That the rate of increase of population of a country depends in almost every case upon its power of feeding its people by its own or imported food, and not upon its birth-rate, is a matter which statesmen will have to recognise; and those who are anxious for the increase of the population of our country and Empire, should turn their attention to the acceleration of food production instead of deploring the declining birth-rate. No intelligent person will claim that the food producing possibilities of the world are exhausted, but it does appear difficult to increase them at more than a very slow rate (probably at present not more than 6 per cent. or 7 per cent. in a decade); and the world’s population cannot increase faster than the food does. Irrigation in India has been followed by an increase in population far greater than before, and encouragement of agriculture or of the industries which bring food to this country is the only means by which our increase of population can be accelerated. No shuffling of the incidence of taxation, and no humanitarian schemes, will affect it—except prejudicially by favoring the increase of the inefficient rather than the efficient. Nor will emigration, the panacea of the orthodox Imperialist, solve the problem. We do not want effective producers to leave us, and these are the only people our colonies really desire. Our town-bred weaklings are frequently less fitted to succeed in the Colonies than at home, as the experience of Canada appears to testify. It has been said that “no Empire can survive which is rotten at the core”; and if we persist in the policy of encouraging the excessive reproduction of the poor, of taxing the capable for their support, of keeping about a third of our men and women unmarried, and of seeing many of our best emigrate for want of decent prospects at home, we need not be surprised if our Imperial efficiency diminishes.