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Updated: June 5, 2025
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.
To give this answer is not Malthus's present business; but there is one right, at any rate, which a man does not and cannot possess: namely, the 'right to subsistence when his labour will not fairly purchase it. He does not possess it because he cannot possess it; to try to secure it is to try to 'reverse the laws of nature, and therefore to produce cruel suffering by practising an 'inhuman deceit. The Abbé Raynal had said that a man had a right to subsist 'before all social laws. Man had the same right, replied Malthus, as he had to live a hundred or a thousand years.
Malthus's revolting ratios with his authority, he does not strain hard to deluge Ireland with blood. On such points, where humanity has not become obnoxious, where liberty has not passed into a by-word, Mr. Southey is still liberal and humane. The elasticity of his spirit is unbroken: the bow recoils to its old position. He still stands convicted of his early passion for inquiry and improvement.
Its yoke was light enough, and he was essentially predisposed to moderate views. He took his degree as ninth wrangler in 1788, became a fellow of his college in 1793, took orders, and in 1798 was curate of Albury, near his father's house in Surrey. Malthus's home was within a walk of Farnham, where Cobbett had been born and passed his childhood.
It was a remarkable and momentous coincidence that both you and he should have independently arrived at the idea of Natural Selection after reading Malthus's book, and a most happy inspiration that you should have selected Mr. Darwin as the naturalist to whom to communicate your discovery.
To settle such points it is necessary to answer the problem of distribution, for the play of the industrial forces is directed by the constitution of the classes which co-operate in the result. Ricardo saw in Malthus's doctrines of rent and of population a new mode of approaching the problem. What was wanted, in the first place, was to systematise the logic adopted by his predecessors.
Here Chalmers's economical theories are crossed by various political and ecclesiastical questions with which I am not concerned. His peculiarities as an economist bring out, I think, an important point. He shows how Malthus's views might be interpreted by a man who, instead of sharing, was entirely opposed to the ordinary capitalist prejudices.
There are now societies and periodicals in all civilized countries for the propagation of Neo-Malthusian principles, as they are still commonly called, though it would be desirable to avoid the use of Malthus's name in this connection.
He accepts Malthus's view of the poor-laws, and hopes that, by encouraging foresight, we may by degrees approach 'a sounder and more healthful state. He repudiates emphatically a suggestion of Say that one of his arguments implies 'indifference to the happiness' of the masses, and holds that 'the friends of humanity' should encourage the poor to raise their standard of comfort and enjoyment.
Society is built up, and all industrial relations determined, by the competition of a multitude of independent atoms, each aiming at self-preservation. Malthus's principle applies this to the great mass of mankind. Systematically worked out, it has led to Ricardo's identification of value with quantities of labour.
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