Fruits and wine

Showing how desirable it is, both in a political and a social point of view, for mankind to be able to limit at WILL THE NUMBER OF THEIR OFFSPRING, WITHOUT SACRIFICING THE PLEASURE THAT ATTENDS THE GRATIFICATION OF THE REPRODUCTIVE INSTINCT.

First.--In a political point of view.-If population be not restrained by some great physical calamity, such as we have reason to hope will not hereafter be visited upon the children of men, or by some moral restraint, the time will come when the earth cannot support its inhabitants. Population unrestrained will double three times in a century. Hence, computing the present population of the earth at 1,000 millions, there would be at the end of 100 years from the present time, 8,000 millions.

At the end of 200 years, 64,000 millions.

" " 300 " 512,000 "

And so on, multiplying by eight for every additional hundred years. So that in 500 years from the present time there would be thirty-two thousand seven hundred and sixty eight times as many inhabitants as at present. If the natural increase should go on without check for 1,500 years, one single pair would increase to more than thirty-five thousand one hundred and eighty-four times as many as the present population of the whole earth!

Some check then there must be, or the time will come when millions will be born but to suffer and to perish for the necessaries of life. To what an inconceivable amount of human misery would such a state of things give rise! And must we say that vice, war, pestilence and famine are desirable to prevent it? Must the friends of temperance and domestic happiness stay their efforts? Must peace societies excite to war and bloodshed? Must the physician cease to investigate the nature of contagion, and to search for the means of destroying its baneful influence? Must he that becomes diseased be marked as a victim to die for public good, without the privilege of making an effort to restore him to health? And in case of a failure of crops in one part of the world, must the other parts withhold the means of supporting life that the far greater evil of excessive population throughout the world may be prevented? Can there be no effectual moral restraint, attended with far less human misery than such physical calamities as these? Most surely there can. But what is it? Malthus, an English writer on the subject of population, gives us none but celibacy to a late age. But how foolish it is to suppose that men and women will become as monks and nuns during the very holiday of their existence, and abjure during the fairest years of life the nearest and dearest of social relations, to avert a catastrophe which they and perhaps their children will not live to witness. But, besides being ineffectual, or if effectual, requiring a great sacrifice of enjoyment, this restraint is highly objectionable on the score of its demoralizing tendency. It would give rise to a frightful increase of prostitution, of intemperance and onanism, and prove destructive to health and moral feelings. In spite of preaching, human nature will ever remain the same; and that restraint which forbids the gratification of the reproductive instinct will avail but little with the mass of mankind. The checks to be hereafter mentioned are the only moral restraints to population known to the writer that are unattended with serious objections.

Besides starvation, with all its accompanying evils, overpopulation is attended with other public evils, of which may be mentioned, ignorance and slavery. Where the mass of the people must toil incessantly to obtain support, they must remain ignorant; and where ignorance prevails, tyranny reigns.*

* The scientific part of Malthus' Doctrine of Population is

not very clearly or correctly given in the above passages.

His great theory, now or generally held by the most eminent

political economists, is that the increase of population is

always powerfully checked in old countries by the difficulty

in increasing the supply of food; that the existing evils of

poverty and low wages are really at bottom caused by this

check, and are brought about by the pressure of population

on the soil, and the continual overstocking of the labor

markets with laborers; and hence that the only way in which

society can escape from poverty, with all its miseries, is

by putting a strong restraint on their natural powers of