148 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
metals at the later than at the earlier dates, but one-third less. The 
Sauerbeck index leads to substantially the same results; it shows 
from 1871-80 onwards a steady fall in the price of vegetable food 
and an even greater rise in the price of minerals relatively to all 
articles (columns 4 and 5); the cost in terms of minerals of a given 
quantity of vegetable food would have been one quarter to a third less on 
the eve of the War than it had been a generation before. Both indices 
point emphatically to a falling, not a rising, real cost of corn. 
Index numbers of wholesale prices are open to criticism, in this 
connection as in many others, because they refer mainly to raw products 
and give little or no representation to manufactured articles. It would 
be consistent with the figures quoted above to argue that though the price 
of coal and of other minerals, which are the basis of manufacturing, 
had risen relatively to corn, the price of manufactured articles them- 
selves as a whole had fallen relatively to corn. Such a result, para- 
doxieal as it is, could occur in two ways: either if increases in manu- 
facturing efficiency reduced the cost of manufacture or distribution, 
or if a superfluity of labour fit only for industry, as distinct from 
agriculture, reduced the reward to such labour, by an amount sufficient in 
each case to outweigh the increased cost of coal and other minerals. 
The first is a real possibility ; it is just in the spheres of manufacturing 
and distribution that increased efficiency most naturally accompanies 
a growth in population and that invention and organisation win their 
last victories over diminishing returns. But a cheapening of manu- 
facture in this way involves not a decreasing but an increasing return 
to each unit of labour in industry; it would cause a fall of the real 
cost of corn measured in labour. The second way assumes a fall in 
real wages of industrial workers both absolutely and relatively to those - 
of agriculturists such as quite certainly has not taken place in Europe. 
In regard to Europe as a whole we find no ground for Malthusian 
pessimism, no shadow of over-population before the War. Still less 
do we find them if we widen our view to embrace the world of white 
men. Mr. Keynes’ fears seem not merely unnecessary but baseless; 
his specific statements are inconsistent with facts. urope on the eve 
of war was not threatened with a falling standard of life because Nature's 
response to further increase in population was diminishing. It was 
not diminishing; it was increasing. Europe on the eve of war was 
not threatened with hunger by a rising real cost of corn; the real cost 
of corn was not rising; it was falling. 
Room for Expansion. 
I have dealt at some length with Europe before the War because 
that is Mr. Keynes’ theme; in his view the society that seems bent on 
self-destruction by the Carthaginian peace that crowned the War was 
already in deadly peril from Nature. If now, with better assurance 
as to the past, we look for a moment at the distant future of the 
European races, the first though not the only point for consideration 
is the extent of the world’s untouched or half-used resources in land 
and minerals. On this point, unfortunately, the existing information 
goes only part of the way. It is certain that enormous areas of the 
