WORLD’S POPULATION.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 26 July 1924, Page 10

WORLD’S POPULATION.

RETURN TO SAVAGERY POSSIBLE. PROFESSOR HARRISON’S LECTURE. The prediction that within a few hundred years the people of the world would probably return to a state of savagery and the law that only the fittest would survive would prevail was made by Professor Launcelot Harrison in the course of a lecture in Sydney recently (reports the Herald). Professor Harrison was dealing with the subject of inheritance in evolution, and, after giving the scientific explanation of the inheritance of characteristics by human beings, referred to the population question.

“It is a grave question,” he said, “as to how we are going to deal with the world’s population at the rate it is increasing. During the last 100 years the population of America has increased from 5,000,000 to over 100,000,000. It is estimated that in a couple of hundred years the food supply of the world will not be sufficient* to maintain it. Unless the population question is tackled it will settle itself, but not in the most desirable way. It is quite possible that we will return to savagery. Feeblemindedness is a menace. The feebleminded woman marrying a normally mental man will result, on the average, in half the children being feebleminded. The question is what can he done to alter the trend of human evolution. We are preserving the unfit. The question is whether we can afford to preserve them. Then the question is how are we going to deal with them. Sterilisation has been suggested, hut public opinion is against this. Others have suggested segregation. This offers a way out of the difficulty. We know that with judicious mating we can generally get rid of unfavourable traits of human character in a few generations. This has already been actually accomplished. The idealists say it is possible to persuade these .people to refrain from marriage. This is not a solution. So we are still left with the problem. As a zoologist, and, speaking from a purely social point of view, I should say that they should be put in the lethal chamber. But then we have to consider the sanctity of human life.” Continuing, Professor Harrison said that the American Bureau had compiled statistics showing that one person in 6,000,000 was a genius, and that one in 20,000 would find himself as a notable person who had done things, and whose name would appear in “Who’s Who.” Nine-tenths of the people belonged to the normal productive mass, and the remainder, practically one-tenth, consisted of the anti-social elements doing harm to the general population. There was the consolation, 'however; that the weak-minded people being in such a small minority could not actually break down the remainder to the lower level. The American immigration authorities had viewed the question of inheritance with so much' concern that they had established officers in southern countries of Europe, who enquired into the history of the parents. The best we could do in Australia was to find out if possible our ancestral defects, and closely study this absorbing question. In conclusion Professor Harrison declared that the imprisonment of criminals or the ordering of the lash for criminal offences, especially in the case of sexual perverts, was the essence of insanity. Only a lawyer, he added, could do such a thing.