MALTHUS, THOMAS ROBERT English economist, was born in 1766 at the Rookery near Guildford, Sur rey, a small estate owned by his father Daniel Malthus, who was a friend and one of the executors of Rousseau. After being pri vately educated, Malthus entered Jesus college, Cambridge, where he was a contemporary of S. T. Coleridge. He was ninth wrangler in 1788, and was elected to a fellowship in 1793. He took orders in 1797, and held for a short while the curacy of Albury in Surrey. In 1798 he published the first edition of his great work, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improve ment of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. God win, M. Condorcet, and other Writers. This was followed five years later by the second greatly enlarged and amended edition of his work in 1803 ; he published several subsequent revised editions, the sixth and last during his lifetime appearing in 1826. In 18o5 Malthus married, and soon after was appointed professor of modern history and political economy in the East India Company's college at Haileybury where he died on Dec. 23, Malthus's Essay on Population grew out of some discussions with his father respecting the perfectibility of society. His father shared the theories on that subject of Condorcet and Godwin, but his son combated them on the ground that the realization of a happy society will always be hindered by the miseries consequent on the tendency of population to increase faster than the means of subsistence. His father was struck by the weight and originality of his views, asked him to put them in writing, and then recom mended the publication of the manuscript.
The first edition is in the nature of a long pamphlet. It is brilliantly written, with a marked felicity of phrase and illustration, and it immediately captured the imagination of his readers. It put forward the view that population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio while subsistence only increases in an arith metical ratio, and Malthus asserts as a fact that population always increases up to the limits of the means of subsistence. Population is prevented from increasing beyond these limits by the positive checks of war, famine and pestilence, and by the influence of misery and vice. From this theory Malthus drew the important practical conclusion for the England of his day that the existing poor law system, with its indiscriminate doles and bounties upon large families, was utterly to be condemned as tending to aggravate the very evils which it was supposed to remedy. The publication
of the Essay roused a storm of controversy, and bitter abuse was hurled at Malthus from the most diverse quarters. Undaunted by the attacks to which he was subjected, he set to work to collect material bearing on the rates of increase of population, in all times and countries, and five years later published the second edition of his Essay in an entirely different form. In its new guise the Essay is a long, soberly worded and scholarly treatise, full of detailed facts and statistics and abundantly documented. Nor was it the form alone that underwent a change. While maintaining his "principle" of population—the universal tendency of population to outrun the means of subsistence—he allowed the question of the mathematical ratios to fall rather into the background. But, above all, he introduced a most important modification into his original doctrine by recognizing the existence, in addition to the positive checks to the increase of population, of a preventive check which he termed "moral restraint." By this term Malthus under stood the postponement of the age of marriage, accompanied by strict sexual continence. It may be noted that the views and methods advocated by those modern upholders of small families, who call themselves Neo-Malthusians, would have received noth ing but condemnation from Malthus. The introduction of the notion of moral restraint, coupled with the realization that sub sistence did not necessarily mean merely the bare necessaries for existence, give a slightly more hopeful colour to Malthus's views as set out in the later editions of his work. Nevertheless he remained profoundly pessimistic in his general outlook on the possibilities of the future progress of mankind, for he had scant faith in the capacity of the human race to regulate its numbers by the ex ercise of prudence and restraint. The positive checks had alone operated in the past and they, with all the vice and misery that follow in their train, were likely to continue to do so in the future.