We take pride that we export so much and need so little. We call it a favourable “balance of trade.” We spread abroad pamphlets and graphic charts and dreary columns of ciphers to show how successfully we have gutted the land we live on to fill alien mouths. We display pictures of train loads of labour-saving machinery, glorying in the fact that one man aided by Pittsburg steel and Cardiff coal can fend off twenty families from a thousand acres, and garner the yield for the contentment of fat-handed brokers eating lobsters in a distant city. Had the matter been understood rightly by the “estanciero” of a generation or two ago, nay, even by this present generation, he would have put a premium on fecundity. His business was to encourage population; but while he drowsed in siesta hour over the newspaper proclaiming the arrival of alien immigration and smiling unctuously at the intelligence, he condemned his own men to celibacy, unwilling to spend the price of five bullocks on a mud hut to cradle the generation on his own land of a race of lusty yeomen. He took pride in the number of calves and lambs born on his estate. It would have beseemed him better to take pride in the number of _babies_ born there. Such a consummation would be vastly upsetting to Malthusian economists who view with jealousy the peopling of new fields of production. They would have us believe that it is only here by the overflowing of the Nile, and there by the discovery of the New World, that the human race has been saved from famine. If we can no longer send 350,000 tons of meat and five million tons of cereals to the Old World our usefulness has passed away and our mission ended.