126 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
until the year 3500 or 3600—‘in case the world should last so iong.’ 
In the year 1900, according to his expectations, the population would have 
amounted to only 7,350,000. These egregious miscalculations are a 
warning of the uncertainty of statistical forecasts as to population and 
an illustration of its surprisingly rapid increase in the modern world owing 
to the application of science to commerce, industry, and public health. 
This accelerated increase is mainly due to the European race, but it has 
been most rapid in Africa and Asia in consequence of the reduction by 
European administration of internal war, plague, pestilence, and famine. 
From 1906 to 1910, to quote the latter half of the last normal decade, the 
population of the world grew at the rate of doubling in sixty years. Itfthis 
rate were to be maintained the 6,600 millions 6f people, which it has been 
calculated is the most that the world can feed, would be in existence in 
120 years ; and even if the food supply were indefinitely multiplied by the © 
precipitation of the nitrogen of the atmosphere as a constant rain of manna, 
standing room on the earth, exclusive of the remoter Arctic and Antarctic 
lands, would be all filled when the population numbered 700 billion (é.e. 
million million) in the year 3000. 
The rapid increase in the population of the world during the last half- 
century has had disturbing political influences. Thus many parts of 
India have apparently almost the maximum population possible under exist- 
ing economic conditions, and the slow present increase is gained painfully 
to the accompaniment of irrepressible discontent. Countries which once 
had extensive empty lands have begun to close their ports to aliens, in 
obedience to the principle that each land must consume its own surplus 
population. The United States, the ‘ melting-pot ’ where the mixed races 
of the Old World were being fused into a new type, has adopted measures 
based on the growing belief, in the words of Lothrop Stoddard, that ‘ the 
book of race migrations must be closed for ever.’ The halt at Ellis Island 
has already warned eastern and southern Europe that America is no longer 
an open asylum for refugees. The three great natural outlets from Asia 
have been closed by the prohibition of immigration thence into western 
America, by the ‘ White Australia’ policy, and by the refusal of eastern 
and southern Africa to accept further Asiatic contributions to their 
needed enlarged supply of labour. The struggle for expansion, which 
was the ultimate motive of the World War of 1914-18, will inevitably be 
still more bitter and terrible if it become a struggle for existence between 
the White and Coloured races. 
The effort to foresee the future progress of the world raises two con- 
trasting visions. The increase in the wealth and prosperity of all the 
continents by the influence of the Huropean race may be continued, either 
by colonization, as in America and Australia, or by administration, as in 
Asia and Africa. Asia, by improved industrial methods, and Africa, 
relieved from the slave trade, may continue to advance in co-operation 
with the European race instead of under its government; and Huropean 
control may be voluntarily withdrawn as sympathetic alliance replaces 
the older systems of servitude. If those developments take place the 
twentieth century will be indeed a golden age. 
The alternative picture is darker. Europe, during the past fifty years, 
like Portugal in the sixteenth century, may have taken on tasks beyond 
its power. The drain on the manhood of Portugal by its vast colonial 
