Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of His Life and Work, Volume 2 (of 2): With an Account of his Parliamentary Struggle, Politics and Teachings. Seventh EditionRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of His Life and Work, Volume 2 (of 2): With an Account of his Parliamentary Struggle, Politics and Teachings. Seventh Edition
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Bradlaugh, Charles, 1833-1891
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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