iiS SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



stated, is not by any means earned by the working of the schemes on which 

 the money was spent. To meet this call for interest, exports must largely 

 exceed imports, and so tariffs are introduced to keep down imports, and 

 local industries are started. 



Both in the teeming monsoon lands and in the new lands, therefore, 

 industrialism spreads, and both react strongly against the danger of a 

 position of inferiority. The risks and evils attendant on international 

 indebtedness without strict control have been publicly emphasised of 

 late by Sir Arthur Salter and Mr. Loftus and others. The evils attendant 

 on the disequilibrium that has arisen between producers of food and raw 

 materials on the one hand, and producers of manufactured goods and 

 merchants on the other, have not been studied as much as they should be. 

 Means must be found to increase self-respect among primary producers, 

 not least among those who are natives of intertropical Africa. 



On all sides, in the first great burst of mass-production, local boundaries 

 seemed to have been swept away. It is probable that our social thoughts 

 and plans will have to regain contact with Mother Earth, each group 

 basing itself on its own soil, but evidently not in the old sense of a self- 

 contained isolation. Interdependence of all on each is a new feature that 

 will become increasingly important, and one of the geographer's tasks is 

 to try to see both the roots of each society in its own soil, and its relations 

 to others. He must try to see which factors are likely to go on operating 

 from generation to generation, and which are temporary, and perhaps 

 carry in themselves the germs that will bring their own decay : the 

 industrialist society with its accumulations of capital in the hands of the 

 grandchildren of able men, and its specialisation of machine tenders 

 lacking seriously in the skilful adaptability of the man who thatches to-day 

 and ploughs to-morrow — the overpopulated agricultural area losing its 

 fertility and driving its people out because of the spectre of famine and 

 disease, and perhaps finding no land ready to receive them. It is ad- 

 mittedly a most difficult phase of the world's life that has now been reached. 

 Traditionalism is challenged everywhere in economic, social and religious 

 life as never before. The local group is inevitably part of a great future 

 whole, and yet is being forced to think more of its roots in its own soil. 

 Each group has its problems and needs the help of others. England has 

 her population problem, France her need to safeguard her peasant tradition, 

 Germany her need to develop her schemes of welfare planning, and so on. 

 But development of each without domination by any is a very difficult 

 idea to work out, and in our attempts we are all too likely to try to crystal- 

 lise out some condition of status quo, forgetting that life has change as one 

 of its basic characteristics. The study of men and their environments 

 that we geographers pursue is necessarily always relative to a particular 

 time, and must always be looked at in the broad frame of the life of 

 mankind as a whole. 



