CHAPTER V

THE MULTIPLICATION OF MAN

“Increase and multiply”

The ceaseless multiplication of man is one of the facts which distinguish him from all other living species, animal or vegetable.[18]

We must not be misled by such a case as that of the multiplication of rabbits in Australia. Apart from such circumstances as human interference, the earth is already crammed with life of a kind, not the highest life nor the most intense life, but at any rate fully extended life. Man alone multiplies persistently, irresistibly, and has done so from the very first, so that, arising locally, he is now diffused over the whole surface of the earth. To quote from Professor Lankester again: “Man is Nature's rebel. Where Nature says Die! Man says I will live! According to the law previously in universal operation man should have been limited in geographical area, killed by extremes of cold or of heat, subject to starvation if one kind of diet were unobtainable, and should have been unable to increase and multiply, just as are his animal relatives, without losing his specific structure.... But man's wits and his will have enabled him ... to ‘increase and multiply,’ as no other animal, without change of form.”

Not only has man made himself the only animal which constantly increases in numbers, but this increase, as Professor Lankester points out in another part of his lecture, already threatening certain difficulties, will be much more rapid than at present, assuming the birth-rate to remain where it is, when disease is controlled. It is within our power, as Pasteur declared long ago, to abolish all parasitic, infectious or epidemic disease. This must be and will be done--within a century, I have little doubt. The problem of the increase of human population will become more pressing than ever. Professor Lankester suggests that in one or five centuries the difficulty raised by our multiplication “would, if let alone, force itself upon a desperate humanity, brutalised by over-crowding and the struggle for food. A return to Nature's terrible selection of the fittest may, it is conceivable, be in this way in store for us. But it is more probable that humanity will submit to a restriction by the community in respect of the right to multiply.” The lecturer added that we must therefore perfect our knowledge of heredity in man, as to which “there is absolutely no provision in any civilised community, and no conception among the people or their leaders, that it is a matter which concerns anyone but farmers.”

=The secret of multiplication.=--Professor Lankester, however, omits to point out the astonishing paradox involved in the fact that--as I pointed out at the Royal Institution in 1907--man, the only ceaselessly multiplying animal, has the lowest birth-rate of any living creature.[19] From the purely arithmetical point of view, what does it mean? We may defer at present any deeper interpretation.

It means necessarily and obviously that the effective means of multiplication is not a high birth-rate but a low death-rate. It is a necessary inference from the paradox in question that the infant death-rate and the general death-rate in man are the lowest anywhere to be found. Producing fewer young he alone multiplies.[20] It follows that a smaller proportion of those young must die. Unless it is supposed by bishops and others, then, that a peculiar value attaches to the production of a baby shortly to be buried, the suggestion evidently is the same as that to which every humanitarian and social and patriotic impulse guides us, namely, the reduction of the death-rate and especially the infant mortality. This is the true way in which to insure the more rapid multiplication of man, if that be desired. I believe it is not to be desired, but in any case the reduction of the death-rate and especially of the infant mortality is a worthy and necessary end in itself, and need not inevitably lead to our undue multiplication provided that the birth-rate falls. Hence the eugenists and the Episcopal Bench may join hands so far as the reduction of the death-rate is concerned, and the only persons with whom a practical quarrel remains are those who--in effect--applaud the mother who boasts that she has buried twelve.

=The facts of human multiplication.=--Human population continues to increase notwithstanding any changes in the birth-rate. This fact remains true, as shown by the latest obtainable figures. It should be one of the dogmas never absent from the foreground of the statesman's mind. Apparently nothing, however, will induce us to take this little forethought. When we build a bridge across the Thames, we ignore it; when we widen a bridge we ignore it likewise. When we make a new street we ignore it; when we build railways and railway stations we ignore it--excusably, perhaps, in this case; when we build hospitals we ignore it: four times out of five there is no room for the addition of a single ward in time to come. We have not yet even learnt, as they are learning in America and Germany, how to acquire the outlying lands of cities for the public possession, so that they may be properly employed as the city grows. The man who builds himself a villa on the outskirts of a city, ignores it, and is staggered by it in ten years. The lover of nature and the country ignores it: “Just look at this,” he says, “this was in the country when first I knew it, look at these horrible rows of villas!” The only possible reply to such a person is simply, “Well, my dear sir, what do you propose? General infanticide?” Most important of all, this fact, that, to take the case of Great Britain, some half million babies are born every year in excess over the number of all who die at all ages, is forgotten by our statesmen--or rather by our politicians. It could, of course, not be forgotten by a statesman. Quite apart from remoter consequences, especially in relation to the wheat supply, this persistent multiplication--which one has actually heard denied on the ground that the birth-rate is falling--is of urgent moment to all of us.

In 1907 the Census Bureau of Washington published some figures on the mortality statistics of nations, a summary of which may be quoted: “In all parts of the civilised world both the birth-rates and the death-rates tend to decrease, and, as a rule, those countries having the lowest death-rates have also the lowest birth-rates. In Europe the lowest birth-rate is that of France, the highest those of Servia and Roumania. The lowest death-rates are in Sweden and Norway; the highest in Russia and Spain. The downward tendency of the birth- and death-rates is best shown by diagrams prepared by the French Government, and it is probable that the downward tendency is actually steeper than the diagrams show, because both births and deaths are more accurately registered than formerly.”

But these statements are by no means necessarily incompatible with steady increase of population, which, of course, increases so long as the birth-rate exceeds the death-rate. I quote a few figures from the _Science Year Book_ of 1908:

In 1890 the total population of the world was estimated at 1,487,900,000.

Aryan (Europe, Persia, India, etc.) 545,000,000 Mongolian (N. and E. Asia) 630,000,000 Semitic (N. Africa) 65,000,000 Negro (C. Africa) 150,000,000 Malay and Polynesian 35,000,000 American Indian 15,000,000

The total figure now must be something like sixteen hundred millions at least.

Density of population, in so far as it means what is commonly called over-crowding, is an important factor in the death-rate, and has a most inimical influence upon race-culture--in virtue of the opportunity afforded to the racial poisons--syphilis, alcohol, etc. Thus Sweden has the lowest death-rate in Europe, and has much the least density of population--only 29 per square mile as compared with our own 341. If now the fact of the increase of population, with all that it means and will mean, may be taken as dealt with and accepted, there will be no danger of leading the reader to false conclusions if we insist upon the fall of the birth-rate, which in Great Britain in 1908 was the lowest on record. The death-rate, however, persistently falls also. The reader who thinks that the birth-rate alone determines the increase of population, and those who believe in polygamy on the ground that it necessarily makes for the rapid multiplication and therefore strength of a nation, should compare the death-rate of London, which is under 16, with that of Bombay, which is just under 79. It is asserted that in many large Indian cities the infant mortality approaches one-half of all the children born. What it amounts to in such cities as Canton and Pekin we can only surmise with horror.

Notwithstanding the persistent fall in the birth-rate of London the rate of increase in population remains stupendous, according to the calculations of Mr. Cottrell, which may be quoted from the _Science Year Book_ of 1908. He estimates the population of Greater London in 1910 at about 7½ millions, and in 1920 at well over 8½ millions--the falling birth-rate notwithstanding.

The increase of population of five great countries may be briefly noted here. In all, with the possible exception of Russia, the birth-rate is rapidly falling. In the course of the nineteenth century the population of

Russia (in Europe) rose from 38 to 105,000,000 France " " 26 " 38,000,000 Germany " " 23 " 55,000,000 Great Britain " " 15 " 40,000,000 United States " " 5 " 75,000,000

These are merely approximate figures, but accurate enough to be of value. It need hardly be pointed out that immigration accounts for the disproportionate increase of population in the United States. But it may be added that the imminent arrest or control of this immigration will assuredly have the most serious and pressing consequences for Europe. Plainly it must hasten the coming of national eugenics.

=The case of Germany.=--Especial interest and importance attach for many reasons to the case of Germany in this connection, and, as might be expected, many precise facts are available. Here I shall avail myself freely of the paper contributed by Dr. Sombart to the _International_ for December, 1907. In the first seven years of this century the population of Germany increased almost ten per cent. The figure in 1870 was 40.8 millions and in 1907 61 millions. The population is increasing yearly at the rate of about 800,000, as compared with about half a million in the case of Great Britain. In France in 1907 the population actually declined by a few thousands. In regard to the growth of population Germany is now at the head of all civilised countries, excepting those cases in which immigration has augmented the number of inhabitants. Does this expansion of population depend upon an increasing birth-rate or a diminishing death-rate? The fact, in strict parallel with the biological generalisation already made, is that “Germany's population is increasing so swiftly because the death-rate has been falling steadily. At the beginning of the period, 1870-1880, there were nearly 30 deaths per thousand inhabitants, while in recent years only about 20 deaths in every thousand inhabitants have taken place each year.... Notwithstanding, the birth-rate during the last ten years, during which the principal growth of population occurs, has not in anywise increased in Germany. Indeed, by careful investigation it becomes apparent that it has declined almost unintermittently for a generation.” The average birth-rate for the ten years 1871-1880 was 40.7, for 1891-1900 the average was 37.4. Since then it has fallen further, and in 1905 the figure was 34, the lowest on record. As Dr. Sombart observes, we shall only appreciate these figures if we regard them as an expression of a tendency which will continue, and that this is so he proves. He observes that “the more highly advanced the country, the lower its birth-rate.... From this we may already draw the conclusion that a diminution of births is a concomitant of our progress in civilisation. Secondly, this is confirmed by the fact that the falling-off in the birth-rate must be attributed largely to the big cities.... As a third statistical argument that the birth-rate declines with the advance of civilisation, the fact may be cited that in the quarters of the well-to-do still fewer children are born than in those of the poor.” (In London, as we have seen, the birth-rate is highest in Stepney and lowest in Hampstead).

Dr. Sombart finally points out what must never be forgotten--that an increase in population, dependent upon a fall in the death-rate, whilst the birth-rate also falls, is necessarily self-limited. The decrease of the death-rate is limited by definite natural age-limits, and “this indicates that the increase of population in Germany is gradually entering upon a period of less activity, and will perhaps quite cease within a conceivable period unless other causes operate in the opposite direction.”

=The yellow peril.=--The facts regarding the yellow races are extremely difficult to ascertain. It appears, however, that the birth-rate in Japan has almost doubled in 27 years--rising from 17.1 to 31. (I doubt the accuracy of the earlier figure.) In China the population is largely controlled by infanticide, but there is little doubt that the main contention of Pearson was correct, and that the yellow races are multiplying much more rapidly than the white races. It does not necessarily follow, however, as we shall see, that this means yellow ascendancy, any more than a similar comparison would mean microbic ascendancy. It is not quantity but quality of life that gives survival-value and dominance. This disparity between white and yellow rates of increase is by far the most pregnant of contemporary phenomena. In the present introductory volume it can merely be named. But since we shall not survive in virtue of quantity, I, for one, am well assured that the choice for Western civilisation will ere long be the final one between eugenics or extinction.

=The wheat problem.=--Meanwhile, we must consider briefly the question evidently raised by this fact of human multiplication. As an expert has lately said, the rise in the price of wheat “is not the transitory result of market manipulation and ‘corners,’ forcing prices up to an unnatural level, but of perfectly natural and irresistible causes which, for all that, are the more anxious and disquieting. The truth is we are for the first time beginning to feel individually the effect of a great natural process--the race which started long ago between the population of the world and the growth of the world's wheat supply. In this race the growth of the world's population has been outstripping the growth of its wheat-food production, and the consequence has been a total growing shortage, in spite of the opening of vast new areas in Canada and the Argentina.” In this connection one of the best papers in Great Britain--the _Westminster Gazette_--cheerfully remarked in a leading article that, after all, we need not be alarmed as to the difficulty in increasing the supply of wheat, since population would, in any case, adapt itself to the food-supply. This is true, indeed: there will never be more human beings than there is food to feed. But the question is, how will the population be kept down? In a word, is it to be by the awful and bloody processes of Nature or by the conscious, provident and humane methods of man?

We are reminded of the argument advanced by Sir William Crookes in his Presidential Address to the British Association in 1898. The distinguished author has himself written an invaluable book on the subject which has been carefully revised and supplemented, and must be read by the serious student.[21] We may note from the point of view of the student of dietetics that wheat is and remains, on physiological examination, what the proverb suggests. Bread is the staff of life, wheat being, in proportion to its price, by far the best and cheapest of all foods.

The argument of Sir William Crookes was advanced exactly a century after the publication of the great essay of Malthus which we must soon consider. In the whole intervening century no one, capable of being heard, had considered the question. The relation of Crookes to the earlier thinker remains, though it is curious that Malthus was not mentioned by his successor. Writing now, a decade later, I wish merely to point out that Sir William's argument is found valid. He observed that “the actual and potential wheat-producing capacity of the United States is--and will be, for years to come--the dominant factor in the world's bread-supply.” Now the recent expert from whom we have already quoted declares that “former great wheat exporting countries like the United States, as well as Russia and India, while their production remains as high, are sending far less abroad under the pressure of their own increasing needs. In this connection it may be recorded that a great American corn expert declares that in twenty-five years the United States will want all, or very nearly all, of her wheat production for herself, and will have very little indeed to send us.” In 1898 Sir William said, “A permanently higher price for wheat is, I fear, a calamity that ere long must be faced.” As everyone knows, this prophecy is now being fulfilled. Sir William declared that “the augmentation of the world's eating population in a geometrical ratio” is a proved fact. The phrase means, of course, simply that the yearly increase increases. On the other hand, the wheat supply is subject to a yearly increase which does not itself increase--in other words the increase is in an arithmetical ratio. This, a century later, precisely illustrates the principle of Malthus. Sir William also declared that exports of wheat from the United States are only of present interest, and that “within a generation the ever-increasing population of the United States will consume all the wheat grown within its borders, and will be driven to import, and, like ourselves, will scramble for the lion's share of the wheat crop of the world.”

Next to the United States Russia is the greatest wheat exporter, but the Russian peasant population increases more rapidly than any other in Europe, even though it is inadequately fed, and this source of supply must fail ere very long. As Sir William points out, the Caucasian civilisation is indeed founded upon bread. “Other races vastly superior to us in numbers, but differing widely in material and intellectual progress, are eaters of Indian corn, rice, millet and other grains; but none of these grains have the food-value, concentrated health-sustaining power of wheat.” Sir William's argument was, and is, that we must learn how to fix the nitrogen of the atmosphere--that is to say, how to combine it in forms on which the plant can feed. “The fixation of nitrogen is a question of the not far distant future. Unless we can class it among certainties to come, the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence by races to whom wheat and bread is not the staff of life.”

Sir William Crookes was himself the pioneer in the discovery of the electric method of fixing the atmospheric nitrogen, and now, a decade after the delivery of his address, this method is in successful commercial employment in Scandinavia. There is also a method of sowing the bacteria which are capable of fixing nitrogen and this, according to some, has been already proved practicable. Further, the Mendelians offer us the possibility of new varieties of wheat having more grains to the stalk than we obtain at present. By these methods the output of the land devoted to wheat may be doubled or trebled, but it is evident that even then there will be an impassable limit. We have to face, indeed, the evident but unconsidered fact that _there must be a maximum possible human population for this finite earth_, whether a bread-eating population or any other. I do not propose to speculate regarding this evident truth. If human life is worth living and is the highest life we know, we may desire to obtain that maximum population, but it must be obtained, and its limits observed, by the humane and decent processes which man is capable of putting into practice, and not by the check of starvation.

It is of great interest to the British reader to look at the question briefly from his point of view. At the present time our wheat production is no more than one-eighth of our needs, and in twenty-five years, when the supply from the United States will probably have ceased, we shall require 40,000,000 quarters of wheat per annum. Yet already, in time of peace, careful observers such as the Rt. Hon. Charles Booth and Mr. Seebohm Rowntree declare that thirty per cent. of our own population are living on the verge of starvation. Our available supply of food of all kinds at any moment would last us about three weeks. How many of us realise what a war would mean for this country? Yet in the face of facts such as these, the majority of those who attempt to guide public opinion are urging us to increase our birth-rate and still pin their faith to quantity rather than quality of population as our great need.

=The theory of Malthus.=--The reader who is interested in general biology will realise, of course, that we are here back to the great argument of Malthus, advanced in 1798 in his _Essay on the Principle of Population_. Malthus was a great and sincere thinker, a high and true moralist, and the people who have a vague notion that his name has some connection with immoral principles of any kind have no acquaintance with the subject. It is of the deepest interest for the history of thought to know that it was the work of Malthus which suggested, independently, both to Charles Darwin and to Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, that principle of natural selection, the survival of the fittest and their choice for parenthood, the discovery of which constituted one of the great epochs in the history of human knowledge, and which is the cardinal principle underlying the whole modern conception of eugenics or race-culture.

Malthus found in all life the constant tendency to increase beyond the nourishment available. In a given area, not even the utmost imaginable improvement in developing the resources of the soil can or could keep pace with the unchecked increase of population.[22] This applies alike to Great Britain and to the whole world. At bottom, then, the check to population--and this is true of microbes or men--is want of food, notwithstanding that this is never the immediate and obvious check except in cases of actual famine. There must therefore be a “struggle for existence,” and as Darwin and Wallace saw, it follows as a necessary truth that, to use Spencer's term, the fittest must survive. The question is whether we are to accept starvation as, at bottom, the factor controlling population (which, in any case, must be and is controlled) or whether we can substitute something better--as for instance, the moral self-control which Malthus recommended. The single precept of this much maligned thinker was “Do not marry till you have a fair prospect of supporting a family”--a fairly decent and respectable doctrine. In the words of Mr. Kirkup, “the greatest and highest moral result of his principle is that it clearly and emphatically teaches the responsibility of parentage, and it declares the sin of those who bring human beings into the world for whose physical, intellectual, and moral well-being no satisfactory provision is made.” Who, alas, will declare that even after a century and a decade this great lesson is yet learnt?

It is to be added, first, that though improvement in agriculture is to be commended on every conceivable ground, and though it may in some degree relieve and postpone the difficulty, it is infinitely incapable of abolishing it. Nothing but necessity can check the prolificness of life. To this doctrine, however, there is, as we shall shortly see, a great excepting principle, unrecognised by Malthus, discovered by Herbert Spencer, and of vast and universal importance. Secondly, it is to be noted that emigration--a real remedy for over-population--is so only for a time. It cannot possibly abolish the problem--short of the development of interplanetary communication, if then; and the observer of contemporary politics must be well aware, as Germany, for instance, is well aware already, that its effectiveness as a practical remedy for over-population in some European countries is already being arrested by the invaded states.

The references already made to the work of Sir William Crookes will suffice to show that the teaching of Malthus is of practical importance to us to-day, and not least to the population of Great Britain. I am tempted to quote the actual case in this connection of a young student of biology who applied for Malthus's book at one of the greatest official libraries in this country. He was looked at as a shameless young rascal, and the librarian curtly said, “We have no books of that kind here.” I commend this exquisite instance of misapplied and perfectly ignorant British prudery to Mr. Bernard Shaw: not even he could imagine anything to surpass it. No more impeccably decent book than this of “Parson Malthus” has ever been written, and I have no adequate comment for the fact that its nature and contents were not merely wholly unknown but grossly misimagined by this responsible official, and that it could not be obtained in the great library of science in question.

We pass in the following chapter to the momentous discovery of Herbert Spencer that the great truth seen by Malthus was not a whole but a half-truth, and that there is a compensating principle, which is at once a source of inspiration and of difficulty to the eugenist. It is in general the principle that as life ascends it becomes less prolific, and its consequences are infinitely more vast than the phrase at first suggests. Had this principle been discovered by a Continental thinker or by a member of a British University instead of by a man who never passed an examination, it would not now need the discussion which we shall have to give it.