Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/56

46 hindrance does not overbalance the added help. If we ignore social hindrances to individual well-being, we shall come out just where the mechanical inventor does who ignores friction.

These hindrances arise in various ways. The very existence of our fellow-beings, if in too large numbers, is a hindrance. We may denounce Malthus as much as we like, but we can not deny the awful consequences of world-crowding. Doubtless it has goaded on inventive genius, and thus promoted mutual helpfulness; but, like most social causes which work remote good, it has worked also immediate evil, and the bones of its pallid victims lie buried in the earth by countless millions. Many writers have been troubled about the matter, and especially about the future it seems to promise. Others have succeeded in convincing themselves that there is no danger, and that the denser the population the happier the individual. The truth which they distort into this error is that the evil effects of world-crowding have been partially offset, in some places more than offset, by new discoveries which cheapened production. It was not always so, and may not always be so. Certainly there are no more new continents to discover. How many new substances, or new powers and uses of old ones, are yet to discover, can not be guessed. But meantime world-crowding, the natural increase of the human species, is going on, and is constantly thrusting human beings into one another's way. We might as well face this truth as deny it, if we are going to study science. Our shrinking from a truth because it is disagreeable, unfortunately does not make it a whit less true. Up to a certain point, and it is a movable point, increase of population is beneficial. There is a certain density of population which is more desirable than any other—than any greater or any less. This movable point of most desirable density of population is moved constantly upward by the inventors who crowd the Patent-Office, by the projectors of great enterprises, and by the skillful organizers of industry; as well as by the statesmen who simplify and perfect the government, and the religious, moral, and economic teachers who facilitate adjustment of the relations of crowding and jostling human beings. As the bounds are thus extended, population grows and fills them—sometimes not quite, but alas! sometimes it quite outgrows them. Before any other explanation of the wretched condition of a community is offered, this one of population should be fully considered.

The grave question which each one asks himself as he gazes upon his own offspring, and wonders what will be the condition of their offspring some generations removed, is, Will this world-crowding relieve itself by checking reproduction as well as by stimulating mutual helpfulness; or will the time come, and how soon, when the only possible object of economic study will be to postpone the universal poverty and starvation of the human race, rather than, as now, to constantly better its condition? If a satisfactory answer to this