A thousand deaths by Jack London

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