BIRTH SELECTION VERSUS BIRTH CONTROL 31 



Over-confidence in future demand and supply, resulting in the too rapid extension of 

 natural resources both in food and in mechanical equipment; 



Over-population beyond the land areas, or the capacity of the natural and scientific 

 resources of the world, with consequent permanent unemployment of the least fitted. 



Added to these "six overs" in many but not in all countries, there has 

 been over-speculation and a consequent over-capitalization which places 

 an intolerable burden of debt on individuals and communities which at the 

 present outlook there are few means to repay. Every port I visited re- 

 vealed over-population, over-production and unemployment — whether in 

 the South Seas or in the great cities of Europe and America. Everywhere 

 ports were full of empty vessels. Everywhere the number of employees 

 in all grades was being cut down, and everywhere the world's staples, even 

 rice, stood about in quantities far exceeding the world's demand. 



Certainly the fears of the great physicist Sir William Crookes, a con- 

 temporary of Francis Galton, have not been realized that a time would be 

 reached when the feeding of the rapidly increasing population of the world 

 would be a problem of the first economic importance for which he suggested 

 such a remedy as harnessing Niagara Falls in order to secure an adequate 

 amount of nitrogen for the reinvigoration of depleted soils. On the con- 

 trary, modern agricultural science and invention have more than met these 

 apparently insuperable dangers besetting certain over-populated countries, 

 such as Java, with a superabundant rice supply even for its teeming 40,000,- 

 000 — rice being produced so cheaply that it is not commercially profitable 

 to sell it — just as wheat is being produced in America so cheaply that we 

 have an over-supply of wheat for our 112,000,000 people. Java's over- 

 population, therefore, can still be fed. But the taking up of every acre of 

 land, even to the mountain tops, has not solved the overcrowding problem 

 of Java, as evidenced by her endeavor to export her surplus of people to 

 other less populated islands. 



With this prologue let us for the moment concentrate on several of the 

 outstanding social conditions of the day and hour, namely, over-population 

 and unemployment. Is over-population a reality? Is unemployment a 

 temporary or a permanent condition? Is birth control the best means of 

 checking over-population, or is birth selection aided by birth control the 

 better means? We shall consider over-population from the double stand- 

 point of birth selection and of birth control. Even the lives sacrificed in 

 the world war, apart from the ethical and intellectual problems of human 

 advancement, are entirely negligible compared with the natural increase of 

 mankind, when no longer checked by disease, by infant mortality and by 

 internecine wars. The International Statistical Institute estimates that 

 the world added 125,550,000 to its total population in the years 1920-1928. 



