POPULATION

Waipa Post, Volume 51, Issue 3658, 19 August 1935, Page 2

POPULATION

WORLD FIGURES. Whatever happens in the near future, whatever plan may be adopted, whatever mistakes are made, or calamities befall us before our problems are solved, there can surely be little doubt that they will be solved at last. It is inconceivable that the world will be content for long “lik# a blind horse, to starve knee deep in corn,” to tolerate want with abundance all around, the destruction of food while men, women and children are perishing for the lack of it. Truth has its rights, simply because it is truth, and the present system depends for its continuance on pretending that things are otherwise than they are. Now, it is our happy fortune to live in an age in which productive capabity is increasing with unexampled rapidity.

The population of the world in 1845, according to Miehelot’s estimate which is accepted by such authorities as Professor Carr Saunders and Sir George Knibbs, was about 1009 millions. To-day it is about 1900 millions. In the 19th century, Great Britain’s population increased as rapidly as it is possible for any country’s population to increase. It doubled itself in each of the half centuries From 10 million in 1811 to 20 million in 1861, and from 20 million in 1861 to 40 million in 1931. The country’s productivity multiplied by a great deal more than four, while the population multiplied by four. Now, the population must be affected by the productivity of the world. It remains an academic truth that if there was not enough food, the death rate would rise, but fortunately there is enough food. Sir William Beveridge gave the following percentages of productive world areas to the British Association in 1923. “In most European countries from 70 per cent to 90 per cent or more land is productive. In nine provinces of Canada the per centage is 8, in Siberia 18, in Australia 6, in Siouth Africa 3. In the U.S.A. it is only 46, and in European Russia 55. Any suggestion that the European races have reached the limit to their growth hardly merits considera tion.” So, too, with the advocates of birth control as a remedy for unemployment. Their assumptions are obviously so entirely apart from the truth that the pursuit of their arguments are not worth while. Now the birth rate in European countries has been falling for the last 50 years. In Great Britain it has fallen from 34.3 per 1000 in 1880 to 16.3 in 1930. The death rate has also fallen from 20.5 per 1000 in 1880 to 11.4 in 1930. The reason for the decline in the death rate is too obvious for comment. Medical and sanitary progress accounts for that. What about the birth rate? The argument of Nature being her own birth controller bears no real evidence in fact, and there is no reason why we should beleive it, Mr Her bert Spencer notwithstanding. The common economic explanation is also insufficient to account for this plienomina. The growing knowledge of contra-ceptives may have something to do with it. It is a strange historical fact that although infantile mortality has improved, material mortality is stable. In 1906-1910, 5 per 1000 women died in child birth in Great Britain; in 1927 it was 4.7 per 1000. In the United States it was 6.8 per 1000 in 1921, and 6.6 per 1000 in 1926. In June, 1933, the Minister of Health in the House of Commons confessed that the rate was still on the increase. The explanation is due to three causes. First, a high standard of living increases the danger of child birth; secondly, an evidently desired child is the best safeguard against maternal fatality; thirdly, late marriages mean extremely difficult births. Of these three causes, the first and second, if they can be removed at all, yet certainly cannot be removed instantaneously and by any simple remedy. The third cause can be easily remedied in an age of plenty. People do not, for the most part, postpone their marriages to the unnatural age of thirty by choice, or because they prefer a late marriage. They do it under protest, with results disastrous to their health, their happiness and their morals, because, under the present system, only the exceptionally lucky can afford to marry at an early age. This habit of late marriages is the first result of a bad economic system, which presumes and encourages some of the most serious of our social evils. This system produces boredom, and boredom is a much more potent cause of race extinction than starvation. Study the history of Greece and Rome. Our own Birtish peerage consists of parvenues. Only six of our noble families can trace their history in the male line without a break to the fifteenth century. The peerage of Sweden tells the same tale, as also does, it is said, the pedigree of the original settlers of the United States. We need therefore to keep an eye upon the conditions of our people in order that our race may continue strong and virile.