Knowlton Biography, Chapter 38
Thirty-eight: Fourth Edition, With Additions
It is now eight years since theory led me to adopt and to recommend to others, a simple, cheap, and harmless method of preventing conception, without requiring any diminution or sacrifice of that enjoyment which attends the gratification of the re-productive instinct. During this eight years I have permitted this work to pass through three editions, comprising in all only seven thousand copies. I have thus limited the circulation of the work with a view of becoming entirely sure, from my own immediate observation and experience, that my method is infallible, before I gave the work free circulation.
When Abner Kneeland was released from prison in Massachusetts, he wasted no time in putting as much distance as possible between himself and his prosecutors. Kneeland wrote a farewell to the Free Enquirers, which was read to them while he was traveling to his new home in Iowa. Charles and Abner never met again, and Kneeland died five years later. The Investigator was taken over by two freethinkers named Horace Seaver and Josiah Paine Mendum, who continued publishing the paper until 1904, and printed several of Knowlton’s pamphlets in the 1840s.
The next edition of Fruits of Philosophy was published in Philadelphia by F. P. Rogers. Knowlton and Kneeland had sold seven thousand copies of the fifty-cent “little book.” The 1839 edition was expected to reach a much wider audience. The book itself was slightly bigger, and the new edition sold for a dollar. It combined Knowlton’s earlier text with arguments he’d perfected over nearly a decade of defending himself and the book. Charles skipped the philosophy in this new edition—or rather, the philosophy had become a natural part of the text. So instead of beginning with a “Philosophical Proem,” the new edition jumped right into “The Argument.”
“In deciding whether any thing be good or evil,” Charles began, “we must, (ever keeping human nature in view,) consider whether it will be productive of more or less misery than happiness.” Then, instead of giving his readers another long discussion of utilitarian morality, Charles moved right to birth control, “to weigh in the scale of reason, the evil that is likely to arise from a knowledge of the anticonception art, against the good that may be derived from the same knowledge.”
The two best arguments against birth control, in Knowlton’s experience, were still the ones that had been advanced in the first years of Fruits of Philosophy’s publication: that it would lead to “illegal intercourse,” and that it was “against nature.” Charles had refined his rebuttals, over the years, to the point where he was able to devote less than a page to each. He moved quickly from these old arguments, to outline the six most important benefits of effective birth control.
The first benefit, as before, was birth control’s answer to the population question. Second was Charles’s claim that by allowing young people to marry earlier, birth control would help prevent prostitution. Third, Charles said, “Poverty, ignorance, and crime” would decrease when all children could be “properly educated and provided for.” To support this argument, Charles included a long “extract from Moral Physiology, a work which I wish every body would read.”
Charles introduced elimination of hereditary diseases as a fourth benefit of birth control. People with afflictions they did not want to pass on to children, Charles said, could still enjoy married life if they could prevent conception. This idea was linked, in a vague way, with what Charles called “the preservation and improvement of the species.” Although it would still be twenty years before Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Charles called his readers’ attention to the “laws of hereditary descent”—which were already familiar to doctors and others who’d read the works of Johann Spurzheim, a German phrenologist who proposed that humanity could be improved by selective breeding. A generation later, Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton would call this eugenics.
Since children inherited traits from their parents, Charles reasoned, “We might naturally suppose…reasonable beings to take as much care in regard to their offspring as they do in relation to their sheep, pigs, dogs, and horses.” Charles even thought Fruits of Philosophy might help prevent some of the scarier aspects of a quest for human perfection. “If a nation should ever be aroused to the importance of this subject,” he concluded, birth control would insure that the government wouldn’t need to prevent anyone from marrying. “None would need be debarred from gratifying their instinct,” Charles said, while “Improvement would progress from generation to generation, until there would again be ‘giants in the land,’ both physical and mental!!!”
The fifth benefit of birth control, Charles argued, would be an end to the damage done to young women and their families by illegitimate births, and also to the abortions and infanticides caused by fear of the social stigma of out-of-wedlock pregnancy. And finally, Charles observed that there were many women who either could never safely bear children in the first place, or who became physically unable to have more children, after a series of pregnancies. “I will not describe the scenes,” Charles said, “where the wife and the mother, perhaps of a large family, is dying…but whoever has witnessed such a scene will not condemn this work, if he believes it may be the means of preventing only a few of them.”
Charles expected the new edition of Fruits of Philosophy to sell much more widely than his own editions or the Abner Kneeland edition had. The fourth edition measured about three by four inches, and was bound in embossed brown cloth. Although he had closely controlled the distribution of earlier editions, Charles was ready to let the book reach a wider public. One of the reasons for this was that in the years since Moral Physiology and Fruits of Philosophy had first come out, a variety of books and pamphlets had “presented the reader with a jumble of truth and error, of science and obscenity [which] must have been productive of quite as much mischief as benefit.” Books such as Canfield’s Lectures on Sexual Physiology, Charles said, not only plagiarized his own work, but “in the author’s attempt to convey my ideas in his own language, and to vary my directions under the false notion that he would thus evade the law of copyright, or escape the charge of plagiarism, he has committed the grossest errors, and discovered an entire ignorance of the subjects of which he treats.” Charles wanted to get the correct information to a wider public, and he also wanted the credit and the book-sales he felt he’d earned.