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Ricardo cordially adopts Malthus's theory of rent, but declares that it is fatal to some of Malthus's conclusions. Malthus, we have seen, wished to regard rent as in some sense a gift of Providence a positive blessing due to the fertility of the soil.
Surely the levers of Archimedes, with submission to Sir Edward B. Lytton, were not the less levers because he wanted the locum standi. It is proper, by the way, that we should inform the reader of this generation where to look for Coleridge's skirmishings with Malthus. They are to be found chiefly in the late Mr.
But Lamarck did not believe that the necks were so designed in the beginning: he believed that the long necks were evolved by wanting and trying. Not necessarily, said Darwin. Consider the effect on the giraffes of the natural multiplication of their numbers, as insisted on by Malthus.
This largely explains the popularity among the well-to-do classes of such books as Malthus' Principle of Population and Kidd's Social Evolution. Such a treatment of the social problem, however, will not bear the test of analysis, since it assumes that the present distribution of opportunity is just.
The immediate effect of equalising property, then, would be an increase of population. It was the natural retort, adopted by Malthus, that such an increase would soon make everybody poor, instead of making every one comfortable. Population, the French economists had said, follows subsistence. Will it not multiply indefinitely?
Of his immediate pupils James Mill is the ablest, Cobbett, a vigorous and idiomatic writer of English, in the course of his long life advocated all varieties of political principle. In political science we have the accurate McCulloch; Malthus, known through his Theory of Population; and Ricardo, the most original thinker in science since Adam Smith.
So in the Quarterly Review Southey attributes the social evils to the disintegrating effect of the manufacturing system, of which Adam Smith was the 'tedious and hard-hearted' prophet. The excellent Malthus indeed becomes the 'hard-hearted' almost as Hooker was the 'judicious. This sufficiently represents the view of the sentimental Tory.
Malthus was a clergyman, who worked out this subject most minutely and truthfully some years ago; he showed quite clearly, and although he was much abused for his conclusions at the time, they have never yet been disproved and never will be he showed that in consequence of the increase in the number of organic beings in a geometrical ratio, while the means of existence cannot be made to increase in the same ratio, that there must come a time when the number of organic beings will be in excess of the power of production of nutriment, and that thus some check must arise to the further increase of those organic beings.
In October, 1838, that is fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement "Malthus on Population," and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.
T. R. Malthus, 1823; M. T. Sadler, Law of Population, 1830; A. Alison, Principles of Population, 1840; T. Doubleday, True Law of Population, 1842. Ricardo's Letters to Trower, p. 47. Spence's Tracts on Political Economy were collected with a preface in 1822. Spence is better known as an entomologist, and collaborated with William Kirby. Tracts , p. xiii. Ibid. p. 59.
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