Is our time of growth drawing to an end?
Are we as nations soon to come under the rule of that great law of
death which is itself but part of the great law of life? None can
tell. Forces that we can see, and other forces that are hidden or that
can but dimly be apprehended, are at work all around us, both for
good and for evil. The growth in luxury, in love of ease, in taste for
vapid and frivolous excitement, is both evident and unhealthy. The
most ominous sign is the diminution in the birth-rate, in the rate of
natural increase, now to a larger or lesser degree shared by most of
the civilized nations of Central and Western Europe, of America and
Australia; a diminution so great that if it continues for the next
century at the rate which has obtained for the last twenty-five years,
all the more highly civilized peoples will be stationary or else have
begun to go backward in population, while many of them will have
already gone very far backward.
There is much that should give us concern for the future. But there is
much also which should give us hope. No man is more apt to be mistaken
than the prophet of evil. After the French Revolution in 1830 Niebuhr
hazarded the guess that all civilization was about to go down with a
crash, that we were all about to share the fall of third-and
fourth-century Rome--a respectable, but painfully overworked,
comparison.
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