ABSTRACT
Population and Power Around the beginning o f this century infant life and child health took on a new importance in public discussion, reinforced by emphasis on the value o f a healthy and numerous population as a national resource. During the nineteenth century most political economists had tended to believe with Thomas Malthus that excessive population was dangerous, leading to the exhaustion o f resources, and consequently to war, epidemic disease, and other natural checks on growth. This argument was strengthened by Darwinist notions o f the struggle for existence as an essential part o f the survival o f the race.1 In the last decades o f the century it was used both by the radical neo-Malthusians, who recommended contraception as an artificial check on population and therefore a preventive o f poverty (which they attributed to overpopulation, arguing for instance that wages were kept down by the competition for employment); and also by the advocates o f what was coming to be known as eugenics, who wanted a selective limitation o f population growth, to prevent the ‘deterioration o f the race’ and decline as an imperial nation through the proliferation o f those they regarded as ‘unfit’ (to breed).2 There was however another view, early expressed by Charles Kingsley (in 1858), that over population was impossible ‘in a country that has the greatest colonial empire that the world has ever seen’ . He believed that ‘since about four-fifths o f the globe cannot be said to be as yet in any wise inhabited or cultivated’ , ‘it was a duty, one o f the noblest o f duties, to help the increase o f the English race as much as possible’ , and he urged the members o f the Ladies’ Sanitary Associ ation, whom he was addressing, to fight against infant mortality.3
