140 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES, 
expanded territories and the world open to her, pursuing a different, 
no doubt a better, currency policy and experiencing unexampled un- 
employment. To argue uncritically from unemployment to over- 
population is to ignore the elements of both problems.? 
Europe before the War. 
Let us turn to the second argument, the argument from authority 
and, above all, from the authority of Mr. J. M. Keynes. No economic 
writing in our generation has obtained so wide a fame as that of Mr. 
Keynes on the ‘ Economic Consequences of Peace.’ None, on its 
merits, has deserved more. With its main argument neither I nor, 
I think, posterity will wish to quarrel. There are, however, in that 
book certain phrases about population, used incidentally, almost casually, 
which have none of the weight of the main argument. To these almost 
more than to anything else is to be attributed the general dread of oyer- 
population to-day; these call for examination. 
In the second chapter of his book, Mr. Keynes paints a picture of 
Europe as an economic Eldorado, now devastated beyond repair by 
war and the peace, but even before the War threatened by internal 
factors of instability—‘ the instability of an excessive population de- 
pendent for its livelihood on a complicated and artificial organisation, 
the psychological instability of the labouring and capitalist classes and 
the instability of Europe’s claim, coupled with the completeness of 
her dependence on the food supplies of the New World.’ In naming 
the first of these factors of instability Mr. Keynes already passes the 
judgment that Europe’s population was ‘ excessive.” Elsewhere in the 
same chapter he is more specific: ‘ Up to about 1900-a unit of labour 
applied to industry yielded year by year a purchasing power over an 
increasing quantity of food. It is possible that about the year 1900 
this process began to be reversed, and a diminishing yield of Nature 
to man’s effort was beginning to reassert itself. But the tendency 
of cereals to rise in real cost was balanced by other improvements.’ 
A few pages further on he passes from possibilities to positive asser- 
tion; in the last years before the War ‘ the tendency towards stringency 
was showing itself . . . in a steady increase of real cost . . . the law 
of diminishing returns was at last reasserting itself, and was making it 
necessary year by year for Europe to offer a greater quantity of other 
commodities to obtain the same amount of bread.’ | In the seventh 
chapter is a wider and yet more explicit assertion of ‘ the increase in 
the real cost of food and the diminishing response of Nature to any 
further increase in the population of the world.’ And so to Malthus. 
‘Before the eighteenth century mankind entertained no false hopes. 
To lay the illusions which grew popular at that age’s latter end, Malthus 
disclosed a Devil. For half a century all serious economical writings 
1 In the United States, which no one suspects of over-population, ‘there 
seems good ground for believing that in actual diminution of employment, the 
depression of 1921 was almost twice as acute as that of 1908’ (Berridge : Cycles 
of Unemployment, p. 52). 1908 was one of the worst depressions hitherto 
experienced in America. 
