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Page 9
The right of the State to say, however, that the criminal, the drunkard,
the diseased, and the pauper, shall not propagate their kind should be
stoutly maintained by all rational men.
Most of the nations of history have recognized the gravity of the
population question, but they were mostly concerned with the tendency of
the numbers in the State to increase beyond the means of subsistence,
instead of the tendency to degeneration as it now concerns us.
CHAPTER II.
THE POPULATION QUESTION.
_The Teaching of Aristotle and Plato.--The teaching of Malthus.--His
assailants.--Their illogical position.--Bonar on Malthus and his
work.--The increase of food supplies held by Nitti to refute
Malthus.--The increase of food and the decrease of births.--Mr.
Spencer's biological theory.--Maximum birth-rate determined by female
capacity to bear children.--The pessimism of Spencer's law.--Wider
definition of moral restraint.--Where Malthus failed to anticipate the
future.--Economic law operative only through Biological law._
Births, deaths, and migration are the factors which make up the
population question.
The problem has burned in the minds of all great students of human life
and its conditions.
Aristotle says (Politics ii. 7-5) "The legislator who fixes the amount
of property should also fix the number of children, for if they are too
many for the property, the law must be broken." And he proceeds to
advise (ib. vii. 16-15) "As to the exposure and rearing of children, let
there be a law that no deformed child shall live, but where there are
too many (for in our State population has a limit) when couples have
children in excess and the state of feeling is adverse to the exposure
of offspring, let abortion be procured."
The difficulty of over-population was conspicuous in the minds of
Aristotle and Plato, and these philosophers both held that the State had
a right and a duty to control it.
But some States were almost annihilated because they were not
sufficiently populous, and Aristotle attributes the defeat of Sparta on
one celebrated occasion to this fact. He says:--"The legislators wanting
to have as many Spartans as they could, encouraged the citizens to have
large families, and there is a law at Sparta, that the father of three
sons should be exempt from military service, and he who has four, from
all the burdens of the State. Yet it is obvious that if there were many
children, the land being distributed as it is, many of these must
necessarily fall into poverty."
The problem in the mind of the Greek philosophers was this.
Over-population is a cause of poverty; under-population is a cause of
weakness. Defectives are an additional burden to the State. How shall
population be so regulated as to established an equilibrium between the
stability of the State, and the highest well-being of the citizens?
The combined philosophy of the Greeks counselled the encouragement of
the best citizens to increase their kind, and the practice of the
exposure of infants and abortion.
A century of debate has raged round the name of Malthus, the great
modern analyst of the population problem. He published his first essay
on population in 1798, a modest pamphlet, which fed so voraciously on
the criticism supplied to it, that it developed into a mighty
contribution to a great social problem, second only in time and in
honour to the work of his great predecessor in economic studies, Adam
Smith.
Malthus's first essay defined and described the laws of multiplication
as they apply only to the lower animals and savage man. It was only in
his revised work, published five years later, that he described moral
restraint as a third check to population.
Adverse criticism had been bitter and severe, and Malthus saw that his
first work had been premature. He went to the continent to study the
problem from personal observation in different countries. He profited by
his observation, and by the writings of his critics, and published his
matured work in 1803.
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