According to one view the development of population, together with the necessity for war which is inextricably mixed up with a developing population, cannot be effected without, as one champion of the doctrine is pleased to put it, "shattering both the structure of Euclidean space and the psychological laws upon which the existence of self-consciousness and human society are conditional."[27] In simpler words, populations tend to become too large for their territories, so that war ensues, and birth-control can do nothing because "it is doubtful whether a group in the plenitude of vigour and self-consciousness can deliberately stop its own growth." The other school proclaims human impotence on exactly opposite grounds.

There is not the slightest reason, it declares, to believe that birth-control has had any but a completely negligible influence on population.

This is a natural process and fertility is automatically adjusted to the death-rate.
Whenever a population reaches a certain stage of civilisation and nervous development its procreativeness, quite apart from any effort of the will, tends to diminish.

The seeming effect of birth-control is illusory.

It is Nature, not human effort, which is at work.[28] [27] B.A.G.Fuller, "The Mechanical Basis of War," _Hibbert Journal_, 1921.
[28] Sir Shirley Murphy some years ago (_Lancet_, 10 Aug.