CHAIRMAN’S ADDRESS. 683 
of the facts as they stand, on the one hand as regards population, on the 
other as regards production. We shall by no means waste time if we try 
to investigate, with some approach to exactness, what are the areas still 
available for extended cultivation, and who and where are the consumers 
of our products, and what are their present and future demands. 
Obviously, however, in the limits of an Address like this it is impractic- 
able to make, in any detail, a world survey such as this implies, and it is 
only the most patent of the changes in the world’s populations and their 
agricultural demands which I can put before you. There was a time when 
the human family lived in self-contained groups, extracting their require- 
ments from the soil which lay around them. So lately as one hundred years 
ago there was very little of the international trade in food or other agricul- 
tural 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 production 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 nineteenth 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 distribution. 
If the world holds to-day just twice as many souls (as the best demo- 
graphic 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. Some- 
times, I think, we are apt to forget what Professor 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 distribution 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, till all the world bids fair to become a single com- 
munity. 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 conquering or colonising races has 
provoked desires for, and made practicable the supply of, far more varied 
wants than once were even contemplated, or could indeed have been made 
available, while the producing areas were sundered widely from the con- 
suming 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 extraordinary 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, exceeding 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 com- 
munities of which we are thinking when we concentrate our attention on 
the increasing transport of breadstuffs or of meat from the New World to 
