The outcry about “Race-Suicide” is so far away from the real facts of life that it is not easy to take it seriously, however solemn one’s natural temperament may be.  We are concerned with people who arrogantly claim to direct the moral affairs of the world, even in the most intimately private matters, and who are yet ignorant of the most elementary facts of the world, unable to think, not even able to count!  We can only greet them with a smile.  But this question has, nevertheless, a genuinely serious aspect, and I should be sorry even to touch on the question of birth-control in relation to “Race-Suicide” without making that serious aspect clear.

“Race-Suicide,” we know, has no existence.  Not only is the race as a whole increasing in number, especially its White branches, but even among the separate national groups there is not even one civilised people anywhere in the world that is decreasing in number.  On the contrary they are all, even France, increasing at a more or less rapid rate.  In England and Wales, for example, where the birth-rate has steadily fallen during the last forty years from 36 to 23 (I disregard the abnormal rates of War-time) the population is still increasing, and even if the present falls in birth-rate and death-rate continue, 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.