In ancient Greece and Rome, with the safety-valve of the power of planting colonies, and in the presence of constant war, an increase in the number of citizens was regarded as a source of public strength; and marriage was encouraged by public opinion, and in many cases even by legislation: though thoughtful men were even then aware that action in the contrary sense might be necessary if the responsibilities of parentage should ever cease to be burdensome.(2*) In later times there may be observed, as Roscher says,(3*) a regular ebb and flow of the opinion that the State should encourage the growth of numbers.It was in full flow in England under the first two Tudors, but in the course of the sixteenth century it slackened and turned; and it began to ebb, when the abolition of the celibacy of the religious orders, and the more settled state of the country had had time to give a perceptible impetus to population; the effective demand for labour having meanwhile been diminished by the increase of sheep runs, and by the collapse of that part of the industrial system which had been organized by the monastic establishments.Later on the growth of population was checked by that rise in the standard of comfort which took effect in the general adoption of wheat as the staple food of Englishmen during the first half of the eighteenth century.At that time there were even fears, which later inquiries showed to be unfounded, that the population was actually diminishing.Petty(4*) had forestalled some of Carey's and Wakefield's arguments as to the advantages of a dense population.Child had argued that "whatever tends to the depopulating of a country tends to the impoverishment of it;" and that "most nations in the civilized parts of the world are more or less rich or poor proportionably to the paucity or plenty of their people, and not to the sterility or fruitfulness of their land."(5*) And by the time that the world-struggle with France had attained its height, when the demands for more and more troops were ever growing, and when manufacturers were wanting more men for their new machinery; the bias of the ruling classes was strongly flowing in favour of an increase of population.So far did this movement of opinion reach that in 1796 Pitt declared that a man who had enriched his country with a number of children had a claim on its assistance.An Act, passed amid the military anxieties of 1806, which granted exemptions from taxes to the fathers of more than two children born in wedlock, was repealed as soon as Napoleon had been safely lodged in St Helena.(6*)2.But during all this time there had been a growing feeling among those who thought most seriously on social problems, that an inordinate increase of numbers, whether it strengthened the State or not, must necessarily cause great misery: and that the rulers of the State had no right to subordinate individual happiness to the aggrandizement of the State.In France in particular a reaction was caused, as we have seen, by the cynical selfishness with which the Court and its adherents sacrificed the wellbeing of the people for the sake of their own luxury and military glory.If the humane sympathies of the Physiocrats had been able to overcome the frivolity and harshness of the privileged classes of France, the eighteenth century would probably not have ended in tumult and bloodshed, the march of freedom in England would not have been arrested, and the dial of progress would have been more forward than it is by the space of at least a generation.As it was, but little attention was paid to Quesnay's guarded but forcible protest: -- "one should aim less at augmenting the population than at increasing the national income, for the condition of greater comfort which is derived from a good income, is preferable to that in which a population exceeds its income and is ever in urgent need of the means of subsistence."(7*)Adam Smith said but little on the question of population, for indeed he wrote at one of the culminating points of the prosperity of the English working classes; but what he does say is wise and well balanced and modern in tone.Accepting the Physiocratic doctrine as his basis, he corrected it by insisting that the necessaries of life are not a fixed and determined quantity, but have varied much from place to place and time to time; and may vary more.(8*) But he did not work out this hint fully.And there was nothing to lead him to anticipate the second great limitation of the physiocratic doctrine, which has been made prominent in our time by the carriage of wheat from the centre of America to Liverpool for less than what had been the cost of its carriage across England.
The eighteenth century wore on to its close and the next century began; year by year the condition of the working classes in England became more gloomy.An astonishing series of bad harvests,(9*) a most exhausting war,(10*) and a change in the methods of industry that dislocated old ties, combined with an injudicious poor law to bring the working classes into the greatest misery they have ever suffered, at all events since the beginning of trustworthy records of English social history.(11*)And to crown all, well-meaning enthusiasts, chiefly under French influence, were proposing communistic schemes which would enable people to throw on society the whole responsibility for rearing their children.(12*)Thus while the recruiting sergeant and the employer of labour were calling for measures tending to increase the growth of population, more far-seeing men began to inquire whether the race could escape degradation if the numbers continued long to increase as they were then doing.Of these inquirers the chief was Malthus, and his Essay on the Principle of Population is the starting-point of all modern speculations on the subject.
