Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/26

 as individuals who in different conditions would have died, live on, perhaps reproducing their species, and thus intensifying the population problem. Against these influences may be set the effect of the restrictions imposed by some civilised peoples on the birth rate, which Mr Roosevelt calls "race suicide." These practices, just now increasingly prevalent, retard the rate of increase, but do not at present stop our increase: they alleviate, but do not cure the difficulty of over-population. Artificial physiological checks on population, if 1am right in certain other conjectures to be presently developed, will not form part of the permanent morality of the new age, partly because, with more enlightenment, they will be voluntarily abandoned or superseded, and partly because the necessity for them will have disappeared, having worked out its own cure.

But with all this it would be folly to anticipate that the population of the civilised world will not have greatly increased before the end of the period contemplated by the present inquiry: and this brings us face to face with two very important questions—those of housing and transport. Where shall we live, and how shall we move from place to place—above all, how shall we proceed from home to the scene of work and thence home again every day, in the future? Shall we indeed thus move back and forth at all?