114 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
This change in our expectations involves many changes of emphasis, 
both in the theory of production and in that of distribution. 
Two of them are perfectly obvious. First, the need, which J. 8. Mill 
and most of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors felt so 
strongly, for insisting on the due restriction of population, has completely 
disappeared in the Western countries. Economists do not now require to 
talk as if the first duty of men and women was to refrain from propagating 
their race. Secondly, the need for insisting on the desirability of saving 
has become less pressing. A rapidly increasing population requires a 
rapidly increasing number of tools, machines, ships, houses, and other 
articles of material equipment in order merely to maintain without 
improving its economic condition, while at the same time the maintenance 
of a larger proportion of children renders it more difficult to make the 
required additions. To a stationary population saving will still be 
desirable for the improvement of conditions, but it need no longer be insisted 
on as necessary for the mere maintenance of the existing standard. 
But there are other changes of equal importance which are more likely 
to be overlooked. One is in regard to the weight which we attach to the 
different kinds of production. In the middle of the eighteenth century 
“ subsistence,’ and what we should consider a very coarse and inadequate 
subsistence probably seriously deficient in vitamins, appeared so much 
the most important economic good that the French Economistes insisted 
on calling all labour which did not get something out of the soil stérile or 
barren; and our own Adam Smith, with all his common sense, while 
admitting the manufacturing class into the ranks of ‘ productive’ 
labourers, insisted on excluding domestic servants, physicians, guardians 
of law and order, and all other workers who did not make up material 
objects, or who were not employed for profit (he never was quite sure 
which criterion he meant to stand by). The great Christian philosopher, 
Paley, believed that nothing more than a ‘healthy subsistence’ was 
required for perfect happiness. Even Malthus and his immediate 
disciples, when they insisted on the desirability of the working-class having 
a high standard of comfort, seem to have done so more because this would 
prevent the ‘ misery ’ of semi-starvation for adults and absolute starvation 
for infants than because there is a direct advantage in being comfortable. 
Ricardo said ‘ the friends of humanity cannot but wish that in all countries 
the labouring classes should have a taste for comforts and enjoyments,’ 
not apparently because comforts and enjoyments are good in themselves, 
but because ‘ there cannot be a better security against a superabundant 
population,’ the population being superabundant, in his opinion, when it 
is subject to famine. 
All this emphasis on food is now out of date. We no longer look forward 
to a future in which an increasing population will be forced by the operation 
of the law of diminishing returns to devote a larger and ever larger pro- 
portion of its whole labour force to the production of food. We know 
that even in the past, with a rapidly increasing population, the returns to 
agricultural industry have increased so much that civilised mankind has 
been able to feed itself better and better, while giving a smaller and ever 
smaller proportion of its whole labour force to the production of bare 
subsistence; and we can reasonably expect that the increase in the 
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