The Evening Star THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 1928. BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS.

Evening Star, Issue 19839, 12 April 1928, Page 6

The Evening Star THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 1928. BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS.

It is a dire alternative that is conjured up for the world by two conclusions, based on the growth of its population, which are presented in our cable news to-day. The well-known economist, Sir Chiozza Money, tells us that the day of the white races is drawing to a close. Since they will not reproduce themselves at the same rate as the black, brown, and yellow peoples, nothing remains for them but to become eventually hewers of wood and drawers of water to those others. The darkskinned races will not conquer the whites at the cannons’ mouth, as a Now Zealand writer has foretold. It will not be necessary. They will simply crowd them, by force of numbers, into all the least desirable places of the earth, or reduce them to such a position, we can suppose, as the negroes of fifty years ago held in America. It is a fate to shudder at, and a great increase in the birth rates of the white nations, which might cause it to be averted, is not to bo hoped for in Sir Chiozza Money’s opinion. The lovo of pleasure, of an easy life, which forbids more than the smallest families, has gone too far for that. Nor does the attempt promise to he worth making if we must accept the conclusions of another set. of theorists, fortified by statistics newly published, that comparatively soon the world must bo starved to death. To enlarge the rate of increase of any proportion of its inhabitants would bo only, by their showing, to bring nearer that day of doom. If we take the two perils together ten frail barque of the white races of the world hovers terribly between Scylla and Charybdis.

Sir Chiozza Money’s alarm is not new. Ho defined it and explained it in a book published three years ago, ‘The Peril of the White,’ which seemed only too convincing in the light of facts and figures emphasised by him. As his statistics show, in 1921 the population of the world was 1,852 millions. Less than one-third (003 millions) were whites. The British stock was 117 millions. The white races are at present controlling all the most favored regions of the globe, and the question was, with a birth rate that for practically all of them persists in declining, how were they to continue to do it? The rate of increase of the colored races is not high at present, owipg to their excessive death rates, but when that last state has been altered by new control over plagues and famine which w© have been teaching them, their growth will be immensely faster than it is today. Those are disturbing portents to which Sir Chiozza Money points in his latest statement, when Franco has to build up a colored army in Africa, and America, which will not admit white immigrants, except in very limited numbers, from their own overcrowded countries, .sees black industrialists increasing in her towns. All Europe, he suggests, will be forced yet to import colored labor, and that will be the beginning of the end. Mr Lotbrop Stoddard, in his ‘ Rising Tide of Color,’ has argued on the same lines. Professor East, of Harvard University, who has also made a specialty of this subject, does not believe that the white races arc threatened by any color submergence. There is no “rising tide of color” in his view. Citing figures which differ considerably from Mr Stoddard’s, he finds that the white race is even to-day numerically superior to any other. More than two-thirds of the total yearly increase of world population, moreover, is white. Before 1950, therefore, “ unless some radical and relatively permanent overturn of world affairs occurs,” the whit© races will form an actual majority of the world’s inhabitants. Moreover, they can afford to be much inferior in numbers as this writer views the position. “ One of the lessons of the Great War was that high-grade brains are what count. If Germany had been surrounded solely by Russian hordes the result would never have been in doubt. So a few million less whites and a few million more blacks matters not.” To view the outlook from another aspect, “ armed [or to a less extent, we may suppose, unarmed] competition with the white man is unthinkable by a race living in a country where the sun burns the will power out of every man, where time is long and life is cheap, and constructive thoughts are little moths that flutter briskly in the evening and die at sunrise.”

But though he scouts the fears of Sir Chiozza Money and Mr Stoddard, Professor East has his own dread of a perhaps crueller fate threatening the world as a whole ns a result of its over-population. For half a million years, say, the increase of the human race was so slow that in the year 1800 there were less than 850 million people. Since that time, a short hundred years, the population has more than doubled. The rate of increase, thanks to the reduced death rates that have offset lower birth rates in Europe, has not slackened. There are almost two new Belgiums to feed now, we are told, with each additional year, and the number is increasing like a compound interest table. How soon will the food be used up? Under the most optimistic assumptions, he believes, as to production and distribution of food which it is possible to make, Ehe world can support but 5,200 millions of people, and at the present rate of increase that total would be reached in just a little over a century. As the saturation point is neared, the rate oi increase will fall of ite own account, without any artificial attempts to keep it down. But it is a bad outlook. A consoling circumstance is that neither Professor East nor anyone else can foresee the progress of invention, or know how mankind may be fed, in a hundred years. Theorists have erred badly before in making these calculations. They may be in error now. Sir Henry Row, an ex-Government statistician of Great Britain, points out some considerations in our cables to-day which may make the outlook appear less menacing. The old Scylla and Charybdis were deadly perils, but there were mariners who passed safely between them. The world may escape yet from their modern examples.