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 consternation during the Great War, a large proportion of the male population of every country is unfit for military service.

So often we hear it assumed, or even asserted, that greatness means quantity, so that to look forward to the replacement of the present teeming insignificant human myriads by a rarer and more truly greater race is to be a pessimist!  Oh, these “optimists”!  To revel in a world which more and more closely resembles all that the poets ever imagined of Hell, is to be an “optimist”!  One wonders how it is that in no brief moment of lucidity it occurs to these people that the lower we descend in the scale of life the greater the quantity in a species and the poorer the quality, so that to reach what such people should really regard as the world’s period of supreme greatness in life we must go back to the days, before animal life appeared, when the earth was merely a teeming mass of bacteria.[26]