A Collection of Stories | Page 3

potent factors in reducing
population--in making room. As Mr. Charles Woodruff, in his

"Expansion of Races," has instanced: In 1886, when the dikes of the
Yellow River burst, 7,000,000 people were drowned. The failure of
crops in Ireland, in 1848, caused 1,000,000 deaths. The famines in
India of 1896-7 and 1899-1900 lessened the population by 21,000,000.
The T'ai'ping rebellion and the Mohammedan rebellion, combined with
the famine of 1877-78, destroyed scores of millions of Chinese. Europe
has been swept repeatedly by great plagues. In India, for the period of
1903 to 1907, the plague deaths averaged between one and two
millions a year. Mr. Woodruff is responsible for the assertion that
10,000,000 persons now living in the United States are doomed to die
of tuberculosis. And in this same country ten thousand persons a year
are directly murdered. In China, between three and six millions of
infants are annually destroyed, while the total infanticide record of the
whole world is appalling. In Africa, now, human beings are dying by
millions of the sleeping sickness.
More destructive of life than war, is industry. In all civilised countries
great masses of people are crowded into slums and labour-ghettos,
where disease festers, vice corrodes, and famine is chronic, and where
they die more swiftly and in greater numbers than do the soldiers in our
modern wars. The very infant mortality of a slum parish in the East End
of London is three times that of a middle-class parish in the West End.
In the United States, in the last fourteen years, a total of coal-miners,
greater than our entire standing army, has been killed and injured. The
United States Bureau of Labour states that during the year 1908, there
were between 30,000 and 35,000 deaths of workers by accidents, while
200,000 more were injured. In fact, the safest place for a working-man
is in the army. And even if that army be at the front, fighting in Cuba or
South Africa, the soldier in the ranks has a better chance for life than
the working-man at home.
And yet, despite this terrible roll of death, despite the enormous killing
of the past and the enormous killing of the present, there are to- day
alive on the planet a billion and three quarters of human beings. Our
immediate conclusion is that man is exceedingly fecund and very tough.
Never before have there been so many people in the world. In the past
centuries the world's population has been smaller; in the future

centuries it is destined to be larger. And this brings us to that old
bugbear that has been so frequently laughed away and that still persists
in raising its grisly head--namely, the doctrine of Malthus. While man's
increasing efficiency of food-production, combined with colonisation
of whole virgin continents, has for generations given the apparent lie to
Malthus' mathematical statement of the Law of Population,
nevertheless the essential significance of his doctrine remains and
cannot be challenged. Population does press against subsistence. And
no matter how rapidly subsistence increases, population is certain to
catch up with it.
When man was in the hunting stage of development, wide areas were
necessary for the maintenance of scant populations. With the shepherd
stages, the means of subsistence being increased, a larger population
was supported on the same territory. The agricultural stage gave
support to a still larger population; and, to-day, with the increased
food-getting efficiency of a machine civilisation, an even larger
population is made possible. Nor is this theoretical. The population is
here, a billion and three quarters of men, women, and children, and this
vast population is increasing on itself by leaps and bounds.
A heavy European drift to the New World has gone on and is going on;
yet Europe, whose population a century ago was 170,000,000, has
to-day 500,000,000. At this rate of increase, provided that subsistence
is not overtaken, a century from now the population of Europe will be
1,500,000,000. And be it noted of the present rate of increase in the
United States that only one-third is due to immigration, while
two-thirds is due to excess of births over deaths. And at this present
rate of increase, the population of the United States will be 500,000,000
in less than a century from now.
Man, the hungry one, the killer, has always suffered for lack of room.
The world has been chronically overcrowded. Belgium with her 572
persons to the square mile is no more crowded than was Denmark when
it supported only 500 palaeolithic people. According to Mr. Woodruff,
cultivated land will produce 1600 times as much food as hunting land.
From the time of the Norman Conquest, for centuries Europe could

support no more than 25 to the square mile. To-day Europe supports 81
to the square mile. The explanation of this