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.
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