Malthusians and the claim to protect human life
there is something a little anti-human about Malthusianism.
The nearby identification of Bradlaugh as a Malthusian gives this sentence a more specific historical setting than a general dislike of large populations. Annie Besant's The Law of Population explicitly names Bradlaugh's declaration that the National Reformer would be Malthusian in political economy. It presents excessive reproduction relative to available subsistence as a cause of poverty, and treats instruction in limiting families as practical help for the poor. The inspected witness is Wikisource's transcription of the Freethought Publishing Company text, whose displayed title page is undated; the work first appeared in 1877. Besant's own retrospective account dates its newspaper serialization to October and its first complete pamphlet edition to early November that year. This identifies a relevant movement and argument, without establishing that Chesterton read this particular pamphlet. (Besant, chapter I; Autobiographical Sketches, account beginning “In October, 1877”.)
Besant's answer to the charge of opposing nature makes the disagreement especially clear. In chapter IV she compares reducing births with reducing deaths through medicine: both use human reason to control natural processes. She calls it immoral to produce children whom parents cannot feed, clothe, and educate, and defends preventive methods against objections concerning nature and chastity. Thus the participants did not agree that limiting births was hostility to humanity. Besant claimed to protect the health and prospects of mothers and children; Chesterton places the movement among the excessive positions from which Christianity appears objectionable. His adjective states his moral diagnosis rather than summarizing his opponents' avowed purpose. (Besant, chapter IV, opening discussion of “conjugal prudence”.)
Nor should these secular campaigners be collapsed into Malthus himself. In the 1798 first-edition text of An Essay on the Principle of Population, inspected through Project Gutenberg's transcription, Malthus argues that unchecked population grows faster than subsistence, but attributes the fixed laws of nature to their divine arranger. The population principle therefore did not by itself require an anti-Christian worldview. Chesterton's concession that Christianity is not especially anti-Malthusian leaves that distinction available, even as his final phrase rejects the movement's moral outlook. (Malthus, chapter I, the two postulates and following paragraphs.)
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