ing another. Mankind will ever set new
tasks to itself, and the accomplishment of the same will lead it to such
a degree of social development that wars, religious quarrels and similar
manifestations of barbarism will be unknown.

FOOTNOTE:

[228] "National and human interests stand to-day opposed to each other.
At a higher stage of civilization these interests will coincide and
become one."--v. Thuenen, "Der Isolirte Staat."

PART V

POPULATION _and_ OVER-POPULATION

POPULATION AND OVER-POPULATION

It has become quite fashionable with people who occupy themselves with
the social question to consider the question of population as the most
important and burning of all. They claim that we are threatened with
"over-population;" aye, that the danger is upon us. This, more than any
other division of the Social Question, must be treated from an
international standpoint. The feeding and the distribution of the people
have pre-eminently become international issues of fact. Since Malthus,
the law underlying the increase of population has been the subject of
extensive dispute. In his celebrated and now notorious "Essay on the
Principles of Population," which Marx has characterized as a
"school-boyish, superficial and pulpiteer piece of declamatory
plagiarism on Sir James Stewart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace and others"
and which "contains not one original sentence," Malthus lays down the
proposition that mankind has the tendency to increase in geometric
progression (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.), while food could increase only
in arithmetic progression (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.); and that the
consequence is a rapid disproportion between the numbers of the
population and the supply of food, that inevitably leads to want and
starvation. The final conclusion was the necessity of "abstinence" in
the procreation of children, and abstinence from marriage without
sufficient means for the support of a family, contrariwise there would
be no place at "the banquet table of Nature" for the descendants.

The fear of over-population is very old. It was touched upon in this
work in connection with the social conditions of the Greeks and Romans,
and at the close of the Middle Ages. Plato and Aristotle, the Romans,
the small bourgeois of the Middle Ages were all swayed by it, and it
even swayed Voltaire, who, in the first quarter of the eighteenth
century, published a treatise on the subject. The fear ever turns up
again--this circu