P OPULATION.* THOSE people who have learned by labour and
devotion the joy that is to be harvested from historical reading will be glad to hear of this new book by Mr. Carr-Saunders. It is a work of monumental proportions, profound in scholarship, and balanced in judgment. To the reader it brings again that sense of calm space, of panoramic vision, which he experi- ences when, leaving the arena of politics and the irreducible questions of the day, he turns to the pages of Gibbon, Robertson, or Thucydides. Certainly this book has that breadth of the classical historians. If it lacks something of their pictorial method, it more than repays by its scientific care. In this quality we feel that it is worthy to stand with Westermarek's History of Human Marriage. The author's method of laying out his great accumulation of facts, and of presenting his thesis, is singularly like that of Westermarck. It is difficult to see how any historian or ethnologist following Westermarck could fail to be so influenced.
Before we discuss the effect which this book should have on present day ethics and social ideas, something must be said of its earlier chapters, for they deal a staggering blow to the
Golden Age " illusion which the middle-age of the human race still loves to hold about its youth. We are here presented with facts about the sex-customs and child treatment of primitive races that make the mind temporarily revolt. Learning how newborn babes were beaten to death against their mothers' knees, and how superfluous children, even up to six years of age, were left to starve or were buried alive in conformation to certain laws of magic, we realize what an abysmal darkness ignorance and superstition really are. We see how they can pervert the irrepressible energy of life, which in the world we call the force of nature and in man we call the spirit of God. We can weep over man when we behold him in the beginning timidly creeping after the receding ice of the glacial period, an inarticulate creature, seeing evil even in his own shadow and in the stones on his path. But our tears give place to dry-eyed horror when we see how he muddied the well-springs of his inward being, and, blind to the beauty of his own birth and of the universal nature of those fires within him, twisted and distorted the divine passion of sex into the most loathsome, the most ungracious forms that creation had known since the first ungainly writhings of matter out of the rage of the solar nebula. We are filled with a sense of dreariness in reading of the sex-perversion of children, the practices of abortion and infanticide, and the murder of the aged and the sick, amongst primitive mankind. And that emotion suddenly makes clear how much to-day spiritual conceptions influence our response to the lust of life. To bring a child into the world now is, even to the most atavistic member of our civilization, a deed that makes us co-operators in eternity. But to our forefathers it was just a physical function, arbitrary and personal, involving no birth of parental love, no reinforcement of the dignity of the • The Population Problem. By A. M. Carr-Saunders, Oxford: at the Clarendon rms. [21a. net.J
soul. It may be that the waking human spirit was battling with the mystery of immediate physical environment ; that in seeing for the first time with the eye of consciousness stoner, trees, rivers, and stars, man was too amazed to look on himself and to find there the beginnings of the subjective revelation which is to translate the universe into the idiom of the mind.
Glorious though the theory of the Golden Age may be, it is the unfruitful theory of pessimism. Our minds have been numbed by the recent war and the resultant calamities in which we are plunged. This economic blunder has blinded us with its consequence of pain. Avarice and passion are in the ascendancy, we think ; but it is not true. We have only to look sanely and calmly over the vista of human evolution to see that our civilization is not degenerate, and that its evils are the wantonly stirred up residuum of the past. Insomuch as the act is consciously recognized, by that recognition does
the hope of the future expand. In bringing datum and proof to confirm this belief, Mr. Carr-Saunders's book serves as a chapter in the religious gospel of to-day. And what is that gospel ? It is the teaching of a new method of judgment, a method devoid of passion and insistent upon evidence. It may be called scientific, if the word has not been spoiled by its early associations. It is scientific, but it is directed by the highest faith of all, the faith which is founded in reason,
which can see reality in abstractions and direction in number ; substituting for the Word, the Logos, of the intuitive eastern mystics this—as Fabre, the French naturalist, invoked it : - " Nombre !
Regulateur des effets et des causes ;
Qui donne le comment et he pourquoi des chows ; Que me veux-tu, Nombre imposant ? "
In the light of this faith, there can be no hate towards indi- vidual or institution. Modern political tendencies, clumsy agI hurtful to the individual though they be, are but subconscious efforts to apply this new method to the social machine, and to function, not capriciously nor sporadically, but with knowledge that sees all and incorporates all in the equation of the new law.
All this is to show the spirit in which Mr. Carr-Saunders works, and in which we are led with a sense of inevitability to our conclusions about one of the deepest mysteries of mankind, which is the maintenance of his number in relation to his potential means of subsistence. Now that our ethical con- cepts arc enlarging, we are able to assess the problem without the vehemence aroused by the zeal of the Neo-Malthusians. The religious aspect of the question of birth-control is now recognized to be too great for sectarianism. The historical survey shows us how immediately the doctrines of Christ affected the terrible methods which had been practised before His coming. Abortion, infanticide in its most horrible forms, and the murder of the aged had been accepted as inevitable by Aristotle and even by Plato. Mankind took an evolu- tionary step upward in following Paul and Augustine in their advocacy of celibacy--although, of course, Buddha had been the pioneer of this doctrine. Paul endowed the ketus with a soul, and on this axiom the Roman Church built all its laws relating to childbirth. By coincidence, events in Europe have been propitious to those laws: But nothing can for long control the march of circumstance, and new conditions arc arising on the break up of the Industrial System which necessitate fresh social legislation if man is to readjust his number so that life may again become adequate for the individual. We know now that creeds are but the creatures of ethical necessity. Religions change and pass ; but ethical truth is the statement of the human family in its relationship
to earth. It cannot be expressed by opinion, bias, or dogma. We are forced to sec that if man is to avoid wars, slums, labour troubles, and all evils of social congestion, the principle of the optimum number, per area, must be regarded. So in respect of quantity alone birth-control is a social necessity.
As for the problem of the quality of the race, that may be a factor of the quantitative problem, and so automatically soluble. Infanticide and abortion are impossible. Mankind
has passed beyond that. We can no longer submit to the fortuitous readjustments effected by disease, famine, and war, the last of which the author convincingly proves not to be a natural inevitability. What else is left for us ? A study of Mr. Carr-Saunders's book will help to give the answer.
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