DOES not the fact that all of the things which furnish
man's subsistence have the power to multiply many fold
— some of them many thousand fold, and some of them
many million or even billion fold — while he is
only doubling his numbers, show that, let human beings
increase to the full extent of their reproductive power,
the increase of population can never exceed subsistence?
This is clear when it is remembered that though in the
vegetable and animal kingdoms each species, by virtue of
its reproductive power, naturally and necessarily presses
against the conditions which limit its further increase,
yet these conditions are nowhere fixed and final. No
species reaches the ultimate limit of soil, water, air,
and sunshine; but the actual limit of each is in the
existence of other species, its rivals, its enemies, or
its food. Thus the conditions which limit the existence
of such of these species as afford him subsistence man
can extend (in some cases his mere appearance will extend
them), and thus the reproductive forces of the species
which supply his wants, instead of wasting themselves
against their former limit, start forward in his service
at a pace which his powers of increase cannot rival. If
he but shoot hawks, food-birds will increase: if he but
trap foxes the wild rabbits will multiply; the bumble bee
moves with the pioneer, and on the organic matter with
which man's presence fills the rivers, fishes feed.
— Progress & Poverty — Book II, Chapter
3: Population and Subsistence: Inferences from
Analogy
IF bears instead of men had been shipped from Europe
to the North American continent, there would now be no
more bears than in the time of Columbus, and possibly
fewer, for bear food would not have been increased nor
the conditions of bear life extended, by the bear
immigration, but probably the reverse. But within the
limits of the United States alone, there are now
forty-five millions of men where then there were only a
few hundred thousand, and yet there is now within that
territory much more food per capita for the forty-five
millions than there was then for the few hundred
thousand. It is not the increase of food that has caused
this increase of men; but the increase of men that has
brought about the increase of food. There is more food,
simply because there are more Man. — Progress &
Poverty — Book II, Chapter 3: Population and
Subsistence: Inferences from Analogy
TWENTY men working together will, where nature is
niggardly, produce more than twenty times the wealth that
one man can produce where nature is most bountiful. The
denser the population the more minute becomes the
subdivision of labor, the greater the economies of
production and distribution, and, hence, the very reverse
of the Malthusian doctrine is true; and, within the
limits in which we have any reason to suppose increase
would still go on, in any given state of civilization a
greater number of people can produce a larger
proportionate amount of wealth and more fully supply
their wants, than can a smaller number. — Progress
& Poverty — Book II, Chapter 4: Population and
Subsistence: Disproof of the Malthusian Theory ...
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