412 



NA TURE 



[September 30, igog 



groups, extracting their requirements from tlie soil which 

 lay around them. So lately as one hundred years ago 

 there was very little of the international trjide in food or 

 other agricultural products such as is familiar to our 

 practice to-day. The nations largely lived on their own 

 territories, and the world has wide sections still where pro- 

 duction is limited by local needs. But even a hundred 

 years ago or more perpetual questions were emerging as 

 to the time when men should have multiplied more rapidly 

 than food. The transportation revolutions of the nine- 

 teenth century may be almost said to have laid that scare 

 by their aid to the mobility alike of the world's populations 

 and of the world's produce. For the migration of men 

 from dense settlements to open lands on the one hand, 

 and the transport of their produce to the cities of the old 

 world on the other, have simplified, and may simplify 

 still further, the solution. It is all a question of distribu- 

 tion. 



If the w-orld holds to-day just twice as many souls (as 

 the best demographic authorities seem to assume) as it 

 did only some two generations back, this growth has been 

 by no means uniform, and the development is governed 

 and provoked by the pressure of population on sustenance. 

 Sometimes, I think, we are apt to forget what Prof. 

 Marshall, of Cambridge, has so well laid down, that " man 

 is the centre of the problem of production as well as that 

 of consumption, and also of that further problem of the 

 relation between the two which goes by the name of dis- 

 tribution and exchange." Vastly has the latter problem 

 been simplified by the giant strides the second half of last 

 century has seen in annulling distance and in facilitating 

 transport, until all the world bids fair to become a single 

 community. Whether the present distinguished British 

 Ambassador to the United States was right in looking 

 forward to the gradual unification of the type of the 

 world's inhabitants by the diverse processes of ultimate 

 extinction and absorption of inferior races, I think we will 

 agree with him that the spread into new regions of con- 

 quering or colonising races has provoked desires for, and 

 made practicable the supply of, far more varied w'ants 

 than once were even contemplated, or could indeed have 

 been made available, while the producing areas were 

 sundered widely from the consuming centres. 



The sixteen hundred million souls this earth of ours now 

 carries are at present by no means evenly spread over its 

 surface, and a population chart reveals the most extra- 

 ordinary diversity in the density of the people on the soil. 

 More than one-half are on the continent of Asia, and of 

 these a large section are densely clustered in India, China, 

 and Japan. In Europe, where the average density is double 

 that of Asia, and approximately one-fourth of the world's 

 inhabitants are gathered, many portions are nevertheless 

 still far less thickly peopled than the Eastern States just 

 named. Populations, over any considerable areas, exceed- 

 ing 500 to the square mile, may be found on the world's 

 map not only in parts of the United Kingdom, in Belgium, 

 or in Saxony, but yet again on the Lower Ganges, on the 

 Chinese coast, and even in portions of the narrow valley 

 of the Nile. But the Indian or the Chinaman are not, 

 broadly speaking, to be ranked among the communities of 

 which we are thinking when w^e concentrate our attention 

 on the increasing transport of breadstuffs or of meat from 

 the New World to the Old, which has become the 

 prominent feature of the agriculture of our own day, what- 

 ever attention may have to be given to the conditions of 

 the Far East at some distant date. 



The great movements of agricultural products which 

 have signalised the last half-century are not for the most 

 currents of food supply into .Asia, or into .Africa, or North 

 America, despite certain limited exceptions which are just 

 beginning to attract attention, as possibly hereafter signifi- 

 cant in the case of imports of wheat into Japan or China, 

 of Australian meat into Eastern Asia and South Africa. 

 The Asiatic or the .African agriculturist is for the most 

 part content to find the primary necessities of life close at 

 hand. It is mainly Europe, and indeed Western Europe, 

 that calls to-day for the import of breadstuffs or meat or 

 dairy produce. There the growing volume of sea-borne 

 imports has not only materially influenced the agriculture 

 of old settled countries, but at the same time has signalled 

 to the European toiler that space and plenty awaits him 

 NO. 2083, VOL. 81] 



oversea, and has stimulated the development of new spheres 

 of cultivation at a rate which the relatively sparse popula- 

 tion of the New World, unless largely recruited by immigra- 

 tion, could never accomplish. 



I ventured some years ago, from the chair of the Royal 

 Statistical Society, to review the recent changes we have 

 seen in the structure of the world's populations, and urged 

 the greater wisdom of bringing the men to the food rather 

 than the food to the men. The centripetal force which 

 was, in all parts of the earth and not in the oldest countries 

 only, packing more and more together the human family 

 in vast industrial centres, which drew the materials of their 

 handicraft and the food for their maintenance from far 

 distant lands, seemed to my judgment a much less healthy 

 form of development than the older centrifugal impulse 

 which led man to move himself to the newer regions, 

 where the produce was nearer to the mouth of the con- 

 sumer, and where he could fulfil the oldest obligation of 

 the race to go forth and replenish the earth and subdue 

 it. The vision that meets us here of ample land awaiting 

 man, of possibilities of agricultural production which can 

 only be realised by w-ell-considered and augmented 

 immigration, impresses the visitor from an old and over- 

 crowded country. Before and above all speculations of 

 what transport has done, and may yet do, to carry masses 

 of agricultural produce across the ocean, I must claim, as 

 the better prospect, a steady settlement of these wide 

 acres by a population resting on the soil which this great 

 Dominion offers, and drawing from it, by a more diversified 

 and more general and more wholesome type of farming, 

 a far better, and in the long run a more economic, return 

 than the mere extraction of grain for export can ever 

 promise. 



Taking the thirteen States of Western and Central 

 Europe as an example of what I mean, there were added 

 there, in the last seventy years of the nineteenth century, 

 on a comparatively limited surface, something like 

 100,000,000 new consumers to the 167,000,000 persons 

 previously resident on the 1,700,000 square miles of terri- 

 torv occupied b\' this group of nations. These numbers, 

 too, take no count of the emigration which has lightened 

 the pressure on the soils of the home lands of Europe. 

 Clearly the maintenance of nearly 70 per cent, more con- 

 sumers must have meant either a vast development of 

 local agricultural production or a vast demand upon the 

 acreage of the new land of the West, or both. The de- 

 fective nature of the early statistics obstructs the search 

 one naturally makes into the extent on which these new 

 populations on the old lands have been fed on larger local , 

 areas, or from larger yields on non-expansive areas. 

 .Adopting, therefore, a much shorter range of view, the 

 lifetime of a single generation has given us 30 per cent, 

 more consumers in Western and Central Europe than were 

 there in 1S70, the Cierman element rising apparently by 

 50 per cent., the Scandinavian, Belgian, and Dutch group 

 of small nationalities by 44 per cent., and the United 

 Kingdom by 40 per cent, in this interval, while these 

 developments were of course reduced in their effect on the 

 total by the slower growth of the South-Western nations 

 and the nearly stationary condition of France. 



No larger areas, hut rather smaller ones, of the chief 

 food grains are apparent in Great Britain or Scandinavia 

 or North-Western Europe. The German areas of wheat 

 and rye show practically little change, and although, if 

 the Hungarian areas are larger in the centre of Europe, 

 the general movement is not upward in respect of food- 

 producing area. Even in live stock the numbers scarcely 

 keep pace with population, for although the herds and the 

 swine of Western and Central Europe have risen by nearly 

 a fourth in the one case and three-fifths in the other, the 

 sheep, except in Great Britain, are much fewer now. 



On the average of the first quinquennium of the present 

 century the home production of wheat represented only 

 about 20 per cent, of the consumption in the United 

 Kingdom or in Holland, 23 per cent, (apparently) in 

 Belgium, 64 per cent, in Germany, and perhaps 80 per 

 cent, in Italy; and the imported grain to fill the deficits 

 was considerably more than 400,000,000 bushels. Nearly 

 half this came, of course, from Eastern Europe, and 

 particularly Russia. Such a mass of produce would require 

 20,000,000 acres elsewhere, even if the exporters could 



