Mill on Poverty, Population and Poor Relief

Abstract

This paper analyses the views of Bentham, Malthus, and Mill, on poverty, population, and poor relief, in order to investigate the influence of the two former on the latter. It argues that all three shared two basic assumptions which led them to frame a similar problem. Mill, like Bentham, and unlike Malthus, defended the public provision of relief to indigence on utilitarian grounds, while his position on the conditions of that relief was impeccably Benthamic. However, Bentham’s poor plan was itself premised, in the absence of perceived population pressure, on deliberate expansion of both population and of subsistence, while Mill had absorbed Malthus’s lesson that restriction on growth of population was the pre-requisite for improvement in the material condition of the labouring poor. For Mill, the legislative imposition in 1834 of the conditions of relief envisaged by Bentham as deterrents to unjust claims, served to rescue the poor laws from Malthus’s fears of their effect in encouraging irresponsible procreation.