9 o THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 



point their story with a moral. No doubt immoral mo- 

 tives of all sorts have figured largely among the minor 

 causes of these events. But beneath all this superficial 

 turmoil lay the deep-seated impulse given by unlimited 

 multiplication. In the swarms of colonies thrown out by 

 Phoenicia and by old Greece; in the ver sacrum 13 of the 

 Latin races ; in the floods of Gauls and of Teutons which 

 burst over the frontiers of the old civilization of Europe ; 

 in the swaying to and fro of the vast Mongolian hordes 

 in late times, the population problem comes to the front 

 in a very visible shape. Nor is it less plainly manifest in 

 the everlasting agrarian questions of ancient Rome than 

 in the Arreoi societies of the Polynesian Islands. 



In the ancient world, and in a large part of that in 

 which we live, the practice of infanticide was, or is, a 

 regular and legal custom; famine, pestilence, and war 

 were and are normal factors in the struggle for existence, 

 and they have served, in a gross and brutal fashion, to 

 mitigate the intensity of the effects of its chief cause. 



But, in the more advanced civilizations, the progress 

 of private and public morality has steadily tended to 

 remove all these checks. We declare infanticide murder, 

 and punish it as such; we decree, not quite so success- 

 fully, that no one shall die of hunger; we regard death 

 from preventable causes of other kinds as a sort 

 of constructive murder, and eliminate pestilence to the 

 best of our ability; we declaim against the curse of war, 

 and the wickedness of the military spirit, and we are 

 never weary of dilating on the blessedness of peace and 

 the innocent beneficence of Industry. In their moments 

 of expansion, even statesmen and men of business go 

 thus far. The finer spirits to an ideal civitas Dei; 14 

 a state when, every man having reached the point of ab- 



13 " A special offering presented from the firstlings of spring." 



14 "City of God." 



