its character?
Clearly not if the _must_ in the case is interpreted literally. A low
birth rate may be secured, not at the cost of virtue, but by a
self-discipline that is quite in harmony with virtue and is certain to
give to it a virile character which it loses when men put little
restraint on their impulses. Late marriages for men stand as the
legitimate effect of the desire to sustain a high standard of living
and to transmit it to descendants; and late marriages for women stand
first among the normal causes of a retarded growth of population.
Moreover, the same moral strength which induces men to defer marriage
dictates a considerate and prudent conduct after it, and prevents
unduly large families without entailing the moral injury which
reckless conduct involves. On the other hand, there may be an
indefinite postponement of marriage by classes that lack moral stamina
and readily lapse into vice. There are vicious measures, not here to
be named in detail, which keep down the number of births or increase
the number of deaths, mostly prenatal, though the infanticide of
earlier times is not extinct. By strength and also by weakness, by
virtue and also by vice, is the economic mandate which limits the rate
of growth of population carried out. A limit of growth must be imposed
if mankind is to make the most of itself or of the resources of its
environment. There is no great doubt that it will be so imposed, and
the great issue is between the two ways of doing it; namely, that
which brutalizes men and depraves them morally and physically, and
that which places them on a high moral level.

_Moral Losses attending Civilization._--There is little doubt that
vice has made gains which reduce in a disastrous way the otherwise
favorable results of increasing wealth. The "hastening ills" that are
said to attend accumulating wealth and decaying manhood have come in a
disquieting degree and forced us to qualify the happy conclusions to
which a study of purely economic tendencies leads. The evil is not
confined to the realm of family relations, but pervades politics,
"high finance," and a large part of the domain of social pleasures.
The richer world is the more sybaritic--self-indulgent and intolerant
of many moral restraints; and if one expects to preserve an
unquestioning trust in the future, he must find a way in which the
economic gains which he hopes for can be made without a casting away
of the moral standards which are ind