100 MAN THE ANIMAL 



place in regard to agriculture during the last fifty years, not 

 alone in the United States or Canada or Argentina but in some 

 degree more or less all over the world, is that the progressive 

 development of new knowledge, improved techniques and fuller 

 application of power and machinery have made it possible for 

 fewer human beings to produce more of everything than was 

 formerly the case. 



From the point of view of population density an odd sort of 

 paradox results. Social and economic forces and modes of 

 thought that are fundamentally identical — namely, applications 

 of new discoveries, improved machinery, better transport, and 

 communication, to the business of getting a better living — work 

 in opposite directions when applied to agriculture and to the 

 manufacturing type of industry so far as concerns the trend 

 toward human crowding. On the one hand, the movement is 

 toward a still lower density of population in agricultural regions, 

 already the most sparsely peopled portions of the earth's surface 

 capable of supporting any substantial population at all. On the 

 other hand, there is the trend toward an ever higher density — 

 still greater crowding — in urban industrial centers, already most 

 densely populated. What makes the paradox is that identically 

 the same set of forces, at bottom, is producing these diverse 

 results. 



The same principle applies to a considerable extent as between 

 mother countries and their colonies or other dependencies. 

 Densely populated countries with small areas, like those of 

 Europe, and Japan, are highly industrialized and commer- 

 cialized. They cry for more land so that their people may 

 spread out. But their nationals, by and large, refuse to leave the 

 homeland in any considerable numbers to settle in the fair 

 but sparsely populated regions available to them. Italy, for 

 example, had succeeded up to the time of the World War in 

 placing only about 8,000 of her people in all her African 

 colonies together. Again, the colonial empire that was Ger- 

 many's on July 1, 1914, had, all told, but a meager 24,000 or so 

 German inhabitants. 



