Page:Annie Besant, The Law of Population.djvu/52

 population is "miserably evaded by all those who have meddled with the subject;" and says that "if the superstitions of the nursery were disregarded, and the principle of utility kept steadily in view, a solution might not be very difficult to be found."

Mr. John Stuart Mill strongly urges restraint of the number of the family, and he took an active part in disseminating the knowledge of scientific checks.

The members of the old Freethought Institution in John Street made it part of their work to circulate popular tracts, advocating scientific checks, such as a four-page tract entitled, "Population: is not its increase at present an evil, and would not some harmless check be desirable?"

Mr. Austin Holyoake, in his "Large and Small Families," follows in the same strain, and recommends as guides Knowlton's Pamphlet and Owen's "Moral Physiology."

Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, writing as one of the Vice-Presidents of the National Secular Society in 1876, points to the difference between Christian and Secular morality on this head; he says: "Let any one regard for a moment the Christian's theory of this life. It tells us that all human beings born are immortal, and that God has to provide for them above or below! Yet in every portion of the land scoundrel or vicious parents may bring into existence a squalid brood of dirty, sickly, depraved, ignorant, ragged children. Christianity fails utterly to prevent their existence, and hurls quick words of opprobrium upon any who advocate the prevention of this progeny of crime. Yet the Christian teaches that, by mere act of orthodox belief, these ignorant and unclean creatures can be sent from the gutter to God. A Secularist cannot help shuddering at this doctrine and this practice, so fatal to society, so contemptuous to heaven."

M. Garnier—and with him I close these extracts, only a few out of many that might be brought forward—says: "I am led to declare openly and positively, that by prudence is to be understood not only delayed marriages, not only celibacy for those who are capable of practising it, but prudence during the married state itself." Answering Proudhon's objections, he asks: "Can it be called immoral in the father of a family if he should wish to have only a limited number of children, proportioned to his means, and to the future which his affection fondly weaves for them, and if he should not, in carrying out this object, condemn