cities.

From our present point of view it is thus a very significant fact that
the equipoise between country-dwellers and town-dwellers has been lost,
that the towns are gaining at the expense of the country whose surplus
population they absorb and destroy. The town population is not only
disinclined to propagate; it is probably in some measure unfit to
propagate.

At the same time, we must not too strongly emphasize this aspect of the
matter; such over-emphasis of a single aspect of highly complex
phenomena constantly distorts our vision of great social processes. We
have already seen that it is inaccurate to assert any connection between
a high birth-rate and a high degree of national prosperity, except in so
far as at special periods in the history of a country a sudden wave of
prosperity may temporarily remove the restraints on natural fertility.
Prosperity is only one of the causes that tend to remove the restraint
on the birth-rate; and it is a cause that is never permanently
effective.

III

To get to the bottom of the matter, we thus find it is necessary to look
into it more closely than is usually attempted. When we ask ourselves
why prosperity fails permanently to remove the restraints on fertility
the answer is, that it speedily creates new restraints. Prosperity and
civilization are far from being synonymous terms. The savage who is
able to glut himself with the whale that has just been stranded on his
coast, is more prosperous than he was the day before, but he is not more
civilized, perhaps a trifle less so. The working community that is
suddenly glutted by an afflux of work and wages is in exactly the same
position as the savage who is suddenly enabled to fill himself with a
rich mass of decaying blubber. It is prosperity; it is not
civilization.[140] But, while prosperity leads at first to the reckless
and unrestrained gratification of the simplest animal instincts of
nutrition and reproduction, it tends, when it is prolonged, to evolve
more complex instincts. Aspirations become less crude, the needs and
appetites engendered by prosperity take on a more social character, and
are sharpened by social rivalries. In place of the earlier easy and
reckless gratification of animal impulses, a peaceful and organized
struggle is established for securing in ever fuller degree the
gratification of increasingly insistent and increasingly complex
desires. Such a struggle involves a deliberate calculation and