Vital statistics : a memorial volume of selections from the reports and writings of William Farr / edited for the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain by Noel A. Humphreys.

  • William Farr
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vital statistics : a memorial volume of selections from the reports and writings of William Farr / edited for the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain by Noel A. Humphreys. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    celibacy whicli still linger as traces of the monastic system, in our universities. Tn conse(!uencc, apparently, oF a friendly controversy Avith his father, he wrote and published the first edition of his Essay on Population iu 1798; chiefly with a viev/ to combat tlie doctrines of Condorcet and Godwin, Avho held that the human race was perfectible, and was advancing towards an ideal standard of excellency. His parados was at direct issue with theirs, as the principle of Ijopulation rendered vice and misery, he contended, inevitable in all ages. Population, we know, cannot iucrcase iudefiuitely; its limit is as absolute as the limits of the world, or of the matter of which the world is composed ; and in Great Britain the rate of increase is retarded by the premature mortality, the vice, the postponement of marriages, and the celibacy of the inhabitants. But Malthus went further in his doctrine; he insisted that the increase of mankind is the chief source of misery, and that extensive abstinence from marriage, or the repression of population, is to be regarded as the fundamental condition of human happiness. Population, he argued, is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence ; but population increases naturally in a geometrical progression, or as 1, 2, 4, 8, ; Avhile subsistence cannot increase at a faster ratio in the same time than is expressed by the arithmetical progression 1, 2, 3, 4 ; consequently population is checked, and the checks which repress the superior power of population, and keep it on a level with the means of subsistence, are all resolvable into moral restraint [celibacy], vice [licentiousness], and misery [famines, plagues, diseasel. Such was in short his doctrine. The ranks of this array— the population of every country—are full; the supply of the commis- sariat is limited ; therefoi'e, the number cf annual recruits remaining invariable, any decrease of the deaths in battle must be followed by an equivalent increase in (he deaths by famine and fever; or, if the deaths from all causes are to decrease, the number of annual recruits must be diminished. Jeuner had recently discovereil an antidote to the poison of small-pox. It Avas declared immediately to be no benefit to mankind. I feel not the slightest doubt, says Malthus, that if the introduction of the cow-pox should extirpate the small-pox, and yet the NUMBEK OP MAKKIAGES CONTINUIC THE SAME, WC shall find a very perceptible difference in the increased mortality of some other diseases. And again : The operation of the preventive check— ■iva7-s—the silent though certain destruction of life in large towns and manvfactories—and the close habitations and insiiffidcnt food of many of the poor—prevent population from, outrunning the means of subsistence ; and, if I may use an expression which certainly at first appears strange, supersede the necessity of great and ravaging epidemics to DESTROY WHAT IS REDUNDANT. If a WASTING PLAGUE were to sweep off two millions in England, and six millions in France, it cannot be doubted that, after the inhabitants had recovered from, the dreadful slioch, the proportion of births to deaths would rise much above the usual average iu either country during the last century.* What prevents the population of hares and rabbits from over- stocking the earth ? demands a distinguished disciple, in a chapter on the increase of mankind.f * Malthus on Population, B, II. chap. xiii.; see also B. I. chapters i. and ii., and the work, passim. t -John S. Mill, Political Economy, i. 10. 2.