Since 1877, when the Lord Chief Justice of England in his charge to the jury pronounced the discovery of Malthus to be an irrefragable truth, a vast amount of literature has appeared upon the population question. The conclusion come to by many of the most recent writers has been in accord with that pithy expression of John Stuart Mill, where he says: “Every one has a right to live. We will suppose this granted. But no one has a right to bring children into life to be supported by other people. Whoever means to stand upon the first of these rights must renounce all pretension to the last.” Mr. Cotter Morison, a distinguished writer, says, in his work entitled The Service of Man: “The criminality of producing children whom one has no reasonable probability of being able to keep, must in time be seen in its true light, as one of the most unsocial and selfish proceedings of which a man nowadays is capable. If only the devastating torrent of children could be arrested for a few years, it would bring untold relief.” Sir William Windeyer, of New South Wales, in a judgment delivered in 1888, concerning a Malthusian work, says: “It is idle to preach to the masses the necessity of deferred marriage and of a celibate life during the heyday of passion.... To use and not abuse, to direct and control in its operation any God-given faculty, is the true aim of man, the true object of all morality.” The Rev. Mr. Whatham, in a pamphlet entitled Neo-Malthusianism, says: “It becomes the duty of every thoughtful man and woman to think out some plan to stop or even check this advancing tide of desolation; and the only plan, to my thinking, that is at all workable is artificial prevention of child-birth.” Professor Mantegazza, Senator of Italy, says, in his Elements of Hygiene, to those affected with hereditary diseases: “Love, but do not beget children.” The Rev. Mr. Haweis says, in Winged Words: “Overpopulation is one of the problems of the age. The old blessing of ‘increase and multiply,’ suitable for a sparsely peopled land, has become the great curse of our crowded centres.” Mr. Montague Cookson says: “The limitation of the family is as much the duty of married persons as the observance of chastity is the duty of those who remain unmarried.” Professor Huxley, the Bishop of Manchester, Mr. Leonard Courtney, Dr. William Ogle, and the Archbishop of Canterbury have all recently endorsed the truth of the Malthusian law of population, which, as Mr. Elley Finch has truly said, “is, in company with the Newtonian law of gravitation, the most important discovery ever made.” CHARLES R. DRYSDALE, M.D.
23 Sackville-street, Piccadilly, London, W.
October, 1892.