The opening of Preface
Many different questions connected with population are frequently discussed at the present day. This book is designed not so much as a contribution to the study of any one of these questions in particular as an attempt to trace back to their origin the main problems which now attract attention and to indicate their relation one to the other—to view the whole problem in fact from an historical and evolutionary standpoint. The book is an accident of the war. When war broke out I was engaged in collecting material which is incorporated in this book with the object of discussing certain aspects of the population problem. It had occurred to me that I might write an introduction showing how these aspects are related to the problem as a whole. Further than that I had not gone when there followed five years of active service during which the project of writing an introductory sketch became converted into the far more ambitious project of treating at some length the population problem as a whole.