Before breeding time birds build their nests to receive their future young and to protect them from the weather. Many men, more improvident than the birds, marry without knowing where and how they can house the children of their love. Air, earth, and forest afford food to birds gratuitously; to man only the butcher, the baker, and eating-house keeper give food, and they have the weakness to ask payment for their services. Economic improvidence in marriage is the bane of all social decadence, and it is precisely amongst workmen and the unemployed, or amongst those who are always struggling and succumbing, that one finds it most, for they have become thoughtless fatalists, to whom the day is sufficient. Fatalism has many forms, but it is always a cowardly emasculation of self, or an even more cruel mutilation, for it undermines the strength of the will and leads us to renounce all that is best in us. In individuals it is emasculation or mutilation, in nations it is suicide; the Ottoman Empire will soon show us whither _Turkish fatalism_ leads. I am compassionate, and believe that I pay my debts of charity toward those who have wrecked their life; but when a starving fellow begs alms of me, or pleads his _large family_ or _many children_ as an excuse for his moral and physical demoralisation, anger gets the better of me and I exclaim: _Why, then, did you have so many?_ And this exclamation is not an insult to misery nor a curse; it is the voice of reason, which if it could be heard in the homes of the poor would suffice to solve the social problem. I am a Malthusian impenitent, and as long as I live I shall always say to those struggling with poverty: _Love, but do not beget children._ In vain priests and rugged moralists of _Providence_ combat Malthusianism, which has now become a social institution, and without the need of written codes governs the economy of the family in France, Italy, Germany, and even in chaste and fecund Albion. In vain my _Elementi d’Igiene_ were put _ad indice_, for from year to year the Malthusian apostolate has made new disciples, and will continue to do so. Neither do I side with those who believe, with too great a faith or fanaticism, that a restriction in the number of births is sufficient to resolve the social problem. No, certainly not; it is not enough; but it clears the ground of the most thorny brambles among which human felicity gets entangled; and a comparison between the proletariat in the populous cities of Europe and that of the desert regions of South America is sufficient to convince us that prolific improvidence is also the prolific mother of hunger, disease, and death. If, then, you are not a Malthusian, nor desire to be converted to the new doctrine, if you have no straw to build your nest, do not take a wife, but increase the glorious number of the animals of rapine and cuckoos. ⁂