Furthermore, not only will socialism get food more easily and in greater quantity, but it will achieve a more equitable distribution of that food.  Socialism promises, for a time, to give all men, women, and children all they want to eat, and to enable them to eat all they want as often as they want.  Subsistence will be pushed back, temporarily, an exceedingly long way.  In consequence, the flood of life will rise like a tidal wave.  There will be more marriages and more children born.  The enforced sterility that obtains to-day for many millions, will no longer obtain.  Nor will the fecund millions in the slums and labour-ghettos, who to-day die of all the ills due to chronic underfeeding and overcrowding, and who die with their fecundity largely unrealised, die in that future day when the increased food-getting efficiency of socialism will give them all they want to eat.

It is undeniable that population will increase prodigiously-just as it has increased prodigiously during the last few centuries, following upon the increase in food-getting efficiency.  The magnitude of population in that future day is well nigh unthinkable.  But there is only so much land and water on the surface of the earth.  Man, despite his marvellous accomplishments, will never be able to increase the diameter of the planet.  The old days of virgin continents will be gone.  The habitable planet, from ice-cap to ice-cap, will be inhabited.  And in the matter of food-getting, as in everything else, man is only finite.  Undreamed-of efficiencies in food-getting may be achieved, but, soon or late, man will find himself face to face with Malthus’ grim law.  Not only will population catch up with subsistence, but it will press against subsistence, and the pressure will be pitiless and savage.  Somewhere in the future is a date when man will face, consciously, the bitter fact that there is not food enough for all of him to eat.

When this day comes, what then?  Will there be a recrudescence of old obsolete war?  In a saturated population life is always cheap, as it is cheap in China, in India, to-day.  Will new human drifts take place, questing for room, carving earth-space out of crowded life.  Will the Sword again sing: 

   “Follow, O follow, then,
   Heroes, my harvesters! 
   Where the tall grain is ripe
   Thrust in your sickles! 
   Stripped and adust
   In a stubble of empire
   Scything and binding
   The full sheaves of sovereignty.”

Even if, as of old, man should wander hungrily, sword in hand, slaying and being slain, the relief would be only temporary.  Even if one race alone should hew down the last survivor of all the other races, that one race, drifting the world around, would saturate the planet with its own life and again press against subsistence.  And in that day, the death rate and the birth rate will have to balance.  Men will have to die, or be prevented from being born.  Undoubtedly a higher quality of life will obtain, and also a slowly decreasing fecundity.  But this decrease will be so slow that the pressure against subsistence will remain.  The control of progeny will be one of the most important problems of man and one of the most important functions of the state.  Men will simply be not permitted to be born.