Robert Wallace on Population and Utopian Government

The two writers whose visions of a utopian future for humanity Malthus chiefly sought to puncture through his principle of population were Godwin and Condorcet. The objection Malthus had to both was that the prosperous and egalitarian society they envisaged would be undermined by the population growth it brought about. As Malthus himself acknowledged, this was not a novel argument: in the second (1803) edition of the Essay, he listed the authors from whom he had “deduced the principle”—David Hume, Robert Wallace, Adam Smith, and Richard Price. Wallace, the closest among these four to being a Utopian thinker, explicitly saw population growth as clouding the future: unlimited increase would impair prosperity, but efforts by the society to curtail it would require “cruel and unnatural customs.”Wallace's views of Utopia are set out in his book Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and Providence, published in 1761. There are twelve “prospects” in all. The first is titled “A general view of the imperfections of human society, and of the sources from whence they flow”; the second presents a “model of a perfect government”; the third investigates the feasibility of this model; and the fourth adduces the proposition “The preceding model of government, tho' consistent with the human passions and appetites, is upon the whole inconsistent with the circumstances of mankind upon the Earth.” The remaining prospects go further into the natural world, the nature of happiness, and the afterlife. Prospects I and IV are excerpted below.Under a perfect government, “poverty, idleness, and war [would be] banished; the earth made a paradise; universal friendship and concord established, and human society rendered flourishing in all respects.” Yet paradoxically, such a society would be overturned “not by the vices of men, or their abuse of liberty, but by the order of nature itself.” This objection is enough to defeat the “airy systems” of the Utopians. Wallace calls for a middle way for government and society, “to set just bounds to every thing according to its nature, and to adjust all things in due proportion to one another.” He writes: “it is more contrary to just proportion, to suppose that such a perfect government should be established in such circumstances, than that by permitting vice, or the abuse of liberty in the wisdom of providence, mankind should never be able to multiply so greatly as to overstock the earth.”Wallace was born in Edinburgh in 1697 and died there in 1771. He was a presbyterian minister who held various offices in the Church of Scotland. In addition to the Prospects, his other major works were Characteristics of the Present Political State of Great Britain (1758) and Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind in Antient and Modern Times (1753). The latter included a vigorous rejoinder to Hume's argument (in his Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, published the preceding year) that the classical world was not more populous than the present. Wallace's argument for the populousness of ancient nations supported the view earlier put by Montesquieu—who arranged for a French translation of Wallace's book.Modern editions of Wallace's writings appear in the series Reprints of Economic Classics published by Augustus M. Kelley, New York.