onsternation during the Great War, a large proportion of the
male population of every country is unfit for military service.

So often we hear it assumed, or even asserted, that greatness means
quantity, so that to look forward to the replacement of the present
teeming insignificant human myriads by a rarer and more truly greater race
is to be a pessimist! Oh, these "optimists"! To revel in a world which
more and more closely resembles all that the poets ever imagined of Hell,
is to be an "optimist"! One wonders how it is that in no brief moment of
lucidity it occurs to these people that the lower we descend in the scale
of life the greater the quantity in a species and the poorer the quality,
so that to reach what such people should really regard as the world's
period of supreme greatness in life we must go back to the days, before
animal life appeared, when the earth was merely a teeming mass of
bacteria.[26]

[26] See, for instance, H.F. Osborn, _The Origin and Evolution of Life_,
1918, Chapter III.

To-day, we are often told, the majority of human beings belong either to
the Undesired Class or the Undesirable Class. To realise that this is so,
we are bidden to read the newspapers or to walk along the streets of the
cities--whichever they may be--wherein dwell the highest products of our
civilisation. In the better class quarters it is indeed the Undesirable
Class that seems to predominate, and in the poor quarters, the Undesired.
Yet, viewing our species as a whole, the two classes may be seen to walk
hand in hand along the same road, and in proportion as our nobler
instincts germinate and develop, we must doubtless admit that it ought to
be our active aim to make that road for both of them--socially though not
individually--the Road to Destruction.

To stem the devastating tide of human procreativeness, however, easy as it
may seem in theory, is by no means so easy as some think, especially as
those think who believe that the human race stands on the brink of
suicide. For there is this about it that we must never forget: the
majority of those born to-day die before their time, so that by
diminishing the production of the unfit, as well as by the progressive
improvement of the environment that automatically accompanies such
diminution, we may make an imposing difference in the appearance of the
birth-rate, whilst yet the population goes on increasing rapidly, probably
even more rapidly than before. It needs a mos