It was an era of prosperity. But when it began to be realised what this meant it was seen that such "prosperity" was far from an enviable condition. A community cannot suddenly adjust itself to a sudden expansion, still less can it adjust itself to a continuous rapid expansion. Disease, misery, and poverty flourished in this prosperous new industrial era. Filth and insanitation, immorality and crime, were fostered by overcrowding in ill-built urban areas. Ignorance and stupidity abounded, for the child, placed in the monotonous routine of the factory when little more than an infant, was deprived alike of the education of the school and of the world. Higher wages brought no higher refinement and were squandered on food and drink, on the lowest vulgar tastes. Such "prosperity" was merely a brutalising influence; it meant nothing for the growth of civilisation and humanity. Then a wholesome movement of reaction set in. The betterment of the environment--that was the great task that social pioneers and reformers saw before them. They courageously set about the herculean task of cleansing this Augean stable of "Prosperity." The era of sanitation began. The endless and highly beneficent course of factory legislature was inaugurated.[7] That is the era which, in every progressive country of the world, we are living in still. The final tendency of it, however, was not foreseen by its great pioneers, or even its humble day-labourers of the present time. For they were not attacking reproduction; they were fighting against bad conditions, and may even have thought that they were enabling reproduction to expand more freely. They had not realised that to improve the environment is to check reproduction, being indeed the one and only way in which undue reproduction can be checked. That may be said to be an aspect of the opposition between Genesis and Individuation, on which Herbert Spencer insisted, for by improving the environment we necessarily improve the individual who is rooted in that environment. It is not, we must remember, a matter of conscious and voluntary action. That is clearly manifest by the fact that it occurs even among the most primitive micro-organisms; when placed under unfavourable conditions as to food and environment they tend to pass into a reproductive phase and by sporulation or otherwise begin to produce new individuals rapidly. It is the same in Man. Improve the environment and reproduction is checked.[8] That is, as Professor Benjamin Moore has said, "the simple biological reply to good economic conditions." It is only among the poor, the ignorant, and the wretched that reproduction flourishes. "The tendency of civilisation," as Leroy-Beaulieu concludes, "is to reduce the birth-rate." Those who desire a high birth-rate are desiring, whether they know it or not, the increase of poverty, ignorance, and wretchedness.