Page:Contraception; 1st ed. (IA in.ernet.dli.2015.94163).pdf/288

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CONTRACEPTION

sive and uncontrolled birth-rate, but as a therapeutist he was a clergyman. For a serious disease he proposed an impossible remedy."

Not only was the advice of Malthus wholly inadequate, his general theory of population will not bear the searchlight of modern scientific investigation, and his views are superseded, although undocumented persons still continue to speak and write of him as though he had laid down immutable laws.

Carr-Saunders in his learned and enlightened study of populations devotes much consideration to the more pregnant ideas of the development of optimum populations, and says[1] (p. 201) "This idea of an optimum density of population is wholly different to that put forward by Malthus, To him the problem was one of the relative increase of population and of food; with us it is one of the density of population and of the productiveness of industry. To Malthus the position was much the same in all ages." And again (p. 476) "The errors underlying the wholly different exposition given by Malthus have been indicated; for him there was no such thing as over-population. In his view population had at any one time increased up to the

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