Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/86

 a temporary character, is yet extremely important for the present day and for the near future. The period in which we live is in one respect a direct contrast to that in which our forefathers lived a hundred years ago. In those days, under the influence of contemporary facts and of the doctrine which we associate with the name of Malthus, people dreaded a large population and its rapid increase. In the intervening century mankind has found out how to rationalise reproduction on purely individualistic lines, and now all are more alarmed by the danger of a stoppage in the growth of population, which threatens the most highly civilized part of the world to-day. Russia is the only large country where the birth-rate has in recent years shown practically no tendency to diminish. Since, too, there is abundant room in Russia for a diminution in the rate of mortality, a very considerable growth of population enters into any estimate of the economic prospects of Russia as a very essential factor. This is a fundamental fact of our present economic position, and, in no less measure, of our political, social, and economic future. We in Russia have not yet been gripped by the individualistic rationalism so typical of countries pf older economic culture, which, though in another form, was recommended by Malthus, but which as a real potentiality entered so little into his calculations.

We are going on multiplying, and if we succeed—and evidently we are already beginning to succeed—in lowering the death-rate through the increase in material well-being which accompanies the spread of education, the rate of growth of the population of