For the moment let us confine our attention to those impersonal forces which are now making the world so extremely unsafe for democracy, so very in­hospitable to individual freedom. What are these forces? And why has the nightmare, which I had pro­jected into the seventh century A.F., made so swift an advance in our direction? The answer to these ques­tions must begin where the life of even the most highly civilized society has its beginnings — on the level of biology.

On the first Christmas Day the population of our planet was about two hundred and fifty millions — less than half the population of modern China. Sixteen cen­turies later, when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plym­outh Rock, human numbers had climbed to a little more than five hundred millions. By the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, world pop­ulation had passed the seven hundred million mark. In 1931, when I was writing Brave New World, it stood at just under two billions. Today, only twenty-seven years later, there are two billion eight hundred million of us. And tomorrow — what? Penicillin, DDT and clean water are cheap commodities, whose effects on public health are out of all proportion to their cost. Even the poorest government is rich enough to provide its subjects with a substantial measure of death con­trol. Birth control is a very different matter. Death control is something which can be provided for a whole people by a few technicians working in the pay of a benevolent government. Birth control depends on the co-operation of an entire people. It must be practiced by countless individuals, from whom it demands more intelligence and will power than most of the world's teeming illiterates possess, and (where chemical or me­chanical methods of contraception are used) an ex­penditure of more money than most of these millions can now afford. Moreover, there are nowhere any reli­gious traditions in favor of unrestricted death, whereas religious and social traditions in favor of un­restricted reproduction are widespread.