Germany (perhaps with England and Italy aiding) to get rid of such
international nuisances as the insane polish republic, the petty states
of the Baltic, and perhaps also most of the Balkan states. I pass
over the probability of a new mutiny in India, of the rising of China
against the Japanese, and of a general struggle for a new alignment
of boundaries in South America. All of these wars, great and small,
are probable; most of them are humanly certain. They will be
fought ferociously, and with the aid of destructive engines of the
utmost efficiency. They will bring about an unparalleled butchery of
men, and a large proportion of these men will be under forty
years of age.


As a result there will be a shortage of husbands in Christendom, and
as a second result the survivors will be appreciably harder to snare
than the men of today. Every man of agreeable exterior and easy
means will be pursued, not merely by a few dozen or score of
women, as now, but by whole battalions and brigades of them, and
he will be driven in sheer self-defence into very sharp bargaining.
Perhaps in the end the state will have to interfere in the business, to
prevent the potential husband going to waste in the turmoil of
opportunity.


Just what form this interference is likely to take has not yet appeared
clearly. In France there is already a wholesale legitimization of
children born out of wedlock and in Eastern Europe there has been
a clamour for the legalization of polygamy, but these devices do not
meet the main problem, which is the encouragement of monogamy
to the utmost. A plan that suggests itself is the amelioration of the