the men
and women who compose it. Its money, in the narrow sense, is nothing; a
set of meaningless chips and counters piled upon a banker's table ready
to fall at a touch. Even before the war we had begun to talk eagerly and
anxiously of the conservation of national resources, of the need of
safeguarding the forests and fisheries and the mines. These are
important things. But the war has shown that the most important thing of
all is the conservation of men and women.

The attitude of the nineteenth century upon this point was little short
of insane. The melancholy doctrine of Malthus had perverted the public
mind. Because it was difficult for a poor man to bring up a family, the
hasty conclusion was reached that a family ought not to be brought up.
But the war has entirely inverted and corrected this point of view. The
father and mother who were able to send six sturdy, native-born sons to
the conflict were regarded as benefactors of the nation. But these six
sturdy sons had been, some twenty years before, six "puling infants,"
viewed with gloomy disapproval by the Malthusian bachelor. If the
strength of the nation lies in its men and women there is only one way
to increase it. Before the war it was thought that a simpler and easier
method of increase could be found in the wholesale import of Austrians,
Bulgarians and Czecho-Slovaks. The newer nations boasted proudly of
their immigration tables. The fallacy is apparent now. Those who really
count in a nation and those who govern its destinies for good or ill are
those who are born in it.

It is difficult to over-estimate the harm that has been done to public
policy by this same Malthusian theory. It has opposed to every proposal
of social reform an obstacle that seemed insuperable,--the danger of a
rapid overincrease of population that would pauperize the community.
Population, it was said, tends always to press upon the heels of
subsistence. If the poor are pampered, they will breed fast: the time
will come when there will not be food for all and we shall perish in a
common destruction. Seen in this light, infant mortality and the cruel
wastage of disease were viewed with complacence. It was "Nature's" own
process at work. The "unfit," so called, were being winnowed out that
only the best might survive. The biological doctrine of evolution was
misinterpreted and misapplied to social policy.

But in the organic world there is no such thing as the "fit" or the
"unfit,