“There are some pessimists who declare there is no remedy. They say it was an egregious blunder on the part of society to attempt the banishment of suffering. It was suffering that had in all ages kept down the population, so that the world remained roomy enough to live in with some comfort. They hold that suffering is a necessary concomitant of comfort and we are bound to have it both before it, as a necessary antecedent and after it, as a necessary consequent. It is the law of nature and it is vain to try to evade it. By banishing war and want and disease, and reducing the problem of life to an easy pleasant certainty, society, they say, has caused herself to be invaded by fresh innumerable hordes of human beings that step into the arena of life from the secret caves of non-existence as if attracted by the feast of good things that she has provided for herself. When the repressive hand of suffering is lifted a little the human species breed and grow like rabbits until they feel its hard pressure again.
“Nature, they affirm, is no sentimentalist. Her ways are all direct, hard, cruel and brutal. She is extravagant and wasteful of effort and parsimonious of results. She creates a thousand seeds of grain or grass or tree, only one of which will become a grown plant and reproduce its kind. She is even more prodigal with the spawn of fishes destroying millions for one she brings to maturity. There is nothing to show that she cares any more for the human race than for fishes. When men get too numerous she destroys them as ruthlessly as if they were so many herring or clams. They assert it is impossible to evade or even to improve upon the methods of nature. They point to the teeming multitudes that have swarmed upon the earth during the last century in such comparative security and comfort as to invite a still greater inundation during the century to come; and they declare it to be one of the characteristic stratagems of nature, only restraining her grim and malicious humor in order to make it the more tragic and appalling when she does give it play. And they aver that it would be better even now to drop a large part if not all of the artificial stimulations to the expansion of the population that have by insensible degrees been grafted upon state policy during the last century. Let every tub stand on its own bottom, say they, let natural selection secure the survival of the fittest, and let the unfit be quietly eliminated by whichever of the numerous methods nature finds most applicable. In opposition to these are the optimists who hold that the human race is nature’s pet. If she could be said to plan anything or to have any preferences in favor of anything, it was the human family. After making trial in succession of the Trilobite, the Orthoceras, the Shark, the Megalosaurus, the Pterodactyl, the Mastodon and others, she put them all down and brought forward man and placed him over them all, and made him master of the earth. He was a frail insignificant helpless creature without weight, power or dignity. Other animals could beat him swimming, diving, flying, running, fighting. There was only one thing he could do tolerably well and that was to climb a tree. That was his capital, his stock in trade as one might say, for it developed his hands and quickened his senses. Nature took this unprepossessing, unpromising creature, educated and developed him in her stern school and by her untender methods, put brains into him, civilized him and fitted him to control the world and finally to govern himself. This last lesson he has not yet perfectly mastered, but he is learning more of it every day. Progress, say they, never takes a back track. The pessimistic theory that nature’s plan is to let every fellow look out for himself and the devil take the hindmost, is no longer true. The race has passed that place and the new ideal is; every fellow for all the rest, and no one left behind. Until this is practically realized they say the race will not have fulfilled its destiny, and retreat is impossible. Moreover it is not necessary; for the new departure is after all as natural as the old way, and is in fact only a continuation of it; a turn in the road as it were; and it may quite as well be depended upon to rectify all the difficulties of its own creation. If the principle of mutual succor, sympathy and assistance leads to over population, the same principle must furnish the remedy. The optimists admit the contention of the pessimists that this trouble is looming up, and the philosophers of all schools are beginning to feel serious.