Page:Progress and poverty - an inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions, and of increase of want with increase of wealth - the remedy (IA progresspovertyi00georiala).pdf/125

Chap. II. employment and subsistence. John Stuart Mill says (Book II, Chap. XII, Sec. 2,) that to do this without state regulation of marriages and births, would be to produce a state of general misery and degradation. "These consequences," he says, "have been so often and so clearly pointed out by authors of reputation, that ignorance of them on the part of educated persons is no longer pardonable." Yet in Sparta, in Peru, in Paraguay, as in the industrial communities which appear almost every where to have constituted the primitive agricultural organization, there seems to have been an utter ignorance of these dire consequences of a natural tendency.

Besides the broad, general facts I have cited, there are facts of common knowledge which seem utterly inconsistent with such an overpowering tendency to multiplication. If the tendency to reproduce be so strong as Malthusianism supposes, how is it that families so often become extinct—families in which want is unknown? How is it, then, that when every premium is offered by hereditary titles and hereditary possessions, not alone to the principle of increase, but to the preservation of genealogical knowledge and the proving up of descent, that in such an aristocracy as that of England, so many peerages should lapse, and the House of Lords only be kept up from century to century by fresh creations?

For the solitary example of a family that has survived any great lapse of time, even though assured of subsistence and honor, we must go to unchangeable China. The descendants of Confucius still exist there, and enjoy peculiar privileges and consideration, forming, in fact, the only hereditary aristocracy. On the presumption that population tends to double every twenty-five years, they should, in 2150 years after the death of Confucius, have amounted to 859,559,193,106,709,670,198,710,528 souls. Instead of any such unimaginable number, the descendants of Confucius, 2150 years after his death, in the reign of Kanghi, numbered 11,000 males, or say 22,000 souls. This is quite a discrepancy, and is the more striking when it is remembered that