An Essay on the Principle of Population

An Essay on the Principle of Population begins as a reply to optimists, chiefly William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, who held that human society was advancing toward a state of equality, abundance, and near-perfection. Malthus accepts that food is necessary to life and that the attraction between the sexes will persist, and from these two simple postulates he builds an argument meant to be insurmountable.

His central claim is a contrast of two powers. Population, when nothing restrains it, tends to double over a generation, increasing in a geometrical series such as 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. Food, even under the best cultivation, can increase only by steady additions, an arithmetical series such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The first power is of a higher order than the second, so the gap between mouths and means widens relentlessly unless something forces them back into balance.

That something Malthus calls a check, and every check reduces in the end to misery or vice. He divides them into the preventive check, in which the foresight of hardship discourages marriage and childbearing, and the positive check, in which want, hard labour, disease, war, and famine shorten lives. In old and settled countries these checks produce a slow oscillation: when food is relatively plentiful the poor marry and multiply, numbers outrun provisions, wages fall and prices rise, distress sets in, growth halts, and the cycle begins again. This vibration, he notes, is easy to miss because recorded history is mostly the history of the higher classes.

From this principle Malthus draws hard conclusions about reform. A scheme of perfect equality would only remove the restraints on population and bring on the crisis faster. England's poor laws, however benevolent in intent, tend to increase numbers without increasing food, raise prices for everyone, and erode the independence of the labouring poor, so that they may be said in part to create the poor they maintain. Charity and benevolence, he argues, cannot repeal the arithmetic of subsistence.

In the closing chapters Malthus turns the bleak principle toward a theology of his own. He suggests that the constant pressure of want is not a flaw in creation but a divine instrument: a mighty process for awakening matter into mind, since evil and difficulty rouse human beings to exertion, and exertion forms reason. The same law that produces partial evil, he proposes, may yield a great overbalance of good, framing the struggle for subsistence as the engine that develops the human faculties rather than a simple curse.