A Collection of Stories | Page 6

of him to eat.
When this day comes, what then? Will there be a recrudescence of old
obsolete war? In a saturated population life is always cheap, as it is
cheap in China, in India, to-day. Will new human drifts take place,
questing for room, carving earth-space out of crowded life. Will the
Sword again sing:
"Follow, O follow, then, Heroes, my harvesters! Where the tall grain is
ripe Thrust in your sickles! Stripped and adust In a stubble of empire
Scything and binding The full sheaves of sovereignty."
Even if, as of old, man should wander hungrily, sword in hand, slaying
and being slain, the relief would be only temporary. Even if one race
alone should hew down the last survivor of all the other races, that one
race, drifting the world around, would saturate the planet with its own
life and again press against subsistence. And in that day, the death rate
and the birth rate will have to balance. Men will have to die, or be
prevented from being born. Undoubtedly a higher quality of life will
obtain, and also a slowly decreasing fecundity. But this decrease will
be so slow that the pressure against subsistence will remain. The
control of progeny will be one of the most important problems of man
and one of the most important functions of the state. Men will simply
be not permitted to be born.
Disease, from time to time, will ease the pressure. Diseases are
parasites, and it must not be forgotten that just as there are drifts in the
world of man, so are there drifts in the world of micro-organisms--
hunger-quests for food. Little is known of the micro-organic world, but
that little is appalling; and no census of it will ever be taken, for there is
the true, literal "abysmal fecundity." Multitudinous as man is, all his
totality of individuals is as nothing in comparison with the
inconceivable vastness of numbers of the micro-organisms. In your
body, or in mine, right now, are swarming more individual entities than
there are human beings in the world to-day. It is to us an invisible
world. We only guess its nearest confines. With our powerful
microscopes and ultramicroscopes, enlarging diameters twenty

thousand times, we catch but the slightest glimpses of that profundity
of infinitesimal life.
Little is known of that world, save in a general way. We know that out
of it arise diseases, new to us, that afflict and destroy man. We do not
know whether these diseases are merely the drifts, in a fresh direction,
of already-existing breeds of micro-organisms, or whether they are new,
absolutely new, breeds themselves just spontaneously generated. The
latter hypothesis is tenable, for we theorise that if spontaneous
generation still occurs on the earth, it is far more likely to occur in the
form of simple organisms than of complicated organisms.
Another thing we know, and that is that it is in crowded populations
that new diseases arise. They have done so in the past. They do so
to-day. And no matter how wise are our physicians and bacteriologists,
no matter how successfully they cope with these invaders, new invaders
continue to arise--new drifts of hungry life seeking to devour us. And
so we are justified in believing that in the saturated populations of the
future, when life is suffocating in the pressure against subsistence, that
new, and ever new, hosts of destroying micro-organisms will continue
to arise and fling themselves upon earth-crowded man to give him
room. There may even be plagues of unprecedented ferocity that will
depopulate great areas before the wit of man can overcome them. And
this we know: that no matter how often these invisible hosts may be
overcome by man's becoming immune to them through a cruel and
terrible selection, new hosts will ever arise of these micro-organisms
that were in the world before he came and that will be here after he is
gone.
After he is gone? Will he then some day be gone, and this planet know
him no more? Is it thither that the human drift in all its totality is
trending? God Himself is silent on this point, though some of His
prophets have given us vivid representations of that last day when the
earth shall pass into nothingness. Nor does science, despite its radium
speculations and its attempted analyses of the ultimate nature of matter,
give us any other word than that man will pass. So far as man's
knowledge goes, law is universal. Elements react under certain

unchangeable conditions. One of these conditions is temperature.
Whether it be in the test tube of the laboratory or the workshop of
nature, all organic chemical reactions take place only within a restricted
range of heat. Man, the latest of the ephemera, is pitifully a