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Updated: June 5, 2025
The preservation of the fittest, which is surely a good thing, is merely another aspect of the dying out of the unfit, which is hardly a bad thing. The feast which Nature spreads before us, according to Malthus's metaphor, is only sufficient for a limited number of guests, and the one question is how to select them.
Undoubtedly Malthus's theory does apply to stationary, non-progressive peoples, like savages and barbarians in certain stages of culture, and also perhaps to certain classes in modern society who fail to participate in modern social progress.
The connection of the theory with Malthus's speculations and with the contemporary difficulties is indeed obvious. The landlord had clearly one of the reserved seats at the banquet of nature. He was the most obvious embodiment of 'security' as opposed to equality. Malthus, again, had been influenced by the French economists and their theory of the 'surplus fund, provided by agriculture.
Malthus's octavo edition, the sexual passion is as necessary to be gratified as the appetite of hunger, and a man can no more exist without propagating his species than he can live without eating. Were it so, neither of these passions would admit of any excuses, any delay, any restraint from reason or foresight; and the only checks to the principle of population must be vice and misery.
Malthus. To enforce protection would be, on Malthus's illustration, to compel us to use the 'worst machines, when, at a less expense, we could hire the very best from our neighbours. Briefly, then, the landlord's interest is opposed to the national interest, because it enforces a worse distribution of capital.
It is not his conclusions that are valuable, but the temper and method of his inquiry. As everyone knows, it was to him that Darwin owed an essential part of his theory of natural selection, and this was only possible because Malthus's outlook was truly scientific.
Malthus's investigations illustrate the necessity of referring every particular process to its place in the whole system, of noting how any given change might set up a set of actions and reactions in virtue of the general elasticity of population, and thus of constantly referring at every step to the general conditions of human life.
If it be replied that this increase of food is but temporary, and that sooner or later Malthus's theory must operate, then it may be said, on the other hand, that as yet we see no limit of man's mastery over nature, and that apparently we are just entering upon the stage of material progress.
Malthus's views were first fully given in his Inquiry into Rent, the second of three pamphlets which he published during the corn-law controversy of 1814-15. The opinions now stated had, he says, been formed in the course of his lecturing at Haileybury; and he made them public on account of their bearing upon the most absorbing questions of the time.
It is evident that Malthus's theory applies only to a stationary society, that is, a non-progressive society, because in a progressive society human invention and, therefore, food supply, may far outstrip any increase of population.
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