The "population question" which troubled Nehemiah at this time is so exactly opposite to that which gives concern to students of social problems in our own day, that we need to look into the circumstances in which it emerged in order to understand its bearings. The powerful suction of great towns, depleting the rural districts and gorging the urban, is a source of the greatest anxiety to all who seriously contemplate the state of modern society; and consequently one of the most pressing questions of the day is how to scatter the people over the land. Even in new countries the same serious condition is experienced--in Australia, for instance, where the crowding of the people into Melbourne is rapidly piling up the very difficulties sanguine men hoped the colonies would escape. If we only had these modern facts to draw upon, we might conclude that a centripetal movement of population was inevitable. That it is not altogether a novelty we may learn from the venerable story of the Tower of Babel, from which we may also gather that it is God's will that men should spread abroad and replenish the earth. It is one of the advantages of the study of history that it lifts us out of our narrow grooves and reveals to us an immense variety of modes of life, and this is not the least of the many elements of profit that come to us from the historical embodiment of revelation as we have it in the Bible. The width of vision that we may thus attain to will have a double effect. It will save us from being wedded to a fixed policy under all circumstances; and it will deliver us from the despair into which we should settle down, if we did not see that what looks to us like a hopeless and interminable drift in the wrong direction is not the permanent course of human development. It is necessary to consider that if the dangers of a growing population are serious, those of a dwindling population are much more grave.