CHAPTER 24 DO HUMANS BREED LIKE FLIES? OR LIKE NORWEGIAN RATS? If we breed like rabbits, in the long run we have to live and die like rabbits. A. J. Carlson, "Science Versus Life," Journal of the American Medical Association, 147:1440. "UNTRAMMELED COPULATION" Chapter 24: Table of Contents Summary Many who worry about population growth in poor countries assert that people breed "naturally." That is, poor people are assumed to have sexual intercourse without taking thought or doing anything about the possible consequences. In the words of environmentalist William Vogt, whose Road to Survival sold millions of copies, population growth in Asia is due to "untrammeled copulation" by Moslems, Sikhs, Hindus, and the rest of "the backward billion." Biologist Karl Sax asserted that "nearly two thirds of the world's people still rely largely on positive checks [death by starvation and disease] to control excessive growth of populations." Or as Robert C. Cook, the long- time population activist and editor of Population Bulletin, put it more politely, "Over a billion adults in less developed countries live outside the realm of decision-making on this matter" of family size. This idea goes hand in hand with the view that population growth will increase geometrically until starvation or famines halt it, in the ever-ascending curve shown in figure 22-1. The same view of human behavior underlies the assertion of Herman Daly and Clifford Cobb that "our current practice [is] allowing new human beings to be unintended by-products of the sexual fumblings of teenagers whose natural urges have been stimulated by drugs, alcohol, TV, and ill-constructed welfare incentives." The notion of "natural breeding," "natural fertility," and "untrammeled copulation" has been buttressed by the animal-ecology experiments that some biologists offer as analogies to human population growth. Their models include John B. Calhoun's famous Norwegian rats in a pen, hypothetical flies in a bottle or germs in a bucket, and meadow mice or cotton rats, which will indeed keep multiplying until they die for lack of sustenance. Daniel 0. Price, in The 99th Hour, gives a typical example of this view. Assume there are two germs in the bottom of a bucket, and they double in number every hour. (If the reader does not wish to assume that it takes two germs to reproduce, he may start with one germ, one hour earlier.) If it takes one-hundred hours for the bucket to be full of germs, at what point is the bucket one-half full of germs? A moment's thought will show that after ninety-nine hours the bucket is only half full. The title of this volume is not intended to imply that the United States is half full of people but to emphasize that it is possible to have "plenty of space left" and still be precariously near the upper limit. It is interesting that a similar analogy was suggested by Benjamin Franklin two centuries ago. In Malthus's words, It is observed by Dr. Franklin, that there is no bound to the prolific nature of plants or animals, but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each others' means of substinence.... This is incontrovertibly true.... In plants and animals the view of the subject is simple. They are all impelled by a powerful instinct to the increase of their species and this instinct is interrupted by no reasoning or doubts about providing for their offspring...the superabundant effects are repressed afterwards by want of room and nourishment...and among animals, by their becoming the prey of each other. Perhaps the most nightmarish of the biological analogies came from Alan Gregg, the former director of the Rockefeller Foundation's Medical Division: "There is an alarming parallel between the growth of a cancer in the body of an organism and the growth of human population in the earth's ecological economy." Gregg then asserts that "cancerous growths demand food; but so far as I know, they have never been cured by getting it....The analogies can be found in our plundered planet." Gregg then goes on to observe "how nearly the slums of our great cities resemble the necrosis of tumors." And this "raises the whimsical query: Which is the more offensive to decency and beauty, slums or the fetid detritus of a growing tumor?" Some demographic facts suggest that humans will increase the number of children when conditions permit. After food supplies and living conditions began to improve in European countries several centuries ago, the birthrate rose. And the same effect has been observed in the poor countries in the twentieth century. "While the data are not so good as to give decisive evidence, it seems very likely that natality has risen over the past generation - certainly in the West Indies, very likely in tropical America, and probably in a number of countries of Africa and Asia." But we must recognize what Malthus eventually came to recognize. After he published the short simplistic theory in the first edition of his Essay on Population, he took the time to consider the facts as well as the theory. He then concluded that human beings are very different from flies or rats. When faced with the limits of a bottle-like situation, people can alter their behavior in the short run so as to accommodate to that limit, and in the long run people usually alter the limit itself. Unlike plants and animals, people are capable of foresight and may abstain from having children from "fear of misery." That is, people can choose a level of fertility that fits the resources that will be available. As Malthus put it in his later writing, "Impelled to the increase of his species by an equally powerful instinct, reason interrupts his career, and asks him whether he may not bring beings into the world, for whom he cannot provide the means of support." People can also alter the limit - expand the "bottle" or the "lily pond" - by consciously increasing the resources available. When the town's population has grown enough so that the school is full, the town builds an additional school - usually a better one than the old school. The arithmetic about how many doublings it takes to fill the container is nothing but pretty arithmetic, wholly irrelevant to human issues. Malthus came to stress the difference between the breeding of animals and of humans, and he decisively rejected Benjamin Franklin's animal analogy: "The effects of this [preventive] check on man are more complicated.... The preventive check is peculiar to man, and arises from that distinctive superiority in his reasoning faculties, which enables him to calculate distant consequences. Human beings are different from the animals in that we have much more capacity to alter our behavior - including our fertility - to meet the demands of our environment. To control fertility in response to the conditions facing them, people must be capable of rational, self-conscious forethought that affects the course of sexual passion - the kind of planning capability that animals apparently do not possess. Therefore we must briefly ponder the extent to which reason and reasoning have guided the reproductive behavior of individual persons in various societies at different periods in their histories. To put the matter bluntly, we must inquire into the notion - often held by the highly educated - that uneducated people in poor countries tend to breed without foresight or conscious control. For most couples in most parts of the world, marriage precedes childbearing. It is therefore relevant to a judgment about the amount of reasoning involved in "breeding" that marriages are contracted, in most primitive and poor societies, only after a great deal of careful thought, especially with reference to the economic effects of the marriage. How a marriage match is made in rural Ireland shows the importance of such calculations. The young lady's father asks the speaker what fortune do he want. He asks him the place of how many cows, sheep, and horses is it? He asks what makings of a garden are in it; is there plenty of water or spring wells? Is it far from the road, he won't take it. Backward places don't grow big fortunes. And he asks, too, is it near a chapel and the school or near town? The Inagh countryman could pause here; he had summarized a very long and important negotiation. "Well," he went on, getting to the heart of the matter, if it is a nice place, near the road, and the place of eight cows, they are sure to ask 350 fortune [pounds dowry]." Then the young lady's father offers 250. Then maybe the boy's father throws off 50. If the young lad's father still has 250 on it, the speaker divides the 50 between them. So now it's 275. Then the young man says he is not willing to marry without 300 - but if she's a nice girl and a good housekeeper, he'll think of it. So there's another drink by the young man, and then another by the young lady's father, and so on with every second drink till they're near drunk. The speaker gets plenty and has a good day. An astute weighing of economic conditions is also seen to affect marriage in a Southern Italian town that was "as poor as any place in the western world." The young man whose account is given lived in a family of four whose total yearly cash and computed income amounted to $482 in 1955 dollars. Edward Banfield described the courtship and marriage decision. In 1935 I was old enough to marry. My sisters wanted me to take a wife because they had no time to do services for me. At that time there was a law that anyone who was 25 years old and not married had to pay a "celibacy" tax of 125 lire. That amount was much, if we recall that to earn it you had to work 25 days. I thought it over and finally decided to marry. My present wife was at that time working with relatives of my employer. Once I stopped her and asked her to marry me, and she liked the idea too, but I had to tell it before her father. He was happy to accept me, and we talked about what she had to bring as dowry and what I had to do. He asked me to bring my mother to call so that everything would be fine. The next time I brought my mother, and we had a nice feast. When I wanted to meet my fiancee I had to ask the boss' permission. In 1937 I asked the girl and her family to hasten the marriage before I was 25 years old. The father told me that she was not ready with the dowry. I asked him if at least we couldn't have the civil ceremony on February 6, 1938, two months late, so that I had to pay the tax for that year. Once my mother and I went to Addo to visit my father-in-law in order to discuss and establish definitely what they were going to give us [in the dowry]. My mother wanted everything to be conveyed through a notary. My father-in-law gave us one tomolo of land and my mother gave the little house, but she reserved for herself the right to use it. Everything was written on official tax-stamp paper by the notary. As soon as my wife was ready with the dowry the church marriage was set for August 25, 1938. As to reason and self-control after marriage, there has been much debate among demographers in recent years about whether in pre-modern societies fertility is or is not "natural" - that is, at a rate equal to the biological limit. As I read that literature, those who reject the "natural fertility" proposition have the better data and analyses, but a conclusive answer is still to come. In virtually no observed society (except, paradoxically, the very modern Hutterites in the U.S. and Canada, and a few other such groups) does actual fertility approach women's fecundity (potential fertility). And in many "primitive" societies, fertility is quite low. The anthropological evidence for fertility control within marriage also seems convincing. Even among the most "primitive" and "backward" of people, fertility seems to be subject to both personal and social constraints. One example is the "primitive" (as of 1936) Polynesian island of Tikopia, where "strong social conventions enforce celibacy upon some people and cause others to limit the number of their offspring", and "the motive of a married pair is the avoidance of the extra economic liability which a child brings." Another example is the effect of the size of the harvest on marriages in Sweden in the eighteenth century (a backward agricultural country then, but one that happened to keep good vital statistics). When the harvest was poor, people did not marry, as figure 24-1 shows. Birthrates were also responsive to the harvest, and even unmarried procreation was affected by objective economic conditions. This is clear evidence that poor people's sexual behavior is sensibly responsive to objective circumstances. FIGURE 24-1. Harvest Index and Marriage Rates in Sweden (old 12-1) After an extensive study of the anthropological literature, A. M. Carr-Saunders concluded, "The mechanism whereby numbers may be kept near to the desirable level is everywhere present", the particular mechanisms being "prolonged abstention from intercourse, abortion, and infanticide." And as a result of a study of "data on 200 societies from all over the world...from tropic to arctic...from sea level to altitudes of more than 10,000 feet," Clellan S. Ford concluded that "both abortion and infanticide are universally known....It is extremely common...to find a taboo on sexual intercourse during the period when the mother is nursing....In nearly every instance, the justification for this abstinence is the prevention of conception." He also found instances of many kinds of contraceptive practices. Some are "clearly magical." Others "are relatively effective mechanical devices [for example] inserting a pad of bark cloth or a rag in the vagina...[and] attempts to flush out the seminal fluid with water after intercourse...." In the 1960s there was a widely-reported estimate that 5 million U.S. women lacked access to contraception, but later analysis produced a more solid estimate of 1.2 million women. Surveys document that perhaps 10 percent of children born in the United States in the 1980s were the result of lack of knowledge of or access to contraception and could be said to be "unwanted" by the mothers at the time of conception, and many of these mothers later became glad that they had the children. If the definition of "unwanted" included both the mother and the father, the proportion of "unwanted" at conception would be much lower yet. There continue to be some supposed experts and officials of anti-population-growth organizations who, on the basis of discredited anthropological accounts, assert that poor people do not know how babies are made - a notion so silly that it should not be necessary even to mention it. For example, "not only are animals ignorant of the relation between mating and offspring, but even modern man until the last few thousand years was probably equally ignorant. In fact, there were recent reports of primitive tribes in Australia who are similarly unenlightened today." More to be believed are such stories as the one about a "primitive" tribesman who said to another, "Do you know what I told that white man? I told him I don't know how to make a baby. And - get this - he believed it!" This joke has now been documented in astonishing fashion. Ever since the 1920s, Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa has been considered as great a classic in anthropology as any other book, providing the foundation for an entire ruling theory of human behavior. In 1983 Derek Freeman disproved her account, using a variety of materials. But more recently there emerged incontrovertible evidence that Mead was not only wrong, but had been hoaxed. If Mead's conclusion of 1928 had been correct it would have been the most important conclusion of twentieth-century anthropology. It is now known that Mead's long-influential conclusion was wholly false. In 1983 I was able to demonstrate in detail that Mead's extreme conclusion was very definitely not supported by the relevant ethnographic evidence. And since then, there have been even more significant developments. It had long been a major mystery that Mead's account of Samoan sexual behavior, on which her conclusion rests, is radically at odds with the reports of all other ethnographers. This mystery was solved in 1987, when Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who is listed in Coming of Age in Samoa as one of her principal informants, came forward to confess that in March of 1926, as a prank, she and her friend Fofoa, had completely hoaxed Margaret Mead by telling her, when she questioned them, the antithesis of the truth about Samoan sexual behavior and values. In Samoa the playing of such pranks, which they call taufa'ase'e, is commonplace....when Mead put to Fa'apua'a, who was herself a taupou or ceremonial virgin, the supposition that she was promiscuous, she and Fafoa, with sidelong glances and pinching one another, set about hoaxing her. They had no idea, says Fa'apua'a, that Margaret Mead was an author and that their wild untruths would be published as facts in an immensely influential book. After Fa'apua'a's testimony had been carefully checked by Leulu Felisi Va'a of the National University of Samoa... a sworn deposition by Fa'apua'a Fa'amu has been lodged with the American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C. What testimony, then, can we trust? Clear evidence that poor people consider their incomes and economic circumstances when thinking about having children is found in their answers to questions about the disadvantages and advantages of large families. A variety of such surveys in various parts of Africa reveal that economic motivations are indeed important. Study after study shows that poor people do indeed think about economic circumstances in relationship to fertility. They do not practice "untrammeled copulation" or "breed without limit." People in developed countries, too, are accustomed to think about how family size fits their incomes. GRENOBLE, France - a 29-year-old grade school teacher gave birth yesterday to quintuplets, three boys and two girls....The children's grandfather, a tailor, said, "This certainly creates a lot of problems and you can't say it's really a joyous event because you've got to think about raising the little wolves." Lee Rainwater interviewed 409 Americans about "their family design." In representative interviews with three pairs of husbands and wives, all mentioned economic factors predominantly, though many other factors were also mentioned, of course. "Husband 1: Would [I] prefer two or four children? I guess two because you can give two more than four. You can send them to college. The average family could not give four very much.... Two is all we can support adequately. Wife 1: Two, but if I had loads of money I would want loads of kids.... If I had lots of money, enough for full- time help, and plenty of room I would like half-a-dozen or more. Husband 2: I think two is ideal for the average American family based on an average income of $5,000 [1950 dollars]. I don't see how they could properly provide for more children. Personally I'd take a dozen if I could afford them. I wanted four when we got married or as many as the family income could support. Wife 3: I think three is ideal because I feel this is all most people are equipped to raise, to give a good education and send them through college. Another study asked a sample of U.S. wives why their intended family size was not bigger. The first reason given by more than half of the respondents was economic. In brief, even though income in rich countries is ample to provide a bare subsistence for many more children than the average family chooses to have, people say that their incomes constrain their family size. In all societies, rich or poor, people give much thought to sex, marriage, and childbearing. Fertility is everywhere subject to some rational control, though the degree to which achieved family sizes match the desired size varies from group to group. Couples in some countries plan their family size more carefully and are better able to carry such plans to fruition than are couples in other countries because of differences in contraceptive technology, infant mortality, and communication between husband and wife. But certainly there is strong evidence that people everywhere think rationally about fertility; hence income and other objective forces influence fertility behavior to a significant degree, everywhere and always. An interesting example of how home economics affects fertility occurred in East Germany following the introduction in 1976 of incentives to have more children. Prior to that time fertility in East and West Germany had been much the same. But the incentives raised marital fertility at least temporarily (perhaps just having some births occur earlier) and more permanently raised extra- marital fertility, as figure 24-2 shows. Fig 24-2[Mon Fig 4 from Monnier in Population.] The fact that there are large families in some poor countries does not prove the absence of rational planning in matters of fertility. Behavior that is reasonable in London or Tokyo may well be unreasonable in a Tibetan or African village. The costs of rearing children are relatively less, and the economic benefits of having children are relatively greater, in poor agricultural communities than in well-off urban places. Therefore, even though the primary motive for having children - in Nigeria as in France - surely is that couples want children for the satisfactions they give, the economic conditions may differ in such a manner that the same desire for children that sensibly implies a two- or three-child family in a city may imply a five- or six- child family in a poor rural area. The economics of child-rearing involve the amounts of time and money that people spend on children, on the one hand, and the amounts of work that children perform and the old-age support they render after they grow up, on the other hand. It costs more time and money to rear children in urban than in rural areas, and children in rural areas of poor countries perform more work than children elsewhere. Hence the larger average size of rural families may reflect sound economic planning. We see this vividly in the following accounts from the period of very high population growth a decade or two ago. BABARPUR, India, May 24, 1976 - Munshi Ram, an illiterate laborer who lives in a crude mud hut in this village 60 miles north of New Delhi, has no land and very little money. But he has eight children, and he regards them as his greatest wealth. "It's good to have a big family," Mr. Ram explained as he stood in the shade of a leafy neem tree, in a hard dry courtyard crowded with children, chickens and a dozing cow. "They don't cost much, and when they get old enough to work they bring in money. And when I am old, they will take care of me...." Mr. Ram, who says he is not likely to have more children, is aware that the Government is now campaigning hard with the birth-control slogan, "Stop at two." But he has no regrets. "Children are the gods' gift," he said, as several of his own clustered around him. "Who are we to say they should not be born?" Here are two more examples, this time through the eyes of an Indian writer. Let us take a few examples. Fakir Singh is a traditional water carrier. After he lost his job, he remained as a messenger for those Jat families which used to be his Jajmans, barely earning a subsistence living. He has eleven children, ranging in age from twenty-five to four....Fakir Singh maintains that every one of his sons is an asset. The youngest one - aged five or six - collects hay for the cattle; the older ones tend to those same cattle. Between the ages of six and sixteen, they earn 150 to 200 rupees a year, plus all their meals and necessary clothing. Those sons over sixteen earn 2,000 rupees and meals every year. Fakir Singh smiles and adds, "To raise children may be difficult, but once they are older it is a sea of happiness." Another water carrier is Thaman Singh....He welcomed me inside his home, gave me a cup of tea (with milk and "market" sugar, as he proudly pointed out later), and said, "You were trying to convince me in 1960 that I shouldn't have any more sons. Now, you see, I have six sons and two daughters and I sit at home in leisure. They are grown up and they bring me money. One even works outside the village as a laborer. You told me I was a poor man and couldn't support a large family. Now, you see, because of my large family, I am a rich man." Hand in hand with the short-run reduction in fertility when times worsen in a poor country is the short-run increase in fertility that accompanies a betterment of conditions. Consider, for example, this report about an Indian village: In the early 1950's, conditions were distinctly unfavorable. The large influx of refugees from Pakistan was accompanied by severe disruption of economic and social stability. We were repeatedly told by village leaders on the panchayat, or elected village council, that important as all of their other problems were, "the biggest problem is that there are just too many of us." By the end of the study period in 1960 a remarkable change had occurred. With the introduction of more irrigation canals and with rural electrification from the Bhakra Nangal Dam, and with better roads to transport produce to market, improved seed and other benefits of community development, and especially because there were increasing employment opportunities for Punjabi boys in the cities, a general feeling of optimism had developed. A common response of the same village leaders now was, "Why should we limit our families? India needs all the Punjabis she can get." During this transitional period an important reason for the failure of education in family planning was the favorable pace of economic development. Children were no longer a handicap. Infant mortality is another influence that uneducated villagers take into account very rationally. In 1971 I asked a few men in Indian villages why they have as many or as few children as they do. A common answer came from a man with five children, "Two, maybe three will die, and I want to have at least two that live to become adults." But by the 1990s villagers in most parts of the world know that the infant mortality rate has fallen very fast in recent decades, and they need not have many more babies than the number of children they want to raise to maturity. This change in conditions, and in people's perception of the change, is part of the reason that fertility has fallen rapidly in so many countries, as seen in figure 23-5. Malthus's theory of population asserts that because fertility goes up if income goes up due to new technical knowledge of agriculture, the extra population eats up the additional income. That is, Malthus asserted a tendency for humankind to be squeezed down to a long-run equilibrium of living at bare subsistence; this is Malthus's "dismal theorem." But when we examine the facts about fertility and economic development (as Malthus himself finally did, after he quickly dashed off his first edition), we find that the story does not end with the short-run increase in the birthrate as income first rises. If income continues to rise, fertility later goes down. There are two main reasons for this long-run decline in fertility. First, as income rises in poor countries, child mortality falls because of better nutrition, better sanitation, and better health care (though, in the twentieth century, mortality may decline in poor countries even without a rise in income.) As couples see that fewer births are necessary to achieve a given family size, they adjust fertility downward. Evidence on response of families to the death of a child buttresses the overall historical data. Several careful researchers have shown that there is a strong relationship between the death of a child and subsequent births in a family. That is, couples produce additional children to "make up for" children who die. If we also consider that families decide to have additional children to allow for deaths that might occur in the future, the relationship between child mortality and fertility shows that childbearing is responsive to the family's circumstances. A rise in income also reduces fertility in the long run through a cluster of forces set in motion by increased income, including (a) increased education, which improves contraception, makes children more expensive to raise, and perhaps alters people's tastes about having children; and (b) a trend to city living, where children cost more and produce less income for the family than they do in the country. The decline in mortality and the other forces set in motion by economic development reduce fertility in the long run. This process is the famous "demographic transition." We see it very clearly in the excellent historical data for Sweden shown in figure 23-6; notice how the death rate began to fall before the birthrate fell. And we can see the same relationship between income and birthrate in a cross-sectional look at various countries of the world (figure 24-3). FIGURE 24-3[12-2]. Per Capita Gross Domestic Product Plotted Against the Crude Birthrate for Selected Nations From the 1930s through the 1950s, most demographers were convinced that the demographic transition would take place in developing countries in the twentieth century, just as it had earlier happened in Europe and North America. Then in the 1960s demographers began to worry that fertility would not fall in poor countries even after mortality fell. But in the 1970s, evidence showed that fertility was indeed falling in at least some developing countries. By the time of the first edition of this book in 1981, I wrote that we could be reasonably sure that the European pattern of demographic transition will also appear in other parts of the world as mortality falls and income rises, though there were still many doubters, especially those who run anti-natalist organizations. In the 1990s we can take out the qualifier "reasonably", because the fall has appeared almost everywhere, and in all the countries with large populations, as seen in figure 23-5. Worth mentioning because many persons believe that teen-age childbearing in the United States runs counter to the general pattern, fertility has fall among the 15-19 age group over the long run, as figure 24-4 shows, though the latter half of the 1980s showed an upturn too brief to be meaningful. Fig 24-4[teen from NCHS typed table 2, and disk.] So the foundation is gone from under Malthus's grand theory and his dismal theorem. At the heart of Malthus's theory - quoting from his last edition - is the following: "(1) Population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence. (2) Population always increases when the means of subsistence increases." The history of the demographic transition and the data in Figure 12-?** disprove the second proposition. The first proposition is shown to be false in chapters 5-8. Contrary to Malthus, people respond to the two major influences on fertility - mortality and level of income - in an economically appropriate fashion. Of course there are delays, especially in the response of society as a whole to changes in the cost of a family's children to other people in the community. But overall, the fertility-adjustment system works in such a fashion that it leads to an optimistic outlook rather than the "dismal" view described by Malthus in the famous first edition of his book, before he changed that view in the second edition. How many children would families have if material resources presented no constraints at all? That is, what would be the level of fertility if child mortality were as low as in advanced countries now, and if income were very high - say, ten times the level in the U.S. now? We have little basis for predicting whether population would tend to increase, decrease, or stabilize in the long run in such a case, because there is no experience to learn from. It is clear, however, that where the material conditions of income and child mortality are harsh, fertility adjusts to meet those conditions, even among poor and uneducated people. But what about the costs that big families impose on society as a whole? Certainly this is a reasonable and important question, because any child does impose some monetary and non-monetary costs on persons other than the parents. There are two parts to the answer: 1) An additional person causes not only costs but also benefits for others in a variety of ways that we shall discuss later. The central question may be expressed quantitatively: Which are greater in various years following a child's birth, the costs or the benefits to others? Once we know whether these "external" effects are positive or negative in any given year, we must next ask: Are the external effects large or small compared with other costs and benefits in the economy? These matters are discussed in chapters 00 and 00. 2) The burden upon the community of an additional child depends very greatly upon the nature of the economic-political system. In Chinese cities, where housing and transportation systems are owned by the government, an additional child imposes a much larger burden upon others than in the United States, where schooling is the only major cost of a child that the parents do not pay from their own pockets. If the parents pay the full costs of a child, their individual child-bearing decisions are likely to be optimal for the community at large. SUMMARY At the heart of much of contemporary theorizing about population growth is the belief that, as one widely read author put it, "The Malthusian laws of population are as valid today as when they were formulated" (in the first edition of his Essay). The core of those "laws" is that population increases faster than does the means of sustenance until the standard of living has fallen to bare subsistence. Those who urge this proposition support it with analogies drawn from other forms of life. "The germs of existence contained in this earth, if they could freely develop themselves, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious, all-pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law and men cannot by any efforts of reason escape from it." page # \ultres\ tchar24 February 7, 1994