Millicent Fawcett Quotes
No circumstance would prevent over-population so effectually as a general raising of the customary standard of comfort among the poorer classes. If they had accustomed themselves to a more comfortable style of living, they would use every effort not again to sink below it.
Fawcett, Millicent Garrett. Political Economy for Beginners, Macmillan and Co., 1870, p. 120.
This was an incredible prediction that few people thought was possible. This speech was given in the early days of WWII when it was far from clear that we would win.
What is also neglected very often is that America and the other developed nations exploited and destroyed much of their own environment in the process of developing yet they express concern that the lesser developed nations will do what they do.
Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett GBE was an English politician, writer and feminist. She campaigned for women's suffrage through legal change and from 1897 to 1919 led Britain's largest women's rights association, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). She explained, "I cannot say I became a suffragist. I always was one, from the time I was old enough to think at all about the principles of Representative Government." Fawcett tried to broaden women's chances of higher education, serving as a governor of Bedford College, London (now Royal Holloway) and co-founding Newnham College, Cambridge in 1875. In 2018, 100 years after the Representation of the People Act, she became the first woman honoured by a statue in Parliament Square.
