THE WORLD’S FOOD SUPPLY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 48, 28 November 1891, Page 628

THE WORLD’S FOOD SUPPLY.

Insl'i I'll ien< Y of food can never be more than a temporary evil in any highly civilized community. The reasons for this—reasons which overthrow opinions once held by thinkers of the Malthus school—are such facts of experience as these : Man’s food animals are more prolific than man, and plants produce more fruit than animals bear young. This is the general law of productiveness, which seems to be well established by the discoveries of modern science.

The doctrine of Malthus, that population increases at a geometrical progression, while man’s subsistence, produced at a slower rate, becomes less competent for the purpose every year a law which threatens at some future time to extinguish human life on the earth—is no longer tenable. It was not necessary for Levasseur to write three volumes on vital statistics to explode a theory that has been refuted by all the classified knowledge of the century and is repugnant to common-sense itself. But to superficial observers the famines in the Bast, and such as occasionally depopulate parts of Europe, indicate the existence of at least a lowratio incompatible with general prosperity in some countries. These sporadic‘starving times,’in the judgment of all recent writers on the history of civilization, as well as of everyday thinkers, are caused by bad government or an imperfect social organization. The ryots of India and the mujiks of Russia perish because the rule over the former is alien and does not comprehend the wants of a population so different from the rulers m race, religion, and customs ; and in tbe latter because the tyranny of the ‘ White Czar ’ is alike ignorant and heartless, caring only for the means wrung from the peasantry with which to maintain a costly aristocracy and bureaucracy, and wars of conquest. If we knew the inner working of the Chinese adminstration as well as we do that of the Hindoo or the Russian, it would not be necessary to invent a Malthusian reason for the swarms of the slowly ’lying Celestials hurried by river floods and resulting famines into their graves, to be worshipped by their attenuated successors as ancestral deities. Levasseur cites the I'nited States, where the race has increased with much greater rapidity than in Europe, all the time enlarging the productive capacity of plants and animals in proportion to the population. The rate of increase is diminishing, however, but not because of any prescience in nature forboding the approach of a struggle for existence. This reduction in the rate of increase of population, notwithstanding the improvement in sanitation, is the strongest kind of an argument against the geometrical hypothesis. But the alleged arithmetical progression in the means of subsistence has no better foundation in fact. About 1820 the French harvested 142.000,000 bushels of wheat when the population was 32,000,000. To day, when it has increased to 38,000,000, twice that quantity is gathered. Im pi evidence, bad political administration, drought or flood may produce a shortening of tbe ' ohmie of Buosistcnce, And tlicrpfoie a, shortening of population, but never, so long as the I nited States are governed as well as they are, and Kansas, Minnesota, Texas and other States produce as well as they do of the bread and flesh consumed for sustaining life, will the writer on vital statistics find it necessaiy to resort to an exploded theory, inconsistent with the other facts of human history and incomprehensible in view of the common belief in the wisdom and goodness of a Divine Order in the world.