Of course the check to population resulting from the desire for social betterment is a purely voluntary one, yet it is a good example of a social law that men under certain conditions will choose to refrain from having large families.
In applying this law it must be borne in mind that conditions vary greatly with different individuals and with different countries. If a man is able to raise his standard of living without great exertion, as is usually the case in a new country, no check to population may be expected. Or, if a man by exceptional abilities is able to maintain a high standard of living with comparative ease, he will not be influenced by the same considerations as the average man. If, on the one hand, men who easily raise their standard of living propagate freely, those who are unable to change their social position at all also propagate freely. In a caste system of society, or in an absolute despotism like that of Russia, the lower classes propagate blindly because they see no possibility of rising. No 'social capillarity' exists for them. In other words population is not held in check by a social law, but by a physical one. It is limited by the means of subsistence, according to the Malthusian law. Even among the lower classes of a great industrial center the same principle acts. Unskilled laborers attain the maximum wage at an early age and increased efforts on their part affect their social condition so little that they do not feel the social check and therefore propagate recklessly from hopelessness. A man in the lowest social class has no social position to lose, and only the best equipped can improve their condition sufficiently to feel the social restriction on population. To advise the laboring classes to limit their numbers in order to improve their condition, as the old economists did, is putting the cart before the horse. When the economic condition of the lowest industrial class improves enough to give its members some hope, they will begin to limit their numbers voluntarily in order further to improve their condition.
If, then, the class that rises easily in the social scale and the class which does not rise at all propagate freely the social check applies to that large class which rises, though only with great effort. It would appear then that in a pure democracy where increased reward always followed increased effort, the population would regulate itself automatically, because increased population would increase competition and that would bring about the social check. Its application to some of our large cities will be readily understood by those who are acquainted with the social conditions existing in them. Their enormous increase of population has increased competition to such an extent that only the best equipped—as compared with other members of the same class, not with inferior classes—can easily maintain the standard of living
