But, given the needful inventions, superior weapons for instance, you need never allow yourselves to be shoved away into such an inhospitable region; to which you presumably do not retire voluntarily, unless, indeed, the state of your arts--for instance, your skill in hunting or taming the reindeer--inclines you to make a paradise of the tundra.
Suppose it granted, then, that a given people's arts and inventions, whether directly or indirectly productive, are capable of a certain average yield of food, it is certain, as Malthus and Darwin would remind us, that human fertility can be reckoned on to bring the numbers up to a limit bearing a more or less constant ratio to the means of subsistence.
At length we reach our more immediate subject--namely, social organization.

In what sense, if any, is social organization dependent on numbers?
Unfortunately, it is too large a question to thrash out here.

I may, however, refer the reader to the ingenious classification of the peoples of the world, by reference to the degree of their social organization and culture, which is attempted by Mr.Sutherland in his _Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct_.

He there tries to show that a certain size of population can be correlated with each grade in the scale of human evolution--at any rate up to the point at which full-blown civilization is reached, when cases like that of Athens under Pericles, or Florence under the Medici, would probably cause him some trouble.

For instance, he makes out that the lowest savages, Veddas, Pygmies, and so on, form groups of from ten to forty; whereas those who are but one degree less backward, such as the Australian natives, average from fifty to two hundred; whilst most of the North American tribes, who represent the next stage of general advance, run from a hundred up to five hundred.