Anonymous

“ Gentlemen, do you know the fate of so many of these children?—the little ones half-starved because there is food enough for two but not enough for twelve; half-clothed because the mother, no matter what her skill and care, cannot clothe them with the money brought home by the breadwinner of the family; brought up in ignorance, and ignorance means pauperism and crime—gentlemen, your happier circumstances have raised you above this suffering, but on you also this question presses; for these over-large families mean also increased poor-rates, which are growing heavier year by year. ”

“ Mrs. Besant’s speech to the jury was a remarkable and memorable effort. She examined and discussed the population question in every aspect, contending that, in view of the evils arising from excessive increase, the advocacy of prudential methods was a sacred duty to humanity. In the opening passages of her speech she pointed out, in the most impressive manner, that she pleaded for the welfare of others:
It is not as defendant that I plead to you to-day—not simply as defending myself do I stand here—but I speak as counsel for hundreds of the poor, and it is they for whom I defend this case. ”

“ Beneath the glittering surface of society there lies a seething mass of want and misery. The victims suffer in silence and make no sign, but their existence constitutes a permanent danger to the general welfare. Destitution is in numberless instances the parent of crime and prostitution, with their chain of disastrous consequences; overcrowding, semi-starvation and squalor are the fruitful sources of disease which scruples not to travel beyond its birthplace and to infect the homes of the wealthy. ”

“ To attempt to stifle the cry of human nature uttered in the voice of its most powerful instinct, is indeed to fly in the face of nature. Like all attempts to regulate conduct by ignoring the facts of human nature, it must signally fail. Prostitution with all its horrors is the outcome of enforced unnatural celibacy. To use and not abuse, to direct and control in its operation any God-given faculty, is the true aim of man, the true object of all morality. ”

“ Who could suppose that any jury would regard any means adopted by them to prevent the procreation of a number of children, diseased and rickety, or certain to inherit a taint of insanity, would be otherwise than natural and right, and the adoption of any means that medical science could suggest to prevent it not only not immoral but laudable in the highest degree? If it is not immoral to do what the pamphlet advocates, it seems to me impossible to argue that the mere advocacy itself is a penal offence. ”

“ Think mercifully of a man such as a brick-maker, who, going home after his day’s toil, finds six or seven little ones crying for bread, and clinging around his wife for the food which they cannot get. Think you such a scene as that is not sufficient to make both himself and her hungry and angry too? Gentlemen, it is for you, in your deliverance of guilty or not guilty, to say how we are to go from this court—whether, when we leave this place, if you mark us guilty, his lordship may feel it to be his duty to sentence us, and put upon us the brand of a doom such as your verdict may warrant ”

“ Here we see the painful positive or natural checks to population at work in our very midst. Death stands with his sword and ruthlessly strikes out the redundant lives. What pen can picture the frightful suffering indicated by the figures given above? The mother’s pangs of child-birth: her protracted agony of grief as she watches the ravages of disease upon the weakly frame of her ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-tended babe: the last dread scene when death releases from its misery the child that should never have been called into existence! ”

“ The press, with its myriad voices, became, for the time, a mighty organ of New-Malthusian propaganda, repeating, in tones that echoed round the world, the eloquent words of two social reformers to whom the miseries of the poor were known, and who had faced the danger of imprisonment and of social obloquy in order to proclaim that which they felt to be the only efficient remedy for poverty. ”

“ When the law of population—a law of nature—is clearly understood, it becomes possible for man, by the exercise of his reason, to control its operation, just as he constructs dykes to protect his crops from floods, or diverts the lightning harmlessly into the ground.
Let us see, then, how the general adoption of the New-Malthusian principle of early marriage and limited families would affect the welfare of individuals and of the nation at large.
The knowledge of prudential checks immensely increases the possibility of happiness for every man and woman whose means are “limited.” ”

“ Who will say that the future of society would not have an infinitely better outlook if the breeding of such children were to be prevented by the conjugal prudence of parents in resorting to the use of such means as would prevent their procreation? It is idle to preach to the masse, the necessity of deferred marriage and of a celibate life during the heyday of passion. ”

“ Every thought entertained, every effort made for the good of others, must elevate the thinker and the actor. Who will say that the low and vicious parents of East London’s gutter children, brought up amidst all the moral horrors of over-crowding, half-starved, and stunted in growth, without elementary notions of decency or morality—who will say that such parents would not have been morally superior if they could have seen the wrong they were doing in bringing such offspring into the world, and had taken measures to prevent it? ”

“ The unselfish pleasure of promoting the happiness of a loved wife and children is denied to the morbid and gloomy celibate, doomed to a solitary and cheerless existence. And even when permanent celibacy is not contemplated, marriage may be deferred until the bloom and brightness of life are gone for ever, until delay and disappointment have soured the temper and choked the fountain of affection. ”

“ The physiological evils arising from celibacy, and, in lesser degree, from prolonged abstention from marriage, are of the most disastrous nature. Celibacy is necessarily a condition of privation and suffering, since it involves the deliberate and incessant suppression of the most powerful instinct of mankind. The pure and elevating joys of wedded and family life are shut out, and existence is shorn of its most delightful features. ”

“ When such a cool-headed respectable as Lord Derby feels bound to call attention to the increase of 400,000 per annum in our population as one of the most pressing problems of our day, it is really too fatuous for the General Medical Council to brand as ‘infamous’ a practitioner who, in a work to which no objection is taken on the score of impropriety or immorality, supplies to the poor information already possessed by the rich. ”

“ In all other matters of breeding but the all-important one of the breeding of the human race, the aim of man is to defeat the effects of nature’s laws of reproduction, and to limit the number and kind of animals produced to the amount required for the use of man. The forces of nature, blind and ruthless in their effect, we control and defeat in their operation by all the means that science places at our command. ”

“ It is the poor alone who suffer acutely from the effects of over-population: it is they who feel the actual sting of want when the small wage is distributed over a large family-area. For the well-to-do there is no mystery concerning prudential checks. The family doctor will whisper discreetly into the ear of the wealthy matron whose quiver is sufficiently filled. Expensive medical works containing full instructions are at the command of those who can afford to buy them. Why should the poor be kept in ignorance upon a matter of supreme importance to them? ”

“ A court of law has now to decide for the first time whether it is lawful to argue in a decent way with earnestness of thought and sobriety of language the right of married men and women to limit the number of the children to be begotten by them by such means as medical science says are possible and not injurious to health. Of the enormous importance of this question, not only to persons of limited means in every society and country, but to nations, the populations of which have a tendency to increase more rapidly than the means of subsistence, there cannot be the slightest doubt. ”

“ You will there find that the illicit intercourse which we are charged with trying to produce is an illicit intercourse which is going on and bringing with it the birth of the child, and bringing with it the murder of the child by the mother, because there is the pang of starvation and misery and shame to contend with. I say that it is amongst the poor married people that the evils of over-population are chiefly felt, and that it cannot tend to deprave their morals to teach them how to intelligently check this over-population.... ”

“ In every civilised State the problem of poverty is one which presses for solution. In some European countries it has, at times, locally assumed a critical and menacing form, threatening the very foundations upon which society is based. Revolutions have sprung from the fact that people needed food and could not obtain it; and, even in our own “highly favored” land, honest, industrious men are often driven to despair because they can neither get work nor food.
Occasional outbreaks and demonstrations, however, are by no means the true measure of national poverty. ”

“ 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 [14] 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. The children that spring from such marriages—where not following each other too rapidly—are more vigorous and healthy than those of middle-aged parents ”

“ It is no longer a question whether it is expedient to prevent the growth of a pauper population, with all its attendant miseries following upon semi-starvation, over-crowding, disease, and an enfeebled national [37] stamina of constitution; but how countries suffering from all these causes of national decay shall avert national disaster by checking the production of children, whose lives must be too often a misery to themselves, a burden to society, and a danger to the State. ”

“ And over all there hangs the haunting fear that sickness or loss of employment may disable the bread-winner, and that the wolf of hunger, ever waiting outside, may show his fangs within the door. Little cause is there for wonder that in many cases the sweetheart of happier days becomes a shrew and slattern, or that the toil-worn husband flies to the ruinous joys of the tap-room in a vain attempt to escape from the vexations that surround him in his “home.” ”

“ The purpose of this little work is, first, to show that an excessive increase of population is the source from which these evils arise. In the second place, the means by which population may be kept under control will be explained, for it is useless to warn people of a danger if they are kept in ignorance of the means by which it may be avoided. Above all, it is to the poor that this knowledge must be conveyed, for, as we shall show in the following pages, the indigent class multiplies far more rapidly than the well-to-do, and it is upon themselves that the consequent misery necessarily falls. ”

“ If you think they have failed—if you think these are matters which may fairly be discussed—that the proper answer to them is by refuting them by argument and not by prosecution, the defendants are entitled to your verdict. Or if you have any doubt as to the effect of this work you are bound to bring them in not guilty. I would only say in conclusion, that whatever outrages decency, whatever tends to corrupt the morals of society, and especially the morals and purity of women—whatever tends to have that result is, when published, an offence against the law. ”

“ Modern society may be fitly compared to a magnificent palace reared in a miasmatic swamp, which fills the air with its death-dealing exhalations. No cunning artifices of builders or engineers can afford protection in such a case. In like manner, society cannot hope to escape from the influences which make for corruption and ultimate dissolution whilst it suffers poverty to remain in its midst.
It is, indeed, unnecessary to insist upon the evils and the national dangers arising from poverty ”

“ If admitted, as it is, that the information, physiological and otherwise, given in Chapter III. can be found in medical works of an expensive kind, it cannot affect the character of the information for obscenity that it is given in a cheap form. Information cannot be pure, chaste and legal in morocco at a guinea, but impure, obscene and indictable in a paper pamphlet at sixpence. The information, to be of value in a national point of view as a safeguard from the miseries of over-population and overcrowding, must be given wholesale to the masses likely to over-breed. ”

“ Here and there one may rise above his fellows in the struggle for existence; but the vast majority of those who pass through the valley of the shadow of death emerge into a laborious and joyless existence. Of the males a section will drift into pauperism or crime; many of the females will be driven by want to the shameful traffic of prostitution. The honest and industrious are doomed to a life of incessant toil and privation; and with their numerous offspring will begin another cycle of the obscure tragedy. ”

“ Trade Unions and other forms of combination may partially and temporarily improve the condition of a section of the workers; but in the long run every advance in comfort is overtaken and swallowed up by the increase of population stimulated by prosperity.
Thus, unless the teachings of New-Malthusianism be generally acted upon, poverty will remain a permanent feature of society; and, as we have already said, the element of poverty is a constant menace to the community at large. The strength of a chain is that of its weakest link. ”