CHAPTER II.. History of Population.

HISTORY OF POPULATION.

SECTION CCXLIV.

HISTORY OF POPULATION.--UNCIVILIZED TIMES.

In the case of those wild tribes which can only use the forces of nature by way of occupation, the small extent of the field of food is filled up by even a very sparse population. And the principal means by which population is there limited are the following: the overburthening and ill treatment of the women,[244-1] by which the simultaneous rearing of several small children is rendered impossible;[244-2] the inordinately long time that children are kept at the breast;[244-3] the wide-spread practice of abortion;[244-4] numerous cases of murder, especially of the old and weak;[244-5] everlasting war carried on by hunting nations to extend their hunting territory, found in conjunction with cannibalism in many tribes.[244-6] Besides, nations of hunters are frequently decimated by famine and pestilence, the latter generally a consequence of never-ending alternation between gluttony and famine.[244-7]

Most negro nations live in such a state of legal insecurity that it is impossible for a higher civilization with its attendant increase of the means of subsistence to take root among them. At the same time, their sexual impulses are very strong.[244-8] Here the slave-trade constituted the chief preventive of over-population. If this traffic were suppressed simply and no care taken through the instrumentality of commerce and of missions to improve the moral and economical condition of the negroes, the only probable but questionable gain would be that the prisoners made in the numberless wars generated by famine would be murdered instead of being sold.

Nomadic races, with their universal chivalry, are wont to treat their women well enough to enable them bear children without any great hardship.[244-9] But the mere use of natural pasturage can never be carried to great intensity. The transition to agriculture with its greater yield of food but with the diminished freedom by which it is accompanied is a thing to which these warlike men are so averse that it directs the surplus population by the way of emigration into neighboring civilized countries, where they either obtain victory, booty and supremacy, or are rapidly subjugated. Such migrations are a standing chapter in the history of all Asiatic kingdoms; they for a long time disturb declining civilized states, finally conquering them, and begin the same cycle in the new kingdom.[244-10] Where nomadic races see themselves cut off from such migrations their marriages are wont to be unfruitful.[244-11]