Readers of The Daily News were recently given a scare in an article on a book which treats of the world’s food supply and the increase of population. The alarming conclusion was to the effect that within a measureable space of years the world would be faced with the prospect of starvation for many of its inhabitants, unless remedies were immediately devised to avert the danger. It is hardly necessary to say that ‘a constructive method of birth-control’ was among the suggested remedies.

Now this is the sort of scare that has an influence on the minds of many to-day who, through unavoidable ignorance of the true facts, are overawed by any quack who claims to speak in the name of what is called Science—a much abused word ! Science, if it be really science and worthy of our acceptance as representative of objective truth, ought to be a sure and evident knowledge of things. But many of the statements and conclusions of your modern scientist are nothing of the kind. They are, to say the best, no more than theories or hypotheses : to say the worst, they are often no better than myths which the scientists of to-morrow will throw aside as childish.

And in the case of the problem of the food-supply and the population, the scare-mongering scientists cannot even claim the support of their fellow-scientists. The fact of the matter is that there is plenty of evidence, theoretical and experimental, to prove that the feeding of the world, both present and future, in itself presents no extraordinary difficulty, provided that the artificial restrictions induced by modern financial control be removed.