t some pressure may
not, within limits, be favourable to ultimate progress by stimulating
the energies of the people. In a purely stationary state people might
be too content with a certain stage of comfort to develop their
resources and attain a permanently higher stage. Whatever the
importance of such qualifications of the principle, there is a most
important conclusion to be drawn. Malthus or his more rigid followers
summed up their teaching by one practical moral. The essential
condition of progress was, according to them, the discouragement of
early marriages. If, they held, people could only be persuaded not to
produce families until they had an adequate prospect of supporting
their families, everything would go right. We shall not, I imagine, be
inclined to dispute the proposition, that a certain degree of prudence
and foresight is a quality of enormous value; and that such a quality
will manifest itself by greater caution in taking the most important
step in life. What such reasoners do not appear to have appreciated
was, the immense complexity and difficulty of the demand which they
were making. They seem to have fancied that it was possible simply to
add another clause--the clause "Thou shalt not marry"--to the accepted
code of morals; and that, as soon as the evil consequences of the
condemned behaviour were understood,--properly expounded, for example,
in little manuals for the use of school children,--obedience to the new
regulation would spontaneously follow. What they did not see, or did
not fully appreciate, was the enormous series of other things--religious,
moral, and intellectual--which are necessarily implied in altering the
relation of the strongest human passion to the general constitution, and
the impossibility of bringing home such an alteration, either by an act
of legislation or by pointing out the bearing of a particular set of
prudential considerations. Political Economy might be a very good thing;
but its expositors were certainly too apt to think that it could by
itself at once become a new gospel for mankind. Should we then infer
from such criticisms that the doctrine of Malthus was false, or was of
no importance? Nothing would be further from my opinion. I hold, on the
contrary, that it was of the highest importance, because it drew
attention to a fact, the recognition of which was essential to all sound
reasoning on social questions. The fact is, that population is not to be
treated as a