It may be asserted that this view is alarmist, and that, however bad our state, we are better than Germany. No thought of an enemy from without need, therefore, mar our satisfaction in our swift declension into the morass of vice. That comparison may be granted: we are better than Germany, though Germany has not yet sacrificed her children in such hecatombs as we have done. But what we have to consider is not the birthrate in {51} relation to that of Germany but in relation to the extent of the earth surface which owns our sway. The end of the war will find Germany confined within narrow borders with all her colonies gone. The Germany of to-morrow will have no room for racial expansion. But we own the fourth of the world's surface. That vast territory calls to us for men. And if we individually choose our own selfish ease, and sacrifice the generations to come, we shall have failed in our imperial calling. We may win an empire on the battlefield; we will inevitably lose it in the silent nursery. Not in relation to this or that earthly factor has this question to be considered. It is in relation to the Moral Order of the universe that we must face it. The unseen Power that reigns is a Moral Power. Somewhere in this universe, Righteousness is throned. Whatever race in the past surrendered to evil and made degeneracy its god--upon that race the judgment of the consuming sword fell. Though the {52} judgment often tarried, it always fell. As one considers the moral condition to which we have come, the worse condition to which we are hastening, the destruction which befell those of old in whose footsteps we are now treading, the dust accumulated on buried cities and vanished races who made their pleasure their god, and the flaming of the sword wherewith God removed in all ages the cankerous growth from the body of humanity,--the question leaps forth: How can we escape the righteous judgment of God? Will there be found a place of repentance for us who have sacrificed the child of flesh and blood to the calf of gold[7] and have surrendered ourselves to the sensuous delights of worshipping at our chosen idol's shrine? Unless the nation finds the place of repentance, it needs no prophet to foretell the end. For we have been living for more than a generation a life 'such as God has never suffered man to lead on earth long, which He has always {53} crushed out by calamity or revolution.' And the startling fact is this--that when the judgment of God befell, it was on men unconscious that they were being judged. They came to the Great White Throne and never discerned it; they reached the end and never knew it to be the end. Thus they perished--Babylon and Rome alike. And we are as they. The judgment-seat is visible in the heavens, but our eyes never turn to it; amid the crash of the world's civilisation we hear no voice calling to repentance. [1] _The Declining Birthrate_, p. 90. [2] P. 125.