Darwin's unpublished letter at the Bradlaugh-Besant trial: A question of divided expert judgment

We examine the competing views of two sets of “experts” in a historical context, the Bradlaugh- Besant trial of 1877. The case was ostensibly about what constituted “obscenity” and whether, specifically, republishing a book at low cost that contained information on contraception, was obscene. Behind the trial lurked two larger questions: whether natural selection yielded felicitous results in humans; and, supposing it did not, what might be done to improve upon the results of unimpeded natural selection? The “failure” of natural selection was said to occur because people chose to pursue happiness as opposed to perfection of the human race The issue was whether it was advisable to have unrestricted access to information on how to limit births. Some experts, including Charles Darwin, feared that as information became widely available at low cost, it would be used by the wrong sorts of individuals and not by others, so that the salutary effects of natural selection on human perfection would be suspended. Others, like Besant, Bradlaugh and J. S. Mill, advocated wide access in order to mitigate the misery associated with unwanted births and extreme poverty.