SOURCE: Gilbert, Geoffrey. “Economic Growth and the Poor in Malthus' Essay on Population.” History of Political Economy 12, no. 1 (spring 1980): 83-96.

[In the following essay, Gilbert explains Malthus's changing views on the effects of economic growth on the working poor in the 1798 and succeeding editions of the Essay on Population.]

I

Historians of economic thought have given short shrift to Malthus' treatment of economic growth as it affects the welfare of the working classes, although the issue commands a full chapter in every edition of the Essay on Population. The gist of the argument, as formulated in 1798, is that growth in the national output will be harmful to the working poor if it consists only of manufactured goods, which the working man does not consume, and at the same time entails a transfer of labor from agricultural to “unhealthy” and insecure industrial employment. Edwin Cannan barely mentions the Malthusian case against growth in discussing Malthus' views on the supply and demand for food.¹ Joseph Spengler incorporates a few of the Malthusian ideas on growth and the poor into his lengthy synthesis of Malthus' “total population theory,” but does not analyze them in any detail. Only in a footnote does he hint that Malthus' views on this subject underwent a substantial change over time.² Wesley Mitchell gives the chapter in question only passing notice.³ And G. F. McCleary, though he finds this “one of the most interesting chapters” of the Essay, leaves the logic of Malthus' argument unexamined.⁴

A careful reading of the growth-and-welfare chapter in successive editions of the Essay yields insights into some central themes of Malthusian thought: the relative value of industry and agriculture in promoting national welfare, the role of custom and habit in determining the long-term welfare of the lower classes, and the effective constraints on population. The chapter is of interest not only for the light it throws on these issues but for its methodology, the logic and structure of its argument. In the bold, direct spirit of the first edition, Malthus builds an abstract case against industrial-biased growth,⁵ then uses it to assail the trend of the British economy over the preceding century. In later editions, however, he takes a more ambiguous stand. The broad indictment of British economic experience is withheld. Specific instances of industrial abuse are cited but undercut by reports of improved conditions. On the abstract level as well, Malthus introduces notable changes in the original presentation of the case against growth. Over a twenty-year period the simple analysis of a special type of growth inimical to the welfare of the poor is gradually qualified and at the same time purged of its anti-manufacturing overtones. Indeed by the fifth edition (1817), Malthus can marshal both fact and theory behind a relatively hopeful view of the benefits the working poor might derive from a growing national output.

II

With the diffidence characteristic of all the British classical economists when taking issue with “Dr. Adam Smith,” Malthus sets out in Chapter XVI of the first Essay to correct an “error” he detects in the Wealth of Nations. Smith has included both the “produce of land” (agricultural output) and the “produce of labour” (manufactures) in his definition of national “wealth” (to us, national product).⁶ He has also asserted: “The demand for those who live by wages … necessarily increases with the increase of the revenue and stock [i.e., the ‘wealth’ or output] of every country, and cannot possibly increase without it.”⁷ As the rise in national product swells the revenue of employers and augments their funds for hiring labor, the demand for labor increases. Pending an increase in population, real wages rise and workers are better off. Hence Malthus sees Smith as giving his unqualified approval to growth in national output as “tending always to ameliorate the condition of the poor.”⁸

From this position Malthus dissents, on both analytical and historical grounds. The analysis takes the form of a counterexample or “instance.”⁹ Suppose capital was accumulated in the manufacturing sector only and the result was an increase in manufactured output Smithian “wealth” would have increased, but workers would have gained nothing, because they consume only “provisions,” or non-manufactured products. In fact this purely industrial variety of economic growth might have, to import a Marxian term, “immiserizing” effects on the poor by shifting labor away from agriculture into industry and thereby causing a decline in the per capita quantity of provisions available for workers' consumption. Though technological advance might forestall an actual reduction in agricultural output, on the whole the working poor would still have “no greater command over the necessaries and conveniences of life” than before.¹⁰

With respect to health, a non-pecuniary but “essential ingredient of happiness,”¹¹ the working poor would certainly be injured by industrial-biased growth. Moving from the farm to the factory, more workers would be exposed to crowding in “close and unwholesome rooms.”¹² They would also experience more uncertain employment on account of “the capricious taste of man, the accidents of war, and other causes.”¹³

Crucial to this negative appraisal of the effect on workers' welfare of growth in manufactured output is the implicit assumption that manufactures do not enter the consumption of workers. Malthus reveals in more than one place that he conceives of manufactures as “ornamental luxuries.”¹⁴ These “silks, laces, trinkets, and expensive furniture” are “the revenue only of the rich, and not of the society in general.”¹⁵ An increase in the output of such goods, therefore, cannot have “the same importance as an increase of food, which forms the principal revenue of the great mass of the people.”¹⁶

One can find both an empirical and an a priori basis for Malthus' views on the expenditures of the working poor. Although it is unclear whether he had access to Eden's monumental State of the Poor (1797) in writing the Essay of 1798, Malthus would have found there abundant statistical evidence on workers' spending patterns. Eden's selected budgets of agricultural laborers from all over England demonstrated that most working families spent over half their income on food. Additional expenses included rent and fuel, leaving little room for discretionary purchases of “manufactures.”¹⁷

Even if they could afford to buy non-subsistence goods, the working poor of Malthus' first Essay would not be expected to do so. In the counterexample to Smith, the demand for labor in the manufacturing sector increases, causing money wages to rise; workers then spend the entire increase on food.¹⁸ Elsewhere in the Essay, Malthus analyzes the effects of private and public income transfers to the poor solely in terms of their effect on the price and distribution of provisions.¹⁹ Again the implication is that the poor will spend any additional income on necessities, especially food. This is entirely consistent with the behavioral assumptions about man which lie at the core of the first Essay. The human race suffers from a “perpetual tendency … to increase beyond the means of subsistence.”²⁰ It is always pressing against available food supplies. “Happiness” is achieved only when those supplies are abundant and increasing.²¹ The working poor, who “seem always to live from hand to mouth,”²² would be expected to use any increase in income to widen their margin of subsistence rather than indulge in manufactured goods.

Malthus rounds out the analytical case against industrial-biased growth by parrying two possible objections. First, might not the national food supply actually increase if higher food prices (caused by workers spending their higher money wages on food) attracted “some additional capital into the channel of agriculture”?²³ Perhaps, but this would happen only “very slowly,” according to Malthus. Thus the price elasticity of supply for food is judged to be quite low. Second, might not the national food supply be augmentable by exporting some of the additional manufactured output and importing food? For a “small country with a large navy, and great inland accommodations for carriage,” a country like Holland, this might be feasible, but not for countries “less advantageously circumstanced in this respect,”²⁴ such as England.

III

Having made the case that immiserizing growth is theoretically possible—that the poor may be made worse off even as a Smithian measure of “wealth” rises—Malthus now turns to the real world for evidence that what is abstractly possible is at the same time empirically plausible. He does not have to look far. Since the Revolution, England herself has followed a course of economic development which “affords a very striking elucidation of the argument in question.”²⁵

Consider first population. Between the views of Richard Price, who found England's population to be declining since the Revolution, and the Reverend John Howlett, who saw it increasing, Malthus takes the compromise view that population has grown either slowly or not at all.²⁶ Next he infers from the relative stability of population that the subsistence funds to support labor have remained constant also. For if they had increased, population would likewise have increased; if they had declined, so too population. To complete the deductive chain, Malthus argues from the unchanged volume of “funds for the maintenance of labor” to an unchanged output of food in England.²⁷

That many will doubt the stagnation of subsistence output over a century-long period, Malthus fully anticipates. But such doubts must arise from an exclusive attention to the most positive aspect of Enclosure, namely, the enclosing of “waste lands.” Against the undisputed gains in food production from this practice must be set the losses resulting from the widespread conversion of grain fields to pasturage.²⁸ Balancing the gains and losses from Enclosure, Malthus argues (in effect) for the likelihood of no net change in Britain's food production.

By contrast, British commerce and industry have been “rapidly advancing during the last century.”²⁹ And since there are many reasons to suppose that the number of laborers employed in agriculture has declined since the Revolution,³⁰ it does appear that a long-term occupational shift from agriculture to industry has been occurring in England.

Manufacturing growth, agricultural stagnation, stable population, and a “much greater proportion [of British workers] employed in large manufactories, unfavourable both to health and virtue”³¹—in all these respects British historical experience proves out the empirical possibility of immiserizing growth. The ineluctable conclusion for Malthus is that “the increase of wealth of late years has had no tendency to increase the happiness of the labouring poor.”³²

Although formally the reference to British experience simply provides Malthus with an example of immiserizing growth, we can safety assume that the underlying intent of Chapter XVI from the outset has been to protest the long-term direction of the British economy. Bernard Semmel has argued, in The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism, that Malthus was an “agrarian economist,” intellectually indebted to the physiocrats, profoundly at odds with the emerging commercial and industrial order in Great Britain, and determined to prove that “a trade empire based upon an industrial predominance was not viable.”³³ In the chapter here examined, Malthus addresses a limited but important issue arising from Britain's industrial advance, namely, whether growth has tended to enhance the welfare of “the most numerous class” in society, the working poor.³⁴ His answer is a clear and forceful No.

IV

In the second, third, and fifth editions of the Essay, Malthus revises the chapter—which now bears a title, “Of Increasing Wealth, as it Affects the Condition of the Poor”—in substantial and even surprising ways. Superficially, the most obvious changes involve his handling of “empirical” evidence, whether of an historical or a contemporary nature. In this respect there are wholesale deletions and additions, as well as “re-readings” of the facts, to be noted below. But more fundamentally, Malthus retreats from the unambiguous anti-manufacturing stand of 1798, comes to see the possibility and even desirability of the poor consuming manufactures, and is at least partially reconciled to the course of British economic development.

A striking difference between Chapter XVI in the first Essay and the corresponding chapter of the second, which came out in 1803, is the absence of the sweeping indictment of British economic progress, Malthus omits it entirely from the second and all later editions without a word of explanation. Apparently in 1803 he no longer believed that Britain's long-term growth experience conformed to the immiserizing pattern outlined in 1798. We can only conjecture as to the reasons why. A changed perception of British population trends may offer the best explanation. The population of England and Wales, put at five and a half million by Gregory King in 1690, was found to be almost nine million in the census of 1801. Thus it must have seemed to Malthus inappropriate to maintain a parallel between his abstract case, in which the labor force is assumed constant, and Britain's secular experience of growing population.

To continue to assert that British agricultural output had remained stagnant since 1688 was now impossible. By the Malthusian logic, a growing population virtually proved a growing rate of provision output. And the implied rise in British agricultural production would in turn suggest a positive rate of capital formation in the agricultural sector. This, however, would violate yet another premise of the simple theoretical “instance,” that capital is accumulated only in the manufacturing sector. (We may be certain Malthus had noticed the ongoing flow of capital into a prospering British agriculture long before he drew attention to it in print in 1814-15.³⁵)

For whatever reasons, Malthus drops from the second edition his only historical “example” of immiserizing growth. The confident assertion of 1798 that “instances nearly approximating to [immiserizing growth] may be found without any very laborious search”³⁶ also disappears. No claim is staked in 1803 for the empirical relevance or verifiability of the contra-Smithian “instance.”

Another change in 1803 is the more detailed examination of the health and employment effects of industrial growth. There is an extended quotation from John Aikin's Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles Round Manchester, in which the deleterious effects on children from working in the textile mills are vividly portrayed. Aikin draws a general contrast—which Malthus is pleased to quote—between the condition of working families in agriculture and those in manufacturing. “In the former we meet with neatness, cleanliness and comfort; in the latter, with filth, rags, and poverty.”³⁷ The vulnerability of manufacturing workers to changes in fashion and to circumstances of war and peace is also briefly documented, not merely asserted, by Malthus in this edition.³⁸

Equally significant, if more subtle, are the changes in Malthus' treatment of the “abstract” issues relating to growth and the welfare of the poor. The whole contra-Smithian growth sequence, in which the national output of manufactures increases and labor shifts from agriculture into industry, is reproduced almost verbatim. “The question,” posed once again by Malthus, “is how far wealth, increasing in this way, has a tendency to better the condition of the poor.”³⁹ They will still be losers from the occupational shift. But while in 1798 industrial-biased growth brought them no greater command over the “necessaries and conveniences of life,” in 1803 it merely brings them no “permanent” increase in command over the “necessaries” of life.⁴⁰ A greater command over “conveniences” thus is not explicitly ruled out. That the poor may now be considered (at least in theory) potential purchasers of manufactured conveniences is tacitly conceded in the following statement, new to the second edition:

Under such circumstances of situation [i.e., given adverse effects on health and employment], unless the increase of the riches of a country from manufactures give the lower classes of the society, on an average, a decidedly greater command over the necessaries and conveniences of life, it will not appear that their condition is improved.⁴¹

These hints that manufactures may properly be considered purchasable by the poor are consistent with the new emphasis on “preventive” checks to population in the second edition.⁴² The possibility is now more seriously entertained that means other than “misery” and “vice”—the “positive” checks of the first edition—may hold population within the bounds of the food supply. When men are seen exercising a free choice not to marry at the first opportunity, it becomes more difficult to view them crudely as mere food-consumers and children-producers. The range of consumption possibilities open to the working poor, therefore, must be extended beyond subsistence to include alternative, luxury-type goods. Not all of this is worked out explicitly in 1803, nor does Malthus express any opinion yet as to the social utility of luxury consumption by the poor.

Finally, one notes in the growth-and-welfare chapter of 1803 a much expanded discussion of food imports. These are no longer dismissed as an option only for a small country with a large navy. But Malthus warns that a large, landed country does well not to become too dependent on such imports because in years of poor domestic harvests, its foreign suppliers will be unprepared to meet the unexpectedly heavy demand.⁴³ Then, following Sir James Steuart (whom he credits in a footnote), Malthus introduces the idea that a country which, “in the progress of wealth,” shifts its labor out of agricultural employment will reach the point where additional food imports are unobtainable at an acceptable price. This raises the same possibility as in the basic contra-Smithian scenario, that “no further increase of riches [i.e., no further manufacturing growth] will have any tendency to give the labourer a greater command over the necessaries of life.”⁴⁴ Interestingly, Malthus does not assert that continued growth under these circumstances will lower the overall well-being of the poor—again implying that they may share in the increasing manufactured output. He does assert, with Steuart, that the point of inelasticity in the import food supply sets “the natural limit to the population of all commercial states.”⁴⁵

V

In the third edition of the Essay (1806), Malthus renders additional changes in the growth-and-welfare analysis. After again producing the “instance” of immiserizing growth which proves the error of Adam Smith, Malthus, in a footnote, explicitly recognizes the benefits that might accrue to the working poor from growth, even of an industrial-biased kind:

On the supposition of a physical impossibility of increasing the food of a country, it is evident that by improvements in machinery it might grow yearly richer in the exchangeable value of its manufactured produce, but the labourer, though he might be better clothed and lodged, could not be better fed.⁴⁶

We shall see the clothing-and-lodging aspect of welfare developed further in 1817.

It has come to be regarded as basic to Malthus' post-1798 thinking on the poor and the improvement of their well-being that the only real hope lies in changing their self-defeating “habits.” In another important footnote to the 1806 growth-and-welfare chapter, Malthus asserts in this connection:

The condition of the labouring poor, supposing their habits to remain the same, cannot be very essentially improved but by giving them a greater command over the means of subsistence. But any advantage of this kind must from its nature be temporary, and is therefore really of less value to them than any permanent change in their habits. But manufactures, by inspiring a taste for comforts, tend to promote a favourable change in these habits, and in this way perhaps counterbalance all their disadvantages.⁴⁷

Here is a recognition not only that manufactures may properly be considered consumable by the poor but that such consumption may be socially useful as a means of instilling better habits in them. Though this is a line of thought we tend to associate with economists other than Malthus, it is one he takes more than once in the 1806 Essay. In the chapter extolling the benefits of state-supported education, for example, Malthus includes “a taste for the conveniences and comforts of life” among the forces helping to raise the “standard of wretchedness”—what we might term the minimum acceptable standard of living—among the lower classes.⁴⁸

Minor additions are made in 1806 to the discussion of food and population constraints. All of the “great landed nations of Europe” are said currently to be at a safe distance from the point of inelasticity in food import supply, though the “progress of wealth” will find them all eventually approaching it.⁴⁹ But a country can experience the pinch of limited food relative to population whenever “the march of commerce and manufactures is more rapid than that of agriculture.”⁵⁰ Such had been the case in England in the past ten or twelve years, in Malthus' opinion. Thus “the nominal wages of labour have greatly increased,” but the “real recompense of the labourer”—the subsistence he can command—has increased more slowly,⁵¹ limiting the pace of population growth.

VI

The mature expression of Malthus' views on economic growth and the welfare of the working poor is to be found in the fifth edition of the Essay, published in 1817.⁵² In its real-world assumptions and observations, its analytical structure, and its general tone of complacent optimism, it could hardly be more dissimilar to the version of 1798. Most of the key revisions in Malthus' treatment of the subject are adumbrated in the 1803 and 1806 editions, as detailed above. What Malthus offers in the 1817 chapter, “Of Increasing Wealth …,” is a careful and comprehensive reformulation of earlier ideas.

A noteworthy departure from earlier editions is the new emphasis on the “natural progress of wealth” and the corresponding de-emphasis of the narrower concept of industrial-biased growth. As early as 1806 Malthus had introduced (or borrowed from James Steuart) the idea that “in the progress of wealth” a nation would “naturally” reach a point where food supplies could not be increased and further growth in “wealth” must take the form of manufactures. Not until 1817, though, does he adopt the secular evolution of the economy as his central perspective in discussing growth and the poor. There are gains from this. First, it is no longer necessary, in raising the issue of industrial-biased growth, that Malthus make arbitrary assumptions about an abstract economy where one “supposes … for a course of years” that capital is accumulated only in the manufacturing sector, etc. It is less arbitrary and more direct to deal with industrial-biased growth as the condition toward which a normally evolving economy moves over time. Hence, Malthus omits the formulaic, abstract “instance” from this edition. Second, the importance of industrial-biased growth as something more than a theoretical construct is now firmly re-established. After the withdrawal of the British historical analogy in the second edition (cf. § IV above), it may have struck some readers (even Malthus himself) that industrial-biased growth did not merit the space it continued to claim in the Essay. Making such growth a normal and predictable end product of long-term economic processes obviously restores its “relevance.”

As to why industrial-biased growth should be regarded as characteristic of the later stages of economic development, Malthus is not entirely clear. It appears to be a simple matter of absolute limits to land, diminishing returns in agriculture, and an “increasing taste for conveniences and luxuries,” all of which will tend to “direct the greatest part of … new capital to commerce and manufactures”—presumably because of higher relative returns there.⁵³ Industrial-biased growth is not a phenomenon only to be anticipated in the dim future, however. Malthus indicates that it may occur whenever societies reach the limits to food and population consistent with their institutional and technological constraints.⁵⁴

The dominant message of 1817 is that the poor need not experience losses of welfare when growth becomes industrial-biased, that is, limited to manufactured output. True, the funds for the maintenance of labor, which are the “means of marrying early and supporting a family,”⁵⁵ will then have reached their maximum. Malthus does regard the necessity of family limitation as, in itself, a “considerable disadvantage.”⁵⁶ But he holds out to the laborer the prospect that “with a small family he may be better lodged and clothed, and better able to command the decencies and comforts of life.”⁵⁷

A full and explicit recognition of manufactures consumption by the poor marks the fifth edition. Malthus announces here that the “comforts of the lower classes of society do not depend solely upon food, nor even upon strict necessaries.”⁵⁸ In fact they “cannot be considered as in a good state unless they have the command of some conveniences and even luxuries.”⁵⁹ Such goods not only “gratify a natural or acquired want” but “tend unquestionably to improve the mind and elevate the character.”⁶⁰ What a far cry from the Malthus of 1798, who would have barred “the introduction of manufactures and luxuries” into America so as to keep the lower classes in their happy state of innocence!⁶¹

Strong confirmation of Malthus' new, more positive attitude toward growth, especially the type (industrial-biased) that originally had seemed to threaten the poor, comes in his treatment of China in 1817. In every edition Malthus presents a hypothetical example in which he supposes industrial-biased growth to occur in China. In the first four editions, these are the predicted effects of such growth: a larger output of manufactures, their exchange abroad for “luxuries,” an unchanged or diminished output of “produce” in China, and stable or declining real funds for the maintenance of labor. Despite the “increasing wealth” of the country, the overall condition of the working poor is “depressed” by the shift of some into unhealthy industrial occupations and the absence of any compensating increase in purchasing power. The China example of 1817 is far less damning of industrial growth.⁶² The increased quantity of manufactures produced could either be exported for luxuries or “consumed at home”—by poor as well as rich? Also, any shortfall of agricultural output, due to the shift of labor into manufacturing, “would be made up, and indeed more than made up, by the beneficial effects of improved skill and economy of labour” in agriculture. There is no reference here, as previously, to the unhealthful aspects of the industrial work that would now engage more Chinese. The worst Malthus can say, or will say in 1817, is that under this type of economic growth workers will not be able to consume more food than before.

VII

It is no part of our purpose here to suggest the evolution of Thomas Malthus from an apologist for agricultural interests to an apologist for industrial interests. Neither in the chapter examined here nor in any other of Malthus' writings does one see anything like the pro-industrial bias or sympathy so transparent in Ricardo and other “mainstream” British classicists. It would be closer to the mark to suggest the emergence in Malthus' thinking of a more balanced view of industrial and agricultural growth as potential contributors to working class welfare. Item: in 1817 Malthus finally drops the invidious comparison, present in all earlier editions, between two nations which achieve equal increases of “wealth” but by different routes, one devoting itself to “commerce,” the other to agriculture. No longer is Malthus willing to contend that in the former, “the poor would be comparatively but little benefited.”⁶³ Now his position is that growth, “whether it consists principally in additions to the means of subsistence or to the stock of conveniences and comforts, will always, ceteris paribus, have a favourable effect on the poor.”⁶⁴

Of course industrial labor can never be as conducive to workers' health and virtue as labor in the field—this sort of bias is life-long in Malthus. But the Malthus of 1817 is able to gloss over Aikin's account of cotton-mill working conditions by reporting, in a footnote, that the situation of the children employed there “has been … very essentially improved, partly by the interference of the legislature, and partly by the humane and liberal exertions of individuals.”⁶⁵

It is perhaps unfair in view of the obvious analytical refinements and historical-empirical reassessments worked out through successive editions of the Essay to speculate that the line between what Malthus believed and what he wanted to believe in all of this is a very thin one. He seems genuinely convinced in 1817 that the direction of a normally developing economy is toward industrial-biased growth. The evidence indicates to him that manufactured output has been growing much more rapidly than population (hence, food output) in Great Britain since the Revolution.⁶⁶ With Britain moving unmistakably down the industrial path, one suspects Malthus wanted to believe the poor could reap benefits along the way, and wanted them to believe the same. But only if they could be persuaded to substitute “comforts” for children would the long-range outlook be hopeful.

Notes

1. A History of the Theories of Production and Distribution …, 3d ed. (London, 1917), pp. 188-89.

2. Joseph J. Spengler, “Malthus' Total Population Theory: A Restatement and Reappraisal,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 11, Feb., May 1945, reprinted in Spengler and William R. Allen, eds., Essays in Economic Thought: Aristotle to Marshall (Chicago, 1960), pp. 361-62, 396, n. 79.

3. Types of Economic Theory, from Mercantilism to Institutionalism, ed. Joseph Dorfman (New York, 1967), 1:249.

4. The Malthusian Population Theory (London, 1953), pp. 69-70.

5. This term is used throughout the present article to denote an increase in national output consisting solely of manufactured goods.

6. An Essay on the Principle of Population … (London, 1798; reprinted, New York, 1965), p. 306.

7. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Modern Library ed. (New York, 1937), Book I, ch. 8, p. 69.

8. Essay, 1798, pp. 328-29.

9. Ibid., pp. 306-10.

10. Ibid., p. 309.

11. Ibid., p. 310.

12. Ibid., p. 313.

13. Ibid., p. 310.

14. Ibid., p. 329.

15. Ibid., pp. 335-36. See also p. 332, where manufactures are seen as tending only “to gratify the vanity of a few rich people.”

16. Ibid., p. 336.

17. Sir Frederick M. Eden, The State of the Poor: or, An History of the Labouring Classes in England …, 3 vols. (London, 1797), vol. 3, App. xii: 339-50.

18. Essay, 1798, p. 309.

19. Ibid., ch. 5, esp. pp. 75-84.

20. Ibid., p. 346.

21. Ibid., pp. 136-37. Such a condition is most nearly achieved in new colonies, “where the knowledge and industry of an old state operate on the fertile unappropriated land of a new one.”

22. Ibid., p. 86. Note, too, Malthus' rather disdainful assumption that the poor will spend any spare time or money at the “ale-house” (pp. 87, 278), though this must be blamed, at least in part, on the poor-law system, which Malthus thoroughly deplores.

23. Ibid., p. 310.

24. Ibid., p. 311.

25. Ibid., pp. 311-12.

26. Ibid., pp. 313-15. See James Bonar, Theories of Population from Raleigh to Arthur Young (London, 1931), ch. 7. For background on the great population debate, see D. V. Glass, “The Population Controversy in Eighteenth-Century England,” Population Studies 6, no. 1 (1952): 69-91. An excellent short summary of the economic implications of the population controversy is provided in Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, rev. ed. (London, 1962), pp. 341-48.

27. Essay, 1798, p. 315. These “deductions” are more implicit than explicit in Malthus, but capture well the sense of his argument.

28. Ibid., pp. 315-16.

29. Ibid., p. 312.

30. Ibid., pp. 319-20.

31. Ibid., p. 321.

32. Ibid.

33. The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy and the Empire of Free Trade and Imperialism, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 1970), p. 48 and passim.

34. Essay, 1798, p. 303.

35. See both “Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws …” (1814), pp. 102-3 and “An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent” (1815), pp. 198-99, in The Pamphlets of Thomas Robert Malthus (New York, 1970).

36. Essay, 1798, p. 311.

37. Essay, 1803, p. 423. Aikin's work was published in London in 1795.

38. Ibid., p. 424.

39. Ibid., p. 422.

40. Ibid.; italics added.

41. Ibid., pp. 424-25; italics added.

42. F. A. Fetter pointed out in 1898 (“The Essay of Malthus: A Centennial Review,” Yale Review, p. 161) what some commentators continue to overlook, that “preventive checks” were not introduced in the second edition (except in name), but simply received more emphasis there than they had in 1798.

43. Essay, 1803, pp. 425-26.

44. Ibid., p. 427. The Steuart work is An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy: Being an Essay on the Science of Domestic Policy in Free Nations … (London, 1767), 1:118-19.

45. Essay, 1803, p. 427.

46. Essay, 1806, p. 192; italics added.

47. Ibid., p. 206; italics added.

48. Ibid., pp. 422-23.

49. Ibid., pp. 201-2 and 202n.

50. Ibid., p. 202.

51. Ibid.

52. The fourth edition, published in 1807, is a re-issue of the third.

53. Essay, 1817, 3:6, 22.

54. Ibid., 3:4-6, and the “China example,” described below.

55. Ibid., 3:20.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid., 3:22-23.

58. Ibid., 3:10-11. Cf. also the new assertion, made twice in the chapter, that “the condition of the lower classes of society does not depend exclusively upon the increase of the funds for the maintenance of labour, or the power of supporting a greater number of labourers” (3:2-3, 10).

59. Ibid., 3:11.

60. Ibid., 3:25.

61. Essay, 1798, p. 343.

62. Essay, 1817, 3:7-9.

63. Ibid., 3:205-6.

64. Ibid., 3:25-26.

65. Ibid. 3:16 n.

66. Ibid., 3:6.