The real danger lay in the fecundity of her loins, and it was in 1970 that the first cry of alarm was raised.  For some time all territories adjacent to China had been grumbling at Chinese immigration; but now it suddenly came home to the world that China’s population was 500,000,000.  She had increased by a hundred millions since her awakening.  Burchaldter called attention to the fact that there were more Chinese in existence than white-skinned people.  He performed a simple sum in arithmetic.  He added together the populations of the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, European Russia, and all Scandinavia.  The result was 495,000,000.  And the population of China overtopped this tremendous total by 5,000,000.  Burchaldter’s figures went round the world, and the world shivered.

For many centuries China’s population had been constant.  Her territory had been saturated with population; that is to say, her territory, with the primitive method of production, had supported the maximum limit of population.  But when she awoke and inaugurated the machine-civilization, her productive power had been enormously increased.  Thus, on the same territory, she was able to support a far larger population.  At once the birth rate began to rise and the death rate to fall.  Before, when population pressed against the means of subsistence, the excess population had been swept away by famine.  But now, thanks to the machine-civilization, China’s means of subsistence had been enormously extended, and there were no famines; her population followed on the heels of the increase in the means of subsistence.

During this time of transition and development of power, China had entertained no dreams of conquest.  The Chinese was not an imperial race.  It was industrious, thrifty, and peace-loving.  War was looked upon as an unpleasant but necessary task that at times must be performed.  And so, while the Western races had squabbled and fought, and world-adventured against one another, China had calmly gone on working at her machines and growing.  Now she was spilling over the boundaries of her Empire—­that was all, just spilling over into the adjacent territories with all the certainty and terrifying slow momentum of a glacier.

Following upon the alarm raised by Burchaldter’s figures, in 1970 France made a long-threatened stand.  French Indo-China had been overrun, filled up, by Chinese immigrants.  France called a halt.  The Chinese wave flowed on.  France assembled a force of a hundred thousand on the boundary between her unfortunate colony and China, and China sent down an army of militia-soldiers a million strong.  Behind came the wives and sons and daughters and relatives, with their personal household luggage, in a second army.  The French force was brushed aside like a fly.  The Chinese militia-soldiers, along with their families, over five millions all told, coolly took possession of French Indo-China and settled down to stay for a few thousand years.