Now Malthus had pointed out that with conditions of life comparatively favourable, and an increase of food supply comparatively easy, population was found to double itself in twenty-five years or less. Our numbers during these eighty years had been, roughly speaking, trebled! and the increase took place under conditions not favourable but unfavourable to the bulk of the nation. Manufacturing industries had enabled us to purchase food from abroad, and consequently a larger number of children survived. Food, however, cannot always be forthcoming in greater and greater abundance from countries that need more and more of their own food supply, and which, by manufacturing for themselves, are gradually reducing their demand for our manufactured commodities. Notwithstanding this patent fact, there are social reformers to-day who persist in ignoring the population difficulty, and there are thinkers who, basing their views on Herbert Spencer’s dictum that “man’s fertility will be checked by his individuation,” pass it over lightly. Generally speaking, however, the public conscience is now aroused, and enlightened men and women are tolerably well alive to the fundamental nature and the grave importance of the population question. “In some parts of the United States of America,” says an able writer, “population has actually doubled itself, apart from immigration, in twenty-five years; and this in the face of the ordinary retarding influences. If such a rate of increase upon the present population of the whole globe were to prevail for only 250 years, there would be left but one square yard of standing room for each individual.”