the suspicion and dislike which eugenics still arouses in many worthy
old-fashioned people. To some extent that attitude is excused, not only by
the mistakes which in a new and complex science must inevitably be made
even by painstaking students, but also by the rash and extravagant
proposals of irresponsible and eccentric persons claiming without warrant
to speak in the name of eugenics. Two thousand years ago the wild excesses
of some early Christians furnished an excuse for the ancient world to view
Christianity with contempt, although the extreme absence of such excesses
has furnished still better ground for the modern world to maintain the
same view. To-day such a work as _Le Haras Humain_ ("The Human Stud-farm")
of Dr. Binet-Sanglé, putting forward proposals which, whether beneficial
or not, will certainly find no one to carry them out, similarly furnishes
an excuse to those who would reject eugenics altogether. Utopian schemes
have their value; we should be able to find inspiration in the most modern
of them, just as we still do in Plato's immortal _Republic_. But in this,
as in other matters, we must exercise a little intelligence. We must not
confuse the brilliant excursion of some solitary thinker with the
well-grounded proposals of those who are concerned with the sober
possibilities of actual life in our own time. People who are incapable of
exercising a little shrewd commonsense in the affairs of life, and are in
the habit of emptying out the baby with the bath, had better avoid
touching the delicate problems connected with practical eugenics.

There is one prejudice already mentioned, due to lack of clear thinking,
which deserves more special consideration because it is widespread among
the socialistic democracy of several countries as well as among social
reformers, and is directed alike against eugenics and birth-control. This
prejudice is based on the ground that bad economic conditions and an
unwholesome environment are the source of all social evils, and that a
better distribution of wealth, or a vast scheme of social welfare, is the
one thing necessary, when that is achieved all other things being added
unto us, without any further trouble on our part. It is certainly
impossible to over-rate the importance of the economic factor in society,
or of a good environment. And it is true that eugenics alone, like
birth-control alone, can effect little if the economic basis of society is
unsound. But it is equally certain that the economic factor can never in
itself suffice for fine living or even as a cure-all of social and racial
diseases. Its value is not that it can effect these things but that it
furnishes the favourable conditions for effecting them. He would be
foolish indeed who went to the rich to find the example of good breeding
and, as is well known, it is not with the rich that the future of the race
lies. The fact is that under any economic system the responsible personal
direction of the individual and the family remain equally necessary, and
no progress is possible so long as the individual casts all responsibility
away from himself on to the social group he forms part of. The social
group, after all, is merely himself and the likes of himself. He is merely
shifting the burden from his individual self to his collective self, and
in so doing he loses more than he gains.

Thus there is always a sound core in that Individualism which has been
preached so long and practised so energetically, especially in
English-speaking lands, however great the abuse involved in its excesses.
It is still in the name of Individualism that the most brilliant
antagonists of eugenics and of birth-control are wont to direct their
attacks. The counsel of self-control and foresight in procreation, the
restriction necessary to purify and raise the standard of the race, seem
to the narrow and short-sighted advocates of a great principle an
unwarrantable violation of the sacred rights of their individual liberty.
They have not yet grasped the elementary fact that the rights of the
individual are the rights of all individuals, and that Individualism
itself calls for a limitation of the freedom of the individual.

That is why even the most uncompromising Individualist must recognise an
element of altruism, call it whatever name you will, Collectivism,
Socialism, Communism, or merely the vague and long-suffering term,
Democracy. One cannot assume Individualism for oneself unless one assumes
it for the many. That is a great truth which goes to the heart of the
whole complex problem of eugenics and birth-control. As Perrycoste has
well argued,[22] biology is altogether against the narrow Individualism
which seeks to oppose Collective Individualism. For if, in accordance with
the most careful modern investigations, we recognise that heredity is
supreme, that the qualities we have inherited from our ancestors count for
more in our lives than anything we have acquired by our own personal
efforts, then we have to admit that the capable man's wealth is more the
community's property than his own, and, similarly, the incapable man's
poverty is more the community's concern than his own. So that neither the
capable nor the incapable are entitled to an unqualified power of freedom,
and neither, likewise, are justly liable to be burdened by an unqualified
responsibility. It is the duty of the community to draw on the powers of
the fit and equally its duty to care for the unfit. In this way,
Perrycoste, whose attitude is that of the Rationalist, is led by science
to a conclusion which is that of the Christian. We are all members each of
the other, and still more are we members of those who went before us. The
generations preceding us have not died to themselves but live in us, and
we, whom they produced, live in each other and in those who will come
after us. The problems of eugenics and of birth-control affect us all. In
the face of these problems it is the voice of Man that speaks: "Inasmuch
as ye did it not unto the least of these my brethren, ye did it not unto
me." However firmly we base ourselves on the principles of Individualism
we are inevitably brought to the fundamental facts of eugenics which, if
we fail to recognise, our Individualism becomes of no effect.

[22] F.H. Perrycoste, "Politics and Science," _Science Progress_, Jan.,
1920.

But it is the same with Socialism, or by whatever name we chose to call
the Collectivist activities of the community in social reform. Socialism
also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we
neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments.
It is the more necessary to point this out since it is on the Socialist
and Democratic side, much more frequently than on the Individualist side,
that we find an indifferent or positively hostile attitude towards eugenic
considerations. Put social conditions on a sound basis, the people on
this side often say, let all receive an adequate economic return for their
work and be recognised as having a claim for an adequate share in the
products of society, and there is no need to worry about the race or about
the need for birth-control, all will go well of itself. There is not the
slightest ground for any such comfortable belief.

This has been well shown by Dr. Eden Paul, himself a Socialist and even in
sympathy with the extreme Left.[23] After setting forth the present
conditions, with our excessive elimination of higher types, and undue
multiplication of lower types, the racial degeneration caused by the
faulty and anti-selective working of the marriage system in modern
capitalist society, so that in our existing civilisation unconscious
natural selection has largely ceased to work towards the improvement of
the human breed, he proceeds to consider the possible remedies. The
frequent impatience of the Socialist, and Social Reformers generally, with
eugenic proposals has a certain degree of justification in the fact that
many evils thoughtlessly attributed to inferiority of stock are really due
to bad environment. But when the environment has been so far improved that
all defects due to its badness are removed, we shall be face to face,
without possibility of doubt, with bad inheritance as the sole remaining
factor in the production of inefficient and anti-social members of the
community. A socialist community must recognise the right to work and to
maintenance of all its members, Eden Paul points out, but, he adds, a
community which allowed this right to all defectives without imposing any
restrictions in their perpetuation of themselves would deserve all the
evils that would fall upon it. It is quite clear how intolerable the
burden of these evils would be. A State that provided an adequate
subsistence for all alike, the inefficient as well as the efficient, would
encourage a racial degeneration, from excessive multiplication of the
unfit, far more dangerous even than that of to-day.[24] Ability to earn
the minimum wage, Eden Paul argues in agreement with H.G. Wells, must be
the condition of the right to become a parent. "Unless the socialist is a
eugenist as well, the socialist state will speedily perish from racial
degradation."


[23] In an essay on "Eugenics, Birth Control, and Socialism" in
_Population and Birth-Control: A Symposium_, edited by Eden and Cedar
Paul.

[24] This is here and there beginning to be recognised. Thus, not long
ago, the Hereford War Pensions Committee resolved not to issue a
maternal grant for children born during a prolonged period of treatment
allowance. Such a measure of course fails to meet the situation, for it
is obvious that, when born, the children must be cared for. But it shows
a glimmering recognition of the facts, and the people capable of such a
recognition will, in time, come to see that the right way of meeting the
situation is, not to neglect the children, but to prevent their
conception. Mothers' Clinics for instruction in such prevention are now
being established in England, through the advocacy of Mrs. Margaret
Sanger and the actual initiative of Dr. Marie Stopes.

Thus it is essential that the eugenist, dealing with the hereditary
factor of life, and the social reformer or socialist, dealing with the
environmental factor, should supplement each other's work. Neither can
attain his end without the other's help, for the eugenist alone cannot
overcome the environmental factor, even perhaps increases it if he is an
individualist in the narrow sense, and the socialist alone cannot overcome
the bad hereditary factor, and will even increase it if he is no more than
a socialist. The more socialist our State becomes the more essential
becomes at the same time the adoption of eugenic practices as a working
part of the State. "Socialism and eugenics must go hand in hand."

Perrycoste from his own point of view has independently reached the same
conclusions. He is not, indeed, concerned with any "Socialist" community
of the future but with the dangerous results which must inevitably follow
the already established methods of social reform in our modern civilised
States unless they are speedily checked by effective action based on
eugenic knowledge. "If," he observes, "the community is to shoulder half
or three-quarters of the burden of sustaining those degenerates who,
through no fault of their own, are congenitally incompetent to maintain
themselves in decent comfort, and is to render the life-pilgrimage of
these unfortunates tolerable instead of a dreary nightmare, if it is to
assume paternal charge of all the tens or hundreds of thousands of
children whose parents cannot or will not provide adequately for them and
is to guarantee to all such children as much education as they are capable
of receiving, and a really fair start in life: then in sheer
self-preservation the community must insist on, and rigidly enforce, its
absolute claim to secure that no degeneracy or inheritable congenital
defects shall persist beyond the present generation of degenerates, and
that the community of fifty or seventy years hence shall have no incubus
of mentally, or morally, or even physically, degenerate members--none but
a few occasional sporadic morbid 'sports' from the normal, which it, in
turn, may effectively prevent from handing on their like." Unless the
problem is squarely faced, Perrycoste concludes, national deterioration
must increase and a permanently successful collectivist society is
inherently impossible.

We are not now concerned with the details of any policy of eugenics and of
birth-control, which I couple together because although a random
birth-control by no means involves much, if any, eugenic progress, it is
not easy under modern conditions to conceive any practical or effective
policy of eugenics except through the instrumentation of birth-control. We
here take it for granted that in this field the slow progress of
scientific knowledge must be our guide. Premature legislation, rash and
uninstructed action, will not lead to progress but are more likely to
delay it. Yet even with imperfect knowledge, it is already of the first
importance to evoke interest in the great issue here at stake and to do
all that we can to arouse the individual conscience of every man and woman
to his or her personal responsibility in this matter. That is here all
taken for granted.

It seems necessary to consider the political aspect of eugenics because
that aspect is frequently invoked, and a man's attitude towards this
question is frequently determined beforehand by what he considers that
Individualism or Socialism demands. We see that when the question is
driven home our political attitude makes no difference. It is only a
shallow Individualism, it is only a still more shallow Socialism, which
imagines that under modern social conditions the fundamental racial
questions can be left to answer themselves.


III

Many years before the Great War, in all the most civilised countries of
the World, there were those who raised the cry of "Race-Suicide!" In
America this cry was more especially popularised by the powerful voice of
Theodore Roosevelt, but in European countries there were similar voices
raised in tones of virtuous indignation to denounce the same crime. Since
the war other voices have been raised in even more high-pitched and
feverish tones, but now they are less weighty and responsible voices,
since to those who realise that at present there is not food enough to
keep the population of the world from starvation it seems hardly
compatible with sanity to advocate an increased rate of human production.

Now, though it is easy to do so, we must not belittle this cry of
"Race-Suicide!" It is not usually accompanied by definite argument, but it
assumes that birth-control is the method of such suicide, and that the
first and most immediately dangerous result is that one's own nation,
whichever that may be, is placed in a position of alarming military
inferiority to other nations, as a step towards the final extinction. It
is useless to deny that it really is a serious matter if there is danger
of the speedy disappearance of the human race from the earth by its own
voluntary and deliberate action, and that within a measurable period of
time--for if it were an immeasurable period there would be no occasion for
any acute anxiety--the last man will perish from the world. This is what
"Race-Suicide" means, and we must face the fact squarely.

It can scarcely be said, however, that the meaning of "Race-Suicide" has
actually been squarely faced by those who have most vehemently raised
that cry. Translated into more definite and precise terms this cry means,
and is intended to mean: "We want more births." That is what it definitely
means, and sometimes in the minds of those who make this demand it seems
also to imply nothing more. Yet it implies a great number of other things.
It implies certain strain and probable ill-health on the mothers, it
implies distress and disorder in the family, it implies, even if the
additional child survives, a more acute industrial struggle, and it
further involves in this case, by the stimulus it gives to
over-population, the perpetual menace of militarism and war. What,
however, even at the outset, more births most distinctly and most
unquestionably imply is more deaths. It is nowadays so well known that a
high birth-rate is accompanied by a high death-rate--the exceptions are
too few to need attention--that it is unnecessary to adduce further
evidence. It is only the intoxicated enthusiasts of the "Race-Suicide" cry
who are able to overlook a fact of which they can hardly be ignorant. The
model which they hold up for the public's inspiration has on the obverse
"More Births!" But on the reverse it bears "More Deaths!" It would be
helpful to the public, and might even be wholesome for our enthusiasts'
own enlightenment, if they would occasionally turn the medal round and
slightly vary the monotony of their propaganda by changing its form and
crying out for "More Deaths!" "It is a hard thing," said Johnny Dunn, "for
a man that has a house full of children to be left to the mercy of
Almighty God."

If, however, we wish to consider the real significance of the facts,
without regard for the wild cries of ignorant cranks, it is scarcely
necessary to point out here that neither the birth-rate taken by itself,
nor the death-rate taken by itself, will suffice to give us any measure
even of the growth of the population, to say nothing of the progress of
civilisation or the happiness of humanity. It is obvious that we must
consider both gains and losses, and put one against the other, if we wish
to ascertain the net result. We may roughly get a notion of what that
result is by deducting the death-rate from the birth-rate and calling the
remainder the survival-rate. If we are really concerned with the question
of the alleged suicide of the race, and do not wish to be befooled, we
must pay little attention to the birth-rate, for that by itself means
nothing: we must concentrate on the survival-rate. Then we may soon
convince ourselves, not only that the human race is not committing
suicide, but that not even a single one of the so-called civilised nations
of which it is mainly composed is committing suicide. Quite the contrary!
Every one of them, even France, where this peculiar "suicide" is supposed
to be most actively at work, is yearly increasing in numbers.

It is interesting to note, moreover, that the French have been increasing
faster, that is to say the survival-rate has been higher in recent years
just before the war, when the birth-rate was at its lowest, than they were
twenty years earlier, with a higher birth-rate. And if we take a wider
sweep and consider the growth of the French population towards the end of
the eighteenth century, we find the birth-rate estimated at the very high
figure of 40. But the death-rate was nearly as high, the average duration
of life was only half what it is now. So that the survival-rate in France
at that time, with widely different rates of birth and death, was not much
unlike it is now. The recent French birth-rate of 19 and less, which
automatically causes the "Race-Suicide" marionette to dance with rage, is
producing not far from the same result in growth of the population--we are
not here concerned with the enormous difference in well being and
happiness--as the extremely high rate of 40 which sends our marionettes
leaping to the sky with joy. In war-time England, in 1917, the birth-rate
sank to 17.8, yet the death-rate was at 14 and the increase of the
population continued. The more the human race commits this kind of
suicide, one is tempted to exclaim, the faster it grows!

It is, however, in the New World--as in Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand--that we find the most impressive evidence of the real criteria of
the growth in population set up for judgment on the racial suicide cranks.
Canadian statistics bring out many points instructive even in their
variation. Here we see not only unusual curves of rise and fall, but also
pronounced differences, due to the special peculiarities of the French
population, most clearly in the Province of Quebec but also in some parts
of the Province of Ontario. In Quebec the birth-rate some years ago was
35, and the death-rate 21, both rates high, and the survival-rate high at
14; recently the birth-rate has risen to 37 and the death-rate fallen to
17, with the result that the survival-rate of 20 is the highest in the
world, though it must be noted that the high birth-rate is not likely to
last long, since in Quebec, as elsewhere in the world, increasing
urbanisation causes a decreasing birth-rate. In mainly English-speaking
Ontario the birth-rate is much lower, about 24, but the death-rate is also
lower, about 14, so that the fairly considerable survival-rate of 10 is
obtained. But we note the highly significant fact that some thirty years
or more ago the birth-rate was much lower, about 19, and yet the
survival-rate was almost 9, nearly as high as to-day! The death-rate was
then at 10, and nothing could be more instructive as to the real
relationship that holds in this matter. There has been a great rise in
the birth-rate and the only result, as someone has remarked, is a great
increase in the population of the grave-yards. Equally instructive is it
to compare various cities in this same Province, living under the same
laws, and fairly similar social conditions. In the report of the
Registrar-General of Ontario for 1916 I find that highest in birth-rate of
cities in the Province stands Ottawa with a very considerable French
population. But first also stands the same city for infant mortality,
which is three times greater than in some other cities in the Province
with a low birth-rate. Sault Ste. Marie, again with an enormous
birth-rate, stands third for infant mortality. Canada shows us that, even
if we regard the crude desire for a large growth of population as
reasonable--and that is a considerable assumption--a high birth-rate is an
uncertain prop to rest on.

Canada is an instructive example because we have some ground for believing
that the difference between the English-speaking and French-speaking
populations--the greater care of the former in procreation and the more
recklessly destructive methods of the latter in attaining the same
ends--are due to their different attitudes towards the use of methods of
birth-control. What the result of a general use of such methods is we know
from the example already mentioned of Holland, where they are taught,
officially recognised, and in general use, not only among the rich but
among the poor. The result is that the birth-rate has been falling slowly
and steadily for forty years. But the death-rate has also been falling and
at a greater rate. So that the more the birth-rate has fallen the higher
has been the rate of increase among the population.

It is perhaps in Australia and New Zealand that we find the most
satisfactory proofs of the benefits of a falling birth-rate in relation to
"Race-Suicide." The evidence may well appeal to us the more since it is
precisely here that the race-suicide fanatic finds freest scope for his
wrath. He looks gleefully at China with its prolific women, at Russia with
its magnificent birth-rate before the War of nearly 50, at Roumania with
its birth-rate of 42, at Chile and Jamaica with nearly 40. No nonsense
about birth-control there! No shirking by women of the sacred duties of
perpetual maternity! No immoral notions about claims to happiness and
desires for culture. And then he turns from, those great centres of
prosperity and civilisation to Australia, to New Zealand, and his voice is
choked and tears fill his eyes as he sees the goal of "Race-Suicide"
nearly in sight and the spectre of the Last Man rising before him. For
there is no doubt about it, Australia and New Zealand contain a population
which is gradually reaching the highest point yet known of democratic
organisation and general social well-being, and the birth-rate has been
falling with terrific speed. Sixty-years ago in the Australian
Commonwealth it was nearly 44, only forty years ago in New Zealand it was
42. Now it is only about 26 in both lands. Yet the survival-rate, the
actual growth of the population, is not so very much less with this low
birth-rate than it was with the high birth-rate. For the death-rate has
also fallen in both lands to about 10 (in New Zealand to 9) which is lower
than any other country in the world. The result is that Australia and New
Zealand, where (so it is claimed) preventives of conception are hawked
from door to door, instead of being awful examples of "Race-Suicide,"
actually present the highest rate of race-increase in the world (only
excepting Canada, where it is less firmly and less healthily based),
nearly twice that of Great Britain and able at the present rate to double
itself every 44 years. So much for "Race-Suicide."

The outcry about "Race-Suicide" is so far away from the real facts of life
that it is not easy to take it seriously, however solemn one's natural
temperament may be. We are concerned with people who arrogantly claim to
direct the moral affairs of the world, even in the most intimately private
matters, and who are yet ignorant of the most elementary facts of the
world, unable to think, not even able to count! We can only greet them
with a smile. But this question has, nevertheless, a genuinely serious
aspect, and I should be sorry even to touch on the question of
birth-control in relation to "Race-Suicide" without making that serious
aspect clear.

"Race-Suicide," we know, has no existence. Not only is the race as a whole
increasing in number, especially its White branches, but even among the
separate national groups there is not even one civilised people anywhere
in the world that is decreasing in number. On the contrary they are all,
even France, increasing at a more or less rapid rate. In England and
Wales, for example, where the birth-rate has steadily fallen during the
last forty years from 36 to 23 (I disregard the abnormal rates of
War-time) the population is still increasing, and even if the present
falls in birth-rate and death-rate continue, it will for years still go on
increasing by an excess of over 1,000 births a day. When we realise that
this is merely what goes on in one corner of the world and must be
multiplied enormously to represent the whole, we shall find it impossible
even to conceive the prodigious flow of excess babies which is being
constantly poured over the earth. If we are capable of realising all the
problems which thereby arise we must be forced to ask ourselves: _Is this
state of things desirable_?

"Be ye fruitful and multiply." That command was, according to the old
story, delivered to a world inhabited by eight people. It has been handed
down to a world in which it has long been ridiculously out of place, and
has become merely the excuse for criminal recklessness among a race which
has chosen to forget that the command was qualified by a solemn
admonition: "At the hand of man, even at the hand of every man's brother,
will I require the life of man." The high birth-rate has meant a vast
slaughter of infants, it has meant, moreover, a perpetual oppression of
the workers, disease, starvation, and death among the adult population; it
has meant, further, a blood-thirsty economic competition, militarism,
warfare. It has meant that all civilisation has from time to time become a
thin crust over a volcano of revolution, and the human race has gone on
lightly dancing there, striving to forget that ancient warning from a soul
of things even deeper than the voice of Jehovah: "At the hand of man will
I require the life of man." Men have recklessly followed the Will o' the
Wisp which represented mere multiplication of their inefficient selves as
the ideal of progress, quantity before quality, the notion that in an orgy
of universal procreation could consist the highest good of humanity.

The Great War, that is scarcely yet merged into an only less war-like
Peace, has brought at least the small compensation that it has led men to
look in the face this insane ideal of human progress. We see to-day what
has come of it, and the further evils yet to come of it are being embodied
beneath our eyes. So that at last the voice of Jehovah has here and there
been faintly heard, even where nowadays we had grown least accustomed to
hear it, in the Churches. It is Dr. Inge, the Dean of London's Cathedral
of St. Paul's, a distinguished Churchman and at the same time a foremost
champion of eugenics, who lately expressed the hope that the world,
especially the European world, would one day realise the advantages of a
stationary population.[25] Such a recognition, such an aspiration,
indicates that a new hope is dawning on the world's horizon, and a higher
ideal growing within the human soul. The mad competition of the industrial
world during the past century, with the sordid gloom and wretchedness of
it for all who were able to see beneath the surface, has shown for ever
what comes of the effort to produce a growing population by high
birth-rates in peace-time. The Great War of a later day has shown, let us
hope in an equally decisive manner, what comes to a world where men have
been for long generations produced so copiously and so cheaply that it is
natural to regard them as only fit to sweep off the earth with machine
guns. And the whole world of to-day--with its starving millions struggling
in vain to feed themselves, with most of its natural beauty swept away by
the ravages of man, and many of its most exquisite animals finally
exterminated--is likely to become merely the monument to an ideal that
failed. It was time, however late in the day, for a return to
common-sense. It was time to realise that the ideal of mere propagation
could lead us nowhere but to destruction. On that level we cannot compete
even with the lowest of organised things, not even with the bacteria,
which in number and in rapidity of multiplication are inconceivable to us.
"All hope abandon, ye that enter here" is written over the portal of this
path of "Progress."

[25] This has long been recognised by men of science. Even anyone with
the slightest knowledge of biology, Professor Bateson remarked in a
British Association Presidential address in 1914, is aware that a
population need not be declining because it is not increasing; "in
normal stable conditions population is stationary." Major Leonard
Darwin, the thoughtful and cautious President of the Eugenics Education
Society, has lately stated his considered belief ("Population and
Civilisation," _Economic Journal_, June, 1921) that increase in numbers
means, ultimately, relative reduction of wealth per head, with
consequent lowering of the standard of civilisation; that it also, under
existing conditions, involves the production of a smaller proportion of
men of ability; and, further, a depreciation of our traditions; he
concludes that, whatever element in civilisation we regard--wealth, or
stock, or traditions--"any increase in the population _such as that now
taking place_ will be accompanied by a lowering in the standard of our
civilisation."

There are definite reasons why real progress in the supreme tasks of
civilisation can best be made by a more or less stationary population,
whether the population is large or small, and it need scarcely be added
that, so far as the history of mankind is yet legible, the great advances
in civilisation have been made by small, even very small populations.
Where the population is rapidly growing, even if it is growing under the
favourable conditions that hardly ever accompany such growth, all its
energy is absorbed in adjusting its perpetually shifting equilibrium. It
cannot succeed in securing the right conditions of growth, because its
growth is never ceasing to demand new conditions. The structure of its
civilisation never rises above the foundations because these foundations
have perpetually to be laid afresh, and there is never time to get
further. It is a process, moreover, accompanied by unending friction and
disorder, by strains and stresses of all kinds, which are fatal to any
full, harmonious, and democratic civilisation. The "population question,"
with the endlessly mischievous readjustment it demands, must be eliminated
before the great House of Life can be built up on a strong solid human
foundation, to lift its soaring pinnacles towards the skies. That is what
many bitter experiences are beginning to teach us. In the future we are
likely to be much less concerned about "race-suicide," though we can never
be too concerned about race-murder.

When we think, however, of the desirability of a more or less stationary
population, in order to insure real social progress, as distinct from that
vain struggle of meaningless movement to and fro which the history of the
past reveals, we have to be clear in our minds that it may be far from
desirable that the present overgrown population of the world should be
stationary. That might indeed be better than further increase in numbers,
it would arrest the growth of our present evils; it might open the way to
methods by which they would be diminished or eliminated. But the process
would be infinitely difficult, and almost infinitely slow, as we may
easily realise when we consider that, with a population even smaller than
at present, the human race has not only ravished the world's beauty almost
out of existence, but so ravaged its own vital spirit that, as was found
with some consternation during the Great War, a large proportion of the
male population of every country is unfit for military service.

So often we hear it assumed, or even asserted, that greatness means
quantity, so that to look forward to the replacement of the present
teeming insignificant human myriads by a rarer and more truly greater race
is to be a pessimist! Oh, these "optimists"! To revel in a world which
more and more closely resembles all that the poets ever imagined of Hell,
is to be an "optimist"! One wonders how it is that in no brief moment of
lucidity it occurs to these people that the lower we descend in the scale
of life the greater the quantity in a species and the poorer the quality,
so that to reach what such people should really regard as the world's
period of supreme greatness in life we must go back to the days, before
animal life appeared, when the earth was merely a teeming mass of
bacteria.[26]

[26] See, for instance, H.F. Osborn, _The Origin and Evolution of Life_,
1918, Chapter III.

To-day, we are often told, the majority of human beings belong either to
the Undesired Class or the Undesirable Class. To realise that this is so,
we are bidden to read the newspapers or to walk along the streets of the
cities--whichever they may be--wherein dwell the highest products of our
civilisation. In the better class quarters it is indeed the Undesirable
Class that seems to predominate, and in the poor quarters, the Undesired.
Yet, viewing our species as a whole, the two classes may be seen to walk
hand in hand along the same road, and in proportion as our nobler
instincts germinate and develop, we must doubtless admit that it ought to
be our active aim to make that road for both of them--socially though not
individually--the Road to Destruction.

To stem the devastating tide of human procreativeness, however, easy as it
may seem in theory, is by no means so easy as some think, especially as
those think who believe that the human race stands on the brink of
suicide. For there is this about it that we must never forget: the
majority of those born to-day die before their time, so that by
diminishing the production of the unfit, as well as by the progressive
improvement of the environment that automatically accompanies such
diminution, we may make an imposing difference in the appearance of the
birth-rate, whilst yet the population goes on increasing rapidly, probably
even more rapidly than before. It needs a most radical and thorough attack
on the birth-rate before we can make any real impression on the rate of
increase of the population, to say nothing of its real reduction. There is
still an arduous road before us.

True it is that we have two opposing schools of thought which both say
that we need not, or that we cannot, make any difference by our efforts to
regulate the earth's human population. According to one view the
development of population, together with the necessity for war which is
inextricably mixed up with a developing population, cannot be effected
without, as one champion of the doctrine is pleased to put it, "shattering
both the structure of Euclidean space and the psychological laws upon
which the existence of self-consciousness and human society are
conditional."[27] In simpler words, populations tend to become too large
for their territories, so that war ensues, and birth-control can do
nothing because "it is doubtful whether a group in the plenitude of vigour
and self-consciousness can deliberately stop its own growth." The other
school proclaims human impotence on exactly opposite grounds. There is not
the slightest reason, it declares, to believe that birth-control has had
any but a completely negligible influence on population. This is a natural
process and fertility is automatically adjusted to the death-rate.
Whenever a population reaches a certain stage of civilisation and nervous
development its procreativeness, quite apart from any effort of the will,
tends to diminish. The seeming effect of birth-control is illusory. It is
Nature, not human effort, which is at work.[28]

[27] B.A.G. Fuller, "The Mechanical Basis of War," _Hibbert Journal_,
1921.

[28] Sir Shirley Murphy some years ago (_Lancet_, 10 Aug. 1912) argued
that the fall of the birth-rate, as also that of the death-rate, has
been largely effected by natural causes, independent of man's action.
Mr. G. Udney Yule (_The Fall in the Birth-rate_, 1920) also believes
that birth-control counts for little, the chief factor being natural
fluctuations, probably of economic nature. Recently Mr. C.E. Pell, in
his book, _The Law of Births and Deaths_ (1921), has made a more
elaborate and systematic attempt to show that the rise and fall of the
birth-rate has hitherto been independent of human effort.

These two opposing councils of despair, each proclaiming, though in a
contrary sense, the vanity of human wishes in the matter of procreation,
might well, some may think, be left to neutralise each other and evaporate
in air. But it seems worth while to point out that, with proper
limitations and qualifications, there is an element of truth in each of
them, while, without such limitations and qualifications, both are alike
obviously absurd and wrong-headed. Undoubtedly, as the one school holds,
in certain stages of civilisation, even at a fairly advanced stage,
nations tend to break out over their frontiers with resulting war; but the
period when they reach "the plenitude of vigour and self-consciousness" is
exactly the period when the birth-rate begins to decline, and the
population, deliberately or instinctively, controls its own increase. That
has, for instance, been the history of France since the great expansion of
population, roughly associated with the Napoleonic epopee,--which
doubtless covered a web of causes, sanitary, political, industrial,
favourable to a real numerical increase of the nation--had died down
slowly to the level we witness to-day.[29] Similarly, with regard to the
opposing school, we must undoubtedly accept a natural fall in the
birth-rate with a rising civilisation; that has always been visible in
highly civilised individual couples, and it is an easily ascertainable
zoological fact that throughout the evolution of life procreativeness has
decreased with the increased development of species. We may agree that a
natural factor comes into the recent fall in the human birth-rate. But to
argue that because a natural decline in birth-rate is the essential factor
in the slowing down of procreative activity with all higher evolution,
therefore deliberate birth-control counts for nothing, since exactly the
same result follows when voluntary prevention is adopted and when it is
not, seems highly absurd. We must at least admit that voluntary
birth-control is an important contributory cause, in some sense indeed, of
supreme importance, because it is within man's own power and because man
is thus enabled to guide and mould processes of Nature which might
otherwise work disastrously. How disastrously is shown by the history of
Europe, and in a notable degree France, during the four or five centuries
preceding the end of the eighteenth century when various new influences
began to operate. During all these centuries there was undoubtedly a very
high birth-rate, yet infant mortality, war, famine, insanitation,
contagious diseases of many and virulent kinds, tended, as far as we can
see, to keep the population almost or quite stationary,[30] and so ruinous
a method of maintaining a stationary population necessarily used up most
of the energy which might otherwise have been available for social
progress, although the stationary population, even thus maintained, still
placed France at the head of European civilisation. The more firmly we
believe that the diminution of the population is a natural process, the
more strenuously, surely, we ought to guide it, so that it shall work
without friction, and, so far as possible, tend to eliminate the
undesirable stocks of man and preserve the desirable. Clearly, the theory
itself calls for much effort, since it is obvious that along natural lines
the decline, if it is the result of high evolution, will affect the fit
more easily than the unfit.

[29] The reader may point to the renewal of Militarism and Imperialism
in France since the Great War. That, however, has been an artificial
product (in so far as it exists among the people themselves) directly
fostered from outside by the policy of England and the United States,
just as the same spirit in Germany before the war, in the face of a
falling birth-rate, was artificially fostered from above by a military
and Imperialistic caste.

[30] See especially Mathorez, _Histoire de la Formation de la Population
Française_, Vol. I, 1920, _Les Étrangers en France_. The fecundity of
French families, even among the aristocracy, till towards the end of the
eighteenth century, was fabulous; in the third quarter of the
seventeenth century the average number of children was five in Paris.
But the mortality was extremely high; under the age of sixteen, Mathorez
estimates, it was 51 per cent., and infant mortality was terrible in all
classes, small-pox being specially fatal. Then there were the various
diseases termed plagues, with famine sometimes added, while war,
emigration, and religious celibacy all counteracted the excessive
fecundity, so that from the thirteenth century to the third quarter of
the eighteenth the population seems to have been stationary, about
twenty-two millions. Then the size of the family fell in Paris to 3.9
and in France generally to 4.3, while also there were fewer marriages.
Therewith there was an increase of prosperity.

Thus there seems, on a wide survey of the matter, no reason whatever to
quarrel with that conviction, which is gradually over-spreading all
classes of human society in all parts of the world, and ever more widely
leading to practical action, that the welfare of the individual, the
family, the community, and the race is bound up with the purposive and
deliberate practice of birth-control, whether we advocate that policy on
the ground that we are thereby furthering Nature, or on the opposite, and
no doubt equally excellent, ground that we are thereby correcting Nature.

Along this road, as along any other road, we shall not reach Utopia; and
since the Utopia of every person who possesses one is unique that perhaps
need not be regretted. We shall not even, within any measurable period of
time, reach a sanely free and human life fit to satisfy quite moderate
aspirations. The wise birth-controller will not (like the deliciously
absurd suffragette of old-time) imagine that birth-control for all means a
New Heaven and a New Earth, but will, rather, appreciate the delightful
irony of the Biblical legend which represented a world with only four
people in it, yet one of them a murderer. Still, it may be pointed out,
that was a state of things much better than we can show now. The world
would count itself happier if, during the Great War, only twenty-five per
cent of the population of belligerent lands had been murderers, virtually
or in fact. There is something to be gained, and that something is well
worth while.

Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of
the human population becomes increasingly urgent.[31] To many of our
Undesirables it may seem, mere sentiment to trouble about the ravishing of
the world's beauty or the ravaging of the world's humanity. But certain
hard facts, even to-day, have to be faced. The process of mechanical
invention continues every day on an ever increasing scale of magnitude.
Now that process, however necessary, however beneficial, involves some of
the chief evils of our present phase of what we call civilisation, partly
because it has deteriorated the quality of all human products and partly
because it has enslaved mankind, and in so doing deteriorated also his
quality.[32] Now we cannot abolish machinery, because machinery lies in
the very essence of life and we ourselves are machines. But, as the
largest part of history shows, there is no need whatever for man to become
the slave of machinery, or even for machinery to injure the quality of his
own work; rightly used it may improve it. The greatest task before
civilisation at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the
slaves, instead of the masters of men; and if civilisation fails at the
task, then without doubt it and its makers will go down to a common
destruction. It is a task inextricably bound up with the task of moulding
the human race for which birth-control is the elected instrument. Indeed
they are but two aspects of the same task. We have to accept the rugged
fact that every step to render more nearly perfect the mechanical side of
life correspondingly abolishes the need for men. Thus it is calculated
to-day that whenever, in accordance with a growing tendency, coal is
superseded by oil in industry two men are enabled to do the work of
twelve. That is merely typical of what is taking place generally in our
modern system of civilisation. Everywhere a small number of men are being
enabled to replace a large number of men. Not to avoid looking ahead, we
may say that of every twelve millions of our population, ten millions will
be unwanted. Let them do something else! we cheerfully exclaim. But what?
No doubt there are always art and science, infinite in their possibilities
for joy and enlightenment, infinite also, as we know, in their
possibilities of mischief and shallowness and boredom. Let it only be true
science and great art, and one man is better than ten millions. To say
that is only to echo unconsciously the ancient saying of Heraclitus, "One
is ten thousand if he be the best."

[31] Professor E.M. East, a distinguished biologist and lately President
of the American Society of Naturalists (_Nature_, 23 Sept., 1920), has
estimated that, for all the fall in the birth-rate, the present rate of
increase in the population of the world, chiefly of whites, who are
increasing most rapidly, will, in the lives of our grandchildren, lead
to a struggle for existence more terrible than imagination can conceive.

[32] This has been set forth with admirable lucidity and wealth of
illustration by Dr. Austin Freeman in his _Social Decay and
Regeneration_ (1921), already mentioned.

The vistas that are opened up when we realise the direction in which the
human race is travelling may seem to be endless; and so in a sense they
are. Man has replaced the gods he once dreamed of; he has found that he is
himself a god, who, however realistic he seeks to make his philosophy,
himself created the world as he sees it and now has even acquired the
power of creating himself, or, rather, of re-creating himself. For he
recognises that, at present, he is rather a poor sort of god, so much an
inferior god that he is hardly, if at all, to be distinguished from the
Lords of Hell.

The divine creative task of man extends into the future far beyond the
present, and we cannot too often meditate on the words of the wisest and
noblest forerunner of that future: "The whole world still lies before us
like a quarry before the master-builder, who is only then worthy of the
name when out of this casual mass of natural material he has embodied with