“No words can exaggerate the importance in my opinion of our colonisation for the future history of the world”Well nobody is perfect, every hero said or believed things which his followers would rather not have to excuse or explain: Larkin’s racist misogyny, Newton’s alchemy …
And Charles Darwin’s objections to the use of ‘artificial checks’ to human population growth, despite the fact that the works of Thomas Malthus helped to inspire his own ideas of evolution through natural selection in the struggle for existence. Let the fittest produce the most progeny in the interests of a better world.
The introductory quotation for this post comes from a letter which Charles Darwin wrote in 1878 to Jane Hume Clapperton in which he explained that he had lately been giving much thought to the question of artificial methods of birth control. If Britain had not had people who were surplus to its own requirements & so were available to go out & populate, as well as to govern, New South Wales (not to mention America, New Zealand & South Africa) the history of the world would be very different &, by implication, poorer.
And, to make matters even worse, the general availability of contraceptive methods would, almost inevitably, lead to ‘extreme profligacy’ among unmarried women.
And yet, he allowed, the use of such methods might prove to bring unspecified advantage to the world, but only in ‘the distant future’
And so, as Edna Healy acidly observed, ‘year after year, in the cause of national morality & the British Empire, Emma had to bear the pain & discomfort of repeated pregnancies’ & Charles Darwin could continue to wonder if he had, through his own defective genetic heritage, been morally responsible for inflicting pain & illness on his own progeny.
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