Many Socialists to-day remain ignorant of the inherent conflict between the idea of Birth Control and the philosophy of Marx.  The earlier Marxians, including Karl Marx himself, expressed the bitterest antagonism to Malthusian and neo-Malthusian theories.  A remarkable feature of early Marxian propaganda has been the almost complete unanimity with which the implications of the Malthusian doctrine have been derided, denounced and repudiated.  Any defense of the so-called “law of population” was enough to stamp one, in the eyes of the orthodox Marxians, as a “tool of the capitalistic class,” seeking to dampen the ardor of those who expressed the belief that men might create a better world for themselves.  Malthus, they claimed, was actuated by selfish class motives.  He was not merely a hidebound aristocrat, but a pessimist who was trying to kill all hope of human progress.  By Marx, Engels, Bebel, Karl Kautsky, and all the celebrated leaders and interpreters of Marx’s great “Bible of the working class,” down to the martyred Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Birth Control has been looked upon as a subtle, Machiavellian sophistry created for the purpose of placing the blame for human misery elsewhere than at the door of the capitalist class.  Upon this point the orthodox Marxian mind has been universally and sternly uncompromising.

Marxian vituperation of Malthus and his followers is illuminating.  It reveals not the weakness of the thinker attacked, but of the aggressor.  This is nowhere more evident than in Marx’s “Capital” itself.  In that monumental effort, it is impossible to discover any adequate refutation or even calm discussion of the dangers of irresponsible parenthood and reckless breeding, any suspicion that this recklessness and irresponsibility is even remotely related to the miseries of the proletariat.  Poor Malthus is there relegated to the humble level of a footnote.  “If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose essay on Population appeared in 1798,” Marx remarks somewhat tartly, “I remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, etc., and does not contain a single sentence thought out by himself.  The great sensation this pamphlet caused was due solely to party interest.  The French Revolution had passionate defenders in the United Kingdom.... `The Principles of Population’ was quoted with jubilance by the English oligarchy as the great destroyer of all hankerings after human development."(1)

The only attempt that Marx makes here toward answering the theory of Malthus is to declare that most of the population theory teachers were merely Protestant parsons.—­“Parson Wallace, Parson Townsend, Parson Malthus and his pupil the Arch-Parson Thomas Chalmers, to say nothing of the lesser reverend scribblers in this line.”  The great pioneer of “scientific” Socialism the proceeds to berate parsons as philosophers