ong in
most women, and not lacking to some degree in most men.
The joys of caring for and rearing a child have too often been
celebrated in literature and in life by parents both young and
old to need more explicit statement here.

RESTRICTION OF POPULATION. But reproduction has been in
human history promiscuous, and increase of population has
been less a problem to moralists and economists than has its
restriction. The danger of over-increase in population was
first powerfully stated by Malthus in his _Essay on Population_.
Malthus contended in effect that population always tends to
increase up to the limit of subsistence, and gives indications,
unless increase is checked, of increasing beyond it. In its
extreme form, as it appeared in Malthus's first edition of his
_Essay_, it ran somewhat as follows:

As things are now, there is a perpetual pressure by population on
the sources of food. Vice and misery cut down the number of men
when they grow beyond the food. The increase of men is rapid and
easy; the increase of food is in comparison, slow, and toilsome. They
are to each other as a geometrical increase to an arithmetical; in
North America, the population double their number in twenty years.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bonar: _Philosophy and Political Economy in their
Historic Relations_, p. 205.]

Malthus's pessimistic prophecy of the increase of population
beyond the means of subsistence has been subjected to
refutation by various causes. For one thing, among civilized
races at least, the birth-rate is declining. Again, intensive
agriculture has vastly increased the possibilities of our natural
resources. On this point, writes Kropotkin, who is better
acquainted with agricultural conditions than are most social
reformers:

They [market gardeners] have created a totally new agriculture.
They smile when we boast about the rotation system having permitted
us to take from the field one crop every year, or four crops
each three years, because their ambition is to have six and nine crape
from the very same plot of land during the twelve months. They
do not understand our talk about good and bad soils, because they
make the soils themselves, and make it in such quantities as to be
compelled yearly to seed some of it; otherwise it would raise up the
levels of their gardens by half an inch, every year. They aim at
cropping, not five or six tons of grass on the acre as we do, but from
fifty to one hundred tons of various vege