WILL BLACK MEN RULE?

Waipa Post, Volume 36, Issue 2149, 26 April 1928, Page 2

WILL BLACK MEN RULE?

Recently the cableman, bent on giving readers in the Antipodes a thrill or two, by accident or design in one day flashed round the world the opinions of two scientists—one of which declared that the world was rapidly racing towards starvation, and the other that the coloured races—black, brown, and yellow—would before long be masters of the world. Sir Leo Chiozza Money, the well-known economist, was not wearing the drab mantle of the pessimist for the first time when he sounded in this message the white man's doom. He argues that the superior races of the world are writing their own epitaph. By practising birth control they are allowing the dark skins to overrun the earth. Sir Leo Chiozza Money's alarm is not new. He defined it and explained it in a book published three years ago, " The Peril of the White," which appeared only too convincing in the light of facts and figures emphasised by him. As his statistics show, in 1921 the population of the world was 1,852,000,000. Less than one-third (603,000,000) were whites. The British stock was 117,000,000. The white races are at present controlling all the most favoured regions of the globe, and the question was, with a birth rate that for practically all of them persists in declining, how were they to continue controlling those regions I The rate of increase of the coloured races is not high at present, owing to their excQSsive death rate, but when that latter state has been altered by new control over plagues and famine which we have been teaching them, their growth will be immensely faster than it is to-day.

Those disturbing portents to which Sir Leo Chiozza Money points in his latest statement, when France has to build up a coloured army in Africa, and America, which will not admit white immigrants, except in very limited numbers, from their own overcrowded countries, sees black industrialists increasing in her towns. All Europe, he suggests, will be forced yet to import coloured labour, and that will be the beginning of the end. Mr Lothrop Stoddard, in his " Rising Tide of Colour," has argued on the same lines. Professor East, of Harvard University, who has also made a speciality of this subject, does not believe that the white races are threatened by any colour submergence. There is no " rising tide of colour," in his view. Citing figures which differ considerably from Mr Stoddard's, he finds that the white race is even today numerically superior to any other. More than two-thirds of the total yearly increase of world population, moreover, is white. Before 1950, thererfore, "unless some radical and relatively permanent overturn of world affairs occurs," the white races will form an actual majority of the world's inhabitants.

Moreover, they can afford to be much inferior lin numbers, as this writer views the position. " One of the lessons of the Great War was that high-grade brains are what count. If Germany had been surrounded solely by Russian hordes the result would never have been in doubt. So a few million less whites and a few million more blacks matter not." To view the outlook from another aspect, " armed —or, to a less extent, we may suppose, unarmed— competition with the white man is unthinkable by a race living in a country where the sun burns the will power out of every man, where time is long and life is cheap, and constructive thoughts are little moths that flutter briskly in the evening and die at sunrise."