Our teeming population is the strongest evidence our numbers are burdensome to the world

Our teeming population is the strongest evidence our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us from its natural elements. Our wants grow more and more keen and our complaints more bitter in all mouths, while nature fails in affording us our usual sustenance. In every deed, pestilence and famine and wars have to be regarded as a remedy for nations as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race.

-- Tertullian, a Carthaginian priest in 210 AD, when the world population was approximately 250 million people