This brief survey of typical critics and commentators may be completed by a classification of the former, which, among other advantages, will give a bird’s-eye view of the chief points in discussion. Empson classified the opponents of Malthus by their motives,[924] a proceeding hardly fair either to them or to the essay itself. It is not fair to them, for as a rule the critics appeal to argument, and must be judged by what they adduce, not by their good or ill will, wisdom or folly, in adducing it; and not fair to the essay, because few books have owed so much to their reviewers.
The positions of the critics may be classified as follows:—
I. Some say the doctrine of the essay is a truism.[925]
II. Others admit that it is unanswerable, but retain a philosophical faith in the future discovery of some contrary principle.[926]
III. Others find fault with the details of the doctrine, either (a) in regard to the ratios of increase, asserting that no tendency to a geometrical increase of population has been proved, but something much less rapid, even (a few say) a decreasing ratio,[927]—and that no mere arithmetical increase of food has been proved, but something much more rapid,[928]—or (b) in regard to the checks on population, asserting that no checks are necessary,[929]—that vice and misery sometimes add to population instead of checking it,[930]—that to include moral restraint is to stultify the original doctrine,[931]—that moral restraint sometimes involves as great evil as excessive numbers, both from the personal practice of it and from the preaching of it to others,[932]—that important checks have been omitted, the chief being misgovernment,[933] bad laws,[934] high feeding,[935] intellectual development,[936] and those of Owen.[937]
There is, besides, an a priori criticism, which is either (I.) ecclesiastical,[938] alleging that Malthus contradicts the Bible or some other authority,—(II.) theological,[939] that he denies Providence,—or (III.) doctrinaire,[940] that he denies natural rights and the pre-established harmony of moral and economical laws, and the instinct of equality,—or (IV.) ethical and popular,[941] that he runs counter to the moral sense and the natural benevolence of men and cosmopolitan morality. These arguments have been already considered. The fourth of them has, in its last branch, an appearance of truth, because Malthus has certainly pled less for the cosmopolitan than for the domestic and civic virtues. He wishes to lay the foundations solidly and leave the building to others. Cosmopolitan morality can rarely be the foundation. In the Empire, Christianity may have raised the people, and Stoicism the philosophers, to the wider morality without the training of the narrower, so that the converts were made better members of their own small communities by becoming members of the commonwealth of the saints and citizens of the great world. But it seems to Malthus that, in the world of to-day, the many conditions of a steady moral progress are best secured if the domestic and civic virtues precede the cosmopolitan. We must not legislate for a world of heroes, but for men as we know them to be; and a comfortable domestic life (βίος τέλειος) must be the common highway to goodness in a society of ordinary men. If poverty were no evil, churlishness would be no vice. But extreme poverty[942] is a real hindrance to goodness. In the apparent exceptions, as in the voluntary poverty of St. Francis, the greatest evil is absent, for there is no struggle for bare life. To abolish that struggle, and help men to comfort, is in some degree to help men to goodness; and it was the end for which Malthus laboured. The most sure and solid way of reaching it lay, as he thought, in impressing every man with a strong sense of his responsibility for his acts and of his power over his own destiny. To reform a nation, we must reform the members of it, who, if they are good at first in spite of their institutions, will at last conform their institutions to the model of their own goodness. To hold men the creatures of society, and make society responsible for their character, was, he thought, to mistake the order of nature. Society can feel its responsibility only in its individual members; and no member of it can free his own soul by the purity of a collective or representative conscience.
The doctrine of Malthus is, therefore, a strong appeal to personal responsibility. He would make men strong in will, to subdue their animal wants to their notion of personal good and personal goodness, which, he believed, could never fail to develope into the common good and goodness of all. Believers in the omnipotence of outward circumstances and the powerlessness of the human will, to alter them or the human character, may put Malthus beyond the pale of sympathy. But all can enter into the mind of Malthus and understand his work, who know the hardness of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit, and yet believe in the power of ideas to change the lives of men, and have faith not only in the rigour of natural laws, but in man’s power to conquer nature by obeying her.