THE CALL OF THE LAND 



material betterment comes to the ignorant 

 poor, as through a rise of wages or the 

 cheapening of bread, it is speedily checked 

 by increase in population. The principal 

 consideration that forbade me to find in 

 socialism a panacea was the insight that, 

 granting to socialism as a purely economic 

 resort all that is claimed for it, which was 

 further than I could go; supposing social- 

 ism to bring to pass economically all that 

 Rodbertus, Marx, or any other apostle ever 

 claimed, the community would soon be 

 again suffering from its old-fashioned ills 

 through the irrational multiplication of the 

 species. However great economic pros- 

 perity may come through socialism or other- 

 wise, the sort of humanity we have had to 

 deal with thus far, the only kind of man we 

 know, will take impulse from such pros- 

 perity to multiply perniciously, to develop a 

 submerged tenth, an ignorant and vicious 

 proletariat, whose woes will be so great as 

 again, and very soon, to lower the average 

 weal well toward zero. 



I am not forgetting what socialists say 



296 



