University of Virginia Library

TO RICHARD RUSH.

Dear Sir,—Your favor of Novr. 15, came duly
to hand, with Mr. Ridgeley's farming Pamphlet;
for which I return my thanks.

The inflexibility of G. B. on the points in question

with the U. S. is a bad omen for the future relations
of the parties. The present commercial dispute, tho'
productive of ill humor will shed no blood. The
same cannot be said of Impressments & blockades.

I have lately recd. also Mr. Godwin's attack on
Malthus, which you were so good as to forward.
The work derives some interest from the name of
the Author and the singular views he has taken of
the subject. But it excites a more serious attention
by its tendency to disparage abroad the prospective
importance of the U. S. who must owe their
rapid growth to the principle combated.[21]

In this Country the fallacies of the Author will be
smiled at only unless other emotions should be excited
by the frequent disregard of the probable
meaning of his opponent, and by the harshness of
comments on the moral scope of his doctrine. Mr.
G. charges him also with being dogmatical. Is he
less so himself? and is not Mr. G. one of the last
men who ought to throw stones at Theorists? At
the moment of doing it too he introduces one of the
boldest speculations in anticipating from the progress
of chemistry an artificial conversion of the air the
water & earth into food for man of the natural
flavour and colour.

My memory does not retain all the features of
Mr. Malthus's System. He may have been unguarded

in his expressions, & have pushed some of
his notions too far. He is certainly vulnerable in
assigning for the increase of human food, an arithmetical
ratio. In a Country thoroughly cultivated,
as China is said to be, there can be no increase. And
in one as partially cultivated, and as fertile as the
U. S. the increase may exceed the geometrical ratio.
A surplus beyond it, for which a foreign demand
has failed, is a primary cause of the present embarrassments
of this Country.

The two cardinal points on which the two Authors
are at issue, are 1. the prolific principle in the human
race. 2. its actual operation, particularly in the
U. S. Mr. G. combats the extent of both.

If the principle could not be proved by direct
facts, its capacity is so analogous to what is seen
throughout other parts of the animal as well as
vegetable domain, that it would be a fair inference.
It is true indeed that in the case of vegetables on
which animals feed, and of animals the food of other
animals, a more extensive capacity of increase
might be requisite than, in the Human race. But
in this case also it is required, over and above the
degree sufficient to repair the ordinary wastes of
life, by two considerations peculiar to man: one
that his reason can add to the natural means of
subsistence for an increased number, which the
instinct of other animals cannot; the other, that
he is the only animal that destroys his own
species.

Waiving however the sanction of analogy, let the

principle be tested by facts, either stated by Mr.
G. or which he cannot controvert.

He admits that Sweden has doubled her numbers,
in the last hundred years, without the aid of emigrants.
Here then there must have been a prolific
capacity equal to an increase in ten centuries from
2 millions to 1000 mill.s. If Sweden were as populous
ten Centuries ago as now, or should not in ten
Centuries to come arrive at a thousand millions,
must not 998 mills. of births have been prevented;
or that number of infants have perished? And
from what causes?

The two late enumerations, in England which shew
a rate of increase there much greater than in Sweden
are rejected by Mr. G. as erroneous. They probably
are so; tho' not in the degree necessary for his purpose.
He denies that the population increases at
all. He even appeals with confidence to a comparison
of what it has been with what it is at present
as proving a decrease.

There being no positive evidence of the former
numbers and none admitted by him of the Present,
resort must be had to circumstantial lights; and
these will decide the question with sufficient certainty.

As a general rule it is obvious that the quantity
of food produced in a country determines the actual
extent of its population. The number of people cannot
exceed the quantity of food, and this will not be
produced beyond the consumption. There are exceptions
to the rule; as in the case of the U. S. which
export food, and of the W. Indies which import it.

Both these exceptions however favor the supposition
that there has been an increase of the English
population: England adding latterly imported food
to its domestic stock, which at one period it diminished
by exportation. The question to be decided
is whether the quantity of food produced the true
measure of the population consuming it, be greater
or less now than heretofore.

In the savage state where wild animals are the
chief food, the population must be the thinnest.
Where reared ones are the chief food, as among the
Tartars, in a pastoral State, the number may be
much increased. In proportion as grain is substituted
for animal food a far greater increase may
take place. And as cultivated vegetables, & particularly
roots, enter into consumption, the mass of
subsistence being augmented, a greater number
of consumers, is necessarily implied.

Now, it will not be pretended, that there is at
present in England more of forest, and less of Cultivated
ground than in the feudal or even much later
periods. On the contrary it seems to be well understood
that the opened lands have been both enlarged
& fertilized; that bread has been substituted
for flesh; and that vegetables, particularly roots
have been more & more substituted for both. It
follows that the aggregate food raised & consumed
now, being greater than formerly, the number who
consume it, is greater also.

The Report to the Board of Agriculture quoted
by Mr. G. coincides with this inference. The

Animal food of an individual which is the smaller
part of it, requires, according to this authority, 2
acres of ground; all the other articles 1¾ of an acre
only. The report states that a horse requires four
acres. It is probable that an ox requires more, being
fed less on grain & more on Grass.

It may be said that Horses which are not eaten
are now used instead of oxen which were. But the
horse as noted is supported by fewer acres than the
ox; and the oxen superseded by the horses, form but
a small part of the eatable Stock to which they
belong. The inference therefore can at most be but
slightly qualified by this innovation.

The single case of Ireland ought to have warned
Mr. G. of the error he was maintaining. It Seems
to be agreed that the population there has greatly
increased of late years; altho' it receives very few
if any emigrants; and has sent out numbers, very
great numbers, as Mr. G. must suppose, to the U. S.

In denying the increase of the Amn. population,
from its own stock, he is driven to the most incredible
suppositions, to a rejection of the best established
facts, and to the most preposterous estimates
& calculations.

He ascribes the rapid increase attested by our
periodical lists, wholly to emigrations from Europe;
which obliged him to suppose that from 1790, to
1810 150 thousand persons were annually transported;
an extravagance which is made worse by
his mode of reducing the no. necessary to one half;
and he catches at little notices of remarkable numbers

landed at particular ports, in particular seasons;
as if these could be regarded as proofs of the average
arrivals for a long series of years, many of them
unfavorable for such transmigrations. In the year
1817, in which the emigrants were most numerous,
according to Seybert, they did not in the ten Principal
ports where with few if any exceptions they are
introduced, exceed 22,240; little more than 1/7 of the
average annually assumed.

Were it even admitted that our population is the
result altogether of emigrations from Europe, what
wd. Mr. G. gain by it?

The Census for 1820 is not yet compleated. There
is no reason however, to doubt that it will swell our
numbers to about ten millions. In 1790 the population
was not quite four millions. Here then has
been an increase of six millions. Of these six five
millions will have been drawn from the population
of G. B. & Ireland. Have the numbers there been
reduced accordingly? Then they must have been
30 years ago, greater by 5 millions than at this time.
Has the loss been replaced? Then, as it has not
been by emigrants, it must have been by an effect
of the great principle in question. Mr. G. may
take his choice of the alternatives.

It is worth remarking that N. England which has
sent out such continued swarms to other parts of
the Union for a number of years, has continued
at the same time, as the Census shews to increase
in population, altho' it is well known that it has
recd. comparatively very few emigrants from any

quarter; these preferring places less inhabited for
the same reason that determines the course of migrations
from N. England.

The appeal to the case of the black population
in the U. S. was particularly unfortunate for the
reasoning of Mr. G. to which it gives the most striking
falsification.

Between the years 1790 & 1810 the number of
slaves increased from 694,280 to 1,165,441. This
increase at a rate nearly equal to that of the Whites,
surely was not produced by emigrants from Africa.
Nor could any part of it have been imported, (except
30 or 40,000[22] into S. Carolina & Georgia,) the prohibition
being every where strictly enforced throughout
that period. Louisiana indeed brought an addition
amounting in 1810 to 37,671. This n°.
however (to be reduced by the slaves carried thither
from other States prior to 1810) may be regarded
as overbalanced by emancipated blacks & their
subsequent offspring. The whole number of this
description in the Census of 1810, amounts to 186,446.

The evidence of a natural and rapid increase
of the Blacks in the State of Virginia is alone
conclusive on the subject. Since the Epoch of Independence
the importation of slaves has been uniformly
prohibited, and the spirit of the people concurring
with the policy of the law, it has been carried
fully into execution. Yet the number of slaves
increased from 292,627 in 1790 to 392,518 in 1810;

altho' it is notorious that very many have been
carried from the State by external purchases and
migrating masters. In the State of Maryland to the
North of Virginia whence alone it could be surmised
that any part of them could be replaced, there has
been also an increase.

Mr. G. exults not a little (p. 420—2) in the detection
of error in a paper read by Mr. W. Barton
in 1791 to the Philosophical Society at Phild.a. I
have not looked for the paper; but from the account
of it given by Mr. G. a strange error was committed
by Mr. B. not however in the false arithmetic blazoned
by Mr. G., but by adding the number of deaths
to that of births in deducing the Productiveness
of marriages in a certain Parish in Massachusetts.
But what is not less strange than the lapsus of Mr.
B. is that his critic should overlook the fact on the
face of the paper as inserted in his own Page, that
the population of the Parish had doubled in 54 years,
in spite of the probable removals from an old parish
to newer settlements; And what is strangest of all,
that he should not have attended to the precise statement
in the record, that the number of births within
the period exceeded the number of deaths, by the
difference between 2,247 and 1,113. Here is the
most demonstrable of all proofs of an increasing
population unless a Theoretical zeal should suppose
that the Pregnant women in the neighbourhood
made lying in visits to Hingham, or that its sick
inhabitants chose to have their dying eyes closed
elsewhere.

Mr. G. has not respected other evidence in his
hands, which ought to have opened his eyes to the
reality of an increasing population in the U. S. In
the population list of Sweden, in the authenticity
of which he fully acquiesces as well as in the Census
of the U. S. the authenticity of which he does not
controvert, there is a particular column for those
under ten years of Age. In that of Sweden, the
number is to the whole population, as 2,484 to
10,000 which is less than 1/4. In that of the U. S. the
number is as 2,016,704 to 5,862,096, which is more
than 1/3. Now Mr. G. refers (p. 442) to the proportion
of the ungrown to the whole population, as testing
the question of its increase. He admits & specifies
the rate at which the population of Sweden increases.
And yet with this evidence of a greater increase
of the population of the U. S. he contends that it
does not increase at all. An attempt to extricate
himself by a disproportion of children or of more
productive parents emigrating from Europe, would
only plunge him the deeper into contradictions &
absurdities.

Mr. G. dwells on the Indian Establishment at
Paraguay by the Jesuits, which is said not to have
increased as a triumphant disproof of the prolific
principle. He places more faith in the picture of
the establishment given by Raynal than is due to
the vivid imagination of that Author, or than the
Author appears to have had in it himself. For he
rejects the inference of Mr. G. and reconciles the
failure to increase with the power to increase by

assigning two causes for the failure; the small-pox,
and the exclusion of individual Property. And he
might have found other causes, in the natural love
of indolence till overcome by avarice & vanity
motives repressed by their religious discipline; in
the pride of the men, retaining a disdain of agricultural
labour; and in the female habit of prolonging
for several years the period of keeping children
to the breast. In no point of view can a case
marked by so many peculiar circumstances & these
so imperfectly known, be allowed the weight of a
precedent.

Mr. G. could not have given a stronger proof of
the estrangement of his ideas from the Indian character
& modes of life than by his referring to the
Missouri Tribes, which do not multiply, "altho'
they cultivate corn." His fancy may have painted
to him fields of Wheat, cultivated by the Plough &
gathered into Barns, as a provision for the year.
How wd. he be startled at the sight of little patches
of Maize & squashes, stirred by a piece of Wood,
and that by the Squaws only; the hunters & warriors
spurning such an occupation, & relying on the
fruits of the Chase for the support of their Wigwams?
"Corn Eaters" is a name of reproach given by some
tribes to others beginning under the influence of the
Whites to enlarge their cultivated spots.

In going over Mr. Gs. volume, these are some of the
remarks which occurred; and in thanking you for it,
I have made them supply the want of more interesting
materials for a letter. If the heretical Work

should attract conversations in which you may be
involved, some of the facts, which you are saved the
trouble of hunting up, may rebut misstatements
from misinformed friends or illiberal opponents of
our Country.

You have not mentioned the cost of Godwin's
book or the pamphlet of Mr. Rigby. I suspect that
they overgo the remnant of the little fund in your
hands. If so let me provide for it. You will oblige
me also by forwarding with its cost, the Book Entitled
"The apocryphal New Testament translated
from the Original Tongues," "printed for Wm. Hone
Ludgate Hill."