466 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



be so eager to obtain new business by extending the area of 

 their operations. 



Even the humble but not altogether insignificant domestic- 

 servant problem may be reviewed in the light of the tendencies 

 we have been considering. For twenty years, in the case of 

 New Zealand, the population of the ages which in the main 

 supply domestic servants must remain about constant, whereas 

 the population of the ages which supply the demand for ser- 

 vice must substantially increase. Moreover, in addition to 

 the attractions of other employments and the increasing dis- 

 inclination to entering into domestic service, there is another 

 factor tending to diminish the supply of this class of workers. 

 Domestic servants have been largely supplied hitherto from 

 large families. The poor man, with seven or eight or even 

 more children, must perforce send out the elder children to 

 any employment that offers ; with a small family of two or 

 three he can afford to keep it round him, or at least to give 

 them some preparation for a more ambitious occupation, and 

 one, if possible, that will permit the family to remain to- 

 gether. Thus as the demand increases the supply is likely to 

 diminish, and the difficulty may become so acute as to do 

 much to modify the manner of life of the servant-employing 

 class. 



C. Pearson, in his " National Life and Character," dis- 

 cussed the probability of the population of the world soon 

 approaching a stationary state, with a large proportion of old 

 men. With an extract from this suggestive work I shall con- 

 clude. " What we have to suppose," he writes, " is that men 

 with the admirable vitality of Newman, Gladstone, Eadetzky, 

 Moltke, Bismarck, Littre, Chevreul, and Lesseps will become 

 increasingly common, and that, as, in cases where exact 

 reason is more required than quick insight and promptitude of 

 action or alacrity of eye and ear, the best work is very often 

 done by the old, we may get an increasing average of the best 

 work. We may even conjecture that the predominance of 

 experienced and reflective men in a population — for those be- 

 tween forty-five and ninety might easily come to be more 

 numerous than those between twenty and forty-five — would 

 be an important conservative force balancing the democratic 

 tendency to impulsive change. Increased stability of political 

 order, increased efficiency of exact thought, are possible ad- 

 vantages that cannot be disregarded. . . . But the most 

 visible effect to the world will probably be the decay of energy. 

 If youth is the season of unrest, when change is welcomed for 

 its own sake and when orderly growth is despised, it is also 

 the brooding-time of speculation, the maturing-time of adven- 

 ture. Old men are probably best fitted for carrying on the 

 mechanical and routine work of the world, but the artists, the 



