those trading and dividend-consuming classes of whom I have spoken more
than once in previous pages. There is over-population certainly, but it
is an over-population (as any one may see who walks through the West End
of London or the corresponding quarters of any of our large towns) of
idlers and futile people, who are a burden to the nation. With our
extraordinary industrial system--or want of system--it commonly happens
that the abundance of ill-paid or unemployed workers at one end of the
social scale, by reducing the rates of wages and so increasing the rates
of dividends, actually creates a greater abundance of unemployed rich at
the other end; but neither excess points in itself to over-population
--only to a diseased state of distribution. What we really
ought to aim at creating is a nation in which every one was
capable of doing useful or beautiful work of some kind or other and was
gladly occupied in doing it. Such a nation would be truly healthy. It
would be powerful and productive beyond all our present dreams. But the
Western nations of to-day, with their huge burdens of unskilled,
ill-grown poor and their huge burden of incompetent, feeble rich--it is
a wonder that they survive. They would not survive a decade or two if
the Chinese or the Japanese in their numbers were to come into personal
and direct competition with them.

If Britain is not really at present over-populated, the same is probably
even more true of Germany. For Germany, with a larger and more fertile
area in proportion to her population, is safer than we are in the matter
of self-support. But again in Germany the outcry of over-population has
arisen, and has arisen from the same cause as here--namely, the rise of
the commercial system, the division of the nation into extremes of
poverty and riches, and the consequent _appearance_ of excess population
in both directions. And this diseased state of the nation has led to a
fever of "expansion" and has been (as already said) one of the chief