Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/387

Rh POLITICAL ECONOMY 571 early &quot; and comparatively narrow one ; &quot; the only steam- engine he refers to is Newcomen s,&quot; and the cotton trade is mentioned by him only once, and that incidentally. &quot;Between the years 1760 and 1770,&quot; says Mr Marshall, &quot; Roebuck began to smelt iron by coal, Brindley connected the rising seats of manufactures with the sea by canals, Wedgwood discovered the art of making earthenware cheaply and well, Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, Arkwright utilized Wyatt s and High s inventions for spinning by rollers and applied water power to move them, and Watt invented the condensing steam-engine. Cromp- ton s mule and Cartwright s powerloom came shortly after.&quot; Out of this rapid evolution followed a vast expansion of industry, but also many deplorable results, which, had Smith been able to foresee them, might have made him a less enthusiastic believer in the benefits to be wrought by the mere liberation of effort, and a less vehement denouncer of old institutions which in their day had given a partial protection to labour. Alongside of these evils of the new industrial system, socialism appeared as the alike inevitable and indispensable expression of the protest of the working classes and the aspiration after a better order of things ; and what we now call &quot; the social question,&quot; that inexorable problem of modern life, rose into the place which it has ever since maintained. This question was first effectually brought before the English suus. mind by Thomas Eobert Malthus (1766-1834), not, how ever, under the impulse of revolutionary sympathies, but in the interests of a conservative policy. The first edition of the work which achieved this result appeared anonymously in 1798 under the title An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the future improvement of Society, with remarks on the speculations of Mr Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other ivriters. This book arose out of certain private controversies of its author with his father Daniel Malthus, who had been a friend of Rousseau, and was an ardent believer in the doctrine of human progress as preached by Condorcet and other French thinkers and by their English disciples. The most distinguished of the latter was William Godwin, whose Enquiry concerning Political Justice had been pub lished in 1793. The views put forward in that work had been restated by its author in the Enquirer (1797), and it was on the essay in this volume entitled &quot; Avarice and Profusion &quot; that the discussion between the father and the son arose, &quot; the general question of the future improve ment of society &quot; being thus raised between them the elder Malthus defending the .doctrines of Godwin, and the younger assailing them. The latter &quot; sat down with an intention of merely stating his thoughts on paper in a clearer manner than he thought he could do in conversa tion,&quot; and the Essay on population was the result. The social scheme of Godwin was founded on the idea that the evils of society arise from the vices of human institutions. There is more than enough of wealth avail able for all, but it is not equally shared : one has too much, another has little or nothing. Let this wealth, as well as the labour of producing it, be equally divided; then everyone will by moderate exertion obtain sufficient for plain living ; there will be abundant leisure, which will be spent in intellectual and moral self -improvement; reason will determine human actions; government and every kind of force will be unnecessary ; and, in time, by the peaceful influence of truth, perfection and happiness will be established on earth. To these glowing anticipa tions Malthus opposes the facts of the necessity of food, and the tendency of mankind to increase up to the limit of the available supply of it. In a state of universal physical wellbeing, this tendency, which in real life is held in check by the difficulty of procuring a subsistence, would operate without restraint. Scarcity would follow the increase of numbers; the leisure would soon cease to exist; the old struggle for life would recommence; and inequality would reign once more. If Godwin s ideal system, therefore, could be established, the single force of the principle of population, Malthus maintained, would suffice to break it down. It will be seen that the essay was written with a pole mical object; it was an occasional pamphlet directed against the Utopias of the day, not at all a systematic treatise on population suggested by a purely scientific interest. As a .polemic, it was decidedly .successful ; it was no difficult task to dispose of the scheme of equality propounded by Godwin. Already, in 1761, Dr Robert Wallace had published a work (which was used by Malthus in the composition of his essay) entitled Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and Providence, in which, after speak ing of a community of goods as a remedy for the ills of society, he confessed that he saw one fatal objection to such a social organization, namely, &quot; the excessive popula tion that would ensue.&quot; With Condorcet s extravagances, too, Malthus easily dealt. That eminent man, amidst the tempest of the French Revolution, had written, whilst in hiding from his enemies, his Esquisse d un tableau histori- que de Vesprit humain. The general conception of this book makes its appearance an epoch in the history of the rise of sociology. In it, if we except some partial sketches by Turgot, is for the first time explained the idea of a theory of social dynamics founded on history ; and its author is on this ground recognized by Comte as his prin cipal immediate predecessor. But in the execution of his great project Condorcet failed. His negative metaphysics prevent his justly appreciating the past, and he indulges, at the close of his work, in vague hypotheses respecting the perfectibility of our race, and in irrational expectations of an indefinite extension of the duration of human life. Malthus seems to have little sense of the nobleness of Condorcet s attitude, and no appreciation of the grandeur of his leading idea. But of his chimerical hopes he is able to make short work ; his good sense, if somewhat limited and prosaic, is at least effectual in detecting and exposing Utopias. The project of a formal and detailed treatise on popula tion was an afterthought of Malthus. The essay in which he had studied a hypothetic future led him to examine the effects of the principle he had put forward on the past and present state of society ; and he undertook an historical examination of these effects, and sought to draw such inferences in relation to the actual state of things as experience seemed to warrant. The consequence of this was such a change in the nature and composition of the essay as made it, in his own language, &quot;a new work.&quot; The book, so altered, appeared in 1803 under the title An Essay on the Principle of Population, or a view of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness ; with an Enquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal or mitigation of the evils u hich it occasions. In the original form of the essay he had spoken of no checks to population but those which came under the head either of vice or of misery. He now introduces the new element of the preventive check supplied by what he calls &quot;moral restraint,&quot; and is thus enabled to &quot; soften some of the harshest conclusions &quot; at which he had before arrived. The treatise passed through six editions in his lifetime, and in all of them he introduced various additions and corrections. That of 1816 is the last he revised, and supplies the final text from which it has since been reprinted. Notwithstanding the great development which he gave to his work and the almost unprecedented amount of