rs,
as if to have forty million dollar-hunters in the world were any better
than to have twenty million dollar-hunters! The implication that
Americans are nothing but dollar-hunters, and are thereby
distinguishable from the rest of mankind, would not perhaps bear too
elaborate scrutiny. But during the present lecture we have been
considering the gradual transfer of the preponderance of physical
strength from the hands of the war-loving portion of the human race into
the hands of the peace-loving portion,--into the hands of the
dollar-hunters, if you please, but out of the hands of the
scalp-hunters. Obviously to double the numbers of a pre-eminently
industrious, peaceful, orderly, and free-thinking community, is somewhat
to increase the weight in the world of the tendencies that go towards
making communities free and orderly and peaceful and industrious. So
that, from this point of view, the fact we are speaking of is well worth
considering, even for its physical dimensions. I do not know whether the
United States could support a population everywhere as dense as that of
Belgium; so I will suppose that, with ordinary improvement in
cultivation and in the industrial arts, we might support a population
half as dense as that of Belgium,--and this is no doubt an extremely
moderate supposition. Now a very simple operation in arithmetic will
show that this means a population of fifteen hundred millions, or more
than the population of the whole world at the present date. Another
very simple operation in arithmetic will show that if we were to go on
doubling our numbers, even once in every twenty-five years, we should
reach that stupendous figure at about the close of the twentieth
century,--that is, in the days of our great-greatgrandchildren. I do not
predict any such result, for there are discernible economic reasons for
believing that there will be a diminution in the rate of increase. The
rate must nevertheless continue to be very great, in the absence of such
causes as formerly retarded the growth of population in Europe. Our
modern wars are hideous enough, no doubt, but they are short. They are
settled with a few heavy blows, and the loss of life and property
occasioned by them is but trifling when compared with the awful ruin and
desolation wrought by the perpetual and protracted contests of antiquity
and of the Middle Ages. Chronic warfare, both private and public,
periodic famines, and sweeping pestilences like the Bla