But they had not realised that, with the growth of
popular education in modern democratic states, cheap labour is no
longer willing to play without protest this humble and suffering part
in national progress. The workers of the nations began to declare,
clearly or obscurely, as they were able, that they no longer intended
to sell their labour and their lives so cheaply. The rising birth-rate
of the middle of the nineteenth century coincided with, and to a large
extent doubtless produced, the organisation of labour, trades unions,
the political activity of the working classes, Socialism, as well as
the extreme forms of Anarchism and Syndicalism. It was when these
movements began to attain a high degree of organisation and power that
the birth-rate began to decline. Thus the pessimists of the second
period were faced by horrors on both sides. On the one hand, they saw
that the ever-increasing rate of human production which seemed to them
the essential condition of national, social, even moral progress, had
not only stopped but was steadily diminishing. On the other hand, they
saw that, even in so far as it was maintained, it involved, under
modern conditions, nothing but social commotion and economic
disturbance.
There are still many pessimists of this second period alive among us,
and actively proclaiming their gospel of despair, alike in England and
in Germany. But a new generation is growing up, and this question is
now entering a third period.
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