The massacre of the innocents! : address / by the Rev. C. Kingsley.

  • Charles Kingsley
Date:
[between 1860 and 1875?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The massacre of the innocents! : address / by the Rev. C. Kingsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    would cause the subjects of Queen Victoria to increase at a very far more rapid rate than they do now ? And are they aware that some very wise men inform us that England is already over¬ peopled, and that it is an exceedingly puzzling question where we shall soon be able to find work or food for our masses, so rapidly do they increase already, in spite of the thirty or forty per cent, kind Nature carries off yearly before they are five years old ? Have they considered what they are to do with all those children whom they are going to save alive ? That has to be thought of; and if they really do believe, with political economists now, that over-population is a possibility to a country which has the greatest colonial empire that the world has ever seen, then I think they had better stop in their course and let the children die, as they have been dying. u But if, on the other hand, it seems to them, as I confess it does to me, that the most precious thing in the world is a human being : that the lowest, and poorest, and most degraded of human beings is better than all the dumb animals in the world; that there is an infinite, priceless capability in that creature, degraded as it may be—a capability of| virtue, and of social and industrial use, which, if
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