dreary a scene as that which lay before him; a desolate wilderness of moor and morass first dipping down, then swelling up towards a long gray cliff. He looked questioningly at his guide as much as to say, "Does our path lie that way?" It is not strange that he failed to take in the fine contrast between that sullen-visaged down-slope of dusky ling rarely broken by patches of bleached grass and the varied coloring of the upslope on which the sun shone. Over there the masses of heather were of a dark purple-brown, the withered herbage was of a lightsome yellow-brown, streaked with living emerald along the water-courses, and flecked here and there with the gleam of a writhen birch stem; but all these were surrounded, overgrown, dominated by the superabundant rich red-brown of the bracken and crowned by the gray extension of that cliff.

The orator answered Roland's questioning look by turning and leading the way, not across the moor but skirting it, keeping far enough from the edge of the cliff they had just climbed to be hidden from the valley. On their left hand was Win Hill with its conical peak and higher up the valley a lesser height, whose summit glowed red in the sun against the dull green of its base. Beyond that extended a lofty moor; towards which the orator pointed, making Roland understand by signs that their steps were tending thitherward. After a mile and a half of rough walking they went down into a deep gorge, tributary to the river valley, by way of a steep clough. They crossed the brook and the road that ran through the gorge, and immediately entered a rift in its opposite side.

Up

this they clambered, and came out on the skirts of the elevated moor whose sky-line had been so conspicuous before them. Here the orator let Roland lie awhile and recover breath and strength. The man-forsaken aspect of

their surroundings gave a sense of security.

After a short rest again they went on, generally uphill at first but at no difficult gradient. They seemed to be out of the world, encompassed on every hand by huge hills destitute of grace of form, unless austerity be a grace, the austerity of secular hermits of desolation. Lumps of cloud, moreover, white and gray, had begun to get about, not close-packed but enough to discourage the day's wintry cheerfulness and lower the earth's coloring to a general sombreness. But Roland had no eyes for scenery, good or bad. It took his every endeavor to keep up with the orator; breathing hard at the ascents, stumbling at the descents, falling heels-up on a sheet of ice, he often dropped behind but always made it up before it seemed to be noticed by his leader, who with claymore at back and bundle of thievery on shoulder strode along at one swift pace, untirable. Whatever the temperature might be in the valley the wind at that height was piercingly cold; the ground was frozen hard and there was many a drift of snow, remains of that heavy fall which had been forgotten for almost a month in the lowlands.

Twice as they approached a cluster of huge detached stones Roland mistook them-perhaps his eyes were dim -for a gathering of humble cottages. Soon after this happened the second time they traversed the hill-crest, which for a long while had risen slightly above them on their left. A valley opened out before them, a down-sweep of moorland nicked by a ravine and half walled in amphitheatre-like by the ridge on which they stood; but its lower depths were hidden by a final abrupt descent. As abruptly rose its farther barrier, backed and topped by a multiplicity of huge hills which were obscured by the very light they were seen by. The orator had stopped, ap

parently to consider his course, but his gaze was drawn, perhaps unwittingly, from the straightforward north to the west. As for Roland as soon as his leader stood he sat, lay down.

The sun being near his setting had burst through the clouds which had chilled his fervor, and was retorting it upon them by transforming their colorless tissues into robes of state about him as ample as the horizon, of every imperial tint, such blendings of azure, gold and flame as to name them man has only the tongueless speech of wonder. The impressionable air was filled with a fiery palpitation; the darkening earth flushed, though it was too late o' day to glow. But the valley below was in the shade, and the heights behind which the light-giver was sinking remained dusky, featureless, unimpressed, untouched. Their reserve however only emphasized the red warmth of the general response.

The orator gazed on. Maybe in thought he stood on the long mountain watching the sun set behind Scour Ouran, or from the stormy coast beheld far Morven frown under a transitory splendor. Maybe recollection of a hovel beside some wild shore, in some savage glen, by some solitary tarn or on some barren mountain-side raised yearnings for a rude mate and naked children which overpowered for the moment all other thoughts. Roland was so glad to lie that he had no room for any other emotion. But the sun went down, gradually the fire became smoke, a gorgeous smoke it is true, suffused with purples, shot through with flames, but every moment turning to the spectator more and more of the dark side of a night cloud. Then the middle heaven received half of the splendor that the west had lost; on its wide bosom the pageant had ample room, and proceeded from cloud to cloud with the stealth of a blush, the tidal sweep of a sea incarnadine, until

it bathed the earth on either side and gave it for a fugitive minute a tincture of cloud-coloring.

It was enough. The orator turned his face northward and again strode along, keeping near the line of that high ridge. As the glory faded from the zenith it reappeared, though much diminished, in the east, where the sky and the interference of yon lofty edges seemed to be surprised by the promise of another dawn. But the orator did not look that way; he stepped on like one who had to make the most of the remaining daylight, and as for Roland, following stiffly, his soul for the time being was as earthward as his boots. At the most he knew on which side they were of the highest ground by a difference in the force of the blast upon his right cheek.

From time to time as they made their toilsome way through that wilderness the orator whistled loud, but it was long before he got the response that he listened for. The earth slipped off her day-trappings to the last rag and prepared with due solemnity for night. There was hardly more than light enough to mark the separation between earth and sky, when at last a faint answering whistle was heard, and immediately a man's form erected itself on the skyline in front where it lumped itself up into a hill. They went straight for the whistler.

It was

At

a little wiry man, the most ponderously punctilious of the caterans. The two fellow-countrymen held a short consultation, during which Roland stood and felt at once the disability of the deaf and the inferiority of a hanger-on. the end of it they with him again addressed themselves to their way, but so that he felt the direct attack of the bitter wind which had been sidelong. It stung him into some consciousness of their surroundings. They seemed to be on a plateau which lay pretty level before them, but here and there swelled

Yet even man's most hostile critic must admit that during the last 100 or 110 years he has attended to his duty. He may have neglected many things, but he has done his best for the birthrate. In olden days the hideous wastefulness of war kept down the population. War was cheap and chronic, and it was often conducted on principles which would now be regarded as plain massacre. In some countries it was, to all intents and purposes, a form of daily and hourly brigandage accompanied by a general slaughter of non-combatants. Man smote his fellow at short range with a club which cost less than twopence of our money, whereas now he misses him at a ten-mile range with a shot which costs, an incalculable number of pounds. Among the more scientific peoples campaigning has become almost as expensive as if cannon were made of gold. It takes fifty or a hundred years to pay off the bill incurred in twelve months of armed peevishness between two first-class or second-class Powers. In fact, the bill is hardly ever paid though it is often repudiated. Therefore, though war alarms are many, wars are few, and even genuine war alarms are not so many as they were, for it is easy for a big nation to spend £500,000 a week in an impressive demonstration and six weeks of impressive demonstrating may wreck a promising Budget. And even when, once in fifty years or so, two great nations come to blows, the old consequences no longer ensue. War, except as conducted by Chinese, Arabs, Dervishes and their kind, does not reduce the population as it once did. It merely checks the increase a little. It causes the death of a few people who would have died in any case, but it no longer blots out races and cities.

Local famines were also, for thousands of years, a hindrance to the unlimited increase of the population, but LIVING AGE. VOL. LVI. 2919

now, over a great and ever enlarging section of the earth, railways and ships drag food so rapidly from place to place that local famines are almost a thing of the past. Also the telegraph carries orders for food in sixty seconds over distances so vast that formerly the people at one end of the wire might have died of hunger without the people at the other end being aware that the crops had failed. The abolition of slavery and slave-hunting and human sacrifices, the spread of new ideas about sanitation, the growth of medical science, and the uprising of that humanitarianism which seeks to preserve and multiply even the least promising samples of the human family -all these have done their share in the great work of replenishing the earth. And now, in the twelfth year of the twentieth century, civilized man can look back upon his work, and smite his chest hard in self-gratulation and say that it is good.

It is only by consideration of the population figures that he can realize how great his accomplishment really is. In the year 1801 the people of England and Wales numbered less than 9,000,000. That was the accumulation of all the thousands of years or ages or centuries since Genesis was a baby in its cradle in Mesopotamia-since the days when the first tentative ape came down from his tree-top with intent to be a man-since the time of the dinosaurs and the great fish lizards, and the primitive human who waged precarious war against them with the branch of a tree and a rock thrown by hand. In 1911 the people of the same little kingdom amounted to over 36,000,000. In other words, the last 110 years have produced three times more population than all the ages that preceded them. Those folk who dig with the spade of inquiry among the caverns and ruins of the past assume that England and Wales contained about 2,000,000 people at the

The

date of the Norman Conquest. estimate is based on the military force which the country was able to turn out at a period when every able-bodied male was a soldier-of a sort. If the people of the days of Harold and William I. had taken the same intelligent interest in the birth-rate as the folk of to-day, and if all the intermediate generations had done the same, it is a mere matter of arithmetic to discover that England and Wales would now hold about 120,000,000,000 or 130,000,000,000 people. This calculation is based on the theory that America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand were discovered about the time of William the Red King, and that emigration began to relieve the pressure some centuries earlier than it did. Without that assumption the population would now be much greater than 130,000,000,000. It is, in its own small way, a somewhat alarming proposition. Again, it is a mere matter of arithmetic to show that if the present superfluity of births over deaths is maintained, another three hundred and thirty years will find England and Wales trying hard to maintain something like 2,400,000,000 people. That is also an alarming proposition in its own humble fashion. I have a deep sympathy for the views and feelings of a certain English bishop who recently declared that the decline of the birth-rate was England's great danger and great disgrace. At the same time, even a bishop ought to consider what will happen if the birthrate does not decline.

If the case of England were an isolated one it might be regarded as a mere curiosity. But it is only one case among many, and by no means the most striking one. The population of Canada has multiplied by about twenty-eight in a century; that of the United States by sixteen; that of Prussia by five; that of Russia by four; that of Italy by three; that of Argentine by

about twelve; that of Australia by about nine hundred; that of Norway and Sweden by three. In fact, in practically every part of the civilized world, save Ireland, the same story is told. Wherever it is possible to find fairly reliable statistics, the birth-rate, during the last century or so, has been doing its work in a heroic fashion. From the first Monday of Chaos-from the dawning of the world's Great Original Washing Day-until the year 1801 the accumulation of humanity was comparatively trifling. From 1801 until now it has been tremendous-almost incredible. The increase has been so vast that the question may yet arise: "Is Man Really a Rabbit?" Another century, or two centuries, at the same pace and apparently the bottom must fall out of something. Here two problems arise:

1.

What will the bottom fall out of? 2. What will the thing, whatever it is, be like after the bottom has fallen out?

Already the food problem calls for attention. As recently as sixty or seventy years ago every country in the world was capable of raising sufficient food for its own consumption, and almost every one did so. Man found his loaf growing conveniently at his own doorstep, and looking out from his unglazed window he saw his own beef and butter and cheese, and very often his own clothing, walking about in his own paddock. In a national sense he was independent. His country could not be starved out by any blockade. He did not need to maintain vast armed squadrons to protect the lines of his food-supply. He could send his fleet to the farthest seas on the most venturous errands without any fear that it might miss its enemy, and return to find its Mother Country had succumbed to starvation after a month's stoppage of its ports, and that the admiral's only hope of recovering his back pay was