have
perished utterly, though not until after leaving evidences of
their drift clear across the great South Pacific to far Easter
Island. And on that drift they encountered races who had
accomplished the drift before them, and they, the Aryans, passed,
in turn, before the drift of other and subsequent races whom we
to-day call the Polynesian and the Melanesian.

Man early discovered death. As soon as his evolution permitted,
he made himself better devices for killing than the old natural
ones of fang and claw. He devoted himself to the invention of
killing devices before he discovered fire or manufactured for
himself religion. And to this day, his finest creative energy and
technical skill are devoted to the same old task of making better
and ever better killing weapons. All his days, down all the past,
have been spent in killing. And from the fear-stricken, jungle-
lurking, cave-haunting creature of long ago, he won to empery over
the whole animal world because he developed into the most terrible
and awful killer of all the animals. He found himself crowded.
He killed to make room, and as he made room ever he increased and
found himself crowded, and ever he went on killing to make more
room. Like a settler clearing land of its weeds and forest bushes
in order to plant corn, so man was compelled to clear all manner
of life away in order to plant himself. And, sword in hand, he
has literally hewn his way through the vast masses of life that
occupied the earth space he coveted for himself. And ever he has
carried the battle wider and wider, until to-day not only is he a
far more capable killer of men and animals than ever before, but
he has pressed the battle home to the infinite and invisible hosts
of menacing lives in the world of micro-organisms.

It is true, that they that rose by the sword perished by the
sword. And yet, not only did they not all perish, but more rose
by the sword than perished by it, else man would not to-day be
over-running the world in such huge swarms. Also, it must not be
forgotten that they who did not rise by the sword did not rise at
all. They were not. In view of this, there is something wrong
with Doctor Jordan's war-theory, which is to the effect that the
best being sent out to war, only the second best, the men who are
left, remain to breed a second-best race, and that, therefore, the
human race deteriorates under war. If this be so, if we have sent
forth the best we bred and gone on breeding from the men who were
left, and since we have done this for ten thousand millenniums and
are what we splendidly are to-day, then what unthinkably splendid
and god-like beings must have been our forebears those ten
thousand millenniums ago! Unfortunately for Doctor Jordan's
theory, those ancient forebears cannot live up to this fine
reputation. We know them for what they were, and before the
monkey cage of any menagerie we catch truer glimpses and hints and
resemblances of what our ancestors really were long and long ago.
And by killing, incessant killing, by making a shambles of the
planet, those ape-like creatures have developed even into you and
me. As Henley has said in "The Song of the Sword":


"The Sword Singing -

Driving the darkness,
Even as the banners
And spear of the Morning;
Sifting the nations,
The Slag from the metal,
The waste and the weak
From the fit and the strong;
Fighting the brute,
The abysmal Fecundity;
Checking the gross
Multitudinous blunders,
The groping, the purblind
Excesses in service
Of the Womb universal,
The absolute drudge."


As time passed and man increased, he drifted ever farther afield
in search of room. He encountered other drifts of men, and the
killing of men became prodigious. The weak and the decadent fell
under the sword. Nations that faltered, that waxed prosperous in
fat valleys and rich river deltas, were swept away by the drifts
of stronger men who were nourished on the hardships of deserts and
mountains and who were more capable with the sword. Unknown and
unnumbered billions of men have been so destroyed in prehistoric
times. Draper says that in the twenty years of the Gothic war,
Italy lost 15,000,000 of her population; "and that the wars,
famines, and pestilences of the reign of Justinian diminished the
human species by the almost incredible number of 100,000,000."
Germany, in the Thirty Years' War, lost 6,000,000 inhabitants.
The record of our own American Civil War need scarcely be
recalled.

And man has been destroyed in other ways than by the sword.
Flood, famine, pestilence and murder are potent factors in
reducing population--in making room. As Mr. Charles Woodruff, in
his "Expansion of Races," has instanced: In 1886, when the dikes
of the Yellow River burst, 7,000,000 people were drowned. The
failure of crops in Ireland, in 1848, caused 1,000,000 deaths.
The famines in India of 1896-7 and 1899-1900 lessened the
population by 21,000,000. The T'ai'ping rebellion and the
Mohammedan rebellion, combined with the famine of 1877-78,
destroyed scores of millions of Chinese. Europe has been swept
repeatedly by great plagues. In India, for the period of 1903 to
1907, the plague deaths averaged between one and two millions a
year. Mr. Woodruff is responsible for the assertion that
10,000,000 persons now living in the United States are doomed to
die of tuberculosis. And in this same country ten thousand
persons a year are directly murdered. In China, between three and
six millions of infants are annually destroyed, while the total
infanticide record of the whole world is appalling. In Africa,
now, human beings are dying by millions of the sleeping sickness.

More destructive of life than war, is industry. In all civilised
countries great masses of people are crowded into slums and
labour-ghettos, where disease festers, vice corrodes, and famine
is chronic, and where they die more swiftly and in greater numbers
than do the soldiers in our modern wars. The very infant
mortality of a slum parish in the East End of London is three
times that of a middle-class parish in the West End. In the
United States, in the last fourteen years, a total of coal-miners,
greater than our entire standing army, has been killed and
injured. The United States Bureau of Labour states that during
the year 1908, there were between 30,000 and 35,000 deaths of
workers by accidents, while 200,000 more were injured. In fact,
the safest place for a working-man is in the army. And even if
that army be at the front, fighting in Cuba or South Africa, the
soldier in the ranks has a better chance for life than the
working-man at home.

And yet, despite this terrible roll of death, despite the enormous
killing of the past and the enormous killing of the present, there
are to-day alive on the planet a billion and three quarters of
human beings. Our immediate conclusion is that man is exceedingly
fecund and very tough. Never before have there been so many
people in the world. In the past centuries the world's population
has been smaller; in the future centuries it is destined to be
larger. And this brings us to that old bugbear that has been so
frequently laughed away and that still persists in raising its
grisly head--namely, the doctrine of Malthus. While man's
increasing efficiency of food-production, combined with
colonisation of whole virgin continents, has for generations given
the apparent lie to Malthus' mathematical statement of the Law of
Population, nevertheless the essential significance of his
doctrine remains and cannot be challenged. Population DOES press
against subsistence. And no matter how rapidly subsistence
increases, population is certain to catch up with it.

When man was in the hunting stage of development, wide areas were
necessary for the maintenance of scant populations. With the
shepherd stages, the means of subsistence being increased, a
larger population was supported on the same territory. The
agricultural stage gave support to a still larger population; and,
to-day, with the increased food-getting efficiency of a machine
civilisation, an even larger population is made possible. Nor is
this theoretical. The population is here, a billion and three
quarters of men, women, and children, and this vast population

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