t radical and thorough attack
on the birth-rate before we can make any real impression on the rate of
increase of the population, to say nothing of its real reduction. There is
still an arduous road before us.

True it is that we have two opposing schools of thought which both say
that we need not, or that we cannot, make any difference by our efforts to
regulate the earth's human population. According to one view the
development of population, together with the necessity for war which is
inextricably mixed up with a developing population, cannot be effected
without, as one champion of the doctrine is pleased to put it, "shattering
both the structure of Euclidean space and the psychological laws upon
which the existence of self-consciousness and human society are
conditional."[27] In simpler words, populations tend to become too large
for their territories, so that war ensues, and birth-control can do
nothing because "it is doubtful whether a group in the plenitude of vigour
and self-consciousness can deliberately stop its own growth." The other
school proclaims human impotence on exactly opposite grounds. There is not
the slightest reason, it declares, to believe that birth-control has had
any but a completely negligible influence on population. This is a natural
process and fertility is automatically adjusted to the death-rate.
Whenever a population reaches a certain stage of civilisation and nervous
development its procreativeness, quite apart from any effort of the will,
tends to diminish. The seeming effect of birth-control is illusory. It is
Nature, not human effort, which is at work.[28]

[27] B.A.G. Fuller, "The Mechanical Basis of War," _Hibbert Journal_,
1921.

[28] Sir Shirley Murphy some years ago (_Lancet_, 10 Aug. 1912) argued
that the fall of the birth-rate, as also that of the death-rate, has
been largely effected by natural causes, independent of man's action.
Mr. G. Udney Yule (_The Fall in the Birth-rate_, 1920) also believes
that birth-control counts for little, the chief factor being natural
fluctuations, probably of economic nature. Recently Mr. C.E. Pell, in
his book, _The Law of Births and Deaths_ (1921), has made a more
elaborate and systematic attempt to show that the rise and fall of the
birth-rate has hitherto been independent of human effort.

These two opposing councils of despair, each proclaiming, though in a
contrary sense, the vanity of human wishes in the matter of procreation,
mig