[27] B.A.G.  Fuller, “The Mechanical Basis of War,” Hibbert Journal, 1921.

[28] Sir Shirley Murphy some years ago (Lancet, 10 Aug. 1912) argued that the fall of the birth-rate, as also that of the death-rate, has been largely effected by natural causes, independent of man’s action.  Mr. G. Udney Yule (The Fall in the Birth-rate, 1920) also believes that birth-control counts for little, the chief factor being natural fluctuations, probably of economic nature.  Recently Mr. C.E.  Pell, in his book, The Law of Births and Deaths (1921), has made a more elaborate and systematic attempt to show that the rise and fall of the birth-rate has hitherto been independent of human effort.

These two opposing councils of despair, each proclaiming, though in a contrary sense, the vanity of human wishes in the matter of procreation, might 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,