The Return of Malthus

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 735, 14 August 1953, Page 12

The Return of Malthus

THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY, by G. F. McCleary; Faber and Faber. English price, AS/ (Reviewed by Walter Brookes) HEN Thomas Robert Malthus published the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 he aimed to show contemporary Utopian visionaries the danger of neglecting the relation of thé size and increase of population to the producticn of subsistence. This book of 55,000 words: finally, in 1826, became a treatise of 200,000 words, in which the subject was treated historically and geographically in the light of diligent reading and travel undertaken by the auithor. He was rewarded with a great deal of misunderstanding, which Dr, MceCleary, himself a writer on popufation problems and social welfare, attempts to clear away. Malthus considered that the impulses which led to reproduction were so strong that population~ would always tend to run ahead of the means of subsistence; the checks that kept it within bounds were "moral restraint, vice and misery." So little did he discuss contraception, with which his name has been associated, that Dr. McCleary suggests that he included it under the heading of vice-a threat to desirable increase of population. Moral restraint, incidentally, meant postponement of marriage-in chastity. Much of the argument that has gone on about specifi¢ details in the Essay is surely very unprofitable. The potential rate of population increase if unchecked, the rate at which human inventiveness and industry could improve the production of the means of subsistence as posited by Malthus, must be subject to continual modification as science advances. Good health and long life are not absolute terms in the consideration of population growth; and in the consideration of the means of subsistence it is obvious that some hitherto unthought ef development such as the synthetic production of food may upset existing hypotheses completely. What matters is the general approach to the subject made by Malthus and his

detailed studies of the material available to him.-The importance of the subject today, when the birthrate of some Western nations and their colonial settlements overseas is decreasing (the rise during the war was only temporary) and that of other nations and races is rising, can hardly be denied.