ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, THERE WERE FEWER FELLOW COUNTRYMEN FOR SCROOGE TO HATE:

The truth in black and white: there are too many of us (Rod Liddle, 8/30/09, Times of London)

So immigration, both direct and by proxy, is still the main weapon in our valiant fight to reach the 100m mark around about Easter 2112, by which time we will all be stacked horizontally in warehouses on wooden pallets, like in those weird Japanese hotels, and eating one another.

There are plenty of learned people around who worry that Britons — and Europeans in general — are being rapidly outbred in their homelands and will soon constitute a minority in their “own” countries. I don’t much care, frankly, who is stacked above me snoring on one of those pallets (so long as it is not a Belgian); it is the sheer weight of numbers I find alarming. The quicker the problem of overpopulation can be uncoupled from alarmist racial rhetoric, the more likely we are to address the real problem.

The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) think tank reckons Britain’s population should be somewhere between 17m and 27m, although it has not, to my knowledge, recommended a cull...

Britain's population, for example, was 20 million in the early 1850's, when Dickens wrote Hard Times. And Ebenezer Scrooge was, like Mr. Liddle, a Malthusian:

'I wish to be left alone,' said Scrooge. 'Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned-they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.'

'Many can't go there; and many would rather die.'

'If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population..'

Of course, back then Britain at least had a majority living in grinding poverty to "justify" such views. It's a much harder argument to sustain in a society that just moves from one pinnacle of well-being to the next as its population grows. As always, the case against humans depends on wishing them dead, not on any effect from their numbers.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 30, 2009 7:11 AM