DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 116, 6 August 1927, Page 16

DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

TOO MANY PEOPLE fCopyright, 1927 j TDROFESSOR E. A. ROSS says that the earth’s population will multiply itself by 32 by 2027. Then the population of the world will be sixty billion, instead of 1,900,000,000, as now. That is only one hundred years away and will swiftly come around. Ever since the days of Malthus, people have been alarmed by the rapid increase of population in the world. As far as we can see, the number of people is multiplying more and more rapidly. There are no famines now and the casualties in war are smaller. The birth rate continues to gain upon the death rate. But we need not be alarmed. The entire population of the world could now be taken care of by the State of Texas. We are learning more and more how to maintain human life more easily. As we harness electricity and utilise the power of streams, more and more food sustenance and other articles of human necessity are being manufactured. I once lived in a community where some men had very small farms and other farms of three or four thousand acres. I asked a small farmer once, whose name was Bill Johnson, just how much land a man needed to make a living on. His answer was characteristic. He said: “About all he needs is room enough to stand on if he’s got sense enough.” We have not begun yet to make inroads upon the tremendous supply of life found in the seas. We have just scratched the fertility of the tropics. Beside this, governments are just learning that the best thing they can do for their respective countries is to turn Avater on their desert lands, and otherwise improve the productive area of the land. The trend of progress seems to be in the way of making the sustenance of human life more abundant. The sixty billion people of 2027 will not only greatly outnumber the present population, but they will be a great deal more intelligent and a lot more about making a living.