Excesses in service
Of the Womb universal,
The absolute drudge."

As time passed and man increased, he drifted ever farther afield in
search of room. He encountered other drifts of men, and the killing of
men became prodigious. The weak and the decadent fell under the sword.
Nations that faltered, that waxed prosperous in fat valleys and rich
river deltas, were swept away by the drifts of stronger men who were
nourished on the hardships of deserts and mountains and who were more
capable with the sword. Unknown and unnumbered billions of men have been
so destroyed in prehistoric times. Draper says that in the twenty years
of the Gothic war, Italy lost 15,000,000 of her population; "and that the
wars, famines, and pestilences of the reign of Justinian diminished the
human species by the almost incredible number of 100,000,000." Germany,
in the Thirty Years' War, lost 6,000,000 inhabitants. The record of our
own American Civil War need scarcely be recalled.

And man has been destroyed in other ways than by the sword. Flood,
famine, pestilence and murder are potent factors in reducing
population--in making room. As Mr. Charles Woodruff, in his "Expansion
of Races," has instanced: In 1886, when the dikes of the Yellow River
burst, 7,000,000 people were drowned. The failure of crops in Ireland,
in 1848, caused 1,000,000 deaths. The famines in India of 1896-7 and
1899-1900 lessened the population by 21,000,000. The T'ai'ping rebellion
and the Mohammedan rebellion, combined with the famine of 1877-78,
destroyed scores of millions of Chinese. Europe has been swept
repeatedly by great plagues. In India, for the period of 1903 to 1907,
the plague deaths averaged between one and two millions a year. Mr.
Woodruff is responsible for the assertion that 10,000,000 persons now