Population control

“ Under these circumstances the population can be said to press on the soil: and unless their methods of production could be improved, or resources secured from outside, the only possible remedy against the principle of diminishing returns would be a reduction of population; otherwise, the death-rate from want and starvation would gradually rise until it equalled the birth-rate in order to maintain an unhappy equilibrium. ”

“ Our biological criterion must therefore, with our standard of merit, be social rather than individual, and the following general outline is suggested.
The population of each country [79] should be proportionate to its resources. The numerical adjustment should be such that there be no unemployment and that individual productivity be highest without idlers at either end of the social scale. The physical average of the race should be good with no congenital diseases of mind or body and with the minimum of other diseases, and of crime. ”

“ It will be plain that such towns must have clearly defined limits of population, dependant finally on the minimum yearly produce of the district they control. If ever they rise above that limit the natural checks of famine, and of pestilence following enfeeblement, will come into operation, and they will always be kept near this limit by the natural tendency of humanity to increase. The limit would rise with increasing public intelligence, and the organization of the towns would become more definite. ”

“ The actual rise of the population, after allowing for migration, is, of course, given by the census returns. Fig. 1 shows the variation of the total population of the United Kingdom and of England and Wales, from 1850 onwards.
Many of you will have heard alarmist statements from various quarters to the effect that our population is rapidly becoming stationary owing to the combined results of a declining birth-rate and an accelerated emigration. ”

“ The freest government, if it could exist, would not be long acceptable, if the tendency of the laws were to create a rapid accumulation of property in few hands, and to render the great mass of the population dependent and penniless. In such a case, the popular power would be likely to break in upon the rights of property, or else the influence of property to limit and control the exercise of popular power. Universal suffrage, for example, could not long exist in a community where there was great inequality of property. ”

“ Why then do not its effects appear in a rapid increase of the human species? An intimate view of the state of society in any one country in Europe, which may serve equally for all, will enable us to answer this question, and to say, that a foresight of the difficulties attending the rearing of a family, acts as a preventive check; and the actual distresses of some of the lower classes, by which they are disabled from giving the proper food and attention to their children, act as a positive check, to the natural increase of population. ”

“ Causes which affect the number of births or deaths may or may not affect the average population, according to circumstances; but causes which affect the production and distribution of the means of subsistence must necessarily affect population; and it is therefore on these causes, besides actual enumerations, on which we can with any certainty rely. “All the checks to population, which have been hitherto considered in the course of this review of human society, are clearly resolvable into moral restraint, vice, and misery.” ”

“ Principle 16 Demographic policies which are without prejudice to basic human rights and which are deemed appropriate by Governments concerned should be applied in those regions where the rate of population growth or excessive population concentrations are likely to have adverse effects on the environment of the human environment and impede development. ”

“ And can there be a doubt that the large disproportion in the distribution of the population between city and country, in the interior, will be lessened, so that, instead of being, as now, only one to five or six, they will rapidly approach the proportion of one to two or three? ”

“ The use of inhabitants is to be mutually serviceable one to another in particular, and to the society in general. Consequently, every state should, in good policy, first apply itself to make the inhabitants they have answer that purpose, before they carry their views towards augmenting their numbers. I think it is absurd to wish for new inhabitants, without first knowing how to employ the old; and it is ignorance of the real effects of population, to imagine that an increase of numbers will infallibly remove inconveniencies which proceed from the abuses of those already existing. ”

“ But let us assume for a moment that the increase of the population, the surplus of the birth-rate over the death- rate, can be applied as a standard to physical and even moral health and strength. In that case the population principle applies as much to Germany as to other countries. ”

“ And if, what is manifestly impossible, a fair distribution of the land were made among the whole population, giving to each his equal share, and laws were enacted for interposing a barrier to the tendency to concentration, by forbidding the holding by any one of more than the fixed amount, what would become of the increase of population? ”

“ In a state therefore of great equality and virtue, where pure and simple manners prevailed, and where the means of subsistence were so abundant, that no part of the society could have any fears about providing amply for a family, the power of population being left to exert itself unchecked, the increase of the human species would evidently be much greater than any increase that has been hitherto known. ”

“ In these seasons actual want, or the maladies consequent on it, carry off numbers of the population, which in a succession of favourable years again expands, to be again cruelly decimated. 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. ”

“ But though improvement may during a certain space of time keep up with, or even surpass, the actual increase of population, it assuredly never comes up to the rate of increase of which population is capable: and nothing could have prevented a general deterioration in the condition of the human race, were it not that population has in fact been restrained. ”

“ In the back settlements, where the sole employment is agriculture, and vicious customs and unwholesome occupations are little known, the population has been found to double itself in fifteen years. Even this extraordinary rate of increase is probably short of the utmost power of population. ”

“ First, we shall have a theoretical rate, derived from the supposition of the absence, not only of a scarcity of food, but also of all other causes whatever, which tend to diminish fecundity, or prematurely to weaken or destroy the human frame. Let us assume this to be such as would double population in ten years. ”

“ No; some have much smaller populations, some have larger—varying according to the extent of the country they appropriate, or to the degree of excellence to which they have brought their machinery. Each community sets its own limit according to circumstances, taking care always that there shall never arise any class of poor by the pressure of population upon the productive powers of the domain; and that no state shall be too large for a government resembling that of a single well-ordered family. I imagine that no vril community exceeds thirty-thousand households. ”

“ Our Malthusians assuredly have no cause to rack their brains in regard to the increase of population in the future. Until now, nations have been ruined by a diminution of their numbers, but never yet by an excess. In a society, living according to natural laws, the number of the population will ultimately be regulated without harmful abstinence, or unnatural preventive measures. ”

“ The Congress should provide leading principles for eugenic supervision, secured from the point of view of hygiene, of the growth of the population in all the states; policy in regard to population will be of great importance after the war in all the countries. ”

“ When we speak of the power of population to increase in a certain continued ratio, we do not mean to say that it will or will not do so, but merely that it is possible that it should do so from the nature of the principle itself. The power of population to increase is in fact the same both before and after it has become excessive. ”

“ I should expect, therefore, that those countries where subsistence was increasing sufficiency at times to encourage population but not to answer all its demands, would be more subject to periodical epidemics than those where the population could more completely accommodate itself to the average produce. ”

“ A great many of the projects which are now urged upon society are really applications of population philosophy assumed to be wise without adequate knowledge, or they set population free from all restraints on behalf of certain beneficiaries, while a sound population policy, according to the best knowledge we have, would be the real solution of a number of the most serious evils (alcoholism, sex disease, imbecility, insanity, and infant mortality) which now exhaust the vigor of society. ”

“ From a consideration of the law of agricultural industry, and an estimate of the rate at which the means of subsistence could be increased in old countries, even under the most favourable circumstances, it may be inferred with certainty that these means of subsistence could not possibly be increased so fast as to permit population to increase at its natural rate. ”

“ To reintegrate the uprooted population groups, which were socially, economically and politically marginalized, and create the conditions that would allow them to be a dynamic factor in the economic, social, political and cultural development of the country ”

“ Governments that need to do so should develop long-term multi-faceted population policies and a campaign to pursue broad demographic goals; to strengthen social, cultural and economic motivations for family planning, and to provide to all who want then the education,contraceptives, and services required. ”

“ Except, therefore, in the very peculiar cases which I have just noticed, of which the only one of any practical importance is that of a new colony, or a country in circumstances equivalent to it; it is impossible that population should increase at its utmost rate without lowering wages. Nor will the fall be stopped at any point, short of that which either by its physical or its moral operation, checks the increase of population. In no old country, therefore, does population increase at anything like its utmost rate ”

“ 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. ”

“ Indeed, we cannot afford to fail. For we are faced with a grave and persistent problem which, unsolved, will wipe out all our gains and destroy the promise of abundance and stability. This is the population problem.
We are faced by a population crisis. It is time that we became aware of it. Much more important, it is time that we began to take steps to arrest a population growth which, unless checked, threatens to compound our problems in the years ahead. ”

“ To go into an elaborate comparison of our national and state censuses with themselves, past and present, with each other, and with those of similar communities abroad, involving, as it would do, intricate calculations regarding the effect of emigration from state to state, and from nation to nation, the increase of urban population, and the frequent decrease of rural, is not our present intention, nor is it necessary. ”

“ For example, population growth may be viewed as a threat in countries where excessive government controls eliminate incentives for farmers and other workers to produce, where housing and health care facilities do not keep pace, or where precious natural resources are used without regard to future needs. Demographic change can also become problematic when a nation fails to anticipate or to respond to such trends as massive urban migration. However, because people are producers as well as consumers, population growth can also be a sign and a source of strength. ”

“ The modes of repression are the same as what have been called the checks to population. It is obvious that the theoretical rate of increase, that is, the theoretical excess of the births above the deaths, may be reduced to the dimensions of the increase actually possible, in two ways, namely, either by a diminution in the births, or an increase in the deaths. ”

“ But greater care will be required than now; for among ourselves, whatever may be the number of citizens, the property is always distributed among them, and therefore no one is in want; but, if the property were incapable of division as in the Laws, the supernumeraries, whether few or many, would get nothing. One would have thought that it was even more necessary to limit population than property; and that the limit should be fixed by calculating the chances of mortality in the children, and of sterility in married persons. ”

“ The necessity for regulating population comes, of course, from the limitation of the natural resources at society's command. In any community there is a certain normal limit of population—the limit at which all the natural resources are distributed among all the inhabitants according to their powers—and the community will learn when this limit is reached from the number of workmen who are unable to obtain private employment, and are obliged to seek work from the State. ”