Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of His Life and Work, Volume 2 (of 2)
A notable fact in the history of popular Freethought in England has been its association with the social teaching of Malthus, which first came before the world only a few years after Paine's attack on orthodoxy. There is nothing to show that Paine ever realised what a blow was struck at his optimistic Theism, by the essay which his fellow-Theist Malthus wrote to rebut the optimist assumptions on the "Political Justice" of Godwin, a Freethinker who held by the revolutionary optimism in the sphere of politics, while tending away from Deistic optimism in philosophy. Paine, who was certainly as much bent on construction as on destruction, sketched a socio-political system which will be found by many readers as impressive to-day as it was found by Pitt. He proposed on the one hand a progressive income-tax, which should yield new revenue and break up large estates, and on the other hand a system of stipends to poor families; annuities to decayed tradesmen and others over fifty, increasing after sixty; provision for the education of the children of the poor; donations for births, marriages, and some funerals; and "employment at all times for the casual poor in the cities of London and Westminster." Save as regards the old age pensions, which represent a great improvement on pauper relief, and the education scheme, all of this plan comes under the destructive criticism of Malthus, inasmuch as it does not recognise the fatal tendency of an untaught population to multiply in excess of the economic possibilities of maintenance. The plan of allowancing poor families at so much per head would have quickened immensely the progress towards national bankruptcy which was carried so far under the old Poor Law. It would have bred paupers by the thousand.
The demonstration of Malthus naturally was not relished by the Radicals, to whom it was first addressed; and Godwin in particular met it with indecent acrimony, as did Coleridge, the Conservative. But the next generation of Freethinkers assimilated the argument, and a certain propaganda for the restriction of families was carried on by Richard Carlile. It is a remarkable fact that two Christian priests have laid two corner-stones of the structure of Atheistic polity for modern England. Butler in confuting the Deists wrought as much for Atheism as for orthodoxy; Malthus, in meeting the remaining Deists on the ground of sociology, confuted their optimism on the practical side. Freethought finally accepted both services, rectifying Malthus as it rectified Butler; and under Bradlaugh it made for science all round. Malthusianism in its original form certainly lent itself to Toryism; and no amount of benevolence on the part of Malthus could make his doctrine acceptable to democracy so long as it was tied down to his Christian ethic. The step which reconciled the knowledge of the law of population with energetic Radicalism in politics was taken when rationalists laid it down that the prudential check need not mean prolonged celibacy. Teaching as he did the all-importance of checking the birth-rate, and knowing as he did the possibility of bringing about the restraint, Bradlaugh had no further cause for misgiving as to political progress than his recognition of the general capacity of human nature to blunder.
He took up the neo-Malthusian position emphatically in his early pamphlet on "Jesus, Shelley, and Malthus," published in 1861, a somewhat youthfully rhetorical, but still a very notable presentment of the three main influences successively brought to bear on the problem of poverty – the spirit of religious submission, the spirit of humanitarian revolt, and the spirit of science. He pleaded for the last. "An acquaintance with political economy," he there declares, "is as necessary to the working man as is a knowledge of navigation to the master of a ship. It is the science of social life, the social science." And he was able in those days of the "orthodox" economics to cite in support of his definition, from the high priest of orthodoxy, a deliverance which may surprise readers whose knowledge of the old economics is not commensurate with their censure of it.
"The object of political economy," says Mr M'Culloch, "is to point out the means by which the industry of man may be rendered most productive of those necessaries, comforts, and enjoyments which constitute wealth; to ascertain the circumstances most favourable for its accumulation, the proportion in which it is divided among the different classes of the community, and the mode in which it may be most advantageously consumed."
And in another early pamphlet on "Poverty and its Effect on the Political Condition of the People," first published in 1863, he put as one of his mottoes, after a more guarded sentence from John Mill, this from Sir James Steuart: —
"The object of political economy is to secure the means of subsistence to all the inhabitants, to obviate every circumstance which might render this precarious, to provide everything necessary for supplying the wants of society, and to employ the inhabitants so as to make their several interests accord with their supplying each other's wants."
But his application of the principle was democratic and Neo-Malthusian, not Collectivist. "Unless," he wrote, "the necessity of the preventative or positive checks to population be perceived; unless it be clearly seen that they must operate in one form if not in another, and that, though individuals may escape them, the race cannot, human society is a hopeless and insoluble riddle." And for years before this he had persistently pressed the point in his lectures, steadily defying the odium which his action brought upon him. As early as 1862 we find him temperately replying to denunciation on this head in a lecture on "Malthusianism and its connection with Civil and Religious Liberty," of which a partial report happened to be taken in shorthand. "It may almost seem unwise," he remarked, "to be continually putting this subject before you; but really I find myself so misrepresented, and so liable to be misunderstood, in quarters where one would expect better things, that you must not wonder if I seek to make it clear to you why I persist in this advocacy." He here pressed the law of population as a fundamental datum of political science.
"I shall urge upon you this morning that there can be no permanent civil and religious liberty, no permanent and enduring freedom for humankind, no permanent and enduring equality amongst men and women, no permanent and enduring fraternity, until the subject which Malthus wrote upon is thoroughly examined, and until the working men make that of which Malthus was so able an exponent the science of their everyday life; until, in fact, they grapple with it, and understand that the poverty which they now have to contend against must always produce the present evils which oppress them."
Again: —
"Poverty, so long as it exists, is in fact the impassable barrier between man and civil and religious liberty. You can never have true liberty so long as men are steeped in poverty. So long as men do not comprehend what liberty, what freedom really is, they will be ignorant how to attain it. Ignorance is the necessary sequence of their poverty. Are the people poor? For the poor there are no museums, no pictures, no elevating spheres of life, no grand music, no ennobling poetry. All these phases are closed to them; and why? Because their life is a constant struggle to live… What is the use of preaching to the masses if the masses do not understand the language in which you talk to them? What is the use of your phrases to them when their education compels them not to comprehend the words you say, nay, makes them misunderstand you – for unfortunately poverty has its education, and is in this case worse than mere ignorance. There is a miseducation in poverty, which distorts the human mind, destroys self-reliant energy, and is a most effectual barrier in the way of religious liberty. Liberty, equality, fraternity, are words used very often about the Republican institutions of the world; but you can never have liberty, equality, and fraternity as long as there is poverty dividing one class from another."
These words have been echoed since by Socialists and others who represent Bradlaugh as a "Manchester" politician; and who either evade the question of the birth-rate, or deny that it is of any account. Their argument takes two main forms: (1) That to urge prudence on the poor is useless, since they will not listen; while the better workers who do listen are "sterilised;" (2) that there would be no over-population if only wealth were properly distributed. Both arguments are fallacious; the first proceeding upon ignorance of the facts, and the desire to shirk a troublesome question; the second upon non-comprehension of the law of population. In the first case, the objector first implies that it might be good to limit families if only people could be got to do so, and then proceeds to say that the limiting of families is harmful when practised. Both of these conflicting views are erroneous in fact. It is not difficult to make the majority of poor men and women listen to reason on the subject; with those who say it is, the wish is father to the thought, in that they do not want to try to give the requisite knowledge. Thousands of poor women ignorantly use the most disastrous means to limit their fecundity; and extreme poverty often hampers them even where they have the knowledge. A little money spent by the charitable in helping the very poor in this way would obviate the need for endless alms to relieve the misery which ignorant instinct multiplies. Nor is there the least need to fear the "sterilising" of the more prudent, as the limitation of the family has been unwarrantably termed. Small families do not necessarily mean lessened total population. A man who has only three children and rears them all healthfully, maintains the species more efficiently than a man who has eight, loses six, and perforce rears the two survivors badly, because what might have nourished two or three well was for years spent in merely keeping more alive. The extreme case of France, over which there has been so much superficial talk in France and elsewhere, is no such portent as it is made out, but is in part explicable by the stress of the influenza plague, which heavily affected even the English birth-rate, and is in part a useful reminder to French statesmen that they are pressing too heavily on their country's resources, and need to mend their methods. Withal, the misery in France is far less grinding and pervasive than the misery in England.
As to the argument that it is not over-breeding, but bad distribution that causes poverty, the answer is that both causes operate, but that over-breeding can work misery under any system of distribution whatever, and is a main support to bad distribution at present. Some Malthusians have supposed that with a proper proportionment of population to the resources of the time being, poverty would wholly disappear. This is over-sanguine; but the case of the United States in the first half of the century, when resources were still far ahead of labour supply, gives abundant support to a more moderate claim. On the other hand, unless the lesson of prudential restraint be learned, the most thorough socialistic system of distribution will simply incur the most complete ruin. People reason that if only the resources of the world were properly utilised, all could be fed and housed comfortably. That is quite true; but they forget that if there be no restraint, the population of the world, being better placed than ever, will double at least every twenty-five years, and will thus soon upset any possible system of housing and feeding, and reduce the general condition to toil and poverty all round. This is so obvious when put, that the optimists are fain to fall back on a theory that population slackens spontaneously under conditions of comfort. Mr George moves nimbly between this theory and one which absolutely negates it. But all such pleas resolve themselves into either an admission that the race must and will learn to practise prudential restraint, which is a surrender to Malthusianism, or an assumption of a pre-ordained beneficent harmony in Nature, the old optimism in a new dress, or rather an old dress "turned."
We come back to the common plea of all the antagonists of Neo-Malthusianism – that there is no need to check over-breeding at present– a position so crudely unreasonable, so irreconcilable with any knowledge of the great facts of the case, that it is a mystery how it can be taken up by candid and well-informed men. No amount of demonstration that the world might feed all its inhabitants can do away with the dreadful fact that myriads of babes are actually born into the world every year only to die of the troubles made by poverty; that these babes had much better not have been born; that their birth might have been prevented; and that the survivors suffered from their birth. That men can shut their eyes to these overwhelming facts, and go on arguing, on an "if," that there is no need to restrain the birth-rate "in the meantime," is one of the darkest anomalies of political science.
Between the obstinacy of the opposing fallacy and the brutality of the resistance of prejudice, many men who recognise the truth have yet been wearied into holding their peace, in a pessimistic conviction that mankind in the mass cannot be enlightened on the matter. Of that attitude Bradlaugh was to the last incapable, though he had more cause than most men to know how tremendous were the odds in the struggle. Later generations will find it hard to credit the facts. A policy which on the face of the case could only be motived by public spirit and zeal for the truth was met by the vilest aspersions, the most malignant imputation of the most preposterously bad intentions. Personal vice was freely charged in explanation of an action which no vicious man would have had the self-denial to undertake. It is the bare truth to say that for many years a main part of the work of the Christian Evidence Society in England has been to employ hirelings to charge Secularism with the promotion of sexual vice – this on the strength partly of Bradlaugh's work for Neo-Malthusianism, and partly of the vogue of the anonymous work entitled "The Elements of Social Science," in which the arguments for family limitation are combined with a perfectly well-intentioned argument for sexual freedom as against celibacy and prostitution, the evils of which are not only exposed, but provided against in the book by careful medical instruction. Of this book, as we have seen, while honouring the moral courage and absolute benevolence of the anonymous writer, Bradlaugh expressly disclaimed the more advanced doctrines; but he has been saddled with them all the same, as if his burden of unpopularity were not already heavy enough.
He had fit though few compensations. He lived to see the rightness of his course more and more widely and openly admitted; and to see some Freethinkers and others who had unworthily attacked him for it come round and follow in his steps. And at his trial with Mrs Besant for selling the Knowlton pamphlet in 1877 he was able to tell the jury of higher sanctions than these. Mill in his "Autobiography," telling how he was attacked for subscribing to Bradlaugh's election fund in 1868, says of him: —
"He had the support of the working-classes; having heard him speak, I knew him to be a man of ability, and he had proved that he was the reverse of a demagogue, by placing himself in strong opposition to the prevailing opinion of the democratic party on two such important subjects as Malthusianism and Personal Representation. Men of this sort, who, while sharing the democratic feelings of the working classes, judged political questions for themselves, and had courage to assert their individual convictions against popular opposition, were needed, as it seemed to me, in Parliament."
It may here be added that Grote, who was a regular reader of the National Reformer and a Neo-Malthusian also, approved even more strongly. The further fact, now established, that Mill was in his youth actually prosecuted for distributing Neo-Malthusian literature, should serve to check the malice of those persons, clerical and other, who still divide Freethinkers into two classes – one of "irreproachable morals," following Mill, the other of "loose and dissolute character," following Bradlaugh.
Some Neo-Malthusians have been charged, despite their rejection of the non-possumus of Malthus, with excluding all other reforms in their advocacy of family limitation. If this charge was even valid, it certainly was not against Bradlaugh. He might much more reasonably be criticised for not keeping the population question to the front in every discussion of main reforms than for unduly obtruding it, or using it to discourage reforms made in disregard of it. After he had thoroughly forced it on the public attention, he trusted more to the quiet dissemination of educative literature on the subject, and the enlistment of individual self-interest in the reform, than to the political handling of it on the platform, where the insistence on it seems still to arouse the resentment of many Socialists and others, who can see no need for any reform save those they themselves propose, and are particularly wroth at the suggestion that working men can be in any degree accountable for their own troubles. The defence of the Knowlton pamphlet, as has been shown in the foregoing pages, was forced on Bradlaugh; and it was the more trying for him in that he was always personally averse to the detailed discussion of sexual topics. At the same time, it was impossible for him to submit to the stupid suppression by the authorities of the only cheap literature that gave to the poor the necessary knowledge for the limitation of their families. He was bound to resist that by every principle he professed; by his doctrine of freedom for the press and his doctrine of prudence in the family. So resisting, he identified himself once for all with the Neo-Malthusian doctrine in politics, though the resulting special notoriety of the topic was thus the work of the prosecutors themselves, who probably did more by their hostile act for the spread of popular knowledge than Bradlaugh had before been able to do by his years of advocacy.
How important was his introduction of the principle into politics can only be realised by those who know how much the principle means; and it is still in the stage of being vilified by the pious and contemned by the superficial, in which latter class may be included a good many Socialists. The former heap upon avowed Neo-Malthusians an abuse which they withhold from eminent politicians who confess opinions that imply Neo-Malthusianism or nothing. Mr John Morley, for instance, has expressed his regret that "we," – that is, the Liberal party in general – shirk the population question so much; and Mr Leonard Courtney has laid it down that we may as well build a house in disregard of the law of gravitation as hope to make a community prosper without regard to the law of population. The late Lord Derby spoke to similar effect. Either, then, such politicians mean to urge, with Malthus, that working-men shall postpone marriage until they have saved a good deal of money – that is, till middle or late life – or they approve of early marriage with conjugal prudence. That is the whole matter; for the nature of the prudence is a quite subsidiary question, on which no wise man or doctor will narrowly dogmatise. But nobody, not even the Times, denounces or insults Mr Courtney or Mr Morley or the late Lord Derby for saying what each of them has said. As usual, the man who says explicitly what other men say implicitly is singled out for attack, not on the score of taste, but on the score of the plain doctrine, however put.
On the whole, however, the tone of the discussion improves from year to year. In the "Knowlton" trial, the then Solicitor-General, Sir Hardinge Giffard (now Lord Halsbury), after hearing abundant evidence to show that the details made known in the pamphlet were just such as were made known in a number of other current works never prosecuted, though freely circulated by prominent booksellers; and after himself expressly avowing that "the book, I think it may be said, is carefully guarded from any vulgarity of expression" – nevertheless persisted in coarsely describing it as "dirty and filthy." Yet he himself was so gratuitously indecent in his own language that in a number of passages it had to be paraphrased or expunged in the report. And though the puzzle-headed jury "entirely exonerated the defendants from any corrupt motives in publishing," they were "unanimously of opinion that the book in question is calculated to deprave public morals," and allowed their foreman to present a verdict of guilty under the indictment. Probably no metropolitan jury would now come "unanimously" to the degrading conclusion that to spread specific physiological knowledge is to deprave public morals, even if the members were the "average sensual men" who habitually circulate and gloat upon lewd anecdotes, to say nothing of their acts. It is true that the abominable imputations packed into the indictment of Bradlaugh and Mrs Besant were repeated in the miserable prosecution108 which took place at Newcastle in 1892; and that the Recorder who tried that case, Judge Digby Seymour, displayed gross prejudice at every stage of the trial, finally vilifying such a perfectly well-meant and well-done treatise as Dr Allbutt's "Wife's Handbook," and the old "Fruits of Philosophy," as "two of the filthiest works that could be circulated to debauch and demoralise the minds of the people." Odious aspersions of this kind represent merely the fanaticism of ignorant custom, and take no heed of the enormous harm which physiological ignorance breeds. The Solicitor-General in the Knowlton trial flatly refused to deal with any such considerations; and Judge Seymour similarly would listen to no rational argument. But a decisive current of public opinion now begins to set the other way. Even a number of clergymen now admit the frightful evils of over-breeding, and are thus at least in part disentitled to cry out against rational prudence. The Newcastle prosecution, moreover, was strongly condemned in the local press; the accused was liberated; and at a public indignation meeting one speaker declared, with applause, that "the verdict of Judge Digby Seymour was an insult and a libel upon their English manners." And though a Neo-Malthusian student was heavily fined109 in London in the previous year for circulating information in a slightly irregular manner, the language of the counsel for the Crown, who declared that "the only check against immorality in this country is the fear of pregnancy," excited general indignation, as did the conduct of the magistrate in ruling that decent language was "obscene." This prosecution, too, was repented of; and the most direct journalistic challenge afterwards failed to bring on any prosecution of Neo-Malthusian doctrine as such.
Even the comparatively reasonable attitude of Sir Alexander Cockburn in the "Knowlton" trial would not now recommend itself at all points to educated people. In the hearing of the evidence he thought fit to suggest that only "strong-minded ladies" could acquire medical knowledge without becoming "less pure-minded." Nor would any thoughtful people now agree with him and the Solicitor-General that "no better tribunal can be found in the world to judge of such a question as this than the average sound sense and enlightened judgment which is to be found in English society." These flights of declamation on the Bench are part of the general cant of English society, which can decorously endorse the moral reflections of a judge whose own life is the subject of chronic and much-relished scandal. But Cockburn at least put a new obstacle in the way of legal molestation of honest propaganda by expressing his agreement with the Malthusian doctrine as to over-population; and the later judgment of Judge Windeyer in Victoria, vindicating Mrs Besant's "Law of Population" when it was prosecuted there, marks the turn of the legal tide.
§ 3The constructive policy which Bradlaugh joined with his Neo-Malthusian doctrine had for its main item the radical reform of the land laws. He was thus in practical harmony with those individualists who except the land from the operation of the individualist principle, though he did not declare like them for land nationalisation. Nationalisation he considered too vast and difficult a transaction in the present state of political evolution; but progressive interference with the land monopoly he held to be as practicable as it is necessary. Property in land, he held with Mill, "is only valid in so far as the proprietor of the land is its improver; when private property in land is not expedient it is unjust." And the control of the land, in his opinion, must become the subject of a great and decisive struggle between the people and the landowning class, who may or may not be aided by the rest of the capitalist class. On this subject he felt no less strongly, though he always spoke with more restraint, than do Socialists with regard to capitalism pure and simple.
