The old gentleman waved all this away. “I don’t care what the causes are,” he said. “That’s all one to me. What I do object to, sir, is the effects. Why sir, I am old enough to remember walking through the delicious meadows beyond Swiss Cottage, I remember seeing the cows milked in West Hampstead, sir. And now, what do I see now, when I go there? Hideous red cities pullulating with Jews, sir. Pullulating with prosperous Jews. Am I right in being indignant, sir? Do I do well, like the prophet Jonah, to be angry?”
“You do, sir,” said Gumbril, with growing enthusiasm, “and the more so since this frightful increase in population is the world’s most formidable danger at the present time. With populations that in Europe alone expand by millions every year, no political foresight is possible. A few years of this mere bestial propagation will suffice to make nonsense of the wisest schemes of to-day—or would suffice,” he hastened to correct himself, “if any wise schemes were being matured at the present.”
“Very possibly, sir,” said the old gentleman, “but what I object to is seeing good cornland being turned into streets, and meadows, where cows used to graze, covered with houses full of useless and disgusting human beings. I resent seeing the country parcelled out into back gardens.”
“And is there any prospect,” Gumbril earnestly asked, “of our ever being able in the future to support the whole of our population? Will unemployment ever decrease?”
“I don’t know, sir,” the old gentleman replied. “But the families of the unemployed will certainly increase.”
“You are right, sir,” said Gumbril, “they will. And the families of the employed and the prosperous will as steadily grow smaller. It is regrettable that birth control should have begun at the wrong end of the scale. There seems to be a level of poverty below which it doesn’t seem worth while practising birth control, and a level of education below which birth control is regarded as morally wrong. Strange, how long it has taken for the ideas of love and procreation to dissociate themselves in the human mind. In the majority of minds they are still, even in this so-called twentieth century, indivisibly wedded. Still,” he continued hopefully, “progress is being made, progress is certainly, though slowly, being made. It is gratifying to find, for example, in the latest statistics, that the clergy, as a class, are now remarkable for the smallness of their families. The old jest is out of date. Is it too much to hope that these gentlemen may bring themselves in time to preach what they already practise?”
“It is too much to hope, sir,” the old gentleman answered with decision.
“You are probably right,” said Gumbril.
“If we were all to preach all the things we all practise,” continued the old gentleman, “the world would soon be a pretty sort of bear-garden, I can tell you. Yes, and a monkey-house. And a wart-hoggery. As it is, sir, it is merely a place where there are too many human beings. Vice must pay its tribute to virtue, or else we are all undone.”
“I admire your wisdom, sir,” said Gumbril.