Few people would agree that the factors determining the birth-rate trend and the root tauses which led us into this battle for existence are intimately related phenomena. Most people would dismiss the suggestion that a sixty-year decline in reproductivity and the occurrence of two internecine wars between slightly different environmental types of the human species are twin expressions of ong and ihe same thing. Hardly anyone would subscribe to the idea that there is a correlation between the growth of monopoly capitalism and the production and sale of contraceptive devices. Admittedly these are strange fellows. Their apparent incongruity may be because no one has yet placed them together in the same bed. Or perhaps we are too close to the war and too casual about the birth-rate to connect them. Whatever the reagan, we may note that there ate only two causes under human control which can lead to the extinction of homo sapient. One is the apparent aptitude for, and effectiveness of, mass suicide; the other is the failure to reproduce, writes Richard M. Titmuss in the "New Statesman and Nation."
During the past century man has ' had placed in his hands—but not in his head—the means of controlling his environment and his stay on earth. The growth in the power of this control has been curiously but significantly paralleled by a continuous rise in the use and efficiency of the two "extinct tion" forces. The greater the power to control the more mechanically destructive does war become. The higher the standard of living the lower the rate of human replacement. The more man gets away from primitive sustenance the more deliberately destructive he becomes and the less willing to bring into the world his own kind. In the violent history of the human race this is the first time two great concentrations of population—Britain and Germany—have fought and killed while failing to replace their numbers. Both entered the war with a net reproduce tion rate below unity. Whatever Hitler may claim for his New Order, at no time since he ássumed power has the German birth-rate been sufficient to replace existing numbers. Europe, as an entity, fell below unity many years ago. This war must mean either a tremendous speed up (in terms of reproduce tivity) in the process of the dying out of the human race, or a complete reversal in our way of life so that an environment will emerge in which parents will desire children.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.