Note 290 — Chapter III · : THE PESSIMISTS

Thomas Robert Malthus was born in 1766. His father, a country gentleman, was a man of learning and a friend of most of the philosophers of his time, especially Hume, and, it also seems, J. J. Rousseau. He was the youngest son of the family, and was intended for the Church and given an excellent education. After leaving Cambridge he took a living in the country, but in 1807 was appointed professor at a college founded by the East India Company at Haileybury, in Hertfordshire, where he remained until his death in 1834. He married when thirty-nine years of age, and had three sons and a daughter.

Malthus was a young unmarried clergyman living in a small country parish when, at the age of thirty-two, he in 1798 published anonymously his famous Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society. His critics were legion. In order to devote more study to the subject, he took a three years’ tour (1799-1802) on the Continent—avoiding France, because France at this period was anything but inviting to an Englishman. In 1803 he published—under his own name this time—a second edition, much modified and amplified, and with a slightly different title: An Essay on the Principle of Population, or a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness. Four other editions were published during his lifetime.

We must not forget his other works, although they were all eclipsed by his earliest effort. These were: The Principles of Political Economy considered with a View to their Practical Application (1820); A Series of Short Studies dealing with the Corn Laws (1814-15); On Rent (1815); The Poor Law (1817); and finally his Definitions in Political Economy (1827).