Life and Writings of Thomas R. Malthus

Life and Writings of Thomas R. Malthus

Since 1877, when the Lord Chief Justice of England in his charge to the jury pronounced the discovery of Malthus to be an irrefragable truth, a vast amount of literature has appeared upon the population question. The conclusion come to by many of the most recent writers has been in accord with that pithy expression of John Stuart Mill, where he says: Every one has a right to live. We will suppose this granted. But no one has a right to bring children into life to be supported by other people. Whoever means to stand upon the first of these rights must renounce all pretension to the last. Mr. Cotter Morison, a distinguished writer, says, in his work entitled The Service of Man: The criminality of producing children whom one has no reasonable probability of being able to keep, must in time be seen in its true light, as one of the most unsocial and selfish proceedings of which a man nowadays is capable. If only the devastating torrent of children could be arrested for a few years, it would bring untold relief. Sir William Windeyer, of New South Wales, in a judgment delivered in 1888, concerning a Malthusian work, says: It is idle to preach to the masses the necessity of deferred marriage and of a celibate life during the heyday of passion.... To use and not abuse, to direct and control in its operation any God-given faculty, is the true aim of man, the true object of all morality. The Rev. Mr. Whatham, in a pamphlet entitled Neo-Malthusianism, says: It becomes the duty of every thoughtful man and woman to think out some plan to stop or even check this advancing tide of desolation; and the only plan, to my thinking, that is at all workable is artificial prevention of child-birth. Professor Mantegazza, Senator of Italy, says, in his Elements of Hygiene, to those affected with hereditary diseases: Love, but do not beget children. The Rev. Mr. Haweis says, in Winged Words: Overpopulation is one of the problems of the age. The old blessing of increase and multiply, suitable for a sparsely peopled land, has become the great curse of our crowded centres. Mr. Montague Cookson says: The limitation of the family is as much the duty of married persons as the observance of chastity is the duty of those who remain unmarried. Professor Huxley, the Bishop of Manchester, Mr. Leonard Courtney, Dr. William Ogle, and the Archbishop of Canterbury have all recently endorsed the truth of the Malthusian law of population, which, as Mr. Elley Finch has truly said, is, in company with the Newtonian law of gravitation, the most important discovery ever made. A great deal has been said in Courts of Law during the last two years about the Malthusian principle of population. The Lord Chief Justice of England has pronounced that it is an irrefragable truth, and that all parties who have studied such questions know, since the days of the Rev. T. R. Malthus, that the great cause of indigence is the tendency that population has to increase faster than agriculture can furnish food. And yet we have serious doubts whether one out of a thousand of the population of the British Islands knows who Mr. Malthus was, or, indeed, whether he was a Roman, or a citizen of modern Europe, at all. It is, therefore, we are convinced, very important to let his countrymen know that Thomas Robert Malthus was an Englishman; that he was a denizen of the 19th century; and that he lived most part of his life in the neighbourhood of London. Thomas Robert Malthus was born at the Rookery, near Dorking, in Surrey, in 1766. Those who are interested in the matter will do well to make a pilgrimage, as we have done, to the romantic birth-place of the discoverer of the law of population, the greatest (if we measure discoveries by their effect on human happiness) ever made. Malthus father was an able man, a friend and correspondent of the noble and unfortunate J. J. Rousseau, and one of his executors. Thomas Robert was his second son, and, as a boy, evinced so much ability that his father kept him at home and superintended his education himself. The son repaid his fathers care, and had awakened in him that spirit of independence and love of truth which were ever afterwards the characteristics of his mind. He had two tutors, in addition to his father, both men of geniusRichard Graves and Gilbert Wakefieldthe former the author of the Spiritual Quixote, the latter the correspondent of Fox, and well known in his day as a violent democratic writer and politician. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 60378
Author: Drysdale, Charles R. (Charles Robert)
Release Date: Sep 29, 2019
Format: eBook
Language: English