Legislative Quackery, Ignorance, and Blindness to the Future.
In Iowa, by the management of a medical clique, a law has been juggled through the Legislature, under which the founders of Christianity would have been criminals, and prolonged imprisonment might have been as effective as crucifixion. That any class of men could have been mean enough and shameless enough to ask for such a law is a sad commentary on the demoralizing influence of medical schools, from which they derived their inspiration; and that any legislative body could have yielded to the demand is another illustration of the well known corruption of political life.
The Iowa papers state that Mrs. Post, of McGregor, Iowa, has been twice arrested, convicted, and fined fifty dollars and costs for praying with the sick and curing them. European tyranny is eclipsed in Iowa. The old world is freer than the new, if the medical clique are allowed to rule. G. Milner Stephen performs his miraculous cures in London with honor, and Dorothea Trudell had her house of cure by prayer in Switzerland, which has been made famous in religious literature. All over Europe the people enjoy a freedom in the choice of their physicians which has been prohibited in Iowa.
The Legislature of Maine which adjourned March 17 was induced, by the newspaper comments on two bogus institutions which had been chartered some years ago, to depart from their settled policy and pass a law prepared by the medical clique, but not quite as stringent as that of Iowa. Gov. Bodwell, however, vetoed the bill, pointing out its objectionable features, and the Senate, which had passed it unanimously, after being enlightened by the governor rejected it by a nearly two thirds majority, showing how thoughtlessly a great deal of our legislation is effected.
Under the laws which the colleges and their clique seek to establish, Priessnitz could never have introduced hydropathy, Pasteur could not have inoculated for hydrophobia without danger of imprisonment, and the great American Medical Reformation, which abolished the lancet and mercurial practice, and which is now represented by seven colleges, would have been strangled at its birth, for its primitive origin was outside of college authority. There are other great ideas, great discoveries, great reforms, not yet strong enough to be embodied in colleges, which medical legislation is designed to suppress, to enforce a creedal uniformity.
Another piece of legislative quackery is revealed in the action of Congress as stated in the following paragraph concerning “a new bureau.”
“One of the acts of the retiring Congress has not been noted so far, but, though not a large item in itself, it is the entering wedge of subsequent legislation which will be of the highest importance to the country. It is the item in the legislative appropriation bill which allows of the expenditure of $10,000 by the bureau of labor “for the collection of statistics of and relating to marriage and divorce in the several states and territories, and in the District of Columbia.” This gives the opportunity, which has heretofore not existed, to obtain reasonably accurate statistics of what is going on as concerns the integrity of the family throughout the whole country. This will be a department under Col. Wright, in the work of the bureau of labor, and is one of the results of persistent work which the National Divorce League has done, under the direction of its secretary, Rev. S. W. Dike. Col. Wright has already formulated plans which are likely to make this new branch of the labor bureau the channel for one of the most valuable reports which have yet come from his hands. It will be the gathering of facts whose study will suggest wise legislation in the future.”
It may not be absolutely unconstitutional for Congress to collect such statistics, but it is contrary to the spirit of the constitution. Congress has nothing whatever to do with such social questions, which are exclusively matters of state legislation. It has allowed itself to be made a cat’s paw by the National Divorce League for its retrogressive policy. The welfare of society is deeply concerned in breaking up all unhappy, discordant marriages, which are simply nurseries of misery and crime. Every generous sentiment should prompt us to go to the relief of the large number of women who suffer in secret from tyranny and brutality, while from poverty, timidity, helplessness, and a dread of publicity or censure, they endure their wrongs in silence, and continue to bear children cursed from their conception with intemperance and brutality. And when they seek to escape, a barbarian law comes in to give the brutal husband the ownership of their offspring; and thus they are bound fast as galley slaves in their unhappy position.
The Legislature of Massachusetts had the opportunity of redressing this wrong at their present session; but, like other masculine legislatures in the past, they were deaf to the voice of mercy, and the press quietly reports (March 18) that “Inexpedient was reported by the House judiciary committee on equalizing the respective rights of husband and wife in relation to their minor children, and on equalizing their interest in each other’s property.”
The ladies who are so active in behalf of woman suffrage might have taken more interest in this vital question, which was so easily disposed of. A great wrong remains unredressed.
The barbarous policy of the church of Rome, which has been finally abolished even in Catholic France, where divorce is now permitted, our clerical bigots would revive in this country, as if it were the business of the state to encourage or compel the propagation of the worthless and criminal classes!
It is not the interest of the state to encourage human multiplication at all, for it is already too powerful and progressive. It is the public interest to check all propagation but that of good citizens, and to protect all women from enforced maternity, whether enforced under legal powers or by the arts of seduction and libertinism.
Prostitution, in the light of political economy, is far less of an evil than the enforced maternity of wretched and discordant families, which becomes the fountain of an endless flow of crime, while prostitution shows its evils only in the parties immediately concerned, and effectually purifies society in time by arresting the propagation of its most worthless members. In the same manner it may be said that some epidemics are an advantage to society, by cutting off the feeble and worthless constitutions so as to leave a better race. Any one who recollects the history of the Jukes family, and the number of criminals infesting society who were descendants of one depraved pair, will not believe that such a propagation of crime should be permitted. The worthless class should not be allowed to marry, and the criminals whom the state finds it necessary to confine in the penitentiary should be permanently deprived of the power of parentage.
Few ever reflect upon the necessary consequences of the growth of population. The great wars, famines, and pestilences as in the past will not be able to keep down population, and where it has free course under favorable circumstances it doubles in twenty-five or thirty years. In two centuries more we shall begin to feel a terrible pressure, and that pressure will be aggravated by the exhaustion of coal mines, of petroleum, of gas, and of forests. In Great Britain alone 120,000,000 tons of coal are annually mined.
It may be safely assumed that one thousand to the square mile is about the limit of population of the world, a limit at which population must be arrested. Massachusetts is already within less than a century of its utmost possible limit. It has at this time about 250 to the square mile, and at the American rate of growth it would reach its utmost limit by the year 1950, and begin to realize the crush and crisis of a crowded population, which must either cease to grow or encounter the horrors of famine and social convulsions arising from the struggle for life, or the calamities arising from unfortunate seasons which in China and India have in our own time hurried millions into their graves.
If Massachusetts is within sixty years of this collision with destiny, other countries are still nearer the dead line of the coming century. Italy is parallel with Massachusetts and Rhode Island, but Great Britain and Ireland are considerably further advanced. British India and the Netherlands are still further advanced, and half a century, if they had the American ratio of growth, would bring them to their limit, while Belgium’s progress would be arrested in thirty years.
A wise statesmanship would not seek to hurry mankind on to this great crisis, the results of which have never been foreseen or provided for, but would realize that the greater the amount of inferior and demoralized population the more terrible must that crisis be when it comes—a crisis which can be safely borne only by elevating the entire population to a higher condition than any nation has ever heretofore attained.
Calculate as we may, the crisis must come, as certainly as death comes to each individual; and whether our social system can bear the strain of such conditions is beyond human ken. Look even two centuries ahead, and what do we see? At that time the prolific energy of the people of this republic, if continued as it has been in the past, will give us more than twice the estimated population of the entire globe at present—more than three thousand millions.
It is possible that our vast territory (including Alaska) of three million, six hundred thousand square miles may, with the greatly improved agriculture of the future, maintain such a population, especially if relieved by overflow to the north and south.
If the evil elements at work to-day predominate in our population, which retrogressive legislation would promote, it will be a time of calamity and social convulsions; but if the benevolent and enlightening influences now at work predominate (as we may hope), two centuries hence will bring us to a consummation of prosperity, enlightenment, and happiness, of which the pessimistic and sceptical thinkers of to-day have no conception. A thorough comprehension of the science of man will lead us in the path of enlightened progress.