Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) was a perceptive and humorous writer who ever so gently drew out the absurdities that hid behind the culture of deference towards authority and wealth in Victorian society. His original idea for humour was to have dialogues between two historical characters whose ideas contributed to history and made their name...
Herod was the king who had 4000 children killed in his attempt to kill the infant Jesus, who Herod believed was out to succeed him.
Reverend Mr Malthus was the eighteenth century mathematician and clergyman who devised unintentionally erroneous mathematical models about population growth, in which he hid his lack of concern for the poor behind the mathematical terms he used.
The Reverend Mr Malthus: I am delighted to meet your majesty. I have always considered you a grossly misjudged monarch. You have my sincerest sympathy.
King Herod: I thank you. These are the first kind words that I have heard for eighteen hundred years.
The Reverend Mr Malthus: No doubt your methods were a little violent - in fact as a clergyman of the Church of England I can by no means sanction them. But it is not your methods, it is your principles that interest me and fill me with admiration. I hail in you the earliest exponent of the Theory of Population.
King Herod: You are referring, no doubt, to the so - called Massacre of The Innocents.
The Reverend Mr Malthus: Quite so. And do not imagine for a moment that I am deluded by the ridiculous account which has reached us of your Majesty's motives in the affair. No, no; a reasonable man knows how to discuss the childish fantasies of ignorance and superstition. You were not a bloodthirsty tyrant of fairyland; you were a royal philosopher, who understood the great principle underlying the whole structure of the social fabric - the principle that population increases in a geometrical, and subsistence only in an arithmetical, ratio.
King Herod: I am appreciated at last!
Reverend Mr Malthus: You understand the fatal consequences of over-population - poverty, misery, disease, vice - an inevitable decline in the whole standard of existence - and you resolved to prevent those evils at all hazards. Accordingly, you ordered that every child under the age of two in your dominions should be destroyed. The measure was drastic; yet it might well be argued that it was ultimately merciful, like the cruelty of a surgeons knife. But the instincts of humanity were against you; your name has been branded with indelible infamy; and no monarch, however enlightened, has ventured to follow your example.
King Herod: All that you say is true. I did not take into consideration the profound irrationality of mankind. But you must admit my position was a difficult one, I saw the evil; I saw the cure; and I was possessed of absolute power. Supposing you, Mr Malthus, had been King of Judea, what would you have done?
The Reverend Mr Malthus: As a clergyman of the Church of England, my position would have been so extremely anomalous that I hesitate to answer. But this I will say; I should have taken care to not outrage an instinct so deeply rooted in the human heart as the love of parents for their children. Persuasion is more effective than violence. There will be no need for a Massacre the Innocents when you have induced men and women to realise the folly and wickedness of bringing too many innocents into the world.
King Herod: You think you can induce them to realise that?
Reverend Mr Malthus; I am an optimist I think I can.
King Herod: But even supposing you can - what then? My dear sir, I cannot help smiling. You talk of my outraging an instinct deeply rooted in the human heart; but what else, I should like to know, do you propose to do ? What instinct is more deeply rooted than that which brings men and women together ? And you quietly suggest that they should suppress that instinct - and you imagine they will indeed supress it, when once they can be made to realise that if they do not the world, at some future date will be less prosperous! That is optimism indeed.
Reverend Mr Malthus: Common sense and self restraint is all I ask for.
King Herod: And that is much too much. A few stoical philosophers, a few fanatical ascetics, my follow you; but the great mass of human beings will never set a limit on begetting children, for the simple reason that the begetting of children is the result of the greatest pleasure they know of.
The Reverend Mr Malthus: Your argument is forcible, I confess. The almost inevitable consequence -! that is also indeed - would it were not so! And yet I remain an optimist. I cannot but hope that some way out of this dreadful difficulty may yet be found.
King Herod: Who knows but it may be ? Mankind is irrational, but it is ingenious. I too shall continue to hope.
The Reverend Mr Malthus: There are all sorts of possibilities; and I see no reason when they, at any rate, may not be left to fruitify - if I may use the term - in the womb of time.
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