CONCLUSIONS AS TO POPULATION INCREASE 119 
ing trouble. With the collisions of interest that are 
now in existence, the future looks not merely threaten- 
ing but very ominous indeed. If that future is to be 
better than appears, it will depend largely upon the 
attitude of its inhabitants to the era that is dawning. 
The matter even of its growth in numbers is truly 
momentous, and, with its assertive and unscrupulous 
greeds, is no less alarming to any one who has any 
vision, and who realises to what past history is pointing. 
The frightful indifference to ghastly miseries and 
unspeakable sufferings which made the last war 
possible, reveal the spirit which is governing so large 
a part of mankind even now. That spirit is a limiting 
factor to the growth of the human race and to material 
and spiritual advances in its future. Virtually we are 
told it will never change ; if that be true, then the 
Shadow of the Future will be very dark. 
The World’s Future is, then, the problem of problems. 
That we should at once face it, is revealed by the 
fact that the rapidity of the increases in population- 
numbers is already threatening us with apparently 
almost insoluble difficulties: we are rapidly approach- 
ing numbers that make the problem a stupendous, 
aye, even an appalling, one. At the present time one 
country, at least, must make provision for the emigra- 
tion of some of its inhabitants. We may elect to 
ignore these matters, but if we do we only accentuate 
our future difficulties. It is here that we see that 
the way of humility is needed, for the ablest are 
intellectually incompetent, and the noblest fall short 
of the splendour of purpose, demanded for its solution. 
Anyone who has read Dean Inge’s England (Benn, 
1926) attentively will realise something of the magni- 
tude, not merely of England’s problems, but those of 
the world. His epilogue sums up the situation. The 
issues for all great nations do not differ materially. 
What Dean Inge has to say, in his most able review