CHAPTER ONE

THE TREND OF POPULATION

1. THE REVIVAL OF THE POPULATION QUESTION 1

Public interest in the question of population appears to be one of the standard consequences of a great war. The years which linked the dying Eighteenth Century and the dawning Nineteenth marked the end of a period of intensive and extensive warring – Napoleonic in Europe, revolutionary in America. In this period one of the principal topics of serious discussion by all thoughtful publicists and statesmen was the population problem. An extensive literature was produced. . . . The great work was of course that of Malthus, but there were many others of real significance. One of the wisest things Benjamin Franklin's great intellect ever produced was a little essay on "Observations concerning the increase of mankind, peopling of countries, etc., written in Pennsylvania, anno 1751," which in certain respects anticipated the conclusions which Malthus, with more elaborate documentation but no less surely, was later to draw.

The reason why war appears normally to engender concern about population is a twofold one. In the first place, as Harold Cox in his Problem of Population has shown perhaps better than any one else, population pressure is always a major cause of war, either directly or indirectly. Curiously enough, everybody sees this after the event, but apparently never before. "A place in the sun" is looked upon as the idle chatter of a vain and too vocal monarch until after its mischief has been done. After the war is over and every one is filled with an immediate first-hand realization of what an inherently dreadful and stupid affair war is, there is a great buzzing in the hives of learning about all of the things, including population growth and pressure, which contributed to its causation.

1 From Raymond Pearl, "The Biology of Population Growth," in The American Mercury, Vol. 3, No. 11 (November, 1924). Reprinted by special permission of the author.