industrial system; it is also true that a helpless baby never yet was
guilty of expropriating land, of building slums, of under-paying the
workers, or of rigging the market. Therefore instead of preventing the
birth of children we should set about to rectify the evil conditions which
make the lives of children and adults unhappy. Like many other policies
advocated on behalf of the poor, birth control is immoral if only on this
account, that it distracts attention from the real causes of poverty. In
Spain birth control is not practised. I do not say there is no poverty in
that country, but there is no poverty that resembles the hopeless grinding
poverty of the English poor. For that strange disease, artificial birth
control is a worthless remedy; and it were far better that we should turn
our attention to the simple words of Cardinal Manning: "There is a natural
and divine law, anterior and superior to all human and civil law, by which
men have the right to live of the fruits of the soil on which they are
born, and in which they are buried." [23]

(c) _A Quack Remedy for Poverty_

Artificial birth control is one of the many quack remedies advertised for
the cure of poverty, and G.K. Chesterton has given the final answer to the
Malthusian assertion that some form of birth control is essential _because
houses are scarce_:

"Consider that simple sentence, and you will see what is the matter
with the modern mind. I do not mean the growth of immorality; I mean
the genesis of gibbering idiocy. There are ten little boys whom you
wish to provide with ten top-hats; and you find there are only eight
top-hats. To a simple mind it would seem not impossible to make two
more hats; to find out whose business it is to make hats, and induce
him to make hats; to agitate against an absurd delay in delivering