and in many ages and many countries, the situation has been discussed
with serious forebodings for the future.

In all ages thinking men have regarded war with aversion, yet with peace
and domestic prosperity other dangers arose to threaten the progress of
the race, and as the passing generations cried out for some remedy for
the ever pressing evils, thinking men have been proposing measures
somewhat harmonising with the knowledge or the sentiment of the times.
Whether we are wiser than our ancestors remains an unsettled question.

The old Greeks faced the problem boldly. There were two dangers in the
minds of these ancient philosophers. There was the danger of
over-population of good citizens, and there was the danger of increasing
the burden good citizens had to bear by the maintenance of defectives.
However good the breed, over-population was an economic danger, for,
said Aristotle, "The legislator who fixes the amount of property should
also fix the number of children, for if the children are too many for
the property the law must be broken." (Politics II, 7-5.) And he further
declares (ib. VII. 16 25) "As to the exposure and rearing of children,
let there be a law that no deformed child shall live"; and the exposure
of infants was for years the Grecian method of eliminating the unfit.

A century ago "Parson Malthus" dealt with over-population without regard
to the fitness of individuals to survive, and he advised the exercise
of moral restraint expressed in delayed marriage, to prevent population
pressing on the limits of food, which he maintained it invariably tends
to do. After the high souled Malthus, came the Neo-Malthusians, who,
although they retained the name perverted the teaching of this great
demographist, and some Socialist writers of high repute still advocate
the systematic instruction of the poor in Neo-Malthusian practices.