It is widely believed that the Roman Catholic Church, by sternly forbidding the artificial limitation of families, is increasing its numbers at the expense of the non-Catholic populations. To some extent this is true. The Prussian figures for 1895-1900 give the number of children per marriage as:
| Both parents Catholic | 5 |
| Both parents Protestant | 4 |
| Both parents Jews | 3.7 |
An examination of the entries in 'Who's Who' gives about the same proportion for well-to-do families in England. The Catholic birth-rate of the Irish is nearly 40.[21] The French-Canadians are among the most prolific races in the world. On the other hand, their infant mortality is very high, and it is said that French-Canadian parents take these losses philosophically. It is quite a different question whether it is ultimately to the advantage of a nation which desires to increase its numbers to profess the Roman Catholic religion. The high birth-rates are all in unprogressive Catholic populations. When a Catholic people begins to be educated, the priests apparently lose their influence upon the habits of the laity, and a rapid decline in the births at once sets in. The most advanced countries which did not accept the Reformation, France and Belgium, are precisely those in which parental prudence has been carried almost to excess. We must also remember that the Dutch Boers, who are Protestants, but who live under simple conditions not unlike those of the French-Canadians, are equally prolific, as were our own colonists in the United States before that country was industrialised. The advantages in numbers gained by Roman Catholicism are likely to be confined to half-empty countries, where there is really room for more citizens, and where social ambition and the love of comfort are the chief motives for restricting the family.
The population of a settled country cannot be increased at will; it depends on the supply of food. The choice is between a high birth-rate combined with a high death-rate, and a low birth-rate with a low death-rate. The great saving of life which has been effected during the last fifty years carries with it the necessity of restricting the births. The next question to be considered is how this restriction is to be brought about. The oldest methods are deliberate neglect and infanticide. In China, where authorities differ as to the extent to which female infants are exposed, the practice certainly prevails of feeding infants whom their mothers are unable to suckle on rice and water, which soon terminates their existence. Such methods would happily find no advocates in Europe. The very ancient art of procuring miscarriage is a criminal act in most civilised countries, but it is practised to an appalling extent. Hirsch, who quotes his authorities, estimates that 2,000,000 births are so prevented annually in the United States, 400,000 in Germany, 50,000 in Paris, and 19,000 in Lyons. In our own country it is exceedingly common in the northern towns, and attempts are now being made to prohibit the sale of certain preparations of lead which are used for this purpose. Alike on grounds of public health and of morality, it is most desirable that this mischievous practice should be checked. Its great prevalence in the United States is to be attributed mainly to the drastic legislation in that country against the sale and use of preventives, to which many persons take objection on moral or æsthetic grounds, but which is surely on an entirely different level from the destruction of life that has already begun. The 'Comstock' legislation in America has done unmixed harm. It is worse than useless to try to put down by law a practice which a very large number of people believes to be innocent, and which must be left to the taste and conscience of the individual. To the present writer it seems a pis aller which high-minded married persons should avoid if they can practise self-restraint. Whatever injures the feeling of 'sanctification and honour' with which St. Paul bids us to regard these intimacies of life, whatever tends to profane or degrade the sacraments of wedded love, is so far an evil. But this is emphatically a matter in which every man and woman must judge for themselves, and must refrain from judging others.
In every modern civilised country population is restricted partly by the deliberate postponement of marriage. In many cases this does no harm whatever; but in many others it gravely diminishes the happiness of young people, and may even cause minor disturbances of health. Moreover, it would not be so widely adopted but for the tolerance, on the part of society, of the 'great social evil,' the opprobrium of our civilisation. In spite of the failure hitherto of priests, moralists, and legislators to root it out, and in spite of the acceptance of it as inevitable by the majority of Continental opinion, I believe that this abomination will not long be tolerated by the conscience of the free and progressive nations. It is notorious that the whole body of women deeply resents the wrong and contumely done by it to their sex, and that, if democracy is to be a reality, the immolation of a considerable section of women drawn from the poorer classes cannot be suffered to continue. It is also plain to all who have examined the subject that the campaign against certain diseases, the malignity and wide diffusion of which are being more fully realised every year, cannot be successful through medical methods alone. If the institution in question were abolished, medical science would soon reduce these scourges to manageable limits, and might at last exterminate them altogether; but while it continues there is no hope of doing this. I believe then that the time will come when the trade in vice will cease; and if I am right, early marriages will become the rule in all classes. This will render the population question more acute, especially as the diseases which we hope to extirpate are the commonest cause both of sterility and of infant mortality. Under this pressure, we must expect to see preventive methods widely accepted as the least of unavoidable evils.
When we reflect on the whole problem in its widest aspects, we see that civilised humanity is confronted by a Choice of Hercules. On the one side, biological law seems to urge us forward to the struggle for existence and expansion. The nation in that case will have to be organised on the lines of greatest efficiency. A strong centralised government will occupy itself largely in preventing waste. All the resources of the nation must be used to the uttermost. Parks must be cut up into allotments; the unproductive labours of the scholar and thinker must be jealously controlled and limited. Inefficient citizens must be weeded out; wages must be low and hours of work long. Moreover, the State must be organised for war; for its neighbours, we must suppose, are following the same policy. Then the fierce extra-group competition must come to its logical arbitrament in a life and death struggle. And war between two over-peopled countries, for both of which more elbow-room is a vital necessity, must be a war of complete expropriation or extermination. It must be so, for no other kind of war can achieve its object. The horrors of the present conflict will be as nothing compared with a struggle between two highly-organised State socialisms, each of which knows that it must either colonise the territory of the other or starve. It is idle to pretend that such a necessity will never arise. Another century of increase in Europe like that of the nineteenth century would bring it very near. If this policy is adopted, we shall see all the principal States organising themselves with a perfection far greater than that of Germany to-day, but taking German methods as their model; and the end will be the extermination of the smaller or looser organisations. Such a prospect may well fill us with horror; and it is terrible to find some of the ablest thinkers of Germany, such as Ernst Troeltsch, writing calm elegies over 'the death of Liberalism' and predicting the advent of an era of cut-throat international competition. Juvenal speaks of the folly of propter vitam vivendi perdere causas; and who would care to live in such a world? But does Nature care whether we enjoy our lives or not?
The other choice is that which France has made for herself; it is on the lines of Plato's ideal State. Each country is to be, as far as possible, self-sufficing. If it cannot grow sufficient food for itself, it must of course export its coal or its gold, or the products of its industry and ingenuity. But it must know approximately what 'the number of the State' (as Plato said) should be. It must limit its population to that number, and the limit will be fixed, not at the maximum number who can live there anyhow, but at the maximum number who can 'live well.' The object aimed at will not be constant expansion, but well-being. The energies liberated from the pitiless struggle for existence will be devoted to making social life wiser, happier, more harmonious and more beautiful. Have we any reason to hope that this policy is not contrary to the hard laws which Nature imposes on every species in the world?
In the first place, would such a State escape being devoured by some brutal 'expanding' neighbour? What would have happened to France if she had stood alone in this war? The danger is real; but we may answer that France, as a matter of fact, did not stand alone, because other nations thought her too precious to be sacrificed. And the completely organised competitive State which I have imagined would be a far more unlovely place than Germany, and more unpleasant to live in. The spectacle of a saner and happier polity next door would break up the purely competitive State from within; the strain would be too great for human nature. We cannot argue confidently from the struggle for existence among the lower animals to our own species. For a long time past, human evolution has been directed, not to living anyhow, but to living in a certain way. We are guided by ideals for the future, by purposes winch we clearly set before ourselves, in a way which is impossible to the brutes. These purposes are common to the large majority of men. No State can long maintain a rigid and oppressive organisation, except under the threat of danger; and a nation which aims only at perfecting its own culture is not dangerous to its neighbours. It is probable that without the supposed menace of another military Power on its eastern flank German militarism would have begun to crumble.
In the second place, would the absence of sharp competition within the group lead to racial degeneration? This is a difficult question to answer. Perhaps a diminution of pugnacity and of the means to gratify this instinct would not be a misfortune. But it is certainly true that, if the operation of natural selection is suspended, rational selection must take its place. Failing this, reversion to a lower type is inevitable. The infant science of eugenics will have much to say on this subject hereafter; at present we are only discovering how complex and obscure the laws of heredity are. The State of the future will have to step in to prevent the propagation of undesirable variations, whether physical or mental, and will doubtless find means to encourage the increase of families that are well endowed by Nature.
Assuming that a nation as a whole prefers a policy of this kind, and aims at such an equilibrium of births and deaths as will set free the energies of the people for the higher objects of civilised life, how will it escape the cacogenic effects of family restriction in the better classes combined with reckless multiplication among the refuse which always exists in a large community? This is a problem which has not yet been solved. Public opinion is not ready for legislation against the multiplication of the unfit, and it is not easy to see what form such legislation could take. Many of the very poor are not undesirable parents; we must not confound economic prosperity with biological fitness. The 'submerged tenth' should be raised, where it is possible, into a condition of self-respect and responsibility; but they must not be allowed to be a burden upon the efficient; and the upper and middle classes should simplify their habits so far as to make marriage and parenthood possible for the young professional man. Special care should be taken that taxation is so adjusted as not to penalise parenthood in the socially valuable middle class.