uropean world, would one day realise the advantages of a
stationary population.[25] Such a recognition, such an aspiration,
indicates that a new hope is dawning on the world's horizon, and a higher
ideal growing within the human soul. The mad competition of the industrial
world during the past century, with the sordid gloom and wretchedness of
it for all who were able to see beneath the surface, has shown for ever
what comes of the effort to produce a growing population by high
birth-rates in peace-time. The Great War of a later day has shown, let us
hope in an equally decisive manner, what comes to a world where men have
been for long generations produced so copiously and so cheaply that it is
natural to regard them as only fit to sweep off the earth with machine
guns. And the whole world of to-day--with its starving millions struggling
in vain to feed themselves, with most of its natural beauty swept away by
the ravages of man, and many of its most exquisite animals finally
exterminated--is likely to become merely the monument to an ideal that
failed. It was time, however late in the day, for a return to
common-sense. It was time to realise that the ideal of mere propagation
could lead us nowhere but to destruction. On that level we cannot compete
even with the lowest of organised things, not even with the bacteria,
which in number and in rapidity of multiplication are inconceivable to us.
"All hope abandon, ye that enter here" is written over the portal of this
path of "Progress."

[25] This has long been recognised by men of science. Even anyone with
the slightest knowledge of biology, Professor Bateson remarked in a
British Association Presidential address in 1914, is aware that a
population need not be declining because it is not increasing; "in
normal stable conditions population is stationary." Major Leonard
Darwin, the thoughtful and cautious President of the Eugenics Education
Society, has lately stated his considered belief ("Population and
Civilisation," _Economic Journal_, June, 1921) that increase in numbers
means, ultimately, relative reduction of wealth per head, with
consequent lowering of the standard of civilisation; that it also, under
existing conditions, involves the production of a smaller proportion of
men of ability; and, further, a depreciation of our traditions; he
concludes that, whatever element in civilisation we regard--wealth, or
stock, or traditions--"any increase in the population _such