RAPID MATURITY

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 48, Issue 2818, 5 October 1938, Page 7

RAPID MATURITY

AMERICAN POPULATION PEAK WILL BE REACHED IN 1980 REPORT ISSUED BY EXPERTS. Those who still insist upon talking about America as a youth, or even about America’s coming of. age, may revise their language when they read a bulky report which the National Resources Committee recently issued on population trends. America, according to this report, is rapidly approaching maturity on a stationary population.

The data comes from the country’s leading- population experts. It is predicted on the basis of present vital statistics arid immigration policies that the crest of America’s population will be reached by 1980. The figure is 158 millions, or 30 millions more than the present total.

But this is the committee’s maximum estimate, their minimum placing the peak as near as 1955 with 138 millions. A decline in population is prognosticated from both levels.

The population report mentions the opportunity which a mature population presents of improving human relations. Basic in the committee’s view is the state of the nation’s mental health. Though the. death-rate is falling with the birth-rate, there is what the New York Times calls an alarming increase in mental ailments. Perhaps the revelation is due to improved reporting facilities and greater attention to the needs of mental patients. That, at any rate, is the committee’s opinion. Still, one won-

ders whether the spread of mental disorder is not a penalty of. the hectic growth of material America, says the New York correspondent of The Observer.

In President Roosevelt’s view the first problem in the new national therapy is the backward agricultural south. The President’s consuming interest in southern rehabilitation was first revealed in the Tennessee Valley Authority.

How the President wishes further to repair what he calls sectional unbalance is not stated. Southerners and many disinterested persons think that he is on a wrong track already with such measures as the Wages and Hours Bill and crop control, which had as their obpect the improvement of the southerner’s lot.

Change in the South

The chief single source of southern living is raw cotton. Under New Deal restrictionism foreign markets have been lost which no temporary handout can offset. The current Texas Business Review estimates that but for such a policy southern exports this year would have doubled.

As a permanent counter aid, the New Deal is trying to encourage crop diversification. None doubts the need for this, but the real diversification required is the linking of productive agriculture with productive industry.

Such a change was happening when the New Deal came along with its quest for economic stability. Southern industrial progress, however, may now be arrested and put back by the labour standards of the Hours and Wages Act. For experts say that the Act will subject the small and lessproductive business of the south to competitive disadvantage.