to be the obvious and glaring causes of much harm to humanity, in reality they are light and superficial — mere feathers floating on the surface — compared to those deeper causes of corruption that poison the springs and cloud the whole stream of human life.
Godwin, in his chapter on the benefits of a system of equality, says:
"The spirit of oppression, the spirit of servility, and the spirit of fraud — these are the direct products of the established system of property. They are all hostile to intellectual progress. The other vices of envy, malice, and revenge are their inseparable companions. In a society where people lived in the midst of plenty and where everyone shared equally in nature's abundance, these feelings would inevitably die out. The narrow principle of selfishness would vanish. No one being forced to guard his little hoard or provide with anxiety and pain for his restless needs, each person would lose his individual concerns in the thought of the common good. No one would be an enemy to his neighbor, for they would have nothing to fight over, and as a result, generosity would reclaim the throne that reason assigns it. The mind would be freed from its constant anxiety about physical survival and able to roam freely in the field of thought, where it truly belongs. Everyone would contribute to the inquiries of all."
This would indeed be a happy state. But the reader, I am afraid, is already too well convinced that this is merely an imaginary picture, with hardly a single feature close to the truth.
People cannot live in the midst of plenty. Everyone cannot share equally in nature's abundance. If there were no established system of property, every person would be forced to guard their little supply by brute force. Selfishness would triumph. The causes of conflict would be endless. Every individual mind would be under constant anxiety about physical survival, and not a single intellect would be free to roam in the field of thought.
How little Godwin has turned the attention of his penetrating mind to the real condition of humanity on earth is clear enough from the way he tries to dismiss the problem of overpopulation. He says:
"The obvious answer to this objection is that reasoning like this means worrying about problems far in the future. Three-fourths of the habitable globe is still uncultivated. The parts already cultivated are capable of immeasurable improvement. Countless centuries of still-increasing population may pass, and the earth will still be found sufficient for the subsistence of its inhabitants."
I have already pointed out the mistake of assuming that no hardship or difficulty would arise from overpopulation before the earth absolutely refused to produce any more food. But let us imagine for a moment that Godwin's beautiful system of equality has been realized in its purest form, and see how soon this difficulty might be expected to arise under so perfect a society. A theory that cannot be applied to reality cannot possibly be correct.
Let us suppose that all the causes of misery and vice on this island have been removed. War and conflict have ended. Unhealthy trades and factories no longer exist. Crowds no longer pack together in great, disease-ridden cities for the purposes of court politics, commerce, and vice. Simple, healthy, and sensible entertainments have replaced drinking, gambling, and debauchery. No towns are large enough to have any harmful effects on human health. The great majority of the happy inhabitants of this earthly paradise live in hamlets and farmhouses scattered across the countryside. Every home is clean, well-ventilated, spacious enough, and in a healthy location. All people are equal. The labors of luxury have ended. And the necessary work of farming is shared cooperatively among all. We suppose the number of people and the total food production of the island to be the same as at present. The spirit of benevolence, guided by impartial justice, will divide this food among all members of the society according to their needs. Although it would be impossible for everyone to have meat every day, vegetable food with meat from time to time would satisfy a frugal people and would be enough to keep them healthy, strong, and in good spirits.
Godwin considers marriage a fraud and a monopoly. Let us suppose that sexual relations are established on principles of the most complete freedom. Godwin himself does not think this freedom would lead to casual promiscuity, and on this point I completely agree with him. The love of variety is a corrupt and unnatural taste that could not prevail to any great extent in a simple and virtuous society. Each man would probably choose a partner and stay with her as long as both freely wished to remain together. It would be of little consequence, according to Godwin, how many children a woman had or who fathered them. Food and help would flow naturally from wherever there was plenty to wherever there was need. (See Book VIII, Ch. 8; in the third edition, Vol. II, p. 512.) And every person would be ready to help educate the rising generation according to his abilities.
I cannot imagine a form of society more favorable to population growth. The permanence and binding nature of marriage, as currently established, undoubtedly discourages many people from entering into it. Free relationships, on the other hand, would be a powerful encouragement to early partnerships. And since we are assuming no anxiety about the future support of children, I do not think there would be one woman in a hundred, at age twenty-three, without a family.
With these extraordinary encouragements to population growth, and every cause of population decline, as we have assumed, removed, the numbers would necessarily increase faster than in any society that has ever been known. I have mentioned, on the authority of a pamphlet published by Dr. Stiles and cited by Dr. Price, that the inhabitants of the back settlements of America doubled their numbers in fifteen years. England is certainly a healthier country than the American back settlements, and since we have assumed every home on the island to be well-ventilated and wholesome, with even greater encouragements to have families than those back settlers had, there is no good reason why the population should not double in less than fifteen years, if possible. But to make absolutely sure we do not exaggerate, we will assume the doubling period to be twenty-five years — a rate of increase well documented throughout all the Northern States of America.
There can be little doubt that the equalization of property we have assumed, combined with directing the labor of the whole community mainly toward farming, would greatly increase the country's total food output. But to meet the demands of a population increasing so rapidly, Godwin's estimate of half an hour of work per day per person would certainly not be enough. Probably half of every person's time would need to be devoted to farming. Yet even with such effort, or much greater effort, anyone who knows the nature of England's soil and considers the fertility of lands already under cultivation versus the barrenness of those that are not will have serious doubts about whether the total average output could possibly be doubled in twenty-five years. The only hope would be to plow up all the grazing lands and almost entirely eliminate meat. Yet part of this plan might defeat itself. English soil will not produce much without fertilizer, and cattle seem to be necessary to produce the kind of manure that best suits the land. In China, it is said, the soil in some provinces is so fertile that it produces two crops of rice a year without fertilizer. None of England's land fits that description.
Difficult as it would be to double the island's average output in twenty-five years, let us suppose it done. At the end of the first period, therefore, the food — though almost entirely vegetable — would be sufficient to support the doubled population of fourteen million in health.
During the next twenty-five years of doubling, where will the food be found to satisfy the relentless demands of the increasing numbers? Where is the fresh land to plow? Where is the fertilizer needed to improve land already under cultivation? There is no one with the slightest knowledge of farming who would say it was possible for the country's average output to increase during the second twenty-five years by an amount equal to what it currently produces. Yet let us suppose this increase, however improbable, takes place. The overwhelming strength of the argument allows for almost any concession. Even with this concession, however, there would be seven million people at the end of the second period with no food at all. An amount of food sufficient to barely support twenty-one million would have to be divided among twenty-eight million.
And so — what becomes of the picture where people lived in the midst of plenty, where no one was forced to provide with anxiety and pain for their restless needs, where the narrow principle of selfishness did not exist, where the mind was freed from its constant anxiety about physical survival and able to roam in the field of thought? This beautiful fabric of imagination vanishes at the harsh touch of truth. The spirit of benevolence, nurtured and strengthened by plenty, is crushed by the chilling breath of want. The hateful passions that had vanished come roaring back. The mighty law of self-preservation drives out all the softer and nobler emotions of the soul. The temptations to evil are too strong for human nature to resist. The grain is snatched before it is ripe, or hidden away in unfair shares, and the whole black parade of vices that come with dishonesty is immediately unleashed. Food no longer flows in to support the mother with a large family. The children grow sickly from insufficient nourishment. The rosy flush of health gives way to the pale cheek and hollow eye of misery. Benevolence, still lingering in a few hearts, makes some faint and dying efforts, until at last self-interest reclaims its old throne and rules triumphant over the world.
No human institutions existed here whose corruption Godwin could blame for the original sin of the worst people. (Book VIII, Ch. 3; in the third edition, Vol. II, p. 462.) No institutions had created any conflict between public and private good. No monopoly had been created over advantages that reason says should be shared. No one had been driven to break the law by unjust rules. Benevolence had established her reign in every heart — and yet in as little as fifty years, violence, oppression, dishonesty, misery, every hateful vice, and every form of suffering that degrades and darkens the present state of society seem to have been generated by the most unavoidable circumstances, by laws built into human nature itself, and absolutely independent of any human regulations.
If we are not yet fully convinced of the reality of this grim picture, let us look for a moment at the next twenty-five-year period. We would see twenty-eight million human beings without the means of survival. And before the end of the first century, the population would be 112 million, with food sufficient for only thirty-five million, leaving seventy-seven million with nothing. In such times, want would truly reign supreme, and robbery and murder would run rampant — and yet all this time we are assuming the earth's output is absolutely unlimited, with yearly increases greater than the boldest optimist can imagine.
This is undoubtedly a very different view of the population problem from Godwin's, when he says, "Countless centuries of still-increasing population may pass, and the earth will still be found sufficient for the subsistence of its inhabitants."
I am perfectly aware that the surplus twenty-eight million, or seventy-seven million, that I have mentioned could never actually have existed. Godwin's observation is perfectly correct: "There is a principle in human society by which population is perpetually kept down to the level of the means of subsistence." The only question is: what is that principle? Is it some obscure and hidden force? Is it some mysterious intervention from heaven that at a certain point strikes men with impotence and women with barrenness? Or is it a cause open to our investigation, within plain sight — a cause that has consistently been observed to operate, with varying intensity, in every condition humanity has ever known? Is it not a degree of misery, the necessary and inevitable result of the laws of nature, which human institutions, far from making worse, have actually done much to soften, even if they can never eliminate it entirely?
It may be interesting to observe, in the scenario we have been imagining, how some of the very laws that currently govern civilized society would be brought back into existence one by one, dictated by the most pressing necessity. Since, according to Godwin, people are shaped by the conditions they experience, the pressures of want could not continue for long before some theft of public or private property would inevitably occur. As these thefts increased in number and scale, the more active and far-sighted minds in the society would soon realize that while the population was growing fast, the country's yearly food production would soon begin to fall. The urgency of the situation would suggest the need for immediate measures to protect the general welfare. Some kind of assembly would be called, and the dangerous state of the country described in the strongest terms.
It would be pointed out that while everyone lived in the midst of plenty, it mattered little who worked the least or who owned the least, since every person was perfectly willing to supply the needs of their neighbor. But the question was no longer whether one person should give to another what he did not need himself — it was whether he should give to his neighbor the food absolutely necessary for his own survival. It would be noted that the number of those in need far exceeded the number and resources of those who could supply them; that these pressing needs, which could not all be met given the country's food supply, had already led to serious violations of justice; that these violations had already slowed the growth of food production and would, if not somehow prevented, throw the whole community into chaos; that sheer necessity seemed to demand that the yearly food supply should be increased at all costs; and that to achieve this first, great, and essential goal, it would be wise to make a more complete division of land and to protect every person's property with the most powerful penalties — even death itself.
Some might object that as the land's fertility varied and various circumstances arose, some people's shares might be much more than they needed, and that once self-interest was established, they would not give away their surplus without something in return. The answer would be that this was an unfortunate problem, but an evil that bore no comparison to the devastating chain of miseries that would inevitably follow from insecure property. After all, the amount of food one person could eat was limited by the size of the human stomach. It was unlikely that someone would simply throw the rest away. And even if they exchanged their surplus food for the labor of others, making those people somewhat dependent on them, this would still be better than letting those others actually starve.
It seems highly likely, therefore, that a system of property not very different from what exists in civilized nations today would be established, as the best — though inadequate — remedy for the evils pressing on the society.
The next subject that would come up for discussion, closely connected with the first, is the relationship between the sexes. Those who had understood the true cause of the community's difficulties would argue that as long as every person felt confident all their children would be well cared for by general benevolence, the earth's capacity would be completely overwhelmed by the population that would inevitably follow. Even if the society's entire attention and labor were directed to this single goal, and if the most perfect protection of property and every other possible encouragement produced the greatest possible increase in food each year, the growth of food would still by no means keep pace with the much faster growth of population. Some check on population was therefore absolutely necessary. The most natural and obvious check seemed to be to make every person responsible for their own children. This would serve as a kind of guide and restraint on population growth, since no one could be expected to bring children into the world for whom they could not provide. And when someone did so regardless, it seemed necessary, for the sake of setting an example, that the shame and hardship resulting from such reckless behavior should fall on the individual who had thoughtlessly plunged himself and his innocent children into misery and want.
The institution of marriage — or at least some explicit or implied obligation on every person to support their own children — seems to be the natural outcome of this reasoning in a community under the pressures we have described.
These pressures also give us a very natural explanation for the greater disgrace traditionally attached to sexual misconduct in women than in men. Women could not be expected to have the resources to support their own children. So when a woman was involved with a man who had entered into no agreement to support her children — and who, aware of the trouble it might cause him, had abandoned her — those children would necessarily fall on the community for support, or starve. And to prevent this from happening regularly, since it would be deeply unjust to punish so natural a fault with physical punishment or imprisonment, people might agree to punish it with social disgrace instead. Besides, the offense is more visible in the woman and less subject to doubt. The father of a child may not always be known, but the same uncertainty rarely exists about the mother. Where the evidence was clearest and the cost to the community greatest, that is where the largest share of blame would fall. The obligation of every man to support his children would be enforced by society if necessary. And the greater burden and labor that a family would inevitably impose on him, along with some degree of disgrace for leading another person into unhappiness, might be considered punishment enough for the man.
That a woman should currently be nearly driven from society for an offense that men commit with almost no consequences seems undeniably to be a violation of natural justice. But the origin of the custom, as the most obvious and effective way of preventing a serious recurring problem for the community, seems natural, even if not perfectly fair. This origin, however, has been lost in the new set of ideas the custom has since generated. What was first dictated by practical necessity is now upheld by ideas of female virtue, and the custom falls most heavily on exactly the part of society where, if the original purpose were kept in mind, there is the least real need for it.
Once these two fundamental laws of society — the security of property and the institution of marriage — were established, inequality would necessarily follow. Those born after the division of property would come into a world where everything was already owned. If their parents, from having too large a family, could not give them enough to live on, what are they to do in a world where everything is claimed? We have seen the disastrous results that would follow if every person had an equal right to an equal share of the earth's produce. Members of a family that had grown too large for the land originally allotted to it could not then demand a portion of other people's surplus as a matter of right. It has become clear that, because of the inescapable laws of our nature, some human beings must suffer from want. These are the unfortunate people who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank. The number of these people needing help would soon exceed the ability of the surplus to provide for them. Moral merit is a very difficult way to distinguish between claimants, except in extreme cases. The owners of surplus food would generally look for some more obvious measure of worth. And it seems both natural and fair that, except on special occasions, their choice should fall on those who were able and willing to use their strength to produce more surplus food — at once benefiting the community and enabling these landowners to help greater numbers. Everyone who needed food would be driven by sheer necessity to offer their labor in exchange for this most essential article of survival. The money available to pay workers would be the total quantity of food that the landowners possessed beyond their own needs. When the demands on this pool were heavy and numerous, it would naturally be divided into very small shares. Labor would be poorly paid. People would offer to work for bare subsistence, and the raising of families would be checked by sickness and misery. Conversely, when this pool was growing fast, when it was large in proportion to the number of people claiming from it, it would be divided into much larger shares. No one would trade their labor without receiving a generous amount of food in return. Workers would live in comfort and ease, and would consequently be able to raise a large and healthy family.
On the state of this pool — the money available to pay workers — the happiness or degree of misery among the working classes in every known society chiefly depends. And on that happiness or misery depends whether the population is growing, holding steady, or shrinking.
And so it turns out that a society organized according to the most beautiful plan that imagination can conceive — with benevolence as its driving force instead of self-interest, and with every selfish impulse in all its members corrected by reason rather than force — would, because of the inescapable laws of nature and not because of any innate depravity in human beings, within a very short time deteriorate into a society organized on a plan not essentially different from what exists in every known nation today. I mean a society divided into a class of property owners and a class of laborers, with self-interest as the mainspring of the whole machine.
In the scenario I have described, I have undoubtedly assumed a smaller increase in population and a greater increase in food production than would really occur. There is no reason to think that, under the conditions I described, population would not grow faster than in any known historical case. If we were to set the doubling period at fifteen years instead of twenty-five, and consider the labor necessary to double the food supply in so short a time — even if we grant it possible — we may declare with certainty that if Godwin's system of society were established in its fullest perfection, instead of lasting for countless centuries, not even thirty years could pass before its total destruction from the simple principle of population.
I have ignored the possibility of emigration, for obvious reasons. If similar societies were established in other parts of Europe, those countries would face the same population pressures and could take no additional members. If this beautiful society were confined to this island alone, it would have to have deteriorated badly from its original purity, offering only a small fraction of the happiness it promised — in short, its essential principle would have to be completely destroyed — before any of its members would voluntarily agree to leave it and live under the kinds of governments that currently exist in Europe, or endure the extreme hardships of first settlers in new territories. We know from repeated experience how much misery and suffering people will endure in their own country before they can bring themselves to leave it, and how often the most tempting offers to emigrate to new settlements have been rejected by people who seemed to be nearly starving.
Godwin's conjecture that sexual desire might someday be extinguished -- Very little evidence to support such a conjecture -- The passion of love is not inconsistent with either reason or virtue.
In the previous chapter, we assumed that Godwin's system of society had been fully established — and then watched it collapse. But even that was giving the argument too much credit, because establishing it in the first place would be impossible. The same natural forces that would tear it apart so quickly once it existed would also prevent it from ever being created. And on what grounds we can expect those natural forces to change, I have absolutely no idea. There has been no movement whatsoever toward the extinction of sexual desire in the five or six thousand years the world has existed. Old men have always railed against a passion they can no longer feel, but with just as little logic as success. People who, thanks to their naturally cold temperament, have never experienced what love actually is are surely the least qualified to judge how much this passion contributes to the sum of pleasure in life. And those who wasted their youth on destructive excess — who prepared for their old age a legacy of physical weakness and mental regret — may well denounce such pleasures as empty and pointless, unable to produce lasting satisfaction. But the pleasures of genuine love can withstand the scrutiny of the sharpest reasoning and the highest virtue. There is probably hardly a man alive who has once experienced the true delight of virtuous love — however great his intellectual pleasures may have been — who does not look back on that time as the sunny spot of his whole life, the place where his imagination loves to linger, the memory he returns to with the fondest longing, and the experience he would most wish to live over again. The superiority of intellectual pleasures over physical ones lies not so much in their being more real or more essential, but rather in their filling up more time, covering a wider range, and being less prone to wearing thin.
Excess ruins every enjoyment. A walk on the finest day through the most beautiful countryside, if pushed too far, ends in pain and exhaustion. The most wholesome and energizing food, eaten without restraint, produces weakness instead of strength. Even intellectual pleasures, though certainly less likely than others to grow stale, pursued with too little rest will wear down the body and dull the mind. To argue that these pleasures are not real because they can be abused seems deeply unfair. Morality, according to Godwin, is a calculation of consequences — or, as Archdeacon Paley puts it very aptly, the will of God as determined from what generally benefits humanity. By either of these definitions, a physical pleasure that carries no likely risk of bad consequences does not violate the laws of morality. And if it is pursued with enough moderation to leave plenty of room for intellectual growth, it must surely add to the total amount of happiness in life. Virtuous love, deepened by friendship, seems to be exactly that kind of blend of physical and intellectual enjoyment — perfectly suited to human nature and uniquely powerful in awakening the sympathies of the soul and producing the most exquisite gratification.
Godwin says, in order to demonstrate the obvious inferiority of physical pleasures, "Strip the commerce of the sexes of all its attendant circumstances, and it would be generally despised" (Book I, Chapter 5; third edition, Vol. I, pp. 71-72). He might as well say to someone who admires trees: strip them of their spreading branches and lovely leaves, and what beauty can you see in a bare pole? But it was the tree with its branches and leaves, not without them, that inspired admiration. One feature of an object, taken in isolation, can be as different from the whole — and stir emotions as different — as any two things imaginable: a beautiful woman and a map of Madagascar, for instance. It is "the symmetry of person, the vivacity, the voluptuous softness of temper, the affectionate kindness of feelings, the imagination and the wit" of a woman that spark the passion of love — not the mere fact that she is female. Driven by the passion of love, men have certainly been led into behavior that was deeply harmful to society. But they probably would have had no trouble resisting the temptation if it had appeared in the form of a woman with no attractions whatsoever beyond her sex. To strip physical pleasures of all their accompanying qualities in order to prove their inferiority is like stripping a magnet of some of its most essential sources of attraction and then declaring it weak and ineffective.
In the pursuit of every pleasure, whether physical or intellectual, reason — the faculty that allows us to calculate consequences — is the proper guide and corrective. It is likely, then, that improved reasoning will always tend to prevent the abuse of physical pleasures. But it by no means follows that reason will extinguish them.
I have tried to expose the fallacy of the argument that infers unlimited progress from partial improvement just because the upper limit of that improvement cannot be precisely determined. There are, I think, many cases where clear progress has been observed, yet where it would be absurd to assume the progress is unlimited. But toward the extinction of sexual desire, no observable progress whatsoever has ever been made. To suppose such an extinction, therefore, is merely to offer a groundless guess, unsupported by any scientific evidence.
It is a truth — one that history unfortunately makes all too clear — that some of the most brilliant minds have been devoted not just to a moderate, but even to an excessive indulgence in the pleasures of sexual love. But even if I grant, as I am inclined to do despite many examples to the contrary, that intense intellectual effort tends to weaken this passion's hold on a person, it is obvious that the vast majority of humanity would need to be improved far beyond the most brilliant individuals alive today before any difference could emerge that would meaningfully affect population growth. I certainly would not claim that the general population has reached its limit of improvement. But the central argument of this essay strongly suggests that the working poor in any country are unlikely ever to be free enough from want and labor to achieve the kind of high intellectual development that might — might — begin to diminish the force of sexual desire.
Godwin's conjecture about the indefinite prolongation of human life -- The flawed reasoning drawn from the effects of mental stimulants on the body, illustrated through various examples -- Conjectures not grounded in any evidence from the past should not be considered philosophical conjectures -- Godwin's and Condorcet's conjecture about humanity approaching immortality on earth as a striking example of the inconsistency of skepticism.
Godwin's conjecture about humanity's future approach toward immortality on earth seems rather oddly placed in a chapter that claims to be removing the objection to his system of equality based on the principle of population. Unless he assumes that sexual desire will decline faster than the human lifespan increases, the earth would end up more overcrowded than ever. But setting that difficulty aside for Godwin to deal with, let's examine a few of the signs from which the probability of human immortality is supposedly inferred.
To prove the power of the mind over the body, Godwin observes: "How often do we find that a piece of good news cures an illness? How common is the observation that health problems which would plague an idle person are forgotten and eliminated in someone who is busy and active? I walk twenty miles in a half-hearted, unenthusiastic mood and end up extremely exhausted. I walk twenty miles full of passion, with a purpose that consumes my whole soul, and I arrive as fresh and alert as when I started. An emotion triggered by some unexpected word, or by a letter delivered to us, causes the most extraordinary changes in our bodies — it speeds up circulation, makes the heart race, ties the tongue, and has been known to cause death through extreme anguish or extreme joy. There is nothing, indeed, that a physician is more aware of than the power of the mind in helping or hindering recovery."
The examples Godwin mentions are mainly instances of mental stimulants affecting the body. No one has ever doubted for a moment the close, though mysterious, connection between mind and body. But it shows a complete misunderstanding of how stimulants work to assume either that they can be applied continuously with equal force, or that if they could be applied that way for a while, they wouldn't exhaust and wear out the person. In some of the cases Godwin mentions, the strength of the stimulus depends on its novelty and unexpectedness. By its very nature, such a stimulus cannot be repeated often with the same effect, because repetition would strip away the very quality that gives it its power.
In the other cases, the argument leaps from a small, limited effect to a sweeping, universal one — a type of reasoning that turns out to be deeply misleading in countless situations. The busy, active person may to some degree counteract — or, closer to the truth, may simply ignore — those minor physical complaints that consume the attention of someone with nothing else to think about. But this does nothing to prove that an active mind will enable a person to ignore a raging fever, smallpox, or the plague.
The person who walks twenty miles driven by a purpose that consumes his soul doesn't notice his mild physical fatigue when he arrives. But double his motivation and send him out for another twenty miles. Quadruple it and start him on a third round. Keep going, and eventually the length of his walk will depend on his muscles, not his mind. Powell, motivated by ten guineas, would probably have walked farther than Godwin motivated by half a million. An extraordinarily powerful motive acting on a body of moderate strength might make a person kill himself through sheer exertion, but it would not make him walk a hundred miles in twenty-four hours. Stating the case this way reveals the fallacy of assuming that the person wasn't really tired at all during his first twenty-mile walk just because he didn't appear to be, or perhaps barely felt any fatigue himself. The mind cannot focus intensely on more than one thing at a time. The twenty thousand pounds so consumed his thoughts that he paid no attention to any slight soreness in his feet or stiffness in his legs. But if he had truly been as fresh and alert as when he first set out, he would have been able to do the second twenty miles just as easily as the first, and then the third, and so on — which leads to an obvious absurdity. When a spirited horse is nearly half exhausted, with the stimulus of the spur and proper handling of the bit, he can be pushed so hard that he would appear to a bystander as fresh and high-spirited as if he hadn't gone a mile. In fact, the horse himself, in the heat and excitement produced by this stimulus, probably wouldn't feel any fatigue. But it would be completely absurd to argue from this appearance that if the stimulus were kept up, the horse would never get tired. The cry of a pack of hounds will make some horses, after a forty-mile ride on the road, appear as fresh and lively as when they first set out. If they were then taken hunting, their riders would at first notice no decline in their strength and spirit. But toward the end of a hard day, the previous fatigue would take its full toll, and they would tire sooner. When I've taken a long walk with my gun and had no luck, I've often come home feeling quite uncomfortable from exhaustion. On another day, covering nearly the same distance with plenty of game, I've come home feeling fresh and alert. The difference in how tired I felt upon arriving on those different days may have been dramatic, but on the following mornings I've found no such difference. I haven't noticed that I was any less stiff in my limbs, or any less footsore, on the morning after the day of good sport than on the other morning.
In all these cases, mental stimulants seem to work by diverting attention away from physical fatigue, rather than by genuinely counteracting it. If the energy of my mind had truly counteracted my body's fatigue, why would I feel tired the next morning? If the stimulus of the hounds had overcome the fatigue of the journey in reality as completely as it did in appearance, why would the horse tire sooner than if he hadn't traveled those forty miles? I happen to have a very bad toothache as I'm writing this. In the heat of composition, I forget about it every now and then for a moment or two. Yet I can't help thinking that the process causing the pain is still going on, and that the nerves carrying that information to the brain are, even during those moments, demanding attention and space for their signals. The flood of other mental activity may perhaps block them out or overpower them for a time, until a sudden sharp stab of extraordinary intensity routs all other thoughts, shatters the vividness of my arguments, and rides triumphant through the brain. In this case, as in the others, the mind seems to have little or no power to counteract or cure the disorder — it merely has the ability, when strongly engaged, to focus its attention on other things.
I don't mean to say, however, that a sound and vigorous mind has no tendency whatsoever to keep the body in good shape. The connection between mind and body is so close and intimate that it would be very strange if they didn't support each other's functions. But if anything, the body probably has more effect on the mind than the mind has on the body. The mind's first job is to serve the body's needs. When those needs are fully met, an active mind is indeed inclined to wander further — to explore the fields of science, or play in the realms of imagination, to fancy that it has "shuffled off this mortal coil" and is seeking its true element. But all these efforts are like the futile sprinting of the hare in the fable. The slowly plodding tortoise — the body — never fails to catch up with the mind, no matter how far and wide it has roamed. And the brightest, most energetic intellects, reluctant as they may be to heed the first or second summons, must ultimately surrender control of the brain to the demands of hunger, or sink with the exhausted body into sleep.
It seems safe to say that if a medicine could be found to make the body immortal, there would be no worry about the mind failing to keep up. But the immortality of the mind by no means implies the immortality of the body. On the contrary, the greatest conceivable mental energy would probably exhaust and destroy the body's strength. A moderate level of mental activity seems to benefit health, but very intense intellectual exertion tends, as people have often observed, to wear out the body that houses it. Most of the examples Godwin has offered to prove the power of the mind over the body — and the resulting likelihood of human immortality — are actually of this latter type. If such stimulants could be applied continuously, far from leading to immortality, they would very quickly destroy the human body.
Godwin next considers the probable increase of voluntary control that humans might gain over their physical functions, and he concludes by noting that some people's voluntary power in this area extends to things that most people cannot control. But this is arguing against a nearly universal rule based on a few exceptions — and those exceptions seem to be parlor tricks rather than powers that could serve any practical purpose. I've never heard of anyone who could regulate their pulse during a fever, and I strongly doubt that any of the people Godwin refers to have made the slightest noticeable progress in regularly correcting their body's disorders or extending their lives as a result.
Godwin says: "Nothing can be more unphilosophical than to conclude that, because a certain kind of power lies beyond what we can currently observe, it therefore lies beyond the limits of the human mind." I have to say, my idea of what counts as philosophical is very different from Godwin's on this point. The only distinction I can see between a philosophical conjecture and the pronouncements of the self-proclaimed Prophet Mr. Brothers is that one is based on patterns arising from what we have actually observed, and the other has no foundation at all. I fully expect that great discoveries are yet to be made in every branch of human knowledge, especially in physics. But the moment we abandon past experience as the basis for our predictions about the future — and even more so if our predictions flatly contradict past experience — we are cast adrift in a vast sea of uncertainty, and any guess is as good as any other. If someone told me that humans would eventually have eyes and hands in the back of their heads as well as the front, I would grant the usefulness of the addition but would give as my reason for disbelieving it that I see no indication whatsoever in the past from which I could infer even the smallest probability of such a change. If that is not considered a valid objection, then all conjectures are equal, and all equally philosophical. It seems to me that in the record of everything we have observed, there are no more genuine signs that humans will become immortal on earth than that they will have four eyes and four hands, or that trees will grow sideways instead of upward.
Someone will perhaps say that many discoveries have already been made in the world that were completely unforeseen and unexpected. I grant that this is true. But if someone had predicted those discoveries without being guided by any analogies or clues from past experience, they would deserve to be called a seer or a prophet, not a philosopher. The amazement that some of our modern discoveries would cause among the primitive inhabitants of Europe in the days of Theseus and Achilles proves very little. People who are almost entirely unfamiliar with what a machine can do cannot be expected to guess at its effects. I am far from saying that we currently have anything close to a full understanding of the powers of the human mind. But we certainly know more about this instrument than people did four thousand years ago, and therefore, though we can't claim to be fully competent judges, we are certainly much better equipped than ancient peoples to say what is or is not within its grasp. A watch would strike a person from an ancient society with as much astonishment as a perpetual motion machine. Yet one is a perfectly familiar piece of machinery to us, and the other has constantly eluded the efforts of the sharpest minds. In many cases, we can now see the causes that prevent unlimited improvement in inventions that at first seemed to promise it. The original inventors of telescopes probably thought that as long as they could keep increasing the size of the mirrors and the length of the tubes, the instrument's power and usefulness would keep growing. But experience has since taught us that the shrinking field of view, the loss of light, and the magnification of atmospheric distortion prevent the benefits that were expected from telescopes of extraordinary size and power. In many areas of knowledge, humanity has been almost constantly making progress. In others, our efforts have been consistently defeated. People in ancient times probably couldn't have guessed at the reasons for this enormous difference. Our additional experience has given us some insight into those reasons, and has therefore put us in a better position to judge — if not what we should expect in the future, at least what we should not expect. And that negative knowledge, though it may sound modest, is a very useful thing to have.
Since the need for sleep seems to depend more on the body than the mind, it's hard to see how improving the mind can do much to overcome what Godwin calls this "conspicuous weakness." A person who, through intense mental stimulation, manages to go two or three nights without sleep proportionally drains the strength of his body. This decline in health and energy will soon disrupt his thinking, so that through these great efforts he has made no real progress whatsoever in eliminating the need for rest.
There is certainly enough of a range among the various historical figures we know about — in the energy of their minds, their charitable pursuits, and so on — to let us judge whether intellectual activity has any clear effect on how long people live. And it's certain that no such effect has been observed. Though no mental effort of any kind has ever produced anything that could remotely be interpreted as a step toward immortality, if either type of attention makes a difference, paying attention to the body seems to do more for longevity than paying attention to the mind. The person who eats moderate meals and exercises regularly with careful discipline will generally be found healthier than the person who, deeply absorbed in intellectual work, often forgets about physical needs for a time. The retired citizen whose thoughts barely rise above or extend beyond his little garden — puttering around all morning among his flower beds — will perhaps live just as long as the philosopher with the most sweeping intellect and the clearest vision of anyone in his generation. It has been consistently observed by those who have studied mortality records that women live longer on average than men. And though I would by no means claim that women's intellectual abilities are inferior, I think it must be acknowledged that, because of differences in education, there are not as many women as men who are driven to vigorous mental exertion.
Given all this — and the vast diversity of human lives and characters that have existed over thousands of years — since no clear difference in lifespan has been observed as a result of intellectual activity, human mortality on earth seems to be as firmly established, and on exactly the same grounds, as any of the most reliable laws of nature. A direct act of power by the Creator of the Universe could, of course, change one or all of these laws, either suddenly or gradually. But without some indication of such a change — and no such indication exists — it is just as unscientific to suppose that human life might be extended beyond any definable limit as to suppose that the earth's gravity will gradually turn into repulsion and that stones will eventually rise instead of fall, or that the earth will fly off at some point toward a more pleasant and warmer sun.
The conclusion of Godwin's chapter presents us, without question, with a very beautiful and appealing picture. But like some landscapes painted from imagination rather than from life, it lacks the hold on the heart that only nature and probability can give.
I can't leave this subject without pointing out that these conjectures by Godwin and Condorcet about the indefinite prolongation of human life are a very striking example of the soul's longing for immortality. Both of these men have rejected the light of revelation, which explicitly promises eternal life in another state. They have also rejected the light of natural religion, which to the ablest minds in every age has pointed toward the future existence of the soul. Yet the idea of immortality is so deeply natural to the human mind that they cannot bring themselves to throw it out of their systems entirely. After all their picky skepticism about the only plausible form of immortality, they introduce a version of immortality of their own — one that is not only completely contradictory to every law of probability that philosophy recognizes, but is in itself extremely narrow, partial, and unjust. They assume that all the great, virtuous, and noble minds that have ever existed, or that may exist for thousands — perhaps millions — of years, will sink into oblivion, and that only a few beings, no greater in number than can live on the earth at one time, will ultimately be crowned with immortality. If such a doctrine had been put forward as a tenet of religious revelation, I am quite sure that all the enemies of religion — probably including Godwin and Condorcet themselves — would have unleashed the full force of their ridicule upon it as the most childish, the most absurd, the poorest, the most pitiful, the most outrageously unjust, and consequently the most unworthy idea of God that human foolishness could invent.
What a strange and telling proof these conjectures offer of the inconsistency of skepticism! For we should notice that there is a very important and fundamental difference between believing a claim that flatly contradicts our most consistent experience and believing a claim that contradicts nothing but simply lies beyond what we can currently observe and know. The natural world around us is so varied, and so many displays of extraordinary power present themselves to our view every day, that we can reasonably assume there are many forms and processes of nature that we have not yet observed — or that perhaps we are not capable of observing with our current limited means of perception. The resurrection of a spiritual body from a physical body does not in itself seem like a more astonishing display of power than the sprouting of a blade of wheat from a grain, or an oak from an acorn. Imagine an intelligent being who had only ever encountered inanimate or fully grown objects and had never witnessed the process of growth. Suppose another being showed him two tiny pieces of matter — a grain of wheat and an acorn — invited him to examine them, to analyze them if he liked, and to try to figure out their properties and essence. And then suppose that being told him that however insignificant these little bits of matter might seem, they possessed such remarkable powers of selection, combination, arrangement, and something very close to creation, that when placed in the ground they would choose from all the dirt and moisture surrounding them exactly the parts best suited to their purpose. They would collect and arrange these parts with wonderful skill, judgment, and precision, and would rise up into beautiful forms bearing almost no resemblance to the tiny bits of matter first placed in the earth. I have very little doubt that the imaginary being I've described would hesitate more — would demand better authority and stronger proof — before believing these strange claims than if he had simply been told that a being of immense power, who had caused everything he saw around him and the very existence of which he himself was conscious, would, through a great act of power upon the death and decay of human creatures, raise up the essence of thought in a bodiless — or at least invisible — form, to give it a happier existence in another state.
The only difference, as far as our own judgment is concerned, that does not favor the latter claim is that the first miracle we have witnessed repeatedly, and the second miracle we have not witnessed at all. I fully acknowledge the enormous weight of this difference. But surely no one can hesitate for a moment in saying that, setting Revelation aside, the resurrection of a spiritual body from a physical body — which may simply be one among the many processes of nature we cannot see — is an event incomparably more probable than the immortality of humans on earth. The latter is not only something for which no symptoms or signs have ever appeared, but a direct contradiction of one of the most reliable laws of nature that has ever come within human observation.
When we look beyond this life, it's clear that we can have no guides other than authority, or conjecture, and perhaps an obscure and undefined feeling. What I'm saying here does not, in my view, contradict what I said earlier — that it is unscientific to expect any specific event not suggested by some kind of pattern in the past. In venturing beyond "the bourne from which no traveler returns," we must necessarily leave that rule behind. But when it comes to events we expect to happen on earth, we can rarely abandon it and still call ourselves truly scientific. Analogy, however, as I see it, has a wide scope. For example, humanity has discovered many of the laws of nature. Analogy suggests we will discover many more. But no analogy suggests we will discover a sixth sense, or a new kind of power in the human mind entirely beyond anything we have ever observed.
The powers of selection, combination, and transformation that every seed displays are truly miraculous. Who can imagine that these extraordinary abilities are contained in those tiny bits of matter? To me, it seems far more philosophical to suppose that the mighty God of nature is present in full power in all these processes. To this all-powerful Being, it would be equally easy to grow an oak without an acorn as with one. The preparatory step of placing seeds in the ground is ordained simply for humanity's benefit, as one among the various stimuli necessary to awaken matter into mind. It is an idea consistent with the natural world around us, with the events of human life, and with God's successive revelations to humanity: that the world is a mighty process for the creation and formation of mind. Many vessels will inevitably come out of this great furnace in flawed shapes. These will be broken and cast aside as useless, while those vessels whose forms are full of truth, grace, and beauty will be carried into happier situations, nearer to the presence of the mighty maker.
I should perhaps apologize again to my readers for spending so long on a conjecture that many, I know, will consider too absurd and improbable to deserve the slightest discussion. But if it really is as improbable and as contrary to the genuine spirit of scientific inquiry as I believe it is, why shouldn't a fair examination show it to be so? A conjecture, however unlikely it may seem at first glance, when put forward by able and clever thinkers, at least deserves investigation. For my own part, I have no reluctance whatsoever to give the idea of probable human immortality on earth exactly as much credit as the evidence brought in its support deserves. Before we declare such an event utterly impossible, it's only fair to examine that evidence impartially. And from such an examination, I think we can conclude that we have even less reason to suppose human life can be extended indefinitely than to suppose that trees can be made to grow indefinitely tall, or potatoes indefinitely large. Though Godwin puts forward the idea of indefinitely prolonging human life merely as a conjecture, he has offered some evidence that, in his view, supports it. He must certainly intend for that evidence to be examined — and that is all I have meant to do.
Godwin's error of treating humans as purely rational beings -- In the complex creature that is a human being, bodily passions will always act as disruptive forces on the decisions of the mind -- Godwin's arguments on the subject of punishment and coercion -- Some truths are simply impossible to communicate from one person to another.
In the chapter I have been examining, Mr. Godwin claims to address the objection to his system of equality that arises from the principle of population. I think it has been clearly shown that he is deeply mistaken about how far off this problem is. Instead of being countless centuries away, the difficulty is really not even thirty years distant from us — or even thirty days. The idea that humans are approaching immortality on earth certainly does nothing to soften the problem. The only argument in that chapter with any real tendency to remove the objection is the conjecture about the extinction of sexual desire. But since this is nothing more than a guess, unsupported by even the faintest shred of evidence, the objection stands with its full force intact. And it is undoubtedly weighty enough, all by itself, to completely overturn Godwin's entire system of equality. I will, however, offer a few observations on some of the more prominent points in Godwin's reasoning, which will help make it even clearer how little hope we can reasonably have for those sweeping improvements in human nature and society that he holds up for our admiration in his Political Justice.
Godwin treats humans too much as if they were purely intellectual beings. This error — and I do believe it is an error — runs through his entire work and mixes itself into all his reasoning. People's voluntary actions may originate in their opinions, but those opinions will be shaped very differently in creatures who are a combination of rational minds and bodily desires than they would be in beings who were purely intellectual. Godwin, in trying to prove that sound reasoning and truth can be effectively communicated, first examines the proposition in practical terms, and then adds: "Such is the appearance which this proposition assumes when examined in a loose and practical view. In strict consideration it will not admit of debate. Man is a rational being, etc." (Book I, Chapter 5; in the third edition, Volume I, page 88). Far from calling this a "strict" consideration of the subject, I would actually call it the loosest and most mistaken way you could possibly think about it. It is like calculating the speed of a falling object in a vacuum and then insisting the result would be the same no matter what resistant medium it fell through. That was not how Newton did science. Very few general principles hold up perfectly when applied to specific cases. The moon is not kept in its orbit around the earth, nor the earth in its orbit around the sun, by a force that varies simply as the inverse square of the distance. To make the general theory accurate for the actual movements of these bodies, it was necessary to carefully calculate the disrupting force of the sun on the moon and of the moon on the earth. Until those disrupting forces were properly accounted for, actual observations of how these bodies moved would have shown that the theory was not quite right.
I am willing to grant that every voluntary act is preceded by a decision of the mind. But it would be strangely opposed to what I believe is the correct theory, and a blatant contradiction of all experience, to say that the bodily desires of human beings do not act very powerfully as disrupting forces in those decisions. The question, therefore, is not simply whether you can make someone understand a clear proposition or convince them with an airtight argument. A truth can be brought home to a person's intellect — they can accept it as rational beings — and yet they may still choose to act against it as complex beings made of both mind and body. Hunger, the craving for alcohol, the desire for a beautiful woman — these will drive people to actions whose devastating consequences for society they understand perfectly well, even at the very moment they commit them. Remove their bodily cravings, and they would not hesitate for a second to reject such actions. Ask them what they think of the same behavior in someone else, and they would immediately condemn it. But in their own case, under all the real circumstances of their situation and with those bodily cravings bearing down on them, the decision of the whole person is different from the conclusion of the rational mind alone.
If this is the correct way to look at the subject — and both theory and experience come together to prove that it is — then almost all of Godwin's reasoning about coercion in his seventh chapter turns out to be based on a mistake. He spends some time making the attempt to change someone's mind through physical blows look ridiculous. And undoubtedly it is both ridiculous and barbarous — but so is cockfighting, and one has about as much to do with the real purpose of criminal punishment as the other. One common (indeed, far too common) form of punishment is death. Godwin would hardly claim that execution is intended to enlighten the offender's understanding. It is hard to see how the individual or society could reap much future benefit from a mind "enlightened" in that particular fashion.
The main goals of criminal punishment are, without question, restraint and deterrence. Restraint means removing an individual whose destructive habits are likely to harm society. Deterrence means that by expressing the community's judgment about a particular crime and by making the connection between crime and punishment more visible and immediate, punishment provides a moral reason for others to avoid committing the same offense.
Godwin is willing to allow restraint as a temporary measure, though he condemns solitary confinement — which has actually been the most successful, and really the only serious attempt at the moral rehabilitation of criminals. He talks about the selfish passions that are nurtured by solitude and the virtues that are developed in society. But surely those virtues are not developed in the society of a prison. If an offender were confined to the company of capable and virtuous people, they would probably improve more than in solitary confinement. But is that practical? Godwin's cleverness is more often employed in identifying problems than in suggesting workable solutions.
Punishment as a deterrent is something Godwin rejects entirely. It is true that by trying to make examples too terrifying and extreme, nations have been led into the most barbaric cruelties. But the abuse of any practice is not a good argument against its proper use. In England, the tireless effort put into investigating murders, and the certainty of punishment when one is caught, has powerfully helped create the common belief among ordinary people that "a murder will sooner or later come to light." The deep habitual horror that murder is held in as a result will make a person, in the heat of rage, throw down a knife for fear they might be tempted to use it to satisfy their revenge. In Italy, where murderers could more often escape punishment by fleeing to a sanctuary, the crime was never viewed with the same horror and was consequently more common. No one who understands how moral incentives work could doubt for a moment that if every murder in Italy had been consistently punished, the use of the stiletto in fits of passion would have been comparatively rare.
No one would be foolish enough to claim that human laws can perfectly match the punishment to the offense. Because motives are impossible to fully know, perfect proportionality is absolutely out of reach. But this imperfection, though it might be called a kind of injustice, is no valid argument against having laws at all. It is the human condition to frequently have to choose between two evils. And it is reason enough to adopt any institution that it is the best available means of preventing even greater evils. We should certainly always strive to make these institutions as good as their nature allows. But nothing is easier than finding fault with human institutions, and nothing is harder than suggesting practical improvements that would actually work. It is unfortunate that more talented people spend their time on the first task than on the second.
The frequency of crime among people who, as the common saying goes, "know better" is proof enough that some truths can be brought home to the mind without always producing the right effect on behavior. And there are other truths that perhaps can never be adequately communicated from one person to another. The superiority of intellectual pleasures over physical pleasures is something Godwin considers a fundamental truth. Taking everything into account, I am inclined to agree with him. But how am I supposed to communicate this truth to someone who has barely ever experienced intellectual pleasure? I might as well try to explain the nature and beauty of colors to a blind person. No matter how hard I work at it, no matter how patient and clear I am, no matter how many chances I have to make my case, any real progress toward my goal seems absolutely hopeless. There is no common ground between us. I cannot lead them there step by step. It is a truth that simply cannot be demonstrated through argument. All I can say is that the wisest and best people in every age have overwhelmingly preferred intellectual pleasures over physical ones, and that my own experience completely confirms their judgment. I have found that physical pleasures are fleeting, hollow, and constantly accompanied by boredom and disgust, while intellectual pleasures always seem fresh and alive, fill my hours with real satisfaction, give life a new energy, and spread a lasting calm over my mind. If this person believes me, it can only be out of respect and trust in my authority. That is faith, not genuine conviction. I have not said anything — nor can anything be said — that would produce real conviction. This is not a matter of reasoning but of experience. They would probably reply: "What you say may be perfectly true for you and many other good people, but I feel very differently about the whole thing. I have frequently picked up a book and almost as frequently fallen asleep over it. But when I spend an evening with a lively group of friends or a beautiful woman, I feel alive, full of energy, and I truly enjoy being alive."
Under circumstances like these, reasoning and arguments are simply not the right tools for the job. At some future time, perhaps — real exhaustion with physical pleasures, or some chance experience that awakened the powers of their mind — might accomplish in a month what the most patient and skillful arguments might be incapable of achieving in forty years.
Godwin's five propositions about political truth, on which his entire work depends, are not established -- Reasons we have for believing, based on the hardship caused by the principle of population, that human vice and moral weakness can never be entirely eliminated -- "Perfectibility," in the sense Godwin uses the word, does not apply to human beings -- The nature of real human perfectibility illustrated.
If the reasoning in the previous chapter is sound, then the conclusions about political truth that Godwin draws from his proposition — that people's voluntary actions originate in their opinions — will not appear to be firmly established. Those conclusions are: "Sound reasoning and truth, when adequately communicated, must always be victorious over error. Sound reasoning and truth are capable of being so communicated. Truth is omnipotent. The vices and moral weakness of man are not invincible. Man is perfectible, or in other words, susceptible of perpetual improvement."
The first three propositions form a complete logical chain. If "adequately communicated" means producing a conviction strong enough to actually change behavior, then the major premise can be granted, but the minor premise must be denied. The conclusion — that truth is omnipotent — collapses. If, on the other hand, "adequately communicated" simply means convincing someone's rational mind, then the major premise has to be denied, the minor premise holds true only in cases that can be rigorously demonstrated, and the conclusion still falls apart. The fourth proposition Godwin calls a slight rewording of the one before it. If so, it must fall along with its predecessor. But it may be worth asking — in light of the central argument of this essay — what specific reasons we have for believing that human vice and moral weakness can never be entirely overcome in this world.
According to Godwin, a human being is a creature shaped entirely by the successive impressions received from the very first moment the germ that produced him came to life. If you could place someone in a situation where they were exposed to no harmful impressions whatsoever, then — even though it might be debatable whether virtue could exist in such a setting — vice would certainly be banished. The main thrust of Godwin's work Political Justice, if I understand it correctly, is to show that most human vices and weaknesses stem from unjust political and social institutions, and that if those were removed and people's minds were more enlightened, there would be little or no temptation toward evil in the world. However, as I believe has been clearly demonstrated, this is an entirely false picture. Independent of any political or social institutions whatsoever, the great majority of humankind — because of the fixed and unchangeable laws of nature — must always face the evil temptations that arise from material want, in addition to other passions. It follows from Godwin's own definition of human nature that such impressions and combinations of impressions cannot be floating around in the world without producing a wide variety of bad people. By Godwin's own theory of how character is formed, it is surely just as unlikely that all people would be virtuous under these circumstances as it would be for sixes to come up a hundred times in a row on the dice. The enormous variety of combinations that appear in a long sequence of dice rolls seems to me a fitting image for the enormous variety of character that must inevitably exist in the world, assuming every individual is shaped by whatever combination of impressions they have received since they first came into existence. And this comparison will, to some degree, show the absurdity of assuming that exceptions will ever become the general rule — that extraordinary and unusual combinations will become common — or that the isolated instances of great virtue that have appeared in every age of the world will ever become universal.
I realize Godwin might respond that the comparison is inaccurate in one respect: in the case of dice, the preceding causes — or rather, the odds related to the preceding causes — are always the same, so I would have no good reason to expect more sixes in the next hundred throws than in the previous hundred. But human beings, he might argue, have some power to influence the causes that shape character, and every good and virtuous person who is produced, through the influence they inevitably exert, actually increases the probability that another virtuous character will emerge — whereas rolling sixes once certainly does not increase the probability of rolling sixes again. I accept this objection to the exactness of the comparison, but it is only partly valid. Repeated experience has shown us that even the most virtuous person's influence will rarely prevail against very strong temptations to evil. It will certainly affect some people, but it will fail with a far greater number. If Godwin had succeeded in proving that these temptations to evil could be removed through human effort, I would give up the comparison entirely — or at least allow that a person might become so skilled at shaking their elbow that they could throw sixes every time. But as long as a large number of the impressions that shape character — like the fine motions of the arm — remain completely independent of human will, then even though it would be the height of folly and arrogance to try to calculate the exact proportions of virtue and vice at some future point in history, it can safely be said that the vices and moral weakness of humanity, taken as a whole, are unconquerable.
The fifth proposition is the general conclusion drawn from the four preceding ones, and it must collapse along with the foundations that supported it. In the sense that Godwin uses the word "perfectible," the perfectibility of humankind cannot be maintained unless those earlier propositions had been clearly established. There is, however, one sense in which the idea of perfectibility is perhaps valid. It can truly be said that human beings are always capable of improvement — that there has never been, and never will be, a period in human history when we can say humanity has reached its highest possible level of perfection. Yet it does not follow from this at all that our efforts to improve humanity will always succeed, or even that progress over the greatest number of ages will ever make any extraordinary leap toward perfection. The only conclusion we can draw is that the precise limit of human improvement cannot be known. And I cannot help reminding the reader again of a distinction that seems to me especially important in this discussion: the essential difference between unlimited improvement and improvement whose limit simply cannot be determined. The first — unlimited improvement — is not something that applies to human beings under the present laws of nature. The second — improvement with an unknown upper bound — undoubtedly does apply.
The real perfectibility of human beings can be illustrated, as I have mentioned before, by the perfectibility of a plant. The goal of an ambitious gardener is, as I see it, to bring together size, symmetry, and beauty of color. It would surely be presumptuous for even the most successful breeder to claim that they possessed a carnation in which all these qualities existed in their greatest possible state of perfection. However beautiful their flower might be, different care, different soil, or different sunlight might produce one even more beautiful.
Yet even though a gardener may be fully aware of the absurdity of claiming to have reached perfection, and even though they may know exactly what methods brought the flower to its current degree of beauty, they cannot be sure that by pursuing the same methods with even more effort, they will get a more beautiful blossom. By trying to improve one quality, they may damage another. The richer soil they might use to increase the size of the plant would probably burst the calyx and destroy its symmetry all at once. In a similar way, the forced fertilizer used to bring about the French Revolution — to give greater freedom and energy to the human mind — has burst the calyx of humanity, the restraining bond that holds all society together. And however large some of the individual petals may have grown, however strongly or even beautifully a few of them have developed, the whole thing is at the moment a loose, deformed, disjointed mass, without unity, symmetry, or harmony of color.
If it mattered to improve pinks and carnations, then even though we could have no hope of growing them as large as cabbages, we might certainly expect, through one effort after another, to produce more beautiful specimens than we currently have. No one can deny the importance of improving the happiness of the human species. Every smallest advance in this direction is highly valuable. But an experiment with the human race is not like an experiment on inanimate objects. The bursting of a flower may be a trivial thing. Another will soon take its place. But the bursting of the bonds of society is a tearing apart that cannot happen without causing the most intense pain to thousands of people — and a long time may pass, and much suffering may be endured, before the wound heals again.
Since the five propositions I have been examining can be considered the cornerstones of Godwin's fanciful structure — and since they really express the aim and direction of his entire work — however excellent much of his individual reasoning may be, he must be considered to have failed in the great objective of his project. Beyond the difficulties arising from the complex, compound nature of human beings, which he has by no means sufficiently addressed, the principal argument against the perfectibility of humanity and society remains whole and undiminished by anything he has put forward. And as far as I can trust my own judgment, this argument appears to be conclusive — not only against perfectibility in the expansive sense in which Godwin understands the term, but against any very marked and dramatic change for the better in the form and structure of society as a whole. By that I mean any great and decisive improvement in the condition of the lower classes of humanity — the most numerous, and therefore, in any broad view of the subject, the most important part of the human race. Were I to live a thousand years, and the laws of nature to remain the same, I would have little fear — or rather, little hope — of being contradicted by experience when I say that no possible sacrifices or efforts by the wealthy, in a country that has been long settled, could for any real length of time put the lower classes in circumstances equal to those of the common people about thirty years ago in the northern states of America.
The lower classes of Europe may at some future time be much better educated than they are now. They may learn to use what little spare time they have in far better ways than at the pub. They may live under better and more equal laws than they have perhaps ever had in any country. I even believe it is possible, though not likely, that they may have more leisure. But it is not in the nature of things that they can ever be given enough money or food to allow them all to marry early, with full confidence that they will be able to comfortably provide for a large family.
Overly perfect models can sometimes hold back real improvement rather than promote it -- Godwin's essay on "Avarice and Extravagance" -- The impossibility of dividing a society's necessary labor fairly among everyone -- Attacking work itself may cause real harm now with little or no chance of doing good later -- Any increase in agricultural labor is always an advantage for workers.
In the preface to his Enquirer, Godwin drops a few remarks that seem to hint at some shift in his views since he wrote Political Justice. Since that work is now several years old, I would certainly think I had been arguing against opinions the author himself had already reconsidered — except that in some of the essays in the Enquirer, Godwin's distinctive way of thinking shines through as strongly as ever.
People often say that even though we can never hope to reach perfection in anything, it must always be helpful to keep the most perfect models before our eyes. This sounds plausible, but it is far from universally true. I even doubt it in one of the most obvious examples that would come to mind. I doubt whether a very young painter would benefit more from trying to copy a highly polished, perfect painting than from copying one where the outlines were bolder and the technique for applying colors was easier to see. And in cases where the perfection of the model is of a completely different and higher nature than anything we could naturally evolve toward, we will not only fail to make any progress toward it — we will in all likelihood actually slow down the progress we might have made if we had not fixed our gaze on such an unattainable ideal. A purely intellectual being, free from the nagging demands of hunger or sleep, is undoubtedly a far more perfect existence than a human being. But if a person tried to model themselves on such a creature, they would not only fail to get any closer to it; by foolishly straining to imitate the inimitable, they would probably destroy the very intelligence they were trying to improve.
The form and structure of society that Godwin describes is as fundamentally different from any form of society that has ever existed in the world as a being that can live without food or sleep is from an actual human being. By improving society in its current form, we are making no more progress toward the kind of world he envisions than we would toward a line we were walking parallel to. The question, then, is this: by fixing our eyes on Godwin's ideal society as our guiding star, are we more likely to advance or to hold back the real improvement of the human species? Godwin appears to me to have answered this question against himself in his essay on "Avarice and Extravagance" in the Enquirer.
Adam Smith very rightly observed that nations, like individuals, grow rich through frugality and poor through extravagance, and that every thrifty person was therefore a friend to their country and every spendthrift an enemy. The reason he gives is that whatever is saved from income is always added to capital, and is therefore taken away from labor that is generally unproductive and put toward labor that produces real, valuable goods. No observation could be more obviously correct. The subject of Godwin's essay looks somewhat similar on the surface, but is as different as can be in substance. Godwin treats the harm of extravagance as an established fact and therefore draws his comparison between the miser and the person who spends their income. But Godwin's miser is a completely different character — at least in terms of his effect on the prosperity of the nation — from Adam Smith's frugal person. The frugal person, in order to make more money, saves from their income and adds to their capital, and this capital they either invest themselves in productive labor or lend to someone else who will probably use it that way. They benefit the nation because they add to its total capital, and because wealth used as capital not only puts more labor in motion than when spent as income, but the labor it drives is also of a more valuable kind. Godwin's miser, by contrast, locks up his wealth in a chest and puts no labor at all in motion — neither productive nor unproductive. This is such a fundamental difference that Godwin's conclusion in his essay appears immediately and obviously false, just as Adam Smith's position is immediately and obviously true. It could not, of course, have escaped Godwin's notice that some real hardship might fall on the poor from locking up money that would otherwise go to paying workers. The only way he could weaken this objection was to compare the two characters mainly in terms of their tendency to speed up our approach to that happy state of civilized equality which, he says, we should always keep before our eyes as our guiding star.
I believe it has been shown in the earlier parts of this essay that such a state of society is absolutely impossible in practice. What consequences, then, should we expect from using such a point as our guide and guiding star on the vast sea of political discovery? Reason would tell us to expect nothing but perpetually unfavorable winds, constant but fruitless effort, frequent shipwreck, and guaranteed misery. We would not only fail to make the smallest real approach toward such a perfect form of society; but by exhausting our mental and physical energy in a direction where progress is impossible, and by the repeated suffering we would inevitably cause through our constant failures, we would clearly hold back the real, achievable degree of improvement in society.
It has been shown that a society organized according to Godwin's system must, by the inescapable laws of our nature, break down into a class of property owners and a class of laborers, and that substituting benevolence for self-interest as the driving force of society, instead of producing the wonderful results you might expect from such an appealing idea, would cause the same crushing pressure of poverty to be felt by all of society that is now felt by only part of it. It is to the established system of property rights and to the seemingly narrow principle of self-interest that we owe all the noblest achievements of human genius, all the finer and more delicate emotions of the soul — everything, in fact, that distinguishes civilized life from the savage state. And no sufficient change has yet taken place in the nature of civilized human beings to allow us to say that they either are, or ever will be, in a condition where they can safely kick away the ladder by which they climbed to this height.
If in every society that has advanced beyond the savage state a class of property owners and a class of laborers must necessarily exist, then it is obvious that since labor is the only property the laboring class possesses, anything that tends to reduce the value of that property must tend to make this part of society poorer. The only way a poor person can support themselves independently is through the exertion of their physical strength. This is the only commodity they have to trade for the necessities of life. So it would hardly seem that you are helping them by shrinking the market for this commodity — by decreasing the demand for labor and reducing the value of the only property they own.
It should be noted that the main argument of this essay only goes so far as to prove the necessity of a class of property owners and a class of laborers, but by no means implies that the current extreme inequality of wealth is either necessary or beneficial to society. On the contrary, it must certainly be considered an evil, and every institution that promotes it is fundamentally bad and unwise. But whether a government could actually benefit society by actively intervening to reduce inequality of wealth is debatable. Perhaps the generous system of complete economic freedom advocated by Adam Smith and the French economists would be a poor trade for any system of regulation.
Godwin would perhaps say that the entire system of trade and exchange is a corrupt and unjust practice. If you truly want to help the poor, you should either take on some of their labor yourself or simply give them your money without demanding such a harsh return. In response to the first suggestion, it should be pointed out that even if the rich could be persuaded to help the poor this way, the value of such help would be comparatively trivial. The rich, though they think themselves very important, are vastly outnumbered by the poor, and would therefore relieve them of only a tiny fraction of their burdens by taking on a share. If all those employed in producing luxuries were added to the number of those producing necessities, and if this essential work could be divided amicably among everyone, each person's share might indeed be quite light. But desirable as such a friendly division of labor would undoubtedly be, I cannot imagine any workable principle by which it could actually happen. It has been shown that the spirit of benevolence, guided by the strict impartial justice that Godwin describes, would — if rigorously put into practice — drag the entire human race down into poverty and misery. Let us examine what would happen if property owners kept a decent share for themselves but gave the rest away to the poor without requiring any work in return. Setting aside the idleness and the vice that such a practice, if widespread, would probably create in the current state of society, and the serious risk it would pose of reducing the output of the land along with the production of luxuries, there is yet another objection.
Godwin seems to have little respect for practical principles. But it seems to me that the person who shows how a lesser good can actually be achieved is a far greater benefactor to humanity than the one who merely dwells on the ugliness of the current state of society and the beauty of some alternative state, without pointing out any practical method that could be put to use right now for speeding up our progress from one to the other.
It has been shown that, because of the principle of population, there will always be more people in need than can be adequately provided for. A rich person's surplus might be enough for three, but four people will want it. They cannot choose three out of the four without granting an enormous favor to those they select. Those chosen individuals must see themselves as deeply obligated to the benefactor and dependent on them for their survival. The rich person would feel their power, and the poor person would feel their dependence — and the corrosive effects of both these feelings on the human heart are well known. So even though I completely agree with Godwin that hard labor is an evil, I still think it is a lesser evil, and less likely to degrade the human mind, than dependence. Every account of human history we have ever read vividly illustrates the danger to any mind entrusted with constant power.
Under the current system, and particularly when labor is in demand, the person who does a day's work for me confers just as great a benefit on me as I do on them. I have what they need; they have what I need. We make a fair exchange. The poor person walks upright in conscious independence, and the employer's mind is not corrupted by a sense of power.
Three or four hundred years ago there was undoubtedly much less labor in England relative to the population than there is now, but there was much more dependence. We probably would not enjoy our present degree of civil liberty if the poor, through the rise of manufacturing, had not been able to offer something in exchange for what the great lords provided, instead of relying on their charity. Even the greatest enemies of trade and manufacturing — and I do not count myself a particularly enthusiastic friend of them — must admit that when they were introduced into England, liberty came along with them.
Nothing I have said is meant in the slightest degree to undervalue the principle of benevolence. It is one of the noblest and most godlike qualities of the human heart, perhaps generated slowly and gradually from self-interest, and afterward intended to serve as a general law whose kind purpose is to soften the rough edges, to smooth out the harshness, and to ease the wrinkles of its parent. This seems to be how all of nature works. Perhaps there is no single general law of nature that will not appear — at least to us — to produce some localized harm. And we frequently observe at the same time some generous provision that, acting as another general law, corrects the inequalities created by the first.
The proper role of benevolence is to soften the localized harms that arise from self-interest, but it can never replace self-interest entirely. If no one were to allow themselves to act until they had completely determined that the action they were about to take was more beneficial than any other to the general good, the most brilliant minds would freeze in confusion and bewilderment, and ordinary people would constantly be making the worst possible mistakes.
Since Godwin has not laid out any practical plan by which the necessary agricultural labor of a society might be fairly shared among all workers, his general attacks on employment appear to pursue an unattainable good at the cost of much real harm in the present. For if every person who employs the poor should be considered their enemy, adding to the weight of their oppression, and if the miser is for this reason to be preferred to the person who spends their income, then it follows that any number of people who currently spend their incomes could, to the benefit of society, be converted into misers. Suppose, then, that a hundred thousand people who now each employ ten workers were to lock up their wealth away from general use. It is obvious that a million working people of various kinds would be completely thrown out of all employment. Even Godwin himself could hardly refuse to acknowledge the enormous misery that such an event would produce in the current state of society. And I wonder whether he might not have some difficulty proving that this kind of behavior tended more than the behavior of those who spend their incomes to "place human beings in the condition in which they ought to be placed." But Godwin says that the miser does not really lock up anything, that the point has not been properly understood, and that the true nature and definition of wealth have not been applied to explain it. Having therefore defined wealth — quite correctly — as the goods produced and developed by human labor, he observes that the miser locks up neither grain, nor cattle, nor clothing, nor houses. And indeed, the miser does not literally lock up these items. But he locks up the power of producing them, which amounts to the same thing. These goods are certainly used and consumed by his contemporaries just as fully as if he were a beggar. But not as fully as if he had used his wealth to bring more land under cultivation, to breed more cattle, to employ more tailors, and to build more houses. And even if we supposed for a moment that the miser's behavior did not tend to reduce any truly useful production, how are all those who are thrown out of work supposed to obtain the credentials they can show in order to be given a proper share of the food and clothing produced by society? This is the insurmountable difficulty.
I am perfectly willing to grant Godwin that there is much more labor in the world than is really necessary, and that if the working classes could agree among themselves never to work more than six or seven hours a day, the goods essential to human happiness could still be produced in just as great abundance as at present. But it is almost impossible to imagine such an agreement being maintained. Because of the principle of population, some people would inevitably be in greater need than others. Those with large families would naturally want to trade two extra hours of their labor for a larger quantity of food. How could they be prevented from making this exchange? It would be a violation of the first and most sacred right a person possesses to try, through formal institutions, to interfere with their control over their own labor.
Until Godwin can point to some practical plan by which the necessary labor of a society might be fairly divided, his attacks on labor, if anyone listened to them, would certainly produce much real harm in the present without bringing us any closer to that state of civilized equality he looks forward to as his guiding star — and which, he seems to think, should be our compass right now for determining the nature and tendency of human actions. A sailor guided by such a star is in danger of shipwreck.
Perhaps there is no way wealth could generally be put to more beneficial use for a nation — and especially for its poorest members — than by improving and making productive the land that would not be worth a farmer's expense to cultivate. If Godwin had used his powerful eloquence to paint the superior worth and usefulness of the person who employed the poor in this kind of work, compared to the one who employed them in petty luxuries, every enlightened person would have applauded his efforts. An increasing demand for agricultural labor must always tend to improve the condition of the poor. And if the additional work is of this kind, far from it being true that the poor would be forced to work ten hours for the same pay they previously earned in eight, the exact opposite would happen: a worker could then support a wife and family on six hours of labor just as well as they previously could on eight.
The labor created by luxuries, while useful in distributing the country's output without corrupting the property owner through power or degrading the worker through dependence, does not have the same beneficial effects on the condition of the poor. A large increase in manufacturing work, though it may raise wages even more than an increase in demand for agricultural labor, has a catch: in this case the amount of food in the country may not be increasing proportionally, so the advantage to the poor will be only temporary, since food prices must inevitably rise in step with wages. On this subject, I cannot resist offering a few remarks on a section of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, while speaking with the deference I certainly ought to feel in disagreeing with a person so justly celebrated in the world of political thought.
Adam Smith was probably wrong to treat every increase in a nation's income or capital as an increase in the money available to pay workers -- Cases where growing wealth does nothing to improve the condition of the working poor -- England has grown richer without a proportional increase in the funds available to support labor -- The condition of the poor in China would not be improved by an increase in manufacturing wealth.
The stated purpose of Adam Smith's inquiry is to explain the nature and causes of national wealth. But there is another investigation — perhaps an even more interesting one — that he occasionally mixes in with the first. I mean an investigation into the causes that affect the happiness of nations, and particularly the happiness and comfort of the lower classes, who make up the largest group in every country. I am well aware of how closely these two subjects are connected, and that the forces which tend to increase a nation's wealth also tend, generally speaking, to increase the happiness of the lower classes. But Adam Smith may have treated these two lines of inquiry as more closely linked than they really are. At the very least, he has not paused to notice those cases where a society's wealth may increase — according to his own definition of "wealth" — without doing anything to improve the comfort of its working people. I don't intend to get into a philosophical discussion about what true human happiness consists of. Instead, I will simply focus on two widely recognized ingredients: health, and access to the necessities and comforts of life.
There is little room for doubt that the comfort of the working poor depends on the growth of the funds set aside for supporting labor, and will be closely proportional to how quickly those funds grow. The demand for labor that such growth would create, by generating competition in the job market, would naturally drive up the value of labor. Until the additional workers needed could be raised, the increased funds would be distributed among the same number of people as before, and so every worker would live comparatively well. But Adam Smith may have been wrong to treat every increase in a society's income or capital as an increase in these funds. Such surplus capital or income will, of course, always be seen by the person who owns it as an additional fund from which they can hire more workers. But it will not be a real and effective fund for supporting additional workers unless the whole — or at least a large part — of this increase in the society's capital or income can be converted into a proportional quantity of food. And it will not be convertible into food when the increase has come merely from the products of labor rather than the products of the land. In this case, a gap opens up between the number of workers that the society's capital could employ and the number that its land can actually feed.
Let me explain with an example. Adam Smith defines the wealth of a nation as the annual produce of its land and labor. This definition clearly includes manufactured goods as well as agricultural produce. Now suppose a nation spent several years adding everything it saved from its yearly income to its manufacturing capital alone, and nothing to the capital invested in agriculture. Obviously, it might grow richer according to that definition without gaining the ability to support a greater number of workers — and therefore without any increase in the real funds for supporting labor. There would still be a demand for labor, however, because each manufacturer would have the ability — or at least think he had the ability — to expand his existing operations or set up new ones. This demand would naturally raise the price of labor, but if the country's yearly stock of food was not increasing, the rise would soon turn out to be purely nominal, since the price of food would inevitably rise along with it. The demand for manufacturing workers might draw many people away from agriculture, which would tend to shrink the annual food supply. But let us assume that any such effect is offset by improvements in farming equipment, so that the total quantity of food stays the same. Meanwhile, improvements in manufacturing machinery would certainly take place, and this — combined with the larger number of people employed in manufacturing — would cause the total annual output of the country to increase significantly. The nation's wealth would therefore be growing year after year according to the definition, and it might be growing quite rapidly.
The question is whether wealth increasing in this way actually tends to improve the condition of the working poor. It is self-evident that any general rise in the price of labor, when the food supply stays the same, can only be a nominal rise, since it must very quickly be followed by a proportional rise in food prices. The increase in labor prices that we have been imagining would therefore have little or no effect in giving working people greater access to the necessities and comforts of life. In this respect, they would be in roughly the same situation as before. In one other respect, they would actually be worse off. A larger proportion of them would be employed in manufacturing, and fewer in agriculture. And this shift in occupations, I think everyone would agree, is very unfavorable in terms of health — one essential ingredient of happiness — not to mention the greater uncertainty of manufacturing work, which is subject to the whims of fashion, the disruptions of war, and other unpredictable forces.
It might be said, perhaps, that the scenario I have described could not actually happen, because a rise in food prices would immediately redirect some additional capital toward agriculture. But this is a process that may unfold very slowly. Keep in mind that a rise in the price of labor came before the rise in food prices, and would therefore slow down the beneficial effects on agriculture that higher food prices might otherwise have produced.
It might also be said that the additional capital of the nation could be used to import enough food to support those whom its capital could employ. A small country with a large navy and excellent internal transportation — like Holland — might indeed import and distribute an effective quantity of food. But food prices would have to be very high to make such importation and distribution worthwhile in large countries that are less fortunately situated.
A scenario exactly like the one I have described may never have actually occurred. But I have little doubt that cases closely approximating it can be found without too much searching. In fact, I am strongly inclined to think that England itself, since the Revolution of 1688, provides a very striking illustration of this argument.
The commerce of this country, both domestic and foreign, has certainly been advancing rapidly over the last century. The market value in Europe of the annual produce of its land and labor has without doubt increased considerably. But on closer examination, the increase turns out to have been mainly in the products of labor, not in the products of the land. So even though the nation's wealth has been advancing at a fast pace, the real funds available to support labor have been growing very slowly. The result is exactly what you would expect. The growing wealth of the nation has done little or nothing to improve the condition of the working poor. They do not, I believe, have greater access to the necessities and comforts of life than before, and a much larger proportion of them than at the time of the Revolution are employed in manufacturing and crowded together in cramped and unhealthy rooms.
If we could believe Dr. Price's claim that England's population has actually declined since the Revolution, it would appear that the real funds for supporting labor had been shrinking even as wealth was growing in other ways. For I think it can be laid down as a general rule that if the real funds for supporting labor are increasing — that is, if the land can feed, as well as the capital employ, a greater number of workers — then that additional population will quickly spring up, even despite the kinds of wars Dr. Price lists. Consequently, if a country's population has been stationary or declining, we can safely conclude that however much it may have grown in manufacturing wealth, its real funds for supporting labor cannot have increased.
It is hard to believe, however, that England's population has actually declined since the Revolution, though all the evidence agrees that its growth, if it has grown at all, has been very slow. In the debate this question has sparked, Dr. Price clearly appears to be more thoroughly in command of his subject and to possess more accurate information than his opponents. Judging simply from the arguments exchanged, I would say Dr. Price's position is closer to being proven than Mr. Howlett's. The truth probably lies between the two claims, but even this middle ground implies that population growth since the Revolution has been very slow compared to the growth of wealth.
Few people would be willing to believe that the country's food production has been decreasing, or even that it has been completely flat, over the last century. The enclosure of commons and wasteland certainly tends to increase the food supply. But it has been confidently argued that the enclosure of common fields has frequently had the opposite effect — that large tracts of land which formerly produced great quantities of grain now employ fewer workers and feed fewer mouths after being converted to pasture. It is an acknowledged fact that pasture land produces less human food than grain land of equal natural fertility. And if it could be clearly established that the rising demand for high-quality meat, and its higher price as a result, has led to more good land being used for grazing each year, then the reduction in human food that this would cause might have offset the gains from enclosing wasteland and the general improvements in farming methods.
It hardly needs pointing out that the high price of meat today and its low price in earlier times were not caused by scarcity in the one case or abundance in the other, but by the different costs involved at different periods in preparing cattle for market. It is possible that there were actually more cattle in the country a hundred years ago than there are now. But there is no doubt that much more meat of superior quality is being brought to market today than ever before. When meat prices were very low, cattle were raised mainly on wasteland and, except for a few major markets, were probably slaughtered with little additional fattening. The veal sold cheaply in some remote counties today bears little resemblance, beyond the name, to what is sold in London. In the past, the price of meat would not even cover the cost of raising cattle on land that could be used for crops, let alone fattening them. But the current price will not only pay for fattening cattle on the very best land — it will even justify raising many of them on land that could produce good harvests of grain. The same number of cattle — or even the same weight of cattle at slaughter — will have consumed very different quantities of food that could have fed humans, depending on the period. A fattened beast may, in some ways, be considered — to borrow the language of the French economists — an unproductive laborer: it has added nothing to the value of the raw food it consumed. The current system of grazing undoubtedly tends, more than the old system, to reduce the amount of food available for human consumption relative to the overall fertility of the land.
I would not want to be understood as saying that the old system either could have or should have continued. The rising price of meat is a natural and inevitable consequence of the general advance of farming. But I cannot help thinking that the current enormous demand for high-quality meat, the amount of good land that is consequently being used to produce it, and the large number of horses now kept for pleasure are the main reasons why the country's food supply has not kept pace with the generally increased fertility of the soil. A change in these habits would, I have little doubt, have a noticeable effect on the amount of food in the country, and therefore on its population.
The use of much of the most fertile land for grazing, the improvements in farming equipment, the growth of large farms, and especially the decline in the number of rural cottages throughout the country all point to the same conclusion: there are probably not as many people employed in agricultural labor now as at the time of the Revolution. Whatever increase in population has occurred must therefore be employed almost entirely in manufacturing. And it is well known that the failure of some industries — simply due to the whims of fashion, like the adoption of muslin instead of silk, or of shoelaces and covered buttons instead of buckles and metal buttons — combined with the restrictions on the labor market created by corporation and parish laws, has frequently thrown thousands of people onto charity for support. The enormous growth in the poor rates is in itself strong evidence that the poor do not have greater access to the necessities and comforts of life. And if we add to the fact that their condition in this regard is somewhat worse rather than better the further consideration that a much larger proportion of them are employed in large factories — which are bad for both health and moral character — it must be acknowledged that the growth of wealth in recent years has done nothing to increase the happiness of the working poor.
The fact that every increase in a nation's capital or income cannot be treated as an increase in the real funds for supporting labor — and therefore cannot have the same beneficial effect on the condition of the poor — becomes even clearer when the argument is applied to China.
Adam Smith observes that China has probably long been as rich as its laws and institutions will allow, but that with different laws and institutions, and if foreign trade were valued rather than looked down on, it could be much richer. The question is: would such an increase in wealth actually be an increase in the real funds for supporting labor, and therefore tend to give the lower classes in China a better standard of living?
It is obvious that if trade and foreign commerce were highly valued in China, then given its abundant labor supply and cheap wages, the country could produce manufactured goods for export in enormous quantities. It is equally obvious that because of the sheer bulk of food required and the immense extent of China's inland territory, it could not import enough food in return to make any meaningful addition to the country's annual food supply. It would therefore exchange its vast manufacturing output chiefly for luxury goods gathered from all parts of the world. As things stand now, no labor whatsoever is spared in the production of food. The country is somewhat overpopulated relative to what its capital can employ, and labor is therefore so abundant that no effort is made to economize on it. The result is probably the greatest production of food that the soil can possibly yield. It will generally be observed that labor-saving methods, though they may allow a farmer to bring a given quantity of grain to market more cheaply, tend to reduce rather than increase total output. In agriculture, therefore, such methods may in some ways be considered more of a private advantage than a public one.
A huge amount of capital could not be put to work in China producing goods for foreign trade without pulling so many workers out of agriculture that it would change this entire situation and, to some degree, shrink the country's food production. The demand for manufacturing workers would naturally drive up the price of labor, but since the quantity of food would not be increasing, food prices would keep pace with wages — or even outpace them if the food supply were actually declining. The country would clearly be advancing in wealth. The market value of the annual produce of its land and labor would be growing year after year. Yet the real funds for supporting labor would be flat or even declining. Consequently, the nation's increasing wealth would actually tend to push down, not raise, the condition of the poor. In terms of their access to the necessities and comforts of life, they would be in the same or worse situation than before, and a large proportion of them would have traded the healthy work of farming for the unhealthy occupations of manufacturing.
The argument is perhaps easier to see when applied to China, because it is generally accepted that China's wealth has long been stationary. For any other country, it could always be debated which of two compared periods saw faster growth in wealth, since Adam Smith argues that the condition of the poor depends on the speed of wealth's increase at any given time. But it is clear that two nations might be growing at exactly the same rate in the market value of their annual output, yet if one had focused mainly on agriculture and the other mainly on commerce, the funds available to support labor — and therefore the effect of that growing wealth on the people in each nation — would be extremely different. In the nation that had focused on agriculture, the poor would live in plenty, and population would grow rapidly. In the nation that had focused on commerce, the poor would benefit comparatively little, and population would grow slowly.
The proper definition of a nation's wealth -- Why the French economists considered all manufacturers unproductive workers, and why their reasoning was not quite right -- The labor of craftspeople and manufacturers is productive enough for individuals, even if not for the nation -- A remarkable passage from Dr. Price's Observations -- Price's error in attributing America's happiness and rapid population growth mainly to its particular stage of civilization -- Nothing good can come from closing our eyes to the difficulties standing in the way of improving society.
A question naturally comes up here: is the exchangeable value of a country's annual production the right way to define a nation's wealth, or would the gross production of its land — as the French economists argued — be a more accurate measure? One thing is certain: every increase in wealth under the economists' definition would mean an increase in the money available to pay workers, and would therefore always tend to improve the condition of the working poor. An increase in wealth under Adam Smith's definition, on the other hand, would by no means always have the same effect. And yet it does not necessarily follow that Adam Smith's definition is wrong. It seems improper in many ways to exclude the clothing and housing of an entire population from any part of their income. Much of it may indeed be of trivial and unimportant value compared to the country's food supply, yet it can still fairly be counted as part of that income. Therefore, the only point on which I would disagree with Adam Smith is where he seems to treat every increase in a society's income or capital as an increase in the money available to pay workers — and consequently as always tending to improve the condition of the poor.
The fine silks and cottons, the laces, and other decorative luxuries of a wealthy country may add considerably to the exchangeable value of its annual production. Yet they do very little to increase the overall happiness of that society. It seems to me that we should evaluate how productive or unproductive different kinds of labor are based partly on the real usefulness of what they produce. The French economists considered all labor used in manufacturing to be unproductive. Compared with labor used to work the land, I would be perfectly willing to agree with them — but not quite for the reasons they give. They argue that labor used on land is productive because the output, after fully paying the worker and the farmer, still yields a clear rent to the landlord. And they argue that the labor used to make a piece of lace is unproductive because it merely replaces the food the worker consumed and the capital his employer invested, without yielding any clear rent at all. But suppose the finished lace were valuable enough that, besides paying the worker and his employer in full, it could still yield a clear rent to a third party. It seems to me that compared with labor used on the land, it would be just as unproductive as ever. By the French economists' reasoning, the man making lace would in this case appear to be a productive worker. Yet by their own definition of national wealth, he should not be considered one. He has added nothing to the gross production of the land. He consumed a portion of that gross production and left a bit of lace in return. And though he may sell that bit of lace for three times the amount of food he ate while making it — and so be a very productive worker as far as he himself is concerned — he cannot be considered to have added, through his labor, anything essential to the nation's wealth. The clear rent that a particular product can yield, after paying the costs of producing it, does not appear to be the only standard by which we should judge whether any particular kind of labor is productive or unproductive to the nation.
Suppose that 200,000 men who are currently employed producing manufactured goods that only serve to flatter the vanity of a few rich people were instead put to work on barren, uncultivated land and produced only half the food they themselves consumed. They would still be more productive workers for the nation than they were before — even though their labor, far from yielding a rent to a third party, would only half replace the food used up in obtaining the product. In their former employment, they consumed a certain portion of the country's food and left behind some silks and laces. In their latter employment, they consumed the same amount of food and left behind provisions for 100,000 men. There can be little doubt which of these two legacies would be more genuinely beneficial to the country. And I think it will be agreed that the wealth that supported those 200,000 men while they were producing silks and laces would have been more usefully employed supporting them while they produced the additional food.
Capital invested in land may be unproductive for the individual who invests it and yet be highly productive for society. Capital invested in trade, on the other hand, may be highly productive for the individual yet almost entirely unproductive for society. And this is the reason I would call manufacturing labor unproductive compared to agricultural labor — not the reason given by the French economists. It is indeed almost impossible to see the great fortunes made in trade, and the generous lifestyles that so many merchants enjoy, and still agree with the economists' claim that manufacturers can only grow rich by depriving themselves of the funds meant for their own support. In many branches of trade, the profits are so large that they could easily yield a clear rent to a third party. But since there is no third party involved, and all the profits go to the master manufacturer or merchant, he seems to have a fair chance of growing rich without much self-denial. And so we regularly see large fortunes built in trade by people who were never known for their frugality.
Everyday experience proves that the labor used in trade and manufacturing is productive enough for individuals, but it is certainly not productive in the same degree for the nation. Every addition to a country's food supply tends to benefit the whole of society immediately. But fortunes made in trade benefit society only in a remote and uncertain way, and in some respects actually work against that end. Domestic trade is by far the most important trade of every nation. China is the richest country in the world, without any other kind. Setting foreign trade aside for a moment, the man who uses a clever manufactured product to claim a double share from the existing stock of food is certainly not as useful to the nation as the man who, through his labor, adds even a single share to the overall food supply. The consumable goods of silks, laces, trinkets, and expensive furniture are undoubtedly part of a society's income — but they are the income only of the rich, not of society at large. An increase in this part of a nation's income cannot, therefore, be considered as important as an increase in food, which forms the principal income of the great mass of the people.
Foreign trade adds to a nation's wealth according to Adam Smith's definition, though not according to the economists' definition. Its main use, and probably the reason it has generally been so highly valued, is that it greatly increases a nation's external power — that is, its ability to command the labor of other countries. But on closer examination, it turns out to contribute very little to increasing the domestic funds available for paying workers, and consequently very little to the happiness of most of the population. In the natural course of a nation's development toward prosperity, manufacturing and foreign trade would follow, in their turn, after the land had been intensively cultivated. In Europe, this natural order has been reversed: the soil has been cultivated using surplus manufacturing capital, instead of manufacturing rising from surplus capital invested in land. The greater encouragement given to urban industry, and the resulting higher wages paid to craftspeople compared to farm workers, are probably the reasons why so much European soil remains uncultivated. Had a different policy been pursued across Europe, the continent might undoubtedly have been far more populous than it currently is — and yet not more burdened by its population.
I cannot leave this fascinating subject of the difficulty posed by population — a subject that deserves far more careful investigation and skilled discussion than I can give it — without taking note of a remarkable passage in Dr. Price's two volumes of Observations. After presenting some tables on life expectancy in cities versus the countryside, he writes (Vol. II, p. 243):
"From this comparison, it is clear how truthfully great cities have been called the graves of mankind. It must also convince anyone who considers it that, as I observed at the end of the fourth essay in my earlier volume, it is by no means strictly accurate to think of our diseases as nature's original intention. They are, without doubt, generally our own creation. If there were a country where the inhabitants lived entirely natural and virtuous lives, few of them would die without living out the full span of existence allotted to them. Pain and sickness would be unknown among them, and death would come upon them like sleep, from no other cause than gradual and unavoidable decay."
I have to say that I felt compelled to draw a very different conclusion from the facts presented in Dr. Price's two volumes. I had been aware for some time that population and food increase at different rates, and a vague idea had been floating in my mind that the two could only be kept in balance by some form of misery or vice. But reading Dr. Price's Observations, after this idea had already taken shape, raised it at once to a firm conviction. With so many facts before him showing the extraordinary speed at which population grows when unchecked, and with such a body of evidence to illustrate even the specific ways that nature's general laws hold back excess population, it is completely beyond me how he could have written that passage. He was a strong advocate for early marriage as the best safeguard against immoral behavior. He had no fanciful ideas about the extinction of sexual desire, like Godwin, nor did he ever think of dodging the difficulty in the ways hinted at by Condorcet. He frequently talks about giving nature's reproductive powers room to work. Yet the fact that his understanding could escape from the obvious and necessary conclusion — that an unchecked population would grow, beyond all comparison, faster than the earth could produce food to support it, even with humanity's best-directed efforts — astonishes me as much as if he had rejected the conclusion of one of the simplest propositions in geometry.
Dr. Price, speaking of the different stages of civilized society, says: "The first, or simplest, stages of civilization are those which most favor the increase and happiness of mankind." He then points to the American colonies as being, at that time, in the first and happiest of the stages he had described — and as offering very striking proof of the effects that different stages of civilization have on population. But he does not seem to realize that Americans' happiness depended much less on their particular stage of civilization than on the special circumstances of their situation as new colonies — specifically, having a great abundance of fertile, uncultivated land. In parts of Norway, Denmark, or Sweden, or in England two or three hundred years ago, he might have found roughly the same stage of civilization but by no means the same happiness or the same population growth. He himself quotes a statute of Henry VIII complaining about the decline of farming and the rising cost of food, "whereby a marvelous number of people were rendered incapable of supporting themselves and their families." The greater degree of civil liberty that existed in America certainly contributed its share to promoting the industry, happiness, and population of those states. But even civil liberty, as powerful as it is, will not create new land. The Americans may be said to enjoy a greater degree of civil liberty now that they are an independent nation than they did while under British rule, but we can be perfectly sure that population will not continue to increase at the same rapid pace as it did then.
Someone who looked at the happy condition of the working classes in America twenty years ago would naturally wish to keep them in that state forever, and might think that by preventing the introduction of manufacturing and luxury, they could achieve that goal. But they might just as reasonably expect to prevent a wife or lover from growing old by never letting her step into the sun or open air. The situation of new, well-governed colonies is a bloom of youth that no efforts can preserve. There are, it is true, many treatments in the political body — just as in the human body — that can speed up or slow down the approach of old age. But there is no chance of success in any method that could be devised for keeping either of them permanently young. By encouraging urban industry more than agriculture, Europe may be said to have brought on a premature old age. A different policy in this respect would inject fresh life and energy into every nation. As long as the law of primogeniture and other European customs keep land at a monopoly price, capital can never be invested in it with much advantage to the individual, and therefore it is unlikely that the soil will be properly cultivated. And though in every civilized nation there must exist a class of property owners and a class of laborers, one permanent advantage would always follow from a more equal distribution of property. The greater the number of property owners, the smaller the number of laborers. A larger portion of society would be in the happy state of owning property, and a smaller portion in the unhappy state of owning nothing but their labor. But even the best-directed efforts, though they may ease the pressure, can never remove it. And it will be hard for anyone who honestly considers the real situation of humanity on earth, and the general laws of nature, to imagine that even the most enlightened efforts could place mankind in a state where "few would die without living out the full span of existence allotted to them; where pain and sickness would be unknown among them; and death would come upon them like sleep, from no other cause than gradual and unavoidable decay."
It is, without question, a deeply discouraging thought that the great obstacle standing in the way of any extraordinary improvement in society is one we can never hope to overcome. The perpetual tendency of the human race to increase beyond the means of subsistence is one of the general laws of living nature, and we have no reason to expect it will change. Yet discouraging as this reality must be for those whose efforts are admirably directed toward improving the human condition, it is clear that nothing good can come from any attempt to paper over this fact or push it into the background. On the contrary, the most harmful results can be expected from the cowardly refusal to face a truth simply because it is unpleasant. Setting aside what relates to this great obstacle, there is still plenty left to be done for humanity — more than enough to inspire us to the most tireless effort. But if we proceed without a thorough knowledge and clear understanding of the nature, extent, and scale of the difficulties we face — or if we foolishly direct our efforts toward a goal we cannot hope to reach — we will not only exhaust our strength in fruitless work and remain just as far as ever from what we wished for, but we will be perpetually crushed by the recoil of this rock of Sisyphus.
The constant pressure of hardship on humanity, caused by the principle of population, seems to direct our hopes toward the future -- The idea of a "state of trial" conflicts with our understanding of God's foreknowledge -- The world is probably a vast process for awakening matter into mind -- A theory of how the mind is formed -- Stimuli from the body's needs -- Stimuli from the operation of general laws -- Stimuli from the difficulties of life created by the principle of population.
When we look at human life through the lens of the constant pressure that population places on subsistence, and see how little reason we have to expect perfection on earth, it seems to strongly point our hopes toward the future. And the temptations we are inevitably exposed to — arising from the natural laws we have been examining — seem to cast the world in the light it has often been seen in before: as a state of trial and a school for virtue, preparing us for a higher state of happiness. But I hope I will be forgiven if I offer a somewhat different view of humanity's situation on earth — one that seems to me more consistent with the various natural phenomena we observe around us, and more in harmony with our ideas about the power, goodness, and foreknowledge of God.
It cannot be a worthless exercise for the human mind to try to "vindicate the ways of God to man" — as long as we proceed with proper distrust of our own understanding and a fair sense of how little we can grasp of the reasons behind all we see. We should greet every ray of light with gratitude. And when no light appears, we should consider that the darkness comes from within ourselves, not from above, and bow with humble respect before the supreme wisdom of the one whose "thoughts are above our thoughts," "as the heavens are high above the earth."
In all our feeble attempts, however, to "find out the Almighty to perfection," it seems absolutely necessary that we should reason from nature up to nature's God — and not presume to reason from God down to nature. The moment we allow ourselves to ask why some things are not otherwise, instead of trying to account for them as they are, we will never know where to stop. We will be led into the most absurd and childish errors, all progress in understanding the ways of Providence will grind to a halt, and the inquiry itself will cease to be a worthwhile exercise of the mind. Infinite power is so vast and incomprehensible an idea that the human mind must necessarily be overwhelmed by it. With the crude and simplistic conceptions we sometimes form of this attribute of God, we might imagine that he could call into existence countless billions of beings, all free from pain and imperfection, all outstanding in goodness and wisdom, all capable of the greatest joys, and as numerous as the points throughout infinite space. But when we turn from these wild and extravagant daydreams to the book of nature — where alone we can read God as he truly is — we see a constant succession of conscious beings, rising apparently from tiny specks of matter, going through a long and sometimes painful process in this world, but many of them achieving, before the end of it, such elevated qualities and powers as seem to suggest their fitness for some higher state. Shouldn't we, then, correct our crude and simplistic ideas about infinite Power by looking at what actually exists? Can we judge the Creator except by his creation? And unless we want to exalt God's power at the expense of his goodness, shouldn't we conclude that even for the great Creator, almighty as he is, a certain process may be necessary — a certain time (or at least what appears to us as time) may be required — in order to form beings with those elevated qualities of mind that will make them fit for his high purposes?
The idea of a "state of trial" seems to imply a previously existing soul that doesn't match what we actually observe in a human infant, and it suggests something like suspicion and a lack of foreknowledge that conflicts with how we want to think about the Supreme Being. I am inclined, therefore — as I have hinted before — to consider the world and this life as the mighty process of God, not for the trial but for the creation and formation of mind. It is a process necessary to awaken inert, chaotic matter into spirit — to transform the dust of the earth into soul — to draw an ethereal spark from a lump of clay. And from this perspective, the various impressions and stimuli that a person receives throughout life can be seen as the forming hand of the Creator, acting through general laws and awakening our sluggish existence, through the animating touch of the divine, into a capacity for higher enjoyment. The original sin of humanity is the inertia and disorder of the chaotic matter in which we are, so to speak, born.
There would be no point in getting into the question of whether mind is a substance distinct from matter, or simply a finer form of it. The question is perhaps, in the end, just a question of words. Mind is essentially mind, whether it is formed from matter or from anything else. We know from experience that soul and body are deeply united, and every observation suggests that they grow together from infancy. It would be a highly unlikely assumption to believe that a complete and fully formed spirit exists inside every infant, but that it is weighed down and held back during the first twenty years of life by the weakness — or dullness — of the organs enclosing it. Since we would all agree that God is the creator of mind as well as of body, and since both seem to be forming and developing at the same time, it should not seem inconsistent with either reason or revelation — if it is consistent with what we observe in nature — to suppose that God is constantly engaged in forming mind out of matter, and that the various impressions a person receives throughout life are the process by which this happens. The work is surely worthy of the highest attributes of God.
This view of humanity's condition on earth will seem quite plausible if, judging from what little experience we have of the nature of mind, we find upon investigation that the phenomena around us and the various events of human life seem especially designed to advance this great purpose — and particularly if, on this assumption, we can explain, even to our own limited understanding, many of the roughnesses and inequalities of life that we so often complain about to the God of nature.
The first great awakeners of the mind seem to be the needs of the body. (It was my intention to explore this subject at considerable length as a kind of second part to this essay. A long interruption from other business has forced me to set that plan aside, at least for now. So here I will only sketch out a few of the main points that seem to me to support the general theory I have put forward.) The body's needs are the first stimulants that rouse the brain of a newborn into conscious activity. And such is the sluggishness of raw matter that, unless a particular course of stimuli generates other needs that are equally powerful, those original stimulants seem to remain necessary even afterward to sustain the activity they first sparked. A person in a primitive state would sleep forever under a tree unless roused from that stupor by the pangs of hunger or the bite of cold. The efforts such a person makes to avoid those hardships — by finding food and building shelter — are the very exercises that develop and keep in motion faculties that would otherwise sink into lifeless inactivity. From everything experience has taught us about how the human mind works, if the stimuli that arise from the body's needs were removed from the mass of humanity, we have far more reason to think people would sink to the level of animals — from a lack of stimulation — than that they would rise to the level of philosophers through the gift of leisure. In those countries where nature is most generous in what it produces on its own, you will not find the inhabitants most remarkable for sharpness of mind. Necessity has with great truth been called the mother of invention. Some of the noblest achievements of the human mind have been set in motion by the need to satisfy the body's wants. Need has often given wings to the poet's imagination, sharpened the flowing passages of the historian, and added precision to the investigations of the philosopher. And though there are undoubtedly many minds today that have been so thoroughly developed by the various stimulations of knowledge or social connection that they would not fall back into apathy if their physical needs were removed, it can hardly be doubted that these stimulants could not be taken away from the mass of humanity without producing a general and devastating stupor — one that would destroy all the seeds of future progress.
Locke, if I remember correctly, says that the drive to avoid pain, rather than the pursuit of pleasure, is the great motivator of action in life — and that when we look toward any particular pleasure, we will not be moved to act to obtain it until thinking about it for long enough creates something like a sensation of pain or restlessness at not having it. To avoid evil and pursue good seem to be the great duty and business of human beings, and this world appears to be especially designed to provide endless opportunities for exactly that kind of effort. And it is through this effort — through these stimulations — that the mind is formed. If Locke's idea is right, and there is strong reason to think it is, then evil seems to be necessary to create effort, and effort seems clearly necessary to create mind.
The need for food to sustain life probably produces a greater quantity of effort than any other need, physical or mental. The Supreme Being has ordained that the earth shall not produce food in large quantities until a great deal of preparatory labor and ingenuity has been applied to its surface. There is no connection we can comprehend between a seed and the plant or tree that grows from it. The Supreme Creator could undoubtedly cause plants of all kinds to spring up for the use of his creatures without the help of those tiny bits of matter we call seeds, or even without the assisting labor and attention of human beings. The processes of plowing and clearing ground, of collecting and sowing seeds, are surely not for God's assistance in his creation. Rather, they are made necessary preconditions for enjoying the blessings of life, in order to rouse people into action and train their minds to think.
To provide the most relentless stimulation of this kind, and to drive humanity to further the gracious designs of Providence through the full cultivation of the earth, it has been ordained that population should increase much faster than food. This general law — as it has been shown in the earlier parts of this essay — undoubtedly produces a great deal of suffering in specific cases. But a little reflection may perhaps convince us that it produces a great overall surplus of good. Strong stimuli seem necessary to create effort, and to direct that effort and develop the power of reason, it seems absolutely necessary that the Supreme Being should always act according to general laws. The constancy of the laws of nature — the certainty with which we can expect the same effects from the same causes — is the foundation of our ability to reason. If in the ordinary course of things the hand of God were frequently visible, or to put it more accurately, if God frequently changed his purposes (for the hand of God is indeed visible in every blade of grass we see), a general and fatal paralysis of the human faculties would probably follow. Even the body's needs would cease to motivate people to effort if they could not reasonably expect that well-directed work would be rewarded with success. The constancy of the laws of nature is the foundation of the farmer's industry and foresight, the tireless ingenuity of the craftsman, the skilled research of the physician and anatomist, and the careful observation and patient investigation of the scientist. To this constancy we owe all the greatest and noblest achievements of the mind. To this constancy we owe the immortal mind of a Newton.
Since the reasons for the constancy of the laws of nature seem obvious and compelling, even to our limited understanding — if we return to the principle of population and consider people as they really are, inert, sluggish, and resistant to labor unless forced by necessity (and it is surely the height of foolishness to talk about people according to our wishful fantasies of what they might be) — we can state with certainty that the world would never have been populated if not for the superiority of the power of population over the means of subsistence. As strong and constantly active as this stimulus is in driving people to cultivate the earth, if we still see that cultivation proceeds very slowly, we can fairly conclude that a weaker stimulus would have been insufficient. Even under the pressure of this constant motivation, people in a primitive state will inhabit countries of the greatest natural fertility for long periods before they turn to herding or farming. If population and food had increased at the same rate, humanity might never have emerged from the primitive state. But suppose the earth were once fully populated. An Alexander, a Julius Caesar, a Tamerlane, or a bloody revolution could irreversibly deplete the human race and defeat the great designs of the Creator. The devastation of a contagious disease would be felt for ages. An earthquake could depopulate a region forever. The principle by which population increases prevents the vices of humanity, or the accidents of nature — the specific harms that arise from general laws — from obstructing the high purpose of creation. It keeps the inhabitants of the earth always fully up to the level of the means of subsistence, and it constantly acts on people as a powerful stimulus, driving them to further cultivate the earth and enable it to support a larger population. But it is impossible for this law to operate and produce the effects apparently intended by the Supreme Being without causing harm in specific cases. Unless the principle of population were adjusted to the circumstances of each individual country — which would not only contradict our universal experience of how the laws of nature work, but would also contradict our own reason, which recognizes the absolute necessity of general laws for the development of the intellect — it is clear that the same principle which, aided by human industry, will populate a fertile region in a few years, must also produce hardship in countries that have been settled for a long time.
It seems, however, entirely probable that even the acknowledged difficulties caused by the law of population tend to advance rather than hinder the general purpose of Providence. They stimulate universal effort and contribute to that infinite variety of situations — and therefore of impressions — which seems on the whole favorable to the growth of mind. It is likely that too much or too little stimulation, extreme poverty or excessive wealth, may be equally unfavorable in this respect. The middle levels of society seem best suited to intellectual development. But it is contrary to every analogy in nature to expect that all of society can be a middle level. The temperate zones of the earth seem most favorable to the mental and physical energies of human beings, but not everything can be a temperate zone. A world warmed and lit by a single sun must, by the laws of matter, have some parts frozen by perpetual cold and others scorched by perpetual heat. Every piece of matter resting on a surface must have a top side and a bottom side — all the particles cannot be in the middle. The most valuable part of an oak tree, to a lumber dealer, is neither the roots nor the branches. But these are absolutely necessary for the existence of the middle part — the trunk — which is what is actually wanted. The lumber dealer could not possibly expect to grow an oak without roots or branches. But if they could find a method of cultivation that caused more of the tree's substance to go into the trunk and less into roots and branches, they would be right to put such a system into general use.
In the same way, though we cannot possibly expect to eliminate wealth and poverty from society, if we could find a form of government that reduced the numbers at the extremes and increased the numbers in the middle, it would undoubtedly be our duty to adopt it. It is not unlikely, however, that just as with the oak — where the roots and branches could not be greatly reduced without weakening the vigorous flow of sap in the trunk — so in society, the extreme parts could not be reduced beyond a certain point without weakening the energetic effort throughout the middle portions, which is the very reason they are most favorable to the growth of intellect. If no one could hope to rise or fear to fall in society — if hard work did not bring its reward and laziness its punishment — the middle portions would certainly not be what they are now. In thinking about this subject, we should clearly focus on humanity as a whole, not on individual cases. There are undoubtedly many minds — and statistically there should be many, given the odds when drawing from so large a pool — that, having been stimulated early by a particular course of experiences, would not need the constant pressure of narrow motives to remain active. But if we were to survey the various useful discoveries, the valuable writings, and other praiseworthy achievements of humankind, I believe we would find that more were driven by the narrow motives that act on the many than by the seemingly nobler motives that act on the few.
Leisure is, without doubt, highly valuable to human beings. But taking people as they actually are, the odds seem to be that in the majority of cases it will produce harm rather than good. It has often been observed that talent is more common among younger sons than among eldest sons. But it can hardly be supposed that younger sons are, on average, born with greater natural ability. The difference, if there really is any noticeable difference, can only come from their different circumstances. Effort and activity are in one case absolutely necessary, and in the other merely optional.
That the difficulties of life help generate talent, everyday experience must convince us. The efforts people find it necessary to make in order to support themselves or their families frequently awaken abilities that might otherwise have lain dormant forever. And it has been commonly observed that new and extraordinary situations generally produce minds equal to grappling with the challenges they face.
The sorrows of life are necessary to soften and humanize the heart -- Social sympathy often produces people of higher character than those who merely possess talent -- Moral evil is probably necessary for the development of moral excellence -- Intellectual challenges are continually renewed by the infinite variety of nature and the obscurity surrounding metaphysical subjects -- The difficulties in religious revelation can be explained by this same principle -- The degree of evidence the scriptures contain is probably best suited to improving human abilities and the moral improvement of humanity -- The idea that mind is created through experience and challenge seems to account for the existence of both natural and moral evil.
The sorrows and hardships of life form another category of experiences that seem necessary — through a particular sequence of impressions — to soften and humanize the heart, to awaken social sympathy, to generate all the Christian virtues, and to provide the scope for generous acts of kindness. The general tendency of an unbroken stretch of prosperity is to degrade character rather than elevate it. A heart that has never known sorrow itself will rarely be truly alive to the pains and pleasures, the wants and wishes, of the people around it. It will rarely overflow with that warmth of brotherly love, those kind and generous feelings, that dignify the human character even more than the possession of the greatest talents. Talents, though undoubtedly a very prominent and fine feature of the mind, can by no means be considered the whole of it. There are many minds that haven't been exposed to the kinds of experiences that usually develop talent, yet have been brought vividly to life by the experience of social sympathy. In every level of society, among the lowest as often as the highest, you can find people overflowing with the milk of human kindness, radiating love toward God and their fellow human beings, and — though without those particular powers of mind we call talents — clearly holding a higher rank among living beings than many who possess them. Evangelical charity, meekness, piety, and that whole class of virtues known especially as the Christian virtues don't necessarily require exceptional ability. Yet a soul that possesses these generous qualities, a soul awakened and brought to life by these beautiful sympathies, seems to hold a closer communion with the heavens than sheer intellectual brilliance alone.
The greatest talents have often been misused and have produced evil proportionate to their powers. Both reason and revelation seem to assure us that such minds will be condemned to eternal death. But while on earth, these corrupted instruments played their role in the great mass of human experience by provoking the disgust and horror they inspired. It seems highly likely that moral evil is absolutely necessary for the development of moral excellence. A being who has only ever seen good can fairly be said to be driven by blind instinct. The pursuit of good in that case tells us nothing about whether the person has virtuous inclinations. You might say, perhaps, that infinite Wisdom wouldn't need anything so crude as outward action to know a person's character — that God would know in advance whether the being would choose good or evil. That might be a plausible argument against the idea of life as a trial. But it doesn't hold against the idea that the mind in this world is in a state of formation. Under this view, the being who has witnessed moral evil and felt disapproval and disgust at it is essentially different from the being who has only ever seen good. They are pieces of clay that have received different impressions; they must, therefore, necessarily take different shapes. Or even if we grant that both end up with the same beautiful form of virtue, we have to acknowledge that one has gone through the further process needed to give firmness and durability to its substance, while the other is still vulnerable to damage and liable to be broken by any accidental blow. A passionate love and admiration for virtue seems to require the existence of something opposed to it. And it seems highly likely that the same beauty of form and substance, the same perfection of character, could not be produced without the impressions of disapproval that arise from witnessing moral evil.
When the mind has been awakened into activity by the passions and the body's physical needs, intellectual needs arise next. The desire for knowledge and the frustration of ignorance form a new and important class of experiences. Every part of nature seems specially designed to provide stimulants for this kind of mental effort and to offer inexhaustible food for the most relentless inquiry. Our immortal Bard says of Cleopatra:
Custom cannot stale Her infinite variety.
The expression, when applied to any single person, might be considered poetic exaggeration, but it is precisely true when applied to nature. Infinite variety seems, indeed, to be nature's defining characteristic. The shadows blended here and there in the picture give spirit, life, and depth to her extraordinary beauties. And those rough patches and uneven surfaces, those supporting elements that hold up the grander features — though they sometimes offend the fussy microscopic eye of short-sighted humanity — contribute to the symmetry, grace, and fair proportion of the whole.
The infinite variety of nature's forms and processes, besides immediately awakening and improving the mind through the variety of impressions it creates, also opens up other rich sources of improvement by offering such a vast and extensive field for investigation and research. Uniform, unvarying perfection could not possess the same power to rouse the mind. When we try to contemplate the system of the universe — when we think of the stars as the suns of other solar systems scattered throughout infinite space, when we reflect that we probably don't see a millionth part of those bright spheres that are beaming light and life to countless worlds, when our minds, unable to grasp the immeasurable idea, sink lost and overwhelmed in admiration of the mighty incomprehensible power of the Creator — let us not petulantly complain that all climates aren't equally pleasant, that perpetual spring doesn't reign throughout the year, that God's creatures don't all enjoy the same advantages, that clouds and storms sometimes darken the natural world and vice and misery darken the moral one, and that all the works of creation aren't formed with equal perfection. Both reason and experience seem to tell us that the infinite variety of nature — and variety cannot exist without lesser parts, or apparent flaws — is admirably suited to furthering the high purpose of creation and producing the greatest possible amount of good.
The obscurity that surrounds all metaphysical subjects seems to me, in the same way, specially designed to add to that class of experiences that arise from the thirst for knowledge. It is likely that while on earth, humans will never achieve complete understanding of these subjects. But this is by no means a reason to stop pursuing them. The darkness surrounding these fascinating topics of human curiosity may be intended to furnish endless motivation for intellectual activity and effort. The constant struggle to dispel this darkness, even if it fails, strengthens and improves our ability to think. If the subjects of human inquiry were ever exhausted, the mind would probably stagnate. But the infinitely diverse forms and workings of nature, together with the endless food for thought that metaphysical subjects offer, prevent any chance that such a period will ever come.
It is by no means one of Solomon's wisest sayings that "there is nothing new under the sun." On the contrary, it is likely that if the present system were to continue for millions of years, continual additions would keep being made to the mass of human knowledge. And yet it may be worth asking whether what we could call the capacity of the human mind is increasing in any clear and decisive way. A Socrates, a Plato, or an Aristotle, however obviously they knew less than today's philosophers, don't appear to have been much below them in intellectual capacity. Intellect rises from a tiny spark, stays vigorous for only a certain period, and probably can't absorb more than a certain number of impressions while on earth. These impressions may be infinitely varied, and from these various combinations — added probably to some difference in the original raw material of each mind — arise the endless diversity of character we see in the world. But reason and experience both seem to assure us that the capacity of individual minds does not increase in proportion to the growing mass of existing knowledge. (It is likely that no two grains of wheat are exactly alike. Soil undoubtedly makes the main difference in the plants that spring up, but probably not all of it. It seems natural to assume some kind of difference in the original seeds that are afterwards awakened into thought, and the extraordinary differences in how receptive very young children are seems to confirm this idea.)
The finest minds seem to be formed more by efforts at original thinking — by striving to create new combinations and to discover new truths — than by passively absorbing other people's ideas. Suppose the day arrived when there was no further hope of future discoveries, and the mind's only task was to learn pre-existing knowledge without any effort to form new and original combinations. Even if the mass of human knowledge were a thousand times greater than it is now, one of the noblest stimulants to mental effort would have vanished. The finest feature of intellect would be lost. Everything connected to genius would be at an end. And it seems impossible that, under such circumstances, any individuals could possess the same intellectual energy as a Locke, a Newton, or a Shakespeare — or even a Socrates, a Plato, an Aristotle, or a Homer.
If a revelation from heaven — one that no person could doubt in the slightest — were to dispel the mists that now hang over metaphysical subjects, were to explain the nature and structure of the mind, the essences of all substances, the way the Supreme Being operates in the works of creation, and the entire plan and design of the Universe, such an enormous gain in knowledge, obtained in that way, would in all likelihood tend to suppress future effort rather than energize it, and to clip the soaring wings of intellect.
For this reason, I have never considered the doubts and difficulties that surround some parts of the sacred writings as any argument against their divine origin. The Supreme Being could, undoubtedly, have accompanied His revelations to humanity with such a series of miracles — and of such a nature — as would have produced universal, overwhelming conviction and put an end at once to all hesitation and discussion. But as weak as our reason is when it comes to understanding the plans of the great Creator, it is still strong enough to see the most striking objections to such a revelation. From the little we know of how the human mind works, we must be convinced that an overwhelming conviction of that kind, instead of improving humanity and advancing moral development, would act like an electric shock to all intellectual effort and would nearly put an end to the existence of virtue. If the scriptural warnings of eternal punishment were brought home to every person's mind with the same certainty as that night will follow day, this one vast and gloomy idea would so completely take over the human mind that it would leave room for nothing else. Everyone's outward actions would look nearly the same. Virtuous behavior would tell us nothing about whether someone was actually virtuous inside. Vice and virtue would be blended together in one undifferentiated mass. And though the all-seeing eye of God might be able to tell them apart, they would necessarily look the same to human beings, who can only judge by external appearances. Under such a system, it is hard to see how people could be shaped to detest moral evil and to love and admire God and moral excellence.
Our ideas of virtue and vice may not be perfectly precise and well-defined. But few people, I think, would call an action truly virtuous if it was done purely and solely out of dread of an extreme punishment or expectation of a great reward. The fear of the Lord is very rightly said to be the beginning of wisdom, but the end of wisdom is the love of the Lord and the admiration of moral good. The warnings of future punishment found in the scriptures seem well suited to stop the wicked in their tracks and get the attention of the careless. But we see from repeated experience that they are not accompanied by evidence so powerful as to overpower the human will and make people lead virtuous lives while harboring vicious inclinations, purely out of dread of what comes after death. A genuine faith — by which I mean a faith that shows itself in the virtues of a truly Christian life — can generally be considered a sign of a generous and virtuous nature, one shaped more by love than by pure, unmixed fear.
When we reflect on the temptations that human beings must inevitably face in this world — given the structure of our bodies and the workings of the laws of nature — and on the resulting near-certainty that many vessels will come out of this mighty creative furnace in the wrong shape, it is completely impossible to believe that any of these creatures of God's hand could be condemned to eternal suffering. If we once accepted such an idea, our natural sense of goodness and justice would be completely overthrown, and we could no longer look up to God as a merciful and righteous Being. But the doctrine of life and mortality brought to light by the gospel — the teaching that the reward of righteousness is everlasting life, but that the wages of sin are death — is in every respect just and merciful, and worthy of the great Creator. Nothing could seem more consistent with our reason than that those beings who come out of the creative process of this world in lovely and beautiful forms should be crowned with immortality, while those who come out misshapen — whose minds are not suited to a purer and happier state of existence — should perish and be consigned to mix again with their original clay. Eternal condemnation of this kind may be seen as a form of eternal punishment, and it is not surprising that it should sometimes be depicted through images of suffering. But life and death, salvation and destruction, are set against each other in the New Testament far more often than happiness and misery. The Supreme Being would appear to us in a very different light if we thought of Him as pursuing the creatures who had offended Him with eternal hatred and torture, instead of merely returning to their original unconsciousness those beings that, through the operation of general laws, had not been formed with qualities suited to a purer state of happiness.
Life is, generally speaking, a blessing regardless of what comes after it. It is a gift that even the most wicked people would not always be eager to throw away, even if they had no fear of death. The limited pain that the supreme Creator inflicts while forming countless beings to a capacity for the highest happiness is but a speck of dust on the scale compared to the happiness that is given. And we have every reason to believe that there is no more evil in the world than what is absolutely necessary as one of the ingredients in this mighty process.
The clear necessity of general laws for the development of intellect will not be contradicted by one or two exceptions — exceptions that are obviously not intended for narrow purposes, but designed to affect a great portion of humanity across many ages. Based on the view I have offered of how the mind is formed, the breaking of nature's general law through a divine revelation will appear as the direct hand of God mixing new ingredients into the mighty mass — ingredients suited to the particular stage of the process, and designed to give rise to a new and powerful sequence of impressions tending to purify, elevate, and improve the human mind. The miracles that accompanied these revelations, once they had captured humanity's attention and made it a matter of the most intense debate whether the teaching came from God or from human beings, had done their job — had fulfilled the Creator's purpose. These communications of the divine will were then left to make their way by their own inherent excellence, and by working as moral motivations, to gradually influence and improve — not to overpower and paralyze — the faculties of the human mind.
It would, undoubtedly, be presumptuous to say that the Supreme Being could not possibly have accomplished His purpose in any other way than the one He chose. But since the revelation of the divine will that we possess does come with some doubts and difficulties, and since our reason points out the strongest objections to a revelation that would force immediate, unquestioning, universal belief, we surely have good reason to think that these doubts and difficulties are no argument against the divine origin of the scriptures, and that the kind of evidence they contain is best suited to the improvement of human abilities and the moral betterment of humanity.
The idea that the impressions and experiences of this world are the instruments with which the Supreme Being shapes matter into mind — and that the necessity of constant effort to avoid evil and pursue good is the main driver of these impressions and experiences — seems to smooth many of the difficulties that arise when we contemplate human life. It appears to me to give a satisfying explanation for the existence of both natural and moral evil, and consequently for that portion of both — and it is certainly not a small portion — which arises from the principle of population. But even though, on this theory, it seems highly unlikely that evil should ever be removed from the world, it is also clear that this belief wouldn't serve the Creator's apparent purpose — wouldn't work as powerfully as an incentive for effort — if the amount of evil didn't decrease or increase along with human activity or laziness. The constant shifts in the weight and distribution of this pressure keep alive a constant expectation of throwing it off.
"Hope springs eternal in the human breast, Man never is, but always to be blest."
Evil exists in the world not to create despair, but to inspire action. We are not meant to submit to it passively, but to exert ourselves to overcome it. It is not only the interest but the duty of every individual to use their utmost efforts to remove evil from themselves and from as wide a circle as they can influence. And the more they exercise themselves in this duty, the more wisely they direct their efforts, and the more successful those efforts are, the more they will probably improve and elevate their own minds — and the more completely they appear to fulfill the will of their Creator.