POPULATION AND FOOD-SUPPLY. T HE main part of the address of
Sir William Crookes before the British Association was somewhat less technical and more generally interesting than is common in the Presidential addresses before our annual scientific parliament. We only propose to deal with that portion which refers to the subject of the food-supply of the world, though we could have wished that Sir William Crookes had seen his way to make the subject of telepathy the complete matter of his address. Science cannot much longer afford to boycott that momentous theme, and the presence of Sir William Crookes in the chair was a great opportunity which we should have been glad to see utilised. However, nobody can deny that the question of the world's food is one of the deepest importance, and that, in his way of dealing with it, Sir William Crookes had much to say that was worth listening to. He stated accurately the existing facts as to the food-supply of England, so far as the consumption of wheat is con- cerned. We require annually two hundred and forty million bushels, increasing annually by two million bushels. Of the total amount consumed we grow only 25 per cent., importing 75 per cent, of our wheat. When we look outside our borders, we find, according to Sir William Crookes, that the United States is likely within generation to consume all the enormous volume of wheat produced in the Union. Russia also is not likely to send us more, and, in fact, under present conditions of low acre yield wheat cannot long retain its important position among the food-stuffs of the world. A higher level of production must, then, be attained, or we shall be in danger of starvation. That higher level can be reached only through the aid of nitrates, which we get mostly from Chili. But the supply of nitrates is insuf- ficient to meet the increment of demand, and so, if we are to exptet an increase, we must look to some other source of supply. It is suggested that we shall have to obtain this from the atmosphere, by means of electrical power which will apparently extract the necessary nitrogen from the air. Such is, in brief, the solution which science, through the mouth of Sir William Crookes, offers of the problem how to make our supply of wheat balance the needs of our increasing population.
The problem as dealt with by Sir William Crookes ii interesting in theory, but is it so urgent a problem as he seems to imagine ? We do not for one moment say that it is to be put by or treated as of no importance, for it ii conceivable that the Malthusian hypothesis might be found to correspond with facts, and that our populatios might swell beyond the limits of subsistence. In ono country—India—the problem is a serious one, in view ol the enormous growth of the Indian population. But i! we take the world as a whole, nothing which has happened, or is happening, seems to confirm the hard-and-fast theory of Malthus. We had all of us—economists, scientific men, social reformers—better begin by candidly admitting that we do not know anything about the laws of popula. tion. We observe certain facts, but we cannot tell why they happen. It would seem as if the Malthusias idea were a priori probable, that greater wealth leads to larger population. And. yet how can we reconcile such a hypothesis with the facts in India, where the bulk of the people are very poor ? If we take Franco before the Revolution, we find a population steeped in poverty, and yet growing faster than any other in Western Europe. France had about twenty-six million people at the time of the Revolution, as against about a third. of that number in Great Britain. To-day, a century later, we find the populations of the two countries nearly equal, although the wealth of France has grown pro. digiously in the interval, and that wealth is perhaps better distributed on the whole than in any of the larger countries of the civilised world. In Ireland, on die other hand, during the same period population grew by leaps and bounds in spite of a terrible poverty, which a great famine brought to a crisis. To-day Ireland is far richer than she was half a century ago, and yet she has only half the number of people. How, in the face of such facts, can it be said that wealth and population go hand in hand? Clearly they do nothing of the kind. While the population of France remains stationary, that of Germany has increased during the last quarter of a century in a way that has startled mankind and given the German authorities serious subject-matter for reflection. Yet the annua income per head in Germany is far less than in France.
The same curious increase took place in England after th great change from the small to the large industry. Befo that, our population had increased but imperceptibly fo centuries. If we were to say that Malthus was misle by a temporary series of facts in England similar t those in Germany to-day, it would be probably neare the truth than is the naked Malthusian hypothesis, an yet the fact itself would need explanation, in th absence of which we should be no nearer to th solution than before. And that, to tell the truth, i precisely the condition we are in. We do not kno what governs the movements of population. We suggest then, that it is not well to speculate on sod problems a generation ahead on the basis of popuh tion increase as we see it at this moment. The lag Census confirmed the opinions of those who believe that the large increase would not be maintained and the next few years may strengthen the view of thee who, like Mr. Cannan, think that the population of th British Isles will not move much higher than some forty two or forty-three millions. Emigration, for example, ma still enormously relieve the threatened congestion of th British Isles. Canada alone could hold one hundred million more people than she has at present. The remarkable figarel of the late Mr. Pearson, published so far back as (we think) 1868, were, as he triumphantly asserted, confirmed by th actual actual enumerations of the American population, wino showed that the growth had not nearly corresponded the extravant assumptions of the spread-eagle oratory 0 half a century ago. In short, though war, pestilence, an famine cover a far narrower area than they did in forme times, we need not assume that the growth of populatio will attain such formidable proportions that we shall fin ourselves face to face with the dire problem of bare an sistence.
The alarmists as to the food-supply also assume the movement towards the big towns and. the life, 0 industrialism is inevitable, and, as it is this indispontly to toil in the fields when one can loaf in the town win has partly brought about a relative decline in food pro- duction as compared with what was anticipated, it is natural that we should contemplate our huge areas of bricks and mortar on the one hand, and our idle and fruitless fields on the other, with something like dismay. But is this agglomeration of industries in huge towns inevitable ? Are we doomed to see Leeds, Manchester, and Birmingham joining hands? We doubt it. Some surprises are in store for us in the realm of industry. Electric power will tend to disperse men, and those who come after us may look on the ugly phenomena of this century as a bad dream. The cultivation, too, of fruits and dairy produce by people whom Nature has endowed with brains has been so profitable that we may look for- ward to a great extension of this kind of country industry in the future. In a word, we are not unlikely to produce vastly more of the necessaries of life. This leads us naturally to the question, What are the necessaries of life P While we do not believe in the chemical food tabloid, we cannot help seeing that great changes are going on in diet. Most people to-day live very differently from what they and their fathers did half a century ago. Many more vegetables are cultivated, more fruit is eaten, and the numberless kinds of patent breads adapted for weak stomachs appear to suggest that many persons are finding out that wheaten bread is not perchance the staff of life it has been supposed to be. At any rate, the tendency is universally to a more varied diet, and therefore there will be less dependence on wheat than in former days. We do not, of course, suppose that man will go back to the fare of the hunters' period, but it does seem not im- probable that he will gather up the varied threads of different eras, and adopt a diet which shall remind him of each of those eras. As new lands are opened to culti- vation, new products will find their way into the markets of the world, with the result that wheat may count as a far less important item than it does to-day. Altogether, it seems to us that hypotheses as to the future should not be based on the assumption that a merely temporary state of things is to be permanent. Alike in regard to the movements of population, to the conditions of industry, and to the diet of civilised man, we are in a fluid and transition state, of which nothing very dogmatic or positive can be properly affirmed.
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