THE "LAW OF POPULATION"
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
should like to call the attention of Dean Inge, who contributed an article on " Constructive Birth-Control " to the Christmas Number of your paper, to an article that appeared in The Month for September, 1927. It wag written by Professor Henry Somerville, and was entitled "The Devil of Malthus." In it Dean Inge's statement that " The human race, .like every other species, tends to multiply. far more rapidly than the means of subsistence," is seen to have no foundation in economic fact.
Professor Somerville wrote as follows :—
" Malthus's. Devil was his famous Law of Population . . . The Law of Population stated that population, when unchecked by vice, misery or moral restraint, increases in geometrical ratio, while the means of subsistence increase only in arithmetical ratio. The essence of the Malthusian theory was the comparison of ratios. All the economic experiedee of the world since Malthus wrote has gone to prove his ratios ridiculous. The increase of subsistence has been nearer geometrical than arithmetical and it has been far
higher than the increase of population, even when population has not been checked by vice, misery or moral restraint.' -
Professor Somerville then points out that ." all the arguments designed to' show that over-population is present or approach- ing in Great Britain, in Europe or in the .world at large," had already been " pulverized " by Sir William Beveridge., in his well-known address to the British Association in 1923,
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