Page:Annie Besant, The Law of Population.djvu/48

 nature; in human nature they are guarded, tended, nourished, and they hand on to their offspring their own disabilities. Scientific checks to population would just do for man what the struggle for existence does for the brutes: they enable man to control the production of new human beings; those who suffer from hereditary diseases, who have consumption or insanity in the family, might marry, if they so wished, but would preserve the race from the deterioration which results from propagating disease. The whole British race would gain in vigour, in health, in longevity, in beauty, if only healthy parents gave birth to children; at present there is many a sickly family, because sickly persons marry; they revolt against forbiddance of marriage, celibacy being unnatural, and they are taught that "the natural consequences of marriage" must follow. Let them understand that one set of "consequences" results naturally from one set of conditions, another set from different conditions, and let them know that laisser aller in marriage is no wiser than in other paths of life.

Leaving objectors, let us look at the other side of the question. The system of preventive checks to population points us to the true pathway of safety; it is an immediate relief, and at once lightens the burden of poverty. Each married couple have it in their power to avoid poverty for themselves and for their children, by determining, when they enter on married life, that they will not produce a family larger than they can comfortably maintain: thus they avoid the daily harass of domestic struggle; they rejoice over two healthy, robust, well-fed children, instead of mourning over seven frail, sickly, half-starved ones; they look forward to an old age of comfort and of respectability instead of one of painful dependence on a grudgingly-given charity.

How rapidly conjugal prudence may lift a nation out of pauperism is seen in France; the proportion of adults to the whole population is the largest in Europe, the proportionate number of persons under thirty being the smallest; hence, there are more producers and fewer non-producers than in any other country. The consequence of this is that the producers are less pressed upon, and live in greater comfort and with more enjoyment of life. There are no less than 5,000,000 of properties under six acres, each sufficient to support a small family, but wholly inadequate for the maintenance of a large one, and it was from these independent peasants that M. Thiers borrowed the money to pay