Birth Control Part 10

Australia 11.74 9.65[88]

New Zealand 28.72 36.73 India (including Native States) 11.44 12.02

The foregoing facts destroy the chief Neo-Malthusian argument, and, as birth control tends to extinguish the birth-rate, this Neo-Malthusian propaganda is a menace to the Empire. In fact, the danger is very great for the simple reason that the proportion of white people within the Empire is very small.

"The British Empire's share of the world's people is very large, but it mainly consists, it should be remembered, of Asiatics and African natives. The Empire as a whole contains about 450 millions of the world's 1,800 millions, made up roundly as follows:

United Kingdom 47,000,000 Self-governing Dominions 22,000,000 Rest of the Empire (chiefly India, 319 millions) 378,000,000 Total 447,000,000

"Of the great aggregate Empire population of 447 millions, the white people account for no more than 65 millions. That is to say, outside the United Kingdom itself the Empire has only 18 million white people, or less than four million families. That figure, of course, includes Boers, French-Canadians, and others of foreign extraction. This fact is clearly not realized by those present-day Malthusians who a.s.sure us that too many Britons are being born." [89]

It is also well to remember that depopulation in Italy preceded the disintegration of the Roman Empire. Historians have estimated that, while under the Republic, Italy could raise an army of 800,000 men, under t.i.tus that number was halved.

Unfortunately there are some to whom this argument will not appeal, and wandering about in our midst are a few lost souls, so bemused by the doctrines of international finance that they see no virtue in patriotism or, in other words, in the love that a man has for his own home. They are unmoved by the story of sacrifice, of thrift, and of patient trust in G.o.d that is told for instance in the history of the Protestant manses of Scotland, where ministers on slender stipends brought up families of ten and twelve, where the boys won scholars.h.i.+ps at the universities, and where women were the mothers of men.

These days have been recalled by Norman Macleod:

"The minister, like most of his brethren, soon took to himself a wife, the daughter of a neighbouring 'gentleman tacksman,' and the grand-daughter of a minister, well born and well bred; and never did man find a help more meet for him. In that manse they lived for nearly fifty years, and there were born to them sixteen children; yet neither father nor mother could ever lay hand on a child and say, 'We wish this one had not been.' They were all a source of unmingled joy...." [90]

"A 'wise' neighbour once remarked, 'That minister with his large family will ruin himself, and if he dies they will be beggars.' Yet there has never been a beggar among then to the fourth generation." [91]

How did they manage to provide for their children? In this pagan, spoon-fed age, many people will laugh when they read the answer--in a family letter, written more than a hundred years ago by a man who was poor:

"But the thought--I cannot provide for these! Take care, minister, the anxiety of your affection does not unhinge that confidence with which the Christian ought to repose upon the wise and good providence of G.o.d! What though you are to leave your children poor and friendless?

Is the arm of the Lord shortened, that He cannot help? Is His ear heavy, that He cannot hear? You yourself have been no more than an instrument in the hand of His goodness; and is His goodness, pray, bound up in your feeble arm? Do you what you can; leave the rest to G.o.d. Let them be good, and fear the Lord, and keep His commandments, and He will provide for them in His own way and in His own time. Why, then, wilt thou be cast down, O my soul; why disquieted within me?

Trust thou in the Lord! Under all the changes and the cares and the troubles of this life, may the consolations of religion support our spirits. In the mult.i.tude of thoughts within me, Thy comforts O my G.o.d, delight my soul! But no more of this preaching-like harangue, of which, I doubt not, you wish to be relieved. Let me rather reply to your letter, and tell you my news." [92]

That letter was written by Norman Macleod, ordained in 1774, and minister of the Church of Scotland in Morven for some forty years. His stipend was 40, afterwards raised to 80. He had a family of sixteen. One of his sons was minister in Campbelltown, and later in Glasgow. He had a family of eleven. His eldest son was Chaplain to Queen Victoria, and wrote the _Reminiscences of a Highland Parish_.

The birth controllers ask why we should bring up children at great cost and trouble to ourselves, and they have been well answered by a non-Catholic writer, Dr. W.E. Home. [93]

"One of my acquaintances refuses to have a second child because he could not then play golf. Is there, then, no pleasure in children which shall compensate for the troubles and expenses they bring upon you? I notice that the penurious Roman Catholic French Canadian farmers are spreading out of Quebec and occupying more and more of Ontario. I fancy these hard-living parents would think their struggles to bring up their large (ten to twenty) families worth while when they see how their group is strengthening its position. If a race comes to find no instinctive pleasure in children it will probably be swept away by others more virile. One man will live where another will starve; prudence and selfishness are not identical.

"In her book, _The Strength of a People_, Mrs. Bosanquet, who signed the Majority Report of the Poor Law Commission, tells the story of two girls in domestic service who became engaged. One was imprudent, married at once, lived in lodgings, trusted to the Church and the parish doctor to see her through her first confinement, had no foresight or management, every succeeding child only added to her worries, and her marriage was a failure. The other was prudent, did not marry till, after six months, she and her fiance had chosen a house and its furniture. Then she married, and their house was their own careful choice; every table and chair reminded them of the afternoon they had had together when it was chosen; they were amus.e.m.e.nt enough to themselves, and they saved their money for the expenses of her confinement. He had not to seek amus.e.m.e.nt outside his home, did his work with a high sanction and got promoted, and each child was only an added pleasure. Idyllic; yes, but sometimes true. One of the happiest men I have known was a Marine sergeant with ten children, and a bed in his house for stray boys he thought he should help.

"One of my friends married young and had five children; this required management. He certainly could not go trips, take courses and extra qualifications, but he did his work all right, and his sons were there to help in the war, and one of them has won a position of Imperial usefulness far above that of his father or me. Is that no compensation to his parents for old-time difficulties they have by now almost forgotten? A bad tree cannot bring forth good fruit."

Dr. W.E. Home is right, and the Neo-Malthusian golfer is wrong. Moreover, he is wrong as a golfer. Golf requires skill, a fine co-ordination of sight and touch, much patience and self-control: and many unfortunate people lack these qualities of mind and body, and are therefore unable to play this game with pleasure to themselves or to others. Consequently every golfer, no matter whether he accepts the hypothesis of Spencer or that of Weismann concerning the inheritance of acquired characteristics, should rejoice to see his large family in the links as a good omen for the future of this game, although there be some other reasons that also justify the existence of children.

_(d) The Dangers of Small Families_

In a Malthusian leaflet, written for the poor Dr. Binnie Dunlop states:

"You must at least admit that there would be nothing like the usual poverty if married couples had only one child for every 20s. or so, a week of wages. Yet the population would continue to increase rapidly, because very few of the children of small families die or grow up weakly; and it would become stronger, richer, and of course much happier." [94]

The false suggestion contained in his first sentence, namely that a high birth-rate is the cause of poverty, has already been exposed (Chap. II), and apparently Dr. Binnie Dunlop has never considered _why_ so many of the English people should be so poor as to enable him to make use of their very poverty in order to tempt them to adopt an evil method of birth control.

Moreover, his second contention, that a small family produces a higher type of child, better fed, better trained, and healthier, than is found amongst the children of large families is contrary to the following facts, as stated by Professor Meyrick Booth:

"1. A civilisation cannot be maintained with an average of less than about four children per marriage; a smaller number will lead to actual extinction.

"2. Much information exists tending to show that heredity strongly favours the third, fourth, fifth, and subsequent children born to a given couple, rather than the _first two_, who are peculiarly apt to inherit some of the commonest physical and mental defects (upon this important point the records of the University of London Eugenics Laboratory should be consulted). A population with a low birth-rate thus naturally tends to degenerate. _It is the normal, and not the small family, that gives the best children_.

"3. The present differential birth-rate--high amongst the less intelligent cla.s.ses and low amongst the most capable families--so far from leading upwards, is causing the race to breed to a lower type.

"4. The small family encourages the growth of luxury and the development of what M. Leroy-Beaulieu calls _l'esprit arriviste_.

"5. The popular idea that _childbirth is injurious_ to a woman's health is probably _quite erroneous_. Where the _birth-rate is high the health of the woman is apparently better_ than where it is artificially low.

"6. A study of history does not show that nations with low birth-rates have been able to attain to a higher level of civilisation. Such nations have been thrust into the background by their hardier neighbours." [95]

Moreover, M. Leroy-Beaulieu, in _La Question de la Population_ [96] states that those districts of France which show an exceptionally low birthrate are distinguished by a peculiar atmosphere of materialism, and that their inhabitants exhibit, in a high degree, an att.i.tude of mind well named _l'esprit arriviste_--the desire to concentrate on outward success, to push on, to be climbers, to advance themselves and their children in fas.h.i.+onable society. This spirit means the willing sacrifice of all ideals of ethics or of patriotism to family egoism. To this mental att.i.tude, and to the corresponding absence of religion, he attributes the decline of population.

In conclusion the following evidence is quoted by Professor Meyrick Booth:

"The _Revue des Deux Mondes_ for July 1911 contains a valuable account, by a doctor resident in Gascony, of the state of things in that part of France (where, it will be remembered, the birth-rate is especially low). He expresses with the utmost emphasis the conviction that the Gascons are deteriorating, physically and mentally, and points out, at the same time, that the decline of population has had an injurious effect upon the economic condition of the country. 'L'hyponatalite est une cause precise et directe de la degenerescence de la race,' he writes. And, dealing with the belief that a low birthrate will result in the development of a superior type of child, he says: 'C'est une illusion qui ne resiste pas a la lumiere des faits tels que les montre l'etude demographique de nos villages gascons. Depuis que beaucoup de bancs restent vides a la pet.i.te ecole, les ecoliers ne sont ni mieux doues, ni plus travailleurs, et ils sont certainement moins vigoureux.'

And again, 'La quant.i.te est en general la condition premiere et souveraine de la qualite.'" [97]

Section 8. THE PLOT AGAINST CHRISTENDOM

All purposive actions are ultimately based on philosophy of one sort or another. If, for example, we find a rich man founding hospitals for the poor, we may a.s.sume that he believes in the principle of Charity. It is, therefore, of prime importance to determine what kind of philosophy underlies Neo-Malthusian propaganda. The birth controllers profess to be actuated solely by feelings of compa.s.sion and of benevolence towards suffering humanity; and it is on these grounds that they are appealing to the Church of England to bless their work, or at least to lend to their propaganda a cloak of respectability. Now, the very fact that Neo-Malthusians are sincere in their mistaken and dangerous convictions makes it all the more necessary that we should discover the doctrines on which their propaganda was originally based; because, although their economic fallacies were borrowed from Malthus, their philosophy came from a different source.

This philosophy is to be found, naked and unashamed, in a book ent.i.tled _The Elements of Social Science_. I have already referred to this work as the Bible of Neo-Malthusians, and its teaching has been endorsed as recently as 1905 by the official journal of the Malthusian League, as witness the following eulogy, whose last lines recall the happy days of Bret Harte in the Far West, and the eloquent periods of our old and valued friend Colonel Starbottle:

"This work should be read by all followers of J.S. Mill, Garnier, and the Neo-Malthusian school of economists. We could give a long criticism of the many important chapters in this book; but, as we might be considered as prejudiced in its favour because of our agreement with its aims, we prefer to cite the opinion given by the editor of that widely circulated and most enlightened paper _The Weekly Times and Echo_, which appears in its issue of October 8." [98]

Before quoting from the book an explanation is due to my readers. I do not suggest that all of those who are to-day supporting the propaganda for artificial birth control would agree with its foolish blasphemies and drivelling imbecilities; but it is nevertheless necessary to quote these things, because our birth controllers are too wise in their day and generation to reveal to the public, still less to the Church of England, _the philosophy on which Neo-Malthusianism was originally based, and from which it has grown_. Moreover, the Malthusians claim that it was the author of the _Elements of Social Science_ "who interested Mr. Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant in the question." [99] Four quotations from the last edition of the book will suffice:

"But this is a certain truth, that any human being, any one of us, no matter how fallen and degraded, is an infinitely more glorious and adorable being than any G.o.d that ever was or will be conceived" (p. 413).

In justice to the memory of John Stuart Mill, whom Malthusians are ever quoting, it should be noted that the foregoing blasphemy is nothing more nor less than a burlesque of Positivism or of Agnosticism. The teaching of Mill, Bain, and of Herbert Spencer was that the knowledge of G.o.d and of His nature is impossible, because our senses are the _only_ source of knowledge. Their reasoning was wrong--because a primary condition of all knowledge is memory, in itself an intuition, because primary mathematical axioms are intellectual intuitions, and because mind has the power of abstraction; but, even so, not one of these men was capable of having written the above-quoted pa.s.sage. The next quotation refers to marriage.

"Marriage is based upon the idea that constant and unvarying love is the only one which is pure and honourable, and which should be recognised as morally good. But there could not be a greater error than this. Love is, like all other human pa.s.sions and appet.i.tes, subject to change, deriving a great part of its force and continuance from variety in its objects; and to attempt to fix it to an invariable channel is to try to alter the laws of its nature"(p. 353).

That quotation is an example of how evil ideas may arise from muddled thinking: because if the word "l.u.s.t" be subst.i.tuted for the word "love" in the third sentence, the remaining forty-five words would merely convey a simple truth, expressed by Kipling in two lines:

"For the more you 'ave known o' the others The less will you settle to one."

Very few people, I suppose, are so foolish as to believe that man is by nature either a chaste or a constant animal, and indeed in this respect he appears to his disadvantage when compared with certain varieties of birds, which are _by nature_ constant to each other. On the other hand, millions of people believe that man is able to overcome his animal nature; and for the past two thousand years the civilised races of the world have held that this is a goal towards which mankind should strive. In the opinion of Christendom chast.i.ty and marriage are both morally good, but, according to the philosophy of our Neo-Malthusian author, they are morally evil.

"Chast.i.ty, or complete s.e.xual abstinence, so far from being a virtue, is invariably a great natural sin" (p. 162).

Is it not obvious that to the writers of such pa.s.sages love is synonymous with animalism, with l.u.s.t? It is by no means necessary to go to saints or to moralists for a refutation of this Neo-Malthusian philosophy. Does any decent ordinary man or woman agree with it? Ask the man in the street. Turn the pages of our literature. Refer to Chaucer or Spenser, to Shakespeare or Milton, refer to Fielding or Burns or Scott or Tennyson. Some of these men were very imperfect; but they all knew the difference between l.u.s.t and love; and it is because they can tell us at least something of that which is precious, enduring, ethereal, and divine in love that we read their pages and honour their names. Not one of these men could have written the following sentence:

"Marriage distracts our attention from the real s.e.xual duties, and this is one of its worst effects" (p. 366).

Now it is certain that if "the real s.e.xual duties" are represented by promiscuous fornication, then both marriage and chast.i.ty are evil things.

That philosophy is very old. From time immemorial--it has been advocated by one of the most powerful intelligences in the universe. Such is the soil on which the Neo-Malthusian fungus has grown--a soil that would rot the foundations of Europe.

[Footnote 66: _The Lancet_, May 14, 1921, p. 1024]