THE PROBLEM OF POPULATION.* IT is not unusual, after reading
an able book advocating some special reform, to feel for an hour or two that here we have the solution for almost eveDy social problem. After reading Mr. Harold Cox's book this feeling does not, as in many cases, wear off. The conviction that what he is advocating is the cure for a great many problems intensifies and persists. The evils with which he deals are not primarily those of the mind or of the spirit, but the inconveniences and miseries of our pressing, everyday, unrelenting human affairs. In the Problem of Population we are irresistibly led to the conclusion that most of the economic and social evils which beset us at the moment are evils due to over-population.
To take a few examples : A very large number of new houses have been built, but people are still living in slums because these new houses have not made up for the increase in population. Our population is increasing .0 The Problem of Population. By Harold (lox. London : Jonathan Cape. [Gr. net.] every- year by large numbers. Therefore, in spite of cheap and swift transport, getting out of the city is becoming
more difficult for the poor man who needs it most. The town is spreading all over the tracts of country that lie round such cities as Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and London, and a dreadful crop of bungalows is growing up. You must spend both time and money in getting out of London ; a poor man cannot do it in his half-day holiday. Our hospitals arc as overcrowded as our tramcars or as our labour market. You cannot get work, you cannot get a seat, if you arc ill you cannot get a bed in a hospital. One teacher in an elementary school has to attempt to teach from forty to sixty ehildren There are too many of us. Yet not so long ago there were complaints that the birth-rate per thousand was decreas- ing, but, as Mr. Cox shows, the actual number of births was higher than ever, for we are dealing here with the law of arithmetical progression. That is what makes the situation so alarming. Men are not Ford cars ; mass production is far from helping the human being. Men are intricate subtle beings. We are all of us anxious to tighten up, not, perhaps, so much the legislation as the social conscience in regard to infant and child welfare. A child is a valuable and precious creature. We want infants to be more carefully and more scientifically tended ; we want children to be more intelligently brought up ; we want out young people more thoroughly, more inspiringly taught ; we want the whole of our people to live in such surroundings that a civilized existence is possible to them. It ought to be considered wicked and unforgivable rather than inevitable to neglect an infant, to provide for a child of five or six nowhere but a dirty street to play in, to teach boys and girls four to five dozen at a time. We rarely develop human beings, either physically or mentally, as we know they can be developed. But what can we do ? We realize the defects in the workings of our homes and our schools, we know that the young person going into business is up against a real struggle for existence. But of England De Quincey's dreadful sentence about the Chinese is now true, " Man is a weed in that region."
We do not take human beings seriously because we have not yet assimilated the new morality.
"A duty rests upon every man to refrain from bringing new beings into the world unless he can make reasonable provision for their maintenance."
But what if the discomforts of living in this overcrowded world arc great ? It is, of course, pleasant to imagine the delights of the open spaces that might be made near where the Mile End Road welters and seethes, to picture the extra happiness of the city dweller living in a town shrunk to a reasonable size, where a man could exercise himself in some green space, or get into his electric train with a prospect of
reaching real country for a summer evening. Pleasant, too, it is to think that if we could limit our population there would be some chance of the good things of this world—the humbler luxuries, turkeys, perambulators with hoods, straw- berries, silks and hot-water—really going round.
But these material delights are not enough. Mr. Cox is quite right in not so much emphasizing the extra prosperity which he tielieves a decrease in the population would bring, but in laying weight on the moral and intellectual side of the question. Does our big population help here in any way ? On the contrary. A moment's visualization of a family group will prove it :— " If the ordinary man and woman arc to win sufficient freedom from the drudgery of routine industry, sufficient leisure for the education and cultivation of the taste and intercsts which enrich personality and raise the value of life, this can only be obtained on condition of some limitation of the number of mouths to bc fed and bodies to be clothed and housed."
This is an understatement of the case. Tbe question as it first of all affects women is hardly touched fibon. But there remains a question, perhaps the most important, to be dis- cussed before the reader can accept Mr. Cox's solution. Must all these benefits be bought at the cost of wrong, immoral, or degrading actions ? In our opinion there is nothing wrong about the practice of birth control, though we are not for the moment, perhaps, prepared to go so far as Mr. Harold Cox
and affirm that the ascetic impulse which is at the bottom of most theological denunciations of birth control is actually immoral. Yet we hold that in tpe matter of parenthood there is no question that the moral obligation is on the other side. The use of contraceptives is nol irmnoial. It is immoral for parents to bring into the world children who are (1) un- wanted; (2) likely to suffer from some hereditary disease ; (3) beyond the number whom the parents can reasonably expect to support till the completion of their education.
The love of children, the acts of self-sacrifice necessary to their care and nurture, the sacred relation between parents and their offspring, between brothers and sisters, arc the noblest things in the world and bring with them an enlighten- ment and a joy that nothing else can. But. these best gifts become a mockery, a pretence, or a poignant grief without a remedy when the parent cannot do justice to the child, cannot meet its requirements, cannot find it room enough in which to be, we will not say happy, but even healthy. We condemn cruelty to children, but where is there a cruelty so terrible as that which condemns a child to the life in death of the slums ? But the slums are the outcome of over-population. It is idle to say that the mass of parents among the professional class who practise birth control are selfish and luxurious. They are the most continent class in the widest sense, the most self-sacrificing, the most humane, the best lovers of their country. We talk of race suicide ! But this supreme evil will come from .hungry generations that tread each other down, not from a population sound in body and mind and trained to raise, not to dilute and deprave, the human stock
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