immoral, or cruel in a high degree, together with the same want of success in every other person, ancient or modern, who has made a similar attempt, seem to show that the argument against systems of equality founded on the principle of population does not admit of a plausible answer even in theory. The fact of the tendency of population to increase beyond the means of subsistence may be seen in almost every register of a country parish in the kingdom. The unavoidable effect of this tendency to depress the whole body of the people in want and misery, unless the progress of the population be somehow or other retarded, is equally obvious; and the impossibility of checking the rate of increase in a state of equality, without resorting to regulations that are unnatural, immoral, or cruel, forms an argument at once conclusive against every such system.

11. PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE PRUDENTIAL CHECK1

Progress has been marked by a lowering of the general birth rate, a still greater lowering of the death rate, and an improvement in the arts which has enabled the increased population to live in greater comfort than before. But it has left certain parts of the population in a state where they are constantly on the verge of starvation. Is this to be regarded as a necessary incident of progress, or as an unnecessary evil which constitutes an indictment against the modern industrial system? Malthus holds the former view; the socialists the latter.

The successive points in the Malthusian theory may be summed up as follows:

1. A low death rate is a necessity for national prosperity. A high death rate (say 40 per 1000) means a low average duration of life (say twenty-five years), much disease, and little industrial efficiency.

2. Any excess of birth rate over death rate means increased population, and, in long-established communities, increased density of population. As long as this increase is accompanied by

1 By Arthur T. Hadley. From Population and Capital. Publications of the American Economic Association, Vol. IX, 1894, pp. 557-566.

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corresponding improvements in the arts of producing and utilizing food, it has no adverse effect; but when the increase of numbers is more rapid than this, it means less food per unit of labor, more disease, stoppage of accumulation of capital and of the progress which is dependent on such accumulations.

"

3. The physiological possibilities of the birth rate are so far in excess of any death rate which is consonant with social prosperity, that the improvement in the arts of food supply has not kept pace with this possible excess and cannot be expected to do so. This difference must therefore be reduced by "preventive checks to lessen the birth rate. An individual who refuses to conform to this necessity has himself to blame for his poverty and that of his children, and must expect to see their numbers reduced by the positive checks of famine and disease.

The socialistic criticism of Malthus may without unfairness, and with great gain in perspicuity, be analyzed into two heads : (1) There is almost never, in civilized society, a present or immediate pressure of population upon subsistence. There is always food enough to go around, if it were only better distributed. (2) If such a distribution were made, there is no likelihood of a future pressure of population upon subsistence, because increased comfort is accompanied by a lower birth rate instead of a higher one.

The last point is erroneous. It is true that as society exists at present, high comfort and low birth rate are commonly associated, because comfort is made to depend upon prudence. Let the comfort be made independent of the exercise of prudence, as in the operation of the English poor law at the beginning of this century, and the birth rate tends to increase rather than diminish. It may not be exactly true, as some Malthusians would have us believe, that the low birth rate is the c fort; but it is much farther from the truth to comfort is the cause of the low birth rate. B of a common cause the exercise of prudence. wichalves high comfort and low birth rate to those who are cale it, while those who are incapable of so doing he birth rate and lower level of comfort.

comat the the results

practicing ve a higher

This line of thought enables us to explain satisfactorily a phenomenon which has been misunderstood by many of the opponents of Malthus, namely, that the fear of starvation does not lower the birth rate so much as the fear of losing caste. It is not that the desire of decencies in itself constitutes a greater preventive check to population than the need of subsistence; but that the need of subsistence is felt by all men alike, emotional as well as intellectual, while the desire of decencies stamps the man or the race that possesses it as having reached the level of intellectual morality. Ethical selection can therefore operate on the latter as it does not on the former. The intellectual man has possibilities of self-restraint which the emotional man has not. Give the intellectual man the chance to reap the benefit of such self-restraint and you will find reduced birth rate and increased comfort.

There are some cases under the existing social order where men who are capable of higher things multiply recklessly through sheer hopelessness. With men like this, a better distribution of the results of labor would doubtless operate not only to increase their productive efficiency but to contribute to their prudence in marrying, and thus to diminish the birth rate. But this result would be accomplished by assimilating the condition of the hopelessly poor to the normal condition of property owners, and would be dependent on the operation of those capitalistic motives which the majority of the opponents of Malthus so severely disapprove.

The more completely you give the prudent and efficient man control of the results of his labor, the more you localize the pressure of population upon subsistence, and confine the effects of this pressure to a few. Under such circumstances there is habitually that surplus of food on which the anti-Malthusian lays so much stress. But give the children of the shiftless the right to ** eat the substance of the efficient and prudent, and you will soon lose both the capital and the morality under which that capital has been created, witness the history of the English poor law. The fund of national capital is placed at the mercy of the paupers, and the restraints which now limit the number of these paupers are taken away. Let this process be carried to an extreme, and unist not

the localized pressure of population upon subsistence, now so familiar under the name of poverty, widens more and more until we have that general imminence of starvation characteristic of savage or half-savage races. javage

When the comfort of an individual is made dependent upon his foresight and prudence, and when the comfort of a group is made dependent on the existence of intellectual as distinct from emotional morality, we shall find prudent men and prudent races possessing high comfort and low birth rates. The history of civilization is in large measure a history of this development of prudence and comfort. Possibly some nations are carrying this conscious adaptation of means to ends a little too far for their own good. The waste of nerve power connected with the exercise of conscious prudence is a real evil, and if carried to an extreme may offset the gain attendant upon the possession and accumulation of capital. This is a fair point for socialistic criticism. But with the average man, the dangers of this extreme are less than those of the other. The evils of thinking too much and trusting Providence too little seem small in comparison with those which arise from trusting Providence for everything and not thinking at all. Doubtless Malthus made a mistake in giving too much countenance to the idea that preventive checks must be conscious. But his socialist critics make a greater mistake in holding that such checks are automatic. The truth would seem to be that such checks are for the most part institutional. The modern family and the modern law of capital have acted as a powerful system of preventive checks to population. The apparently automatic and often nonconscious operation of these checks must not blind us to the historical power which has established and perpetuated them.

To hope as do the socialistic critics of the Malthusian theory - that the average character of a people will remain unchanged when the institutions under which this character has developed are radically modified or abolished, is a fatuous delusion.

12. THE NECESSITY FOR STATE PENSIONS FOR MOTHERS1

The conclusion which the present writer draws from the declining birth rate is one of hope, not of despair. It is something to discover the cause of the phenomenon. Moreover, the cause is one that we can counteract. If the decline in the birth rate had been due to physical degeneracy, whether brought about by "urbanization" or otherwise, we should not have known how to cope with it. But a deliberately volitional interference, due chiefly to economic motives, can at any moment be influenced partly by a mere alteration of the economic conditions, partly by the opportunity for the play of the other motives which will be thereby afforded.

What seems indispensable and urgent is to alter the economic incidence of childbearing. Under the present social conditions the birth of children in households maintained on less than three pounds a week (and these form four fifths of the nation) is attended by almost penal consequences. The wife is incapacitated for some months from earning money. For a few weeks she is subject to a painful illness, with some risk. The husband has to provide a lump sum for the necessary medical attendance and domestic service. But this is not all. The parents know that for the next fourteen years they will have to dock themselves and their other children of luxuries and even of some of the necessaries of life, just because there will be another mouth to feed. To four fifths of all the households in the land each succeeding baby means the probability of there being less food, less clothing, less house room, less recreation, and less opportunity for advancement for every member of the family. Similar considerations appeal even more strongly to a majority of the remaining 20 per

1 By Sidney Webb. From The Decline in the Birth Rate (Fabian Tract No. 131. The Fabian Society, London, 1907). Reprinted in the Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LXIX. Mr. Webb set out to ascertain the real cause of "race suicide." Partly on statistical evidence, partly on the basis of answers to questionnaires sent out to about three hundred married people "who could be relied upon to give frank and truthful answers to a detailed interrogatory," he arrived at the conclusion that the "decline of the birth rate is principally, if not entirely, the result of deliberate volition in the regulation of the marriage state," that is, of neoMalthusian practices. That part of his article here reprinted gives his proposal for the removal of the economic penalty on people who have children.