第56章 Malthus(14)

Hence Malthus draws his most emphatic political moral.The admission that all evil is due to government is the way to tyranny.Make men believe that government is the one cause of misery,and they will inevitably throw the whole responsibility upon their rulers;seek for redress by cures which aggravate the disease;and strengthen the hands of those who prefer even despotism to anarchy.This,he intimates,is the explanation of the repressive measures in which the country-gentlemen had supported Pitt.The people had fancied that by destroying government they would make bread cheap;government was forced to be tyrannical in order to resist revolution;while its supporters were led to 'give up some of the most valuable privileges of Englishmen.'69It is then of vital importance to settle what is and what is not to be set down to government.Malthus,in fact,holds that the real evils are due to underlying causes which cannot be directly removed,though they may be diminished or increased,by legislators.Government can do something by giving security to property,and by making laws which will raise the self-respect of the lower classes.But the effect of such laws must be slow and gradual;and the error which has most contributed to that delay in the progress of freedom,which is 'so disheartening to every liberal mind,'70is the confusion as to the true causes of misery.Thus,as he has already urged,professed economists could still believe,so long after the publication of Adam Smith's work,that it was 'in the power of the justices of the peace or even of the omnipotence of parliament to alter by a fiat the whole circumstances of the country.'71Yet men who saw the absurdity of trying to fix the price of provisions were ready to propose to fix the rate of wages.They did not see that one term of the proportion implied the other.Malthus's whole criticism of the poor-law,already noticed,is a commentary upon this text.It is connected with a general theory of human nature.The author of nature,he says,has wisely made 'the passion of self-love beyond expression stronger than the passion of benevolence.'72He means,as he explains,that every man has to pursue his own welfare and that of his family as his primary object.Benevolence,of course,is the 'source of our purest and most refined pleasures,'and so forth;but it should come in as a supplement to self-love.Therefore we must never admit that men have a strict right to relief that is to injure the very essential social force.'Hard as it may seem in individual instances,dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful.'73The spirit of independence or self-help is the one thing necessary.'The desire of bettering our condition and the fear of making it worse,like the vis medicatrix in physics,is the vis medicatrix naturae in politics,and is continually counteracting the disorders arising from narrow human institutions.'74It is only because the poor-laws have not quite destroyed it,that they have not quite ruined the country.The pith of Malthus's teaching is fairly expressed in his last letter to Senior.75He holds that the improvement in the condition of the great mass of the labouring classes should be considered as the main interest of society.To improve their condition,it is essential to impress them with the conviction that they call do much more for themselves than others can do for them,and that the only source of permanent improvement is the improvement of their moral and religious habits.What government can do,therefore,is to maintain such institutions as may strengthen the vis medicatrix,or 'desire to better our condition,'which poor-laws had directly tended to weaken,He maintains in his letter to Senior,that this desire is 'perfectly feeble'compared with the tendency of the population to increase,and operates in a very slight degree upon the great mass of the labouring class.76Still,he holds that on the whole the 'preventive checks'have become stronger relatively to the positive,77and,at any rate,all proposals must be judged by their tendency to strengthen the preventive.