The Malthusian Handbook by Anonymous

Author:Anonymous [Anonymous]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Reference & Language, Reference, Fiction & Literature, Classics
ISBN: 4057664633019
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2019-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

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Having given an account of this memorable trial, we proceed to trace some of its far-reaching effects. In the first place, Dr. Knowlton’s pamphlet gained immediately an enormous circulation. Before the prosecution the annual sales were very small; within three months from the time when proceedings were instituted against the publishers, 125,000 copies were sold. But this result, startling as it appears, was by no means the most important phase of the impetus given to the public mind upon the question of population by the cause célèbre of “The Queen versus Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant.” During the trial the newspapers of this country contained lengthy reports of the proceedings, and the remarkable speeches of the defendants were thus carried far and wide. Their popular statements of the Malthusian position, their description of the evils arising from over-population and the remedies that they proposed were sent forth into many thousands of homes into which no hint of the truth would otherwise have penetrated. The press, with its myriad voices, became, for the time, a mighty organ of New-Malthusian propaganda, repeating, in tones that echoed round the world, the eloquent words of two social reformers to whom the miseries of the poor were known, and who had faced the danger of imprisonment and of social obloquy in order to proclaim that which they felt to be the only efficient remedy for poverty.

Amidst the public excitement caused by this famous trial, The Malthusian League was called into existence, and has since carried forward the work of propaganda in an organised and systematic fashion. It was founded to promote the following objects:

I. To agitate for the abolition of all penalties on the public discussion of the Population Question, and to obtain such a statutory definition as shall render it impossible, in the future, to bring such discussions within the scope of the common law as a misdemeanor.

II. To spread among the people, by all practicable means, a knowledge of the law of population, of its consequences, and of its bearing upon human conduct and morals.

Dr. Charles R. Drysdale, M.D., F.R.C.S., Eng., has from the first been the President of the League, and has devoted himself to the work of explaining and advocating the New-Malthusian principle. The list of Vice-Presidents has included the names of the late M. Yves Guyot, a distinguished French deputé and Minister of State, and of Mr. J. Bryson, President of the Northumberland Miners’ Association. A reference to its present composition will show the reader that the efforts of the League to spread enlightened views on the population question have the approval and sympathy of influential persons in this and in other countries.3

The work of the League is chiefly carried on by public lectures and meetings, the dissemination of literature, and letters addressed to the editors of newspapers. By these means the public mind is constantly being influenced in the direction of rational views upon the population question.

The annual meetings of members and friends of the League have

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