A Century ago, a violent controversy raged upon the subject of the limitation of the families of the poor; the two chief protagonists in this contest were the Rev. T. Malthus and William Cobbett. As the dispute has been revived during the present age, it is not without interest to re-trace the arguments of the debate.

In those days the fight centred upon the economic question; Malthus based his position upon the theory that population had a tendency to increase faster than subsistence; whilst Cobbett pointed out that under natural conditions there was ample means of providing for an increase in numbers in this country.

To-day, the question still remains of vast and vital importance, inasmuch as both advocates and opponents of Birth Control admit that married couples nowadays are compelled by reason of economic conditions to consider whether they can afford to maintain a family or not. Both Malthus and Cobbett agreed that modern industrial conditions were unsatisfactory in the extreme; Malthus desired to remedy social conditions by demanding that the proletariat should restrict the number of their children by means of ‘moral restraint’ and by this means increase the amount of food-supply available; Cobbett on the other hand regarded this demand as an outrage upon human liberty and saw in a return to natural conditions the only way out of the ‘impasse’ into which Industrialism had plunged the people of this country.