do not necessarily mean lessened total population. A man who has only three children and rears them all healthfully, maintains the species more efficiently than a man who has eight, loses six, and perforce rears the two survivors badly, because what might have nourished two or three well was for years spent in merely keeping more alive. The extreme case of France, over which there has been so much superficial talk in France and elsewhere, is no such portent as it is made out, but is in part explicable by the stress of the influenza plague, which heavily affected even the English birth-rate, and is in part a useful reminder to French statesmen that they are pressing too heavily on their country's resources, and need to mend their methods. Withal, the misery in France is far less grinding and pervasive than the misery in England. As to the argument that it is not over-breeding, but bad distribution that causes poverty, the answer is that both causes operate, but that over-breeding can work misery under any system of distribution whatever, and is a main support to bad distribution at present. Some Malthusians have supposed that with a proper proportionment of population to the resources of the time being, poverty would wholly disappear. This is over-sanguine; but the case of the United States in the first half of the century, when resources were still far ahead of labour supply, gives abundant support to a more moderate claim. On the other hand, unless the lesson of prudential restraint be learned, the most thorough socialistic system of distribution will simply incur the most complete ruin. People reason that if only the resources of the world were properly utilised, all could be fed and housed comfortably. That is quite true; but they forget that if there be no restraint, the population of the world, being better placed than ever, will double at least every twenty-five years, and will thus soon upset any possible system of housing and feeding, and reduce the general condition to toil and poverty all round. This is so obvious when put, that the optimists are fain to fall back on a theory that population slackens spontaneously under conditions of comfort. Mr George moves nimbly between this theory and one which absolutely negates it. But all such pleas resolve themselves into either an admission that the race _must and will learn to practise prudential restraint_, which is a surrender to Malthusianism, or an assumption of a pre-ordained beneficent harmony in Nature, the old optimism in a new dress, or rather an old dress "turned."