Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/806

 784 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL well as of the amount and distribution of wealth ? What says the author of the Methods of Ethics ? We shall find that under this head another large debt is incurred by political economy to ethics, through the cgency of Dr. Sidgwick. Discoveries are hardly possible in ethics, practical principles have grown slowly; but we hold that the nearest approach to an absolutely new idea of first-rate importance in morals was made by the following momentous passage which occurs in the fourth book of the Methods of Ethics (ch. 1): ' Political economists of the school of Malthus often ap- pear to assume that no increase of numbers can be right which involves any decrease in average happiness. But if we take Utilitarianism to prescribe, as the ultimate end of action, happiness on the whole, and not any individual's happiness, unless considered as an element of the whole, it would follow that, if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gainec] by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. So that, strictly conceived, the point up to which, on Utilitarian principles, population ought to be allowed to increase, is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible, but that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches a maximum.' , Bentham was not led to regard the ' lot of happiness' enjoyed by a nation as a function of the number of population considered as variable. J.S. Mill was so preoccupied by the evils of overpopulation as hardly to have indicated whether there is an opposite extreme. ' Even, if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it,' he sa. ys with respect to the increase of population. Cantilion indeed, had stated, but did not attempt to answer the question,' whether it is better to have a large population poor and without comforts, or a smaller population with more affluence; a population of a million consuming the produce of six acres (arjoens) per head, or of four millions, each living on an acre and a half.' And Cournot, in his later writings, had pointed to the insolubility of such questions as the rock on which economic optimism foundered. But the question is not regarded as unanswerable, nor is it left unanswered, by Dr. Sidgwick. ' I regard,' he says, ' the increase of the amount of human life in the world, under its present conditions of existence in civilised countries, as a good and not an evil.' Accordingly' in the preser/t condition of the world'he would disapprove of measures tending to restrict the growth of population. As we interpret, Dr. Sidgwick, like Aristotle, would regard according to circumstances at one time the expansion, at another the contraction of population expedient. But in the present state of the world he is not prepared to mo.ve in either direction. When we compare Dr. Sidgwick with other eminent writers, ancient and modern, who have maintained the desirability of a large popula- tion, it is to be noticed that this object is sought by him as good in itself, part of the utilitarian end, not for the sake of defence against,