e or preventive
and prudential. What are positive checks? The learned counsel has told
you what they are. They are war, disease, misery, starvation. They are in
China--to take a striking instance--accompanied by habits so revolting
that I cannot now allude to them. See the numbers of miserable starving
children in the great cities and centres of population. Is it right to go
to these people and say, 'bring into the world children who cannot live',
who all their lives are prevented by the poverty-smitten frames of their
parents, and by their own squalid surroundings, from enjoying almost
every benefit of the life thrust on them! who inherit the diseases and
adopt the crimes which poverty and misery have provided for them? The
very medical works I have put in in this case show how true this is in
too many cases, and if you read the words of Dr. Acton, crime is
sometimes involved of a terrible nature which the human tongue governed
by training shrinks from describing. We justly or erroneously believe
that we are doing our duty in putting this information in the hands of
the people, and we contest this case with no kind of bravado; the penalty
we already have to pay is severe enough, for even while we are defending
this, some portion of the public press is using words of terrorism
against the witnesses to be called, and is describing myself and my
co-defendant in a fashion that I feel sure will find no sanction here,
and that I hope will never occur again. We contest this because the
advocacy of such views on population has been familiar to me for many
years. The _Public Journal of Health_, edited by Dr. Hardwicke, the
coroner for Central Middlesex, will show you that in 1868 I was known, in
relation to this question, to men high in position in the land as
original thinkers and political economists; that the late John Stuart
Mill has left behind him, in his Autobiography, testimony concerning me
on this subject, according unqualified praise to me for the views thereon
which I had labored to disseminate; and that Lord Amberley thanked me, in
a society of which we were then both associates, for having achieved what
I had in bringing these principles to the knowledge of the poorer classes
of the people. With taxation on every hand extending, with the cost of
living increasing, and with wages declining--and, as to the last element,
I am reminded that recently I was called upon to arbitrate in a wages'
dispute in the north of Engl