CHAPTER 2

Elaborations and Cleavages within the Classical System:

Thomas Robert Malthus

Though Adam Smith posed the main questions with which subsequent classical writers dealt, he left a number of loose ends in his argument. To his successors fell the jobs of refining and revising the classical theoretical structure and of probing deeper into its implications.

Thomas Robert Malthus was to play a prominent part in the next round of classical debate. High among his interests was the codification of technical terminology and late in life he devoted a book, entitled Definitions in Political Economy, to this subject. The development of the science, he argued, had been retarded by the absence of standardized definitions with the result that writers on economic subjects often confused the public.

But analytical tidiness was by no means his dominant interest. He also sought to place the discipline on solid empirical foundations, recognizing both the woeful deficiency of statistical data then available and the shaky empirical basis of many widely accepted theoretical propositions. In the introduction to his main work on economics, he maintained:

The principal cause of error, and of differences which prevail at present among the scientific writers on political economy, appears to me to be, a precipitate attempt to simplify and generalize; and while their more practical opponents draw too hasty inferences from a frequent appeal to partial facts, these writers run to a contrary extreme, and do not sufficiently try their theories by a reference to that enlarged and comprehensive experience which, on so complicated a subject, can alone establish their truth and utility.1 Though not himself altogether innocent of the sins he saw in others, the empirical turn of his mind was often decisive in shaping his position on controversies of the day.

By the time Malthus wrote, re-examination and reconsideration of Smith's findings were clearly in order. The economic climate had undergone a significant change. Smith's successors, though still concerned with the economy's long period prospects, were quite naturally involved in debates over immediate economic problems as well. The Napoleonic wars had stimulated sharp price increases and most particularly in the prices of food grains. Meanwhile real wages had deteriorated, bringing considerable distress to the working class. In addition, the United Kingdom became for the first time a net importer of foodstuffs. These war-induced disturbances were compounded when the end of hostilities brought with it a period of severe deflation. The post-1815 problems of re-adjustment were to stimulate important embellishments in classical theory and to spark a lively public interest in the reflections of political economists.

1.THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS (1766-1834)

Malthus has been described by his principal biographer as 'the best-abused man of the age.’2 Certainly he was in the thick of controversy for the better part of his days.

Born to an upper-middle class English family with aristocratic pretensions, Malthus entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1784 where he studied mathematics and compiled a distinguished academic record. As he himself reported, he was more noted as an undergraduate 'for talking of what actually exists in nature or may be put to real practical use’3 than for an interest in abstract reasoning for its own sake. After a period of hesitation - apparently because of concern about a speech defect - he took Holy Orders. Though the label `parson' was permanently attached to him, he was a practising clergy man for only a brief period. For most of his life he pursued an academic career, first in Cambridge and later as Professor of Modern History and Political Economy at a college newly established to train officials of the East India Company. This appointment, for which there was no precedent, entitles him to be regarded as the world's first professional economist.

Malthus first gained fame with the Essay on the Principle of Population. The first edition, published in 1798, appeared anonymously, presumably because its author feared that some readers might be disturbed to discover an ordained churchman discoursing on such delicate matters. The author's identity, however, was only thinly veiled. William Godwin, whose views were a major target of criticism in the essay, is known to have corresponded with Malthus about its contents in the year of publication.4

The lively reception of the essay led Malthus to prepare six further editions, the final one in 1826. The theme he dealt with was directly pertinent to current debates. Shortly before the publication of the first edition, the younger Pitt proposed legislation designed to reorganize relief for the poor by the award of special compensation and encouragement to large families on the grounds that 'those who, after having enriched their country with a number of children, have a claim upon its assistance for their support'.5 Interest in the subject was intensified by the census of 1801 (the first comprehensive enumeration of the population of Great Britain). These tabulations appeared to indicate that population had grown substantially in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Previously, an important body of opinion had believed - along with Gregory King, the pioneer national income statistician, who had predicted in 1696 that the population of England would be unlikely to double in less than six hundred years - that the pace of population growth was slow.

Malthus's interest in population questions served as a point of departure into more general analyses of economic and social problems. He addressed himself to broader themes in a series of pamphlets and articles on topics of the day and in his major theoretical work, The Principles of Political Economy Considered with a View to Their Practical Application. He found his teaching duties satisfying and regarded his subject a suitable study for young men who `could not only understand it, but they did not even think it dull'.6

Contrary to many popular impressions - both in his day and since - he was by temperament a warm, generous, and gentle man. Of his many friendships the one of most significance to the history of ideas was his association with David Ricardo, an intellectual adversary on many occasions but an ally in the pursuit of truth. On his feelings toward Ricardo he once observed: `I never loved anybody out of my own family so much.'7

2. THE LAW OF POPULATION

Malthus's law of population developed a point that Smith had left in disarray and was readily assimilated into the main stream of classical thought. Malthus's inquiry into the subject, however, was originally stimulated by a debate with his father over the doctrines of Godwin, an advocate of a crude form of utilitarianism who had called for the abolition of private property. In Godwin's view population growth was an unqualified social blessing: with more numbers to be happy total happiness could be increased. Feeding an enlarged population, moreover, was held to present no problem; social ownership of land was expected to unleash fresh incentives for the enlargement of production. In short, Godwin maintained that with appropriate institutional reforms a social Utopia was within reach. The sympathies of the elder Malthus with this position spurred his son to refute it and the document he wrote for this purpose became the first version of his famous essay.8

The basic argument was stated succinctly in the following propositions:

I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state.... Assuming, then, my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.9

From these propositions Malthus deduced that a war between the powers of human reproduction and the production of food would be perpetual. In the nature of things, population could not exceed the limits set by the availability of food-stuffs. How then were the immense powers of human reproduction to be contained? The first edition described one of the mechanisms touched off by population growth as follows:

The number of labourers also being above the proportion of the work in the market, the price of labour must tend toward a decrease; while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise. The labourer therefore must work harder to earn the same as he did before. During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great, the population is at a stand. In the meantime the cheapness of labour, the plenty of labourers, and the necessity of an increased industry amongst them, encourage cultivators to employ more labour upon their land; to turn up fresh soil and to manure and improve more completely what is already in tillage; till ultimately the means of subsistence become in the same proportion of the population as at the period from which we set out.10

Over a longer period, more forceful checks to the tendency of population to outstrip the means of its subsistence were also likely to be brought into play. In the first edition two checks - the positive and the preventive – were distinguished, though both were reducible to misery and vice. Through the positive check, population might be thinned by war, famine, pestilence, plague or disease. The outcome would be less bleak if the populace could be persuaded to exercise appropriate prudence in restraining the growth of numbers. Malthus held out little hope that this outcome could be brought to pass. In any event, he maintained that lengthy postponement of marriage would probably be associated with a rise in moral depravity and unnatural attachments.

This analysis offered only a dismal future for the human race. Mankind was left on a treadmill. Any improvement in average levels of income, the message seemed to say, would soon be neutralized by expanding numbers; wages would then be pushed back to subsistence. (Modern readers should bear in mind that the age of entrance into the labour force was much lower in Malthus’s day than is now the case in industrial societies; many of the textile mills in the early stages of the industrial revolution were manned by children under ten and it was by no means uncommon in the first decades of the nineteenth century in Britain to find six-year-olds in the coal pits.) The Malthus of the first edition saw the links between population and real wage levels as so unbreakable that `to prevent the recurrence of misery, is, alas! Beyond the power of man’.11 It is small wonder that Malthus has been interpreted as converting Smith’s inquiry in the ‘wealth of nations’ into an inquiry into ‘the poverty of nations’.

In the second and subsequent editions, the argument was restated with a number of modifications. These qualifications made little difference to the public understanding of his message and indeed Malthus sometimes neglected them in his own writing. The preventive check – i.e. the restraint on population growth brought about by prudence and foresight – was upgraded with the effect of opening up some prospect for improvement in the condition of the working class. This shift in emphasis, however, involved a more substantial redefinition of one of his crucial concepts than Malthus directly acknowledged. In the first edition subsistence could generally be interpreted as referring to physiological requirements for survival. But the status accorded to the preventive checks in subsequent editions introduced a complication. Subsistence could no longer be understood in terms of survival needs. A psychological version of subsistence – i.e. the minimally acceptable level of income that a potential parent would insist upon before raising a family – was now brought to the foreground. These two interpretations of subsistence yield divergent results. Should popular tastes be elevated, the likelihood that an improvement in real income would soon be eaten up by more mouths would be considerably diminished.

In his essays on population Malthus attached little weight to the possibility of this outcome. He appeared to believe that significant changes in the habits and attitudes of the population (and, most particularly, of the working class) could take effect only over long periods. In his major piece of economic writing, the alternatives were given fuller recognition:

From high wages, or the power of commanding a large portion of the necessaries of life, two very different results may follow; one, that of a rapid increase of population, in which case the high wages are chiefly spent in the maintenance of large and frequent families: and the other, that of a decided improvement in the modes of subsistence and the conveniences and comforts enjoyed, without a proportionate acceleration in the rate of increase.12

This concession, however appealing as a withdrawal from the harshness of the first edition, stripped his population theory of much of its bite. No longer could it be maintained that Malthus had uncovered a scientific law with direct and immediate bearing on social reality. Instead, his principle was reduced to a tautology, empty of empirical content. Despite its appearance, the proposition that pressure of population will naturally perpetuate a subsistence wage level says nothing specific about the future condition of the working class. With growth in national output, real wages might be constant or they might rise, depending on which notion of subsistence was operative. No evidence can falsify a statement of this form. The cost of this immunity, however, is loss of contact with the world of events.

In his recommendations on economic policy Malthus largely ignored these qualifications. Moreover, most classical economists interpreted his `principle of population’ as providing a convincing demonstration that real wages would naturally gravitate to an equilibrium at a fixed level of subsistence. Nor in the popular understanding was the gloom of the original version noticeably relieved. As one of the characters in Thomas Love Peacock’s novel, Melincourt, observed:

Bachelors and spinsters I decidedly venerate. The world is overstocked with featherless bipeds. More men than corn is a fearful pre-eminence, the sole and fruitful cause of penury, disease and war, plague, pestilence and famine.13

If Malthus’s logic was not impeccable, his interpretation of the causal mechanics of population change was also open to challenge. Malthus had argued that adjustment of population size to economic change occurred largely through effects on natality. If real incomes improved, marriages would be contracted earlier and births would increase. He assigned little importance to the possible relationships between economic improvement and reductions in mortality. There is considerable evidence to suggest, however, that the `population explosion’ of his day was heavily influenced by reductions in death rates. These demographic changes, moreover, were linked more closely to improvements in public health and sanitation than to improvements in real wages. The facts of the case, however, are not yet conclusively established. The inadequacies of the national statistics on the British population in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are such that, as one close student of these problems has commented, a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of population growth in that era would require `a generation of collaborative work on parish registers and other local sources’.14

With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that Malthus considerably underestimated the pace of technological progress and its impact. He could not reasonably have been expected to anticipate the revolution in agricultural science that was later to alter radically the capacity of the limited supply of land to feed much enlarged populations. Nor did he foresee improvements in the techniques of fertility limitation. Similarly, Malthus did not appreciate the opportunities offered by international trade for expanding a small island’s capacity to provide subsistence to larger numbers. It was, in fact, through international specialization and trade that Britain first managed to evade the Malthusian danger in the nineteenth century.

These shortcomings are easy to identify a century and a half after Malthus wrote. But in his time there was no basis for a confident expectation that technology and trade could produce such a transformation. Indeed, it was then not inappropriate to sound warnings that mankind might be poised on the brink of disaster. After all, Britain, though it managed to escape the distresses of the positive checks, did not do so by a very comfortable margin. In Ireland they came into play with a vengeance; the potato famine of the 1840s reduced the population – through the combined effects of mortality and emigration – from nearly nine million to six and a half million in only six years.15

In Western countries, the tone of fatalism that ran through Malthus’s discussion of the relationship between population growth and real wage changes now has no justification. The experience of the past century in industrial societies provides abundant evidence that the coefficients of human reproduction and food production are more variable than Malthus and many of his contemporaries believed them to be. In many of the poorer parts of the modern world, however, Malthusian presuppositions are dangerously approximated. Agrarian technology is backward and not readily responsive to stimuli for change, fertility is largely unchecked by modern contraceptive techniques, while mortality rates have been sharply reduced by public health and sanitation measures. In these areas Malthusian warnings have not lost their relevance. This issue is one of the central problems of our times.

3. THE MALTHUSIAN ANALYSIS OF THE LAWS OF
PRODUCTION IN AGRICULTURE

The population question provided Malthus's point of departure into political economy. But the postulates on which the principle of population rested - especially his views on the productive possibilities of agriculture - required further analytical support before they could carry conviction. In particular it was incumbent upon him to demonstrate why food supplies could not be expected to expand more rapidly than mouths.

His work in economic theory provided an underpinning of the type required. The basic insight he developed is now often referred to as the 'law of diminishing returns' and a notion of much the same sort was hit upon almost simultaneously by three other writers: Ricardo, West and Torrens. The discussion of the point at issue thus marked one of those occasions - of which there have been several in the history of economic ideas - of a co-incidence in formulation of a fundamental theoretical proposition by several active minds.

Tempting as it is to describe the message of these contributors to classicism in modern terminology, it would distort part of their argument to do so. In current practice the concept of 'diminishing returns' is commonly stated in the following form: if all factors of production save one are held constant, the increments to output obtainable from the addition of successive units of a variable factor will, beyond a certain point, diminish. Thus, for example, if more and more labour is engaged to work a fixed acreage with an unchanged amount of capital equipment, total output may thereby be expanded but when the number of workers is substantially enlarged the rate of increase in product will decline. This principle is usually interpreted as applying quite generally to all lines of production in any sector of the economy.

The divergence between the modern concept and the one worked out by writers in the classical tradition can be observed in the manner in which Malthus developed the analysis. His opening move was to offer a three-fold account of the origins of rent:

First, and mainly, That quality of the earth, by which it can be made to yield a greater portion of the necessaries of life than is required for the maintenance of the persons employed on the land.

Secondly, That quality peculiar to the necessaries of life of being able, when properly distributed, to create their own demand, or to raise up a number of demanders in proportion to the quantity of necessaries produced.

And, Thirdly, The comparative scarcity of fertile land, either natural or artificial.16

The first of these observations is reminiscent of the 'bounty of nature' view advanced by the Physiocrats and appropriated by Smith. The second links his population principle to an account of a perpetually assured demand for the products of the land. But it is the third that turns the analysis in a new direction. Land is not only limited in supply, but its quality is uneven. As population growth swells the demand for food and raises its price, cultivation will be extended to less fertile acreages and/or will be intensified on lands already under the plough. In either case, the average costs of production will rise because the effort required per unit of additional output increases. By the same token, the rise in prices necessary to induce landowners to extend cultivation to new lands or to improve cultivation on older ones will benefit the owners of the more fertile acreages. They can enjoy higher receipts without an increase in their costs; thus their rents will swell.

In appearance this argument bears a striking similarity to the latter-day version of 'diminishing returns'. Yet there are two important points of contrast. In the hands of Malthus and his contemporaries the analysis of the tendency for returns per successive unit of input in agriculture to diminish was not developed around static conditions in which all factors, save one, are held constant. Instead the argument was constructed in a context of change - particularly of population and of the size of the capital stock. In the form presented, it provided an answer to those who had maintained that the Malthusian population prognosis should be rejected on the grounds that for each mouth God sends a pair of hands. Now it appeared that food output, though it could still grow, was likely to do so at a declining rate and that in consequence the problem of maintaining food availability per head could be expected to become more serious as the population mounted. Malthus did recognize, however, that considerable relief could be afforded if capital were poured into agricultural improvement even though it could not be `laid out without diminished return'.17 Unlike Smith, he held that the landlord could be an important improver and investor. The intensification of agricultural production, however, was not likely to occur until rents had already risen.

In another respect the classical notion of diminishing returns diverged from the interpretation that later acquired currency. For Malthus (and for most classical economists) this analysis was intended to refer only to agricultural production. The tendency to ‘diminishing return' was not extended to all lines of production. On the contrary, they anticipated that in manufacturing - where the basic instruments of production could be multiplied without natural limit - the same problem would not arise. The returns reaped by capitalists (i.e. profits) were likely, over the long term, to diminish. But this phenomenon was related more to the effect of rising rents and food prices than to the conditions attached to the production of manufactured goods.

This analysis of production problems in agriculture buttressed Malthusian population arguments, but it also had a number of further consequences. In effect it challenged one of the presuppositions on which The Wealth of Nations had been built. Smith had viewed rent as an unearned income arising primarily from the bounty of nature. Malthus brought another side of nature to the foreground - its stinginess in limiting the cultivable acreage and in restricting the supply of lands with high fertility. Natural conditions thus imposed severe limitations on the rate at which agricultural output could grow.

This finding, in turn, was symptomatic of a broader re-orientation in the classical outlook. Given the nature of agricultural production as it was seen by Malthus and by Ricardo, a re-distribution of income in favour of rents and at the expense of profits was likely to occur at a faster pace than Smith had been prepared to allow. Malthus added the qualification that rents, while rising in absolute magnitude in the course of economic expansion, would not necessarily increase as a proportionate share of total revenue. But his view - which Ricardo, among others, did not share - rested on the assumption that rising rents would spur capital improvements in agriculture with the result that a growing share of the income of landowners could be treated as profit. In any event, the combined effects of capital accumulation and population growth were likely to be associated with rising food prices, higher 'honey wages (even though the real wage was unchanged), and a squeeze on the profits of capitalists. The prospect A the stationary state - when growth would cease and capital accumulation would be restricted to replacement requirements - thus became a less distant possibility.

Malthus's analysis of population and of agricultural production did much to cast a shadow over the optimism of early classicism. In some degree this part of his message was absorbed into the mainstream of later classical thought. The inferences flowing from these findings were largely responsible for provoking Carlyle to label political economy as 'the dismal science'.

4. MALTHUS AND THE LAW OF MARKETS

Malthus's place in the history of economic ideas rests on more than his contribution to the classical analysis of population and of productivity in agriculture. He is also renowned for an important dissent from one aspect of orthodox classical doctrine. The crucial point on which he parted company with most of his contemporaries concerned the allegedly 'self-adjusting' properties of markets. This weapon in the arsenal of classical economic laws has usually been associated with the name of a Frenchman, J. B. Say (1767-1832), though its central idea had been spelled out earlier by James Mill. For that matter, Smith - without arguing the point - had anticipated its conclusions in The Wealth of Nations.

Say's Law has figured so prominently in economic controversies over the past century and a half that the form in which it was originally stated deserves to be set out. It proceeded deductively from two propositions: (1) that products are given in exchange for products; and (2) that goods constitute the demand for other goods.

The significance of the first of these statements lay as much in what was not said as in what was said. By asserting that 'products are given in exchange for products', Say restricted money to the role of a medium of exchange as a catalyst to commerce. Its use, however, did not alter the basic fact about transactions: that they represented exchanges of goods. This was not an original view; Smith and Hume before him had reached essentially the same conclusion. Say regarded this finding as revolutionary, and as demonstrating conclusively the fallacies of a mercantilist view that money was worth acquiring as an asset.

Say's second proposition was to have a marked influence on the development of economic thinking. The statement that 'goods constitute the demand for other goods' was interpreted to mean that the act of producing generates incomes sufficient to buy back the product or, more simply, that 'supply creates its own demand'. This proposition, of course, was understood to refer to the economy as a whole and not to the situation of individual firms or industries. Because a deficiency in aggregate demand allegedly could never exist, Say's Law ruled out the possibility of 'general over-production'.

This conclusion rested on an important, though implicit, assumption: that all income was spent and none hoarded. For Say and most writers in the classical tradition, the basic premise was too self-evident to call for detailed argument. As they viewed the world, there was no reason why anyone should ever wish to hoard. After all, no intelligent man (as opposed to the exceptional case of the misguided miser) would accumulate idle balances when he could increase his income by lending the same funds at interest. This attitude was held with the force of dogma by the orthodox classical mind, a phenomenon not unrelated to its antipathy toward the mercantilist attitude that hoarding on a national basis was socially beneficial.

While 'general over-production' was thus ruled out, `partial over-production'- a situation in which individual firms or industries were unable to dispose of all their output - could clearly occur. Even though an individual producer added as much to total demand as to total supply, he was not thereby assured that all his output would find a buyer. Disturbances might arise - stemming, for example, from entrepreneurial miscalculation or changes in the public taste - that would confront the seller with a partial glut of unsold commodities.

But that was not the end of the matter. It was essential to this argument to insist that if and when partial overproduction occurred, the disturbance would not- escalate into a general glut. The doctrine maintained that if one seller was unable to dispose of all his product, then others could be expected to enjoy an abnormally strong demand for theirs. This conclusion followed from the condition that all income was spent on either consumption goods or investment goods.

With one further step it could also be maintained that a situation of partial over-production would tend, in the normal course of events, to correct itself. If it could be assumed that there were no significant obstacles to the mobility of capital and labour, then partial over-production could be expected to induce a re-allocation of productive resources. Capital and labour would be withdrawn from the glut sectors and put to work in those enjoying buoyant demand. The required adjustment could not be made instantaneously. Nevertheless the natural forces of the market, if left alone, would supply the impetus required to eliminate a temporary partial glut.

The tidiness and elegance of this argument gave to it an obvious appeal. But to Malthus, who observed the distresses following the Napoleonic Wars, the impossibility of a general glut was not self-evident. Nor was he confident that the problem was only temporary and remediable through the untampered processes of the market. Producers of many kinds of goods experienced difficulty in disposing of their product and 'unemployment' - at least as measured by registrants for parish relief who numbered nearly one and a half million in 1818 18 - was at an unprecedented level. The glut, he feared, might be both general and chronic.

By modern standards; Malthus's counter-argument was not systematically worked out. His views were developed around a distinction between two categories of outputs - essentials (primarily food) and non-essentials. In the case of the former there was never a problem of glut. As his argument on population had demonstrated, increased supply (in the form of an enlarged availability of foodstuffs) automatically created its own demand (in the form of a larger number of mouths). In the case of the nonessentials, however, the problem was different. Whether or not the market was cleared of these goods depended on the tastes of those - primarily landlords and capitalists - with incomes high enough to acquire them. Malthus might well have added another sub-group (though he did not): the nouveaux rentiers who held the enormously enlarged government debt created by the Napoleonic wars. At the time their economic position was not unimportant, as service charges on the national debt amounted to about ten per cent of the national income.19

Malthus's diagnosis of the `glut' problem had much in common with the attitude that led him to put little faith in the efficacy of the preventive check to population growth. The tastes and habits of the working class could not be altered except over a prolonged time period, he maintained, nor were those of potential buyers of luxuries likely to be much more pliable. As he elaborated the significance of this point in a letter to Ricardo in 1817:

You seem to think that the wants and tastes of mankind are always ready for the supply; while I am most decidedly of opinion that few things are more difficult, than to inspire new tastes and wants, particularly out of old materials; that one of the great elements of demand is the value that people set upon commodities, and that the more completely the supply is suited to the demand the higher will this value be, and the more days' labour will it exchange for, or give the power of commanding.... I am quite of opinion that practically the actual check to produce and population arises more from want of stimulus than want of power to produce.20

To deal with these distresses Malthus proposed several heretical remedies. Fearing that - in the absence of extraordinary measures - demand might be insufficient to absorb the product of the economy, he maintained that encouragement of unproductive expenditures was the course of wisdom. In his view it was to society's advantage when the rich (particularly large landowners) augmented their complement of retainers. The results would be even happier if landlords engaged workers who would otherwise be unemployed to improve their estates. In addition, the state - the unproductive spender par excellence - might well undertake public works in order to create jobs. As he summed up his proposals:

And altogether I should say, that the employment of the poor in roads and public works, and a tendency among landlords and persons of property to build, to improve and beautify their grounds, and to employ workmen and menial servants, are the means most within our power and most directly calculated to remedy the evils arising from that disturbance in the balance of produce and consumption, which has been occasioned by the sudden conversion of soldiers, sailors, and various other classes which the war employed, into productive labourers.21

Malthus's views on the problem of gluts in the post-Napoleonic war period have been described as an anticipation of later Keynesian arguments on the importance of aggregate demand to the determination of total income and employment. Despite the surface resemblance between these lines of argument such claims place an undue strain on the facts. Malthus's thought was still very much in the classical mould. Though he sensed something amiss, he was unable to rise above the limitations of this tradition. In fact, the main manoeuvre that would have permitted him to make a counter-argument stick - an analysis of the likelihood of hoarding in periods of 'glut' - he did not seriously entertain.

5. MALTHUS AND ECONOMIC POLICY

If Malthus was at odds with the mainstream of the classical tradition in his analysis of 'gluts', he also parted company with many of his contemporaries on other matters. While most classicists favoured free trade (particularly in agricultural commodities), Malthus defended the agricultural protection provided by the Corn Laws. While most of his contemporaries opposed unproductive expenditures (particularly government spending), Malthus - at least in certain circumstances - made a positive case for them. Perhaps even more puzzling was his attitude towards population control. In view of his fears of a population explosion and its consequences for human misery, one might have expected him to be a strong advocate of birth control. In fact, however, he opposed contraceptive practices, technically deficient (by modern standards) as they were in his day.

Underlying these positions was a consistent, if dubious, rationale. Malthus attached prime importance to an expanded production of foodstuffs and he regarded a sharpening of incentives as essential to its achievement. Agricultural protection was thus justified on the grounds that high food prices would encourage productivity-raising investment in agriculture. This attitude was bolstered by a subsidiary non-economic argument: it would be unwise, he maintained, for a small island to rely on imports for a substantial part of its nourishment. In times of war or national emergency, its position would be uncomfortably vulnerable.

Similarly, his opposition to birth control rested on the view that family responsibilities helped men to overcome their natural tendency to indolence and sloth. The pressure of necessity was an unrivalled spur to diligent and intensive work. His heretical recommendations on unproductive expenditures were addressed to a specific situation and were not defended as general propositions. The remedies proposed, however, gave an important place to the employment of idle labour in tasks that would raise the productivity of the land.

Though Malthus made some conspicuous departures from the standard classical position, his views on a wide range of policy issues were in full accord with those of the orthodox tradition. Apart from the exceptions already noted he was generally an advocate of the free market and an opponent of governmental restrictions. Like most of his classical contemporaries he attacked the Poor Laws. While he followed the path cleared by Smith, he provided - with the aid of his population analysis - some additional arguments for repeal or amendment. No longer were the Poor Laws objectionable primarily on the grounds that they interfered with labour mobility; Malthus also argued that they had the unfortunate effect of swelling claims on the nation's food supplies while making no contribution to their enlargement. Moreover, the existing system compounded the difficulties in at least two respects: not only did parish relief deaden incentives to work but it also enabled its recipients to reproduce at rates higher than would otherwise have been possible, thus intensifying the competition for a limited food supply.

Harsh though some of Malthus's views on policy appeared to be, it must be noted that, by his lights, they were inspired by a genuine concern for humanity. Malthus was almost alone among his contemporaries in urging public measures to alleviate post-war unemployment. His recommendations on the Poor Laws - to which he was militantly opposed - called for a gradual phasing out of parish relief. He advised withdrawal of public assistance only from the able-bodied; persons unequipped to earn their own living would retain a claim on state charity. But, most important, all of his views on economic policy stemmed from a conviction that constraints on food production imposed severe limits - limits that men could ignore but only at their peril - on the prospects for improvement in material circumstances.