Commencing with such an absurdity, the essay includes a long argument for the imposition of a duty on the importation, and the payment of a bounty for the exportation of corn, an idea that has long since been sent to the limbo of exploded fallacies. And it is marked throughout the argumentative portions by passages which show on the part of the reverend gentleman the most ridiculous incapacity for logical thought—as, for instance, that if wages were to be increased from eighteen pence or two shillings per day to five shillings, meat would necessarily increase in price from eight or nine pence to two or three shillings per pound, and the condition of the laboring classes would therefore not be improved, a statement to which I can think of no parallel so close as a proposition I once heard a certain printer gravely advance—that because an author, whom he had known, was forty years old when he was twenty, the author must now be eighty years old because he (the printer) was forty. This confusion of thought does not merely crop out here and there; it characterizes the whole work.[1] The main body of the book is taken up with what is in reality a refutation of the theory which the book advances, for Malthus' review of what he calls the positive checks to population is simply the showing that the results which he attributes to over-population actually arise from other causes. Of all the cases cited, and pretty much the whole globe is passed over in the survey, in which vice and misery check increase by limiting marriages or shortening the term of human life, there is not a single case in which the vice and misery can be traced to an actual increase in the number of mouths over the power of the accompanying hands to feed them; but in every case the vice and misery are shown to spring either from unsocial ignorance and
- ↑ Malthus' other works, though written after he became famous, made no mark, and are treated with contempt even by those who find in the Essay a great discovery. The Encyclopædia Britannica, for instance, though fully accepting the Malthusian theory, says of Malthus' Political Economy: "It is very ill arranged, and is in no respect either a practical or a scientific exposition of the subject. It is in great part occupied with an examination of parts of Mr. Ricardo's peculiar doctrines, and with an inquiry into the nature and causes of value. Nothing, however, can be more unsatisfactory than these discussions. In truth Mr. Malthus never had any clear or accurate perception of Mr. Ricardo's theories, or of the principles which determine the value in exchange of different articles."
