Meanwhile,it may be noticed that the Whigs as represented by Macaulay were upon this matter as dogmatic as James Mill himself,whose dogmatism Macaulay had censured as roundly as he censured Sadler.Malthus,in fact,had triumphed;and Mill's Malthusianism dominates his whole treatise.He had been brought up as an uncompromising Malthusian;in youth he had become something of a martyr in the cause,and he never flinched from upholding the general principle.What was it?In an early chapter(41)of his treatise he lays down the Malthusian propositions.'Twenty or thirty years ago,'he says,they might have been in need of enforcement.The evidence is,however,so incontestable that they have steadily made way against all opposition,and may now be regarded as 'axiomatic.'This incontestable doctrine,as Mill here explains,is,firstly,that the human race can double itself in a generation;and,secondly,that the obvious consequences can be avoided only by limiting this power through Malthus's positive or preventive checks that is,by prudence on the one hand,and starvation and disease on the other.(42)This prudential restraint,then,is,if not the one thing necessary,the universal condition without which no other scheme of improvement can be satisfactory.It is the focus upon which his whole argument converges.Mill,however,gives a characteristic turn to the argument.The doctrine that the progress of society must 'end in shallows and in miseries'(43)was not,as had been thought,a 'wicked invention'of Malthus.Implicitly or explicitly,it was the doctrine of his 'most distinguished predecessors'and can only be successfully combated on his principles.The publication of his essay is the era from which better views of this subject must be dated.'(44)It gives the really fundamental principle.
Mill agrees with Malthus that the root of social evil is not the inequality of property.Even an unjust distribution of wealth does not aggravate,but at most accelerates,the advent of misery.'With the existing habits of the people'an equal division of property would only cause them to populate down to the former state.(45)And yet Mill here parts company from.
Malthus in the spirit,if not in the logic,of his argument.
Malthus no doubt was thoroughly benevolent,and like many amiable country clergymen desired to see the spread of savings banks,friendly societies,and schools;but he was painfully conscious of the difficulty of infusing ideas into the sodden,sluggish labourers of his time,and hoped rather for the diminution of abuses than for the regeneration of mankind.Mill,on the contrary,sympathised with the revolutionists who had alarmed Malthus.He tells them,indeed,with Malthus,that their schemes must conform to actual and inevitable conditions.But he also holds that the 'existing habits'of the 'people'can be materially modified;and believes that a 'just distribution of wealth'would tend to modify them.Malthus emphasises the point that nothing can be done unless the standard of life be raised.
Mill dwells on the other aspect:if the standard be raised,an indefinite improvement can be effected.What Malthus took to be a difficult though not impassable barrier Mill took to represent a difficulty which men might be trained to recognise and surmount.
His sanguine belief in the educability of mankind enabled him to regard as a realisable hope what to Malthus in his early days had seemed a mere vision,and even in later days a remote ideal.The vis medicatrix is the same for Mill as for Malthus,but Mill has a far more vivid expectation of the probability of curing the patient.
IV.PEASANT-PROPRIETORSHIP
