THE 
LAW of POPULATION, 
ITS CONSEQUENCES 
A.KT3D ITS 
Bearing Upon Unman Conduct and Morals. 
33Y 
ANNIE BESANT. 
THIRTY-FOURTH THOUSAND. 
Xew American Edition from the Thirty-fifth Thousand, 
English Edition. 
FAIR PLAY PUBLISHING CO., 
VALLEY FALLS, KANSAS. 
E. M.. 280. (1880.)  THE 
LAW OF POPULATION. 
ITS CONSEQUENCES 
AND 
Its Bearing Upon Human Conduct and Morals. 
BV 
ANNIE BESANT, 
THIRTY-FOURTH THOUSAND. 
Xew American Edition from the Thirty-fifth Thousand* 
English Edition. 
FAIR PLAY PL'PLISIIING CO., 
VALLEY FALLS, KANSAS. 
E. M., 2£9. (1££9:) TO THE POOR 
IN GREAT CITIES AND AGRICULTURAL DISTRICTS, 
DWELLERS IN STIFLING COURT OR CROWDED 
HOVEL, 
IN THE HOPE 
THAT IT MAY POINT OUT A PATH FROM POVERTY, AND 
MAY MAKE EASIER THE LIFE OF 
BRITISH MOTHERS, 
TO THEM 
. I DEDICATE THIS ESSAY, THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
CHAPTER I. 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
The law of population first laid down in this country by 
the Rev. T. R. Malthus in his great work, entitled “ The 
Principle of Population,” has long been known to every 
student, and accepted by every thinker. It is, however, 
but very recently that this question has become ventilated 
among the many, instead of being discussed only by the 
few. Acknowledged as an axiom by the naturalist and by 
the political economist, the law of population has never 
been appreciated by the mass of the people. The free 
press pioneers of the last generation, Richard Garble, 
James Watson, Robert Dale Owen—these men had seen 
its importance and had endeavored, by cheap publications 
dealing with it from its practical side, to arouse attention 
and to instruct those for whom they worked. But the 
lesson fell on stony ground and passed almost unheeded ; 
it would, perhaps, be fairer to say that the fierce political 
conflicts of the time threw all other questions into a com- 
parative shade; nor must the strong prejudice against 
Malthus be forgotten—the prejudice which regarded him 
as a hard, cold theorist, who wrote in the interest of the 
richer classes, and would deny to the poor man the com- 
fort of wife and home. The books issued at this period — 
such as Carlile’s “Every Woman’s Book,” Knowlton’s 
“ Emits of Philosophy,” R. D. Owen s “ Moral Physiology ” 
—passed unchallenged by authority, but obtained only a 
limited circulation ; here and there they did their work, 
and the result was seen in the greater comfort and re- 
spectability of the families who took advantage of iheir 
teachings, but the great mass of the people went on in 
their ignorance and their ever-increasing poverty,conscious 
that mouths multiply more rapidly than wages, but dimly 
supposing that Providence was the responsible agent, and 
that where “God sends mouths” he ought to “sendmeat.” 4 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
One or two recognized advocates for the people did not 
forget the social side of the work which they had inherited; 
men like Austin Holyoake and Charles Bradlaugh, carry- 
ing on the struggle of Carlile and Watson, were not care- 
less of this vital portion of it, and Mr. Holyoake’s ‘ Large 
and Small Families,” and Mr. Brad'augh’s declaration that 
the National Reformer was to be “ Malthusian’’ in its 
political economy, proved that these two, at least, were 
sound on this scarcely regarded branch of social science. 
Now, all has changed ; Malthusianism has become one 
of the “ burning questions” of the day, and a low priced 
work, stating clearly the outlines of the subject, has be- 
come a necessity. Our paternal authorities, like their pred- 
ecessors, entertain a horror of cheap knowledge, but they 
will have to assent to the circulation of cheap information 
on social science, as those who went before them were 
compelled to tacitly assent to cheap information touching 
kings and priests. 
,The law of population, tersely stated, is—“ there is a 
tendency in all animated existence to increase faster than 
the means of subsistence. Nature produces more life than 
she can support, and the superabundant life is kept down 
by the want of food. Malthus put the law thus : “ The 
constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond 
the nourishment prepared for it.” “ It is observed by Dr. 
Franklin,” he writes, u that there is no bound to the pro- 
lific nature of plants or animals but what is made by their 
crowding and interfering with each other’s means of sub- 
sistence. . . . . 
Throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms, Nature 
has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse 
and liberal hand; but has been comparatively sparing in 
the room and the nourishment necessary to rear them-” 
“ Population,” Malthus teaches, “ when unchecked, goes 
on doubling itself every twenty-five years “ in the northern 
States of America, where the means of subsistence have 
been more ample, the manners of the people more pure, 
and the checks to early marriages fewer than in any of 
the modern States of Europe, the population has been 
found to double itself, for above a century and a half suc- 
cessively, in dess than twenty-five years. In the back 
se dements, 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 in- TIIE LAW OF POPULATION. 
5 
crease is probably short of the utmost power of popula- 
tion.” 
The “power of increase” of the human species, accord- 
ing to John Stuart MiU, “is indefinite, and the actual mul- 
tiplication would be extrao dinarily i apid, if the power were 
exercised to the utmost, it never is exercised to the 
utmost, and yet, in the most favorable circumstances known 
to exist, which are those of a fertile region colonized from 
an industrious and civilized community, population has 
continued for several generations, independently of fresh 
immigration, to double itself in not much more than twenty 
years. ... It is a very low estimate of the capacity of in- 
crease, if we only assume that in a good sanitary condition 
of the people, each generation may be double the number 
of the generation which preceded it.” James Mill wrote: 
“That population therefore has such a tendency to increase 
as would enable it to double itself in a small number of 
years, is a proposition resting on the strongest evidence, 
which nothing thatwleserves the name of evidence has been 
b. ought on the other side to oppose.” 
Mr. McCulloch tells us that “ it has been established 
beyond all question that the population of some of the 
states of North America, after making due allowance foil 
immigration, has continued to double for a century past F 
so short a period as twenty, or at most five and-tweni 
years.” M. Moreau de Jonnes gives us tli2 following tabic 
of the time in which the population of each of the under- 
mentioned countries would double itself:— 
Tiukey would take ... ... 555 years. 
Switzerland ,, ... ... 227 ,, 
France ., ... ... 138 ,, 
Spain ,, ... ... 106 ,, 
Holland ,, ... ... 100 ,, 
Germany ,, ... ... 76 ,, 
Russia ., ... ... 43 „ 
England ,, ... ... 43 „ 
United States ,, ... ... 25 ,, 
(Without reckoning immigrants.) 
We shall take but a narrow view of the law of population 
if we confine ourselves exclusively to human beings. Man 
is but the highest in the animal kingdom, not a creature 
apart from it, and the law of population runs through the 
animal and the vegetable worlds. To take the commonest 
illustration : the horse is but a slowly breeding animal, pro- 
ducing but one at a birth, and that at considerable intervals 6 
THE LAAV OE POPULATION. 
of lime ; yet how small a proportion of the horses of a 
country are either stallions or brood mares; the reproductive 
organs of the colt are destroyed in the enormous majority ol 
those born, and, nevertheless, our production of horses 
suffices for the vast needs of our commercial and luxurious 
classes. Darwin, in his “Origin of Species,’’ writes:— 
“There is no exception to the rule that every organic being 
naturally increases at so high a rate that, if not destroyed, 
the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single 
pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-live 
years, and at this rate, in a few thousand years, there would 
literally not be standing room for his progeny. Linnaeus lias 
calculated that if an annual plant produced only two seeds — 
and there is no plant so unproductive as this—and their 
seedlings next year produced two and so on, then in 
twenty years there would be a million plants. The elephant 
is reckoned the slowest breeder of all known animals, and I 
have taken some pains to estimate its probable minimum 
rate of natural increase ; it will be under the mark to assume 
that it breeds when thirty years old, and goes on breeding 
till pinety years old, bringing forth three pairs of young in 
this interval; if this be so, at the end of the fifth century 
there would be alive 15.000,000 elephants, descended from 
the first pair. But we have better evidence on this subject 
than mere theoretical calculations, namely, the numeious 
recorded cases of the astonishingly rapid increase of various 
animals in a state of nature, when circumstances have been 
favorable to them during two or three following seasons. 
Still more striking is the evidence from our domestic animals 
of many kinds which have run wild in many parts of the 
world; if the statements of the rate of increase of slow- 
breeding cattle and horses in South America, and latterly in 
Australia, had not been well authenticated, they would have 
been incredible. So it is with plants; cases could be given 
of introduced plants which have become common through- 
out whole islands in a-period of less than ten years. Several 
of the plants, such~a»s the cardoon and a tall thistle, now 
most numerous oyey, wade plains of La Plata, clothing 
square leagues of almost to the exclusion of all other 
plants, hgv^beerrintroduced from Europe; and theie are 
plants which now range in India, as I hear from Dr. Falconer, 
from Cape Comorin .to tljie Himalayas, which havebeen im- 
ported ft'oqy Aipq[i,ca pmee its discovery. In such cases, 
and end 1 es^,ipst;a,pcep cpuld be,g;ven, no one supposes that 
the fertility of these animals or plants has been suddenly THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
7 
and temporarily increased in any sensible degree. The 
obvious explanation is that the conditions of life have been 
very favorable, and that there has consequently been less 
destruction of the old and young, and that nearly all the 
young have been enabled to breed. In such cases the 
geometrical ratio of increase, the result of which never fails 
to be surprising, simply explains the extraordinarily rapid 
increase and wide diffusion of naturalized productions in 
their new homes. In a state of nature almost every plant 
produces seed, and amongst animals there are very few 
which do not annually pair. Hence, we may confidently 
assert that all plants and animals are tending to increase at 
a geometrical ratio, that all would most rapidly stock every 
station in which they could anyhow exist, and that the geo- 
metrical tendency to increase must be checked by destruc- 
tion at some period of life.” 
Mr. John Stuart Mill also remarks: “The power of 
multiplication inherent in all organic life may be regarded 
as infinite. There is no species of vegetable or animal, 
which, if the earth were entirely abandoned to it, and to the 
things on which it feeds, would not in a small number of 
years overspread every region of the globe of which the 
climate was compatible with its existence.” 
The rapid multiplication of rabbits in Australia has lately 
given a startling instance of reproductive power; a number 
of rabbits were taken over and let loose ; the district was 
thinly peopled, so they were not shot down to any great 
extent; their natural enemies, the hawks, weasels, &c., that 
prey on their young in England, were not taken over with 
them ; food was abundant, and there was no check to keep 
them back ; the consequence was that whole districts were 
overrun by them, and the farmers were at their wits' end to 
save their crops from the swarming rodents. In France, 
again, owing to the wholesale destruction of small birds, 
there \yas a perfect plague of insects, and the inhabitants 
of many districts have striven to import birds, so as to pre- 
vent the insects from practically destroying the vegetation 
While in the vegetable and animal kingdoms the rapidr 
of the increase is generally far greater than in the human 
race, we have yet seen how rapidly man has been found to 
increase where the circumstances surrounding him were 
favorable to vigorous life. We have never yet, however, 
seen the full power of reproduction among mankind ; the 
increase of population in America “falls very iar short,” 
says the author of ihe “Elements of Social Science,” “of the 8 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
possible rate of increase, as is seen by the short average 
of life in America, and by the large amount of the repio- 
ductive power which, even in that country, is lost Irom 
celibacy and prostitution. . . . The capacity of in- 
crease in the human race, as in all other organized beings, 
is, in fact, boundless and immeasurable.” 
But while animated existence increases thus rapidly no 
such swift multiplication can be secured of the means of 
subsistence. The means of subsistence of vegetable life 
arc strictly limited in quantity ; the amount obtainable f om 
the soil may be increased by manure, by careful tillage, by 
rotation of crops, by improved methods of husbandry, but 
none the less is this amount limitable, while there is no limit 
to the power of animal life-production; if the soil and air 
and light could be indefinitely stretched, vegetable life would 
.•still suffice without effort to clothe the increased surface. 
But since the size of the globe inexorably limits the amount 
of vegetable produce possible of growth, the limited 
vegetable produce must, in its turn, limit the amount of 
animal life which can be sustained. AVhile increased knowl- 
edge, skill and care may augment the means of subsistence 
obtainable from the earth, yet animal life multiplies more 
rapidly than can its food. As is truly said by the author 
just quoted : “ From a consideration of the law of agricul- 
tural industry, and an estimate of the rate at which the 
means of subsistence could be increased in old countries, 
even under the most favorable circumstances, it maybe in- 
ferred with certainty that these means of subsistence could 
not possibly be increased so fast as to permit population to 
increase at its natural rate. . . Let us apply the American 
rate of increase to the population of this country. Is it 
conceivably possible that the population of England or any 
old country should double itself every twenty-five ) ears ? 
In Great Britain there are now” (the book was written many 
years ago) c!about twenty-one-millions; is it conceivable that 
the means of subsistence could be so rapidly increased as to 
allow these twenty-one millions to swell to forty-two millions 
in the first twenty-five years; to eighty-four millions in the 
next; 168 millions in the next, «Stc.? The supposition is 
evidently absurd. Even the rate of increase of the last fifty- 
three years (in which time the population has doubled) 
cannot possibly be long continued. If it were, it would in- 
crease our population in three centuries to about 1300 
millions ; or, in other words, to more than the total popula- 
tionof the globe, which is estimated at about rooo millions.” THE LAW OP POPULATION. 
9 
Wherever, then, we look throughout Nature we find 
proofs of the truth of the law, that “there is a tendency in 
all animated existence to increase faster than the means of 
subsistence.” This is the law of which Miss Martineau said 
that i-t could be no more upset than a law of arithmetic ; this 
is the law which John Stuart Mill regarded “ as axiomatic;” 
this is the law which the Lord Chief Justice designated ‘ an 
irrefragable truth.” Controversialists may quarrel as to its 
consequences, and may differ as to man's duty in regard to 
them, but no controversy can arise on the law itself, any 
more than on the sphericity of the earth. 
CHAPTER II. 
ITS CONSEQUENCES. 
It is abundantly clear, from experience, that population 
does not, as a general rule, increase at anything like the rate 
spoken of in the preceding chapter; the earth would, long 
ere now, have become unable to support her offspring, if 
they had multiplied at the pace which the naturalist tells us 
is possible ; if, for instance, all rabbits had increased in the 
same ratio as those taken over to Australia and naturalized 
there. Some cause must therefore be at work checking the 
increase and preventing over-rapid multiplication, holding 
the balance, in fact, roughly even between the means of 
subsistence and the living creatures who consume them. J n 
the vegetable kingdom the checks to increase are not diffi- 
cult to find ; every plant needs for its development suitable 
soil, moisture, air, and light; these are its means of sub- 
sistence. The amount of these is limited, while the power 
of multiplication in the vegetable is unlimited. What is the 
necessary consequence? That of the myriad seeds produced 
only a few will develop into seed-bearing plants ; each seed 
needs a certain proportion of soil, moisture, air, light; if they 
fall round the parent stem and sprout into seedlings, they so 
crowd each other that the weaker perish; every gardener 
knows that his seedlings need thinning if any are to grow 
into useful plants, that his plantations must be thinned out, 
if any tree is to have full development; an overcrowded 10 
TIIE LAW OF POPULATION. 
plantation, an overcrowded garden-bed, gives a crop of 
dwarfed stunted, weak, and useless plants. These facts are 
so commonplace that they pass continually before our eyes, 
and tire simple inference from them is unregarded. There 
is another check of a severe character on vegetable increase. 
Birds eat the seeds; animals browse on the plants; man uses 
many kinds for his own support; the wheat sown in one 
year, not only produces the seed corn for the ensuing season, 
but also affords so vast a multiplication as to supply the 
world with bread; the animal world preys on the vegetable, 
and so is made a check which destroys the mature, as well 
as the check of want of room and nourishment which de- 
stroys the infant, growth. Out of 357 seedlings of English 
weeds, carefully watched by Mr. Darwin, 295 were destroyed. 
On some heaths near Farnham, in the portions enclosed 
during ten years previously, self-sown firs were observed by 
him springing up so closely that all could not live, while in 
the unenclosed portions not one young tree was to be seen. 
On close examination Mr. Darwin found, in one square 
yard, thirty-two little trees, no higher than the heather,one 
with twenty-six rings of growth : the check here was the 
Browsing of cattle over the open parts of the heath. In the 
animal kingdom the same class of checks is found : the 
rabbit which in Australia has become an intolerable plague, 
is kept down to a fair level in England, not becausehe mul- 
tiplies less rapidly, but because the check of destruction is 
brought to bear upon him; food is scarcer in the more cul- 
tivated land; guns and traps send him to the market in 
millions ; hawks, weasels, cats, prey upon his young ; he 
produces life rapidly, but the check of death waits upon him 
and keeps him down. The swift increase of plants and 
animals under favorable circumstances, dealt with in 
Chapter I., shows the enormous power of the destructive 
checks which generally keep in subjection the life-producing 
force. Once more turning to Mr. Darwin, we read :— 
“ Of the many individuals of any species which are 
periodically born, but a small number can survive. ... A 
struggle for existence inevitably follows from the h:gh rate 
at which all organic beings tend to increase. Every being, 
which during its natural lifetime produces several eggs or 
seeds, must suffer destruction during some period of its 
li!e, 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 THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
11 
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. It 
is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to 
the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms ; for in this 
case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no 
prudential restraint from marriage. Although some species 
may be now increasing more or less rapidly in numbers* 
all cannot do so, for the world would not hold them. . . c 
Our familiarity with the larger domestic animals tends, \ 
think, to mislead us ; we see no great destruction falling 
on them, and we forget that thousands are annually 
slaughtered for food, and that in a state of nature an 
equal number would have somehow to be disposed of. 
In looking at nature, it is most necessary to keep the fore- 
going 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. Lighten 
any check, mitigate the destruction ever so little, and the 
number of the species will almost instantaneously increase 
to any amount.” 
If there be such vast destruction of life throughout the 
vegetable and animal kingdoms, necessarily consequent on 
the superabundance of life produced, is man exempt from 
the same law ? 
Malthus laid down the three following propositions, prop° 
ositions of which his book is only an amplification :— 
“ i. Population is necessarily limited by the means of 
subsistence. 
“ 2. Population invariably increases where the means of 
subsistence increase, unless prevented by some very power- 
ful and obvious checks. 
“ 3. These checks, and the checks which repress the 
superior power of population, and keep its effects on a 
level with the means of subsistence, are all resolvable into 
moral restraint, vice, and misery. 
“ The ultimate check to population appears to be a want 
of food, arising necessarily from the different ratios accord- 12 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
ing to which population and food increase. But this ulti- 
mate check is never the immediate check except in cases 
of actual famine. The immediate check may be stated to 
cons st in all those customs and all those di eases, which 
seem to be generated by a scarcity of the means of subsis- 
tence ; and all those causes, independent of this scarcity, 
whether of a moral or physical nature, which tend prema- 
turely to weaken and destroy the human frame.’’ These 
causes which retard the growth of population by killing 
human beings, either slowly or rapidly, are all classed to- 
gether by Malthus under the head of “ positive'1 checks ; 
they are the natural” checks to population, common alike 
to vegetables, to animals, to man ; they are all checks of 
suffering, cf want, of disease : they are life-destroying, anti- 
lmman, brutal, irrational. 
These checks are, as might be imagined, more striking, 
more openly repulsive, more thorough, among savage than 
among civ.lized nations. 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 
vigor, 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. Infanticide, mo>t prev- 
alent where means of existence are most restricted, is 
largely practiced among barbarous nations the custom being 
Fie, t j a great extent, to the difficulty of providing food for 
:i. large family. Hardship carr es away many a child in 
savage life : Women,” says Malthus, “ obliged, by (heir 
lubi s cf living, to a constant change of places, and com- 
pelled to an u iremitting drudgery for their husbands appear 
to be abiolu'ely incapable of bringing up two or three 
children nearly of the same age. If another child be born 
bvfoie the one above it can shift for itself, and fol ow its 
mother on foot, one of the two must almost necessarily 
peiish from want of care.” 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 feeble- 
ness 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 civ.lized the checks are the same in kind although THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
13 
more decently veiled. Hut tlie moment we come among 
•civilized nations a new factor is introduced into the 
problem which complicates it very considerably. H.therto 
we have seen Nature--apart from man - going her own way, 
producing and destroying without let or hindrance. But 
Avhe i we examine civilized nations we find .l new agent at 
wotk; Nature's grandest product, the brain of m in, now 
•comes into play, and a new set of circumstances arises. 
Men, women, and children, who would be doomed to death 
in the savage state, have their lives prolonged by civilization; 
the sickly, whom the hardships of the savage struggle for 
•existence would kill off, are carefully tended in hospitals, 
and saved by medical skill; the parents, whose thread of life 
would be cut short, are cherished on into prolonged old age; 
the feeble,who would be left to starve, are tenderly shielded 
from hardship, and life’s road is made the smoother for the 
lame ; the average of life is lengthened, and more and more 
thought is brought to bear on the causes of preventable 
disease; better drainage, better homes, better food, better 
clothing, all these, among the more comfortable classes, re- 
move many of the natural checks to population. Among 
these nations wars become less frequent and less bloody; 
famines, owing to improved means ofinter-communication, 
become for a time almost impossible; epidemics no longer 
depopulate whole districts. In England, in a. d. 1258, no 
less than 15,000 people were starved to death in London 
alone ; in France, in a. d. 1348, one-third of the whole popu- 
lation perished from the same cause; in Rome, from a. n. 
250-265, a plague raged, that, for some time, carried off 
•daily 5000 persons; in England, in a. d. 1506 and 1517, 
the sweating sickness slew half the inhabitants of the large 
towns and depopulated Oxford; in London, in a. d. 1603-4, 
the plague killed 30,578 persons, and in a n. 1664-5 it 
•destroyed 68,596; in Naples, in a. d. 1656, 400,000 died 
an l in Egypt, a. d. 1792, above 800,000. These terrible 
•epidemics and famines have ceased to sweep over Europe, 
but for how long? This decrease of natural checks to 
population, consequent on advancing civilization, has, un- 
fortunately, a very dark side. Darwin has remarked: 
‘‘Lighten any check, mitigate the destruction ever so little, 
and the number of the species will almost instantaneously 
increase to any amount.” A signal instance of the truth of 
this remark is now being given to us in our Indian empire 
by the introduction there of Western civilization; Lord Derby 
.says: ‘ We have established there order and peace; we 14 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
have clone away with local wars; we have lessened the 
ravages of pestilence ; and we do what we can—and, in 
ordinary seasons, we do it with success —to mitigate the 
effects of destitution. The result is, naturally and neces- 
sarily, a vast increase in population; and if present appear- 
ances can be trusted, we shall have in every generation a 
larger aggregate of human beings relying upon us for help 
in those periods of distress which must, from time to time, 
occur in a country wholly agricultural and liable to droughts.” 
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 Presi- 
dency 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. 
Ireland suffered thirty years ago from exactly the same 
cause which has now touched India—over-population. 
Professor Fawcett, in his Essay on Pauperism, writes as 
follows:—“Ireland should serve to warn us of the terrible 
misfortunes brought upon a country by an undue increase 
of population. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, 
the population of that country was about two millions; 
maintaining for the next 150 years a smaller rate of increase 
than is now going on in England, the two millions had 
grown into eight millions in the year 1847. The country, 
at this time, became so densely peopled that a considerable 
portion of the nation could only obtain the barest subsis- 
tence ; still nothing was done to avert the suffering that was 
certain to ensue; the people went on marrying with as 
much recklessness as if they were the first settlers in a new 
country possessing a boundless area of fertile land. All 
the influence that could be exerted by religion prompted 
the continuance of habits of utter improvidence; the priests 
and other ministers of religion encouraged early marriages. 
At length there came one of those unpropitious seasons 
which are certain occasionally to recur ; the potato, the 
staple food of the people, was diseased, and it was soon 
found that there were more people in the country than 
could be fed.” 
Here, again, we see famine as the result of improved civil- 
ization. Turning to England, we find that our population is THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
15 
growing rapidly enough to cause anxiety; although there are 
some severe checks,with which we shall deal presently,Eng- 
land has almost doubled her population during the last fifty 
years. In 1810 the population of England and "Wales was 
about 10,000,000, and in i86oit was about 20,000,000. “At 
the present time,” writes Professor Fawcett, “it is growing 
at the rate of 200,000 every year, which is almost equivalent 
to the population of the county of Northampton. If in fifty 
years the descendants of one million become two millions, 
it is obvious that in 100 years the two millions will have 
become four millions, so that if the population of England 
were eight millions in 1810 it would be 80 millions in i960.” 
40 years hence, if we maintain the rate of increase which we 
have kept up since the commencement of this century, some 
40 millions of people will be crowded into our little island; 
yet “ at the present time it is said that there is a great 
redundancy of labor. Many who are willing to work can- 
not find employment; in most of our important branches 
of industry there has been great over-production ; every 
trade and every profession is over-crowded; for every vacant 
clerkship there are hundreds of applications. 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 con- 
versation, 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 ad- 
dition to our numbers, as if it were an unerring sign of ad- 
vancing prosperity. But viewed in relation to the tacts just 
mentioned, what does this addition to our numbers indi- 
cate ? To this question only one reply can be given—that 
in ten years’ time, where there are a hundred now seeking 
employment there will then be a hundred and twenty. 
This will not apply simply to one industry, but will be the 
case throughout the whole country. It will also further 
happen that in ten years’ time for every hundred that now 
require food, fuel, and clothing, a similar provision will 
have to be made for one hundred and twenty. It therefore 
follows that, low as the general average standard of living 
now is, it cannot by any means be obtained, unless in ten 
years’ time the supply of all the commodities of ordinary 
consumption can be increased by 20 per cent., without 
their becoming more costly.’’ The continually rising price 16 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
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 practiced 
in every food-supplying trade is, to a great extent, an effort 
to equalize the supply and the demand. Much of the food 
on whi h our poor live is unwholesome in the extreme ; let 
anyone walk through the poorer districts of London, or of 
any large town and see the provisions lying for sale in the 
shops ; it is not only the meat sold for cooking at home, the 
doubtful sugar,and not doubtful apo'ogv for butter, the blue 
milk, the limp and tiabby vegetables—but let the inquirer 
stop at the cook-shop and inspect the fish, unpleasant both 
to eye and smell, in itself and in its cooking ; the “ faggots" 
— the eating of which killed a child the other day; the 
strangely shaped and strangely marked lumps of what 
should be meat, and, after an hour’s walk, the searcher will 
not wonder at the wan, haggard faces of those who support 
life on this untempting fare. Even of this fare, however, 
there is not enough; the low fever so sadly common in poor- 
districts, the “ falling away,” the hollow cough, the prema- 
ture old age, all these are the results of insufficiency of 
food—insufficiency which does not kill at once, but slowly 
and surely starves away the life. Much of the drunkenness, 
most common in the poorer districts, has its root in lack 
of food; the constantly craving stomach is stilled with 
drink, which it would not desire if it were better filled. 
13u t the pressure on the means of subsistence has other 
consequences than the living on unwholesome food. One 
of the earliest signs of too rapidly increasing population is. 
the over-crou'ding of the poor. Just as the ove -crowded 
seedlings spoil each other’s growth, so do the overcrouxled 
poor injure each other morally, mentally, and physically. 
Whether we study town or country the result of our in- 
quiries is the same—the houses are too small and the 
families are too large. Take, as illustrating this, the terrible 
instances given by Mr. George Godwin in his essay on 
** Over-crowding in London.” In Lincoln Court he states 
that: In the majority of the houses the rooms are small, 
and the staircases are narrow and without ventilation. In 
two of them it was admitted that more than thirty five 
persons lived in each; but it would probably be nearer 
truth to say that each house of eight rooms contains on an 
average, including children, forty-five persons." A child THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
17 
was found dead in Brownlow Street, and on inquiry, it was. 
learnt that the mother, a widow, and six children slept in 
one bed in a small room. The death of the child was... 
attributed to the bedclothes.” ‘‘ In a model lodging house 
for families, a father, who with his wife and one child occu- 
pies one room, has accommodated six of his nine other 
children the crossway on two camp bedsteads, while three 
elder girls, one sixteen years old, sleep on a small bedstead 
near.” “ In a respectable house not far from the last,occu- 
pied by steady artisans and others, I found that nine per- 
sons slept in one of the rooms (12 feet by 14 feet), a father, 
mother and seven children. Eleven shoemakers worked in 
the attics; and in each of the other five rooms there was 
a separate family. I could quote scores of such cases of 
overcrowding in what would seem to be decent houses ” 
“ Hundreds of modern houses, built in decent suburban 
neighborhoods, as if for one family only, are made to con- 
tain several. The neat external appearance of many of 
them gives no suggestion of the dangerously-crowded state 
of the houses. A description of one of them in Bemerton 
Street, Caledonian Road, will be more truthful. The base- 
ment below the level of the street contains in the front room 
an old man and his wife; in the back room, two lodgers ;.. 
in the parlors there are a man and his wife and eight chil- 
dren. On the first iloor, a man and his wife and infant;. 
two gil ls, sixteen and eighteen years of age, and occasion- 
ally thtir mother—all in the front room; and in the small 
back room, two women, a girl, and two young children. On. 
the second lioor, a father, mother, two grown up sons, an 
infant, and a brood of rabbits. Two women and two boys 
in the back room make the whole population of the hotise 
thirty four. In the next there were thirty-three persons, 
similarly divided.” “ In one s nail house, with staircase in 
the centre, there were in the lour small rooms on each side 
of it, forty persons in the daytime. How many there may 
be at li ght I cannot say. The atmosphere on the staircase 
was sickening.” Who can wonder that the death-rate is so - 
high in large cities,and that the difference in the death-rate 
between the rich and poor sections of the same city is ap- 
palling. In Glasgow, for the quarter ending June 30, the 
death rate in the Blythswood division was 19; that in the 
Bridgegate and Wynds division 52’. Many of the deaths, 
in the richer districts might be prevented by better sanitary 
arrangements and wider sanitary knowledge; the excess in 
the poorer districts is clearly preventable with our present 18 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
knowledge, and preventable death is manslaughter. As 
might be expected, the rate of infant mortality is very high 
in these overcrowded districts; where 200 children under 
the age of five years die among the rich, 600 die among 
the poor; a young child is easily killed, aud the bad air 
and unwholesome food rapidly murder the little ones ; again 
quoting from the Glasgow report, “ a large number cf the 
deaths, bearing the relation of per cent, to the total 
births, were those of children under one year.” In addition 
to the actual deaths caused by overcrowding, we must add 
to the mass of misery accruing from it, the non-fatal dis- 
eases and the general debility and lack of vigorous life 
so common in our large centres of industry. “ Overcrowd- 
ing,” says Mr. Godwin, “means want of pure air; and 
want of pure air means debility, continued fever, death, 
widowhood, orphanage, pauperism, and money loss to the 
living.” Epidemics are most fatal in over-crowded dis- 
tricts. not only because they pass so rapidly from one to 
another, but also because the people dwelling in those dis- 
tricts have less vitality, less vigor 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 common- 
est checks to population in all great cities. Nor must the 
results to morality be omitted in this imperfect summary of 
the evils which grow out of over-crowding. "What modesty, 
what decency, what self-respect is possible to these men and 
women, boys and girls, herded together, seven, ten, fourteen 
in a room? Only the absence of these virtues could make 
the life endurable for four-and-twenty hours; no delicacy 
of feeling can exist there, and we cannot wonder at Dr. 
Drysdale's sad answer in the recent trial: “They do not 
know what modesty is.” 
Can there be any doubt that it is the large families so 
common among the English poor that are the root of this 
over-crowding't For not only would the “model-lodging 
house ” spoken of above have been less crowded if the 
parents, instead of having ten children, had had only two, 
but with fewer children less money would be needed for food 
and clothing, and more could be spared for rent. The artisan 
with six children, forced to live in a stifling pair of rooms in a 
back street in London in order to be near his work, might, if 
he had only two, spare money enough to pay his rail to and THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
19 
fro from the suburbs, where the same rent would give him 
decent accommodation ; and not only would he have a bet- 
ter home, but the two children would grow strong in the 
free air, where the six pine in the London street, and the 
two would have plenty of food and clothing, where the six 
lack both. Mr. Godwin recognizes this fact; he says: 
“Amongst the causes which lead to the evil we are de- 
ploring, we must not overlook the gradual increase of chil- 
dren, while in the case of the laboring man, the income 
mostly remains the same. . . . As the children increase 
in number the -wife is prevented from adding by her earn- 
ings to the income, and many years must elapse before the 
children can be put to work.” “ Ought to be put to work,” 
would be a truer phrase, for the age at which young chil- 
dren are forced to help in winning their daily bread is one 
of the disgraces of our civilization. 
Overcrowding in country districts is, naturally, not so 
injurious to health as it is in the towns; the daily work in 
the open air, the fresh breeze blowing round the cottage, 
and cleansing, to some extent, the atmosphere within, the 
fields and lanes where the children can play, all these things 
may do much to neutralize the harm to health wrought by 
overcrowding at night. The injury to health, caused by 
large families among the agricultural poor, arises more from 
other causes than from overcrowding; the low wage cannot 
afford a house sufficiently good, and the cheap ill-built cot- 
tage, damp, draughty, badly-drained, brings to those who live 
in it the fever, and the ague, and the rheumatism so sadly 
common among these laboring classes. Butthemoral effect 
of overcrowding is, as the present Bishop of Manchester 
said—when serving, as the Rev. J. Fraser, in the Royal 
Commission on the employment of children, young per- 
sons, and women in agriculture—“fearful to contemplate.” 
“Modesty,” he goes on, “must be an unknown virtue, 
decency an unimaginable thing, where, in one small cham- 
ber, with the be,Is lying as thickly as they can be packed, 
father, mother, young men, lads, grown and growing up 
girls—two and sometimes three generations—are herded 
promiscuously; where every operation of the toilette and 
of nature—dressings, undressings, births, deaths—is per- 
formed by each within the sight or hearing of all; where 
children of both sexes, to as high an age as twelve or four- 
teen, or even more, occupy the same bed; where the whole 
atmosphere is sensual, and human nature is degraded into 
something below the level of the swine. ” THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
20 
The too early putting of the children to work is one of 
the consequences of over-large families. In the country the 
children working in gangs in the fields learn evil speech and 
•evil act at an age when they should be innocent, at school 
and at plfiy. In town, in the factory and in the workroom, 
the seeds of disease are sown in the child laborers. “ Chil- 
dren in big families,” says Dr Drysdale, “are taken out to 
work very early, and premature exertion often injures them 
for life. . . 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 
Tread; 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 child- 
hood 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. 
From the same pressure and struggle for ex'stence, con- 
sequent on the difficulty of winning the means of life in an 
over-crowded land, arise the unhealthy conditions among 
which many kinds of work are carried on. Mr. Godwin re- 
marks, as to artificial flower-making: “In an upper room in 
Oxford Street, not ten feet square, I have seen a dozen deli- 
'-cate young women closely shut up, pursuing this occupation. 
. . . . Many of the workrooms of fashionable millinei s 
• are similarly over-c owded, as are those where young girls 
-are engaged in book stitching. Take, as an example, a hout e 
in Fleet Street, looked at not long ago The passage is 
narrow; a door in it shuts with a spring; the staircase is 
confined and without ventilation; the is steamy 
and smells of glue; ascending, it is seen that all the doors 
shut with springs. In the first room looked into forty young 
women and girls wee sorting and stitching 1 ook-c ..... 
Pour creatures so placed are being sloly slain. ’ Dr Symes 
Thompson, wiiting 01 the “Influence of Occupation on 
Health and Life,” points out the death bringing ciicum- 
stances under which loo many of our wealth-producers toil; 
if there were fewer of them their lives would be more valuable 
than they are; horses and cat le are cared for and protected; 
the very machinery used is oiled and polished; only the 
human machines are worked under life-ruining conditions, 
and are left to struggle on as best they may. Dr. Thompson 
gives cases of printers — which every one connected with 
journalism can supplement by his own experience — where 
nmwholesome atmosphere and preposterously long hours THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
21 
destroy the constitution. He tells us how ihe shoddy- 
grinders, the cocoa-matting weavers, the chaff cutters, the 
workers in flax woolen and cotton factories, suffer from a 
* peculiar kind of bronchitis, arising from the irritation of the 
d ist ’and other matters inhaled, and the cough ‘-is followed 
by expectoration, and, if the occupation is continued, emphy- 
sema, or, in those predisposed to phthisis, tubercle is de- 
veloped.’’ At Sheffield the “inhalation of metal filings” ’s 
“destructive” to the knife and fork grinders, and although 
this might be prevented by the use of respirators the men s 
lives are not sufficiently valuable to be thus saved. If grit 
got into the works of a machine and ruined them the woiks 
avoid 1 be covered over, but it may pass into men's lungs and 
kill them and no one troubles. Brass finishers and stone- 
masons 1 ibor under the same disadvantages ; lead poison- 
ing i; common a nong plumbers, pimters, &c. ; “women 
employed in lead works rarely bear healthy children ; in a 
large number of cases miscarriage occurs at the fudi or 
seven'll month, and if the children are born alive ill jy rare y 
survive long Lead exerts a similar influence on the repro- 
ductive powers in the male sex; men with lead affections 
seldom produce healthy children.” Many of these di eases 
might be prevented, if the excessive number of wo: kers did 
not make the prevention a matter of indifference to those 
concerned. Dr. Thompson says: “Let over-cro.vding and 
■orer heating be avoided. There should be an abundant 
supply of pure ai". The hours of work should be mo lerate, 
widi fair intervals for meals. If there is much dust or other 
foreign m itter in the air a suitable respirator should be used, 
•or the offensive par.icles should be carried off by a current 
of air produced by a chimney or revolving wheel. Again, 
mechanical appliances may often take the place of hand- 
lab jr, and much may of en be accomplished by the 
ap; l.caiitn of practical science and chemical knowledge.” 
'Thus we see indiffer n e to life resul ing from the over- 
crowding of the labor market, and in the unhealthy condi- 
tions among which many kinds of work are carried on we 
find a widely spread check to population. 
Baby farming has only too justly been called the 
“hideous social phenomenon of the nineteenth century.” 
It is the direct result of the pressure of over-large 
families, and is simply a veiled form of infanticide. 
Mr. Benson Baker, one of the medical officers cf Maryle- 
bone, has written a sad notice of baby-farming. He 
•speaks of a notorious case: “One of the stock from that 22 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
model baby-farm is now under my care. This child, 
tluee years old, was employed by the proprietoress as a 
gaffer or ganger over the younger babies. His duties were 
to sit up in the middle of the bed with eight other babies 
round him, and the moment any one of them awoke to put 
the bottle to their mouth. He was also to keep them quiet, 
arid generally to superintend them.” A vast number of 
children are slowly murdered annually in this way, and the 
dea h-rate is also very high in every place where many 
infants are kept together, whether it be in workhouse, 
hospital, or creche. 
Another consequence of large families which must not 
be overlooked is the physical injury caused to the mothers. 
Among the poor, cases of prolapsus uteri, or falling of the 
womb, are only too common ; prolapsus uteri results fre- 
quently from “getting about” too rapidly after child birth, 
it being impossible for the mother of the increasing family 
to lie by for that period of rest which nature absolutely en- 
joins. “Women,” says Dr. Drysdale, “ought never to get 
up from confinement for some weeks after the child is born, 
but these poor women are so utterly unable to do without 
work that they are compelled to get up in a day or two. The 
womb being full of blood, falls down and produces infirmity 
for life.'’ The doctor also says of this disease : “It is ex- 
tremely common. Indeed, when I was obstetrical assistant 
at Edinburgh, it was one of the commonest diseases among 
women—the principal one, in fact.” “ Prolapsus, or falling of 
the womb,” says Dr. Graily Hewett, “is an affection to which 
women are in one form or other exceedingly liable, and it is 
one which is not unfrequently productive of very much in- 
convenience and distress.” The reason of the disease is 
not far to see. The womb, in its unimpregnated state, is 
“ from two and a half to three inches long, and an inch and 
a half wide, more or less, at its largest part, and about an 
inch thick” (Dr. Marion Sims). During the nine months 
of pregnancy this organ is stretched more and more, until 
at the end of nine months it is capable of containing the 
fully developed infant. During these nine months the mus- 
cular substance of the womb “increases in thickness, 
while the whole organ enlarges in order to accommodate 
the growing foetus and its appendages ” (Dr. Dalton). At 
birth the muscular fibres begin to contract, and the womb 
ought to return to almost its original size. But in order 
that it may so return the horizontal position is absolutely 
necessary for some days, and much rest for some weeks, THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
23 
until the muscles connected with the womb have regained 
something of their natural elasticity. If the mother be 
forced to leave her bed too early, if she be compelled to ex- 
ert herself in housekeeping cares, to stand over the wash- 
tub, to bend over the fire--what happens ? The womb so 
long distended, has no chance of healthy contraction ; the 
muscles which support it in its proper position have not 
recovered from the long strain; the womb itself is heavy 
with the blood flowing from the vessels yet unclosed, and 
it naturally falls and “produces infirmity for life.” Too 
frequent pregnancy is another cause of prolapsus uteri, and 
of many other diseases of the womb. “ We frequently find 
that the uterus becomes diseased from the fact that the 
pregnancies rapidly succeed each other, the uterus not 
having recovered its natural size when it becomes again oc- 
cupied by an ovum ” (Dr. Graily Hewettj. The womb is 
too constantly put on the stretch, and is not allowed suffi- 
cient rest to recover its original vigor and elasticity. It 
takes about two months for the womb to thoroughly recon- 
struct itself after the delivery of a child; a new mucous 
membrane develops, and a degeneration and reconstruc- 
tion of the muscles takes place, technically known as 
“the involution of the uterus.” During pregnancy, the 
uterine muscles “ increase very considerably in size. 
Their texture becomes much more distinctly granular, 
and their outlines more strongly marked The 
entire walls of the uterus, at the time of delivery, 
are composed of such muscular fibres, arranged in 
circular, oblique, and longitudinal bundles. About the end 
of the first week after delivery, these fibres begin to under- 
go a fatty degeneration. . . . The muscular fibres which 
have become altered by the fatty deposit, are afterwards 
gradually absorbed and disappear; their place being subse- 
quently taken by other fibres of new formation, which already 
begin to make their appearance before the old ones have 
been completely destroyed. As this process goes on, it 
results finally in a complete renovation of the muscular sub- 
stances of the uterus. The organ becomes again reduced in 
size, compact in tissue, and of a pale ruddy hue, as in the 
ordinary unimpregnated condition. This entire renewal or 
reconstruction of the uterus is completed, according to 
Heschl, about the end of the second month after delivery” 
(Dr. Dalton). No words can add strength to this state- 
ment, proving the absolute right of women to complete 
repose from sexual disturbance during this slow recovery of 24 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
the normal condition of the womb. Many a woman in 
fairly comfortable circumstances suffers from lack of knowl- 
edge of ph\ sical laws, and from the reckless English dis- 
regard o; all conjugal prudence; short of absolute displace- 
ment of the womb, and of grave uterine diseases, various 
disorders result from weakness of the over taxed generative 
organs. Leucorrhcea is one of the commonest of these, 
producing general debility, pain in the back, indigestion, 
&c It is not right, it is not moral, that mothers of families 
should thus ruin their health, causing suffering to themselves 
and misery to those around them; it is only a perverted 
moral sense which leads men and women to shut their eyes 
to these sad consequences of over-large families, and causes 
them thus to disregard the plainest laws of health Sexual 
intemperance, the over-procreation of children, is as im- 
moral as intemperance in drink. 
Among the melancholy consequences of over-population 
we must not omit the foolish and sometimes criminal 
attem ts made by ignorant people to limit the family; the 
foolish attempt is the prevalent habit of over lactation, arising 
f om the mistaken idea that conception is impossible during 
the nursing of a child ; the criminal attempt is the procur- 
ing of abortion by means of drugs or by the use of instru- 
ments These will be more fully dealt with in Chapter III., 
and are only alluded to here as among the consequences 
of the pressure of over-population. Too often, indeed, do- 
these come under the head of the positive, the life destroy- 
ing checks. 
I'o turn to a different and more immediately life-destroy- 
ing class of checks, that of war cannot, of course, be left out 
of this melancholy picture. The Franco-German war, in 
1S70 the Turco Russian war now going on, have both been 
sensible checks to the populations of their respective coun- 
tries. Tne great famine now raging in In ia is a positive- 
check on a s.ill more frightful scale, and we have, seen that 
this leriible famine results entirely from over population; 
the evidence of Lord Derby may be taken as conclusive 
upon this point: but is it possible to accept Lord Derby's 
facts, and yet make no kind of effort to so've the question 
which, he says, “ does not seem to me to be a light 1 ne ? ” 
It is all very well to say that: ‘‘If present appearances can 
be trusted, we shall have in every generation a larger ag- 
gregate of human beings relying upon us for help in those 
periods of distress which must from time to time occur in. 
a country wholly agricultural and liable to droughts.” TJIE LAW OF POPULATION. 
25 
But what a confession of helplessness! Is it possible to sit 
clown with folded hands and calmly contemplate the recur- 
rence at regular intervals of such a famine as is now slaying 
its tens of thousands ? Yet the law of population is “an ir- 
refragable truth,” and these people are starved to death, 
according to natural law; early marriages, large families, 
these are the premises; famine and disease, these are the 
conclusions. The same consequences will, sooner or later— 
rooner 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. 
One more melancholy positive check must be added, the 
last to which we*shall here refer. It is the absolute child- 
murder by desertion or by more violent means: Dr. Lan- 
kester said that “there were in London alone 16,000 
women who had murdered their offspring.” Dr. Attwood 
lately stated of Macclesfield that the doctors in that town 
often had moral, though not legal, proof that children were 
“ put away,” and that Macclesfield was “no worse than 
any other manufacturing town.” 
Such are some of the consequences of the law of popu- 
lation; the power of production is held in check by the con- 
tinual 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, wo- 
men, 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 Ilardinge Giffard trusts for the prevention of 
over population, are being removed, one by one, by science 
and by civilization. War will be replaced by arbitration, 
and those who would have fallen victims to it will become 
fathers of families; sanitary knowledge will bring sanitary 
improvement, and typhus fever and small-pox will disap- 
pear as the plague and black death have done; children 
will not die in their infancy, and the average length of 
human life will increase. The life-destroying checks of 
“ nature and providence ” will be met with the life-preserv- 
ing attempts of science and of reason, and population will 
increase more and more rapidly. AVhat will be the result ? 
Simply this : 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 ap- 
plication. Ought we then to encourage positive checks so 26 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
as to avert this final catastrophe ? Ought we to stir up 
war ? Ought we to prevent sanitaiy improvements ? ought 
we to leave the sickly to die ? Ought we to permit infants 
to perish unaided ? Ought we to refuse help to the starv- 
ing ? 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 ? has 
reason no solution to this problem ? has thought no mes- 
sage of salvation to the poor ? 
CHAPTER III. 
ITS BEARING UPON HUMAN CONDUC1' AND MORALS. 
To the question that closes the last chapter there is an 
answer; all thinkers have seen that since population in- 
creases more rapidly than the means of subsistence, the 
human brain should be called in to devise a restriction cf 
the population, and so relieve man from the pressure of the 
struggle for existence. The lower animals are helpless and 
must needs suffer, and strive, and die. but man, whose brain 
raises him above the rest of antimated 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, civilized 
man seeks so to alter the conditions which surround him as 
to produce a happier result. Thinkers have, therefore, 
studied the law and its consequences, and have suggested 
various views of its bearing on human conduct and morals. 
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 ? Mahhus proposed that 
prevention, or birth restricting, should be substituted for 
positive, or life destroying, checks, and that “ moral res- 
traint ” 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 sup- 
port.” This obligation, he says, is a “duty intelligible to 
the humblest capacity.” But the duty being admitted on 
all sides, the crucial point is—How is this duty to be THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
27 
fulfilled ? Malihus answers :—By delay of marriage. We 
arc bound “ not to marry till we have a fair prospect of being 
able to support our children; ” in a right state of society 
“ no man, whose earnings were only sufficient to maintain 
two children, would put himself in a situation in which he 
might have to maintain four or five ; ” a man should “ defer 
marrying, till, by industry and economy, he is in a capacity 
to support the children that he may reasonably expect from 
his marriage.” Thus marriage—if ever possible to the 
poor—would be delayed until the middle of life, and the 
birth-rate would be decreased by a general abstention from 
marriage until a comparatively late age. 
This preventive check would doubtless be an effectual 
one, but it is opt. n to grave and fatal objections, and would 
only replace one set of evils by another. If late marriage 
were generally practised the most melancholy results would 
follow. The more marriage is delayed, the more prostitu- 
tion spreads. It is necessary to gravely remind all advocates 
oflate marriage that men do not and will not live single, 
and all women, and all men who honor 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. Prostitu- 
tion is an evil which we should strive to eradicate, not to 
perpetuate, and late marriage, generally adopted, would 
most certainly perpetuate it. Tire state of the streets of 
our large towns at nightfall is the result of deferred mar- 
riage, and marriage is deferred owing to the ever-increasing 
difficulty of maintaining a large family in anything like 
comfo: t. 
Mr. Montagu Cookson, writing in theFortnightly Review, 
says : “If, indeed, we could all become perfect beings, the 
rule of life deduced by Malthus from the unalterable law of 
population would be both practicable and safe; as it is, it 
has a direct tendency to promote the cardinal vide of cities 
—that of unchastity. The number of women in England 
who ply the loathsome trade of prositution is already large 
enough to people a county, and, as our great thoroughfares 
show at nightfall, is certainly not diminishing. Their chief 
supporters justify themselves by the very plea which Mal- 
thus use; to enforce the duty of continence, namely, that 
they are not well enough off to maintain a wife and family, 
.If they could be sure that they could limit the number of 
their children, so as to make it commensurate with their 28 
THb LAW OF POPULATION. 
income, not only would the plea be generally groundless,, 
but 1 believe it would not be urged, and the so-called social 
evil would be stormed in i s strongest fortress.’’ 
The evi's resulting from late marriage to those who 
remain really celibde, must not be overlooked in weighing 
this recommendation of it as a cure for the evils of over- 
population. Celibacy is not natural to men or to women ;. 
all bodily needs require their legitimate satisfaction, and 
celibacy is a disregard of natural law. The asceticism which 
depises the body is a contempt of nature, and a revolt 
against her; the morality which upholds virginity as the 
type of womanly perfection is unnatural; to be in harmony 
with nature, men and women should be husbands and wives, 
fathers and mothers, and until nature evolves a neuter sex 
celibacy will ever be a mark of imperfection. Very clearly 
has nature marked celibacy with disapproval; the average 
life of the unmarried is shorter than the average 1:fe of the 
married; the unmarried have a less vigorous physique, are 
more withered, more rapidly aged, more peevish, more 
fanciful; “the disordered emotions of persons of both sexes 
who pass lives of voluntary or enforced celibacy,” says Dr. 
Drysdale in his essay on Prostitution, “ is a fact of every- 
day observation. Their bad temper, fretfulness, and excita- 
bility are proverbial.” We quote from the same tractate 
the following opinions : “ M. Villamay, in his ‘ Dictionnarie 
des Sciences Medicales,’ says ‘ It is assuredly true that abso- 
lute and involuntary abstinence, is the most common cause 
of hysteria.’ Again, at a meeting of the Medico-Chirurgical 
Society, reported in the Lanctt of February 14, 1859, Mr. 
Holmes Coote is reported to have said, ‘No doubt incon- 
tinence was a great sin ; but the evils connected with con- 
tinence were productive of far greater misery to society. 
Any person could bear witness to this, who had had 
experience in the wards of lunatic asylums. Again, Sir. 
benjamin brodie, at the birmingham Social Science Meet- 
ing, is reported to have said, in a discussion on prostitution, 
that ‘ the evils of celibacy were so great, that he would not 
mention them ; but that they quite equalled those of prosti- 
tution! ’ ” M block informs us that in France out of 100 
male lunatics, 65.72 are celibate, 5.6r are widowers, and 
only 2S 67 are married; of 100 female lunatics, 58.16 are 
celibate, 12.48 are widows, and 29.36 are married. M* 
bertillon, dealing with France. Holland, and Belgium, states 
that men who live celibate lives after twenty have, on an 
average, six years less of life than those who marry. The THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
29 
same fact holds good as regards married and unmarried 
women. A long train of formidable diseases results from 
celibacy—such as spermatorrhoea 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 differing natures. The children that 
spring from such marriages—where not following each 
other too rapidly—are more vigorous and healtny than 
those born of middle-aged parents, and in the ordinary 
course of nature the parents of such children live long 
enough to see them make their start in life, to aid, streng- 
then, and counsel them at the beginning of their career. 
Fortunately, late marriage will never be generally prac- 
tised 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 ; the best 
of the people, the most careful, the most provident, the 
most intelligent, would remain celibate and barren, while 
the careless, thoughtless, thriftless ones would marry and 
produce large fa mi ies ; the evil is found to prevail to some 
extent even now; the more thoughtful, seeing the misery 
resulting from large families on low wage, often abstain 
from marriage, and have to pay heavy poor rates for the 
support of the thoughtless and their families. The pre- 
ventive check proposed by Malthus must therefore be re- 
jected, and a wiser solution of the problem must be sought. 
I „ater thinkers, recognising at once the evils of over- 
population and the evils of late marriage, have striven to 
fm l a path which shall avoid both Scylla and Charybdis,. 
and have advocated early marriages and small families. 
John btuart Mill has been one of the most earnest of these 
true friends of the people; in his “Political Economy ” he 
writes: “in a very backward state of society, like that of 
Europe in the Middle Ages, and many parts of Asia at. 30 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
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. '1 here is a condition to which the labouring 
people are habituated; they perceive that by having too 
numerous families, they must sink below that condition, or 
fail to transmit it to their children; and this they do not 
choose to submit to. The countries in which, so far as is 
known, a great degree of voluntary prudence has been 
longest practised on this subject, are Norway and parts of 
Switzerland. . . In both these countries the increase of 
population is very slow; and what checks it, is not multitude 
of deaths, but fewness of births. Both the births and the 
deaths are remarkably few in proportion to the population; 
the average duration of life is the longest in Europe; the 
population contains fewer children, and a greater propor- 
tional number of persons in the vigor of life than is known 
to be the case in any other part of the world. The paucity 
of births tends directly to prolong life, by keeping the 
people in comfortable circumstances. ’ Clearly and pointedly 
Mill teaches “ conjugal prudence;he quotes with ap- 
proval the words of Sismondi, who was “ among the most 
benevolent of his time and the happiness of whose married 
life has been celebrated: ” “When dangerous prejudices 
have not become accredited, when a morality contrary to 
our true duties towards others, and especially towards 
those to whom we have given life, is not inculcated in the 
name of the most sacred authority, no prudent man con- 
tracts matrimony before he is in a condition which gives him 
an assured means ofliving, and no married man has a 
greater number of children than he can properly bring up.” 
Many other eminent men and women have spoken in the 
same sense ; Professor Leone Levi advocates u prudence 
as regards the increase of our families ” Mrs. Fawcett 
writes: “ Those who deal with this question of pauperism 
should remember that it is not to be remedied by cheap 
food, by reductions of taxation, or by economical admini- 
stration in the departments, or by new forms of government. 
Nothing will permanently affect pauperism while the pres- 
ent reckless increase of population continues. And noth- 
ing will be so likely to check this increase as the imposi- THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
31 
tion by the State on parents of the whole responsibility of 
maintaining their offspring.” Mr. Montagu Cookson says 
that some may think “ prudential restraint after marriage 
wilder than anything Malthus ever dreamt,” but urges that 
“ the numbers of children born after marriage should be 
limited,” and that “such limitation is as much the duly of 
married persons as the observance of chastity is the duty 
of those that are unmarried.” 
It remains, then, to ask how is this duty to be performed ? 
It is clearly useless to preach the limitation of the family, 
and to conceal the means whereby such limitation may be 
effected. If the limitation be a duty, it cannot be wrong to 
afford such information as shall enable people to discharge it. 
There are various prudential checks which have been 
suggested, but further investigation of this intricate subject 
is sorely needed, and it is much to be wished that more 
medical men would devote themselves to the study of this 
important branch of physiology. 
The check we will take first in order is that to which 
Mr. Montagu Cookson alludes in his essay : he says that the 
family may be limited by “obedience to natural laws which 
all may discover and verify if they will.” The “ natural 
laws” to which Mr. Cookson refers would be, we imagine, 
the results of observation on the comparative fertility with 
women of some periods over others. It is well known that 
the menstrual discharge, or the Catamenia, recurs in normal 
cases at monthly intervals, during t4ie whole of the fertile 
period of female life ; a woman does not bear children 
before menstruation has commenced, nor after it has ceased. 
There are cases on record where women have borne children 
but have never menstruated, but these are rare exceptions 
to the general rule ; menstruation is the sign of capability of 
conception, as its cessation is the sign of future disability to 
conceive. Recent investigators have collected many cases 
in which “ the menstrual period was evidently connected 
with the maturation and discharge of ova” (Carpenter). 
“ The essential part of the female generative system,” says 
Dr. Carpenter, “is that in which the ova [eggsj are pre- 
pared. ... In the higher animals, as in the human female, 
the substance of the ovarium is firm and compact, and con- 
sists of a nucleated, tough, fibrous connective tissue, with 
much interspersed fusiform muscular tissue, forming what 
is known as the stroma. ... As development proceeds the 
cells , . . multiply, and single cells or groups of cells, round, 
ovoid, or tubular, come to be enclosed in the tissue of the 32 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
ovary by delicate vascular processes which shoot forth from 
the stroma. These cells constitute the primordial ova.” 
These ova gradually mature, and are then discharged from 
the ovary and pass into the uterus, and on the fertilization 
of one of them conception depends. Dr. Kirke writes : 
* It has long been known that in the so-called oviparous 
animals, the separation of ova from the ovary may take 
place independently of impregnation by the male, or even 
of sexual union. And it is now established that a like 
maturation and discharge of ova, independently of coition, 
occurs in mammalia, the periods at which the matured ova 
are separated from the ovaries and received into the Fal- 
lopian tubes being indicated in the lower mammalia by the 
phenomena of heat or rut; in the human female by the 
phenomena of menstruation. ... It may, therefore, be 
concluded that the two states, heat and menstruation are 
analogous, and that the essential accompaniment of both 
is the maturation and extrusion of ova.” Seeing, then, that 
the ova are discharged at the menstrual periods, and that 
conception depends on the fertilization of the ova by the 
male, it is obvious that conception will most readily take 
place immediately before or after menstruation. “ It is 
-quite certain that there is a greater aptitude for conception 
immediately before and after that epoch than there is at 
any intermediate period” (Carpenter). A woman “is more 
apt to conceive soon after menstruation than at any other 
time” (Chavasse). So much is this fact recognized by the 
medical profession, that in cases of sterility a husband is 
often recommended only to visit his wife immediately after 
the cessation of the Catamenia. Since women conceive 
more essily at this period, the avoidance of sexual inter- 
course during the few days before and after menstruation 
has been recommended as a preventive check. Dr. Tyler 
Smith writes : “ In the middle of the interval between the 
periods, there is little chance of impregnation taking place. 
The same kind of knowledge is of use, by way of caution, 
to women who menstruate during lactation, in whom there 
is a great aptitude to conceive; pregnancy, under such 
circumstances, would be injurious to the health of the feetus, 
the child at the breast, and the muther herself, and there- 
fore should be avoided, if possible.” The most serious ob- 
jection to reliance on this check is that it is not certain. 
M. Raciborski says that only 6 or 7 per cent, of concep- 
tions take place during this interval, but the 6 or 7 cxcep- 
• lions to the general rule prevent recommendation of the THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
33 
check as thoroughly reliable ; we can scarcely say more 
than that women are far less likely to conceive midway 
between the menstrual periods than either immediately 
before or after them. 
The preventive check which is so generally practised in 
France that Dr. Drysdale—with a rarely wide French experi- 
ence—stated that among the peasantry it was “used univer- 
sally,” and was “practised by almost every male in Paris, 
and all over the country,” is one which depends entirely on 
the self-control of the man. It consists simply in the with- 
drawal of the husband previous to the emission of the semen, 
and is, of course, absolutely certain as a preventive. A few 
among the French doctors contend that the practice is in- 
jurious, more especially to the wife ; but they have failed, 
so far as we can judge, in making out their case, for they 
advance no proofs in support of their theory, while the 
universal practice of the French speaks strongly on the 
•other side. 
The preventive check advocated by Dr. Ivnowlton is, on 
tire other hand, entirely in the hands of the wife. It con- 
sists in the use of the ordinary syringe immediately after 
intercourse, a solution of sulphate of zinc or of alum being 
used instead of water. There is but little doubt that this 
check is an effective one, a most melancholy proof of its 
effectiveness being given by Dr. J. C. Barr, who, giving 
-evidence before the Commission on the working of the 
Contagious Diseases Act, stated:—“Every woman who 
leaves the hospital is instructed in the best mode of pre- 
venting disease. These are cleanliness, injections of alum 
and sulphate of zinc.” 
Professor Sheldon Amos, dealing with the same painful 
subject, refers to this evidence, and quotes Dr. Barr as 
saying again, “ my custom is to instruct them to keep them- 
selves clean, to use injections and lotions.” These women 
are not meant to bear children, they are to be kept “ fit for 
use ” by Her Majesty’s soldiers. 
Apart altogether from this sad, but governmentally 
authorized use of this check, there are many obvious dis- 
advantages connected with it as a matter of taste and feel- 
ing. The same remark applies to the employment of the 
baudruche, a covering used by men of loose character as a 
guard against syphilitic diseases, and occasionally recom- 
mended as a preventive check. 
The check which appears to us to be preferable, as at 
-once certain, and in no sense grating on any feeling of 34 
THE LAW OF LOBULATION. 
affection or of delicacy, is that recommended by Carlile 
many years ago in his “Every Woman’s Book.” In 
order that impregnation should take place, “ the absolute 
contact of the spermatozoa with the ovum is requisite” 
(Carpenter). The ovum passes from the ovary down the 
Fallopian tube into the uterus ; the spermatozoa, floating in 
the spermatic fluid, pass upwards through the uterus, and 
fecundate the ovum either in the uterus, in the tube, or in 
the ovary itself. To prevent impregnation it is then only 
necessary to prevent the contact. The neck of the uterus, 
where it enters the vagina, ends with the Os uteri, an orifice 
varying in shape in different individuals. Through this orifice 
the male semen must pass in order to fertilize the ovum. 
To prevent impregnation, pass to the end of the vagina 
a piece of fine sponge, which should be dipped in 
water before being used, and which need not be removed 
until the morning. Dr. Marion Sims, who in cases of 
retroversion of the uterus constantly used mechanical sup- 
port to maintain the uterus in its normal position, and so 
make pregnancy possible, gives much useful information 
on the various kinds of pessaries. He sometimes used a 
“small wad of cotton, not more than an inch in diameter,” 
which was “secured with a string for its removal ; ” this was 
worn during the day and removed at night. lie says that 
the woman using a pessary should be able “ to remove and 
replace it with the same facility that she would put on and 
pull off an old slipper.” There is, in fact, no kind of diffi- 
culty in the use of this check, and it has the great advantage 
of unobtrusiveness. 
There is a preventive check attempted by many poor 
women which is most detrimental to health, and should 
therefore never be employed, namely, the too long persis- 
tence in nursing one baby, in the hope of thereby prevent- 
ing the conception of another. Nursing does not prevent 
conception. A child should not be nursed, according to Dr. 
Chavasse, for longer than nine months; and he quotes Dr. 
Farr, as follows:—“It is generally recognized that the 
healthiest children are those weaned at nine months com- 
plete. Prolonged nursing hurts both child and mother: 
in the child, causing a tendency to brain disease, probably 
through disordered digestion and nutrition ; in the mother, 
•causing a strong tendency to deafness and blindness.” 
Dr. Chavasse adds : “If he be suckled after he be twelve 
months old, he is generally pale, flabby, unhealthy, and 
rickety; and the mother is usually nervous, emaciated., THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
35 
and hysterical. ... A child nursed beyond twelve months 
is very apt, if he should live, to be knock-kneed, and bow- 
legged, and weak-ankled, to be narrow-chested, and chicken- 
breasted.’’ If pregnancy occur, and the mother be nurs- 
ing, the consequences arfect alike the mother, the babe, and 
the unborn child. To nurse under these circumstances, 
Says Dr, Chavasse, “ is highly improper, as it not only in- 
jures her own health, and may bring on a miscarriage, but 
it is also prejudicial to her babe, and may produce a del- 
icacy of constitution from which he might never recover.” 
Another class of checks is distinctly criminal, i.e., the 
procuring of abortion. Various drugs are taken by women 
with this intent, and too often their use results in death, or 
in dangerous sickness.. Dr. Fleetwood Churchill gives 
various methods of inducing labor prematurely, and 
argues, justly, that where the delivery of a living child at 
the full time is impossible, it is better to bring on labor 
than be compelled to perform later either craniotomy or the 
Caesarian section. But he goes further : “ There are cases 
where the distortion [of the pelvis] is so great as to render 
the passage of a seven months’ child impossible, and, 
others still worse, where no reduction of a viable child’s 
bulk will enable it to pass. I do not see why abortion 
should not be induced at an early period in such cases.” 
And Dr. Churchill quotes Mr. Ingleby as saying : li Prem- 
ature labor 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 impos- 
sible, surely the prevention of conception is far better 
than the procuring of abortion. The destruction of the 
foetus is destruction of life, and it is immoral, where a 
woman cannot bear a living child, that she should conceive 
at all. 
If this system of preventive checks were generally 
adopted, how happy would be the result both to the home 
and to the State ! 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-i eliance would supersede charity. Where the work- 
house now frowns, the busy school would then smile, and 36 
TIIE LAW OF POPULATION. 
care and forethought for the then valuable lives would 
diminish the dangers of factory and of work-room. Pros- 
titution 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. It remains for England to have all 
this if she will; but the first upward step towards that 
happier life will only be taken when parents resolutely de- 
termine to limit their family to their means, and stamp with 
moral disapprobation every married couple who selfishly 
overcrowd their home, to the injury of the community of 
which they are a part. 
CHAPTER IV. 
Many people, perfectly good-hearted, but somewhat 
narrow-minded, object strongly to the idea of conjugal 
pri deuce, and regard scientific checks to population as “ a 
violation of nature s laws, and a frustration of nature’s ends.” 
Such people, a hundred years ago, would have applauded 
the priest who objected to lightning conductors as being 
an interference with the bolts of Deity; they exist in every 
age, the rejoicers over past successes, and the timid dis- 
approves of new discoveries. Let us analyze the argu- 
ment. “A violation of nature's laws;” this objection is 
couched in somewhat unscientific phrase; natures laws” 
are but the observed sequences of events; man cannot 
violate them; he may disregard them, and suffer in con- 
sequence; he may observe them, and regulate his conduct 
so as to be in harmony with them. Man's prerogative is 
that, by the use of his reason he is able to study nature out- 
side himself, and by observation may so control nature, as 
to make her add to his happiness instead of bringing him 
OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED. THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
37 
misery. To limit the family is no more a violation of 
nature's laws, than to preserve the sick by medical skill; 
the restriction of the birth-rate does not violate nature's 
laws more than does the restriction of the death-rate. 
Science strives to diminish the positive checks; science 
should also discover the best preventive checks. The 
frustration of nature’s ends.” Why should wc worship 
nature’s ends ? Nature flings lightning at our houses: we 
frustrate her ends by the lightning conductor. Nature divider 
us by seas and by rivers; we frustrate her ends by sailing 
over the seas, and by bridging the rivers. Nature sends 
typhus fever and ague to slay us ; we frustrate her ends by 
purifying the air, and by draining the marshes. Oh! it is 
answered, you only do this by using other natural powers. 
Yes, we answer, and we only teach conjugal prudence by 
balancing one natural force against another. Such study 
of nature, and such balancing of natural forces, is civiliza- 
tion. 
It is next objected that preventive checks are “ un- 
natural’’ and “ immoral.” “ Unnatural” they are not; for 
the human brain is nature’s highest product, and all im- 
provements on irrational nature are mo t purely natural; 
preventive checks are no more unnatural than every other 
custom of civilization. Raw meat, nakedness, living in 
caves, these are the irrational natural habits; cooked food, 
clothes, houses, these are the rational natural customs. 
Production of offspring recklessly, carelessly, lustfully, this 
is irrational nature, and every brute can here outdo us ; 
production of offspring with forethought, earnestness, prov- 
idence, this is rational nature, where man stands alone. 
But “ immoral.” What is morality ? It is the greatest good 
of the greatest number. 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 endeavor to vilify and de- 
grade these means in the eyes of the public, andwhospeak 
of them as ‘immoral’ and ‘disgusting,’ are little aware of 
the moral responsibility they incur thereby. As already 
shown, to reject preventive intercourse is in reality to 
choose the other three true population checks—poverty, 
prostitution, and celibacy. So far from meriting reproba- 
tion, the endeavour to spread the knowledge of the pre- 38 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
venlive methods, of the great law of nature which renders 
them necessary, is in my opinion the very greatest service 
which can at present be done to mankind ” ( “ Elements cf 
Social Science ”). 
But the knowledge of these scientific checks would, it is 
argued, make vice bolder, and would increase unchastity 
among women by making it safe. Suppose that this were so, 
it might save some broken hearts and some deserted chil- 
dren; men ruin women and go scatheless, and then bitter- 
ly object that their victims escape something of public 
shame. And if so, are all to suffer, so that one or two, al- 
ready corrupt in heart, may be preserved from becoming 
corrupt in act ? Are mothers to die slowly that impure 
women may be held back, and wives to be sacrificed, that 
the unchaste may be curbed ? As well say that no knives 
must be used because throats may be cut with them ; no 
matches sold because incendiarism may result from them ; 
no pistols allowed because murders may be committed by 
them. Blank ignorance has some advantages in the way 
of safety, and if all men's eyes were put out, none would 
ever be tempted to seduce a woman for her beauty. Let us 
bring for our women the veil to cover, and the eunuch to 
guard, and so be at least consistent in our folly and our 
distrust! But this knowledge would not increase unchastity; 
the women who could thus use it would be solely those who 
only lack opportunity, notwill, to go astray: the means 
suggested all imply deliberation and forethought; arc these 
generally the handmaids of unchastity ? English women 
are not yet sunk so low that they preserve their loyalty to 
cne, only from fear of the po sible consequences of dis- 
loyalty ; their purity, their pride, their honour, their wo- 
manhood, these are the guardians of their virtue, and never 
from English women’s heart will fade the maiden and mat- 
ronly dignity, which makes them shield their love fiom all 
taint of impurity, and bid them only surrender themselves, 
where the surrender of heart and of pledged faith have led 
the way. Shame on those who slander England’s wives 
and maidens with the foul thoughts that can only spring 
from the mind and the lips of the profligate. 
Another class of objectors appears: those who argue 
that there is no need to limit the population, at any rate 
for a long while to come. Some of these say that there is 
food enough in the world for all, and point out that the 
valley of the Mississippi would grow corn enough to feed 
the present population of the globe. They forget that the THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
39 
available menus of subsistence are those with which we 
have to deal. Corn in Nebraska and starving mouths in 
Lancashire are not much use to each other; when the 
cost of carriage exceeds tire money power of the would-be 
buyer, the corn-fields might be in the moon for all the good 
they are to him ; if means can be discovered of bringing 
corn and mouths together, well and good, but until they are 
discovered, undue production of mouths here is unwise, 
because their owners will starve while the corn is still on 
the other side of the sea. 
But if the corn can't be brought to the mouths may not 
the mouths go to the corn ? Why not emigrate ? 13ecause 
emigration is impracticable to the extent needed for the 
relief of the labour market. Emigration caused by starva- 
tion pressure is not a healthy outlet for labour; if it is 
Government-aided, helpless, thriftless folk dock to it for 
a while, and starve on the other side; if land is given, 
capital is wanted by the emigrant, for before he can eat 
his own bread, he must clear his land of timber, plough or 
dig it, sow his corn, and wait for his harvest; if he goes 
out poor, on what is he to live during the first year? Men 
with or of capital may find more profitable in- 
vestment for it in the West in America, or in our colonies, 
than at home, but their outgoing will not much relieve the 
labour market. Emigration for penniless agricultural 
labourers, and for artizans, means only starvation abroad 
instead of at home. And it is starvation under worse con- 
ditions than they had left in the mother-country; they have 
to face vicissitudes of climate for which they are utterly 
unprepared, extremes of heat and of cold which try even 
vigorous constitutions, and simply kill off underfed, half 
•clothed, and ill housed new comers. Nor is work always 
to be had in the New World. No better proof of the fool- 
ishness of emigration to the United Slates can be given, 
than the fact that, at the present time, contractors in Eng- 
land are in treaty with American workmen, with the ob- 
ject of bringing them over here. Unskilled labour does 
not improve its chances by going abroad. Nor is skilled 
labour in a better position, tor here the German emigrant 
undersells the British; he can live harder and cheaper, 
and has had a better technical education than has fallen to 
the lot of his British rival. One great evil connected with 
emigration is the disproportion it causes between men and 
women, both in the old country and in the new, those who 
•emigrate being clfielly males. Nor must it be forgotten 40 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
that when England colonized most, her population was far 
smaller than it is at the present time; physical vigour is 
necessary for successful colonizing, and the physical vigour 
of our labouring poor deteriorates under their present con- 
ditions ; as the Canadian roughly said at the meeting of 
the British Association at Plymouth: “ the colonies don’t 
want the children of your rickety paupers.” 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 emigra- 
tion 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; “it 
still remains to be shown by experience,” he says, “ w'hether 
a permanent stream of emigration can be kept up sufficient 
to take off, as in America, all that portion of the annual in- 
crease (when proceeding at its greatest rapidity) which, be- 
ing in excess of the progress made during the same short 
period in the arts of life, tends to render living more diffi- 
cult for every averagely situated individual in the com- 
munity. And unless this can be done, emigration cannot, 
even in an economical point of view, dispense with the 
necessity of checks to population.” 1173 infants are born 
in the United Kingdom every day, and to equalize matters 
about 1000 emigrants should leave our shores daily. Care- 
ful calculations are sometimes entered into by anti-Mal- 
thusians as to the acreage of Great Britain as compared 
with its population, and it is said that the land would sup- 
port many more than the present number of inhabitants ; 
quite so; there is a very large quantity of land used for 
deer, game, and pleasure, that, if put under cultivation, 
would enormously increase the food-supply. But to know 
this, does not remedy the pressing evils of over-popula- 
tion ; what service is it to the family crowded into a St. 
Giles’ cellar to tell them that there are large uninhabited 
tracts of land in Pertshire ? In the first place they can’t 
get to them, and if they could, they would be taken up for 
trespassing. Such information is but mockery. Land 
reform is sorely needed, but, to meet the immediate needs 
of the present, land revolution would be necessary; it is 
surely wdser to lessen the population-pressure, and to work 
steadily at the same time towards Reform of the Land Laws, 
instead of allowing the population pressure to increase, un- 
til the starving multitudes precipitate 11s into a revolution.. THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
41 
An extraordinary confusion exists in some minds between 
preventive checks and infanticide. People speak as though 
prevention were the same as destruction. But no life is 
destroyed by the prevention of conception, any more than 
by abstention from marriage ; if it is infanticide for every 
man and woman not to produce as many children as pos- 
sible during the fertile period of life, if every person in a 
state of celibacy commits infanticide because of the poten- 
tial life he prevents, then, of course, the prevention of 
conception by married persons is also infanticide ; the two 
things are on exactly the same level. When conception 
has taken place, then prevention is no longer possible and 
anew life having been made, the destruction of that life 
would be criminal. Before conception no life exists to be 
destroyed; the seminal fluid is simply a secretion of 
the body; its fertilizing power is not a living thing, the 
non-use of which destroys life; the spermatozoa, the active 
fertilizing agents, are not living existences, and “ they 
have been erroneously considered as proper animalculte ” 
(Carpenter). Life is not made until the male and female 
elements are united, and if this is prevented, either by 
abstention from intercourse among the unmarried, or by 
preventive intercourse among the married, life is not 
destroyed, because the life is not yet in existence. 
Mr. Darwin puts,forward an argument against scientific 
checks which must not be omitted here; he says:—‘‘The 
enhancement ot the welfare of mankind is a most intricate 
problem; all ought to refrain from marriage who cannot 
avoid abject poverty for their children, for poverty is not 
only a great evil, but tends to its own increase by leading 
to recklessness in marriage. On the other hand, as Mr. 
Gabon has remarked, if the prudent avoid marriage, whilst 
the reckless marry, the inferior members tend to supplant 
the better members of society. Man, like every other 
animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high con- 
dition 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.” 
If the struggle for existence among mankind were waged 
under the same conditions as among animals, then Mr., THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
42 
Darwin s argument would have great force, terrible as would 
be the amount of human misery caused by it. Then the 
strongest, cleverest, craftiest, would survive, and would 
transmit their qualities to their offspring. But Mr. Darwin 
forgets that men have qualities which the brutes have not, 
such as compassion, justice, respect for the right of others 
— and all these, man's highest virtue-:, are absolutely incom- 
patible with the brutal struggle for existence. Where the 
lion would leave his parents to starve, man would feed his; 
where the stag would kill the sickly one, man would carry 
him to the hospital and nurse him back to health. The 
feeble, the deformed, the helpless, are killed out in brute 
nature; in human nature they are guarded, tended, 
nourished, and they hand on to their offspring their own 
disabilities. Scientific checks to population would just do 
for man what the struggle for existence does for the brutes; 
they enable man to control the production of new human 
beings ; those who suffer from hereditary diseases, who 
have consumption or insanity in the family, might marry, if 
they so wished, but would preserve the race from the de- 
terioration which results from propagating disease. The 
whole British race would gain in vigour, in health, in 
longevity, in beauty, if only healthy parents gave birth to 
children; at present there is many a sickly family, because 
sickly persons marry; they revolt against forbiddance of mar- 
riage, celibacy being unnatural, and they are taught that 
“ the natural consequences of marriage must follow. Let 
them understand that one set of “consequences ” results 
naturally from one set of conditions, another set from dif- 
ferent conditions, and let them know that laisscr aller in 
marriage is no wiser than in other paths of life. 
Leaving objectors, let us look at the other side of the 
question. 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; they rejoice over 
two healthy, robust, well fed children, instead of mourning 
over seven frail, sickly, half starved ones r they look for- 
ward to an old age of comfort and of respectability instead 
vof one of painful dependence on a grudgingly-given charity. 
How rapidly conjugal prudence may lift a nation out of THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
43 
pauperism is seen in France; the proportion of adults to 
the whole population is the largest in Eiyope, the propor- 
tionate number of persons under thirty being the smallest; 
hence, there are more producers and fewer non-producers 
than in any other country. The consequence of this is that 
the producers are less pressed upon, and live in greater 
comfort and with more enjoyment of life. There are no less 
than 5,000,000 of properties under six acres, each sufficient 
to support a small family, but wholly inadequate for the 
maintenance of a large one, and it was from these indepen- 
dent peasants that M. Thiers borrowed the money to pay 
off the indemnity levied by the Germans after the late war. 
If those peasants had been struggling under the difficulties 
of large families, no savings would have been made to fall 
back upon in such an emergency. France shows a pattern 
of widely-spread comfort which we look for in vain in our 
own land, and this comfort is directly traceable to the 
systematic regard for conjugal prudence. Small agricultural 
holdings directly tend to this virtue, the fact of the limita- 
tion of the food-supply available being obvious to the most 
ignorant peasant. So strongly rooted is this habit in France, 
that the Roman Church in vain branded it as a deadly sin, 
and Dr. Drysdale writes that a French priest begged the 
Vatican Council to change this direction ; he said, It is 
not the sin which is new, but the circumstances which have 
changed. This practice has been spreading more and more 
for half a century from the force of things. As Providence 
doe ; not multiply animals, when they have not Wherewithal 
to cat, so it will not require reasonable man voluntarily to 
multiply when there is no longer the condition for his sub- 
sistence. This is human calculation, pecuniary motives if 
you will, but a calculation as inevitable as destiny. Countries 
enjoying the faith do not thus calculate, it is true, and so 
long as obedience is possible they will obey the priest with- 
out a murmur; but a clay will come when the prevailing- 
doctrine will be applicable to them all, and hence we 
earnestly plead for reform. Other times, other customs. 
The laws should change with the customs.” 
It is well worthy of notice that those who have pleaded 
for scientific checks to population, have also been those 
who have been identified with the struggle for political and 
religious freedom; Carlile defended the use of such—as 
advocated in his “ Every Woman’s Book ”—as follows: — 
“ There are four grounds on which my ‘ Every Woman's 
Book ’ and its recommendation can be defended, and each 44 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
of them in itself sufficient to justify the publication, and to 
make it meritorious. First—the political or national ground, 
which refers to the strength and wealth of the nation, and 
the greatest happiness of the greatest number of the people. 
Second—the local or commercial ground, or the ground of 
the wages of labour, and its supply in the several trades and 
districts. Third —the domestic or family ground, where 
the parents may think they have already children enough, 
and that more will be an injury. Fourth—the individual 
ground, where the state of health in the female, or her 
situation in life, will not justify a pregnancy ; but where the 
abstinence from love becomes as great an evil. It has been 
a sort of common, but ill-judged maxim, that the strength 
and wealth of a nation consist in the number, the greatest 
number, of its people. The error in the judgment of the 
maxim is, in not taking into consideration whether that, 
number be well or ill employed, well or ill fed, clothed and 
housed. 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 ; and England and Ireland are both weak at 
this moment: weak, too evidently weak, from ill employed 
cv unemployed members of the people. It is objected to 
me, that there is a sufficiency of natural checks already in 
existence, to remedy the evils of which I complain. My 
answer is, that these natural checks are the evil of which I 
do complain, and which I seek io remove by the substitution 
of a moral check, that shallfurnish no pain, no degradation 
no discomfort, no evil of any hind. The existing natural or 
physical checks are disease or pestilence and famine. 
Surely it is to be desired that neither of these should exist. 
It is not wise, not parental, not kind, to breed children to 
such disasters. It is better that they should not be born, 
than be cut off prematurely by disease or famine, or strug- 
gle through a life of disease, poverty, and misery, a life of 
pain to themselves, and both a pain and burthen to their 
parents. The existing moral checks on numbers are war, 
and social arrangements, such as poverty, late marriages, 
celibacy, and the bad health which bad states of living 
produce; to which may be added, states of servitude, in THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
45 
which marriage is found inconvenient. These are all so 
many evils—all will say. It would be well to go on without 
war, and the time will come when wars wall cease. In the 
question of trade, a government can do nothing more than 
remove impediments. It cannot increase the amount of 
trade beyond ils natural demand. It cannot force trade 
to any permanent utility. Therefore I take it to be a clear 
point, that no change in government will do anything per- 
manently for the relief of the present number of persons 
employed in surplus production. In limiting the number 
of children, as applicable to such a case, there is a double 
relief; an immediate relief to the parents, in not incurring 
expenses w hich cannot be well met, and a remote relief, in 
not bringing forth new labourers, when those existing can- 
not'fmd employment. Besides, there is something cruel, 
wanton, base, and parentally unfeeling, in the principle that 
says: ‘ I will bring all the children I can into the world, 
and if I cannot maintain them, some other persons who 
care nothing about them must, or, which is the real alter- 
native, they may starve.’ ” 
Mr. Francis Place argues: “The mass of the people in 
an old country must remain in a state of wretchedness, 
until they are convinced that their safety depends upon 
themselves, and that it can be maintained in no other wa> 
than by their ceasing to propagate faster than the means 
of comfortable subsistence are produced 
“If above all it were once clearly understood that it wjas 
not disreputable for married persons to avail themselves 
of such precautionary meads as would,’ without being in- 
jurious to health, or destructive of female delicacy, prevent 
conception, a sufficient check might at once be given to the 
increase of population beyond the means of subsistence, 
and vice and misery to a prodigious extent might be re- 
moved from society If means were adopted 
to prevent the breeding of a larger number of children 
than married people might desire to have, and if the labour- 
ing part of the population could thus be kept below the de- 
mand for labour, wages would rise, so as to afford the 
means of comfortable subsistence for all, and all might 
marry 
“ It is ti ne that those wrho really understand the cause 
of a redundant, unhappy, miserable, and considerably 
vicious population, and the means of preventing the redun- 
dancy, should clearly, freely, openly, and fearlessly point 
out the moans." 46 
THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
Mr James Watson showed his view of the matter by 
publishing Dr. Charles Knowlton's ll Fruits of Philosophy.” 
Mr. Robert Dale Owen (son of Robert Owen, and 
American minister in Florence), in his “ Moral Physiology,” 
urges “ some ‘moral restraint ’ that shall not,like vice and 
misery, be demoralizing, nor, like late marriages, be ascetic 
and impracticable;and he proceeds to advocate and 
describe scientific checks. 
Mr. James Mill complains that the problem of checking 
population is “ miserably evaded by all those who have 
meddled with the subject: ” and says that “ if the supersti- 
tions of the nursery were disregarded, and the principle of 
utility kept steadily in view, a solution might not be very 
difficult to be found.” 
Mr. John Stuart Mill strongly urges restraint of the 
number of the family, and he took an active part in dis- 
seminating the knowledge of scientific checks. 
The members of the old Freethought Institution in 
John Street made it part of fiheir work to circulate popular 
tracts, advocating scientific checks, such as a four-page 
tract entitled, “ Population: is not its increase at present 
an evil, and would not some harmless check be desirable ? ” 
Mr. Austin Holyoake, in his “ Large and Small Families,” 
follows in the same strain, and recommends as guides 
Knowlton’s Pamphlet and Owen’s “Moral Physiology.” 
Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, writing as one of the Vice- 
Presidents of the National Secular Society in 1876, points 
to the difference between Christian and Secular morality 
on this head ; he says : “ Let any one regard for a moment 
the Christian s theory of this life. 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 exis- 
tence, and hurls quick words of opprobrium upon any who 
advocate the prevention of this progeny of crime. Yet the 
Christian teaches that, by mere act of orthodox belief, these 
ignorant and unclean creatures can be sent from the gutter 
to God. A Secularist cannot help shuddering at this 
doctrine and this practice, so fatal to society, so con- 
temptuous to heaven.” 
M. Gamier—and with him I close these extracts, only a 
few out of many that might be brought forward—says: 
“ 1 am led to declare openly and positively, that by pru- THE LAW OF POPULATION. 
47 
clencc is to be understood not only delayed marriages, not 
only celibacy for those who are capable of practicing it, but 
prudence during the married state itself.” Answering 
Proudhon's objections, he asks : “ Can it be called immoral 
in the father of a family if he should wish to hive only a 
li nited number of children, proportioned to his means, and 
to the future which his affection fondly weaves for them, 
and if he should not, in carrying out this object, condemn. 
himself to the most absolute and rigorous continence ? 
Let any one ask himself whether it is more moral, more 
conscientious, to give birth to children in the midst of 
privations, or prevent them being born, and let him then, 
reply.” 
Thus has the effort to obtain social reform gone hand in 
hand with that for political and religious freedom ; the 
victors in the latter have been the soldiers in the former. 
Discussion on the Population Question is not yet safe;, 
legal penalty threatens those who advocate the restriction 
of birth instead of the destruction of life; the same penalty 
was braved by our leaders in the last generation, and we 
have only to follow in their steps inorderto conquer as they 
conquered and become sharers of their crown. We work 
for the redemption of the poor, for the salvation of the 
wretched; the cause of the people is the sacredest of all 
causes, and is the one which is the most certain to triumph., 
however sharp may be the struggle for the victory. 
THE END.  OF THE 
SOCIAL QUESTION 
BETWEEN 
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many other women, and will help many more in the years to come.” 
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