F.—ECONOMICS. 155 
which she had the greatest economic advantage, and to withdraw from 
the rest. This process of challenge and adjustment was bound to 
occur irrespective of the growth of population, and as it occurred to 
give rise to strains and pressures; when accomplished it might yet 
leave room for progress, if not at the full Victorian pace. 
Of Britain before the War we may conclude that the position called 
for serious thought, not tears or panic. The economic records are open 
to diverse readings. The check to material progress in the Edwardian 
age may in part have been less than appears, and in part real but due 
to transient causes. At worst our industrial rank was challenged, not 
destroyed; forgetting some of the slacknesses of our easy days, we 
might through science and system and industrial peace have won a 
new lease of rapid progress. In this direction lay our remedy; in this, 
I think, rather than in hastening the process of birth restriction which 
had begun a generation before. 
Britain and Austria after the War. 
Let us pass to Britain after the War. Here, statistical tests of 
progress must be abandoned altogether. | War’s disturbance of our 
economic life and all its standards and records is barely subsiding; to 
found judgments of the future on the course of production or wages 
or prices in the years of demobilisation is vanity. Judgment by re- 
corded results is impossible; we are driven back to general considera- 
tions for an estimate of prospects in this new but not better world. 
The first principle of population to-day is that under conditions of 
economic specialisation and international trade the population problem 
in any particular country cannot profitably be considered without 
reference to other countries. The problem in every country is a prob- 
lem of the distribution of the population of the world as a whole. The 
actual density in different regions of the earth varies fantastically, 
according to the part which that region plays in the life of the world, 
from less than one person per square kilometre in Canada or three in 
the Argentine, through 186 in Britain, or 245 in Belgium, to 760 in 
Monaco or 3,538 in Gibraltar. The ‘ optimum density’ ™ for any 
one country at each moment depends not solely or even mainly upon 
its own resources of natural fertility or mineral treasure, on its own 
achievements of technique or co-operation, but on how in each of these 
matters it compares with other countries, on whether other countries 
are prospering or depressed, on the relations of its own people—in 
respect of peace or war, of trade or tariffs—towards other peoples. 
Britain illustrates this principle more clearly than any other great 
10 These figures relate to 1911 and are taken from Table I of the Inter- 
national Yearbook of Agricultural Statistics. A remarkable instance of the 
density possible to a purely agricultural population is presented by Java and 
Madura, which in 1921 had a population of 35,000,000, living 266 to the square 
kilometre, more than the most crowded industrial states of Europe. This 
involves of course a Chinese standard of life. 
1 That is, the density which will bring the largest return per head of the 
population. Cf. Cannan, Wealth, p. 68, and Carr-Saunders, The Population 
Problem, pp. 200 seq. 
