Because something had gone wrong with the system, evil was laid bare.
Jack the Ripper had merely exposed one aspect of it. Malthus's Essay on Population, meanwhile, tried to attribute suffering and evil to population growth, attempting to conceal the true root of the problem.
As long as wealth remained concentrated in the hands of a few, no matter how much the poor reduced childbirth, they could only divide up the small portion of wealth left to them. For example, even if only one poor person remained, he would still possess only twenty percent of the wealth, while one rich person held eighty percent. No calculation could make that equal.
Before parliamentary reform lowered the property and status requirements for voters, the poor had no voting rights. In other words, there were no representatives to speak for them. The ordinary commoners, who made up the majority of the population, had vanished; they seemed not to exist, yet the Factory Act truly concerned their interests.
It could be explained this way: when emerging industrial leaders such as Wedgwood sent their own children to better schools, they needed to send ordinary workers' children into factories, making them work more than ten hours a day. The surplus value earned by those children paid for their own children's education, allowing them to become the social elite and continue ruling the children of ordinary people.
Children were not born by men, after all. Men cared more about how many spouses they had. Wealthy and powerful men could attract plenty of women whenever they wished, so they did not care about women or children.
Women bore children. After carrying a child for ten months and giving birth, most women with maternal instincts would risk their lives to protect their children. But women had no voting rights,