To get to the bottom of the matter, we thus find it is necessary to look into it more closely than is usually attempted.
When we ask ourselves why prosperity fails permanently to remove the restraints on fertility the answer is, that it speedily creates new restraints.
Prosperity and civilization are far from being synonymous terms.
- The savage who is able to glut himself with the whale that has just been stranded on his coast, is more prosperous than he was the day before, but he is not more civilized, perhaps a trifle less so.
- The working community that is suddenly glutted by an afflux of work and wages is in exactly the same position as the savage who is suddenly enabled to fill himself with a rich mass of decaying blubber.
It is prosperity; it is not civilization.
1But, while prosperity leads at first to the reckless and unrestrained gratification of the simplest animal instincts of nutrition and reproduction, it tends, when it is prolonged, to evolve more complex instincts. Aspirations become less crude, the needs and appetites engendered by prosperity take on a more social character, and are sharpened by social rivalries. In place of the earlier easy and reckless gratification of animal impulses, a peaceful and organized struggle is established for securing in ever fuller degree the gratification of increasingly insistent and increasingly complex desires. Such a struggle involves a deliberate calculation and forethought, which, sooner or later, cannot fail to be applied to the question of offspring.