If the human brood is too numerous for the food supply, Nature has three
agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence, and war. In a famous
Essay on Population (1798) Thomas Malthus [Malthus, Thomas Robert
(1766-1834)] explained that without these periodic checks the birth rate
would so far exceed the death rate that the multiplication of mouths would
nullify any increase in the production of food. Though he was a clergyman
and a man of good will, Malthus pointed out that the issuance of relief
funds or supplies to the poor encouraged them to marry early and breed
improvidently, making the problem worse. In a second edition (1803) he
advised abstention from coitus except for reproduction, but he refused to
approve other methods of birth control. Having little hope of acceptance for
this counsel of sanctity, he predicted that the balance between mouths and
food would be maintained in the future, as in the past, by famine,
pestilence, and war.
The advances of agricultural and contraceptive technology in the
nineteenth century apparently refuted Malthus: in England, the United
States, Germany, and France the food supply kept pace with births, and the
rising standard of living deferred the age of marriage and lowered the size
of the family. The multiplication of consumers was also a multiplication of
producers: new “hands” developed new lands to raise more food. The
recent spectacle of Canada and the United States exporting millions of
bushels of wheat while avoiding famine and pestilence at home seemed to
provide a living answer to Malthus. If existing agricultural knowledge were
everywhere applied, the planet could feed twice its present population.
Malthus would answer, of course, that this solution merely postpones the
calamity. There is a limit to the fertility of the soil; every advance in
agricultural technology is sooner or later canceled by the excess of births
over deaths; and meanwhile medicine, sanitation, and charity nullify
selection by keeping the unfit alive to multiply their like. To which hope
replies: the advances of industry, urbanization, education, and standards of
living, in countries that now endanger the world by their fertility, will
