But should they fail in the war of extermination,sickly seasons,epidemics,pestilence,and plague advance in terrific array,and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands.Should success still be incomplete,gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear,and at one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.'The life of the race,then,is a struggle with misery;its expansion is constantly forcing it upon this array of evils;and in proportion to the elasticity is the severity of the evils which follow.This is not only a 'gloomy view,'but again seems to suggest that 'vice'is an alternative to 'misery.'Vices are bad,it would seem,but at least they obviate the necessity for disease and famine.Malthus probably suppressed the passage because he thought it liable to this interpretation.
It indicates,however,a real awkwardness,if not something more,in his exposition.He here speaks as if there was room for a fixed number of guests at his banquet.Whatever,therefore,keeps the population to that limit must be so far good.If he had considered his 'moral check'more thoroughly,he might have seen that this does not correspond to his real meaning.The 'moral'and the prudential checks are not really to be contrasted as alternative,but co-operative.Every population,vicious or virtuous,must of course proportion its numbers to its means of support.That gives the prudential check.But the moral check operates by altering the character of the population itself.From the purely economic point of view,vice is bad because it lowers efficiency.A lazy,drunken,and profligate people would starve where an industrious,sober,and honest people would thrive.The check of vice thus brings the check of misery into play at an earlier stage.
It limits by lowering the vitality and substituting degeneration for progress.
The check,therefore,is essentially mischievous.Though it does not make the fields barren,it lowers the power of cultivation.Malthus had recognised this when he pointed out,as we have seen,that emergence from the savage state meant the institution of marriage and property and,we may infer,the correlative virtues of chastity,industry,and honesty.If men can form large societies,and millions can be supported where once a few thousands were at starvation point,it is due to the civilisation which at every stage implies 'moral restraint'in a wider sense than Malthus used the phrase.An increase of population by such means was,of course,to be desired.
If Malthus emphasises this inadequately,it is partly,no doubt,because the Utilitarian view of morality tended to emphasise the external consequences rather than the alteration of the man himself.Yet the wider and sounder view is logically implied in his reasoning --so much so that he might have expressed his real aim more clearly if he had altered the order of his argument.He might have consistently taken the same line as earlier writers and declared that he desired,above all things,the increase of population.He would have had indeed to explain that he desired the increase of a sound and virtuous population;and that hasty and imprudent increase led to misery and to a demoralisation which would ultimately limit numbers in the worst way.We shall see directly how nearly he accepts this view.
Meanwhile,by insisting upon the need of limitation,he was led to speak often as if limitation by any means was good and the one thing needful,and the polemic against Godwin in the first edition had given prominence to this side of the question Had he put his views in a different shape,he would perhaps have been so edifying that he would have been disregarded.
He certainly avoided that risk,and had whatever advantage is gained by stating sound doctrine paradoxically.
We shall,I think,appreciate his real position better by considering his approximation to the theory which,as we know,was suggested to Darwin by a perusal of Malthus,35there is a closer resemblance than appears at first,the first edition concludes by two chapters afterwards omitted,giving the philosophical application of his theory.He there says that the 'world is a mighty process of God not for the trial but for the creation and formation of the mind.'36It is not,as Butler thought,a place of 'probation,'but a scene in which the higher qualities are gradually developed.Godwin had quoted Franklin's view that 'mind'would become 'omnipotent over matter.'Malthus holds that,as he puts it,'God is making matter into mind.'The difference is that Malthus regards evil in general not as a sort of accident of which we can get rid by reason;but as the essential stimulus which becomes the efficient cause of intellectual activity.The evils from which men suffer raise savage tribes from their indolence,and by degrees give rise to the growth of civilisation.The argument,though these chapters were dropped by Malthus,was taken up by J.B.Sumner,to whom he refers in later editions.37It is,in fact,an imperfect way of stating a theory of evolution.This appears in his owning chapters upon the 'moral restraint.'38He explains that moral and physical evils are 'instruments employed by the Deity'to admonish us against such conduct as is destructive of happiness.