Recently, Prince Charles gave
a speech at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. During the course of his address, he called for population control in the developing world. Since he had the gall to quote G K Chesterton (and indeed C S Lewis) in his speech, the
Catholic G K Chesterton Society has posted a couple of pertinent quotations from the great man who was a vehement opponent of population control.
Chesterton Answers Prince Charles
In 1925 Chesterton wrote an introduction to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in which he said that “The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him, whether he is part of the surplus population; or if not, how he knows he is not.”
Elsewhere, in an essay titled “Social Reform vs. Birth Control,” Chesterton argued that it is typically the wealthy elite who are interested in promoting population control as a solution to poverty, often simply as a means of avoiding dealing with the more difficult root problems that lead to poverty. "If [the Birth-Controller] can prevent his servants from having families, he need not support those families. Why the devil should he?” wrote Chesterton. “The landlord or the employer says in his hearty and handsome fashion: ‘You really cannot expect me to deprive myself of my money. But I will make a sacrifice. I will deprive myself of your children.’”
8 comments:
Lust without life
Where you have laid it, let the sword divide:
And let your unmotherly Medea be
Here sundered from our human trinity
The Mother and the Virgin and the Bride.
Why should we falter? Ours shall be the mirth
And yours the amaze when you have thinned away
Your starving serfs to fit their starveling pay
And seen the meek inheriting the earth.
That Christ from this creative purity
Came forth your sterile appetites to scorn
Lo: in her house Life without Lust was born
So in your house Lust without Life shall die.
G.K.Chesterton
Even before GK Chesterton, someone, perhaps even more significant, answered Prince Charles and his father, the Duke of Edinburgh
(patron of Population Concern, or Interact Worldwide, as it now likes to call itself) and all the other croesus rich population-controllers who get worked up about the fecundity of working-class and ethnic minority families in a ringing critique of Malthus' Essay on the principle of population.
His riposte stands as true now as it did then: Malthus' magnum opus was a "libel on the human race," he declared.
What was this clever chap's name?
Wasn't it also Chesterton who said (apropos population control) that the solution to having more than one head wasn't to call on the Headsman, it was to call on the Hatter ?
Father Tim, this is brilliant. Our national leaders fashion themselves the brightest people in the world and yet can't "get" some basic realities of life like the flimsy arguments that leftists use to justify population control. Thanks for the great Chesterton quotes and specific references to them. I will use them regularly!
Red Maria - just googled that. Fun!
@ Father Tim :-)
Answer: Karl Marx.
Population-control is REACTIONARY, people.
But it's going on right now and whether we like it or not, we're paying for it.
Even as I type this, Chinese women are being forcibly sterilised, aborted or having their new born babies dragged away from them. If they do not comply with the one-child policy they face hefty compensation fees at best, homelessness, harassment and torture at worst.
But don't for a minute think that the Chinese people do not resist their tyrannical government. They do. Just one example: In May 2007 thousands of Chinese villagers in Guanxi region rioted, overturned cars and set fire to government buildings in protest against the one-child policy.
Their fight is our fight. Urge your MP to sign EDMs 38 and 107.
I know someone who lost her pro-life convictions after dealing with a messed up foster care system and hearing horror stories of babies born to drug-addicted and neglectful mothers. I wonder if part of the reason she now wants such mothers to have abortion available is that it's the emotionally easiest solution to her-- just kill the kids before they're born to suffer neglect.
Reminds me of the Peanuts comic strip where Lucy is going on about overpopulation, and Linus finally asks, "Why don't you leave?"
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