SCIENTIFIC PHILANTHROPY. 531 



engage itself, in a general and vague way, to give places or work to 

 all who demand them, neither to the physician without patients, the 

 advocate without causes, nor the poet without readers. It can no 

 more make itself an ironmonger, a dealer in dress-goods, a furniture- 

 manufacturer, or a house-decorator. In short, it can not substitute 

 itself for the individual, artificially create work for him, nor artificially 

 continue the production of any article, whenever a suspension reveals 

 the fact that production has been excessive, and ought to be arrested. 

 The merely moral right of the indigent engenders, in respect to this mat- 

 ter, only a moral duty on the part of society, a combined duty of re- 

 parative justice and fraternity. Since, moreover, the demands of every 

 duty should be fulfilled, so far as is possible, society ought progress- 

 ively to secure the satisfaction of them by the means which it shall 

 judge best. But it can not grant its assistance to healthy individuals 

 except under determined conditions and by a reciprocal convention. 

 It is a case of a contract imposing mutual obligations, all the clauses 

 of which ought to be settled with care. Here, more than anywhere 

 else, the right to assistance is limited in a thousand ways, not only by 

 the rights of personal property, but also by the real resources of the 

 states, by practical impossibilities, and finally by the consequences that 

 would follow if we should erect it into an absolute and positive right. 

 It would in that case not stop short of self- destruction. We should 

 recollect that, in the question of reciprocal rights and duties, we have 

 to consider the future as well as the present. In this point of view, 

 we can say in truth with the Malthusians and the Darwinians that the 

 increase of sustenance would not follow the increase of population. 

 As Malthus shows, an absurd consequence is implied in acknowledging 

 an indefinite and unlimited right to assistance and to work ; it is, that 

 the funds destined to support labor can be made to grow at will, and 

 that an order of government or a tax, like Elizabeth's tax, is all that 

 is needed to bring this about. It would not be more unreasonable to 

 order that two ears of corn shall grow where the earth has heretofore 

 produced but one. Canute did not arrogate a greater power over the 

 laws of nature when he prohibited the waves from touching his royal 

 feet. To say that we ought to furnish work to all who only ask to work, 

 is really to say, in other words, that the forces dedicated to labor, in 

 any country, are infinite, that they are not subject to any variation, 

 and that the ability to give work and good wages to the working 

 classes ought to remain absolutely the same, without regard to whether 

 the resources of the country are rapidly or slowly progressive, station- 

 ary, or retrograde. 



This assertion, therefore, Malthus concludes, with reason, contra- 

 dicts the most simple and most evident principles of the tender and 

 the demand, and includes by implication the absurd proposition that 

 a limited territory can feed an unlimited population. The question 

 of assistance is inseparable from that of subsistence and population ; 



