Abstract
THE James Seth Memorial Lecture at the University of Edinburgh was delivered on April 26 by Mr. Roy Glenday, economic adviser to the Federation of British Industries, who took as his subject “The Economic Consequences of Progress”. There is a limit, he said, beyond which it is unhealthy to allow growth to proceed even in a community which takes special care not to overstep the frontiers of its own territory. Conflict will still inevitably arise in the process of growing, under the pressure of congestion between the members of the different groups or subdivisions into which the community of necessity splits its territory and occupations. No matter what may be the basic plan of subdivision adopted, there is a limit to the size of economic structure which can be erected on it with safety. The United Kingdom, however, still possesses enormous resources, and the solution Mr. Glenday favours is the one which accepts present tendencies as both reasonable and inevitable. They should be encouraged by promoting a flow of migrants from Great Britain, not for the purpose of developing the land and country-side of the Dominions and Colonies but to enlarge their industries and towns. Given supplies of cheap capital, there are no insuperable obstacles to a redistribution of population between the over-populated Mother country and the under-populated Dominions overseas. This would be as much to their advantage as to ours. In Canada, for example, the railways could serve a population three times its present size.
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Economics of Progress. Nature 135, 785 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135785a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135785a0