Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/876

 860 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The intensity of this struggle varies with the relations of the population to the food supply. In some manner, whether by the so-called positive checks, as war, pestilence, famine, and the like, or by negative checks, like vice and prudential restraint, the equilibrium must be maintained. Among the lowest classes the checks on population are chiefly positive. It is only the intelligent, the thoughtful, the prudent, who act upon the advice of Matthew Arnold. Matthew Arnold, it is said, was upon one occasion, in company with a good man, overlooking a multitude of children in one of the most miserable parts of London, children eaten up with disease, half size, half fed, half clothed, neglected by their parents, without house, without home, without hope. "The one thing really needful," said the good man, "is to teach these little ones to succor one another, if only with a cup of cold water; but now from one end of the country to another one hears nothing but the cry for knowledge, knowl- ledge, knowledge." But Mr. Arnold replied that so long as the multitude of these poor children is perpetually swelling, they must be charged with misery to themselves and us, whether they help one another with a cup of cold water or not. The knowledge how to prevent them accumulating is what we want. 1 "A man's children," says the same writer, in Culture a?id Anar- chy, "are not really sent no more than the pictures upon his wall, or the horses in his stable are sent; and to bring people into the world when one cannot afford to keep them and one's self decently, or to bring more of them into the world than one can afford to keep, is by no means an accomplishment of the divine will, or a fulfillment of nature's simplest laws, but is con- trary to reason and the will of God." 1

Aside from this relation of population to food, it is clear that wealth, notwithstanding the evils connected with its pro- duction, distribution, and consumption, is essential to the grati- fication of all our higher desires. Without wealth society could not exist. Its accumulation is the prerequisite of all great social improvements. Railway systems, large manufacturing concerns,

1 Quoted by JANE HUME CLAPPERTON in Scientific Meliorism, p. 85.