In these admirable remarks Malthus points out that whenever we make improvements in the science of health, we must be contented to lessen the birth-rate, if we would really secure the benefits we might expect. Thus, if drainage, good water supply, and the extirpation of fevers are to be of service to us, it must be that we are determined to have fewer children. For, if we have an equally high birth-rate, and no great addition to our food supplies from abroad or from our own soil, we must die inevitably of some other chronic, although different, maladies than those produced by bad drainage and fevers, or small-pox. In no case can we have a birth-rate of 40 per 1,000 in an old country, without a high death-rate.
In Chapter VI. of Book IV. Mr. Malthus treats of the effects of the knowledge of the principal cause of poverty on Civil Liberty, observing at the outset that it may appear to some that a doctrine which attributes the greatest part of the sufferings of the lower classes of society exclusively to themselves, is unfavorable to the cause of liberty, affording, it may be said, a tempting opportunity to governments of oppressing their subjects at pleasure, and laying all the blame on the improvident habits of the poor. Our author contends that, on the other hand, the pressure of distress on the lower classes of people, with the habit of attributing the distress to their rulers, appears to him to be the rock of defence, the castle and the guardian spirit of despotism, affording as it does to the tyrant the unanswerable plea of necessity.
“The patriot who might be called upon by the love of his country to join with heart and hand in a rising of the people for some specific attainable object or reform, if he knew that they were enlightened respecting their own situation, and would stop short when they had attained their demand, would be called upon by the same motion to submit to very great opposition rather than give the slightest countenance to a popular tumult, the members of which, at least the greatest number of them, were persuaded that the destruction of the Parliament, the Lord Mayor, and the monopoly would make bread cheap, and that a revolution would enable them all to support their families. In this case it is more the ignorance and delusion of the lower classes of people that occasions the oppression, than the actual disposition of the government to tyranny.”