Fruits of Philosophy: A Treatise on the Population Question

by Charles Knowlton

Showing how desirable it is, both in a political and a social point of view, for mankind to be able to limit at WILL THE NUMBER OF THEIR OFFSPRING, WITHOUT SACRIFICING THE PLEASURE THAT ATTENDS THE GRATIFICATION OF THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT.

First.—-In a political point of view.—If population be not restrained by some great physical calamity, such as we have reason to hope will not hereafter be visited upon the children of men, or by some moral restraint, the time will come when the earth cannot support its inhabitants. Population unrestrained will double three times in a century. Hence, computing the present population of the earth at 1,000 millions, there would be at the end of 100 years from the present time, 8,000 millions.

At the end of 200 years, 64,000 millions.
" " 300 " 512,000 "

And so on, multiplying by eight for every additional hundred years. So that in 500 years from the present time there would be thirty-two thousand seven hundred and sixty eight times as many inhabitants as at present. If the natural increase should go on without check for 1,500 years, one single pair would increase to more than thirty-five thousand one hundred and eighty-four times as many as the present population of the whole earth!

Some check then there must be, or the time will come when millions will be born but to suffer and to perish for the necessaries of life. To what an inconceivable amount of human misery would such a state of things give rise! And must we say that vice, war, pestilence and famine are desirable to prevent it? Must the friends of temperance and domestic happiness stay their efforts? Must peace societies excite to war and bloodshed? Must the physician cease to investigate the nature of contagion, and to search for the means of destroying its baneful influence? Must he that becomes diseased be marked as a victim to die for public good, without the privilege of making an effort to restore him to health? And in case of a failure of crops in one part of the world, must the other parts withhold the means of supporting life that the far greater evil of excessive population throughout the world may be prevented? Can there be no effectual moral restraint, attended with far less human misery than such physical calamities as these? Most surely there can. But what is it? Malthus, an English writer on the subject of population, gives us none but celibacy to a late age. But how foolish it is to suppose that men and women will become as monks and nuns during the very holiday of their existence, and abjure during the fairest years of life the nearest and dearest of social relations, to avert a catastrophe which they and perhaps their children will not live to witness. But, besides being ineffectual, or if effectual, requiring a great sacrifice of enjoyment, this restraint is highly objectionable on the score of its demoralizing tendency. It would give rise to a frightful increase of prostitution, of intemperance and onanism, and prove destructive to health and moral feelings. In spite of preaching, human nature will ever remain the same; and that restraint which forbids the gratification of the reproductive instinct will avail but little with the mass of mankind. The checks to be hereafter mentioned are the only moral restraints to population known to the writer that are unattended with serious objections.

Besides starvation, with all its accompanying evils, overpopulation is attended with other public evils, of which may be mentioned, ignorance and slavery. Where the mass of the people must toil incessantly to obtain support, they must remain ignorant; and where ignorance prevails, tyranny reigns.*

* The scientific part of Malthus' Doctrine of Population is
not very clearly or correctly given in the above passages.
His great theory, now or generally held by the most eminent
political economists, is that the increase of population is
always powerfully checked in old countries by the difficulty
in increasing the supply of food; that the existing evils of
poverty and low wages are really at bottom caused by this
check, and are brought about by the pressure of population
on the soil, and the continual overstocking of the labor
markets with laborers; and hence that the only way in which
society can escape from poverty, with all its miseries, is
by putting a strong restraint on their natural powers of
multiplication. "It is not in the nature of things," he
says, "that any permanent and general improvement in the
condition of the poor can be effected without an increase in
the preventive checks to population."—G. R.

Second—In a social point of view.—"Is it not notorious that the families of the married often increase beyond which a regard for the young beings coming into the world, and the happiness of those who give them birth, would dictate. In how many instances does the hard-working father, and more especially the mother, of a poor family remain slave throughout their lives, tugging at the oar of incessant labor, toiling to live, and living to toil; when, if their offspring had been limited to two or three only, they might have enjoyed comfort and comparative affluence? How often is the health of the mother, giving birth every year to an infant—happy if it be not twins—and compelled to toil on, even at those times when nature imperiously calls for some relief from daily drudgery,—how often is the mother's comfort, health, nay, even her life, thus sacrificed? Or if care and toil have weighed down the spirit, and at length broken the health of the father; how often is the widow left unable, with the most virtuous intentions, to save her fatherless offspring from becoming degraded objects of charity, or profligate votaries of vice!

"Nor is this all. Many women are so constituted that they cannot give birth to healthy, sometimes not to living children. Is it desirable, is it moral, that such women should become pregnant? Yet this is continually the case. Others there are who ought never to become parents; because, if they do, it is only to transmit to their offspring grievous hereditary diseases, which render such offspring mere subjects of misery throughout their sickly existence. Yet such women will not lead a life of celibacy. They marry. They become parents, and the sum of human misery is increased by their doing so. But it is folly to expect that we can induce such persons to live the lives of Shakers. Nor is it necessary; all that duty requires of them is to refrain from becoming parents. Who can estimate the beneficial effect which a rational moral restraint may thus have on the health and beauty and physical improvement of our race throughout future generations?"

Let us now turn our attention to the case of unmarried youth.