Besides the considerations of national health, ‘back to village movement’ is essential even for the biological survival of human beings. There has been for the past few decades a steady decrease in the populations of several industrialised countries of the West. Malthus was haunted by the spectre of over-population, but modern biologists are worried over the prospects of decreasing population and deterioration in the quality of the human species. That the fecundity of the urban population is much less than that of the rural areas is a well-established principle of Sociology. As Prof. Lancelot Hogben points out, the lower fertility is due to urban congestion, alternative distractions which compete with the satisfaction of the claims of parenthood, and the impact of a new pattern of social relations on the stability of the family group. Excessive mechanisation tends to mechanise life itself. “In the city,” comments Prof. Hogben, “reproduction is an unwarranted intrusion of hospital practice on the orderly routine of a mechanisedexistence.” “The machine, which neither creates nor begets,sets the fashion of human relationships.”[77] On the contrary, in rural surroundings where children grow up in contact with the recurrence of parenthood in animals and plants, the processes by which life renews itself are accepted as natural events. City life is not the special characteristic of the capitalist society. A socialist state will also be confronted with the task of planning for ‘human survival.”
