The Earth and Its People

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 116, 6 August 1927, Page 25

The Earth and Its People

Problem for White Races

BHERE are about 53 million square miles of dry land on this earth, and i nearly 2,000 million people live on it. Mankind may be; roughly divided accord-1 ing to colour into white, black, brown and yellow. There are about 600 million white people, 200 million black, 400 million brown, and 700 million yellow. How is the world divided among them all? Broadly speaking.! the"black men and the brown men are: under the domination of the whites. j About 47 million square miles of dry land out of the 53 millions is con- ; trolled by the white races: the yellow men have the rest. There are fewer white men than yellow, yet the yellow men, a third of the whole population of the globe, control only a tenth of the land and the white men ninetenths. The white men have enormous empty spaces under their control, but the yellow men must not enter them. The British Empire occupies about a quarter of the land surface of the globe, and its population is some 460 millions, about a quarter of the globe’s inhabitants. Our people have their share of land: our land supports its share of people. But how are our people distributed, and what part do our white people take in its peopling? We are 460 millions, white, black, 1 and brown. But there are 320 million brown people in India alone, and in Africa and elsewhere we rule about 60 million blacks. Whites number only 66 millions; seven millions are nonBritish, and of the 59 million British over 47 millions are in the Motherland, j It is the remaining 12 millions that occupy and control the quarter of the j habitable globe which is the British Empire. India is a brown mans’ country, i Africa is prevailingly a black’s man’s, j But the whole American continent I is a white man’s land, and so is Aus- j t.ralia. Canada and Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland, cover to- j gether nearly eight • million square i miles, and support a population of 17 : millions, mainly British whites. Here ! is a seventh of the world’s land occu-1 pied by less than a hundredth of the world’s population (says a writer in “My Magazine.”). Or take Australia by itself. The yellow man looks hungrily at this mighty continent. Australia covers three million square miles, and has been declared to be capable of supporting 200 million people, about one in ten of the world’s population. It now supports six million people, less than one in 300 of the people of the world. There are, on the average, two people to the square mile in Australia, or, leaving out the population of the great cities, little more than one to a square mile. There are five square miles for an average family. In Java, less than 800 miles away, 50,000 square miles of land support 35 million people, or 700 to the square mile. The yellow people, in their tenth of the world, live about 130 to the square mile. Can we expect to prevent them from making their way into the great empty spaces? It is as certain as anything can be that the only way of preventing the yellow men form peopling it is to people its ourselves. As to this two facts stand out. The first fact is that the birth-rate in each of the self-governing Dominions is

declining; fewer and fewer children are born to the people already living there. The second fact is that people are emigrating there from the Old Country only half as fast as before the war. It shoud be just the other way. The chief reason for the slackened tide of emigration has been the policy of the Dominions themselves. There is a tendency among those already there to fear the competition of newcomers both in the selling of their labour and in the marketing of their produce; and this fear has found expression in ever stricter rules and regulations as to the conditions of emigration and the character and quality of the emigrants. The Dom-

inions have asked for the people we could not spare rather than for those we could spare; for those in good employment here and not for those out of work. The Dominions cantiot be expected to take the worst part of our home population, but neither can they expect to take our best and leave the worst to us. They must take a fair average and leave us a fair average. The Mother Country has ceased to exploit the oversea Dominions; the oversea Dominions must not seek to exploit the Mother Country. It is in Australia, where the need of population is greatest and the bounty of Nature most abundant, that this jealous reluctance to encourage immigration has been most in evidence. It is bad policy for the Dominion; it is bad policy for the Empire;

it is a bad world policy. It seeks to make permanent a position of things most dangerous to all concerned. Australia cannot remain empty. If it is not people with, white men it will be people with yellow. Even with the utmost encouragement of British immigration and a big rise in the birth-rate it is difficult to imagine the growth of a white population within a reasonable time large enough to make it practicable to hold that vast continent exclusively for Europeans. It is primarily for Australia that we are spending our hard-earned wages in building a great naval station at Singapore, an extravagance to be paid for almost entirely by the Mother Country. But no battleships and no naval bases can avail for long to bottle up a people in a crowded island with an empty continent next door.