In Chapter VI. of Book IV. Mr. Malthus treats of the effects of the
knowledge of the principal cause of poverty on Civil Liberty, observing
at the outset that it may appear to some that a doctrine which
attributes the greatest part of the sufferings of the lower classes of
society exclusively to themselves, is unfavorable to the cause of
liberty, affording, it may be said, a tempting opportunity to
governments of oppressing their subjects at pleasure, and laying all the
blame on the improvident habits of the poor. Our author contends that,
on the other hand, the pressure of distress on the lower classes of
people, with the habit of attributing the distress to their rulers,
appears to him to be the rock of defence, the castle and the guardian
spirit of despotism, affording as it does to the tyrant the unanswerable
plea of necessity.
“The patriot who might be called upon by the love of his country to join
with heart and hand in a rising of the people for some specific
attainable object or reform, if he knew that they were enlightened
respecting their own situation, and would stop short when they had
attained their demand, would be called upon by the same motion to submit
to very great opposition rather than give the slightest countenance to a
popular tumult, the members of which, at least the greatest number of
them, were persuaded that the destruction of the Parliament, the Lord
Mayor, and the monopoly would make bread cheap, and that a revolution
would enable them all to support their families. In this case it is more
the ignorance and delusion of the lower classes of people that occasions
the oppression, than the actual disposition of the government to
tyranny.”
Mr. Malthus observes that the circulation of Paine’s Rights of Man was
said to have done great mischief among the lower and middle classes in
this country: and that might be true; but that was because Mr. Paine in
many important points had shown himself totally unacquainted with the
structure of society, and the different moral effects to be expected
from the physical difference between this country and America. Mobs of
the same description as those collections of people known by that name
in Europe could not at that day exist in America. The number of people
without property was, then, at that time, from the physical state of the
country, comparatively small: and therefore the civil power which was
needed to protect property, did not require to be so large. Mr. Paine
argued that the real cause of riots was always want of happiness, and
maintained that such was always due to something being wrong in the
system of Government. But this is evidently not always the case. The
redundant population of an old state furnishes materials for
unhappiness, unknown to such a state of that of America.
Nothing would so effectually counteract the mischief caused by Mr.
Paine’s Rights of Man (says our author), as a general knowledge of our
true rights. “What these rights are, it is not now my business to
explain: but there is one right which man has generally been thought to
possess, which I am confident he neither does nor can possess, a right
to subsistence when his labor will not fairly purchase it. Our laws (in
1806) indeed say that he has this right, and bind the society to furnish
employment and food to them who cannot get them in the regular market;
but in so doing they attempt to reverse the laws of nature; and it is in
consequence to be expected, not only that they should fail in their
object, but that the poor who were intended to be benefited should
suffer most cruelly from this inhuman deceit which is practised upon
them.”
Malthus adds that the Abbé Raynal had said that before all other social
laws, man has a right to subsistence. “He might just as well have said
that every man had a right to live 100 years. Yes! He has a right to do
so, if he can. Good social laws enable truly a greater number of people
to exist than could without them; but neither before nor since the
institution of social laws can an unlimited number exist. Consequently,
as it is impossible to feed all that might be born, it is disgraceful to
promise to do so.
“If the great truths on these subjects were more generally circulated,
and the lower classes could be convinced that by the laws of nature,
independently of any particular institution, except the great one of
property, which is absolutely necessary in order to attain any
considerable produce, no person has any claim or _right_ on society for
subsistence, if his labor will not purchase it, the greatest part of the
mischievous declamation on the unjust institutions of society would fall
powerless to the ground. If the real causes of their misery were shown
to the poor, and they were taught to know how small a part of their
present distress was attributable to government, discontent would be far
less common.
“Again—Remove all fear from the tyranny or folly of the people, and the
tyranny of government could not stand a moment. It would then appear in
its proper deformity, without palliation, without pretext, without
protection.
“Good governments are chiefly useful to the poorer classes, by giving
them a clearer view of the necessity of some preventive check to
population. And in despotic governments it is usually found that the
checks to population arise more from the sickness and mortality
consequent on poverty, than from any such preventive check.”
Mr. Malthus contends that “the most successful supporters of tyranny are
without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of
the poor, and almost all the evils to which society is subject, to human
institutions and the iniquity of governments. The falsity of these
accusations, and the dreadful consequences that would result from their
being generally admitted and acted upon, make it absolutely necessary
that they should at all events be resisted: not only on account of the
immediate revolutionary horrors to be expected from a movement of the
people acting under such impressions, a consideration which must at all
times have very great weight, but on account of the extreme probability
that such a revolution would soon terminate in a much worse despotism
than that which it had destroyed. Whatever may be, therefore, the
intention of those indiscriminate accusations against governments, their
real effect undoubtedly is to add a weight of talents and principles to
the prevailing power which it would never have received otherwise.”
“Under a government constructed upon the best and purest principles, and
executed by men of the highest talents and integrity, the most squalid
poverty and wretchedness might universally prevail from an inattention
to the prudential check to population, and as this cause of unhappiness
has hitherto been so little understood, that the efforts of society have
always tended rather to aggravate than to lessen it, we have the
strongest reason for supposing that in all the governments with which we
are acquainted, a great part of the misery to be observed among the
lower classes of the people arises from this cause.”
The inference, therefore, which Mr. Godwin, and in latter days Mr.
Hyndman and the Democratic Federation, have drawn against governments
from the unhappiness of the people is palpably unfair, and before we
give a sanction to such accusations, it is a debt we owe to truth and
justice, to ascertain how much of this unhappiness arises from the
principle of population, and how much is fairly to be attributed to
government. When this distinction has been properly made, and all the
vague, indefinite, and false accusations removed, government would
remain, as it ought to be, clearly responsible for the rest, and the
amount of this would still be such as to make the responsibility very
considerable. “Though government has but little power in the direct
relief of poverty, yet its indirect influences on the prosperity of its
subjects is striking and incontestible. And the reason is, that though
it is comparatively impotent in its efforts to make the food of a
country keep pace with an unrestricted increase of population, yet its
influence is great in giving the best direction to those checks, which
in some form or other must necessarily take place.”
The first great requisite, says Mr. Malthus, to the growth of prudential
habits is the perfect security of property, and the next perhaps is that
respectability and importance which is given to the lower classes by
equal laws, and the possession of some influence in the framing of them.
The more excellent, then, is the government, the more does it tend to
generate that prudence and elevation of sentiment by which alone in the
present state of our being can poverty be avoided.
Mr. Malthus was greatly opposed to despotic government; and he remarks
that it has been sometimes asserted, that the only reason why it is
advantageous that the people should have some share in the government,
is that a representation of the people tends best to secure the framing
of good and equal laws; but that if the same object could be obtained
under a despotism, the same advantage would accrue to the community. If,
however, the representative system, by securing to the lower classes of
society a more equal and liberal mode of treatment from their superiors,
gives to each individual a greater personal respectability and a greater
fear of personal degradation, it is evident that it will powerfully
co-operate with the security of property in animating the exertions of
industry, and in generating habits of prudence, and thus more powerfully
tend to increase the riches and prosperity of the lower classes of the
community, than if the same laws had existed under a despotism.
But, says our author, though the tendency of a free constitution and a
good government to diminish poverty is certain, yet its effect in this
way must necessarily be indirect and slow, and very different from the
immediate and direct relief which the lower classes of people are too
frequently in the habit of looking forward to as the consequences of a
revolution. This habit of expecting too much, and the irritation
occasioned by disappointment, continually give a wrong direction to
their efforts in favor of liberty, and continually tend to defeat the
accomplishment of those gradual reforms in government, and that slow
amelioration of the lowest classes of society, which are really
attainable.
The following passage might be well studied in these days of proposed
schemes for land confiscation and communism. “It is of the very highest
importance, therefore, to know distinctly what government cannot do, as
well as what it can do. If I were called upon to name the cause which,
in my conception, had more than any other contributed to the very slow
progress of freedom, so disheartening to every liberal mind, I should
say that it was the confusion that had existed respecting the causes of
the unhappiness and discontent which prevail in society; and the
advantage which governments had been able to take, and indeed had been
compelled to take, of this confusion, to confirm and strengthen their
power. I cannot help thinking, therefore, that a knowledge generally
circulated, that the principal cause of want and unhappiness is only
indirectly connected with government, and totally beyond its power to
remove; and that it depends upon the conduct of the poor themselves,
would, instead of giving any advantage to government, give a great
additional weight to the popular side of the question, by removing the
danger with which from ignorance it is at present accompanied; and these
tend in a very powerful manner to promote the cause of rational
freedom.”
Mr. J. S. Mill, who was more of a Socialist than Mr. Malthus and a
greater optimist, admits that it would be possible for the State to
ensure employment at ample wages to all that are born. But, he adds, if
it does this, it is bound in self-protection, and for every purpose for
which the State exists, to see that no one should be born without its
consent. That is, he seems to favor the framing of a statute directed
against the production of large families.
In suggesting that it would be possible for the State to ensure
employment at ample wages to all that are born, if it only takes care
that too many shall not be born, Mr. Mill differs a good deal from Mr.
Malthus and from many of the _laissez faire_ economists of the school of
Adam Smith. Persons who are great admirers of individual liberty
confound, as is very often the case, the idea of freedom with that of
the right to do wrong. It is quite clear that if in an old country, such
as any of the European States, all classes of society were to engender
as many children as is now done by the poorest and most thoughtless
members, poverty would become as universal as it formerly was, when
mankind were less civilised and had a very low standard of comfort. Mr.
Mill and those who follow him in this contention, among whom is to be
reckoned the author of the “Elements of Social Science,” affirm that,
although it is quite true that a grown-up man or woman should be
perfectly free to live his or her own life so far as relates to
self-regarding actions, it is a confusion of ideas to style the bringing
into life of another human being, an act purely self-regarding. When a
country is over-peopled, or threatened with that greatest of all
calamities, the production, it is held by these able writers, of more
than a very small number of children by any couple is a gross offence
against all who gain their living by toil, since the over-crowding of a
country with human beings makes it very difficult for those at the
bottom of society to get enough even of the coarsest food for themselves
and their families, whilst life is rendered harder for all who have to
gain it by services of any kind. The number of children to a family
among the richer classes in France appears now to be on an average not
quite two to a _family_: whereas the poorer classes in Paris and some of
the less thoughtful districts of France have families of more than six
on an average. London now exhibits the notable fact that, whereas in the
comfortable parishes of Kensington, St. George Hanover Square, St. James
Westminster, and Hampstead, the birth-rate in 1886 was not much above 21
per 1000 inhabitants annually; in the poor parishes of Shoreditch,
Bethnal Green, St. George in the East, and Whitechapel the birth-rate
was 38·6 per 1000 in that year, _i.e._, nearly twice as many children
are born of 1000 persons in the poor quarters as in the rich. As a
consequence of this, the death-rate in the East End is to that in the
West End as 3 to 2. Mr. Mill, and in this I entirely concur with him,
thinks that the State can and ought to discourage the production of
large families by some social stigma, and the author of the “Elements of
Social Science” thinks that some fine might be the penalty for the
production of more than four children by any married pair. This he looks
upon as a far juster way of checking rapid birth-rates than the
Continental plan of preventing the poorest persons from marrying, since
it is not marriage, he observes, but the production of large families,
that the State ought to endeavor to guard against. The mere discussion
in the House of Commons of such a proposition would do an immense deal
of good in this and in all European States, since the poorer classes are
generally anxious enough to do their duty, if they only knew what that
duty was. Of course any penalty for the production of a large family
should fall equally on the rich and the poor, since the miseries
inflicted by the well-to-do parent, who produces a large family, on his
helpless and innocent offspring, in the shape of life-long celibacy, may
fairly be compared with the want of food which such conduct causes among
the poor. And any penalty ought to be very small, because, if not so,
persons might be led to practise criminal abortion or infanticide,
practices most inimical to the welfare and even the existence of
society.
The existence of the Malthusian theory of population was greatly
obscured during the greater part of this century by the writings of the
Free Traders, many of whom, in common with the illustrious leaders of
the movement, Messrs. Cobden and Bright, thought that by means of the
free importation of food, poverty might be entirely put an end to. It
was said by some of the most enthusiastic speakers against the Corn
Laws, that if they were but abolished, the workhouses would soon
disappear; and the United Kingdom would be filled with a numerous and
contented population. This shows how little these eminent men had
considered the immense power of multiplication of the human race. As Mr.
Malthus said, the power of increasing production is, to the power of
reproduction, as the speed of a tortoise is to that of a hare. The
tortoise can only overtake the hare if the swifter animal fall asleep.
Hence, free trade, however admirable in itself, has but little influence
on the life of the poorest inhabitants of an over-crowded country. The
share they get of the productions of the world will always be most
meagre, so long as they increase so rapidly in number by producing
families of ten or fifteen children, and thus courting the positive
check of the lower animals.
Soon after Mr. Malthus wrote his essay, it began to be noticed that in
France families were much smaller, among the respectable classes, than
they were in England; and Mr. Francis Place wrote a pamphlet in which he
pointed this out and recommended the plan in place of the preventive
check of late marriages. His pamphlet and remarks had much influence on
the celebrated Robert Owen, and it is said that the latter
philanthropist made known Place’s views to his workmen at New Lanark, in
Scotland, and it was on that account that that famous socialistic
experiment succeeded so well. Mr. Robert Dale Owen, son of Robert Owen,
emigrated to the United States and was ambassador to Europe from that
country for some years. His pamphlet entitled “Moral Physiology” was a
most eloquent plea for parental prudence, or early marriages and small
families. That pamphlet was written subsequently to one written by Mr.
Richard Carlile, entitled “Every Woman’s Book,” and also to Dr. Charles
Knowlton of Boston’s work, written in 1833, entitled the “Fruits of
Philosophy.”
This last work, in company with those of Owen, Carlile, and Austin
Holyoake, which last was called “Large and Small Families,” were sold
openly for some forty years in London and elsewhere, chiefly by the
Secular party. In the year 1876, the “Fruits of Philosophy” was attacked
as an obscene publication under a new Act of Parliament, called “Lord
Campbell’s Act,” and a Bristol bookseller named Cook was sentenced to
two years’ imprisonment for selling it. Mr. Charles Watts, the London
publisher of the work, was also prosecuted; but, on his submission, he
was allowed to get free with the payment of costs. This did not suit the
views of the more chivalrous of the Secularist party, and accordingly
Mr. Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant, the leaders of that party
in England, issued the work again with a preface, and invited the
authorities to prosecute them. The “Fruits of Philosophy” was sold
openly at 28, Stonecutter Street, London, and as the City authorities
prosecuted, the case was sent up for trial to the Queen’s Bench, where
it was tried before the Lord Chief Justice Cockburn in June, 1877. The
details of this most interesting of all trials are to be found in a work
published by Mr. Charles Bradlaugh, which should be perused by all who
wish to understand how our liberties are gradually acquired. Mr.
Bradlaugh, in his admirable speech, maintained that the advocacy of all
checks to population is lawful, except such as advise the destruction of
the fœtus in utero, or the child after birth. The Lord Chief Justice
admitted the truth of the principle of population, and summed up most
favorably to the defendants; but the jury being quite new to the
question, gave the following verdict: “We are unanimously of opinion
that the book in question is calculated to deprave public morals; but at
the same time we entirely exonerate the defendants from any corrupt
motives in publishing it.” It turned out that the indictment was faulty;
and, on appeal to a higher court, the defendants were set free from the
fine and imprisonment imposed on them by Chief Justice Cockburn, which
he sentenced them to because they went on selling the pamphlet. In the
year 1877 the Malthusian League, a society for the propagation of
Malthusian literature, was inaugurated. In February, 1878, Mr. Edward
Truelove, bookseller, of Holborn, London, was prosecuted by the
authorities of the City of London, for the publication of the Hon. R. D.
Owen’s pamphlet “Moral Physiology,” and another pamphlet entitled
“Individual, Family, and National Poverty.” His case was admirably
defended by Mr. William Hunter, and Mr. Truelove was set free; but a
second trial took place shortly after this at the Old Bailey, and the
jury then gave a verdict of guilty, on which the judge sentenced the
defendant to a fine of £200 and a period of four months’ imprisonment.
Fortunately, Mr. Truelove’s health was excellent, and he supported his
period of imprisonment without injury, emerging from his prison a hero
to all those who understand the immense value of the cause for which he
suffered. No further trials have taken place of such works in London,
although Mrs. Annie Besant’s new pamphlet, the “Law of Population,” and
others have had a quite enormous sale of recent years. In the North of
England and in Scotland, there is still a remnant of the old persecuting
spirit, for a travelling hawker named Mr. Williamson has been imprisoned
at Goole and in Lincolnshire for selling Mrs. Besant’s pamphlet in 1887.
In the same year Dr. Henry Arthur Allbutt of Leeds, published a medical
work called “The Wife’s Handbook,” which gave details of how the size of
a family might be controlled by married people; and the Royal College of
Physicians of Edinburgh in 1887 summoned him in March to come up in
three months time, to show cause why he should not be deprived of his
diploma for this act of common humanity. A host of protests and
petitions were at once despatched to the Fellows of the College, showing
them the gross wickedness of this action of theirs; and the consequence
of this was that up to July, 1887, Dr. H. Arthur Allbutt had heard
nothing more of this atrocious persecution by the governing body of a
noble profession against one of its members for telling the poor how to
get rid of poverty. Hopes are entertained that not only may that body of
physicians withdraw its opposition to Dr. H. A. Allbutt’s work; but that
they may even see fit to act the generous part, and, whilst confessing
their error, ask for forgiveness from outraged humanity.
[Illustration]
APPENDIX.
At the Annual Meeting of the Malthusian League in May, 1887, held in
London at the South Place Institute, Finsbury, DR. CHARLES R. DRYSDALE,
President of the Malthusian League, read the Presidential Address, which
contained the following passages:—
To that objection to the Neo-Malthusian propaganda which is usually
successful with timid people, that incontinence would be increased if
the means recommended by New-Malthusians were adopted, Mr. Place says:
“I am of opinion it would not; so much depends on manners, that it seems
to be by no means an unreasonable expectation that, if these were so
improved as greatly to increase the prudential habits, and to encourage
the love of distinction, the master-spring of public prosperity, and if,
in consequence of the course recommended, all could marry early, there
would be less debauchery of any kind. An improvement in manners would be
an improvement in morals; and it seems absurd to suppose an increase of
vice with improved morals.”
Mr. James Mill, a friend of Mr. Place, writing also in 1820, (article
“Colony,” _Encyclop. Brit._) speaks of the question of checking
population rationally as “the most important practical problem to which
the wisdom of the politician and the moralist can be applied.” “If,” he
says, “the superstitions of the nursery were discarded, and the
principles of utility kept steadily in view, a solution might not be
difficult to be found, and the means of drying up one of the most
copious sources of human evil—a source which, if all other sources of
evil were taken away, would alone suffice to retain the great mass of
human beings in misery, might be seen to be neither doubtful nor
difficult to be applied.”
Mr. Francis Place and Mr. James Mill exhibited in these utterances one
of the qualities of true men of science—that is, they were enabled to
foretell truly what has taken place before the end of the century in
civilised countries like England and France. The truth of their
prophecies is shown in the fact that the inhabitants of France, who, at
the commencement of this century, had a birth-rate of 33 children
annually per 1000 of inhabitants, have now one of 26 per 1000; while the
West End of London shows a still lower birth-rate than this—in
Kensington of 20, in St. George, Hanover Square, of 19, and in Hampstead
Parish of 22 per 1000. In France, the low birth-rate is due, as every
intelligent person now knows, to Neo-Malthusian practices and not to
celibacy, for France contains, in every 1000 inhabitants, 140 married
women between the ages of fifteen and fifty, against 133 in this country
and under 128 in Prussia. This prudence among the French population,
since the time of the French Revolution, seems to have been due to a
certain extent to the acquisition of landed property by the masses of
the population, and also to the law of equal inheritance in France,
which prohibits parents from leaving their real or personal estates to
one person. The extreme desire to keep the land in the hands of a few
descendants has made the more respectable of the French peasants the
most careful of Europeans. Thus we find, from an essay by the late Dr.
Bertillon, that in the thirty departments of France where there are the
greatest number of proprietors of land, 285 per 1000 inhabitants, the
birth-rate is only 24·7, against 28·1 in those departments where there
are only 177 proprietors per 1000 of the population. The professional
classes in France are so thoughtful in regard to the number of children
they bring into the world, that they do not have quite two children
(1·75) to a family; whilst the average children to a family in France
does not exceed 3, against 5 in Germany, 4½ in England, 5¼ in Scotland,
and 5½ in poor and distressed Ireland. How true it is, then, what James
Mill and Mr. Francis Place predicted!
Universally we may say of modern Europeans, that the poorer classes are
less prudent in the size of their families; and, indeed, it has been
said by M. de Haussonville (“La vie et les salaires à Paris”) that the
number of children to a family in the poor quarters of Paris is three
times as great as it is in the rich quarters. The same story holds
nearly true in modern London since 1877—_i.e._, since the date of the
trial of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant; for the birth-rate
in Kensington is at present 20 per 1000, against 40 per 1000 in Bethnal
Green, a result which is yearly becoming due rather to small families in
the West End than to late marriages or celibacy, the old-fashioned
causes of lower birth-rates. The celebrated cases of “Regina _v._
Bradlaugh and Besant,” “Regina _v._ Edward Truelove,” and, at this
moment, of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh against the
esteemed and learned physician, Dr. H. A. Allbutt, of Leeds, who is
threatened by that body with expulsion from the list of its members,
because he has published, in a popular work of a practical character,
what has been said so many times, that large families lead to early
death, prostitution, and every horror to which mortality is subject,
have disclosed the fact that there is an idea strongly implanted in the
minds of the majority of mankind, that, if people in general knew,
especially at an early age, what any medical student knows as soon as he
commences to study anatomy and physiology, vice and profligacy would
immediately abound. This is, indeed, a strange idea. Civilisation
differs from savage life mainly in that civilised men know more of
nature than savages; but, just on that very account, civilised people
are more moral than savages. “It is impossible for us to understand,”
says M. Joseph Garnier, “how the counsels of marital prudence can lead
to the abolition of marriage and the debauchery of the young. Has not
prudence the effect of rendering the state of marriage more happy and
more attractive? Youth is encouraged to marriage more easily by the
example of prosperous and wisely managed households than by the example
of households crushed under the tortures of misery.” And M. Villermé,
one of the greatest writers on Health that this century has produced,
mentions that the workmen of La Croix Rouge, Lyons, had, in his day, an
average of only 3¼ children to a family; and that “these workmen were
the foremost in France for behavior and dignity of character.” “The
question is,” says a distinguished Vice-President of the Malthusian
League, Mr. Van Houten, Deputy at the Hague, “whether morality can
demand that a married couple shall have offspring immediately after
their marriage; that constantly, as soon as the mother, after giving
birth to one, is able, a second one should at once succeed the first.
The question is, whether those less blessed with worldly goods must
restrain their desires and remain celibates, because they are unable,
while following the traditional morality, to provide for a family? Or
whether those whose inclination for one another, or whose trust in the
future was too great when their expectations proved deceptive, must be
condemned, in the name of morality, to procreate children who will be
insufficiently fed, tended and educated, and can never become energetic
citizens, or who, if sickly, are born only to descend speedily to the
grave, to be succeeded by others equally unfortunate.” Mr. Van Houten
truly says: “An end must be put to our ignorance of physiology. Everyone
ought to _know_; and it must be left to his own requirements and to his
own judgment what use he will make of his knowledge.”
How dangerous such superstitions as those referred to by Mr. Van Houten
are to the happiness of mankind is best seen in the old civilisations of
Hindostan and China. Owing to certain strange doctrines in those
countries as to the importance of children as a religious duty, the
unfortunate Hindoo people are so terribly over-peopled that a man will
work hard for wages equivalent to six shillings a month. The most
learned of Italian medical writers on health, Senator Paulo Mantegazza,
mentions that his work was placed on the Index by the Pope of Rome in
1863, because he had ventured to recommend to persons afflicted with
hereditary disease, such as insanity or epilepsy, or to excessively poor
people, to marry but to have as few children as possible. When two human
beings (says that author) love each other, and yet from the bad health
of one or both of them there is every likelihood that diseased children
will result, is it a greater fault to engender epileptic, insane, or
scrofulous children, or to prevent such births? Or when, from the
excessive increase of the family itself, human beings are brought into
the world almost inexorably condemned to hunger, to degradation, to
disease, is it a greater sin to limit the number of children or to
increase the sufferings of the human family? What reply ought we to
give? Whilst the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh is displaying
to the denizens of the end of the 19th century, an amount of ignorance
and conventional bigotry which will be incredible to the next
generation, it is remarkable that what is usually considered the most
benighted Church in Christendom, the Holy Catholic Apostolic Roman
Church, has latterly shown evident signs of admitting that
Neo-Malthusian practices, which are so habitually made use of in France,
must at least be acknowledged to be morally innocent. Thus, in 1870, the
Vatican Council was implored by a French priest, Dr. Friedrich, to
reconsider its judgment on conjugal prudence: “and not to cause the
damnation of so many millions of souls by letting the directors
(confessors) lay upon their consciences, commands or prohibitions
impossible to observe. It will be our duty (he exclaims) to search in
the holy books alone for condemnation of the act in question; if it be
found to be forbidden neither by the decalogue nor by the other laws of
God contained in Holy Writ, nor by the apostles, nor by the commands of
the Church assembled in Council General, nor by the Pope speaking _ex
cathedrâ_, we shall say it (conjugal prudence) cannot be condemned by
anyone.” Dr. Friedrich continues: “A learned and holy devotee of a very
austere Order says: ‘I have studied this case with all the powers of my
intelligence and of my conscience, and I have come to this formal
conviction, that we are on the wrong track. To my mind, this act is
enormously below the smallest mortal sin, and it is enormously lessened
by all the motives that provoke it, real motives of health, even of
interest, of family, &c.’” Lastly, he informs us that Rome has enjoined
on confessors to question very little and to dwell as little as possible
upon this subject. Surely, after this, the Royal College of Physicians
of Edinburgh might hesitate! What Rome has done, other churches might
surely do; and I am pleased to say that many excellent members of the
English Establishment are inclined to side with the Malthusian League in
its earnest recommendation to all classes of the community to replace
the heartrending positive checks to population—war, pestilence, and
famine—and the torturing agonies of prolonged celibacy, which Dr.
Bertillon’s statistics show to be so inimical even to longevity, by the
far more humane and rational plan of early marriage conjoined with very
much smaller families than are at the present time the fashion among all
classes. Some check to population we must submit to; and there is not
the slightest doubt in my own mind that the morality of the near future
will look upon the production of large families in European states as
the most anti-social of all the actions of a citizen. Then, and not till
then, will indigence disappear from the face of all civilised society.
[Illustration]
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Table of Contents added by transcriber.
2. P. 101, “the clear [?]in of duty laid down by the greatest of his
followers” was assumed to be “the clear line of duty laid down by
the greatest of his followers”.
3. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
4. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as
printed.
5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.