For oh, we are proud that we flaunt this flesh in the markets of dismal death.
—Christian Work and Evangelist.
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WAR, RACIAL FERTILITY AND
Comparison of the Annual Cost of the Army and Navy of the United States—1890–98, 1902–10
Overproduction of offspring—“race-suicide” by suffocation instead of by starvation—is responsible, we are now told, for the impulse that is driving the great nations toward war. Germany has outgrown her territory and must seize on some of Great Britain’s colonial overflow territory; Japan is similarly plethoric with population and must disgorge into our Philippines. This is the simple explanation of modern militarism offered by Henry M. Hyde, writing under the title that heads this article, in The Technical World Magazine. His theory has the advantage that most of the great world-movements in recorded history may be traced to this cause, from the Aryan migration to the daily influx of Poles and Hungarians on our own shores. After dwelling on the recent huge increase of armaments, the hasty building of dreadnoughts, the war-scares in England, the eager toasts on German battleships “to the Day”—meaning the day when the Kaiser shall turn loose his dogs of war on Britain—the writer goes on:
What is the matter with the world? What is the disease from which civilization suffers? And where are the physicians who shall prescribe the necessary remedies?
Pending an answer to these ancient and disputed questions, it is desired to point out certain facts which may help to explain the present situation and to ask whether, because of these facts, the nations may not, almost in spite of themselves, be driven into war?
In 1800 France had 4,000,000 more population than Germany. At that time both nations occupied approximately the same amount of territory, about 200,000 square miles each. The density of population in France was 134 to the square mile; in Germany it was 113.