The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21. IN THE FUTURE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 139, 21 September 1910, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21. IN THE FUTURE.

The increase of population, the scarcity of wars, the over-production of unessential, and the lack of raw material are all matters that have claimed the attention of eminent folk lately. On the one liand, we have a cotton king telling the world that there is not enough cotton to keep England's mills going, and on the other we have news that the greatest of irrigation engineers is going to make Chaldea the biggest granary and cotton field in the world. One of the eminents who is trying to see daylight through the maze is Arnold White, and he brings the Malthusian theory to his aid, saying that the doctrine that population tends to increase faster than food is one which at first sight seems selfevident; yet for a time, at all events, among the nations of Europe and America, food has increased faster than population. In the course of one century the population of Britain has increased from fifteen to forty-six millions. Each of the forty-six millions in 1910 obtains a larger average share of food), plothimg, and comforts than the average Briton at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The population of the United States in a little more than a century has increased from six to eighty millions, yet the eighty , millions are better fed not only than the six millions, they are better fed than any other nation in the world. Furthermore, a surplus of American food remains for export, which probably feeds twenty million foreigners. The writer goes on to say:—

"The competition of rival nations for food hangs like a sword over our heads. Behind the steam ploughs of Bedford, behind the motors of Coventry, and behind the reaping machines, cotton gins, and shipbuilding of Birmingham, Manchester and Tyneside, their employment is conditional upon the cultivation of land that is not now cultivated, or, if tilled, is not now producing what it can be made to produce. The reserve of land on which the fabric of civilisation mainly depends is now all but taken up. In Europe little is left. In the tropics, except for the soya bean, the cocoanut, palm oil, and the banana, little European food is produced. The tropics, moreover, are not available as fields for emigration. In Europe the chief States are overcrowded. The Turkish Empire, it is true, formerly supported a vast population; and Morocco, under good Government, might become the granary of Western Europe. Canada and Australia remain. The latter is mainly a pastoral country. The wheat-growing 'reserve of the world is being rapidly exhausted, and, although for a century Malthus' theory has remained in abeyance, Europe, Asia, Africa, and America are now about to be brought face to face with the inconvenient necessity of finding an answer to the question, 'Who is to own the surplus food supplies of the world?' In India peace has increased the population from two to three hundred millions in a century. Notwithstanding the increase of railways, irrigation, forestry, and intelligent cultivation, the pressure of want has increased among the vast populations of the great river valleys. In the Ganges valley the native arts that flourished under 'the Company' are forgotten in the struggle for existence. The obvious remedy for the hunger of India is to settle the surplus population, for whom England is indelibly responsible, in the highlands of Africa. Hitherto, Governments, irrespective of. party, are allowed to drift. But in India, as in Egypt) the sphinx is sitting at the door, and will not depart until an answer has been given to the question, 'What shall we eat and what shall we drink and •wherewithal shall we be clothed?' "

Malthus assumed that the ratio between the natural increase of population and the amount of surplus food is that of geometrical to arithmetical progression. Thus we take the series—Population: 2, 4, 8, .16, 32, 64, .128; food-2, 12, 22, 32, 42, 52, 62. For the first five terms of the series food is; ahead of population, and the condition of the people improves. [After the fifth term one of two things must happen—either existence becomes impossible to any but the strongest, or the bloodiest of bloody wars and the deadliest and most universal of pestilences must check births until the relation between food production and population are again harmoniously adjusted. Germany is the most scientific farming country in the world since England abandoned the premier position. But Germany is already squeezing almost the last ounce of nutriment out of her soil. Organisation can go no further. At the present time British emigration is ten times that of Germany, though the population of the latter exceeds that of Great Britain by twenty million souls. Russia is filling up, Brazil and the Argentine and the Pacific Republics absorb a handful of Germans, Spaniards, Portuguese and British. Except in Canada, Siberia, Asia Minor and Morocco land in temperate climates is not available. To quote Mr. Arnold White again:

"The five cheeks to human increase are war, pestilence, famine, infanticide and celibacy. Infanticide is not practised on a sufficiently large scale to avert the coming cataelasm. Celibacy or artificial prevention, as Napoleon told the French, is the only alternative to war; but celibacy carries with it the drawback that men will fight before they die of hunger. Only two checks remains—war and pestilence. Of the two, war is the cleaner; and modern hygiene, provided the central Government is intelligent and strong, regards pestilence as disgrace. Civilised nations can no longer look to a Black Death, to typhus, or to small-pox as avenues of escape from the political consequences of food rivalry. War alone remains. The nation that is nof preparing itself to ta>ke part in the coming strug-' gle for food, by increasing its efficiency for war and peace, is committing suicide. The German Dreadnoughts, like the British, are intended for the same purpose —food getting and food insurance. Japan builds Dreadnoughts with the intention • of getting back their price in trade, grain andl meat. None are so blind as those who will not see. The coming storm is due less to the ambitions of statesmen to the anxieties of parents. It is 'brewing hr the cradles of the world. Secluded behind our Navy, with the memory of many centuries of immunity from war on British soil, the average English-

man who sees the thing coming hopes that the existing situation may last his time. He does not think it probable. The upheaval of the discontented and dangerous barbarians of the slums, like the march of the lemmings in Northern Siberia, must end in the destruction of the unfit."