The Economic Functions of Vice

“Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life.” ——— “And the individual withers, and the world is more and more.” —Tennyson.
FOR some inscrutable reason which she has as yet given no hint of revealing, Nature is wondrously wasteful in the matter of generation. She creates a thousand where she intends to make use of one.
Life is sown broadcast only to be followed almost immediately by a destruction nearly as swift. Nature creates by the million apparently that she may destroy by the myriads. She gives life one instant only that she may snatch it away the next. The main difference is that the higher we ascend the less lavish is the creation and the less sweeping the destruction.
MANY see in this relentless weeding out and destruction of her inferior products a remarkable illustration of the wisdom of Nature’s methods. What would they think of a workman so bungling that two-fifths of the products of his handicraft were only fit for destruction?
Its application to society is obvious: Since the propagation of human beings goes on with entire recklessness as to the quality of the product and the means of subsistence, some strong corrective is absolutely necessary to establish limits to populations and to secure the continued development of the race.
If every begotten child lived to the average age of 40, in a very few years there would not be standing room on the earth for its people.
Where then should we assign limits to the productiveness of the 750,000,000 human females on the globe, each of whom is capable of producing 20 children in her 30 years of bearing?
BY the “best” is understood those having that harmony of mental and physical development which brings them most nearly into accord with Nature’s laws.
While, however, giving one female the desire and capacity to produce 50,000,000 lives, nature has given other animals the desire and capacity to annihilate most of those 50,000,000 lives.