First, it will have to make up its mind as to how many people we want in
the country. If we want less than at present, we must ascertain how
many less; and if we allow the reduction to be made by the continued
operation of the present sterilization of marriage, we must settle how
the process is to be stopped when it has gone far enough. But if we
desire to maintain the population at its present figure, or to increase
it, we must take immediate steps to induce people of moderate means to
marry earlier and to have more children. There is less urgency in the
case of the very poor and the very rich. They breed recklessly: the rich
because they can afford it, and the poor because they cannot afford
the precautions by which the artisans and the middle classes avoid big
families. Nevertheless the population declines, because the high birth
rate of the very poor is counterbalanced by a huge infantile-mortality
in the slums, whilst the very rich are also the very few, and are
becoming sterilized by the spreading revolt of their women against
excessive childbearing--sometimes against any childbearing.
This last cause is important. It cannot be removed by any economic
readjustment. If every family were provided with 10,000 pounds a year
tomorrow, women would still refuse more and more to continue bearing
children until they are exhausted whilst numbers of others are bearing
no children at all. Even if every woman bearing and rearing a valuable
child received a handsome series of payments, thereby making motherhood
a real profession as it ought to be, the number of women able or willing
to give more of their lives to gestation and nursing than three or
four children would cost them might not be very large if the advance in
social organization and conscience indicated by such payments involved
also the opening up of other means of livelihood to women. And it must
be remembered that urban civilization itself, insofar as it is a method
of evolution (and when it is not this, it is simply a nuisance), is a
sterilizing process as far as numbers go. It is harder to keep up the
supply of elephants than of sparrows and rabbits; and for the same
reason it will be harder to keep up the supply of highly cultivated men
and women than it now is of agricultural laborers. Bees get out of this
difficulty by a special system of feeding which enables a queen bee
to produce 4,000 eggs a day whilst the other females lose their sex
altogether and become workers supporting the males in luxury and
idleness until the queen has found her mate, when the queen kills
him and the quondam females kill all the rest (such at least are the
accounts given by romantic naturalists of the matter).