The Daily News. THURSDAY, MAY 14, 1914. NEW ZEALAND GROWS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVI, Issue 293, 14 May 1914, Page 4

The Daily News. THURSDAY, MAY 14, 1914. NEW ZEALAND GROWS.

When Mr Roosevelt quoted New Zealand as a horrid example of race suicide he repeated a libel whiclj the Dominion still .has to live down (say.i the Lyttelton Times). Not many months ago the Bishop of London said that it was hard to see how the Australasian States were going to bo kept British if they neglected the Biblical injunction to "be fruitful and multiply," and authorities with higher scientific attainments than his lordship would claim persist in representing Australia and New Zealand as lands that would become depopulated if the stream of immigration failed them. Happily for the good name of our country knowledge of the actual facts is being distributed gradually among people who have been shaking their heads at the young nations. Dr C. V. Drysdale delivered a lecture before the Royal Colonial Institute in London the other week on the subject of "The Empire and the Birth-rate," and he discussed the case of Australasia in detail. "He said that New Zealand led the world in the rate of natural increase, with Australia a good second. During the last five years New Zealand's natural increase had been fifty per cent greater than that of Great Britain and the birthrate was tending to rise. The Dominion would double itsi population in forty years without any immigration at all and multiply it by six in a century. Australia's rate of natural increase would mean a five-fold gain in a hundred years, whereas Mr Roosevelt had stated that the Commonwealth could not double its population in that period. Dr Drysdale mentioned that New Zealand's population was growing at a phenomenal rate under the combined influences of a fairly steady birth-rate, and extraordinary low death rate and a large volume of immigration. The country contained 026,05S white people in 1891 and the Re-gistrar-General has announced this week ttyit the figures for to-day are 1,089,820, an increase of 75 per cent, in twentythree years. Japan has at present about ten times more people tlian Australia and New ealand combined have, but the disparity is being reduced rapidly, as nations cannot count time, owing to the fact that British countries have an advantage of about fifty per cent in the rate of natural increase. Immigration is another factor in their favor, Japan having no support of this kind. Dr Drysdale, as most pupils of social problems know, is an ardent advocate of the Malthusian theory of birth limitation. lie says that the prosperity and swurity of the Empire '"will lie best secured by promoting a reduction of the birth rate among the poor and unlit, by the encouragement of agriculture and the conversation of our resources of fertilising material and by a strong scheme, of Imperial defence." But his opinions upon controversial questions need not blind anybody to the importance of the actual facts and figures he quotes. New Zealand is in no danger of depopulation owing to the refusal of its people to fill ijnoceupied cradles.