Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 / Volume 1, Number 4

by Unknown

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.