alism 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:

"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 wan