Abstract
PROF. E. M. EAST has much that is important in his address as retiring president of the American Society of Naturalists, meeting at Princeton (Scientific Monthly, vol. x., 1920, pp. 603–24). At present there are about 1700 million people, with an annual increase of between 14 and 16 millions. The white race is increasing much more rapidly than the yellow or the black. China's 300 million population is practically stationary. With the exception of France, few white peoples are increasing at a less rate than 10 per thousand. It is true that in most of the civilised countries of the world the birth-rate is slowly but steadily decreasing, but the result is not what many would have us believe. Where the birth-rate is low, the death-rate is low, except in France. Prof. East predicts that, owing to the steadily increasing development of preventive medicine, the decrease in the birth-rate will have no great effect on the natural increase in the world for. many years to come. If the rate of iricrease actually existent during the nineteenth century in the United States should continue, within the span of life of the grandchildren of persons now living the States will contain more than a billion inhabitants, “Long before, this eventuality the struggle for existence in those portions of the world at present more densely populated will be something beyond the imagination of those of us who have lived in a time of plenty.” The law of diminishing returns is even npw in operation in a comparatively new country like America, thought to be supplied with inexhaustible riches Prof. East considers in detail what may be done by improved utilisation of energies, improved agriculture, improved breeding, and so on; but he is not sanguine. To the criticism that he has not allowed for the “immense possibilities in the way of utilising sea food,” he responds with vigour. The cloud grows denser when it is noticed that the birthrate of the foreign population of the United States, coming largely now from eastern and southern Europe, is so much greater than that of the Anglo-Saxon stock (to which, it is claimed, most of the superior types belong) that within a century the latter will be but a fraction of the whole Prof. East looks forward to severe restriction of immigration; the spread of education; equitable readjustment in many economic customs; rational marriage selection which will tend to an increase of the birth-rate in families of high civic value; and among the rank and file a restriction of births commensurate with the family resources and the mother's strength.
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Increase of Population—a Warning. Nature 106, 133 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/106133a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/106133a0