THE PEOPLING OF THE WORLD.
SIR CORNEWALL LEWIS may have been narrow-minded in advising statesmen to " take short views," but we confess to a rooted distrust of all prophetic politics. Very few calculations of things to happen fifty years after ever prove accurate, some unexpected and dominant factor always intervening to confound the wisdom of the wise. We are not, therefore, much frightened when a statist, even though, like Mr. R. Giffen, he unites exceptional knowledge of his science to great power of generalisation—indeed, strange as the re- mark may appear, there is something of a poetic strain in some of Mr. Giffen's speculations—tells us that in the near future America may be fully peopled ; and that Europe, its emigration stopped, may be filled with masses of work- men driven to dangerous discontent by insufficient food. Over-population is a possible evil, for it has occurred in China, though, be it noted, without the result of pro- ducing social discontent—the Chinese, though they have been crowded till they have developed abnormal industry and thrift, still belieVing their social system nearly divine—but there is no certainty that the evil will arrive. We know, to begin with, wonderfully little of the true law of the expansion of population. The old theory that it depended on the means of subsistence, that population expanded with prosperity, is totally opposed to the facts. Not to mention the phenomenal growth of the population of India, without a proportionate increase in their means of subsistence—a growth which, we entirely agree with Mr. Giffen, threatens to undo all the material advantages of our rule—the Irish population multi- plied in misery till subsistence failed ; while the Jews, splendidly healthy and fairly-fed people, have either not in- creased at all, or with exceeding slowness. Had they multi- plied after the final Dispersion like Teutons, the world would now belong to the Jewish people. The two branches of the Teutons, again, increase with such startling rapidity that they promise to overwhelm all other White races ; but that rapid in- crease is novel, and did not occur, for example, during the long period of comparative peace enjoyed in England under the House of Tudor. In 1982, there may, as Mr. Giffen inti- mates, be eight hundred millions of people in North America ; but also there may not be two hundred millions. The emi- gration from Europe may stop altogether, or be diverted ; the age of marriage may be thrown back by social causes, as has undoubtedly happened among certain classes of our own society ; or the rate of increase may change, as has repeatedly
occurred in different parts of the world, without the visible intervention of new causes of mortality. There is reason to believe, as Mr. Giffen will know much better than ourselves, that in Scandinavia, from 1700 to 1800, without any perceptible emigration, the increase of population stopped altogether. There may be, probably is, a truth somewhere in Mr. Herbert Spencer's opinion that culture diminishes population —the educated, as we see in New England, increasing very ;lowly. Certainly, the decline of a population without war, without emigration, and without any failure of food, is possible, while stationariness has repeatedly been observed.
For the present, that is, for the thirty years beyond which we hold it vain to calculate with any hope of certainty, the grand rush and sweep of the European peoples to the West, which the future historian will record as one of the dis- tinctive marks of the Victorian era, need not cease for any want of room. A historian of some mark, writing in our own columns many years ago, predicted, as the result of personal observation, that the United States would reject immigrants within twenty years after he wrote his letter. Three-fourths of the time has elapsed, and that astounding march of the European peoples, before which all other movements shrink into insignificance, has only increased. in breadth and volume, till as we write, from all the Teutonic and Scandinavian countries and from Ireland four regiments a day precipitate themselves upon the New World, and still the Old World is full. Here and there, in Sweden and in Ireland principally, the drain begins to tell perceptibly on numbers, until North Sweden is threatened with something like depopulation, and the place of Ireland in the British Empire sinks, as Mr. Giffen has noticed, year by year. The island which in 1840 contained a third of the population of the United Kingdom, now holds only a seventh, and by the time of the next census will probably con- tain only a tenth, a fact which profoundly modifies the import- ance of Irish movements, and explains, if it does not justify, the Nationalist horror of any measure calculated to in- crease the rate of outflow. Britain, however, increases, and so does Germany, while the absorbing power of the United States shows no perceptible diminution. The thousands who land every week pass on Westward in endless succession, settle on the land, and still there is room for all. The average population is only 35 to the square mile. The State of New York itself is still very unsettled, still full of ancient forests, the State which, if peopled like Suffolk, could maintain thirty millions at least, containing as yet only five. There is, except in the Eastern States, where the fertility of the land, originally poor, has been partially worn out, no sign of exhaustion, nor can we trace even the first beginning of that cry in the West against further immi- gration which will be the first, probably even the first premature, sign that the land is full. We think we mark, though this may be an error, a slight decrease in wages; but there is no tendency anywhere to avoid payment in food as supplement of wages, such as would happen the moment food became an article of economic importance. As for the huge Canadian Dominion, which might hold fifty millions in comfort, without neigh- bours ever visiting each other on foot, its great lamentation is that people do not come fast enough, while its Government is straining every nerve to increase the culturable area under its control. Gradually, yet rapidly, the Engineers are driving a Railway westward from the lakes, crossing the wastes, and piercing the huge mountain barriers which separate settled Canada from the Pacific, till within five years the journey to British Columbia will be as easy as the journey to Minnesota. Read the speech by Lord Lorne reported in the Times of Wed- nesday. Lord Lorne, though he has succeeded fairly well as Governor-General of the Dominion, is not a very strong man ; but he has been staying in British Columbia, he has the land- lord's eye for property, timber, and communications, and the spectacle of the visible resources of the colony rouses him almost into eloquence. He finds a country rough, indeed, and full of mountains, but full also of fertile straths, where " all the small fruits reach perfection," and the tomato, which in England loves the hottest corners, grows in the open air; full of coal, full also of vast and dense forests, where men cut logs ninety feet in length and forty inches square. In this vast province of 350,000 square miles, nearly double the size of France, there are but 20,000 white men, though over much of its extent, over, indeed, all the wide region west of the mountains, a territory, including Vancouver's Island, of at least 50,000 square miles, the climate is as pleasant as that of Cornwall would be, if it had half its rainfall. "No words can be too strong to express the charm of this delightful
land, where a climate softer and more constant than the South of England insures, at all times of the year, a full enjoyment of the wonderful loveliness of Nature around you." There is room in British Columbia alone—under, let us trust in Pro- vidence, some less cumbrously grandiloquent name—for twenty millions of happy people ; and Lord Lorne believes that the railway once finished, she may receive nine hundred immi- grants a day, a fourth of the over-spill of Teutonic and Scan- dinavian Europe.
There is no sign, for this generation, at all events, of want of room ; and when the American Republic and the Dominion are both getting so thick that it is possible, as in England, to be unable to ride or drive, yet never lack society, there will still bo temperate Australia, which, though practically only a broad belt surrounding what should be a sea, and is a desert, is a belt which will support forty millions ; and the immense expanses which throughout South America are not only not occupied, but are not in reality explored. There is room in Brazil for all Europe ; while in a State so little regarded as Peru, a kingdom full of men could be established on lands which no white man intelligent enough to report on them has ever traversed, and about which Spanish geographers are as ignorant as our own map-makers about that second Nyanza Lake now vaguely known to exist west- ward of the other. No cause other than misgovernment pre- vents the settlement of South America, and if the increase of which Mr. Giffen speaks goes on in the North, and the White race multiplies even to two hundred millions, no human power can prevent its forcing itself into the regions now held in nominal occupation mainly by half-caste Spaniards, who have not yet developed even a stable form of government. The room, for the present, is amply sufficient, and though we- look forward with no pleasure to the sameness which that result will produce, we are not able to doubt that the new nations now forming will be mainly Teutonic, will be in some form or another Christian, and will speak English. Why our race should conquer, we hardly know, for, whatever its qualities, sympathy with the alien is not among them ; but it does conquer. Only the Jew resists the absorbing force of the Englishman. The Irishman tells us, in speeches growing always shriller, that we are the most hateful of people ; but, though wandering all over the world, he will settle nowhere save where the popula- tion is essentially British ; while the German who scolds us daily, the instant he finds a British community to settle in, forsakes his language, sloughs off caste, and becomes the most contented, industrious, and loyal of citizens. The objection to him is only that he works so well that he leaves no place for the Briton, whose civilisation, and language, and method of life—teetotal- ism excepted—he so eagerly adopts. The English and German-speaking races, at least, have a sufficient heritage before them, and those among them who remain behind will not consent to starve. If the land will not feed them, they also will depart ; and, indeed, it is to an increased rate of emigration that we look for the natural check upon perpetual outflow. Twenty millions of people—and we shall be reduced to that—will not throw off the swarms who now hive out from among thirty-five millions.
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