ht well, some may think, be left to neutralise each other and evaporate
in air. But it seems worth while to point out that, with proper
limitations and qualifications, there is an element of truth in each of
them, while, without such limitations and qualifications, both are alike
obviously absurd and wrong-headed. Undoubtedly, as the one school holds,
in certain stages of civilisation, even at a fairly advanced stage,
nations tend to break out over their frontiers with resulting war; but the
period when they reach "the plenitude of vigour and self-consciousness" is
exactly the period when the birth-rate begins to decline, and the
population, deliberately or instinctively, controls its own increase. That
has, for instance, been the history of France since the great expansion of
population, roughly associated with the Napoleonic epopee,--which
doubtless covered a web of causes, sanitary, political, industrial,
favourable to a real numerical increase of the nation--had died down
slowly to the level we witness to-day.[29] Similarly, with regard to the
opposing school, we must undoubtedly accept a natural fall in the
birth-rate with a rising civilisation; that has always been visible in
highly civilised individual couples, and it is an easily ascertainable
zoological fact that throughout the evolution of life procreativeness has
decreased with the increased development of species. We may agree that a
natural factor comes into the recent fall in the human birth-rate. But to
argue that because a natural decline in birth-rate is the essential factor
in the slowing down of procreative activity with all higher evolution,
therefore deliberate birth-control counts for nothing, since exactly the
same result follows when voluntary prevention is adopted and when it is
not, seems highly absurd. We must at least admit that voluntary
birth-control is an important contributory cause, in some sense indeed, of
supreme importance, because it is within man's own power and because man
is thus enabled to guide and mould processes of Nature which might
otherwise work disastrously. How disastrously is shown by the history of
Europe, and in a notable degree France, during the four or five centuries
preceding the end of the eighteenth century when various new influences
began to operate. During all these centuries there was undoubtedly a very
high birth-rate, yet infant mortality, war, famine, insanitation,
contagious diseases of many and virulent kin