Sir Matthew Hale on the Gradual Increase of Mankind

Abstract

The simple depiction of geometric population growth checked by famine and disease that achieved fame or notoriety through Malthus's First Essay of 1798 was anticipated in the work of a number of other writers. Some of these predecessors Malthus acknowledged in the preface to his much‐enlarged Second Essay of 1803: Montesquieu, Benjamin Franklin, James Steuart, Arthur Young, and Joseph Townsend. Other names could be added to such a list: Giovanni Botero perhaps most notably, in the late sixteenth century. Another name, less well known in this context, would also warrant notice: Sir Matthew Hale.Hale (1609–1676) was a prominent English jurist, chief justice under Charles II, and author of some classic legal treatises, among them A History and Analysis of the common Law of England (1713). On the side, he also wrote (as he says) “at leisure and broken times, and with great intervals, and many times hastily,” a study of the peopling of the world titled The Primitive origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature. Internal evidence dates this book's composition to the 1660s; it was published in London in 1677, the year after Hale's death, and has not been reprinted (aside from a part of it that was included, under the title “Essay on Population,” as an appendix to George Chalmers's Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great Britain (1782)). Excerpts from three chapters, discussing population growth and positive checks to it, are reprinted below, with minor modernization of spelling and punctuation.Hale's idiosyncratic aim was to demonstrate that humans had a beginning—that they had not always existed—and that the course of population growth accorded with the Bible's account of Noah's descendants. The Primitive Origination adduces a broad range of “natural and moral evidences” bearing on this topic. It vividly illustrates the still‐easy coexistence in the seventeenth century of argument based on classical or scriptural authority with one based on evidence and experience. Hale's main support is the former (most of the omitted sections of the excerpts below are lengthy recitations of classical texts), but he is clearly pleased to be able to bring statistics to buttress his case—whether from the Domesday Book on population distribution in medieval England, from back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations of net reproduction, or from Graunt's empirical findings on mortality. (On Graunt's Observations upon the Bills of Mortality (1662), noted as “lately printed,” Hale remarks that it gives “a greater demonstration of the Gradual Increase of Mankind upon the face of the Earth, than a hundred notional arguments can either evince or confute.”) At the same time, he is broadly credulous of the classical authors (Plato on Atlantis perhaps an exception) and appears to accept the chronology and bizarre longevities contained in the biblical narrative.Hale's book is cited approvingly by Sir William Petty in his Essay concerning the Multiplication of Mankind (1686) and may have influenced Petty's own treatment of his subject. A century later, Malthus seems not to have known of it—or perhaps, as social scientist, scorned to recognize what was primarily a work of apologetics.