On that level we cannot compete even with the lowest of organised things, not even with the bacteria, which in number and in rapidity of multiplication are inconceivable to us.
"All hope abandon, ye that enter here" is written over the portal of this path of "Progress." [25] This has long been recognised by men of science.

Even anyone with the slightest knowledge of biology, Professor Bateson remarked in a British Association Presidential address in 1914, is aware that a population need not be declining because it is not increasing; "in normal stable conditions population is stationary." Major Leonard Darwin, the thoughtful and cautious President of the Eugenics Education Society, has lately stated his considered belief ("Population and Civilisation," _Economic Journal_, June, 1921) that increase in numbers means, ultimately, relative reduction of wealth per head, with consequent lowering of the standard of civilisation; that it also, under existing conditions, involves the production of a smaller proportion of men of ability; and, further, a depreciation of our traditions; he concludes that, whatever element in civilisation we regard--wealth, or stock, or traditions--"any increase in the population _such as that now taking place_ will be accompanied by a lowering in the standard of our civilisation." There are definite reasons why real progress in the supreme tasks of civilisation can best be made by a more or less stationary population, whether the population is large or small, and it need scarcely be added that, so far as the history of mankind is yet legible, the great advances in civilisation have been made by small, even very small populations.
Where the population is rapidly growing, even if it is growing under the favourable conditions that hardly ever accompany such growth, all its energy is absorbed in adjusting its perpetually shifting equilibrium.

It cannot succeed in securing the right conditions of growth, because its growth is never ceasing to demand new conditions.

The structure of its civilisation never rises above the foundations because these foundations have perpetually to be laid afresh, and there is never time to get further.

It is a process, moreover, accompanied by unending friction and disorder, by strains and stresses of all kinds, which are fatal to any full, harmonious, and democratic civilisation.