252 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
THE CAUSE OF SOCIAL PROGRESS AND OF THE RATE OF 
INTEREST 
By PROFESSOR J. PEASE NORTON 
YALE UNIVERSITY 
T has been generally considered by the scholars of the social sciences 
that there is no fundamental cause in human societies for social 
progress. Indeed, the whole Malthusian theory is to the effect that the 
overwhelming rate of increase possible in human societies tends to keep 
a considerable percentage of the members of a society on the threshold 
of continuous poverty. A moral hopelessness characterizes the books of a 
great many economists, when they touch upon the subject of population. 
By reason of these gloomy chapters, political economy has been termed 
the dismal science. 
How many established doctrines of good writers have been swept 
away by the light of subsequent discoveries and later reasoning! Were 
it not for the high improbability of any one scientific doctrine long 
standing without modification, I should hesitate seriously before ad- 
vancing these notes on the views held by me and which are so com- 
pletely at variance with the long-established and present theories of 
the science of political economy with respect to population and interest. 
Yet, because these views have greatly brightened my interest in all sub- 
jects of human history, I am interested in subjecting them to early 
criticism. 
There seems to exist in the tendency of populations to increase in 
numbers the cause of progress, which, if unimpeded by certain de- 
structive agencies, which I have termed to assist me in my thinking 
the “wastes of nations,’ would carry along on the waves of comfort 
and prosperity an ever-increasing population up to an unassignable 
limit, so great is the possibility at which a stationary state could be 
maintained. These destructive agencies are not a product of the in- 
crease in numbers, but they constitute the elements of the hostile en- 
vironment against which progress has been continually made since the 
earliest historic times. 
Now a social group on any habitat at a given time exists through 
the application of a series of arts which are possessed by the society 
and are exercised over the environment. The arts existing at any time 
may be inventoried and logically classified. The arts are productive 
and are ways of doing things which bring a return. There are the arts 
of the food supply, such as hunting, fishing, agriculture, food preser- 
