I have now, I venture to hope, established two important principles in relation to human progress. In the first place, I have shown that modern ideas as to the necessity of dealing directly with some of our glaring social evils, such as race degeneration and the various forms of sexual immorality, are fundamentally wrong
and are doomed to failure so long as their fundamental causes—widespread poverty, destitution, and starvation—are not greatly diminished and ultimately abolished. I have proved that human nature is not in itself such a complete failure as our modern eugenists seem to suppose, but that it is influenced by fundamental laws which under reasonably just and equal economic conditions will automatically abolish all these evils.
In the second place, I have shown that the dread of over-population as the result of the abolition of poverty is wholly and utterly fallacious—a mere bugbear created by ignorance of natural laws and of presumption in thinking that we can cure social evils while leaving the man-made causes which produce them unaltered. The three great natural laws which all our would-be reformers ignore are:—
(1) That a very moderate advance in the average age of marriage—which would certainly result from a truly rational system of education combined with economic equality—necessarily diminishes the rate of increase of the population.
(2) That every approach to educational and economic equality by effecting a large
saving of the lives of males who now die from preventable causes, combined with the fact that male births exceed those of females, would so diminish the number of the latter that they would soon become less instead of, as now, more than that of males: that this would give them an effective choice in marriage which they do not now possess, together with the power of delay which for many reasons large numbers of them would exercise.
(3) The law of diminishing fertility with increase of brain-work through education and training would further tend to the diminution of fertility.
These three natural causes all tend in one direction—the equality of births with deaths; while their action would be so readily modified by public opinion as to obviate all danger of either increase or decrease beyond what was necessary for the well-being of each community, nation, or race.
The Future Status of Woman
The foregoing statement of the effect of established natural laws, if allowed free play under rational conditions of civilisation, clearly indicates that the position of