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Malthus on the Prospects for the Labouring Poor*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

E. A. Wrigley
E. A. Wrigley
Affiliation:
London School of Economics
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Extract

In the penultimate chapter of St Matthew's gospel, immediately before the account of the betrayal by Judas, the story is told of a visit which Jesus paid to the house of Simon the leper. As he sat eating a woman came and poured a precious ointment over his head. The disciples were indignant, saying, in the words of King James's bible, ‘To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor. When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, why trouble ye the woman for she hath wrought a good work upon me? For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always’.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , December 1988 , pp. 813 - 829
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

1 St Matthew, 26:8–11.

2 Smith, A., An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, ed. Cannan, E. (2 vols., London, 1904), I, 80–1Google Scholar.

4 Ibid. I, 98.

5 Ibid. I, 106.

6 Ibid. I, 106–7, 108.

7 Ibid. I, 89.

8 Ibid. I, 89.

9 ‘The sons and daughters of peasants will not be found such rosy cherubs in real life as they are described to be in romances. It cannot fail to be remarked by those who live much in the country, that the sons of labourers are very apt to be stunted in their growth, and are a long while arriving at maturity. Boys that you would guess to be fourteen or fifteen, are upon inquiry, frequently found to be eighteen or nineteen. And the lads who drive plough, which must certainly be a healthy exercise, are very rarely seen with any appearance of calves to their legs; a circumstance, which can only be attributed to a want either of proper or of sufficient nourishment.’

And, in an apocalyptic mood, ‘The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. 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 with one mighty blow, levels the population with the food of the world.’ The works of Thomas Robert Malthus ed. Wrigley, E. A. and Souden, D. (London, 1986), IGoogle Scholar, Essay on population (1798), 29–30, 51–2.

10 Works of Malthus, v, Principles of political economy, 10.

11 See, for example, Works of Malthus, IV, ‘Population’, 210–12. Malthus believed the fall in mortality was general in Europe; Works of Malthus, II, Essay on population (1826), 231.

12 See, for example, Thomas's testing of Sundbarg's views on this issue. Thomas, D. S., Social and economic aspects of Swedish population movements 1750–1933 (New York, 1941), pp. 80–8Google Scholar.

13 Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The population history of England, 1541–1871: a reconstruction (London, 1981), chapter xGoogle Scholar.

14 Works of Malthus, I, Essay on population (1798), 15.

15 Work of Malthus, v, Principles of political economy, 183–4.

16 Malthus himself often used the term capitalist but did not habitually refer to the capitalist system.

17 Work of Malthus, III, Essay on population (1826), 405.

18 See, for example, Works of Malthus, III, Essay on population (1826), 440 and 446, where Malthus argues that although population had doubled since Elizabethan times ‘the mass of wealth or the stock and revenue’ must have increased more than fourfold and goes on to remark that, ‘Although, therefore, the labourer may earn less corn than before, the superior value of every portion which he does not consume in kind will have in the purchase of conveniences, may more than counterbalance this diminution. He will not indeed have the same power of maintaining a large family; but with a small family he may be better lodged and clothed, and better able to command the decencies and comforts of life.’

19 Works of Malthus, IV, Amendment of the poor laws (1807), 9. Elsewhere he wrote, ‘If all could be completely relieved, and poverty banished from the country, even at the expense of threefourths of the fortunes of the rich, I would be the last person to say a single syllable against relieving all, and making the degree of distress alone the measure of our bounty. But as experience has proved, I believe, without a single exception, that poverty and misery have always increased in proportion to the quantity of indiscriminate charity, are we not bound to infer, reasoning as we usually do from the laws of nature, that it is an intimation that such a mode of distribution is not the proper office of benevolence?’ Works of Malthus, III, Essay on population (1826), 535.

20 Smith, Adam wrote that ‘The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase in the number of its inhabitants.’ Wealth of nations, I, 79Google Scholar.

21 ‘The poor laws of England tend to depress the general condition of the poor in these two ways. Their first obvious tendency is to increase population without increasing the food for its support. A poor man may marry with little or no prospect of being able to support a family without parish assistance. They may be said, therefore, to create the poor which they maintain; and as the provisions of the country must in consequence of the increased population, be distributed to every man in smaller proportions, it is evident that the labour of those who are not supported by parish assistance, will purchase a smaller quantity of provisions than before, and consequently more of them must be driven to apply for assistance.’ [His second point is to do with workhouses]. Work of Malthus, III, Essay on population (1826), 365.

22 It is a theme, for example, which emerges in a passage containing the memorable assertion that, ‘It is unquestionably true that wealth produces wants; but it is a still more important truth, that wants produce wealth’, and in which Malthus goes on to remark that, ‘The greatest of all difficulties in converting uncivilized and thinly peopled countries into civilized and populous ones, is to inspire them with the wants best calculated to excite their exertions in the production of wealth’. Works of Malthus, VI, Principles of political economy (1836), 321.

23 First and second prayer books of Edward VI, introd. by Harrison, D. (Everyman's Library, London, 1968), p. 252Google Scholar. Malthus made some harsh remarks about the evils and inequities which resultedfrom social customs disfavouring single women. In the second edition of the Essay on population (1803), for example, he included a passage containing some very strong language which he later deleted. ‘The matron who has reared a family often or twelve children, and whose sons, perhaps, may be fighting the battles of their country, is apt to think that society owes her much; and this imaginary debt, society is, in general, fully inclined to acknowledge. But if the subject be fairly considered, and the respected matron weighed in the scales of justice against the neglected old maid, it is possible that the matron might kick the beam. She will appear rather in the character of a monopolist than of a great benefactor to the state. If she had not married and had so many children, other members of society might have enjoyed this satisfaction; and there is no particular reason for supposing that her sons would fight better for their country than the sons of other women.’ Works of Malthus, III, 698.

24 See Wrigley, E. A., People, cities and wealth (Oxford, 1987), chapter II,Google Scholar ‘The classical economists and the industrial revolution’.

25 Ricardo, D., On the principles of political economy and taxation in The works and correspondence of David Ricardo, edited by Sraffa, P. with the collaboration of Dobb, M. H. (Cambridge, 1951) I, 93Google Scholar.

26 Ibid. pp. 94–5.

27 Ibid. p. 102.

28 In his chapter, ‘Of the stationary state’, it is of interest to note that Mill wrote, ‘Adam Smith always assumes that the condition of the mass of the people, though it may not be positively distressed, must be pinched and stinted in a stationary condition of wealth, and can only be satisfactory in a progressive state. The doctrine that, to however distant a time incessant struggling may put off our doom, the progress of society must “end in shallows and in miseries”, far from I being, as many people still believe, a wicked invention of Mr Malthus, was either expressly or tacitly affirmed by his most distinguished predecessors, and can only be successfully combatted by his principles.’ Mill, J. S., Principles of political economy with some of their applications to social philosophy, introd. by Bladen, V. W., textual ed. Robson, J. M. (2 vols., Toronto, 1965), II, 753Google Scholar.

29 As, for example, when we wrote in the Principles of economics (1836), ‘In the natural and regular progress of a country towards its full complement of capital and population, the rate of profits and the corn wages of labour permanently fall together.’ Works of Malthus, V, 128.

30 Works of Malthus, I, Essay on population (1798), 98.

31 See above, p. 824.

32 Wrigley, and Schofield, , Population history of England, figure 10.2, p. 405Google Scholar and figure 10.9, p. 425, and accompanying text.

33 Himmelfarb, G., The idea of poverty: England in the early industrial age (London, 1984), p. 126Google Scholar.

34 Ibid. p. 44.

35 Ibid. p. 44.

36 Ibid. p. 100.

37 Malthus, wrote, ‘And it should also be recollected, that land does not produce one commodity alone, but in addition to that most indispensable of all articles – food – it produces thematerials for clothing, lodging, and firing’. Works of Malthus, v, Principles of political economy (1836), 114–15Google Scholar. Much later Mill still clung to the same view of the centrality of the land, ‘The materials of manufacture being all drawn from the land, and many of them from agriculture, which supplies in particular the entire material of clothing; the general law of production from the land, the law of diminishing return, must in the last resort be applicable to manufacturing as well as to agricultural history.’ Mill, , Principles of political economy, I, 182Google Scholar. Mill went on to stress, however, the wide scope of increasing returns in manufacture, leaving open the question of the final implications of the two conflicting tendencies for real incomes.

38 See above p. 814–15.

39 ‘The capital employed in agriculture, therefore, not only puts in motion a greaterquantity of productive labour than any equal capital employed in manufactures, but in proportion too to the quantity of productive labour which it employs, it adds a much greater value to the annual produce of the land and labour of the country, to the real wealth and revenue of its inhabitants. Of all the ways in which a capital can be employed, it is by far the most advantageous to the society.’ See also the train of argument which led him to associate successful agriculture with cheap food and so with success in manufactures: The corn, which could with difficulty have been carried abroad in its own shape, is in this manner virtually exported in that of the complete manufacture.’ He ends by asserting that the manufactures of Leeds, Halifax, Sheffield, Birmingham and Wolverhampton are ‘the offspring of agriculture’. Smith, , Wealth of nations, I, 385. 430–1Google Scholar.

40 The change is symbolized in the frequency with which economists today make use of Cobb–Douglas production functions to characterize major analytic problems, directing attention to capital, labour and their exponents but excluding land, a proceeding which would not have recommended itself to the classical school.

41 Works of Malthus, in, Essay on population (1826), 486.