An excerpt from the introductory chapter: THE MALTHUSIAN IDEA.
There lies before me, as I write, a little pamphlet which has been sent out by the tens of thousands during the past few years, and which has-either directly or indirectly-exerted an influence so wide, that it is well-nigh impossible for the American physician in general practice to escape the evidence of it for a single day.
For several reasons I refrain from indicating its title; one will suffice-it is literature of the kind which the law of our land forbids to write, publish, or send through the mails.
The opening sentence of this pamphlet is this: The law of population first laid down in this country by the Rev. T. R. Malthus in his great work entitled The Principle of Population, has long been known to every student, and accepted by every thinker. On the next page we find Malthuss law quoted, The constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it, and again, a few lines farther on, he is quoted as saying, Population when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years. On the next page we read, The power of increase of the human species, according to John Stuart Mill, is indefinite, and actual multiplication would be extraordinarily rapid if the power were exercised to the utmost. It never is exercised to the utmost, and yet, in the most favorable circumstances known to exist, which are those of a fertile region colonized from an industrious and civilized community, population has continued for several generations, independently of fresh immigration, to double itself in not much more than twenty years. It is a very low estimate of the capacity of increase, if we only assume that in a good sanitary condition of the people, each generation may be double the number of the generation which preceded it.
The author adds, on the same page, We shall take but a narrow view of the law of population if we confine ourselves exclusively to human beings. Man is but the highest in the animal kingdom, not a creature apart from it, and the law of population runs through the animal and the vegetable worlds. Then follows a long quotation from Darwin showing the naturally rapid increase of plant life, and then we have the following quotation from John Stuart Mill: The power of multiplication inherent in all organic life may be regarded as infinite. There is no species of vegetable or animal which, if the earth were entirely abandoned to it and to the things on which it feeds, would not in a small number of years overspread every region of the globe of which the climate was compatible with its existence. And again: From a consideration of the law of agricultural industry, and an estimate of the rate at which the means of subsistence could be increased in old countries even under the most favorable circumstances, it may be inferred with certainty that these means of subsistence could not possibly be increased so fast as to permit population to increase at its natural rate....