An Essay on the Principle of Population, Vol. 1 of 3: Or a View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; With an Inquiry Into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions; In Three Volumes

Excerpt from An Essay on the Principle of Population, Vol. 1 of 3: Or a View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; With an Inquiry Into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions; In Three Volumes

IT has been justly remarked that few writers have been so much discussed as Malthus by persons who have never read his works; few men have been so violently abused both by his own and by subsequent generations; and few, needless to say, have been so hopelessly misrepresented. No one, among Classical writers, therefore, has a better claim to speak for himself through the pages of the Everyman Library.

Malthus's Essay on Population, which was first published anonymously in 1798, arose out of a discussion with his father on the social philosophy expounded by Godwin in Political Justice and in the pages of the Enquirer. Godwin appears to have been influenced by Rousseau and other French writers of the Revolutionary era, and strongly believed in the power of human reason to bring humanity to a state of perfection. Like his more famous successor, Robert Owen, he maintained that the evils of society were due to human institutions, and in particular to the existence of private property. In a society free from these hindrances there would be an abun dance for everybody, and all reasonable needs would be satis fied if every one worked half an hour a day. In his system of communistic anarchy, where each would receive according to his needs, vice and misery, which flourish on selfishness and greed, would disappear.

But to Malthus this very idealistic theory ignored some of the most fundamental traits in human nature; and, in particular, would inevitably come to grief by reason of what he called the principle of population. The doctrine that will for ever be associated with his name declares that there is a universal tendency for population to outrun the means of subsistence. In the state of society imagined by Godwin.

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