it will for years still go on
increasing by an excess of over 1,000 births a day. When we realise that
this is merely what goes on in one corner of the world and must be
multiplied enormously to represent the whole, we shall find it impossible
even to conceive the prodigious flow of excess babies which is being
constantly poured over the earth. If we are capable of realising all the
problems which thereby arise we must be forced to ask ourselves: _Is this
state of things desirable_?

"Be ye fruitful and multiply." That command was, according to the old
story, delivered to a world inhabited by eight people. It has been handed
down to a world in which it has long been ridiculously out of place, and
has become merely the excuse for criminal recklessness among a race which
has chosen to forget that the command was qualified by a solemn
admonition: "At the hand of man, even at the hand of every man's brother,
will I require the life of man." The high birth-rate has meant a vast
slaughter of infants, it has meant, moreover, a perpetual oppression of
the workers, disease, starvation, and death among the adult population; it
has meant, further, a blood-thirsty economic competition, militarism,
warfare. It has meant that all civilisation has from time to time become a
thin crust over a volcano of revolution, and the human race has gone on
lightly dancing there, striving to forget that ancient warning from a soul
of things even deeper than the voice of Jehovah: "At the hand of man will
I require the life of man." Men have recklessly followed the Will o' the
Wisp which represented mere multiplication of their inefficient selves as
the ideal of progress, quantity before quality, the notion that in an orgy
of universal procreation could consist the highest good of humanity.

The Great War, that is scarcely yet merged into an only less war-like
Peace, has brought at least the small compensation that it has led men to
look in the face this insane ideal of human progress. We see to-day what
has come of it, and the further evils yet to come of it are being embodied
beneath our eyes. So that at last the voice of Jehovah has here and there
been faintly heard, even where nowadays we had grown least accustomed to
hear it, in the Churches. It is Dr. Inge, the Dean of London's Cathedral
of St. Paul's, a distinguished Churchman and at the same time a foremost
champion of eugenics, who lately expressed the hope that the world,
especially the E