The death-rate of children in the poorest districts of the East End of London is three times as great as among the rich at the West End. In barbarous ages the death-rate was, as far as we can learn, far higher than now, and even now the death-rate of children in Russia is extremely high. We have little cause to rejoice in the absence of famine, pestilence and war so long as the lowering of the death-rate—by sanitation, the hospital system and the outcome generally of sympathetic feeling—increases the proportion of human beings in a state of chronic want, and produces a gradual enfeeblement and deterioration of the human race. Yet it is inconceivable that rationalized man could withhold his efforts to reduce the death-rate in the future because of the fatal effects of his philanthropic action in the past. Darwin acknowledged this dilemma. In the year 1878 he somewhat sadly wrote: “The evils that would follow by checking benevolence and sympathy in not fostering the weak and diseased would be greater than by allowing them to survive and procreate.” Ten years later Professor Huxley wrote: “So long as unlimited multiplication goes on, no social organization which has ever been devised, no fiddle-faddling with the distribution of wealth, will deliver society from the tendency to be destroyed by the reproduction within itself in its intensest form of that struggle for existence, the limitation of which is the object of society.” (_Nineteenth Century_, February, 1888.) Further than this he did not go; Huxley, like Darwin, brings us up to the dilemma and leaves us there. Not such, however, is the position of all scientific men in the present day. “We stand on the threshold of a new departure in social evolution,” says the author already quoted, “a new and potent factor in the process is about to make itself felt. This factor is man’s intellect.... The intelligence of man will act intelligently; population will not be subjected to mere haphazard restriction; it will be regulated with a wise adaptation of means to an end.” (_Social Evolution and the Evolution of Socialism_, G. S. Carr, pp. 65, 66.) Man’s intelligence already perceives the right policy to pursue. It is to lower the birth-rate, to limit births to a proportion conformable with the food supply; in other words, to create a painless, instead of a painful, equalization of births and deaths.