PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, 541 
marked as time goes on, and other forces working towards uniform distribu- 
tion make themselves more felt. 
The points to be emphasised so far, then, are, first, that the time when the 
available areas whence food supply as represented by wheat is derived are 
likely to be taxed to their full capacity within a period of about the same 
length as that during which the modern colonial system has been developing 
in the past; secondly, that cheap supplies of energy may continue for a longer 
time, although eventually they must greatly diminish; and, thirdly, there must 
begin in the near future a great equalisation in the distribution of population. 
This equalisation must arise from a number of causes. More intensive cultiva- 
tion will increase the amount of labour required in agriculture, and there will 
be less difference in the cost of production and yield due to differences of soil 
and climate. Manufacturing industries will be more uniformly distributed, 
because energy, obtained from a larger number of sources in the less accessible 
places, will be distributed over an increased number of centres. The dis- 
tinction between agricultural and industrial regions will tend to become less 
and less clearly marked, and will eventually almost disappear in many parts 
of the world. 
The effect of this upon the third element is of first-rate importance. It is 
clear that as the process of equalisation goes on the relative amount of long- 
distance transport will diminish, for each district will tend more and more to 
produce its own supply of staple food and carry on its own principal manufac. 
tures. This result will naturally be most marked in what we may call the 
‘east-and-west ’ transport, for as climatic controls primarily follow the parallels 
of latitude, the great quantitative trade, the flow of foodstuffs and manu- 
factured articles to and fro between peoples of like habits and modes of life, 
runs primarily east and west. Thus the transcontinental functions of the 
great North American and Eurasian railways, the east-and-west systems of the 
inland waterways of the two continents, and the connecting-links furnished 
by the great ocean ferries, must become of relatively less importance. 
The various stages may be represented, perhaps, in some such manner as 
this. If I is the cost of producing a thing locally at a place A by intensive 
cultivation or what corresponds to it, if E is the cost of producing the same 
thing at a distant place B, and T the cost of transporting it to A, then at 
A we may at some point of time have a more or less close approximation to 
I=E-+T. 
We have seen that in this country, for example, I has been greater than 
E + T for wheat ever since, say, the introduction of railways in North America, 
that the excess tends steadily to diminish, and that, however much it may be 
possible to reduce T either by devising cheaper modes of transport or by 
shortening the distance through which wheat is transported, E+T must 
become greater than I, and it will pay us to grow all or most of our own 
wheat. Conversely, in the seventies of last century I was greater than 
E+T in North America and Germany for such things as steel rails and rolling- 
stock, which we in this country were cultivating ‘extensively’ at the time 
on more accessible coalfields, with more skilled labour and better organisation 
than could be found elsewhere. In many cases the positions are now, as we 
know, reversed, but geographically I must win all round in the long run. 
In the case of transport between points in different latitudes the conditions 
are, of course, altogether dissimilar, for in this case commodities consist of 
foodstuffs, or raw materials, or manufactured articles, which may be termed 
luxuries, in the sense that their use is scarcely known until cheap transport 
makes them easily accessible, when they rapidly become ‘necessaries of life.’ 
Of these the most familiar examples are tea, coffee, cocoa and bananas, india- 
rubber, and manufactured cotton goods. There is here, of course, always the 
possibility that wheat as a staple might be replaced by a foodstuff produced 
in the tropics, and it would be extremely interesting to study the geographical 
consequences of such an event as one-half of the surface of the earth suddenly 
coming to help in feeding the two quarters on either side; but for many 
reasons, which I need not go into here, such a consummation is exceedingly 
unlikely. What seems more probable is that the trade between different 
