SCIENTIFIC PHILANTHROPY. 303 



ductions in the future and regulate the conditions under which they 

 may be made. If the question, for example, is one of bringing chil- 

 dren 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 jus- 

 tice 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 pre- 

 vention or reparation of wrong is to act like beings without intelli- 

 gence or Avill 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 exe- 

 cution." 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 



