In the discussion regarding the bearing of the growth of population upon general welfare too much attention was formerly accorded to the merely quantitative question.Too little is now accorded.Under the title of eugenics the population question threatens to become entirely qualitative.Now this is evidently a mistake.For whatever interpretation we accord to social welfare, some consideration as to the desirable number and rate of growth of the population is evidently of importance.Though it may be agreed that vital values in their spiritual and even in the physical meanings are distinctly qualitative, and that, as far as possible, a society should set itself to maintain conditions of sex selection favourable to admittedly finer and healthier types, this issue of quality must not be detached from the issue of quantity.
As in the economy of the individual life a proper allowance of attention must be secured for physical wants and for the material production and consumption they involve, so in a society the size of its physical structure, the number of cooperating human cells through which it lives, is a consideration that inheres in the art of social life.Ruskin was surely right in his general setting of the social question 'How can society consciously order the lives of its members so as to maintain the largest number of noble and happy human beings?'2 How much consciousness or calculation can advantageously be brought to bear upon the regulation of the play of the sexual and related instincts and desires, is a highly controversial question into which we need not enter here.But so far as social reform can make good any claim to regulate the growth of the population, its regulation should clearly have regard to quantity as well as quality.A large number of physically sound and happy human beings must be taken as a prime condition of social welfare.It is not easy to defend the prosperity of a people who shall seem to purchase a fuller and even a more spiritually complex life for some or all their members by a continuous reduction of their numbers.Where life is valued and valuable the natural disposition to extend its values as widely as is consistent with their maintenance is a natural instinct difficult to impugn.If it be contended that this is in some sense an admission of the social validity of the tendency to multiply so as to 'press on the means of subsistence,' I might admit the interpretation, provided it were understood that 'means of subsistence' included all the essentials of spiritual as well as of physical life.
I do not, however, wish to dogmatise upon a difficult and exceedingly debateable matter, but only to insist that a conscious art of social progress can no more ignore quantity than quality of population in any general calculus of human welfare.
§6.The greater equalisation of incomes which would follow from the absorption of unproductive surplus into public income and into remuneration of labour, would be favourable to the two conditions of social progress here laid down, a restriction upon the growth of material consumption and a reasonable regulation of the growth of population.For, as luxury and material waste are seen largely to arise as instruments for the display of individual prowess in competitive industry, the removal of that competition from fields which yield large means for such display would necessarily quench the zest which it exhibits, as well as stop the sources of such extravagant expenditure.For when profuse display of material apparatus is no longer possible, the natural desire for personal distinction, which is the deepest-rooted of all personal desires, will tend more and more to find expression in those arts of refined living which are more truly personal in that they cause the more intellectual and spiritual qualities of personality to shine forth.If, for the quantitative display of material goods, there can gradually be substituted a qualitative display of spiritual goods, this change will be attended by a corresponding change in economic activities.There will be a reduction in the coarser forms of productive energy making large drafts upon the material resources of nature, and an increase of the higher forms of energy whose drafts on these material resources are relatively small.
