20 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
thereby, because the forces of which they are the effect are con- stantly increasing in potency.
In Malthus' time the great economic problem was to find food to fill the mouths of the hungry. His solution of it was simple but not profound. He knew nothing of the resources of science nor of the powers of invention as economic factors. He simply assumed that the capacity to produce was a known quan- tity of the problem, because he saw that nature plus human effort was capable of producing only a certain amount. Con- vinced that this amount was distinctly and increasingly less than the sum of human needs, or rather assuming it without anything like a thorough and exhaustive examination of the facts, he addressed himself to the other branch of the subject and con- sidered how consumption might be lessened. There did not seem to be hope of reducing the individual ration which, with the poor of the time at least, was not capable of much reduc- tion. So he formulated that other feature of his philosophy which has been so extravagantly praised and so absurdly denounced, to wit : the means by which population may be restricted. Given a continually increasing deficit of food pro- duction, he sought to avoid its consequences by restricting the natural demand through legislative action and moral restraint. The problem we face to-day is a curious converse of that he set himself to solve. It is the prospect of a steadily growing sur- plus of production, with its naturally depressing effects on prices and inevitable over-supply of labor. As he assumed that the supply could not be augmented so as to meet the growing dis- parity with the demand, we may now assume that there can be no immediate extension of demand likely to materially lessen the present inequality between production and consumption.
What then is to be done ? The only logical answer is, to restrict production.
Two methods have been suggested for effecting this : First, that of the trade-unionists, who seek to secure the result by limiting the hours of productive labor. Second, that of the socialistic theorists, who seek to limit the area of productive
