Page:Little Essays of Love and Virtue (1922).djvu/174

 civilisation have been made by small, even very small populations. Where the population is rapidly growing, even if it is growing under the favourable conditions that hardly ever accompany such growth, all its energy is absorbed in adjusting its perpetually shifting equilibrium. It cannot succeed in securing the right conditions of growth, because its growth is never ceasing to demand new conditions. The structure of its civilisation never rises above the foundations because these foundations have perpetually to be laid afresh, and there is never time to get further. It is a process, moreover, accompanied by unending friction and disorder, by strains and stresses of all kinds, which are fatal to any full, harmonious, and democratic civilisation. The “population question,” with the endlessly mischievous readjustment it demands, must be eliminated before the great House of Life can be built up on a strong solid human foundation, to lift its soaring pinnacles towards the skies. That is what many bitter experiences are beginning to teach us. In the future we are likely to be much less concerned about “race-suicide,” though we can never be too concerned about race-murder.

When we think, however, of the desirability of a more or less stationary population, in order to insure real social progress, as distinct from that vain struggle of meaningless movement to and fro which the history of the past reveals, we