In discussing the merits of the two plans, Dr Pearl goes on:-- 'Now the morals of the two plans are not at issue here. Both are regarded, on different grounds to be sure, as highly immoral by many people. Here we are concerned only with actualities. There can be no doubt that in general and in the long run the German plan is bound to win over the birth-control plan, if the issue is joined between the two and only the two, and its resolution is military in character.... So long as there are on the earth aggressively-minded peoples who from choice deliberately maintain a high birth-rate, no people can afford to put the French solution of the population problem into operation unless they are prepared to give up, practically at the asking, both their national integrity and their land.' Let us assume, therefore, that France adopts the high birth-rate plan. She, too, will then be compelled, if the plan has worked out successfully, 'to get out and conquer some one.' But that some one will also, for the same reasons, have been following the plan of high birth-rate. What is then to happen? A competition in fecundity as a solution of the excess population problem seems inadequate. Yet it is inevitably prompted by the nationalist impulse. Happily the general rise in the standard of life itself furnishes a solution. As we have seen, the birth-rate is, within certain limits, in inverse ratio to a people's prosperity. But again, nationalism, by preventing the economic unification of Europe, may well stand in the way of that solution also. It checks the tendencies which would solve the problem. A fall in the birth-rate, as a concomitant of a rising standard of living, was beginning to be revealed in Germany also before the War.[32] If now, under the new order, German industrialism is checked and we get an agricultural population compelled by circumstances to a standard of life not higher than that of the Russian _moujik_, we may perhaps also be faced by a revival of high fertility in mystic disregard of the material means available for the support of the population. There is a further point.