Malthus and his work / by James Bonar.

  • James Bonar
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Malthus and his work / by James Bonar. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    were by no means at utter discord. He always treated a hostile economist as a possible ally. He was carrying on the work of their common Founder. In the Zssay on Population he was inquiring into the nature and causes of poverty, as Adam Smith had inquired into the nature and causes of wealth. But Malthus himself did not intend the one to be a mere supplement. to the other. He did not approach the subject from a purely scientific side. He had not. devoted long years of travel and reflection to the pre- paration of an economical treatise. Adam Smith had written his Moral Sentiments seventeen years before his greater work. When he wrote the latter he had behind him an academical and literary. reputation ; and he satisfied the just expectations of the public by giving them, in the two quarto volumes of the Wealth of Nations, his full-formed and completely digested conclusions and reasonings definitively ex- pressed (1776). Malthus, on the contrary, gained his reputation by a bold and sudden stroke, well fol- lowed up. His Hssay was an anonymous pamphlet in a political controversy, and was meant to turn the light of political economy upon , the political philosophy of the day. Whatever the essay con- tained over and above politics, and however far afield the author eventually travelled in the later editions, there is no doubt about the first origin of _ the essay itself. It was not, as we are sometimes told, that, being a kind-hearted clergyman, he set himself to work to inquire whether after all it was right to increase the numbers of the population without caring
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