Page:Little Essays of Love and Virtue (1922).djvu/173

 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.”

There are definite reasons why real progress in the supreme tasks of civilisation can best be made by a more or less stationary population, whether the population is large or small, and it need scarcely be added that, so far as the history of mankind is yet legible, the great advances in