living in the United States are doomed to die of tuberculosis. And in
this same country ten thousand persons a year are directly murdered. In
China, between three and six millions of infants are annually destroyed,
while the total infanticide record of the whole world is appalling. In
Africa, now, human beings are dying by millions of the sleeping sickness.

More destructive of life than war, is industry. In all civilised
countries great masses of people are crowded into slums and
labour-ghettos, where disease festers, vice corrodes, and famine is
chronic, and where they die more swiftly and in greater numbers than do
the soldiers in our modern wars. The very infant mortality of a slum
parish in the East End of London is three times that of a middle-class
parish in the West End. In the United States, in the last fourteen
years, a total of coal-miners, greater than our entire standing army, has
been killed and injured. The United States Bureau of Labour states that
during the year 1908, there were between 30,000 and 35,000 deaths of
workers by accidents, while 200,000 more were injured. In fact, the
safest place for a working-man is in the army. And even if that army be
at the front, fighting in Cuba or South Africa, the soldier in the ranks
has a better chance for life than the working-man at home.

And yet, despite this terrible roll of death, despite the enormous
killing of the past and the enormous killing of the present, there are to-
day alive on the planet a billion and three quarters of human beings. Our
immediate conclusion is that man is exceedingly fecund and very tough.
Never before have there been so many people in the world. In the past
centuries the world's population has been smaller; in the future
centuries it is destined to be larger. And this brings us to that old
bugbear that has been so frequently laughed away and that still persists
in raising its grisly head--namely, the doctrine of Malthus. While man's