of subsistence, while the rest of the wealth of the country is absorbed by those trading and dividend-consuming classes of whom I have spoken more than once in previous pages.  There is over-population certainly, but it is an over-population (as any one may see who walks through the West End of London or the corresponding quarters of any of our large towns) of idlers and futile people, who are a burden to the nation.  With our extraordinary industrial system—­or want of system—­it commonly happens that the abundance of ill-paid or unemployed workers at one end of the social scale, by reducing the rates of wages and so increasing the rates of dividends, actually creates a greater abundance of unemployed rich at the other end; but neither excess points in itself to over-population —­only to a diseased state of distribution.  What we really ought to aim at creating is a nation in which every one was capable of doing useful or beautiful work of some kind or other and was gladly occupied in doing it.  Such a nation would be truly healthy.  It would be powerful and productive beyond all our present dreams.  But the Western nations of to-day, with their huge burdens of unskilled, ill-grown poor and their huge burden of incompetent, feeble rich—­it is a wonder that they survive.  They would not survive a decade or two if the Chinese or the Japanese in their numbers were to come into personal and direct competition with them.

If Britain is not really at present over-populated, the same is probably even more true of Germany.  For Germany, with a larger and more fertile area in proportion to her population, is safer than we are in the matter of self-support.  But again in Germany the outcry of over-population has arisen, and has arisen from the same cause as here—­namely, the rise of the commercial system, the division of the nation into extremes of poverty and riches, and the consequent appearance of excess population in both directions.  And this diseased state of the nation has led to a fever of “expansion” and has been (as already said) one of the chief causes of the present war.  As long as the modern nations are such fools as to conduct their industrial affairs in the existing way they will not only be full of strife, disease, and discord in themselves, but they will inevitably quarrel with their neighbours.

All this, however, does not prove that a genuine over-population difficulty may not occur even now in localities, and possibly in some far future time over the whole earth.  And it may be just as well to consider these possibilities.

Dismissing War and Disease as solutions—­as belonging to barbarous and ignorant ages of human evolution—­there remain, perhaps, three rational methods of dealing with the question:  (1) the organization and improvement of industrial production on existing lands so far as to allow the support of a larger population; (2) the transport of excess populations to new and undeveloped lands (colonization); (3) the limitation of families.