LAWS OF MULTIPLICATION. 293 



consistently stated by those who live in the midst of our highly 

 artificial civilisation. The strongest prejudice seems to be 

 based in a moral cowardice, which gauges a scheme by its 

 " respectability,'^ while even more culpable is that consciously 

 or unconsciously derived from the profitableness to the 

 capitalist classes of unlimited competition of cheap unskilled 

 labour. For never did the proletariat more literally deserve its 

 name than since the advent of the factory period, their rapid 

 and degenerative increase, indeed, primarily representing " the 

 progress of investments." 



The general attitude of the modern Malthusian may first of 

 all be roughly indicated by quoting the mottoes which head 

 the organ of their league. " To a rational being, the prudential 

 check to population ought to be considered as equally natural 

 with the check from poverty and premature mortality" (Malthus, 

 1806). " Little improvement can be ex])ected in morality until 

 the production of large families is regarded in the same light as 

 drunkenness, or any other physical excess " (John Stuart Mill, 

 1872). "Surely it is better to have thirty-five millions of 

 human beings leading useful and intelligent lives, rather than 

 forty millions struggling painfully for a bare subsistence " 

 (Lord Derby, 1879). Starting from the familiar induction 

 that " population has a constant tendency to outrun the 

 meajis of subsistence," they recognise in this over-population 

 " the most fruitful source of pauperism, ignorance, crime, 

 and disease." To counteract this there are checks, posi- 

 tive or life-destroying on the one hand, prudential or birth- 

 preventing on the other. " The positive or life-destroying 

 checks comprehend the premature death of children and adults 

 by disease, starvation, war, and infanticide." As these positive 

 checks are happily reduced with the progress of society, 

 attention must be concentrated on the other side. " This 

 consists in the limitation of offspring by abstention from 

 marriage, or by prudence after marriage." But as to the first, 

 prolonged abstention from marriage, as advocated by Malthus, 

 this is '^ productive of many diseases, and of much sexual vice," 

 while " early marriage, on the contrary, tends to secure sexual 

 purity, domestic comfort, social happiness, and individual 

 health." The check that remains to be advocated is thus 

 " prudence after marriage," and by this the neo-Malthusians 

 most distinctly mean attention to methods which will secure 

 that sexual intercourse be not followed by fertilisation. For 



