Respecting the form of government in a Socialistic State, I cannot do better than quote Mr. J. A. Hobson: “A developed organic democracy will have evolved a specialized ‘head,’ an expert official class, which shall draft laws upon information that comes to them from innumerable sources through class and local representation, and shall administer the government, subject to protests similarly conveyed.” “The conditions of a really effective expert officialism are two: such real equality of educational opportunities as shall draw competent officials from the whole people; and such a growth of public intelligence and conscience as shall establish the real final control of government for society in its full organic structure.” (_Contemporary Review_, February, 1902.) _PART II_ THE PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE SUBJECT The laws of heredity constitute the most important agency whereby the vital forces, the vigour and soundness of the physical system, are changed for better or worse.—NATHAN ALLEN, M.D., LL.D. CHAPTER I THE LAW OF POPULATION The population question is the real riddle of the Sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication all other riddles sink into insignificance.—HUXLEY. No human life can be maintained without food, and no healthy individual life can be maintained without good food in sufficient quantity; therefore, the relation of numbers to the actual food supply—in other words, the Population Question—stands at the threshold of our social inquiries and at the base of all social reform. At the beginning of last century, Malthus, who knew nothing of evolution, expounded the doctrine that man tends to increase more rapidly than the means of subsistence; that population and food, like two runners of unequal swiftness chained together, advance side by side, but the pace or natural rate of increase of the former is so immensely superior to that of the latter that it is necessarily greatly checked. And the checks are of two kinds. They are either positive—that is, deaths occur from famine, accident, war or disease, and keep down the population so that the means of subsistence are just sufficient to enable the poorer classes barely to exist; or they are preventive—that is, fewer births take place than man is capable of causing.