The Lunarian Professor and His Remarkable Revelations Concerning the Earth, the Moon and Mars / Together with An Account of the Cruise of the Sally Ann

by James B. Alexander

“Notwithstanding all that has been and will be accomplished by your enterprising race,” said he, “there are some things about the earth that they will never be able to control or improve. There are two in particular of essential importance. One is the area of the earth’s surface, which your race can never increase no matter what its necessities may be; the other is the slow but very certain refrigeration of the earth’s climate by which we may be sure that a time will be reached in the long distant future when the habitable surface shall gradually be reduced till at last no part of the earth’s surface will be tolerable to any living creature. So in effect while the demand of the race will be for more room it will constantly be required to put up with less.”

“But,” said I, “isn’t that a good ways off? The extreme refrigeration of the earth is a process involving millions of years according to our scientists.”

“Yes, it will be a long time before any important reduction of area can take place, but not long before the present room will become very much cramped. Only a few moments ago we reckoned that by the year 2070 there would be about two acres to each of the 12,000,000,000 of inhabitants, on which to live and move and produce the means of subsistence. If the race should then be doubling every thirty years, in 2100 there will be but one acre for each; and if they keep on increasing in 2130 a half acre; in 2160 a quarter; in 2190 an eighth, in 2220 a sixteenth; in 2250 a lot thirty-three by forty-one and one-fourth feet, which in 2280 is reduced to thirty-three by twenty feet 8 inches and this in 2292 four hundred years after the centennial of the discovery of America by Columbus that was celebrated in your day at Chicago, will be reduced to thirty-three by sixteen and one-half, or two rods by one. If the population should get to be as numerous as that the entire earth would be a city inhabited twelve times as densely as the city of Minneapolis was in your day. This of course is the average. Some places are more desirable than others and these would be more densely packed. Already at the close of the twentieth century many of the pleasanter parts of the earth have become uncomfortably populous, not from want of the means of subsistence, but from want of room to carry on the business and pleasures of life. And yet the growth of population may be said to be just fairly commenced. It is obvious from what can already be seen that it will very soon be necessary to place some artificial restriction on the increase of population or else there will be such suffering among men as will of itself operate to keep down the number of people by killing them off faster and shortening the average duration of life. These questions are already being seriously considered by the philosophers and wise men, and many plans are being discussed.

“There are some pessimists who declare there is no remedy. They say it was an egregious blunder on the part of society to attempt the banishment of suffering. It was suffering that had in all ages kept down the population, so that the world remained roomy enough to live in with some comfort. They hold that suffering is a necessary concomitant of comfort and we are bound to have it both before it, as a necessary antecedent and after it, as a necessary consequent. It is the law of nature and it is vain to try to evade it. By banishing war and want and disease, and reducing the problem of life to an easy pleasant certainty, society, they say, has caused herself to be invaded by fresh innumerable hordes of human beings that step into the arena of life from the secret caves of non-existence as if attracted by the feast of good things that she has provided for herself. When the repressive hand of suffering is lifted a little the human species breed and grow like rabbits until they feel its hard pressure again.

“Nature, they affirm, is no sentimentalist. Her ways are all direct, hard, cruel and brutal. She is extravagant and wasteful of effort and parsimonious of results. She creates a thousand seeds of grain or grass or tree, only one of which will become a grown plant and reproduce its kind. She is even more prodigal with the spawn of fishes destroying millions for one she brings to maturity. There is nothing to show that she cares any more for the human race than for fishes. When men get too numerous she destroys them as ruthlessly as if they were so many herring or clams. They assert it is impossible to evade or even to improve upon the methods of nature. They point to the teeming multitudes that have swarmed upon the earth during the last century in such comparative security and comfort as to invite a still greater inundation during the century to come; and they declare it to be one of the characteristic stratagems of nature, only restraining her grim and malicious humor in order to make it the more tragic and appalling when she does give it play. And they aver that it would be better even now to drop a large part if not all of the artificial stimulations to the expansion of the population that have by insensible degrees been grafted upon state policy during the last century. Let every tub stand on its own bottom, say they, let natural selection secure the survival of the fittest, and let the unfit be quietly eliminated by whichever of the numerous methods nature finds most applicable. In opposition to these are the optimists who hold that the human race is nature’s pet. If she could be said to plan anything or to have any preferences in favor of anything, it was the human family. After making trial in succession of the Trilobite, the Orthoceras, the Shark, the Megalosaurus, the Pterodactyl, the Mastodon and others, she put them all down and brought forward man and placed him over them all, and made him master of the earth. He was a frail insignificant helpless creature without weight, power or dignity. Other animals could beat him swimming, diving, flying, running, fighting. There was only one thing he could do tolerably well and that was to climb a tree. That was his capital, his stock in trade as one might say, for it developed his hands and quickened his senses. Nature took this unprepossessing, unpromising creature, educated and developed him in her stern school and by her untender methods, put brains into him, civilized him and fitted him to control the world and finally to govern himself. This last lesson he has not yet perfectly mastered, but he is learning more of it every day. Progress, say they, never takes a back track. The pessimistic theory that nature’s plan is to let every fellow look out for himself and the devil take the hindmost, is no longer true. The race has passed that place and the new ideal is; every fellow for all the rest, and no one left behind. Until this is practically realized they say the race will not have fulfilled its destiny, and retreat is impossible. Moreover it is not necessary; for the new departure is after all as natural as the old way, and is in fact only a continuation of it; a turn in the road as it were; and it may quite as well be depended upon to rectify all the difficulties of its own creation. If the principle of mutual succor, sympathy and assistance leads to over population, the same principle must furnish the remedy. The optimists admit the contention of the pessimists that this trouble is looming up, and the philosophers of all schools are beginning to feel serious. They are discussing such figures as we had before us a few moments ago and endeavoring to fix the date at which a halt will have to be called, and the means devised by which it is to be accomplished. Some say the population is dense enough now. Others point out that with the increased means of subsistence there need not be anything uncomfortable in a population of 12,000,000,000 which they estimate will not be reached till 2070, or 70 years from the present (A. D. 2000.) And they are hopeful enough to believe that by that time, human wit will have discovered some way of controlling population without violence to human happiness. All agree that if society is to be maintained on the present scale it is high time to settle the manner in which the great question of population is to be met and handled. It is the most difficult question that has ever demanded human attention.

“In your day there was already beginning to be some discussion in regard to stirpiculture and the scientific regulation of the family and rearing of children. But it did not at that time reach a practical stage. No scientific conclusions on the subject of marriage have yet been able to displace sentiment and instinct. But soon, as I have already told you, the rearing of the children was undertaken by the state and removed from the caprice of sentiment and ignorance greatly to the advantage of the children and of course the race. But the question of marriage remains the same sentimental business it was in the days of Jacob. And with the increasing independence of women it has become even more a question of the feelings than it was in your day when women often married for a home and men sometimes for money. As the problems of life, marriage etc., have become questions of state, inviting and even requiring ample and public discussion, the squeamishness and false modesty with which they were approached in your day have entirely disappeared. The public interest and the rights of the state in the question of the perpetuation of the race are freely admitted and discussed. The public mind has been gradually prepared for this by the gradual assumption by the state of the care and education of the youth, and by its experience in the treatment of criminals. Where the treatment of all the youth is uniform and some after all, turn out to be criminals as they occasionally do, the cause is looked for in their parentage. The state is in condition to keep track of ill born children, and after leaving the schools they are still kept under the eye and guiding advice and restraint if necessary of a special department of the police service. In this way the criminally disposed are known in advance, and much crime is no doubt prevented. The criminally disposed are regarded and treated as mentally diseased.

“There has been much discussion pro and con of this mode of punishment, or—as some prefer to express it—mode of treatment. But it is now generally conceded that society is entirely justifiable in employing this mode of defense, especially since capital punishment has been abolished, and this is the maximum penalty that is corporally inflicted. The public mind having had before it the operation of this treatment as a sort of object lesson is the more ready to listen to the proposition that is now being discussed to use this same treatment for the defense of society against herself. The question is one that must be approached with the utmost consideration and tenderness as well as fairness and justice applied after the most careful and expert selection and with due regard to the character and physical and mental qualities that are due to be expected from such conditions. It is natural selection they say, artificially applied without the circumlocution and tedious delay of nature’s ordinary methods. Left to herself, nature in the long run provides for the survival of the fittest. We now propose say they to make the same provision in the short run. We are now approaching one of those crises in human affairs in which something has to be done, and if men have not the wit to do it themselves, nature takes hold and performs it in her hard way with small tenderness for anybody’s feelings or notions of propriety. If we are competent, we will find some way out of this difficulty without losing our civilization; if we are not, nature will put us back in the primer of barbarism, to learn it all over again as she has done a dozen times before. We have it in our power, and it is our obvious duty to reduce the population, or to stop its increase, and to do it in the very scientific manner that is at our disposal, by which the best blood is selected for transmission and the poorest is quietly eliminated without shock or pain to the individual or to society. Not only can the best blood in general be made exclusive, but any particular brand of best blood can be picked out to receive special encouragement. We can preserve a class of talent invaluable to civilization that nature could not be depended on to select for preservation in the hard struggle for existence—the gentle, the unselfish, the intellectual worker and the poet. Nor can she be depended on to eliminate the ruffianly, brutal, criminal and selfish members whose room is better than their company. Rather these are the very ones she would be likely to save.

“This is all in our hands, say they, and if we have the nerve to carry it out, we can make the earth a perpetual paradise. All we have to do is to disqualify in their infancy the stirps whose posterity we prefer not to see.”

The Professor paused here and changed the profile to his ‘jokers’ or middle pair of hands and proceeded to roll up the 20th century and expose the 21st.

“I believe,” he resumed, “that we had better step forward another century, take our stand at the year 2100 and survey the century retrospectively, as we have done the 20th. It seems more natural to speak of it in the past tense since we have become accustomed to that way.”