This condition of things can only be realized, first, if population is
regulated; second, if unproductive labour is suppressed; and third, if
the means of labour are made common property. The necessity for
regulating population comes, of course, from the limitation of the
natural resources at society's command. In any community there is a
certain normal limit of population--the limit at which all the natural
resources are distributed among all the inhabitants according to their
powers--and the community will learn when this limit is reached from the
number of workmen who are unable to obtain private employment, and are
obliged to seek work from the State. Then it can regulate population by
various expedients. It may require the possession of a certain amount of
fortune as a preliminary condition to marriage, and raise this amount
according to necessity. It may encourage emigration. It may forbid
marriages under a fixed age, and to prevent illegitimacy, it might give
natural children the same rights as legitimate ones. But Marlo trusts
most to the strong preventive check that would be supplied by the power
imparted to working men under the Federal _régime_ of improving their
position.
The same necessity that makes it legitimate, and, indeed, imperative to
regulate population, makes it legitimate and imperative also to suppress
what Marlo calls unproductive acquisition, _i.e._, the acquisition by
persons who are able to work of any other property than they earn as the
fruit of their work; and to suppress likewise all waste of the means of
life and enjoyment, such, for example, as is involved in the maintenance
of unnecessary horses, dogs, or other animals that only eat up the
products of the soil. The obligation to labour and the curtailment of
luxury would come into exercise before the restrictions on population,
and be more and more rigorously enforced as the normal limit of
population was approximated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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