Annie Besant

“ So that it appears that our civilization in India, taking away the ordinary natural checks to population, and introducing no others in their stead, brings about a famine which has already destroyed more than 500,000 people in one Presidency alone, and has thrown about one and a half million more on charity. From this point of view civilization can scarcely be regarded as an unmixed blessing, and it must not be forgotten that what is happening in India now must, sooner or later, happen in every country where science destroys the balance of nature. ”

“ The root of poverty would be dug up, and pauperism would decline and at last vanish. Where now overcrowded hovels stand would then be comfortable houses; where now the large family starves in rags, the small family would then live on sufficient food, clad in decent raiment; education would replace ignorance, and self-reliance would supersede charity. Where the workhouse now frowns, the busy school would then smile, and care and forethought for the then valuable lives would diminish the dangers of factory and of work-room. ”

“ Difficult as it is for men to obtain a livelihood, it is ten times more difficult for women to do so; partly on account of unjust laws, and partly because of the tyranny of society, they are shut out from many employments. All that has just been stated is admitted by common consent—it is the topic of daily conversation, and of daily complaint—and yet with the utmost complacency we observe 200,000 added to our population every year, and we often congratulate ourselves upon this addition to our numbers, as if it were an unerring sign of advancing prosperity. ”

“ It is immoral to give life where you cannot support it. It is immoral to bring children into the world when you cannot clothe, feed, and educate them. It is immoral to crowd new life into already over-crowded houses, and to give birth to children wholesale who never have a chance of healthy life. Conjugal prudence is most highly moral, and "those who endeavour to vilify and degrade these means in the eyes of the public, and who speak of them as 'immoral' and 'disgusting,' are little aware of the moral responsibility they incur thereby. ”

“ Prostitution would cease to flaunt in our streets, and the sacred home would be early built and joyously dwelt in; wedded love would enter the lists against vice, and, no longer the herald of want, would chase her counterfeit from our land. No longer would transmitted diseases poison our youth, nor premature death destroy our citizens. A full possibility of life would open before each infant born into our nation, and there would be room, and love, and cherishing, enough for each new-comer. ”

“ War, infanticide, hardship, famine, disease, murder of the aged, all these are among the positive checks which keep down the increase of population among savage tribes. War carries off the young men, full of vigour, the warriors in their prime of life, the strongest, the most robust, the most fiery—those, in fact, who, from their physical strength and energy would be most likely to add largely to the number of the tribe. ”

“ Such are some of the consequences of the law of population; the power of production is held in check by the continual destruction, the number of births is balanced by the number of deaths. Population struggles to increase, but the want of the means of existence beats it back, and men, women, and children perish in the terrible struggle. The more civilization advances the more hopeless becomes the outlook. The checks imposed by "nature and providence," in which Sir Hardinge Giffard trusts for the prevention of over-population, are being removed, one by one, by science and by civilization. ”

“ In looking at nature, it is most necessary to keep the foregoing considerations always in mind—never to forget that every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers; that each lives by a struggle at some period of its life; that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old during each generation or at recurrent intervals. ”

“ Famine, so easily caused among a primitive community, sweeps off young and old together; epidemics carry away almost a whole tribe at one swoop; the aged are often slain, or left to perish, when their feebleness no longer permits them to add to the productive force of the community.
All these miseries are the positive and natural checks to population among uncivilized beings; among the more civilized the checks are the same in kind although more decently veiled. But the moment we come among civilized nations a new factor is introduced into the problem which complicates it very considerably. ”

“ Hardship carries away many a child in savage life: "Women," says Malthus, "obliged, by their habits of living, to a constant change of places, and compelled to an unremitting drudgery for their husbands, appear to be absolutely incapable of bringing up two or three children nearly of the same age. If another child be born before the one above it can shift for itself, and follow its mother on foot, one of the two must almost necessarily perish from want of care." ”

“ India to-day is a microcosm of the world of the future, and the statesman of that time will re-echo the words of the present Foreign Secretary with a wider application. Ought we then to encourage positive checks so as to avert this final catastrophe? Ought we to stir up war? Ought we to prevent sanitary improvements? ought we to leave the sickly to die? Ought we to permit infants to perish unaided? Ought we to refuse help to the starving? These checks may be "natural," but they are not human; they may be "providential," but they are not rational. Has science no help for us in our extremity? ”

“ The lower animals are helpless and must needs suffer, and strive, and die, but man, whose brain raises him above the rest of animated existence, man rational, thoughtful, civilized, he is not condemned to share in the brute struggle, and to permit lower nature to destroy his happiness and his ever-growing rapidity of progress. In dealing with the law of population, as with every other natural law which presses on him unpleasantly, civilised man seeks so to alter the conditions which surround him as to produce a happier result. ”

“ Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence, consequent on his rapid multiplication, and if he is to advance still higher it is to be feared that he must remain subject to a severe struggle; otherwise he would sink into indolence, and the more gifted men would not be more successful in the battle of life than the less gifted. Hence our natural rate of increase, though leading to many and obvious evils, must not be greatly diminished by any means. ”

“ Fortunately, late marriage will never be generally practised in any community; the majority of men and women will never consent to remain single during the brightness of youth, when passion is strongest and feelings most powerful, and to marry only when life is half over and its bloom and its beauty have faded into middle-age. But it is important that late marriage should not even be regarded as desirable, for if it became an accepted doctrine among the thoughtful that late marriage was the only escape from over-population, a serious difficulty would arise ”

“ A long train of formidable diseases results from celibacy—such as spermatorrhœa in the male, chlorosis and hysteria in the female—and no one who desires society to be happy and healthy should recommend late marriage as a cure for the social evils around us. Early marriage is best, both physically and morally; it guards purity, softens the affections, trains the heart, and preserves physical health; it teaches thought for others, gentleness and self-control; it makes men gentler and women braver from the contact of their differing natures. ”

“ It is necessary to gravely remind all advocates of late marriage that men do not and will not live single, and all women, and all men who honour women, should protest against a teaching which would inevitably make permanent that terrible social evil which is the curse of civilization, and which condemns numbers of unhappy creatures to a disgraceful and revolting calling. ”

“ Yet the law of population is "an irrefragable truth," and these people are starved to death according to natural law; early marriages, large families, these are the premisses; famine and disease, these are the conclusions. The same consequences will, sooner or later—sooner in an agricultural country, dependent on its crops, later in a manufacturing country commanding large foreign supplies, but always inexorably—produce the same fearful results. ”

“ It was acknowledged that the only way of escape from pauperism and from the misery occasioned by positive checks, was in the limitation of the population within the available means of subsistence, and the problem to be solved was—How shall this be done? Malthus proposed that preventive, or birth-restricting, should be substituted for positive, or life-destroying, checks, and that "moral restraint" should supersede "misery and vice." He lays it down as a principle of duty, that no one "is to bring beings into the world for whom he cannot find the means of support." ”

“ The system of preventive checks to population points us to the true pathway of safety; it is an immediate relief, and at once lightens the burden of poverty. Each married couple have it in their power to avoid poverty for themselves and for their children, by determining, when they enter on married life, that they will not produce a family larger than they can comfortably maintain: thus they avoid the daily harass of domestic struggle ”

“ Children are not fit to do very much work so long as they are half developed, and early death is often the consequence." Children should not work for their bread; the frame is not fit for toil, the brain is not ready for the effort of long attention; those who give the life should support and protect it until the tenderness of childhood is passed away, and the young body is firm-knit and strong, prepared to take its share of the battle, and bear the burden and heat of the day. ”

“ It tells us that all human beings born are immortal, and that God has to provide for them above or below! Yet in every portion of the land scoundrel or vicious parents may bring into existence a squalid brood of dirty, sickly, depraved, ignorant, ragged children. Christianity fails utterly to prevent their existence, and hurls quick words of opprobrium upon any who advocate the prevention of this progeny of crime. ”

“ The continually rising price of food is one of the most certain signs that population in England is pressing over hard on the means of subsistence; although our own corn and meat production is enormously supplemented by supplies from abroad, prices are always going up, and the large amount of adulteration practised in every food-supplying trade is, to a great extent, an effort to equalise the supply and the demand. Much of the food on which our poor live is unwholesome in the extreme ”

“ Epidemics are most fatal in over-crowded districts, not only because they pass so rapidly from one to another, but also because the people dwelling in those districts have less vitality, less vigour of resistance, than those more fortunately circumstanced. "The great reason," said Dr. Drysdale in the late trial in the Court of Queen's Bench, "that typhus fever is so terrible a disease is that people are crowded. It is impossible to have health with large crowded families." Here then is one of the commonest checks to population in all great cities. ”

“ Ingleby as saying: "Premature labour may with great propriety be proposed on pregnancy recurring, assuming the delivery of a living child at term to have already proved impracticable." If there is a chance for the child's life, this is sound advice, but if the delivery of a living child has been proved to be impossible, surely the prevention of conception is far better than the procuring of abortion. The destruction of the fœtus is destruction of life, and it is immoral, where a woman cannot bear a living child, that she should conceive at all. ”

“ Every being, which during its natural lifetime produces several eggs or seeds, must suffer destruction during some period of its life, and during some season or occasional year, otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product. Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. ”

“ Colonization needs the pick of a nation, if it is to succeed, not the poor who are driven from home in search of the necessaries of life. John Stuart Mill points out how inadequate emigration is as a continued relief to population, useful as it is as a sudden effort to lighten pressure; he remarks that the great distance of the fields of emigration prevents them from being a sufficient outlet for surplus labourers ”

“ If the number be well employed, well fed, well clothed, well housed, then the greatness of the number is in reality the wealth and strength of the nation. But if, on the other hand, the greatness of the number lessens the means of good employment, good living, clothing and housing, then, as in England and Ireland, at this moment, under the present arrangements of government, aristocracy, religion, &c., the greatness of the number constitutes the weakness of the nation ”

“ In a very backward state of society, like that of Europe in the Middle Ages, and many parts of Asia at present, population is kept down by actual starvation. . . In a more improved state, few, even among the poorest of the people, are limited to actual necessaries, and to a bare sufficiency of those; and the increase is kept within bounds, not by excess of deaths, but by limitation of births. The limitation is brought about in various ways. In some countries, it is the result of prudent or conscientious self-restraint. There is a condition to which the labouring people are habituated ”