526 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



moral indignation, real or simulated. Such a judgment appears to the 

 present writer both irrelevant and futile. It is impossible, as Burke 

 has taught us, to draw an indictment against a whole nation. If a 

 course of conduct is habitually and deliberately pursued by vast multi- 

 tudes of otherwise well-conducted people, forming probably a majority 

 of the whole educated class of the nation, we must assume that it does 

 not conflict with their actual code of morality. They may be intel- 

 lectually mistaken, but they are not doing what they feel to be wrong. 

 Assuming, as I think we may, that no injury to physical health is neces- 

 sarily involved — aware, on the contrary, that the result is to spare the 

 wife from an onerous and even dangerous illness, for which in the vast 

 majority of homes no adequate provision in the way of medical attend- 

 ance, nursing, privacy, rest and freedom from worry can possibly be 

 made — it is, to say the least of it, difficult on any rationalist morality 

 to formulate any blame of a married couple for the deliberate regulation 

 of their family according to their means and opportunities. Apart 

 from some mystic idea of marriage as a ' sacrament,' or, at any rate, as 

 a divinely instituted relation with peculiar religious obligations for 

 which utilitarian reasons can not be given, it does not seem easy to 

 argue that prudent regulation differs essentially from deliberate celibacy 

 from prudential motives. If, as we have for generations been taught 

 by the economists, it is one of the primary obligations of the individual 

 to maintain himself and his family in accordance with his social posi- 

 tion and, if possible, to improve that position, the deliberate restriction 

 of his responsibilities within the means which he has of fulfilling them 

 can hardly be counted otherwise than as for righteousness. And when 

 we pass from obligations of the ' self-regarding ' class to the wider con- 

 ception of duty to the community, the ground for blame is, to the 

 ordinary citizen, no more clear. A generation ago, the economists, and, 

 still more, the ' enlightened public opinion ' that caught up their words, 

 would have seen in this progressive limitation of population, whether 

 or not it had their approval, the compensating advantage of an uplift- 

 ing of the economic conditions of the lowest grade of laborers. At any 

 rate, it would have been said, the poorest will thereby be saved from 

 starvation and famine. To those who still believe in the political 

 economy of Ricardo, Nassau Senior, Cairnes and Fawcett — to those, in 

 fact, who still adhere to an industrial system based exclusively on the 

 pecuniary self-interest of the individual and on unshackled freedom of 

 competition — this reasoning must appear as valid to-day as it did a 

 generation ago. 



To the present writer the situation appears in a graver light. More 

 accurate knowledge of economic processes denies to this generation the 

 consolation which the ' Early Victorian ' economists found in the limi- 

 tation of population. No such limitation of numbers prevents the 

 lowest grade of workers, if exposed to unfettered individual competi- 



