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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