It has been handed down to a world in which it has long been ridiculously out of place, and has become merely the excuse for criminal recklessness among a race which has chosen to forget that the command was qualified by a solemn admonition: "At the hand of man, even at the hand of every man's brother, will I require the life of man." The high birth-rate has meant a vast slaughter of infants, it has meant, moreover, a perpetual oppression of the workers, disease, starvation, and death among the adult population; it has meant, further, a blood-thirsty economic competition, militarism, warfare.

It has meant that all civilisation has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution, and the human race has gone on lightly dancing there, striving to forget that ancient warning from a soul of things even deeper than the voice of Jehovah: "At the hand of man will I require the life of man." Men have recklessly followed the Will o' the Wisp which represented mere multiplication of their inefficient selves as the ideal of progress, quantity before quality, the notion that in an orgy of universal procreation could consist the highest good of humanity.
The Great War, that is scarcely yet merged into an only less war-like Peace, has brought at least the small compensation that it has led men to look in the face this insane ideal of human progress.

We see to-day what has come of it, and the further evils yet to come of it are being embodied beneath our eyes.

So that at last the voice of Jehovah has here and there been faintly heard, even where nowadays we had grown least accustomed to hear it, in the Churches.

It is Dr.Inge, the Dean of London's Cathedral of St.Paul's, a distinguished Churchman and at the same time a foremost champion of eugenics, who lately expressed the hope that the world, especially the European world, would one day realise the advantages of a stationary population.[25] Such a recognition, such an aspiration, indicates that a new hope is dawning on the world's horizon, and a higher ideal growing within the human soul.