and not considering it right to circulate erroneous physiology, we submitted the pamphlet to a doctor in whose accurate knowledge we have the fullest confidence, and who is widely known in all parts of the world as the author of the “Elements of Social Science”; the notes signed “G.R.” are written by this gentleman.  References to other works are given in foot notes for the assistance of the reader, if he desires to study the subject further.

“Old Radicals will remember that Richard Carlile published a work entitled ‘Every Woman’s Book’, which deals with the same subject, and advocates the same object, as Dr. Knowlton’s pamphlet.  E.D.  Owen objected to the ‘style and tone’ of Carlile’s ‘Every Woman’s Book’ as not being ‘in good taste’, and he wrote his ‘Moral Physiology’, to do in America what Carlile’s work was intended to do in England.  This work of Carlile’s was stigmatised as ‘indecent’ and ‘immoral’ because it advocated, as does Dr. Knowlton’s, the use of preventive checks to population.  In striving to carry on Carlile’s work, we cannot expect to escape Carlile’s reproach, but whether applauded or condemned we mean to carry it on, socially as well as politically and theologically.

“We believe, with the Rev. Mr. Malthus, that population has a tendency to increase faster than the means of existence, and that some checks must therefore exercise control over population; the checks now exercised are semi-starvation and preventible disease; the enormous mortality among the infants of the poor is one of the checks which now keeps down the population.  The checks that ought to control population are scientific, and it is these which we advocate.  We think it more moral to prevent the conception of children, than, after they are born, to murder them by want of food, air, and clothing.  We advocate scientific checks to population, because, so long as poor men have large families, pauperism is a necessity, and from pauperism grow crime and disease.  The wage which would support the parents and two or three children in comfort and decency is utterly insufficient to maintain a family of twelve or fourteen, and we consider it a crime to bring into the world human beings doomed to misery or to premature death.  It is not only the hand-working classes which are concerned in this question.  The poor curate, the struggling man of business, the young professional man, are often made wretched for life by their inordinately large families, and their years are passed in one long battle to live; meanwhile the woman’s health is sacrificed and her life embittered from the same cause.  To all of these, we point the way of relief and of happiness; for the sake of these we publish what others fear to issue, and we do it, confident that if we fail the first time, we shall succeed at last, and that the English public will not permit the authorities to stifle a discussion of the most important social question which can influence a nation’s welfare.