a moral and æsthetic revolt against the life and work of towns. A careful and drastic system of land reform which should aim at the net economy of individual enterprise and co-operative aid for agriculture is of course in Great Britain a prior condition to all rapid and effective progress. All these conditions are within the power of man, and belong to rational policy; once secured, it is at least probable that private incentives to gain, bringing brain and capital to bear upon the land, might in this or any other industrial country produce so vast an increase of the productiveness of the soil as to destroy completely all speciousness which history attaches to the necessity of expansion for purposes of food supply.
It is not necessary here to discuss the part played respectively by public policy and private initiative in the development of this economy of intensive cultivation. It is sufficient to insist that it furnishes the larger half of a complete answer to the alleged natural necessity of expansion. The other half has reference to a rational control of the growth of population, which must in any sound national economy tend more and more to replace the wasteful and cruel prodigality which nature unchecked by reason here as elsewhere displays. However difficult it may be, rational control of the quantity and quality of population is quite essential to the physical and moral progress of a species which has striven successfully to suspend or stay the cruel and wasteful checks which disease, famine, pestilence, internecine warfare, and early savage usages employed in the struggle for existence. To stay the “natural” checks, and to refuse to substitute “rational” checks, is to promote not merely the unrestricted growth of population, but the survival and multiplication of the physically and morally unfit, the least effective portion of the population, which is able to be born, reared, and to propagate its kind. How far the operation of the great public policy of preventing the propagation of certain definite forms of unfitness can best be left to the free play of individual interest and discretion, illuminated by the growing knowledge of biological science, or how far such private determination