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