POPULATION PROBLEMS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXI, Issue 194, 18 July 1941, Page 4

POPULATION PROBLEMS.

Visiting New Zealand after an absence of 28 years Sir Evelyn Wrench, founder of the Overseas League, discovered the "same lovely country, so richly endowed, and not troubled with pestilence and plague," but with the problem of too little population. What he has said lias been emphasised many times by visitors of authority, but nothing has been done to remedy a grave defect in our social order. Not long ago, a noted visitor in Dr Halli-

day Sutherland, in an address on "How Nations Die," made a powerful appeal to the British Empire, as well as to other nations, to take heed lest they be responsible for their own decline. Statisticians and economists have pointed to the prospect, unless the trends of recent years are arrested, of the beginning of a catastrophic decline in Britain's population within even so short a period as the next thirty years; and a little later, it has been written, the Dominions will follow with varying rapidity—the British stock leading. With the absence of immigration the reduced rate of natural increase in New Zealand, compared with earlier years, has attracted the attention of thoughtful people. Only once in the period between 1930 and 1939 did the growth of population reach 20,000. That was in the last mentioned year, when it was helped by a lower death-rate and a higher birth-rate, giving a natural increase of 14,675. Our much vaunted social security cannot nourish when built on such insecure foundations. It is time for New Zealand to learn that the nation's wellbeing rests upon the family, and real progress will be made only with a return to the slogan, "Populate or Perish." The remarks of the Chief Justice, Sir Michael Myers, arising out of Court proceedings in Palmerston North this week, are a warning that cannot be ignored if national welfare is to have its foremost place in our life.