“Dickens must have known it would have worked on the consciences of the Parliamentarians too, as it did!” At least for a time.

“By advocating that population should be controlled voluntarily through birth control, abstinence, or delayed marriage – or involuntarily, and through the scourges “of war, famine, and disease,” [Thomas] Malthus was derided by his peers and he even earned a nasty mention in Charles Dickens’ book, A Christmas Carol, as Ebenezer Scrooge,” (The End of Plenty: Nigeria’s “Malthusian Curse” Dr. A. Austin Yekpabo, emphasis added).

In our time, however, Malthusians have been making a dangerous comeback.

Mr. Darwin was an ardent Malthusian whose famous theory expounded in his book Origins of the Species was actually titled  “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”

Darwin considered himself as belonging to one of the “favoured races,” of course, as opposed to Africans and many other peoples of earth.

“Two years before he produced the famous essay on population, Malthus wrote an anonymous pamphlet praising the establishment of workhouses for the poor. Many believe he was an archetype for the heartless Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol,” by Charles Dickens”   —Defenders of Malthus Warn of America’s “Addiction” to Economic Growth, by John Omicinski, July 15, 1997 Gannett News Service

“[Dickens’ marvelous tale] A Christmas Carol exemplifies Dickens’s vigorous opposition to those Victorian social reformers and businessmen who believed, like Scrooge, that charity encouraged idleness and that the poor should be left to die and ‘decrease the surplus population.’ This Victorian Malthusianism … was often accompanied by an individualism that classified all misfortunes as personal failings rather than public problems.”

“Dickens’s anti-Malthusian approach to issues like poverty and disability, however, is also worked out in personal and local ways: rather than lobbying for Parliamentary reform, Scrooge acts on his moral rebirth by helping one family.”—Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (New York University)

“Dickens was convinced that a line of thought which elevated self-interest as the mainspring of human action was, though it paraded in the upbeat slogan of ’the greatest happiness for the greatest number,’ bound to cause suffering at some level, as in the operation of the adjusted Poor Laws, or… the inflicting of psychological and moral damage on individuals and communities,” writes Vincent Newey in The Scriptures of Charles Dickens.”—The Political Economy of Malthus, Bethany Stotts, Accuracy in Media

The issue has relevance also for those advocating anti-traditional family measures and redefining traditional family itself. Abortion too is doubtless part of an organized global depopulation scheme… millions upon many millions of babies killed in the womb on every continent daily. Is it any wonder that abortion is easy and fast but adoption is a long and arduous process?