IS BRITAIN OVER-POPULATED ?
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] S" ilt,—The opinion that Great Britain is not over-populated, expressed in your issue of March 3rd by Sir Herbert Samuel, though held by many persons of repute, amazes those who have had experience of differing conditions. For the one thing that appears most certain to the average American or other dweller in spacious lands is that the old world is overstocked.
He can strengthen this conviction by noting the amount of real wages received in his own country, in general at least 50 per cent. greater than those customary in Europe. He would argue that the worker gets more because his work is worth more, and that his work is worth more because there are more opportunities for remunerative undertakings in a 'wide area than in a narrow one. Again, he knows that there is less unemployment than in lands where there are a dozen or a hundred men after every vacancy, and what unemploy- ment there is in his own land is ordinarily confined to the centres where population is thickest. The idea that England is not overcrowded is equivalent for him to the absurd con- ception that his own country would be as prosperous as it is now if the great bulk of the population were packed within a small corner, in a density similar to that of Great Britain.
The most serious peril lies in ignoring the international aspect of the question. It is a vital interest of other densely peopled countries that primary supplies should be abundant and cheap. Failure to utilize to the full the enormous pro- ductive areas from which they themselves are largely excluded, absorption by Great Britain of a large proportion of what production there is, these things make life more difficult for these nations. The result is a smouldering jealousy which awaits its opportunity.
The conditions of poverty and misery to which so many people in England are condemned affords a sufficient com- mentary and proof of the unsoundness of the principles which have guided our economic and colonial policy for so long, a condition of thin& for which no fundamental necessity exists in an unexhausted world yielding abundant returns to rightly applied labour, informed by science and invention. But it 'seems as though the British race were destined to fail to grasp its rapidly passing opportunity of leading the way for the nations to the peaceful industrial conquest of the earth.—
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