Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 4II

doomed to failure, or, if successful, did but benefit one particular class or section of the labouring classes at the expense of all the rest.”? Finally, this conception had its corollary in that notorious theory of population propounded by Malthus socially suicidal, and biologically foolish as we now perceive it to be—which led J. S. Mill to actually propose to the labourers as the main remedy for low wages, that they should restrain their numbers, and endeavour to look upon every one of their class, ‘‘who had more than the number of children which the circumstances of society allowed to each, as doing him a wrong, as filling up the place which he was entitled to share.” ?

It seems hard to believe that only a short interval of time separates us from the period when these ideas were actually authoritatively taught by leaders of opinion in England. Nay more, that in this recent period such ideas were implicitly associated in the minds of statesmen, philosophers, and philanthropists with the import and significance of the principle of free competition in our civilisation. We see now in the clearest light that they in reality represent nothing more or less than the projection into modern economic conditions of the central principle of the barbarisms of a past epoch of the world’s history. The distinctive principle for which our civilisation stands in the evolutionary process is entirely unrepresented therein. There could be no real free play of the competitive forces in such conditions. Under the conception that all economic evils tend to cure themselves in a state of un-

* Dict. of Pol. Econ., vol. iii. p. 636 (Spooner). * Principles of Political Economy, by John Stuart Mill, ii., xiii.