Europe In Grave Danger Of Over-Population Now.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18959, 3 January 1930, Page 8

Europe In Grave Danger Of Over-Population Now.

TO-DAY’S SIGNED ARTICLE.

Written for the “ Star ” liy

GUGLIELMO FERRERO.

(The celebrated Italian Historian.)

All civilisation? that succeeded one another in Europe until the century before last were dominated by the fear of developing themselves unduly one day at the risk of the next day’s means of survival. In those times famine ran rife; civilisations shrank before them, avoiding rapid development so as to placate the evil that threatened them. On the whole, we are most ill-inform-ed on ancient populations. One thing is certain—they were few and far between, slow to increase and prompt at disappearance. Oliganthropy, as the Greeks called scarcity of the human race, was then an evil that seemed to without remedy. A few symptoms tend indirectly towards a supposition that the Middle Ages were more prolific than the ages of antiquity. Merit attaches to the advance of Christianity. Christianity ordained the family around the domestic hearth in making a sacrament of marriage; but religious celibacy, anarchy and poverty were general factors acting in a sense against the new light that had broken upon society. Again, from time to time, plagues and pestilence swept over entire countries and in a few months destroyed progress that represented the work of many years. Then, what remained of civilisation had to start all over again! Gradually, as we come nearer to our own epoch, we see an increase in European populations, and after the French Revolution, in the nineteenth century, our ancient Continent became veritably the “ mother of the peoples.” The greatest audacity of modern civilisation may, perhaps, have been the revolt of poverty against the prudence of its ancestors; against the spirit of reason commanding population not to increase and multiply regardless of means of obtaining their daily bread. The poorest nations and classes" were those which, until the nineteenth century, increased the most rapidly, even in the most sterile regions, in open defiance of the threat of starvation that at one time had been held like a sword of Damocles over their ancestors’ heads. Towards the end of the eighteenth century and at the dawn of the nineteenth, Europe took alarm. The economists of the day queried one another with the vexed interrogation as to how the general increase in population would be fed, for the world was no more an earthly paradise than it is now. Abundance. But the miracle which the wisdom of ancient times had decreed as impossible actually manifested itself. Famine, which neither precaution nor sterility had had the power to combat, was disarmed by foolhardiness. In the face of emergencies resources multiplied with the augmented populations, and then—the miracle—resources surpassed populations! Hand in hand with necessity, abundance came upon the heels of need. Space was exploited, the possibilities of nature extended. In 100 years humanity, long-suffering and famine-driven, became a giant with capacious limbs that developed the power of conquering continents and oceans alike. And by degrees, the economist, at first so troubled and unsure, took courage. During the nineteenth century, Europe arose and multiplied; she was the mother of might and riches, and condemned in verse and prose alike Christian asceticism and caution; she chose as sign of valour the flourishing multiplication of the human race. Now, of late, the experts have started again to show signs of disquietude, exactly as they did at the end of the eighteenth century and the opening of the nineteenth.

How did Europe of the nineteenth century succeed in accomplishing the miracle of nourishing in abundance a population whose density exceeded by ; a large margin the resources of her territories? Merely by a clever combination of work and capital. Europe has succeeded in living on the whole world, by sending out, in countries that were too young and in countries that were too old, intelligence, vigour, capital; manufactured products, works of art; in short, everything that the countries in question lacked; every requisite they might need in the living and modelling of themselves according to the European standard and in the exploiting of the virgin riches still hidden in their soil. Commerce, emigration, political domination, banking, sciences and arts have only been the varied forms of that conquest of the whole earth on the results of which the greatest nations of Europe thrived until 1914. The whole universe paid yearly an immense monetary tribute to Europe in raw materials in exchange for capital, manufactured products, works of art, and the results of scientific researches with which Europe furnished it. World War’s Effect. But the World War and subsequent revolutions have destroyed in part this universal empire of capital and work on which Europe thrived. All around us, this vast continent that had spread and widened since 1848, is narrowing its boundaries. Europe is being cramped once more, and the cramping influence threatens to stifle her. Russia, the greatest part of China and Turkey, are now closed to labour, to capital, and to the merchandises Europe used to export there. Those gates have been shut by the triple catastrophe of war, revolution and misery. Half of Europe and of Asia, vast regions in America, in Russia, Germany and Austria, Hungary, Turkey, China and Mexico are immense cemeteries of European credlits, where the thrift of countless generations lies buried and lost under the ruins of a disintegrated world. North America, that before the War used to absorb one million Europeans, is almost completely closed to immigration. Hitherto the banker of the whole world, Europe for the last fifteen years has become indebted to the richest of its children, the United States. Factories multiplied during the War, but part of our customers is dispersed now. While the nations of Europe were busy in their work of mutual destruction, other nations learned how to capture industry. They seized and held their prizes—the markets for woven goods; foundry works, smelting, etc. Manufacture of goods that were once the prerogative of most important nations changed hands as these other countries grasped their opportunity. An Aggravated Evil. Capital is lacking every were in Europe. The middle-classes have become poor, and thus lessened the possibilities of saving and thrift. Success is relegated to a few groups of the; biggest capitalists. Taxes, debts and laws operating against acquired riches —all these obstacles against progress that arise in different forms in all the different states only tend to aggravate the evil. We are coming to a turning-point in history. Part of Europe will soon see that the continent is over-populated, and that this excess is one of the fundamental causes of the social and political unease that torments its civilisation. Over-population has its origins far

removed from the present day, since that trend had begun to be apparent more than a century ago. But the ex-

ceptional circumstances in which Europe lived since 1848 up till 1914 did not permit the people to feel the effects of that excess. Rapid multiplication of the species had even been transformed into a decisive advantage. It has been the principal cause of Europe’s conquest of the earth effected during the nineteenth century by armed force work, thought, the coming of the railway and the telegraph, etc. Social and industrial progress gave birth to the supreme illusion of optimism. It is still believed that Europe is capable of supporting the burden of unlimited populations. But the immovable limits of reality and logic are enforcing a progressive slowing-up process, in those overpopuated regions of Europe. That slowing-up process was fated to produce itself, but the World War hastened its progress. That is one of the least apparent, but one of the most important and fundamental changes that are taking place in the life of Europe to-day. (Anglo-American N.S. Copyright.)