as that now
taking place_ will be accompanied by a lowering in the standard of our
civilisation."

There are definite reasons why real progress in the supreme tasks of
civilisation can best be made by a more or less stationary population,
whether the population is large or small, and it need scarcely be added
that, so far as the history of mankind is yet legible, the great advances
in civilisation have been made by small, even very small populations.
Where the population is rapidly growing, even if it is growing under the
favourable conditions that hardly ever accompany such growth, all its
energy is absorbed in adjusting its perpetually shifting equilibrium. It
cannot succeed in securing the right conditions of growth, because its
growth is never ceasing to demand new conditions. The structure of its
civilisation never rises above the foundations because these foundations
have perpetually to be laid afresh, and there is never time to get
further. It is a process, moreover, accompanied by unending friction and
disorder, by strains and stresses of all kinds, which are fatal to any
full, harmonious, and democratic civilisation. The "population question,"
with the endlessly mischievous readjustment it demands, must be eliminated
before the great House of Life can be built up on a strong solid human
foundation, to lift its soaring pinnacles towards the skies. That is what
many bitter experiences are beginning to teach us. In the future we are
likely to be much less concerned about "race-suicide," though we can never
be too concerned about race-murder.

When we think, however, of the desirability of a more or less stationary
population, in order to insure real social progress, as distinct from that
vain struggle of meaningless movement to and fro which the history of the
past reveals, we have to be clear in our minds that it may be far from
desirable that the present overgrown population of the world should be
stationary. That might indeed be better than further increase in numbers,
it would arrest the growth of our present evils; it might open the way to
methods by which they would be diminished or eliminated. But the process
would be infinitely difficult, and almost infinitely slow, as we may
easily realise when we consider that, with a population even smaller than
at present, the human race has not only ravished the world's beauty almost
out of existence, but so ravaged its own vital spirit that, as was found
with some c