THE MALTRUSIAN PHILOSOPHY.
Cambridgeslaire, 20th November. Sue—You quote from Professor Rickards, without disapprobation, the fol- lowing sentence—" it is evident that if the population has been doubled, the means of subsistence has been doubled also ; unless it be the fact that the condition of the people in respect to subsistence has deteriorated, or that subsistence has been increased by importation from abroad."
Now, I should have thought that as the Malthusian curse upon an in- creased population is a diminished ability to procure food, an ability to pro- cure the same increasing in proportion to the growth of numbers would if general refute that philosophy, or would if special form an exception to it.
Food is increased in two ways,—by finding the means of cultivating it more successfully, or finding the means of buying it. In either way, the people are enabled to procure it. Whether draining, manuring, and weeding, give to our doubled numbers a double amount of English grain, or whether the ma- nufacture of cloth and hardware give to them the grain of foreign lands, in either ease alike the double number is fed.
The natural want of a man is not to grow a loaf of bread—it is to eat one. If that be otherwise, every man in every country must be starved, the cul- tivators of the soil alone excepted. To that absurdity the words of Professor Rickards seem to lead directly. And, to show their strange repugnancy, I will point out, that he supposes a case in which "subsistence has been in- creased" without increasing "the means of subsistence." What intelligible
difference is there between subsistence and the means of it ? A. H.
Previous page
