Birth Control - Halliday G. Sutherland (summer reading list .TXT) 📗

the birthrate is especially

low). He expresses with the utmost emphasis the conviction that the

Gascons are deteriorating, physically and mentally, and points out, at

the same time, that the decline of population has had an injurious

effect upon the economic condition of the country. ‘L’hyponatalit� est

une cause pr�cise et directe de la d�g�n�rescence de la race,’ he

writes. And, dealing with the belief that a low birthrate will result

in the development of a superior type of child, he says: ‘C’est une

illusion qui ne r�siste pas � la lumi�re des faits tels que les montre

l’�tude d�mographique de nos villages gascons. Depuis que beaucoup de

bancs restent vides � la petite �cole, les �coliers ne sont ni mieux

dou�s, ni plus travailleurs, et ils sont certainement moins vigoureux.’

And again, ‘La quantit� est en g�n�ral la condition premi�re et

souveraine de la qualit�.’” [97]

 

Section 8. THE PLOT AGAINST CHRISTENDOM

All purposive actions are ultimately based on philosophy of one sort or another. If, for example, we find a rich man founding hospitals for the poor, we may assume that he believes in the principle of Charity. It is, therefore, of prime importance to determine what kind of philosophy underlies Neo-Malthusian propaganda. The birth controllers profess to be actuated solely by feelings of compassion and of benevolence towards suffering humanity; and it is on these grounds that they are appealing to the Church of England to bless their work, or at least to lend to their propaganda a cloak of respectability. Now, the very fact that Neo-Malthusians are sincere in their mistaken and dangerous convictions makes it all the more necessary that we should discover the doctrines on which their propaganda was originally based; because, although their economic fallacies were borrowed from Malthus, their philosophy came from a different source.

This philosophy is to be found, naked and unashamed, in a book entitled The Elements of Social Science. I have already referred to this work as the Bible of Neo-Malthusians, and its teaching has been endorsed as recently as 1905 by the official journal of the Malthusian League, as witness the following eulogy, whose last lines recall the happy days of Bret Harte in the Far West, and the eloquent periods of our old and valued friend Colonel Starbottle:

 

“This work should be read by all followers of J.S. Mill, Garnier, and

the Neo-Malthusian school of economists. We could give a long criticism

of the many important chapters in this book; but, as we might be

considered as prejudiced in its favour because of our agreement with

its aims, we prefer to cite the opinion given by the editor of that

widely circulated and most enlightened paper _The Weekly Times and

Echo_, which appears in its issue of October 8.” [98]

Before quoting from the book an explanation is due to my readers. I do not suggest that all of those who are to-day supporting the propaganda for artificial birth control would agree with its foolish blasphemies and drivelling imbecilities; but it is nevertheless necessary to quote these things, because our birth controllers are too wise in their day and generation to reveal to the public, still less to the Church of England, the philosophy on which Neo-Malthusianism was originally based, and from which it has grown. Moreover, the Malthusians claim that it was the author of the Elements of Social Science “who interested Mr. Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant in the question.” [99] Four quotations from the last edition of the book will suffice:

 

“But this is a certain truth, that any human being, any one of us,

no matter how fallen and degraded, is an infinitely more glorious

and adorable being than any God that ever was or will be

conceived” (p. 413).

In justice to the memory of John Stuart Mill, whom Malthusians are ever quoting, it should be noted that the foregoing blasphemy is nothing more nor less than a burlesque of Positivism or of Agnosticism. The teaching of Mill, Bain, and of Herbert Spencer was that the knowledge of God and of His nature is impossible, because our senses are the only source of knowledge. Their reasoning was wrong—because a primary condition of all knowledge is memory, in itself an intuition, because primary mathematical axioms are intellectual intuitions, and because mind has the power of abstraction; but, even so, not one of these men was capable of having written the above-quoted passage. The next quotation refers to marriage.

 

“Marriage is based upon the idea that constant and unvarying love is

the only one which is pure and honourable, and which should be

recognised as morally good. But there could not be a greater error than

this. Love is, like all other human passions and appetites, subject to

change, deriving a great part of its force and continuance from variety

in its objects; and to attempt to fix it to an invariable channel is to

try to alter the laws of its nature”(p. 353).

That quotation is an example of how evil ideas may arise from muddled thinking: because if the word “lust” be substituted for the word “love” in the third sentence, the remaining forty-five words would merely convey a simple truth, expressed by Kipling in two lines:

 

“For the more you ‘ave known o’ the others

The less will you settle to one.”

Very few people, I suppose, are so foolish as to believe that man is by nature either a chaste or a constant animal, and indeed in this respect he appears to his disadvantage when compared with certain varieties of birds, which are by nature constant to each other. On the other hand, millions of people believe that man is able to overcome his animal nature; and for the past two thousand years the civilised races of the world have held that this is a goal towards which mankind should strive. In the opinion of Christendom chastity and marriage are both morally good, but, according to the philosophy of our Neo-Malthusian author, they are morally evil.

 

“Chastity, or complete sexual abstinence, so far from being a virtue,

is invariably a great natural sin” (p. 162).

Is it not obvious that to the writers of such passages love is synonymous with animalism, with lust? It is by no means necessary to go to saints or to moralists for a refutation of this Neo-Malthusian philosophy. Does any decent ordinary man or woman agree with it? Ask the man in the street. Turn the pages of our literature. Refer to Chaucer or Spenser, to Shakespeare or Milton, refer to Fielding or Burns or Scott or Tennyson. Some of these men were very imperfect; but they all knew the difference between lust and love; and it is because they can tell us at least something of that which is precious, enduring, ethereal, and divine in love that we read their pages and honour their names. Not one of these men could have written the following sentence:

 

“Marriage distracts our attention from the real sexual

duties, and this is one of its worst effects” (p. 366).

Now it is certain that if “the real sexual duties” are represented by promiscuous fornication, then both marriage and chastity are evil things. That philosophy is very old. From time immemorial—it has been advocated by one of the most powerful intelligences in the universe. Such is the soil on which the Neo-Malthusian fungus has grown—a soil that would rot the foundations of Europe.

[Footnote 66: The Lancet, May 14, 1921, p. 1024]

[Footnote 67: British Medical Journal, 1921, vol. ii, p. 93.]

[Footnote 68: The Small Family System, 2nd edit., p. 2.]

[Footnote 69: Supplement to The British Medical Journal, March 18, 1905, p. 110.]

[Footnote 70: Common Sense on the Population Question, by Teresa Billington-Greig, p. 4. Published by the Malthusian League.]

[Footnote 71: Medico-Legal Society, July 7, 1921.]

[Footnote 72: Suppl. Qu. 49, Art. 6: “Voluptates meretricias vir in uxore quoerit quando nihil aliud in ea attendit quam quod in meretrice attenderet” (A husband seeks from his wife harlot pleasures when he asks from her only what he might ask from a harlot). Quoted by the Rev. Vincent McNabb, O.P., The Catholic Gazette, September 1921, p. 195.]

[Footnote 73: British Medical Journal, 1921, vol. ii, p. 169.]

[Footnote 74: Reproduced in fourth edition, 1861.]

[Footnote 75: Essays in Medical Sociology, 1899. Revised and printed for private circulation, p. 95, (Copy in Library of Royal Society of Medicine).]

[Footnote 76: British Medical Journal, August 20, 1921, p. 302.]

[Footnote 77: St. Matt. xviii. 6.]

[Footnote 78: Proceedings of the Medico-Legal Society, July 7, 1921]

[Footnote 79: “That arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labour we call The Servile State.”—Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State, 1912, p. 16.]

[Footnote 80: The Secretary of the Malthusian League. Vide The Declining Birthrate, 1916, p. 89.]

[Footnote 81: The Declining Birthrate, 1916, p. 37.]

[Footnote 82: Dominions Royal Commission, Memorandum and Tables relating to the Food and Raw Material Requirements of the United Kingdom: prepared by the Royal Commission on the Natural Resources, Trade, and Legislation of Certain Portions of His Majesty’s Dominions. November, 1915, pp. 1 and 2. My italics—H.G.S.]

[Footnote 83: i.e. grain, wheatmeal, and flour]

[Footnote 84: For particulars of this increase see Canada Year Book 1913, p. 144.]

[Footnote 85: See pp. 387-8 of [Cd. 6588].]

[Footnote 86: Average for period 1907-1910 and excluding British Columbia, where the yield per acre in 1911, the only year for which figures are available, averaged 29-37 bushels.]

[Footnote 87: Including British Columbia.]

[Footnote 88: Below the average. The yield per acre in 1912 was 12.53 bushels, and in 1913 11.18.]

[Footnote 89: The Observer, Nov. 11, 1921.]

[Footnote 90: Reminiscences of a Highland Parish, by Norman Macleod, D.D., 1876, p. 27.]

[Footnote 91: Ibid., p. 34.]

[Footnote 92: Ibid., p. 91.]

[Footnote 93: British Medical Journal, August 13, 1921, p. 261.]

[Footnote 94: Leaflet of the Malthusian League.]

[Footnote 95: The Hibbert Journal, October 1914, p. 153. My italics.—H.G.S.]

[Footnote 96: Quoted by Professor Meyrick Booth, The Hibbert Journal, October 1914, p. 153.]

[Footnote 97: The Hibbert Journal, October 1914.]

[Footnote 98: The Malthusian, November 1905, p. 84]

[Footnote 99: C.V. Drysdale, O.B.E., D. Sc., The Small Family System, 1918, p. 150.]