BURYING THE COFFIN Sut,—Your contributor, Geoffrey Parker, despite his final
paragraph about 'civilising' the southward swing of our industrial pattern, seems to be some- thing of a modern Malthusian. He counsels us to accept with oriental fatalism the working of real or imaginary economic laws. Property speculators apart, it is highly probable that many dwellers in this new southern megalopolis have already begun to notice another economic law--that of diminishing returns. The more the ants proliferate, the more they impede each other's etTorts.
Significantly neither illustration included. Scotland. If Scotland is condemned to economic stagnation with its main,. role that of manpower reservoir, it is not difficult to visualise five million odd 'individual [Scottish] necessities and judgments, the aggregate of which will amount to a decision' to evolve, an axis of their own, north of an actual fron- tier. The. recent arrest of Welsh saboteurs of the Liverpool Water Supply Scheme is an indication that neither would Wales take too kindly to being written off as an economic wilderness.
Ultimately people are more important than machines. Trends can he set as well as followed and,
in Israel, even the desert has been made to flower. Mr. Parker's gospel of the 'economic' man would lead not only to burying the coffin, but to a balkan- isation of our country.
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