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 ARETHERE MANYOFUS?
TOO
BY PRESIDENT E. B. ANDREWS, BROWN UNIVERSITY.

The scientific treatment of questions touching population

began with Thomas Robert Mai thus. The first edition of his
great work, "An Essay on the Principle of Population as It
Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the
Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers,"
appeared in 1798, as a polemic pamphlet. It was in part aimed
at the vicious, pauperizing poor-law of England at that time ; in
part it was a criticism upon the superficial optimism of those
writers who had been carried away by the vaporings of Rousseau
and other French Revolutionary philosophers. Malthus's own
father was one of these. Godwin, to whom the title of the Essay
refers, was another. Political equality and commercial freedom,
they argued, would in a little while produce a perfectly happy
society. Vice and misery were at once to disappear and the mil
lenium to dawn, if only the fine doctrines of the Revolution, of
the Physiocrats, of Adam Smith, could get themselves realized.
Mai thus opposed this pleasing view on the ground that such
ideal social weal is and necessarily must be hindered by the very
conditions of life, population inevitably tending to increase more
rapidly than subsistence and the possibility of general welfare.
In its later editions, of which no less than seven appeared during
the author's lifetime, the Essay casts off its polemic form and be
comes a mere dissertation. But the essential thought is un
changed ; human beings tend to multiply faster than food can
be provided for them. Malthus represented the difference as
that between arithmetical and geometrical ratio, population mul
tiplying as the series 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on, production
swelling meantime only as the series 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and so on.
He, however, laid no stress on the exactness or the mathematical
 ARE THERE TOO MANY OF US ? 597

expressibility of his law, but only on the validity of it as a general

truth.
Malthus does not allege that population in fact increases thus
rapidly, but that it tends to do so, and would, were it not for cer
tain checks. are of two classes : the moral or
They preventive,
and the positive or repressive. The preventive checks include
everything that helps keep human life from originating when it
would otherwise do so. The positive consist in whatever kills
off our as wars, famines, vices, and
species, pestilences ordinary
disease. Had Malthus lived later he would doubtless have noticed
more fully than he did the agency of social custom in nullifying
for men the law of the survival of the physically fittest, propagat
ing bodily disorders probably to a far greater extent than hygiene
and medicine avail in the contrary direction. But the checks
which he names are numerous and so much so, he
powerful,
thinks, that, without their incessant working through all past
time, the world would long ago have been overrun.
Nearly all the countless attempts to refute Malthus, instead of
doing this, practically fall in with his theory, merely emphasizing
more or less the activity of his checks. Thus, Herbert Spencer,
in urging that the physical nature grows less imperious as culture
* is out how the preventive check
advances, simply pointing
applies itself. Bastiat showed that the same advance of culture,
making parents unwilling that their children should be worse off
than they, works a voluntary, or truly moral application of the
preventive check. Neither of these tendencies, however, is oper
ative upon the vast masses of mankind, in reference to whom the
great problem is to get them under the influence of culture. Of the
very poor, only the positive checks keep down the numbers. Mal
thus's second edition significantly differs from the first in admitting
a far larger hope from moral self-restraint as one of the preventive
checks. In this change Malthus does not, as Bagehot argues,
"
cut away the ground of his whole argument." The peculiar
check in question may exist and act, widely and beneficently, yet
over vast multitudes of human kind totally fail of effect.
In spite of all these checks, Malthus maintains, population
tends to outrun subsistence. Some men must always be needy.
As a matter of fact, he says, checks of the one kind or the other
are in every nation, past or present, what has kept population
*
Biology, pt. vi.
598 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
"
down to food. Darwin declares that in reading Malthus On
" "
Population he became impressed that natural selection was the
"
inevitable result of the rapid increase of all organic beings ; and
"
he admits his now famous theory to be but the doctrine of
Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and
vegetable kingdoms." With men as with brutes, it is a fight for
life. The social bliss for which we sigh is not to be had so
cheaply as Rousseau and Godwin said. Great continence is a
human duty. No man has a right to bring children into the
world unless he has a fair prospect of ability to support them.
As Malthus laid no stress on the exactness of his alleged pro
gressions we do not refute him by showing those progressions
inexact. The question is, have they a truth, or truths, at bottom ?
The assumption of a geometrical ratio as the law of humanity's
numerical increase is a good way from the fact. We will not
quarrel over the " question
whether it is not absurd to speak at all
" In his as
of a natural rate of increase for human beings.
sumption of a "natural rate" Malthus seemed to be thinking
how swiftly life would replenish the earth if all checks were away.*
But disease and death are natural, and just what pressure of them
"
shall we call a check ? We must not confound the natural
"
tendency of men to increase with the abstract physiological pos
sibility of numerous births ; nor is it the same to allege a ten
dency to too great increase, and to say that, all things considered,
there is a danger, since a certain increase, if well distributed,
might be for centuries no curse, but a blessing.
Malthus took as his norm to go by a young country, the United
States, where all was in the highest degree favorable to great pro
lificacy. He derived his figures from Benjamin Franklin's "Ob
servations Concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling
of Colonies," 1751, one of his earliest works. As he stated, our
population was, when Malthus wrote, doubling at the rate of
once in 25 years. We have never had a uniform registration of
births and deaths, and our national census is taken once only in
ten years ; so that we cannot tell for any period the exact annual
increment of population, or say how much is due to excess of
births over deaths, and how much to immigration. The increase in
the last decade of last century was 35.10 per cent., and for the first
* Such an order of und
things as R?melin
' describes, "Reden Aufsaetze," I, 320
aeq, Cf. Uhland's beautiful poem, Ver Sacrum.1'
 ARE THERE TOO MANY OF US 9 599
decade of this 36.38 per cent., probably the most rapid gains in
from natural causes?f or the immigration during these
population
20 years was but slight?of which we have any record. In these
two decades there may easily have been, right along, 48 births per
thousand inhabitants, and not over 28 deaths, giving a natural
increase of more than three per cent. As the struggle for exis
tence increases in severity, families diminish in size, marriages
are less frequent, or entered into at a later age, and population
does not grow so rapidly. Oar progress as a nation is greatly due
to the natural waalth of our country. Even now we have of per
sons over 70 only 14 in 1,000, where France has 37, while females
within the 22 years of possible maternity, number 18 or 19 per
cent., instead of 16, which is the average.
During the fifty years from 1790 to 1840 our population
doubled twice. Between 1790 and 1885 Rhode Island doubled in
population nearly two and a half times, or, exactly, increased
341.1 per cent. From 1880 to 1885 the gain was 10 per cent.
The average per cent, of our entire national increase has been
32.7 per decade ever since 1790. Excluding the war decade it
has been 33.95 per cent. Aside from the people who have come
to ns with territorial acquisition, we seem to have gained about
2.6 per cent, yearly ever since this century began. Between 1850
and 1880, we went from 23,191,876, to 50,155,783. That is, we
more than doubled during those thirty years in spite of the war.
As a clergyman, Malthus may have been influenced in part by
the Old Testament figures relating to the multiplication of the
Israelites in Egypt. These captives occupied a fruitful land, with
no hindrances to rapid growth, and were probably augmented by
immigration from related tribes. They were in Egypt 430 years.
The original colony had in Jacob with his sons and grandsons 70
male persons. After the exodus, to Moses's census,
according
there were 603,550 males 20 years old and upwards. By Euler's
method they must have doubled once in about 30 years, involving
a yearly increase of over 2 per cent.
But although Malthus could find a few instances of such
swift growth, he had no right to generalize from them. A hun
dred years before his time, Europe was thought to double its popu
lation only once in two centuries. * Henry George, in his " Progress
and Poverty," urges against Malthus the small number of the de
* Sir
Wm. Petty, "Political Arithmetic," cb. '.
 600 THE NORTH AMERICAN RE VIEW.

scendants from Confucius. These, 2,150 years from their great

ancestor's death, amounted to only about 22,000 souls, instead
of 859,559,193,106,709,670,198,710,528, as they should have
mustered had they doubled once in 25 years. With this maybe
coupled a consideration touching China at large. The Chinese as
a people date back five thousand years at least. The country is
five times as large as Germany, warmer and more fruitful than
Europe. A great part of its soil produces two harvests yearly.
The people raise few cattle, living mostly on vegetable food.
Yet, owing to checks of some sort, of which probably infanticide,
which is favored by law, may be regarded as the chief, the
population there is less dense on the average than in Belgium,
Saxony or England.
Europe has probably doubled its population in the last 100
years. Between 1820 and 1880 its population arose from 200
millions to 330 millions, a yearly increase of -^ of one per cent.
Our oldest statistics are for Sweden and reach back to 1750.
Sweden's population was in 1752 1,785,727; in 1884, 4,644,448,
a total increase of 160 per cent, over the figure at the first
date named. Passing to the first third of this century we
find Baden doubling its population only in 34 years, Hungary
only in 38, Belgium in 42, Tuscany and Galicia in 43, Sardinia in
44. In none of the older nations has a yearly increase of 2 per
cent, ever been reached, nor is there any likelihood of such a gain,
at least for any length of time. France, at its present rate of
will need nearly, or quite, 300 years to double its popula
gain,
tion.

Never, in Europe, were the conditions for great increase better

than from 1820 to 1870 ; yet the numbers only went in these
years from about 200 millions to about 300 millions, or T8^-of one
per cent, annual gain, and the nations which advanced the most
rapidly have at no time doubled this rate. A doubling of popu
lation in 25 years, as was going on in the United States when
Malthus was alive, is therefore no normal but a very abnormal
phenomenon.
We know full well what Malthus would reply to this exhibit.
He would hail it as a proof of his position, alleging as the rea
son for the slower gains enumerated, that the checks had been
more active in Europe than in America. And, for substance of
fact, he would be right. I only demur at his doctrinaire assump
 ARE THERE TOO MANY OF US 9 601
tion of the American figures as the more "normal." Checks
are " normal," too ; and, as already remarked, it is purely arbi
trary to set down this or that exact pressure of them as preemin
ently the natural one. Only at extreme pressure does it seem
to me reasonable to pronounce them pathological.
Malthus erred, not only as to the rate of human increase, but
also as to its philosophy. He did not allow enough for barren
ness, and he made the age of possible maternity too long. Also,
he did not allow for the numerous pairs like Napoleon and Jose
phine, the parties unfruitful together, though able to be fruitful
with others. Statistics show that the maternity period does not
average over twenty-two years, and that about one-seventh of the
married women are without children.* In every thousand
human beings in any community there will average to be about
165 women of the maternity age 15 of them childless, leaving at
most but 150 who will be mothers. To find the yearly increase
of population per thousand, suppose each of the 150 to have three
150 x 3
children in the 22 years. The average per year is then-,
22
which equals 20 +, and the result is larger the more children
there are to the family. If we assume 4, it is 27+ ; if 5, 34+ ;
if 6, 41? ; if 7, 48+ ; if 8, 54 + , etc.
Over against such figure, whatever it is, we have to set the
rate of mortality. This, under the most favorable conditions, is
about 20 per thousand, annually, increasing somewhat according
as the number of births swells.
In 1,000 persons, if the average number of children to a
mother is three, just as many persons will die as are born. If
mothers have four each, 27 will be born while 22 die. And so on.
Malthus supposed that an average of four children per family
would double the population every 25 years. On the contrary,
seven per family would double it only in 35 years. The people of
Rhode Island, where, in 1885, on an average, 4.27 children were
born to each mother, would at that rate need a century and a
quarter to double. This, of course, takes no account of immigra
tion.
It was obvious that Malthus was far astray at least
regarding
the form of his law. From our better statistics we can correct
*R?melin, *'Reden und Auf saetee," I., 312 fi*. I am indebted to this learned
author for most of my figures relating to Europe.
602 THE NORTH AMERICA N REVIEW.

him. The natural rate of multiplication, if we admit such a

notion, could not even by Maithus's own principles have been
greater in his time than in the years covered by our best recent
statistics, because material prosperity has been improving mean
while. If the rate assigned by him is now too great, it certainly
was then.
Yet Malthus is correct in urging that men tend to multiply
with decided rapidity. It is universally recognized that a sta
tionary population is abnormal, a sign of disease. The rule is
advance.
We saw that the rate per cent, of increase in the United States,
including immigration, has been 32.70 per decade ever since 1790.
Unless immigration is checked, it is hardly likely to fall off at
present or for 100 years. But even supposing the rate to be 30 per
cent, perdecade, the population by 1990 will be 898,207,250, which,
without new territory, would give us 299.3 inhabitants to the
square mile. We should then have a denser population than the
British Isles to-day ; and while we could not even so be said to
have reached a limit of population fully taxing the supporting
power of our territory, our people could not look forward to still
further expansion without apprehension.
Europe's population, doubling in the last 100 years, has
gained about \\ of one per cent, yearly. For the last 60 years of
relatively accurate records, the gain in several of the European
states, England, Prussia, and the Scandinavian lands, has been 1
per cent, or more in of and the average
yearly, spite emigration,
has not been under of one per cent, in any normal year. We
^
may then take this \ of one per cent, as the normal minimum.
At 1 per cent, annual increase Germany in the year 2000
would have 160 million inhabitants. In two centuries from now it
would have 300 millions, and in three centuries 650 millions.
Europe would have at the same rate in two centuries from now
2,300 million inhabitants, and in three centuries.4,800 millions.
The last figure would require not much short of 2,000 people to
live on a square mile?an impossibility under anything like pres
ent economic arrangements.
But take the actual minimum normal rate of one-half of one
per cent, annual increase. At this, in 280 years, Europe will
have 1,300,000,000 inhabitants. By the real present rate the in
crease would be much faster, giving 600 millions in about 80
 ARE THERE TOO MANY OF US f 603
years, 25, 30 or 40 millions in excess of the present. Even with
one-third of one percent. Germany would in 1,000 years from now
have 1,200 millions, and in 2,000 years, 36 billions. Even France,
at its rate of progress in the last 60 years, 2.3 per thousand, yearly,
which is the smallest in Europe, would in 500 years have 300
million souls ; just about 2,000 to every square mile.
It is instructive to apply backward the present rate of increase
in Europe's population. Taking the minimum normal of i
of one per cent, a year and reckoning it back to about the
beginning of the 5th century A. D., we should make the pop
ulation of Europe then to have been only half a million. But
Wietersheim carefully estimates the population of the European
parts of the Roman Empire in the 2d century A. D. as
45 millions. Now, after seventeen hundred years, there are only
156 millions, a yearly increase of only y^r ?f one Per cent., or T\
of one in a thousand, and a doubling-period of 950 years.
Malthus's assumption as to the relatively slow and diffi
cult manner in which men's food supply has to be increased was
a good deal nearer the truth than what he wrote about the growth
of population, but he did not see with any clearness the real
nature of the law which he was approaching.
The law, according to which production in general advances,
is : The more capital and labor applied to nature, the more prod
uct. In agriculture, however, and with certain modifications,
in mining, another law evidently prevails, which has been de
nominated the law of diminishing return, to the effect that in the
long run, increased application of labor and capital fails to com
mand a proportionate increase of return. It is this law of
diminishing return in agriculture which forms the stern signifi
cance of the Malthusian doctrine. Its operation may be postponed,
and the reverse law of increasing return be set in action for a
time. Addition to population will have this tendency up to a
certain limit, by making possible a fuller division of labor. Im
proved agricultural machines and methods will work in the same
way ; as it will also to bring, in a new country, more fertile land
under cultivation. To have demonstrated this point is the great
merit of the late Henry C. Carey. But the operation of these
causes cannot continue forever ; the general law under which soil
is tilled is the one named, the law of diminishing return.
So that while Malthus did not hit the truth with any exact
 604 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

ness, the principle for which he was so vaguely feeling is, when
found, a true one, over which it were far more seemly to look
sober than to laugh.
It is a fact that population would, in a thousand localities,
soon outstrip the means of feeding it, if it were not kept down by
vice, or self-restraint. In a state of where self
misery, society
restraint does not act at all, or only sd little that we need not think
of it, population will augment till the poorest class have only
just enough to support life. In a community where self-restraint
acts effectually, each class of the community will augment till it
reaches the point when it begins to exercise that restraint.* Do
not infer from this that the self-restraining communities are as
likely to occur as the others. That would indeed be a negation
of Malthusianism, but it is contrary to fact, so hard is it to bring
restraint to act on the masses of the people.
C?
So long as unlimited multiplication goes on, no social organ
ization which has ever been devised, or is likely to be devised, no
fiddle-faddling with the distribution of wealth, will deliver society
from the tendency to be destroyed by the reproduction within it
self, in its intensest form, of that struggle for existence, the limit
ation of which is the object of society. And however shocking
to the moral sense this eternal competition of man against man
or of nation against nation may be ; however revolting may be
the accumulation of misery at the negative pole of society, in
contrast with that of monstrous wealth at the positive pole, this
state of things must abide, and grow continually worse, so long
as Istar holds her way unchecked. It is the true riddle of the
Sphinx ; and every nation which does not solve it will sooner or
later be devoured by the monster itself has generated." f
Malthus's recommendations are in substance still needed.
Though, perhaps, no country can yet be said to be saturated
with population, many localities, great cities especially, are so.
It boots nothing to know that none die from the niggardliness of
nature in the strict sense, which is true if you take large areas,
so as not to light on famine spots ; because the maladjustments
of society are, even in Malthus's own discussion, conceived as

practically part of nature. The exhortation should, however, be

modified, to the effect that the able, intelligent, well to do,
* "
Bagehot, Economic Studies," 139.
t Huxley, "Nineteenth Century" February, 1888, p. 169.
 ARE THERE TOOMANY OF US9 605
especially such as can instruct and lead, may even have a duty
to propagate. There is nothing in Malthusianism, or in the
fact of life, to render appropriate a crusade in favor of universal
celibacy.*
A Malthusian law there is, which cannot be set aside ; though
it may offer, except in limited localities, nowise the present
threat which many have seemed to see in it. Sometime it must
take effect, the result being, not of course that humanity will
starve, or even any part of it, but that either additional restraint
must be applied, or a lessening per capita plenty will induce vices
and diseases to which enough will succumb to let the others con
tinue. The picture of a world starved to death is no legitimate sug
gestion of Malthusianism.
We may, of course, sip more or less comfort from such obser
vations as these:
1. Only about one-sixth the cultivable land of the world is as
yet occupied.
2. Infinitely greater saving is possible than has ever been
exercised thus far, no one enjoying less in consequence.
3. Though food-getting will become harder and harder, the
getting of other things, and especially such as minister to our
higher life, is to be easier and easier as the aeons pass. Bread
winning may become 100 times as difficult as now ; if manu
facturing becomes the same degree easier, humanity will get its
whole living with no greater difficulty than now.
But no other course of thought so approaches a refutation of
Malthus as that most recently made familiar by Henry George
and Prince Kropotkin. Food, says George, springs not from
agriculture alone, and non-vegetable food may be multiplied
almost without limit by the free agency of man.
'*
Both the jay-hawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jay-hawks
the fewer chickens, while the more men the more chickens. Both the seal
and the man eat salmon, but when a seal takes a salmon there is a salmon
less, and were seals to increase past a certain point salmon must diminish ;
while by placing the spawn of the salmon under favorable conditions man
can so increase the number of salmon as to more than make up for all he may
take, and thus, no matter how much men may increase, their increase
never need outrun the supply of salmon."

The late Spencer F. Baird used to regard one acre of water

*Or to what *
is worse, recommended by an author whom Schaeffie cites,' Bau
und Leben,' II., 256 seqq.
606 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

equal to seven of land in the pioduction of food. Pressed with

the consideration that chickens and salmon too must live upon
food, of which the supply recedes, George rejoins that it cannot
infinitely recede ; that the universe of materials capable of sus
taining life remains ever tbe same, however many times these ma
terials may have aided in the sustenance of life up to any given
date, and that the bounds of this universe have never yet been dis
covered. Kropotkin carries the thought into particulars, showing
from examples and by the principles of chemistry the indefinite
improvableness in the fertility of land.
Nothing could be more interesting than facts like these.
They render it happily clear that, so far from approaching the
limit of the earth's productivity, we have hardly broached it yet.
There is to this planet an ability to bear life incalculably beyond
what Malthus dreamed. But this, again, does not turn his con
tention into unreason. The anti-Malthusian line of argument
just sketched is as illusory as it is interesting. It is very old as
well?older, in fact, than Malthus. President James Madison in
his younger days brilliantly explored it,* anticipating all the
anti-Malthusians, and preceded Malthus and his aides in demon
strating its vanity.
Three hard facts confront us. One is that the earth's stock
of substances capable of sustaining human life is, after all, limited.
Another, that many of these are passing hopelessly beyond man's
reach. The third is that such utilizing of plant nutrition as is
intrinsically possible must forever increase in cost. Less and less
fruitful soils must be brought into use, loam reclaimed from be
neath the ocean, rocks pulverized, to make place for new land
and the mechanical ingredients for artificial soil. And, at best,
such soil cannot but be limited in amount, so expensive will be
its manufacture. cases can never be
Kropotkin's generalized,
involving as they do the limitless carting of heavy stuffs from
farms to towns and from towns to farms. This particular cause
of decrease in agricultural returns will indeed weaken as popula
tion condenses, but cannot disappear, since people can never be
scattered evenly over the land.
Meantime, the sons of men wax ever a greater host. Europe,
with its 156 millions, increases by T\ of one per cent, each year,
threatening to have 600 millions by 1970, and 1,300 millions by
*
Bives's "Life of Madison,'' vol. it, 91, 9*.
 ARE THERE TOO MANY OF US 9 607
2150. Our own country, adding to its numbers by nearly 3 per
cent, a year, bids fair to approach 90 millions by 1900.
Could such growth possibly continue, the failure of standing
room would be but a matter of time. The entire globe measures
about 600,000,000,000,000 square yards, or, allowing a yard, as
standing room for four persons, there is place for 2,400,000,000,
000,000 persons. Now the population of England and Wales,
which may be regarded as about normal for civilized lands, doubled
between 1801 and 1851. At this rate population would in 100
years multiply itself by 4 ; in 200 by 16 ; in 1,000 by 1,000,000 ;
and in 3,000 years by 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. So that, even
if we begin with a single pair, the increase would in 3,000 years
have become two quintillion human beings : viz., to every square
yard 3,333 J persons instead of four. Or, the earth would be cov
ered with men in columns of 833 J each, standing on each other's
heads. If they averaged five feet tall, each column would be
4,166f feet high.*
One cannot look forward to the far future of civilized society
without solicitude. Reflect that the present population of Europe
could, through an increase no greater than that now prevailing,
have sprung from a half million souls living at 400 A. D., and
that there were then in Europe at least 100 times this number,
and probably more ; then sweep mentally over the intervening
history, noting in wars and pestilences some of the causes why
the figures for Europe to-day read 156 millions instead of 15
billions 600 millions, and you will no longer laugh at Malthus.
Are the checks which must be applied in future, likely to be
positive or preventive ? If the latter, shall they be morally pre
ventive or immorally preventive ? A more momentous this-world
question could hardly be asked. Let the masses remain ignorant
and brutish, and human life will forever continue in threatening
disproportion to food, progress and poverty side by side, the com
fort of a few shadowed by wars and want and sicknesses on the
part of multitudes. Only as character shall prevail can coming
generations fill the ideal of an earthly society : human beings
numerous enough to work the great cosmic field to the best ad
vantage, yet voluntarily few enough to admit of a reasonable and
decent subsistence for all. For man's body as for his soul, for
time as for eternity, his only hope lies in spiritual elevation.
*4 E. B. Andrews,
"Marshall, Economics of Industry," book I., chap. v.