, actually creates a greater abundance of unemployed rich at
the other end; but neither excess points in itself to over-population
--only to a diseased state of distribution. What we really
ought to aim at creating is a nation in which every one was
capable of doing useful or beautiful work of some kind or other and was
gladly occupied in doing it. Such a nation would be truly healthy. It
would be powerful and productive beyond all our present dreams. But the
Western nations of to-day, with their huge burdens of unskilled,
ill-grown poor and their huge burden of incompetent, feeble rich--it is
a wonder that they survive. They would not survive a decade or two if
the Chinese or the Japanese in their numbers were to come into personal
and direct competition with them.

If Britain is not really at present over-populated, the same is probably
even more true of Germany. For Germany, with a larger and more fertile
area in proportion to her population, is safer than we are in the matter
of self-support. But again in Germany the outcry of over-population has
arisen, and has arisen from the same cause as here--namely, the rise of
the commercial system, the division of the nation into extremes of
poverty and riches, and the consequent _appearance_ of excess population
in both directions. And this diseased state of the nation has led to a
fever of "expansion" and has been (as already said) one of the chief
causes of the present war. As long as the modern nations are such fools
as to conduct their industrial affairs in the existing way they will not
only be full of strife, disease, and discord in themselves, but they
will inevitably quarrel with their neighbours.

All this, however, does not prove that a genuine over-population
difficulty may not occur even now in localities, and possibly in some
far future time over the whole earth. And it may be just as well to
consider these possibilities.

Dismissing War and Disease as solutions--as belonging to barbarous and
ignorant ages of human evolution--there remain, perhaps, three rational
methods of dealing with the question: (1) the organization and
improvement of industrial production on existing lands so far as to
allow the support of a larger population; (2) the transport of excess
populations to new and undeveloped lands (colonization); (3) the
limitation of families.

The first method hardly needs discussion here. Its importance is too
obvious. It needs, however, more public d