第67章 Chapter III(8)

While these controversies were in the foreground the remarkable movement of which Mr and Mrs Sidney Webb (33)are the first historians,was developing itself.Workmen were learning how to organise effective trades-unions,and co-operators were turning into a more practicable channel some of the aspirations of which Owen had been the prophet.What Mill thought of such movements will appear presently .Meanwhile it is enough to say that the economists generally confined themselves to throwing cold water upon what they held to be irrational schemes.The working classes could not raise their position by combination,though they had an undeniable right to try fruitless experiments.

They were going astray after false prophets,and blind to the daylight of a true science.The co-operative movement,indeed,received a warmer welcome when it came to be known.But the remarkable point is once more the wide gap between the 'philosophical Radicals'and the classes whom they aspired to lead.The aspirations of the poorer class took a form condemned as simply absurd and illogical by the theories of their would-be leaders.(34)

III.MALTHUSIAN CONTROVERSY

Popular instinct recognised its natural enemy in Malthus.

'Malthusian'was a compendious phrase for anti-Christian,hard-hearted,grovelling,materialist,fatalistic.The formal controversy was dying out.One of the last 'confutations'was by the enthusiastic Sadler,which provoked a slashing attack in the Edinburgh by the rising light Macaulay.(35)Alison had prepared a ponderous treatise(36)by 1828,which,however,did not appear till 1840,when his popularity as a historian encouraged its publication.Thomas Doubleday (1790-1870),an amiable man and a sturdy reformer,published his True Law of Population in 1831.(37)Sadler,the churchman and philanthropist,Alison,the ponderous Tory,and Doubleday,the Radical,are agreed upon one point.They are all defending the beneficence of the deity,and take Malthus to be a devil's advocate.Sadler,who was a mathematician,devotes the greatest part of his book to a discussion,helped by elaborate tables,of the famous geometrical progression.Alison,of course,rambles over all the articles of the Tory faith,defending the corn-laws,protection,and slavery along with the factory acts,the poor-law,and the allotment system,and expounding his simple philosophy of history and the inevitable currency question.The real difficulty is to assign the precise point at issue.If Malthus is taken as asserting that,as a matter of fact,population actually and invariably doubles every twenty-five years,or at any rate always multiplies to starvation point,it is easy to 'confute'him;but then he had himself repudiated any such doctrine.If,on the other hand,you only say that over-population is in fact restrained by some means,Malthus had said so himself.It was common ground,for example,that great towns were unfavourable to population;and Macaulay could fairly tell Sadler that this was admitted by Malthus,and was really a case of the famous 'positive checks.'(38)Alison takes similar ground in much of his argumentation.The difference seems to be that Sadler and Doubleday assume a pre-established harmony where Malthus traces the action of 'checks.'Sadler,(39)for example,agrees with the opinion of Muret,ridiculed by Malthus,that God had made the force of life 'in inverse ratio to fecundity.'Sadler and Doubleday agree that 'fecundity'is diminished by comfort.Men multiply less as they become richer,instead of becoming richer as they multiply less.J.S.Mill says that Doubleday alone among the Anti-Malthusians had some followers,but thinks that this argument is sufficiently confuted by a glance at the enormous families of the English upper classes.(40)Macaulay had taken more trouble to reply by statistics drawn from the Peerage.The one obvious point is that none of the disputants could properly talk of 'scientific laws.'What Malthus had indicated was a 'tendency,'or a consequence of the elasticity of population which might arise under certain conditions,and to which it was important to attend.But this gives no approach to a formula from which we can infer what will be the actual growth under given conditions.Macaulay showed clearly enough the futility of Sadler's reasoning.It was hopeless to compare areas,taken at random,large and small,heterogeneous or uniform,in different countries,climates,and social states,and attempt by a summary process to elicit a distinct 'law.'All manner of physiological,psychological,and sociological questions are involved;not to be set aside by a hasty plunge into a wilderness of statistics.To discover a tenable 'law of population'we shall have to wait for the constitution of hitherto chaotic sciences.