The Timaru Herald. TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 1930. “STANDING BOOM ONLY.”

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18520, 18 March 1930, Page 8

The Timaru Herald. TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 1930. “STANDING BOOM ONLY.”

In many corners of the world today, there are too many people, and the result is often an inhuman intensity in the struggle for existence in its cruder form. Numbers outrun the available resources of life, and men and women are wizened and bent with care. “Surely,” asks the critic, “it were better to have forty millions healthy, vigorous, and joyous, than' sixty millions

riddled with bad health, weakness and depression?” To most men and women the idea of some form of control is repugnant. Why not let well alone? they say. But the outlook is far from being “all well” and some expedients ought to be tried to obviate population out-stripping food supplies, since this is apt to involve overcrowding and under-feeding, a deterioration of the health of the mother, and a burden of care to both parents. It is argued that a deliberate reduction of the birthrate may tend to improve the health of children and mothers; may make life more secure, less anxious, and with greater possibilities of fineness; may make earlier marriages among the thrifty more feasible; may promote the independence of women and increase their opportunities for self-development. But there is a further argument that the absence of overcrowding makes for peace, since expansive populations without the avenue for migration constitute one ’of the main causes of war. Another urgent consideration is suggested by the facts of differential fertility. No doubt these require not only careful and critical handling but great extension; yet it is safe to say that there is in many countries, a strong tendency towards a more rapid increase of the less individuated, the less thrifty, and the less biologically-fit members of the community or nation. But after all, who shall judge the potentialities of the child borne in the slums? The increase of the less fit members of the community is in some measure counteracted by a correspondingly greater infantile mortality; but this is being lessened by the efforts of modern hygiene. A policy of quality before quantity is not race-suicide but race-saving and this is regarded by some as one of the lines of progress. But there are cons as well as pros which must be considered, as well as the means by which the growth of population may be controlled, and the motives, not always praiseworthy which lie behind its practice. In dealing with this depressing subject, it is well to think first of the value of children. It would be a dull world, without the laughter of children. They have a rejuvenescent virtue, keeping mankind from growing too old. A world without children I would soon he dead and that j form of race suicide would be a j rather pathetic exit for humanity. But there is a larger thought, that in children there is a continual renovation of life, for each child is a new pattern or indivi-duality-leading the race up or down. Evolution cannot get along without children. So we must be careful in handling this subject. Yet the trouble is that children are sometimes produced too quickly for their good and their mother’s; and that many people who should not have children at all have too many, while others, who are fitter representatives of the species, have none. Last year Britain had a record for low birth-rate, but the growing cloud in the sky is the persistent increase in the absolute number of the world’s inhabitants by fourteen to sixteen millions a year. In most civilised countries, there is a steady decrease in birth-rate, but the effect of this in reducing the population is counteracted by the lowering of the death-rate. Unless something unforeseen happens in the way of food-supply, there is bound to be a world-famine. Professor East points out that if the rate of increase actually existent in the United States should continue, then within the lifetime of the grandchildren of persons now living, the States will contain more than a billion inhabitants (meaning a thousand millions). “Long before this eventuality,” he adds, “the struggle for existence in those parts of the world at present more densely populated will be something beyond the imagination of those of us who have lived in a time of plenty.” Biologists look forward to getting more fish than ever out of the sea; agriculturists look forward to making three blades of grass grow where one or two grew before; biochemists look forward to making bread out of the thin air and so forth. But when all reasonable allowance is made for all advances which scientific imagination can at present regard as possible—the outlook is by no means encouraging. In Professor E. A. Boss’s masterly survey of the population question (“Standing Boom Only?”), the increase in the world’s population is considered in a scientifically critical way, j and as calmly as is possible; there seems no escape from the conclusion that each dawn beholds 50,000 more people ou our planet. The present rate of increase will double the population in sixty years, and multiply,

it by a hundred in four hundred years. “At this rate even,” says Professor Boss in summing up,

“if humanity’s food problem were to be solved once and for all by the fall of the nitrogen of the air in the form of a constant rain of manna, there would not be a square yard of arable land to a person a thousand years hence. At a date no more distant to us than is the capture of Jerusalem by the . Crusaders, humanity would be justified in hanging out on our planet, the sign: Stauding Boom Onlv.”