How much has the economic stress affected old convictions? How general and how eager is the Japanese resolution to Westernise farther? None of the rural sociologists had given any thought apparently to a new factor in the rural problem: the way in which compulsory military service, in taking farmers' sons to the cities as soldiers and bluejackets, is giving them an acquaintance with neo-Malthusianism. In Tokyo and other large cities certain articles are prominently advertised on the hoardings. It is of some importance to consider what will be the effect of this knowledge in competition with the national appreciation of large families.[227] Is it likely that an intensely "practical" people, which has bolted so much of European and American "civilisation," will be wholly uninfluenced by the Western practice of limitation of offspring? What is to-day the actual strength of the social needs which have produced the large Japanese family?[228] Whatever middle-aged Japanese may think, the matter is not in their hands, but in the hands of the younger generation. Most Western economists would no doubt argue that if fewer babies arrived in Japan there would not be so many farmers' boys and university graduates bent on emigrating. Without the voluntary limitation of families, however, the number of children born is likely to be diminished by the increased cost of living and by the postponement of marriage. I know Japanese men who were married before they were twenty; the younger generation of my friends is marrying nearer thirty.[229] There is reason to believe that the population has not increased of recent years at the old rate.[230] A responsible authority expressed the opinion to me that the necessities of the population are unlikely to overtake the means of production in the near future.[231]