120 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
evil turn in human history. But the limitations of economics and perhaps 
of human nature prevent any straight answer being given. Nationalists 
in each nation want their own nation to increase in comparison with 
others ; if they think of the others’ interest at all, they say and believe that 
it will be promoted by the predominance of their own nation. We can 
get no further that way, since the pretension of each is contradicted by the 
pretensions of the others. If we try to avoid this obstacle by saying that 
we will ignore national and racial differences, and assume either that 
somehow the generally fittest will grow at the expense of the others, or 
that each as well as the whole will have stationary numbers, we still have 
to face the fact that our conception of the distinction between economic 
welfare and welfare of other kinds is nebulous in the extreme, and that 
if it was clearer, we should not know—I think we never can know—how 
much of the one should be regarded as equal to a given quantity of the 
other. 
Different persons will give different answers. Some agree with Paley 
that ten persons with sufficient subsistence must be in possession of more 
welfare than a single millionaire; others with J. 8. Mill that the world 
turned into a ‘ human anthill’ would be an undesirable place of residence. 
The same person will give different answers according to his mood at the 
moment. Personally, I spent my early boyhood in a town which through- 
outmy life has been the most prosperous in England,and I have long lived 
in another which, having added motor manufacture to education in its 
old age, has lately been growing nearly as fast, and sometimes when I 
contemplate their growth I feel a little like G. R. Porter when he wrote 
the Progress of the Nation, during the period 1800 to 1831. At other times, 
and I think more often, I regret the open heath and the untouched pine 
wood which stretched in my early recollection to within a few hundred 
yards of the Bath Hotel at Bournemouth, and I hate the gasworks 
straddling the river and the bungalows shutting in the main roads out of 
Oxford; then I agree with Mill that it is well that population should 
become stationary long before necessity compels it. 
After all, the increase must stop some time, and watching the effect 
of the stoppage will be a very interesting experience which I should like 
to have been born late enough to enjoy. 
