(South African Review)
At the conclusion of the New York Conference I thought that I was never going to have anything to do with organizing another. But hardly more than a few months had gone by before my mind was dwelling on one to be centered around overpopulation as a cause of war. From the statements of Keynes and the specialists of the League of Nations, and from the status of the countries of Europe, it was inferred that international peace could in no way be made secure until measures had been put into effect to deal with explosive populations.
Between 1800 and 1900 the inhabitants of the world doubled in spite of bloody wars, thus proving they were only temporary checks. For every hundred thousand babies who died between dawn and dawn, Professor East estimated that one hundred and fifty thousand were born. These fifty thousand survivors contributed to the globe in twenty years a horde almost equal to India’s three hundred and seventy-five million.
In the United States, numerically speaking, overpopulation was not of apparent importance; we still had unoccupied lands. But evidence that we were beginning to consider the quality of our citizens as well as the quantity was shown in our immigration laws. In 1907 we had barred aliens with mental, physical, communicable, or loathsome diseases, and also illiterate paupers, prostitutes, criminals, and the feeble-minded. Had these precautions been taken earlier our institutions would not now be crowded with moronic mothers, daughters, and grand-daughters—three generations at a time, all of whom have to be supported by tax-payers who shut their eyes to this condition, admittedly detrimental to the blood stream of the race.
Then our sudden closing of the doors in 1924 by placing the world on a quota, threw Europe’s surplus population back on herself. Italy had to face this problem as Germany had had to do in 1914. At the Institute of Politics in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1925, Count Antonio Cippico, Fascist Senator, virtually demanded that, to make room for her “explosive expansion,” Italy be allowed to export her half-million annual increase to foreign lands. Professor East answered him, asking Italy first to put her house in order, and setting forth with clarity the inexorable results of “spawning children on the world with haphazard recklessness.” But she had no intention of doing so. Shortly afterwards Mussolini outlined his plan: “If Italy is to amount to anything it must enter into the second half of this century with at least sixty million.”
Japan and Germany as well as Italy were already called danger spots in 1925. Japan’s goal was a hundred million. Göring was soon to say, “The territory in which the Germans live is too small for our sixty-six million inhabitants and will be too small for the ninety million which we want to become.” The three military countries were pleading with their women to bear more children, offering as inducements medals, money, lands. They claimed the right of expansion because they were too crowded at home, and were at the same time increasing their peoples in order to promote successful wars.
Populations can fall into a semi-starved state of inertia, such as that of India or China, unless they are aggressive. They have a choice of three courses: to lower the standards of living to the bare subsistence level, to control the birth rate, or to reach out for colonies as Great Britain has done.
While we had been holding our conference in London in 1922 I had met at one of Major Putnam’s luncheons the Very Reverend “gloomy” Dean Inge, except that he was not gloomy at all; he was full of mischief. In his late fifties, tall, thin as an exclamation point, quite deaf, he reminded me of a Dickens character. He had commented in his usual pungent style on the real meaning of the right to expand:
It is a pleasant prospect if every nation with a high birth rate has a “right” to exterminate its neighbors. The supposed duty of multiplication, and the alleged right to expand, are among the chief causes of modern war; and I repeat that if they justify war, it must be a war of extermination, since mere conquest does nothing to solve the problem.
I was still of the opinion in 1925 that the League of Nations should include birth control in its program and proclaim that increase in numbers was not to be regarded as a justifiable reason for national expansion, but that each nation should limit its inhabitants to its resources as a fundamental principle of international peace.