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The 'poor create their own fund, and the necessity for it has arisen from the exorbitant demands made by the rich. Malthus is a Blifil, hypocritically insinuating arguments in favour of tyranny under pretence of benevolence. Hazlitt's writing, although showing the passions of a bitter partisan, hits some of Malthus's rather cloudy argumentation.
Upon Malthus's assumptions, the statement that sound political and social theories must be based upon systematic inquiry into facts, meant that the individual was the ultimate unalterable unit, whose interest in his own welfare gave the one fulcrum for all possible changes. The ideal 'state of nature' was a fiction. The true basis of our inquiries is the actual man known to us by observation.
The pith of Malthus's teaching is fairly expressed in his last letter to Senior. He holds that the improvement in the condition of the great mass of the labouring classes should be considered as the main interest of society.
One of Malthus's early authorities was Süssmilch, who had published his Göttliche Ordnung in 1761, to show how Providence had taken care that the trees should not grow into the sky. The antediluvians had been made long-lived in order that they might have large families and people an empty earth, while life was divinely shortened as the world filled up.
From the very commencement of his literary and scientific work, a rule rigidly adhered to was that of interspersing his main line of thought and research by reading books touching on widely diverging subjects; and it was thus, no doubt, that during October, 1838, he read "for amusement" Malthus's "Essay on Population"; not, as he himself affirms, with any definite idea as to its intimate bearing on the subject so near his heart.
In this paper, I may add, Cobbett, not yet a Radical, accepts Malthus's view of the tendency of the human species to multiply more quickly than its support.
In October, 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus's Essay on the Principle of 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 favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed.
The difference is that while Chalmers enthusiastically adopted Malthus's theory as indicating the true remedy for the evil, Southey regards it with horror as declaring the evil to be irremediable.
Again, Malthus's theory, so far as it depends upon the economic law of diminishing returns in agriculture, has also certain elements of truth in it, and in so far as it merely asserts that the struggle for existence in human society is, in the last analysis, a struggle for food.
The landlord is simply the receiver of surplus value; the capitalist the one man who saves, and who saves in proportion to profit; and the labourer simply the embodiment of Malthus's multiplying tendency. Then the postulates as to the ebb and flow of capital and labour are supposed to work automatically and instantaneously.
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