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Here, perhaps, we strike more nearly than anywhere else at the heart of the whole problem. The bottom trouble of the world in which we live is the enormous over-multiplication of our wants. In the multitude of ministrations to our senses, the life of the spirit is overlaid and smothered.
It is a vain hope that leads one to believe, while he is engaged in exterminating a certain species of small birds, that their places can be supplied and their services performed by other species which are allowed to multiply to excess. The preservation of every species of indigenous birds is the only means that can prevent the over-multiplication of injurious insects.
Among the witnesses we desired to subpoena was Charles Darwin, as we needed to use passages from his works; he wrote back a most interesting letter, telling us that he disagreed with preventive checks to population on the ground that over-multiplication was useful, since it caused a struggle for existence in which only the strongest and the ablest survived, and that he doubted whether it was possible for preventive checks to serve as well as positive.
Darwin's arguments to prove the struggle for life within the species. Natural checks to over-multiplication. Supposed extermination of intermediate links. Elimination of competition in Nature.
The cherry is a beautiful fruit, and one that is popular with birds as well as with boys. The great northern cherry of Europe, which was named by Linnaeus the 'bird-cherry, is encouraged in Great Britain and on the Continent for the benefit of the birds, which are regarded as the most important checks to the over-multiplication of insects.
The importance of natural checks to over-multiplication, and especially their bearing upon the competition hypothesis, seems never to have been taken into due account The checks, or rather some of them, are mentioned, but their action is seldom studied in detail.
Besides, Darwin never attempted to submit to a closer investigation the relative importance of the two aspects under which the struggle for existence appears in the animal world, and he never wrote the work he proposed to write upon the natural checks to over-multiplication, although that work would have been the crucial test for appreciating the real purport of individual struggle.
It is only too obvious that such a result is not realized in nature, but it is on account of other natural checks, and not because the natural rate of reproductive increase is anything but excessive. The third element of the process of natural selection is the struggle for existence which is to a large extent the direct consequence of over-multiplication.
These reflections have always led me to regard the birds and other interesting animals as having a value to mankind not to be estimated in dollars and cents, and which is entirely independent of any services they may render to the farmer or the orchardist by preventing the over-multiplication of noxious insects.
Everywhere we turn to examine the happenings of organic life we can find nothing but a wearisome warfare in which it is the ultimate and cruel lot of every contestant to admit defeat. What now are the results of variation, over-multiplication, and competition?
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