These facts have a significance which many of us have failed to realise.
The Great War has brought home the gravity of that significance. It has
been the perpetual refrain of the Pan-Germanists for many years that the
vast and sudden expansion of the German peoples makes necessary a new
movement of the German nations into the world and a new enlargement of
frontiers, in other words, War. It is not only among the Germans, though
among them it may have been more conscious, that a similar cause has led
to the like result. It has ever been so. The expanding nation has always
been a menace to the world and to itself. The arrest of the falling
birth-rate, it cannot be too often repeated, would be the arrest of all
civilisation and of all humanity.
[1] Ralph Thicknesse, _A Year's Journey Through France and Spain_, 1777,
p. 298.
[2] The last twelve words quoted are by Miss Ethel Elderton in an
otherwise sober memoir (_Report on the English Birth-rate_, 1914, p.
237) which shows that the birth control movement has begun, just where
we should expect it to begin, among the better instructed classes.
[3] J.L. Myres, "The Causes of Rise and Fall in the Population of the
Ancient World," Eugenics Review, April, 1915.
[4] Roscher, _Grundlagen der National--konomie_, 23rd ed., 1900, Bk. VI.
[5] G. Lowes Dickinson, _The Civilisation of India, China, and Japan_,
1914, p. 47.
VII
WAR AND DEMOCRACY
When we read our newspapers to-day we are constantly met by ingenious
plans for bringing to an end the activities of Germany after the War.
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