In reality chronic poverty exists both in the thickly-peopled and in the thinly-peopled regions of India, and therefore the overpopulation theory is an inadequate explanation. Moreover, there are certain obvious and admitted evils, sufficient in themselves to account for the chronic poverty of India, and of these four are quoted by Devas. [21]
"(1) The grave discouragement to all rural improvement and in particular to the sinking of deep wells, by the absence outside Bengal of fixity of tenure, the landholder having the prospect of his assessment being raised every fifteen or thirty years. (2) Through most of India the unchecked oppression of usurers, in whose toils many millions of landholders are so bound as to lack means or motive for the proper cultivation of the soil. (3) A system of law and police totally unfit for small cultivators—witness the plague of litigation, appeals as 250 to 1 in England, habitual perjury, manufactured crime, and blackmailing by corrupt native police, all destructive of rural amity, co-operation, and industry. (4) Taxation oppressive both in quantity and quality: demanded, on pain of eviction and imprisonment, to be paid punctually and rigidly in cash, instead of optionally or occasionally in kind, or flexible, according to the variations of the seasons; moreover, levied on salt, raising the price of this necessity of life at least ten times, often much more; when precisely an abundant supply of salt, with the climate and diet of India, is a prime need for men and cattle."
Section 4. POVERTY IN FACT CAUSES A HIGH BIRTH-RATE
As will be shown in Chapter V, poverty is generally the cause and not the result of a high birth-rate. The Malthusian doctrine has been and is to-day a barrier to social reform, because it implies that humane legislation, by encouraging population, will of necessity defeat the aim of those who desire to improve the conditions of the poor by methods other than the practice of artificial birth control. To a very great extent Malthusian teaching was responsible for the Poor Law of 1834, the most severe in Europe, the demoralising laxity of the old Poor Law being replaced by degrading severity. Again, as recently as 1899, a Secretary of State reiterated the Malthusian doctrine by explaining that great poverty throughout India was due to the increase of population under the pax Britannica. Now the truth is that if the social conditions of the poor were improved, we have every reason to believe that their birth-rate would be reduced, because as civilisation in a community progresses there is a natural decline in fertility. Hence:
(a) Malthusianism is an Attack on the Poor
Both the supporters and the opponents of Malthus are often mistaken in considering his greatest achievement to be a policy of birth control. Malthus did a greater and a more evil thing. He forged a law of nature, namely, that there is always a limited and insufficient supply of the necessities of life in the world. From this false law he argued that, as population increases too rapidly, the newcomers cannot hope to find a sufficiency of good things; that the poverty of the masses is not due to conditions created by man, but to a natural law; and that consequently this law cannot be altered by any change in political institutions. This new doctrine was eagerly adopted by the rich, who were thus enabled to argue that Nature intended that the masses should find no room at her feast; and that therefore our system of industrial capitalism was in harmony with the Will of God. Most comforting dogma! Most excellent anodyne for conscience against acceptance of those rights of man that, being ignored, found terrible expression in the French Revolution! Without discussion, without investigation, and without proof, our professors, politicians, leader-writers, and even our well-meaning socialists, have accepted as true the bare falsehood that there is always an insufficient supply of the necessities of life; and to-day this heresy permeates all our practical politics. In giving this forged law of nature to the rich, Malthus robbed the poor of hope. Such was his crime against humanity. In the words of Thorold Rogers, Malthusianism was part and parcel of "a conspiracy, conceived by the law and carried out by parties interested in its success, to cheat the English workman of his wages, to tie him to the soil, to deprive him of hope, and to degrade him into immediate poverty." When Malthusians enter a slum for the purpose of preaching birth control, it is right that the people should be told what is written on the passports of these strangers.
(b) A Hindrance to Reform
The teaching of birth control amongst the poor is in itself a crime, because, apart from the evil practice, the people are asked to believe a lie, namely, that a high birth-rate is the cause of poverty and that by means of birth-control their circumstances will be improved. By one advocate of birth control this weak reasoning and inconsequential sentimentality have actually been crowded into the compass of a single sentence: "We must no longer be content to remain indifferent and idle witnesses of the senseless and unthinking procreating of countless wretched children, whose parents are diseased and vicious." [22] It is true that disease, vice, and wretched children are the saddest products of our industrial system; it is also true that a helpless baby never yet was guilty of expropriating land, of building slums, of under-paying the workers, or of rigging the market. Therefore instead of preventing the birth of children we should set about to rectify the evil conditions which make the lives of children and adults unhappy. Like many other policies advocated on behalf of the poor, birth control is immoral if only on this account, that it distracts attention from the real causes of poverty. In Spain birth control is not practised. I do not say there is no poverty in that country, but there is no poverty that resembles the hopeless grinding poverty of the English poor. For that strange disease, artificial birth control is a worthless remedy; and it were far better that we should turn our attention to the simple words of Cardinal Manning: "There is a natural and divine law, anterior and superior to all human and civil law, by which men have the right to live of the fruits of the soil on which they are born, and in which they are buried." [23]
(c) A Quack Remedy for Poverty
Artificial birth control is one of the many quack remedies advertised for the cure of poverty, and G.K. Chesterton has given the final answer to the Malthusian assertion that some form of birth control is essential because houses are scarce: