598 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
given the World's ultimate ceiling of food production and the Peasantry's
traditional breeding habits—a novel 'freedom from want* could not be
guaranteed to Mankind unless a familiar 'freedom to beget' were taken
away from them. On this showing, the maintenance of a minimum,
oecumenical material standard of living would require a public inter-
ference with Personal Liberty that hitherto was unheard of; for, though
it was true that in the past a minute fraction of Mankind had been either
forcibly precluded from exercising its right of reproduction or had
voluntarily abstained from exercising it, religious celibacy had always
been considered to be an exceptional act of spiritual heroism, while the
practice of making eunuchs had ranked with Human sacrifice, Prostitu-
tion, Slavery, and War as one of the blots on the pages of the history of
Civilization.

If the time were indeed to come when the begetting of children would
have to be regulated in conformity with imperious requirements of
public policy instead of being left to chance in being left to the personal
discretion of wives and husbands, how was this revolutionary future
extension of the powers of authoritarian government into the intima-
cies of private life likely to be received on the one hand by the peasant
majority of Mankind and on the other hand by a minority whom an
Industrial Technology had emancipated from the peasant's bondage to
unquestioned custom? The controversy between these two sections of
Mankind that the Malthusian issue was bound to evoke was likely to be
acute and acrimonious, since either section would have grievances against
the other which would seem clamant in the aggrieved party's estimation.
The peasantry would feel aggrieved at being threatened with the loss of
their traditional freedom to reproduce their kind on the plea that this was
the only alternative to starvation; for this sacrifice would be demanded
of them at a time when the gulf between their own pauper standard of
living and the industrial peoples' relatively lavish standard would have
come to be greater than it had ever been before.

A progressive widening of this gulf was, in truth, one of the conse-
quences that must be expected to follow from the course of events that
we have been anticipating, if we are right in forecasting that, at the time
when global food production would be reaching its ceiling, the peasantry
would still be expending most of its additional supply of food on adding
to the head of its population, and the industrialized peoples be expending
most of their additional supply of commodities on raising a slowly in-
creasing or even stationary population's standard of living. Considering
that, by the time of writing, most of the industrialized peoples had al-
ready either reached or come within sight of reaching a new equilibrium
in the movement of their population through the offsetting of an antece-
dent decrease in the death-rate by an eventual countervailing decrease
in the birth-rate, it seemed likely that, among these peoples, this ten-
dency would continue;1 and, considering further that their standard of
living had risen notably even during the period when their populations

* Professor William McNeill comments: 'The stabilization of population in the
industrialized countries is surely less certain now, since the Second World War, than
this passage implies.'