the 
JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 
SEPTEMBER, 1885. 
I. THE POPULATION QUESTION.* 
S O the patient and conscientious observer of social fadts 
the population question transcends all others. Until 
it is solved all philanthropic movements, reforms, and 
the like, are wont to deepen the very evils they were meant 
to lemove. Or at most they end in transferring penalties 
and burdens from the shoulders of those who have incurred 
them to their less guilty neighbours. Sanitary reform, edu- 
cation, tempeiance, in piopoition as they become general 
merely intensify the “ struggle for existence,” or, in other 
words, the internecine war between man and man. 
But unfortunately few, in Britain at least, dare or care to 
ask whether at the bottom of all we deplore there does not 
lie the grim fadt “ too many sheep for the pasture ” ? If the 
supply of coal, of soda-ash, of chloride of lime, or any other 
commodity exceedsthedemand, both employers and employed 
are ready to limit production ; but when in a perfectly 
analogous manner the supply of men and women exceeds 
the demand, neither capitalist nor trades’-unionist sees the 
necessity of reducing the output, and, as human beings can- 
not be warehoused pending an upward movement in the 
market, untold wretchedness follows. 
Into the vexed and difficult question in what manner the 
increase of population is to be kept within reasonable limits 
* State Measures for the Direft Prevention of Poverty, War, and Pestilence 
By A Doctor of Medicine. London : E. Truelove. 
VOL. VII. (THIRD SERIES). 2 M 
