been reached in the islands of Japan. To make the Japanese people richer it would be wise to transport such of them as would go, to Reunion or elsewhere. New manufactories would not enrich them unless foreign buyers could be ensured for the new products. Neither could Communism mend matters in Japan, The levelling down on one side and up on the other would bring about a state of things wherein the great majority would quickly accustom themselves to spend and therefore require more than they manage to get through life on as it is.
In new or thinly peopled countries production can increase relatively to a rising census because every fresh pair of arms extracts from the ground under one form or another a fresh factor of value; something additional to be worn, consumed, or exchanged; more textiles, grain, meat, minerals, or latent force.
We are, happily, still far from Communism, the capabilities of mother earth have appointed limits, while man's luxury, selfishness, and aggressiveness, are practically without any, human habits are hard to alter, individual opportunities and abilities are widely different; in brief, the necessities or supposed necessities of peoples vary ad infinitum with circumstances and social customs; hence it is not wonderful that, turn where we will in the old world, we find immense numbers of fellow-beings whose lot in life is seemingly hopeless misery, a lot usually traceable to disproportion between population and production.[1]
This being so it has, unhappily, come to be thought expedient in densely peopled States possessing ancient civilizations and corruptions, wherein production is thoroughly developed, to impede in some way natural fulfilment of the primary Divine law—"increase and multiply"—whence scandals of Asiatic infanticide and European challenges of the wisdom and providence of God; vicious attempts to preserve by violent means the due proportions, seeking always justification or excuse in the teachings of experience that nature has set limits to production.
Crime and, finally, catastrophe, unfailingly scourge the com-
- ↑ Consideration of final causes must of course be omitted from an inquiry which aims at the immediately practical. It is unnecessary to discuss the abstract question whether, under wholly different conditions to those actually moulding the careers and lives of the inhabitants of Great Britain, the resources placed at their disposal by the bounty of Providence are after all adequate to their needs. That may be admitted, together with the weighty truth that, for temporal evils moral and spiritual causes are in strictness, and in the last resort, assignable.
