104 THE SHADOW OF THE WORLD’S FUTURE 
suffice to say that some measure of the control of 
births, in some way or other, is inevitable. The diffi- 
culties, which necessarily present themselves in life, 
are accentuated by the fact that there is no limit to 
human desire, nor are there any abstract standards 
for human guidance. What satisfied us yesterday is 
inadequate to-day. The son believes that he must 
outdistance the father. The standards-of-living, of 
civilisation, elaborate themselves. Any one class of the 
people, in so-called democratic countries, imagines 
itself to be rightly entitled to what any other possesses. 
The scale of individual demand has no fixed limit, and 
the economic efficiency of the human race must keep 
on rapidly advancing in order to meet the double tax, 
viz., inereasing numbers and the more elaborated and 
luxurious living now characteristic. 
Already there are, of course, factors which tend to 
limit births. In all the higher grades of life the 
educational, the cultural, and the social demands 
tend to defer the age of marriage to a later period of 
life, and in this way operate to limit the family. They 
menace and restrict the reproductive impulse. The 
growing insistence that quality, and not only numbers, 
shall be taken into account, is also operative in the 
same direction. Anyone who surveys the tendencies 
of human development soon realises two things. One 
is that Man is commencing to ask: “ How can the 
standards attained be stabilised or even further 
elaborated?” the other is, “What are the general 
world-conditions, and how will they act on the general 
drift of things?” In facing these questions we bear 
in mind—as said previously—that while science has 
enormously advanced human powers of destruction, 
the ameliorative possibilities she has created are, 
relatively thereto, but slight. And we recognise also 
that modern finance, transport and communication 
have made the problem bristle with new difficulties.