This Fourth of July weekend, it’s worth remembering one of the earliest significant contributions Americans made to global intellectual debate, pointing out the value of the American experience and how it has opened up new perspectives.
Benjamin Franklin wrote the Declaration of Independence, first drafted in 1751, 21 years before he signed it.Observations on the increase of humanityHe talked about what he learned about the population growth of the American colonies through his work as postmaster.
“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, soon become a colony of foreigners who Germanize us instead of us Anglicizing them?”
Franklin had already made his name in Europe as a physicist by consolidating knowledge of electricity into a coherent whole (for example, by giving names to positive and negative charges). The previous year, he had made himself a global hero by publishing for free (and could have charged royalties for) his plans for an improved, sharp lightning rod, a huge boon to mankind that greatly reduced the frequency of churches, sailing ships, and other noble edifices burning down.
By 1755, European thinkers were ready to take notice of America’s new thesis. Franklin estimated that natural increase alone (births minus deaths, not including immigration) was causing the population of the American colonies to double every 20 or 25 years. This was a shock to Old World thinkers, who had tended to assume that human perfection and vitality naturally declined from generation to generation, like a Xerox copy of an old book, from the Golden Age to the Silver Age to the current Brass Age.
In contrast, Franklin suggested that the main reason for slow growth in Europe was that the population was nearly full, but in the relatively sparsely populated America, cheap land and high wages meant that more Americans could afford to marry at a younger age and have more children.
Over the next century, this empirical discovery and simple explanation had a profound influence on later European theorists such as Thomas Malthus, who adopted the concept of the “struggle for existence” from Franklin, and Charles Darwin, who adopted the concept from Malthus.
Malthus’s 1798 revision of this theory has deservedly earned a gloomy reputation. Speaking from the perspective of a rapidly industrializing Britain, Malthus predicted that famine, disease, and war would eventually cause rapid population growth to plateau.
It’s worth noting that Franklin’s original stance was much more optimistic: he essentially said that the US didn’t need to worry about such a cap, at least not yet.
The political background to Franklin’s work of genius is intriguingly relevant. “Observations” was perhaps America’s first restrictionist pamphlet. As a leading member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin sought to weaken the influence of the Proprietor Party, which defended the political and property rights of the Penn family, the colony’s hereditary proprietors. The Proprietor Party was in favor of immigration, and in particular supported the importation of German Pietists.
Franklin was wary of such diversity.
And the English contingent sent from England to America will soon fill up the settlements at home and will increase greatly here. Why should we allow the Boers of the Palatinate to flood into our settlements, and, by swarming, to displace our language and customs and establish their own? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by Englishmen, become a colony of foreigners, who will soon increase, and who, instead of us anglicizing them, will Germanize us, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than we will ever acquire our color.
Franklin argued that Americans were sufficiently fertile that there was little need for this early mass population replacement. So why bring forward the date of the Malthusian ceiling?
However, these “strangers” had one quality that outweighed all of Franklin’s concerns about assimilation: they tended to vote for the Monopoly Party.
