HUMAN IMPLICATIONS 225 



extravagantly wasteful destruction of real wealth that 

 war always causes. This is the problem that is really 

 serious— how can forty persons be maintained for 

 every square mile of land surface of the globe- 

 good, bad and indifferent land together? War can- 

 not enlarge the land surface that must support man- 

 kind; it has never diminished the total number of 

 people who want to live on it except by a tiny frac- 

 tion for quite a brief period. There is no way out 

 of the dilemma by the pathway of war." 



It is a comparatively new idea that population can 

 be controlled at all except by famine, pestilence, 

 and war, which have been regarded as acts of God. 

 Acts of God or not, we can no longer tolerate famine 

 or pestilence if we have the power to prevent them; 

 and lacking such power we intend to get it as soon 

 as it is humanly possible. Among dispassionate, ex- 

 pert students, war has similarly lost caste as a means 

 of population control, though the man in the street 

 has not yet learned this. 



Instead of the dubious check these agencies fur- 

 nished there is a steady turning to birth control, 

 even in the countries where it is most surprising to 

 find this. In Germany and Italy, although artificial 

 stimuli are being applied to keep up the birth rate, 

 some kind of birth control evidently is occurring. 



There is significance not only in the average 



