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

because inadequate means of feeding,

clothing, or employing them may be adopted in that part of time

sometimes called unborn eternity. As a rule, the result usually has

been: limit the increase of population without adequate cause, and the

reaction causes deterioration or annihilation.” [19]

Lastly, there is evidence that poverty has existed in thinly populated countries. Richard Cobden, writing in 1836, of Russia, states: “The mass of the people are sunk in poverty, ignorance, and barbarism, scarcely rising above a state of nature, and yet it has been estimated that this country contains more than 750,000 square miles of land, of a quality not inferior to the best portions of Germany, and upon which a population of 200,000,000 might find subsistence.” [20]

 

Section 3. CAUSES OF POVERTY IN INDIA

In reality chronic poverty exists both in the thickly-peopled and in the thinly-peopled regions of India, and therefore the overpopulation theory is an inadequate explanation. Moreover, there are certain obvious and admitted evils, sufficient in themselves to account for the chronic poverty of India, and of these four are quoted by Devas. [21]

 

“(1) The grave discouragement to all rural improvement and in

particular to the sinking of deep wells, by the absence outside Bengal

of fixity of tenure, the landholder having the prospect of his

assessment being raised every fifteen or thirty years. (2) Through most

of India the unchecked oppression of usurers, in whose toils many

millions of landholders are so bound as to lack means or motive for the

proper cultivation of the soil. (3) A system of law and police totally

unfit for small cultivators—witness the plague of litigation, appeals

as 250 to 1 in England, habitual perjury, manufactured crime, and

blackmailing by corrupt native police, all destructive of rural amity,

co-operation, and industry. (4) Taxation oppressive both in quantity

and quality: demanded, on pain of eviction and imprisonment, to be paid

punctually and rigidly in cash, instead of optionally or occasionally

in kind, or flexible, according to the variations of the seasons;

moreover, levied on salt, raising the price of this necessity of life

at least ten times, often much more; when precisely an abundant supply

of salt, with the climate and diet of India, is a prime need for men

and cattle.”

 

Section 4. POVERTY IN FACT CAUSES A HIGH BIRTHRATE

As will be shown in Chapter V, poverty is generally the cause and not the result of a high birthrate. The Malthusian doctrine has been and is to-day a barrier to social reform, because it implies that humane legislation, by encouraging population, will of necessity defeat the aim of those who desire to improve the conditions of the poor by methods other than the practice of artificial birth control. To a very great extent Malthusian teaching was responsible for the Poor Law of 1834, the most severe in Europe, the demoralising laxity of the old Poor Law being replaced by degrading severity. Again, as recently as 1899, a Secretary of State reiterated the Malthusian doctrine by explaining that great poverty throughout India was due to the increase of population under the pax Britannica. Now the truth is that if the social conditions of the poor were improved, we have every reason to believe that their birthrate would be reduced, because as civilisation in a community progresses there is a natural decline in fertility. Hence:

(a) Malthusianism is an Attack on the Poor

Both the supporters and the opponents of Malthus are often mistaken in considering his greatest achievement to be a policy of birth control. Malthus did a greater and a more evil thing. He forged a law of nature, namely, that there is always a limited and insufficient supply of the necessities of life in the world. From this false law he argued that, as population increases too rapidly, the newcomers cannot hope to find a sufficiency of good things; that the poverty of the masses is not due to conditions created by man, but to a natural law; and that consequently this law cannot be altered by any change in political institutions. This new doctrine was eagerly adopted by the rich, who were thus enabled to argue that Nature intended that the masses should find no room at her feast; and that therefore our system of industrial capitalism was in harmony with the Will of God. Most comforting dogma! Most excellent anodyne for conscience against acceptance of those rights of man that, being ignored, found terrible expression in the French Revolution! Without discussion, without investigation, and without proof, our professors, politicians, leader-writers, and even our well-meaning socialists, have accepted as true the bare falsehood that there is always an insufficient supply of the necessities of life; and to-day this heresy permeates all our practical politics. In giving this forged law of nature to the rich, Malthus robbed the poor of hope. Such was his crime against humanity. In the words of Thorold Rogers, Malthusianism was part and parcel of “a conspiracy, conceived by the law and carried out by parties interested in its success, to cheat the English workman of his wages, to tie him to the soil, to deprive him of hope, and to degrade him into immediate poverty.” When Malthusians enter a slum for the purpose of preaching birth control, it is right that the people should be told what is written on the passports of these strangers.

(b) A Hindrance to Reform

The teaching of birth control amongst the poor is in itself a crime, because, apart from the evil practice, the people are asked to believe a lie, namely, that a high birthrate is the cause of poverty and that by means of birth-control their circumstances will be improved. By one advocate of birth control this weak reasoning and inconsequential sentimentality have actually been crowded into the compass of a single sentence: “We must no longer be content to remain indifferent and idle witnesses of the senseless and unthinking procreating of countless wretched children, whose parents are diseased and vicious.” [22] It is true that disease, vice, and wretched children are the saddest products of our industrial system; it is also true that a helpless baby never yet was guilty of expropriating land, of building slums, of under-paying the workers, or of rigging the market. Therefore instead of preventing the birth of children we should set about to rectify the evil conditions which make the lives of children and adults unhappy. Like many other policies advocated on behalf of the poor, birth control is immoral if only on this account, that it distracts attention from the real causes of poverty. In Spain birth control is not practised. I do not say there is no poverty in that country, but there is no poverty that resembles the hopeless grinding poverty of the English poor. For that strange disease, artificial birth control is a worthless remedy; and it were far better that we should turn our attention to the simple words of Cardinal Manning: “There is a natural and divine law, anterior and superior to all human and civil law, by which men have the right to live of the fruits of the soil on which they are born, and in which they are buried.” [23]

(c) A Quack Remedy for Poverty

Artificial birth control is one of the many quack remedies advertised for the cure of poverty, and G.K. Chesterton has given the final answer to the Malthusian assertion that some form of birth control is essential because houses are scarce:

 

“Consider that simple sentence, and you will see what is the matter

with the modern mind. I do not mean the growth of immorality; I mean

the genesis of gibbering idiocy. There are ten little boys whom you

wish to provide with ten top-hats; and you find there are only eight

top-hats. To a simple mind it would seem not impossible to make two

more hats; to find out whose business it is to make hats, and induce

him to make hats; to agitate against an absurd delay in delivering

hats; to punish anybody who has promised hats and failed to provide

hats. The modern mind is that which says that if we only cut off the

heads of two of the little boys, they will not want hats; and then the

hats will exactly go round. The suggestion that heads are rather more

important than hats is dismissed as a piece of mystical metaphysics.

The assertion that hats were made for heads, and not heads for hats

savours of antiquated dogma. The musty text which says that the body is

more than raiment; the popular prejudice which would prefer the lives

of boys to the mathematical arrangement of hats,—all these things are

alike to be ignored. The logic of enlightenment is merciless; and we

duly summon the headsman to disguise the deficiencies of the hatter.

For it makes very little difference to the logic of the thing, that we

are talking of houses and not of hats…. The fundamental fallacy

remains the same; that we are beginning at the wrong end, because we

have never troubled to consider at what end to begin.” [24]

 

Section 5. POVERTY AND CIVILISATION

A modern writer is burdened by many words that carry an erroneous meaning, and one of these is the word “civilisation.” Intended to mean “The Art of Living,” this word, by wrong usage, now implies that our method of combining mental culture and bodily comfort is the highest, noblest, and best way to live. Yet this implication is by no means certain. On the contrary, the spectacle of our social life would bring tears to eyes undimmed by the industrial traditions of the past hundred years. This I know to be true, having once travelled to London in the company of a young girl who came from the Thirteenth Century. She had lived some twelve years on the Low Sierra of Andalusia, where in a small sunlit village she may have vainly imagined our capital to be a city with walls of amethyst and streets of gold, for when the train passed through that district which lies to the south of Waterloo, the child wept. “Look at these houses,” she sobbed; “Dios mio, they have no view.”

[Footnote 15: Memorandum issued by the Dominions Royal Commission, December 3, 1915 (p. 2).]

[Footnote 16: Prince Kropotkin, Fields, Factories, and Workshops, 1899, chapter iii.]

[Footnote 17: Vide The Economic History of Ireland from the Union to the Famine, by S. O’Brien (Longmans, 1921).]

[Footnote 18: William Cobbett, Social Effects of the Reformation. Catholic Truth Society (H. 132), price 2_d_.]

[Footnote 19: Quoted by F.P. Atkinson, M.D., in Edinburgh Medical Journal, September 1880, p. 229.]

[Footnote 20: Ibid., p. 234.]

[Footnote 21: Charles S. Devas, Political Economy, 1901, p. 199.]

[Footnote 22: British Medical Journal, July 23, 1921, p. 131.]

[Footnote 23: Quoted in Tablet, November 5, 1921, p. 598.]

[Footnote 24: Quoted from America, October 29, 1921, p. 31.]