One last resort the would-be patriotic alarmist seeks when all others fail. He is good enough to admit that a general decline in the birth-rate might be beneficial. But, he points out, it affects social classes unequally. It is initiated, not by the degenerate and the unfit, whom we could well dispense with, but by the very best classes in the community, the well-to-do and the educated. One is inclined to remark, at once, that a social change initiated by its best social classes is scarcely likely to be pernicious. Where, it may be asked, if not among the most educated classes, is any process of amelioration to be initiated? We cannot make the world topsy-turvy to suit the convenience of topsy-turvy minds. All social movements tend to begin at the top and to permeate downwards. This has been the case with the decline in the birth-rate, but it is already well marked among the working classes, and has only failed to touch the lowest social stratum of all, too weak-minded and too reckless to be amenable to ordinary social motives. The rational method of meeting this situation is not a propaganda in favour of procreation--a truly imbecile propaganda, since it is only carried out and only likely to be carried out, by the very class which we wish to sterilise--but by a wise policy of regulative eugenics. We have to create the motives, and it is not an impossible task, which will act even upon the weak-minded and reckless lowest social stratum. These facts have a significance which many of us have failed to realise. The Great War has brought home the gravity of that significance. It has been the perpetual refrain of the Pan-Germanists for many years that the vast and sudden expansion of the German peoples makes necessary a new movement of the German nations into the world and a new enlargement of frontiers, in other words, War. It is not only among the Germans, though among them it may have been more conscious, that a similar cause has led to the like result. It has ever been so. The expanding nation has always been a menace to the world and to itself. The arrest of the falling birth-rate, it cannot be too often repeated, would be the arrest of all civilisation and of all humanity. [1] Ralph Thicknesse, _A Year's Journey Through France and Spain_, 1777, p. 298. [2] The last twelve words quoted are by Miss Ethel Elderton in an otherwise sober memoir (_Report on the English Birth-rate_, 1914, p. 237) which shows that the birth control movement has begun, just where we should expect it to begin, among the better instructed classes. [3] J.L. Myres, "The Causes of Rise and Fall in the Population of the Ancient World," Eugenics Review, April, 1915. [4] Roscher, _Grundlagen der National--konomie_, 23rd ed., 1900, Bk. VI. [5] G. Lowes Dickinson, _The Civilisation of India, China, and Japan_, 1914, p. 47. VII WAR AND DEMOCRACY