So the land’s current yield of consumer goods more than suffices to feed the population, as is proven by low grain prices; this yield is capable of an extraordinary increase; its consumption has grown comparatively smaller; products from abroad will still be the reward for our hard work, and will always be so; artificial needs are satisfied more easily on a daily basis, and yet should Europe not feed its children because that is asking too much? Should overpopulation be imminent or already here? Overpopulation? Where soil and human effort produce more than is used? Never can such contradictions be united.
“But with all this you do not explain this misery and poverty, which you are in no position to deny!” But that is not what I want [to explain] thereby, rather I [want to] prove that the surplus of population cannot be the root of the evil. It cannot be this, because we are still far from having a situation in which all sources of assistance are exhausted, used to the greatest extent possible, or even made fully accessible. Consequently, the disturbing condition that all of us are lamenting may be described not as a condition of overpopulation, but as an inability to provide for basic needs [Nahrungslosigkeit]. This is not another name for the same thing, there is a very big difference; from the moment we acknowledge the condition as such, we are liberated from the terrible (and hardly achievable) task of working toward reducing the population or at least preventing its increase. We are dealing rather with the search for circumstances that prevent the existing, still too small population from developing all the powers at its disposal to the fullest and most successful extent possible. In order to remedy an evil, one needs at the very outset to become acquainted with its cause. In order to counteract this inability to provide for basic needs [Nahrungslosigkeit], one has to have found its sources. And, truly, in our highly cultivated states, one need not search far to identify active causes that bring about the impoverishment of numerous classes of the people with far greater certainty than an increase in the popular multitude. What’s astonishing is not that poverty exists, but that it is not greater.
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