We have never ceased to talk about overpopulation, though true instances of it seem very rare. The English workingman Francis Place, having contrived to educate himself under astonishingly unfavorable circumstances, became the first writer in English to argue for birth control. He accepted Malthus’s view that workers were poor because there were too many of them, and he argued that their improvement lay in self-restraint. Of course, like poor people almost anywhere, they had children for their economic value. As late as the present century the prosperity of a family fluctuated with the number of employed people in it, and the early redundancy of the father, as well as such vicissitudes as sickness and injury, were more easily borne the more shoulders they fell on. Any glut of labor was the result of employing people from childhood, for sixteen hours a day or more, at wages that denied them any possibility of withholding their labor. A higher wage would have relieved the glut by allowing women to stay home with their new infants, or allowing families to keep older children at home to attend to younger children. Physical efficiency would have been enhanced at the same time.
But “working class” is the primary term in British social thought. The coercive implications of the phrase are glossed in every version and institution of the Poor Laws, right through Fabianism and the Welfare State, which is only the latest version of the ancient view that what the worker earns, his wage defined as subsistence, is not his by right, as property. The welfare system indeed assures that the wage will never amount to any specific sum of money but will be nuanced to provide subsistence itself, not in a money equivalent, however calculated. In other words, workers earn their existence by working. At the same time, their employment exists at the pleasure of those who employ, first of all, the government. The Welfare State, being designed for the employed, is designed for the less necessitous. Those who do not work are historically regarded with a sort of scandalized aversion, exactly like people without caste in a society based on caste.
Francis Place accepted blame for poverty on behalf of working people, and accepted the notion that there could be an excess of people relative to their economic usefulness, and that that excess should be eliminated by sexual abstinence so that it need not be carried off by disease and starvation. He accepted the notion that there was a natural balance, a marketplace of survival glutted with laborers.
Darwin was likewise indebted to Malthus, and freely acknowledged his influence. Overbreeding relative to available food sources harrowed out those less well adapted to survive, in Darwin’s view. Herbert Spencer, who was to Beatrice Webb as Aristotle to Alexander, seized upon the idea immediately as a model drawn from nature, which justified just such horrors as had been Malthus’s point of departure one hundred years previously. Competition supposedly described the hardscrabble existence of the laboring classes, who sold their labor by the day and were constantly thrown out of work by a change of season or fashion, or the invention of a new machine. It was a commonplace that they helped one another as best they could through these disasters. The idea nevertheless had great impact because it made death a legitimate part of the social and economic order, a function rather than a malfunction of political economy, a measure of the extent to which the new industrial society cleaved to the ways of nature rather than departing from them. It affirmed the idea that there existed a human surplus, whose survival could only be secured at the cost of creatures worthier to survive. In such a context subsistence would be a positive reward, easily withdrawn, as in Darwinian nature.
The penchant for developing theories to account for suffering and death proved useful. Press and parliamentary reports of the Victorian period describe a system of exploitation which ravaged the culture, extruded every ounce of labor from those able to work — including small children and women recently delivered — starved them, beat them, poisoned them, housed them in cellars into which sewage drained from the streets, taking from them everything that could be taken, turning every good thing into a mode of exaction.
Housing, for example, which was typically wretched, was often rented to workers as a condition of employment, so that the employer could withhold rent and therefore be at no risk of losing it, raise rent as a control on the amount received by the worker in wages, and expel the worker from the house when he was fired, adding to the terrors of idleness the loss of shelter, and dreaded vagrancy. The houses would be inhabited, however foul or wet or crowded, and no one would be in a position to request repairs. How could more economic advantage be found in the supplying of shelter? Well, this sort of housing permitted the claim to be made that the factory was a relatively wholesome environment for young children, and the sixteen-hour day a positive philanthropy. It was not merely dirtiness or neglect but low morals as well that were said to characterize the working-class home, whole families and even lodgers sharing a single bed, where there was a bed. This state of affairs seized upon the imagination of moralists, who lamented all the degradation such a life must entail. At the same time, the morally convenient view that degraded people were less sensitive to insult and imposition and therefore could be exposed to conditions their betters would find intolerable resulted in savings to both employer and taxpayer.
The Victorians, who presided over this squalor at its worst, evolved a fastidious system which seems, in context, designed to widen the chasm between the wealthy and the poor by devising a system of virtue dependent on privacy and on elevating amenity to the status of morality. A Victorian lady was confined from the time her pregnancy became discernible. A working-class woman worked until she delivered, gave birth in a crowded room, and returned to work a few days afterward. At the end of her ten to sixteen hours, her clothing would be sodden with milk. When morality was so thoroughly confounded with mere fastidiousness, these women must have seemed appalling indeed, and their children as well, who could scarcely pretend to any innocence at all, as their betters understood the word. Added to this compromising proximity of family members was a virtually absolute lack of sanitation, which involved the laboring classes in an awareness of the particulars of bodily processes as far beyond the pale even as begetting and birthing. Their quarters were swamped in excrement. Again this was not a peculiarity of urban life, since the depopulations of the countryside had squeezed farm laborers into rural slums entirely as dense and filthy as industrial slums. All this simply indicates how invasive and pervasive were the exploitations of the controlling classes, who determined every particular of the lives of those who lived by labor.