Is there any other means of escape from the existent dilemma? I answer, there is none. Emigration has sometimes been regarded as an efficient check to over-population, and Dr. Ogle allows that “hitherto some of the excess of births over deaths has been met by emigration, or rather by excess of emigration over immigration; but never on such a scale as to free the country from more than one-twentieth part of its redundant growth.” Moreover, this minimum of good is counterbalanced by evil, for emigration “carries off the more vigorous and enterprising of our working men to the necessary deterioration of the residue left at home.” And further: “The facilities for successful emigration are yearly diminishing; the time must inevitably come—sooner or later—when this means of reducing our population will altogether fail us.”
In view of the obvious tendency of better conditions—when brought about—to create a reduction of the death-rate and an acceleration of the birth-rate, eventuating in an increase of general misery, neither Malthus, Darwin, Huxley, nor any other great teacher of the past, has given us applicable and available counsel. There only remains for us now to consider Herbert Spencer’s opinion regarding this all-important matter. He is credited with the demonstration of a law of population wider than the laws discerned by Malthus and Darwin. The law is this: “Other things equal, multiplication and individuation vary inversely, i.e. the rate of reproduction of all living things becomes lowered as the development is raised, and conversely.” (Lecture on “Claims of Labour,” Edin., 1886, Patrick Geddes.)
We have to do with this so-called law in respect only of its bearing on practical action. The corollary deduced from it is: Individuate, educate and refine your masses, for the rate of increase will fall as organisms rise in the scale of culture.
Now what are our prospects of any rapid advance in individuation (development and culture) among the seething masses of a people who are helpless and frightfully overcrowded by the action of the very law which individuation is to counteract? In how long a period will the process be likely to take effect? It is on the answer to these questions that the worth of the principle as a law of practical guidance for humanity must depend.
Accepting it as a fact that in the families of our higher classes the average number is distinctly smaller than in the families of our lower classes, let us look for a moment at some of the causes creating this difference. First, in the higher classes men may have mistresses whose children are unacknowledged; and frequently they form the marriage tie with heiresses whose hereditary tendency is necessarily—as expounded by Francis Galton—towards sterility. Second, women of the higher classes are often delicate. They cannot support the strain of frequent maternity. Is this a condition that, in an advancing civilization, will persist? By no means. The ideal of womanhood, as of manhood, points to strength, not weakness—“a combination of brain power and skill with bodily health and vigour. Many intellectual men are physically robust and capable in a polygamous state of patriarchal propagation.” (Over-population, John M. Robertson.) And it is impossible to doubt that a rational education, embracing free play to activities hitherto denied to the sex, and promoting physical development, will lift women to a superior level of health and of physiological capacity. Third, the higher classes avail themselves to some extent of neo-Malthusian preventive checks, whereas the mass of the people are either ignorant of them or opposed to their use. Fourth, enforced celibacy in the case of a large proportion of women of the cultured classes is a cause of relatively fewer numbers. Obviously it is from the “warrens of the poor” that prolific life persistently springs. There we have the highest rate of genesis; and as the refined restrain propagation and limit their numbers, the poor enter the breach and fill up the ranks from their own inferior stock. Now, mark the result. The individuating process is checked, and ultimately fails, through the crowding out of the individuated. What occurs, naturally, inevitably, by the action of the process is a gradual subsidence, finally a limiting of the individuating factor, the very social force to which Herbert Spencer directs attention! Surely it suffices to point out “that no theory of the ultimate effects of mere refinement on rate of increase can give us help while nine-tenths of the human race are not refined, and not visibly in the way of becoming so.” (Over-population, John M. Robertson.)
We are compelled to dismiss Herbert Spencer’s “law of population” as irrelevant to the situation, and to declare that he has no more solved the riddle of the Sphinx than have Malthus, Darwin and Huxley.
The population problem, as it faces us to-day, is serious beyond all comparison. It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of finding its true solution. But while thousands of men and women are ready now to admit the seriousness, nowhere as yet has a movement appeared of united action applicable and adequate to the exigency.
CHAPTER II
THE PROBLEM OF SEX
How glorious will be the awakening when man’s desires will be honoured, his passions utilized, his labour exalted, whilst life is loved, and ever and ever creates love afresh.—Zola.
The Law of Population derives its force from an innate, powerful instinct or passion in man, the unguarded exercise of which brings about reproduction of the species. The thing therefore of greatest importance to general well-being is the discovery of means whereby to prevent this imperious instinct dominating and controlling the reproductive conditions—which imperatively need to be governed by reason and moral sense.