The Fertility of the Unfit | Page 9

instead of the tendency to degeneration as it now concerns us.


CHAPTER II.
THE POPULATION QUESTION.
_The Teaching of Aristotle and Plato.--The teaching of Malthus.--His
assailants.--Their illogical position.--Bonar on Malthus and his
work.--The increase of food supplies held by Nitti to refute
Malthus.--The increase of food and the decrease of births.--Mr.
Spencer's biological theory.--Maximum birth-rate determined by
female capacity to bear children.--The pessimism of Spencer's
law.--Wider definition of moral restraint.--Where Malthus failed to
anticipate the future.--Economic law operative only through Biological
law._
Births, deaths, and migration are the factors which make up the
population question.

The problem has burned in the minds of all great students of human life
and its conditions.
Aristotle says (Politics ii. 7-5) "The legislator who fixes the amount of
property should also fix the number of children, for if they are too
many for the property, the law must be broken." And he proceeds to
advise (ib. vii. 16-15) "As to the exposure and rearing of children, let
there be a law that no deformed child shall live, but where there are too
many (for in our State population has a limit) when couples have
children in excess and the state of feeling is adverse to the exposure of
offspring, let abortion be procured."
The difficulty of over-population was conspicuous in the minds of
Aristotle and Plato, and these philosophers both held that the State had
a right and a duty to control it.
But some States were almost annihilated because they were not
sufficiently populous, and Aristotle attributes the defeat of Sparta on
one celebrated occasion to this fact. He says:--"The legislators wanting
to have as many Spartans as they could, encouraged the citizens to have
large families, and there is a law at Sparta, that the father of three sons
should be exempt from military service, and he who has four, from all
the burdens of the State. Yet it is obvious that if there were many
children, the land being distributed as it is, many of these must
necessarily fall into poverty."
The problem in the mind of the Greek philosophers was this.
Over-population is a cause of poverty; under-population is a cause of
weakness. Defectives are an additional burden to the State. How shall
population be so regulated as to established an equilibrium between the
stability of the State, and the highest well-being of the citizens?
The combined philosophy of the Greeks counselled the encouragement
of the best citizens to increase their kind, and the practice of the
exposure of infants and abortion.
A century of debate has raged round the name of Malthus, the great
modern analyst of the population problem. He published his first essay

on population in 1798, a modest pamphlet, which fed so voraciously on
the criticism supplied to it, that it developed into a mighty contribution
to a great social problem, second only in time and in honour to the
work of his great predecessor in economic studies, Adam Smith.
Malthus's first essay defined and described the laws of multiplication as
they apply only to the lower animals and savage man. It was only in his
revised work, published five years later, that he described moral
restraint as a third check to population.
Adverse criticism had been bitter and severe, and Malthus saw that his
first work had been premature. He went to the continent to study the
problem from personal observation in different countries. He profited
by his observation, and by the writings of his critics, and published his
matured work in 1803.
The distinguishing feature about this edition was the addition of moral
restraint as a check, to the two already described, vice and misery.
Malthus maintained that population has the power of doubling itself
every 25 years. Not that it does so, or had done so, or will do so, but
that it is capable of doing so, and he instanced the American Colonies
to prove this statement.
One would scarcely think it was necessary to enforce this distinction,
between what population has done, or is doing, and what it is capable
of doing. But when social writers, like Francesco Nitti (Population and
the Social System, p. 90), urge as an argument against Malthus's
position that, if his principles were true, a population of 176,000,000 in
the year 1800 would have required a population of only one in the time
of our Saviour, it is necessary to insist upon the difference between
increase and the power of increase.
One specific instance of this doubling process is sufficient to prove the
power of increase possessed by a community, and the instance of the
American Colonies, cited by Malthus, has never been denied.
A doubling of population in 25 years was thus looked upon by Malthus

as the normal increase, under the most favourable conditions; but