prejudice,
assures us that civilisation will go to smash, the trend of
society, to-day, the world over, is toward socialism. The old
individualism is passing. The state interferes more and more in
affairs that hitherto have been considered sacredly private. And
socialism, when the last word is said, is merely a new economic
and political system whereby more men can get food to eat. In
short, socialism is an improved food-getting efficiency.

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.

Disease, from time to time, will ease the pressure. Diseases are
parasites, and it must not be forgotten that just as there are
drifts in the world of man, so are there drifts in the world of
micro-organisms--hunger-quests for food. Little is known of the
micro-organic world, but that little is appalling; and no census
of it will ever be taken, for there is the true, literal "abysmal
fecundity." Multitudinous as man is, all his totality of
individuals is as nothing in comparison with the inconceivable
vastness of numbers of the micro-organisms. In your body, or in
mine, right now, are swarming more individual entities than there
are human beings in the world to-day. It is to us an invisible
world. We only guess its nearest confines. With our powerful
microscopes and ultramicroscopes, enlarging diameters twenty
thousand times, we catch but the slightest glimpses of that
profundity of infinitesimal life.

Little is known of that world, save in a general way. We know
that out of it arise diseases, new to us, that afflict and destroy
man. We do not know whether these diseases are merely the drifts,
in a fresh direction, of already-existing breeds of micro-
organisms, or whether they are new, absolutely new, breeds
themselves just spontaneously generated. The latter hypothesis is
tenable, for we theorise that if spontaneous generation still
occurs on the earth, it is far more likely to occur in the form of
simple organisms than of complicated organisms.

Another thing we know, and that is that it is in crowded
populations that new diseases arise. They have done so in the
past. They do so to-day. And no matter how wise are our
physicians and bacteriologists, no matter how successfully they
cope with these invaders, new invaders continue to arise--new
drifts of hungry life seeking to devour us. And so we are
justified in believing that in the saturated populations of the
future, when life is suffocating in the pressure against
subsistence, that new, and ever new, hosts of destroying micro-
organisms will continue to arise and fling themselves upon earth-
crowded man to give him room. There may even be plagues of
unprecedented ferocity that will depopulate great areas before the
wit of man can overcome them. And this we know: that no matter
how often these invisible hosts may be overcome by man's becoming
immune to them through a cruel and terrible selection, new hosts
will ever arise of these micro-organisms that were in the world
before he came and that will be here after he is gone.

After he is gone? Will he then some day be gone, and this planet
know him no more? Is it thither that the human drift in all its
totality is trending? God Himself is silent on this point, though
some of His prophets have given us vivid representations of that
last day when the earth shall pass into nothingness. Nor does
science, despite its radium speculations and its attempted
analyses of the ultimate nature of matter, give us any other word
than that man will pass. So far as man's knowledge goes, law is
universal. Elements react under certain unchangeable conditions.
One of these conditions is temperature. Whether it be in the test
tube of the laboratory or the workshop of nature, all organic
chemical reactions take place only within a restricted range of
heat. Man, the latest of the ephemera, is pitifully a creature of
temperature, strutting his brief day on the thermometer. Behind
him is a past wherein it was too warm for him to exist. Ahead of
him is a future wherein it will be too cold for him to exist. He
cannot adjust himself to that future, because he cannot alter
universal law, because he cannot alter his own construction nor
the molecules that compose him.

It would be well to ponder these lines of Herbert Spencer's which
follow, and which embody, possibly, the wildest vision the
scientific mind has ever achieved:


"Motion as well as Matter being fixed in quantity, it would seem
that the change in the distribution of Matter which Motion
effects, coming to a limit in whichever direction it is carried,
the indestructible Motion thereupon necessitates a reverse
distribution. Apparently, the universally-co-existent forces of
attraction and repulsion, which, as we have seen, necessitate
rhythm in all minor changes throughout the Universe, also
necessitate rhythm in the totality of its changes--produce now an
immeasurable period during which the attractive forces
predominating, cause universal concentration, and then an
immeasurable period during which the repulsive

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