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 European world, would one day realise the advantages of a stationary population.[25] Such a recognition, such an aspiration, indicates that a new hope is dawning on the world’s horizon, and a higher ideal growing within the human soul.  The mad competition of the industrial world during the past century, with the sordid gloom and wretchedness of it for all who were able to see beneath the surface, has shown for ever what comes of the effort to produce a growing population by high birth-rates in peace-time.  The Great War of a later day has shown, let us hope in an equally decisive manner, what comes to a world where men have been for long generations produced so copiously and so cheaply that it is natural to regard them as only fit to sweep off the earth with machine guns.  And the whole world of to-day—­with its starving millions struggling in vain to feed themselves, with most of its natural beauty swept away by the ravages of man, and many of its most exquisite animals finally exterminated—­is likely to become merely the monument to an ideal that failed.  It was time, however late in the day, for a return to common-sense.  It was time to realise that the ideal of mere propagation could lead us nowhere but to destruction.  On that level we cannot compete even with the lowest of organised things, not even with the bacteria, which in number and in rapidity of multiplication are inconceivable to us.  “All hope abandon, ye that enter here” is written over the portal of this path of “Progress.”

[25] This has long been recognised by men of science.  Even anyone with the slightest knowledge of biology, Professor Bateson remarked in a British Association Presidential address in 1914, is aware that a population need not be declining because it is not increasing; “in normal stable conditions population is stationary.”  Major Leonard Darwin, the thoughtful and cautious President of the Eugenics Education Society, has lately stated his considered belief ("Population and Civilisation,” Economic Journal, June, 1921) that increase in numbers means, ultimately, relative reduction of wealth per head, with consequent lowering of the standard of civilisation; that it also, under existing conditions, involves the production of a smaller proportion of men of ability; and, further, a depreciation of our traditions; he concludes that, whatever element in civilisation we regard—­wealth, or stock, or traditions—­“any increase in the population such as that now taking place will be accompanied by a lowering in the standard of our civilisation.”