Without these forces, the relation of men to the land would have tended to modify everywhere in the same way.

Increase in numbers would have been attended by a corresponding decrease in the amount of land at the disposal of each individual.

Those states which, like Norway and Switzerland, cannot expand and which have exploited their natural resources to the utmost, must resign themselves to the emigration of their redundant population.

But those which have remained within their own boundaries and have adopted a policy of isolation, like China, feudal Japan during its two and a half centuries of seclusion, and numerous Polynesian islands, have been forced to war with nature itself by checking the operation of the law of natural increase.

All the repulsive devices contributing to this end, whether infanticide, abortion, cannibalism, the sanctioned murder of the aged and infirm, honorable suicide, polyandry or persistent war, are the social deformities consequent upon suppressed growth.