SECTION M.—AGRICULTURE. 
SCIENTIFIG PROGRESS AND _ ECO- 
NOMIC PLANNING IN RELATION 
TOAGRICULTUREAND RURALLIFE 
ADDRESS BY 
PROF. J. A. S. WATSON, M.A., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
Ever since the beginnings of civilisation the rate of improvement in 
agricultural technique has controlled and conditioned, to a considerable 
degree, the progress of the human race. This progress has been of two 
kinds—on the one hand an increase of numbers, and on the other a rise 
in the standard of life. 
At certain times and places better farming has meant no more than the 
possibility of a given level of subsistence for an increasing number of 
people. Indeed, where the available land has been limited, where condi- 
tions of climate and the like have favoured the increase of population 
and where the progress of agriculture has been relatively slow, we find all 
the essential features of that rather gloomy picture of man’s economic 
destiny which Malthus conceived as normal. Broadly speaking, this has 
been the state of things, in China, during many centuries. Conditions 
among the Western nations have, however, become more and more unlike 
those that Malthus presupposed. He assumed that populations tend to 
increase in geometric progression, whereas in many countries population 
is already, or is rapidly tending to become, static. He assumed that the 
additional land, brought under cultivation in order to meet man’s growing 
necessities, would be inferior in some respect to that already farmed ; 
but at present the tendency upon the whole is for farm land to go out of 
cultivation. Malthus could foresee no more than a slow and dwindling 
rate of increase in the productivity of the soil, each successive increment 
being obtained at the cost of a progressively greater amount of human 
toil; but recent additions to scientific knowledge have been enough to- 
outweigh the effects of the economists’ law of diminishing returns ; our 
increasing output of food is being secured with less and less toil, instead 
of more and more. The main result of the most recent agricultural pro- 
gress in the more advanced countries has been then to set free, for activities 
other than food production, an increasing proportion of the population, 
with, as a secondary consequence, the possibility of an unprecedented 
rise in standards of life. 
Before, however, we attempt to analyse the present situation of our 
