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Show T ' Knocking Out Malthus.- Writing for the Catholic Columbian,, James R. Randall says: An English clergyman named Malthus, some years ago, created a sensation in the literary world by writing a book advocating small families and rejoicing that war and pestilence, famine and earthquake came periodically to diminish di-minish the human 'race, which.hc claimed, was overproduced.' If anyone, curiously : inclined, would like to see how this thing has been academically academi-cally annihilated, a chapter in the Tate' Henry George's work, ''P.ogress and Poverty" will gratify that desire. But, perhaps, the most pertinent illustration il-lustration of the falsehood of the-Malthusian theory the-ory is" found in the island of Java,. whet;c ,10.000 Dutchmen benignly.' rule 32,000.000 - natives in health, comfort and morality. Java's contented millions live on an area "smaller , than iha-'etete o' New York. We are told that not "only is everybody every-body happy, but there is no such thing as poverty on the island. Or, to be more precise, among the natives there is, an equality of poverty that places everyone upon an equal plane, and yet lifts everyone every-one above actual need. Every man, woman and child of the glorious island of the East has enough to live on; every one has a decent place to sleep and an abundance of clothing- of. the natjve type, and, though everybody works for a living, they do not work nearly so hard or such long hours as do the people of Xew York, or, in fact, anv American city." . '. According to a certain class ' of European scientists this condition ought to be reversed, but the fact Outweighs all theory, and we see a. people : obeying ihe Divine mandate to "increase and multiply" and are blessed accordingly. If favored lands in' Europe and America, sparsely populated, are neither contented nor reasonably prosperous, all around, it may be because there rs. a species of legislation that exploits the masses for the benefit of the classes, and, while this condition exists, no artificial and immoral 'suppression of population will solve the problem. Political economy is called "the dismal science," but it is so because it violates the laws of God, in many instances, and, if we look beyond the mere assumptions and logarithms of. the natural philosophers, we may find that nearly, if not all, of the seemingly incurable maladies of the world are traceable to violations of . the ten commandments. ' At any rate, Java is a living proof that "race suicide" is not the solution of national progress, but its frustration and malediction. It is an attempt at-tempt to "circumvent God." It is a wager with "the Devil, and Edgar Poe, in one of his short tale3, tells us weirdly what happens to the man "who bets the devil bis head." An anathema has come upon France and it will come upon the United States eventually, because of rampant - divorce, sensuality and unnatural diminution of population! ' At the present' rate -of progress in- wickeduessfthe "natives" will become an enfeebled." minority and the "foreigners" occupy ihe "seats o .the. mighty." |