Owen's Moral Physiology; or, A Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question

by Robert Dale Owen

When the number of working people in any trade or manufacture, has for some years been too great, wages are reduced very low, and the working people become little better than slaves.

When wages have been thus reduced to a very small sum, working people can no longer maintain their children as all good and respectable people wish to maintain their children, but are compelled to neglect them;—to send them to different employments;—to mills and manufactories, at a very early age.

The misery of these poor children cannot be described, and need not be described, to you who witness them and deplore them every day of your lives.

Many indeed among you are compelled for a bare subsistence to labor incessantly, from the moment you rise in the morning, to the moment you lie down at night, without even the hope of ever being better off.

The sickness of yourselves and your children, the privation and pain and premature death of those you love, but cannot cherish as you wish, need only be alluded to. You know all these evils too well.

And, what, you will ask, is the remedy?

How are we to avoid these miseries?

The answer is short and plain; the means are easy. You have but to use the Electro-Galvania as directed and previously explained; it will prevent conception, and thus, without diminishing the pleasures of married life, or doing the least injury to the health of the most delicate woman, both the woman and her husband will be saved from all the miseries which having too many children produces.

By limiting the number of children, the wages both of children and of grown up persons will rise; the hours of working will be no more than they ought to be; you will have some time for recreation, some means of enjoying yourselves rationally, some means as well as some time for your own and your children’s moral and religious instruction.

At present, every respectable mother trembles for the fate of her daughters as they grow up. Debauchery is always feared. This fear makes many good mothers unhappy. The evil when it comes make them miserable.