I am compassionate, and believe that I pay my debts of charity toward those who have wrecked their life; but when a starving fellow begs alms of me, or pleads his large family or many children as an excuse for his moral and physical demoralisation, anger gets the better of me and I exclaim: Why, then, did you have so many?
And this exclamation is not an insult to misery nor a curse; it is the voice of reason, which if it could be heard in the homes of the poor would suffice to solve the social problem. I am a Malthusian impenitent, and as long as I live I shall always say to those struggling with poverty:
Love, but do not beget children.
In vain priests and rugged moralists of Providence combat Malthusianism, which has now become a social institution, and without the need of written codes governs the economy of the family in France, Italy, Germany, and even in chaste and fecund Albion.
In vain my Elementi d’Igiene were put ad indice, for from year to year the Malthusian apostolate has made new disciples, and will continue to do so.
Neither do I side with those who believe, with too great a faith or fanaticism, that a restriction in the number of births is sufficient to resolve the social problem. No, certainly not; it is not enough; but it clears the ground of the most thorny brambles among which human felicity gets entangled; and a comparison between the proletariat in the populous cities of Europe and that of the desert regions of South America is sufficient to convince us that prolific improvidence is also the prolific mother of hunger, disease, and death.
If, then, you are not a Malthusian, nor desire to be converted to the new doctrine, if you have no straw to build your nest, do not take a wife, but increase the glorious number of the animals of rapine and cuckoos.
⁂
I know very well that the most hateful and disagreeable problem of matrimony is the economic, but we cannot avoid nor solve it by shutting our eyes and disregarding it.
To love and be loved, to feel that our life is doubled and the horizons of the future enlarged, to drink from the eyes of a woman who is a perfect fountain of delight, to feel the doors of paradise opened to us by her lips; and then all at once to be obliged to speak of income and dowry amidst such intoxicating pleasures; then to remember between one kiss and another that to harbour all this paradise we do not possess, I cannot say a house, but not even the most modest of rooms! It is hard, cruel, abominable, but it is necessary!