The Hidden Future of Europe.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 5005, 13 May 1889, Page 2

The Hidden Future of Europe.

It is utterly vain to speculate on the future of Europe, when the outflowing tide of aur- > plus populations shall have been effectually * damned back, for we do not know even the v general laws which will regulate the new direction given to human energy. None of us really know whether the increase of the European peoples will continue as it has done, during this century, or whether it will stop, as it must have done for ages; whether the great races will burst out in arms, seizing new lands for themselves, -—as for instance, the Bussians might do in Persia, or the Germans in Hungary and the Balkan Peninsula —or whether Europe, like China, will rely upon feverish industry and thrift pushed beyond all precedent, to feed her teeming multitudes. None of us can be sure that a plague analagous to the phylloxera may not attack wheat, or whether science may nob find for us a substance as universal as clay and as reinvigorating to the soil as nitrate of soda. The assertion that poverty checks the production of a race has proved absolutely ' false in China and Ireland; while the counter hypothesis, that prosperity checks the birthrate by inducing prudence in marriage, is absolutely contradicted by the statistics of the American West. We know nothing about it for certain, except a few facts so confused and so contradictory that tliey will not yield under any analysis a basis for clear thought. One fact is, that in most European countries the increase of population has been unattended with any decrease in the standard of comfort. That is hopeful, j but there is another which is not,—that Europe is becoming over-cropped, and needs, decade by decade, more and better restoratives for the declining vigor of her soil. We know that if the emigrants stay, we shall have more labour, and very good labor, they being, in the main, energetic men; but we also know that if they stay, the very pick of the discontented will remain among us in hunger. Prediction is as impossible as guidance, and all we can hold to be established is, that if emigration stops, the problems of the future will be at once;more|complox and more urgent even then those of the past.