The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.

The economic motives and ideals of that generation no longer satisfy us: we must find a new way and must suffer again the _malaise_, and finally the pangs, of a new industrial birth.

This is one element.

The other is that on which I have enlarged in Chapter II.;--the increase in the real cost of food and the diminishing response of nature to any further increase in the population of the world, a tendency which must be especially injurious to the greatest of all industrial countries and the most dependent on imported supplies of food.
But these secular problems are such as no age is free from.

They are of an altogether different order from those which may afflict the peoples of Central Europe.