The law of population : its consequences and its bearing upon human conduct and morals / by Annie Besant.

  • Annie Besant
Date:
1889
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The law of population : its consequences and its bearing upon human conduct and morals / by Annie Besant. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tliat preventive, or birth-restricting, should be substituted for positive, or life-destroying, checks, and that 44 moral restraint” should supersede 44 misery and vice”. He lays it down as a principle of duty, that no one 44 is to bring beings into the world for whom he cannot find the means of support ”. This obligation, he says, is a 44 duty intelli¬ gible to the humblest capacity”. But the duty being ad¬ mitted on all sides, the crucial point is—How is this duty to be fulfilled ? Malthus answers :—By delay of marriage. We are bound 44 not to marry till we have a fair prospect of being able to support our children ” ; in a right state of society 4 4 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 44 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 open 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 advo¬ cates of late 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 civilisation, 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. The state of the streets of our large towns at nightfall is the result of deferred marriage, and marriage is deferred owing to the ever-increasing diffi¬ culty of maintaining a large family in anything like comfort. Mr. Montagu Cookson, writing in the Fortnightly Review says : 44 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,
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