carnage made possible by present-day machinery. This is not
theoretical, as will be shown by a comparison of deaths in battle
and men involved, in the South African War and the Spanish-
American War on the one hand, and the Civil War or the Napoleonic
Wars on the other.
Not only has war, by its own evolution, rendered itself futile,
but man himself, with greater wisdom and higher ethics, is opposed
to war. He has learned too much. War is repugnant to his common
sense. He conceives it to be wrong, to be absurd, and to be very
expensive. For the damage wrought and the results accomplished,
it is not worth the price. Just as in the disputes of individuals
the arbitration of a civil court instead of a blood feud is more
practical, so, man decides, is arbitration more practical in the
disputes of nations.
War is passing, disease is being conquered, and man’s food-getting
efficiency is increasing. It is because of these factors that
there are a billion and three quarters of people alive to-day
instead of a billion, or three-quarters of a billion. And it is
because of these factors that the world’s population will very
soon be two billions and climbing rapidly toward three billions.
The lifetime of the generation is increasing steadily. Men live
longer these days. Life is not so precarious. The newborn infant
has a greater chance for survival than at any time in the past.
Surgery and sanitation reduce the fatalities that accompany the
mischances of life and the ravages of disease. Men and women,
with deficiencies and weaknesses that in the past would have
effected their rapid extinction, live to-day and father and mother
a numerous progeny. And high as the food-getting efficiency may
soar, population is bound to soar after it. “The abysmal
fecundity” of life has not altered. Given the food, and life will
increase. A small percentage of the billion and three-quarters
that live to-day may hush the clamour of life to be born, but it
is only a small percentage. In this particular, the life in the
man-animal is very like the life in the other animals.
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And still another change is coming in human affairs. Though
politicians gnash their teeth and cry anathema, and man, whose
superficial book-learning is vitiated by crystallised prejudice,
assures us that civilisation will go to smash, the trend of
society, to-day, the world over, is toward socialism. The old
individualism is passing. The state interferes more and more in
affairs that hitherto have been considered sacredly private. And
socialism, when the last word is said, is merely a new economic
and political system whereby more men can get food to eat. In
short, socialism is an improved food-getting efficiency.
Furthermore, not only will socialism get food more easily and in
greater quantity, but it will achieve a more equitable
distribution of that food. Socialism promises, for a time, to
give all men, women, and children all they want to eat, and to
enable them to eat all they want as often as they want.
Subsistence will be pushed back, temporarily, an exceedingly long
way. In consequence, the flood of life will rise like a tidal
wave. There will be more marriages and more children born. The
enforced sterility that obtains to-day for many millions, will no
longer obtain. Nor will the fecund millions in the slums and
labour-ghettos, who to-day die of all the ills due to chronic
underfeeding and overcrowding, and who die with their fecundity
largely unrealised, die in that future day when the increased
food-getting efficiency of socialism will give them all they want
to eat.
It is undeniable that population will increase prodigiously-just
as it has increased prodigiously during the last few centuries,
following upon the increase in food-getting efficiency. The
magnitude of population in that future day is well nigh
unthinkable. But there is only so much land and water on the
surface of the earth. Man, despite his marvellous
accomplishments, will never be able to increase the diameter of
the planet. The old days of virgin continents will be gone. The
habitable planet, from ice-cap to ice-cap, will be inhabited. And
in the matter of food-getting, as in everything else, man is only
finite. Undreamed-of efficiencies in food-getting may be
achieved, but, soon or late, man will find himself face to face
with Malthus’ grim law. Not only will population catch up with
subsistence, but it will press against subsistence, and the
pressure will be pitiless and savage. Somewhere in the future is
a date when man will face, consciously, the bitter fact that there
is not food enough for all of him to eat.
When this day comes, what then? Will there be a recrudescence of
old obsolete war? In a saturated population life is always cheap,
as it is cheap in China, in India, to-day. Will new human drifts
take place, questing for room, carving earth-space out of crowded
life. Will the Sword again sing:
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“Follow, O follow, then,
Heroes, my harvesters!
Where the tall grain is ripe
Thrust in your sickles!
Stripped and adust
In a stubble of empire
Scything and binding
The full sheaves of sovereignty.”
Even if, as of old, man should wander hungrily, sword in hand,
slaying and being slain, the relief would be only temporary. Even
if one race alone should hew down the last survivor of all the
other races, that one race, drifting the world around, would
saturate the planet with its own life and again press against
subsistence. And in that day, the death rate and the birth rate
will have to balance. Men will have to die, or be prevented from
being born. Undoubtedly a higher quality of life will obtain, and
also a slowly decreasing fecundity. But this decrease will be so
slow that the pressure against subsistence will remain. The
control of progeny will be one of the most important problems of
man and one of the most important functions of the state. Men
will simply be not permitted to be born.
Disease, from time to time, will ease the pressure. Diseases are
parasites, and it must not be forgotten that just as there are
drifts in the world of man, so are there drifts in the world of
micro-organisms–hunger-quests for food. Little is known of the
micro-organic world, but that little is appalling; and no census
of it will ever be taken, for there is the true, literal “abysmal
fecundity.” Multitudinous as man is, all his totality of
individuals is as nothing in comparison with the inconceivable
vastness of numbers of the micro-organisms. In your body, or in
mine, right now, are swarming more individual entities than there
are human beings in the world to-day. It is to us an invisible
world. We only guess its nearest confines. With our powerful
microscopes and ultramicroscopes, enlarging diameters twenty
thousand times, we catch but the slightest glimpses of that
profundity of infinitesimal life.
Little is known of that world, save in a general way. We know
that out of it arise diseases, new to us, that afflict and destroy
man. We do not know whether these diseases are merely the drifts,
in a fresh direction, of already-existing breeds of micro-
organisms, or whether they are new, absolutely new, breeds
themselves just spontaneously generated. The latter hypothesis is
tenable, for we theorise that if spontaneous generation still
occurs on the earth, it is far more likely to occur in the form of
simple organisms than of complicated organisms.
Another thing we know, and that is that it is in crowded
populations that new diseases arise. They have done so in the
past. They do so to-day. And no matter how wise are our
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physicians and bacteriologists, no matter how successfully they
cope with these invaders, new invaders continue to arise–new
drifts of hungry life seeking to devour us. And so we are
justified in believing that in the saturated populations of the
future, when life is suffocating in the pressure against
subsistence, that new, and ever new, hosts of destroying micro-
organisms will continue to arise and fling themselves upon earth-
crowded man to give him room. There may even be plagues of
unprecedented ferocity that will depopulate great areas before the
wit of man can overcome them. And this we know: that no matter
how often these invisible hosts may be overcome by man’s becoming
immune to them through a cruel and terrible selection, new hosts
will ever arise of these micro-organisms that were in the world
before he came and that will be here after he is gone.
After he is gone? Will he then some day be gone, and this planet
know him no more? Is it thither that the human drift in all its
totality is trending? God Himself is silent on this point, though
some of His prophets have given us vivid representations of that