ductions in the future and regulate the conditions under which they may be made. If the question, for example, is one of bringing children into the world in greater numbers than the island can support, the little state we are considering will not be able to assume the duty of future assistance unless the individuals on their part renounce, as John Stuart Mill has it, their right of indefinite multiplication.
It is through failure to make the preceding distinction that Malthus rejects the whole obligation of assistance, and leaves it to Nature to do justice. The penalty attached to improvidence by the laws of Nature, he asserts, falls immediately upon the guilty one, and that penalty is itself severe. But, we may ask, are not those who suffer from the improvidence of the father, contrary to this assertion, the innocent wife and children? Let them alone, Malthus persists; let God's justice take its course. These pretended laws of God, of which Malthus tries to show us the justice, are injustice itself. The English pastor had no other resource for escaping the objections of the moralists than to invoke original sin. "It appears indispensable," he says, "in the moral government of this universe, that the sins of the fathers shall be punished in the children. And if our presumptuous vanity natters itself that it could govern better by systematically contradicting this law, I am led to believe that it will engage in a vain enterprise." Where Malthus sees an effort of human vanity, social science sees an effort of human justice, superior to the pretended justice of Nature or of Providence. To trust to natural and providential laws for the prevention or reparation of wrong is to act like beings without intelligence or will—is to accept for man the fatality that controls animals, "which," however, have not eaten of the forbidden fruit."
The argument of Malthus, adopted by many English economists, as well as by the naturalists of the Darwinian school, is contrary, not only to pure fraternity, but also to strict justice. Malthus reasons as if there were at this very time not enough food on the earth for all the men; as if in the existing state of society there were to be found no men enjoying superfluity, while there are, however, men who have nothing to live upon. Instead of limiting his assertions to the future, and to a future still far off, he speaks as if those harsh words which have been so many times cast in reproach by the socialists against the strict economists, as containing the most authentic formula of their theories, were applicable even to the present time: "A man born into a world already occupied, whose family has no means of supporting him or of whose labor society has no need, has not any right to demand any portion whatever of food. He is really one too many on the land. No cover is laid for him at the great banquet of Nature. Nature tells him to go away, and does not delay herself to put the order into execution." All is involved in that doctrine; it is in effect the right even of living that Malthus denies to a host of men. To solve the question he has recourse to Nature, which knows neither pity nor justice; he
