Along this road, as along any other road, we shall not reach Utopia; and since the Utopia of every person who possesses one is unique that perhaps need not be regretted.  We shall not even, within any measurable period of time, reach a sanely free and human life fit to satisfy quite moderate aspirations.  The wise birth-controller will not (like the deliciously absurd suffragette of old-time) imagine that birth-control for all means a New Heaven and a New Earth, but will, rather, appreciate the delightful irony of the Biblical legend which represented a world with only four people in it, yet one of them a murderer.  Still, it may be pointed out, that was a state of things much better than we can show now.  The world would count itself happier if, during the Great War, only twenty-five per cent of the population of belligerent lands had been murderers, virtually or in fact.  There is something to be gained, and that something is well worth while.

Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.[31] To many of our Undesirables it may seem, mere sentiment to trouble about the ravishing of the world’s beauty or the ravaging of the world’s humanity.  But certain hard facts, even to-day, have to be faced.  The process of mechanical invention continues every day on an ever increasing scale of magnitude.  Now that process, however necessary, however beneficial, involves some of the chief evils of our present phase of what we call civilisation, partly because it has deteriorated the quality of all human products and partly because it has enslaved mankind, and in so doing deteriorated also his quality.[32] Now we cannot abolish machinery, because machinery lies in the very essence of life and we ourselves are machines.  But, as the largest part of history shows, there is no need whatever for man to become the slave of machinery, or even for machinery to injure the quality of his own work; rightly used it may improve it.  The greatest task before civilisation at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men; and if civilisation fails at the task, then without doubt it and its makers will go down to a common destruction.  It is a task inextricably bound up with the task of moulding the human race for which birth-control is the elected instrument.  Indeed they are but two aspects of the same task.  We have to accept the rugged fact that every step to render more nearly perfect the mechanical side of life correspondingly abolishes the need for men.  Thus it is calculated to-day that whenever, in accordance with a growing tendency, coal is superseded by oil in industry two men are enabled to do the work of twelve.  That is merely typical of what is taking place generally in our modern system of civilisation.  Everywhere a small number of men are being enabled to replace a large number of men.  Not to avoid looking ahead, we may say that of every twelve millions of our population,