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the masses in the towns and villages of even the most highly civilised countries? 1

'Be fruitful and multiply' is apparently the only advice ever tendered to our poor on this vital subject by their spiritual guides,2 who seem utterly oblivious of the fact, that if human beings are encouraged or permitted to, and do in fact, propagate as heedlessly as vermin, the surplus number must be prepared to exist, and undergo extinction, like vermin.

There is no escape from natural inexorable law.

Strange that it should never seem to occur to our teachers, whilst imputing misery and suffering to the inscrutable Will of Deity, that, as a matter of fact, there can be no human misery without an object to be miserable, and that, equally in fact, every such object of misery brought into existence is the direct result of a deliberate act on the part of one, at any rate, of two persons; an act which such person may feel impelled by his animal instinct to do, but which he is by his human intelligence empowered, and often counselled, to forbear to do. This doubtless is an extreme, and to many a repulsive proposition, but, until society is thoroughly roused and startled, and the subject considered from all points of view, relief would seem to be hopeless from the miseries which overwhelm the masses,

1 'Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care. He is impelled by nearly the same motives as are the lower animals when left to their own free choice. ... Yet he might by selection do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities All ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children.'-Darwin, Descent of Man, vol. ii. p. 403.

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2 Presuming, apparently, that the Divine nature takes a delight in swarming the East End of London with paupers.'-Matthew Arnold (infra). But the dramatist says by way of malediction, Drudge to feed loathsome life; get brats and starve.'

Otway's Venice Preserved, act i. scene 2.

making their ordinary lives a hideous, ghastly and shocking mockery of the theological idea of the beneficent and special Providence by whose will everything on earth is assumed to be directly ruled, and from whose will, supplicated by prayer, redress alone is to be expected; a state indeed of desperation or wretchlessness of most unclean living,' since such miseries are well known to science to be almost entirely traceable to the disproportionate numbers of the people, that is, territorially too many in relation to local means of subsistence, and is a condition of things remediable by human effort.2

There is no difficulty in peopling the earth, which is now known to be a comparatively very small globe,3 that can only sustain a limited number; and the time when such limited number will be reached is, in relation to our present ideas and conduct on the subject, a question of simple arithmetic, and not apparently so very remotely distant.

The forcible language of the 17th Article of the Church of England.

2 'No one whose opinion deserves a moment's consideration can doubt that most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits. Poverty, in any sense implying suffering, may be completely extinguished by the wisdom of society, combined with the good sense and providence of individuals. Even that most intractable of enemies, disease, may be indefinitely reduced in dimensions by good physical and moral education, and proper control of noxious influences, while the progress of science holds out a promise for the future of still more direct conquests over this detestable foe. . . . All the grand sources, in short, of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely, conquerable by human care and effort.'-Mill's Utilitarianism, p. 23.

3 This earth is a globe or ball less than 8,000 miles in diameter, of which the substance is drawn and held together in a rounded form by the mutual attraction of the component particles. Very slowly have the facts been ascertained which prove the truth of these assertions.'-Dr. Neil Arnott's Elements of Physics, 'Astronomy,' sec. 1.

The earth existed for probably millions of ages before the appearance of its human inhabitants,' and there is nothing from which science can infer any obligation, imposed by the Creator upon man, unreflectively, to do his utmost completely to cover its surface with human beings, in the course of some few thousands of years, and that, too, by so reckless, wanton and unintelligent use (probably abuse) of his animal powers of reproduction, as must necessarily cause misery and suffering, so vast and overwhelming in their aggregate, and so awful in their contemplation, as the

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1 'Geologists of all religious creeds are agreed that the earth has existed for an immense series of years, to be counted by millions rather than by thousands.' ('On the Mosaic Cosmogony,' by C. W. Goodwin, M.A.: Essays and Reviews. Parker, 1860.) 'No greater folly can be committed than to think to serve the cause of truth by contracting the long periods of geology into the compass of a few thousand years. . . . The human species are among the most recent products of the Creator's power.' ('Dissertation on the Reasons for assigning a very high Antiquity to the Earth.' Pye Smith's Geology and Scripture. Bohn, 1854.) 'Though it is yet premature to hazard any opinion as to the date of man's first appearance on the globe, every step we descend into the stratified crust is rife with evidence that this earth was the scene of life and enjoyment thousands of ages before man became a partaker of its bounties.'Philosophy of Geology, by David Page, F.R.S.E., F.G.S., pp. 115-129. Blackwood, 1863. See Note M, p. 79. 2 See Mayhew's London Labour and London Poor. The terrible truths which are laid bare to us in this work constitute an account of the manner in which hundreds of thousands of our fellow beings are being gradually ground and pressed to death and multiform destruction by hard work and want of food. It tells us of starvation, disease, crime, and every conceivable moral and physical degradation to which these unhappy ones who are born at the foot of our social scale are inexorably doomed. No hope or chance of rising; in the mire they were born, and in the mire they must, sooner or later, with greater or less misery, be engulfed. 'We don't live,' said many of the street folk to Mr. Mayhew, starve.'

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"I think the inference of those who walk the streets of London from their observation of what is passing there might naturally be

alleged result of obedience to the will of Almighty Power, as to be in themselves sufficient to justify the theological conclusion that 'It is hard to believe that God has never cursed his creatures.' '

The real difficulty is, how to maintain-that is, feed, clothe and educate the people when they are here.

It is sad to think how little Science, with all its splendid discoveries, will be able to effect practically for the elevation of the masses until this question of over-population is seriously and generally faced and dealt with. All cheapening of the necessaries of life, all breaking down of trade monopolies, and freeing commerce from restriction, all legal and political reforms, all improvements even in the medical art, have had little other result hitherto than so to stimulate the production of human beings, or to preserve those that would otherwise perish,2 as in a few years to create a greatly augmented number of the indigent or wage-receiving class, from whose ranks a proportionably increased number are being continually cut off by disease, low-living, and the various other penultimate forms of starvation that constitute the 'terrible correctives' of redundancy,3 whereby Nature is ever silently asserting her supremacy, and reducing the numbers of the people to precisely that inexorable limit, which the de facto resources of the country for the time being can sustain.

Nothing is more clearly known to Science than that the rate of wages depends almost solely upon two things, viz. the amount of the wage-fund and the numbers of the people

that it would be good for ninety-nine hundreds of its people if they had never been born.'-Rev. F. D. Maurice.

Theodore Parker, Discourse on Matters pertaining to Religion. Parker, whose large and cultivated mind soared far above the shibboleths of superstition, discusses the dogma of the curse not as a truth, but as the reverse of truth.

2 In the struggle for existence as many more individuals are born than can possibly survive.'-Malthus, cited and corroborated by Darwin, Origin of Species, Introduction. Murray, 1861.

3 Smith's Wealth of Nations, by M'Culloch, note 'Population.'

amongst whom it is distributable. That such people, in relation to wages, are, in the eye of science, simply a commodity-labour, whose value depends upon supply and demand. That high wages, i. e. a command of the comforts and luxuries of life, are clearly impossible without a relatively diminished supply of labour, with more intelligence in its possessor, on the one hand, or an increase of the wage-fund, on the other. Whether the wage-fund can at any given moment be increased is nearly always a question ; but there can be no question whatever that the people, elevated in intelligence, would have it in their own power to control and diminish the supply of labour, to render such diminished supply more valuable, and by thus obtaining higher wages raise their own standard of existence.

Instead of prejudicing the public against acquiring a knowledge of these truths by stigmatising such knowledge as 'the dismal science,' every pulpit in the land would be usefully occupied for years to come in disseminating and impressing them upon the minds of the people at large, and the result of their intelligence being awakened to the fact of the inexorable operation of these natural laws, and to the fact that human welfare is involved in obedience to their dictates, would certainly have the effect of rendering the lives of the majority far less dismal' than they are at present; for it is an equally well known scientific fact, that

1 It is indeed now an elementary proposition. See Smith's Wealth of Nations; M'Culloch's Principles of Political Economy, part iii. chap. ii.; J. S. Mill's Ditto, book ii. chap ii.; Professor Fawcett's Manual of Political Economy, chap. viii.

2 'In fact there are no means whatever by which the command of the labouring class over necessaries and conveniences can be enlarged, other than by accelerating the increase of capital as compared with population, or by retarding the increase of population as compared with capital; and every scheme for improving the condition. of the labourer which is not bottomed on this principle, or which has not an increase of the ratio of capital to population for its object, must be completely nugatory and ineffectual.'-M'Culloch, ubi supra, p. 380.

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