684 TRANSACTIONS OF SUB-SECTION K. 
the Old, which has become the prominent feature of the agriculture of our 
own day, whatever 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 significant 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 oversea, and has stimulated the 
development of new spheres of cultivation at a rate which the relatively sparse 
population of the New World, unless largely recruited by immigration, 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 tothe 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 consumer, 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 well-considered and augmented immigration, 
impresses the visitor from an old and overcrowded 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 territory occupied by 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 main- 
tenance of nearly 70 per cent. more consumers 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 defective 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, there- 
fore, 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 1870, the German 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 
