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.