Standing Room Only?

377 Pages·1928·34.824 MB·English

by  Edward Alsworth Ross

STANDING ROOM ONLY?
STANDINGR OOM
ONLY?
EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS
PAOFESSOI. OF SOCIOLOGY, UIUVEI.SITY OF WJICOMSIN
Author of "SOCIAL CONTI.OL," ''SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY,"
"THE PRJNCJPLES OF IOCIOLOGY," ''THE CHAMGISG
CHINESE," 111.USSJA 111 UPHEAVAL," etc., etc.
LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL LTD.
11, HENRIETTA STREET, W. C. 2
1918
Copyright,. I927, by
T.II.E CEN"TURY- c.�o_
INTRODUCTION
Whether a people's economic lot improves or worsens
depends at bottom upon two factors:
A. The growth of population.
B. The increase of food production.
For more than a century B has been outrunning A
among the progressive peoples of the world; so the out­
look has been cheering. A, however, depends in turn on
two variables:
a. The birth-rate.
b. The death-rate.
Now, in forty years the advanced societies have expe­
rienced an astounding fall in the death-rate. They have
achieved a new longevity, which is destined to be shared
soon in varying degrees with all important sections of
mankind. Wherever it arrives population leaps like a
startled hare. Unless a falls as well as b, there is no pros­
pect of B being able to keep up with A for long. Certain
enlightened peoples, to be sure, have their reproduction
under control. But so far probably less than one sixth of
the human race bas applied any brake to its fertility. Un­
less this practice spreads much faster than it seems
likely to do, overpopulation, and therewith misery and
degradation, will sensibly increase throughout large parts
of the world before the close of our century.
How little the pioneer microbe-quellers divined such an
outcome of their exploits I
Population pressure is not only very unequal over the
globe, but the growth tendencies of peoples and races are
so unlike that inequality of population pressure is bound
vi INTRODUCTION
to become greater. Emigration will therefore become pop­
ular with the congested peoples. Tempted by the speed,
cheapness, and safety of overseas movement, and beguiled
by the patter of steamship agents and their runners, grow­
ing population surpluses will stream hither and thither
about the earth. Menaced as to like-mindedness, stand­
ards of living, and even self-perpetuation, the advanced
peoples will be forced in sheer self-defense to bar out
mass immigration. So, strangely enough, thanks to the
recent brilliant victories over disease, the twentieth­
century attitude toward the international flow of human
beings in quest of a chance to earn their bread bids fair
to mock the dreams of the great humanitarian thinkers
of the last century.
As underpinning for the above theses I offe r an elabo­
rate examination of the dynamics of population. Much
as I value the work of Malthus, I venture a fresh attack
upon his problem because for several reasons his famous
"Essay" is no longer fit to guide us.
1. Malthus's "law" that population increases in a geo­
metrical ratio whereas subsistence can be increased only
in an arithmetical ratio was rejected long ago. What he
was driving at is the economist's "law of diminishing
returns."
2. Malthus was "stumped" by the query why a benev­
olent God created us with a bent to multiply faster than
we can enlarge our food supply. To-day in the light of
evolution we have no difficulty in seeing how this super­
fecundity may have become established.
3. In Malthus's day those too intelligent to regard epi­
demics as God's chastisements held to the filth theory of
human disease. The germ theory has been ascendant no
more than fifty years.
4. At the dawn of the nineteenth century when Mal-
INTRODUCTION vii
thus was writing no one dreamed of victories over human
ailments that would cut the death-rate to a half, even to
a third.
S. Malthus offered no means of keeping down numbers
save the postponement of marriage. Contraceptive means
of regulating family size lay in the womb of the future.
6. Unable to imagine steamship and railroad, Malthus
could not foresee how his people would set their table with
food from all over the globe and how famine would dis­
appear from the horizon of civilized peoples.
7. Malthus conceived that England might "in the course
of some centuries contain two or three times its present
population and yet every man in the Kingdom be much
better fed and clothed than he is at present." Thanks to
the new forces, his people doubled in fifty years and again
in the next sixty years, while their plane of living rose.
8. In his day no one foretold such facility of overseas
movement that surplus people in the congested parts of
the earth would migrate in vast streams toward the roomy,
democratic, and well governed lands.
9. Since Malthus much has been learned as to the pos­
sibilities of and the limitations upon food production.
10. Although he championed popular education, Mal­
thus never dreamed of such a laboring population as we
know to-day; ambitious and aspiring, reading newspapers
and advertisements designed to breed in them new wants.
11. Malthus did not foresee the development of de­
mocracy to such a point that in some countries the labor­
ing class are practising prudence in the matter of family,
not from dread of want, but from fear of losing the style
of living essential to one's standing in the eyes of others
and hence to one's self-respect.
12. Malthus had no presentiment of women becoming
so emancipated that their revolt against the needless an-
viii INTRODUCTION
guish and mortality excessive child-bearing inflicts upon
them would appreciably lower the birth-rate.
13. Finally, Malthus could not foresee that the exten­
sion of the rule of the advanced nations over the back­
ward would cause human life to be conserved among the
blindly multiplying peoples of Asia and Africa with much
of the intelligence and zeal with which it is conserved
among the prudently multiplying peoples of Europe and
America.
Recognition of these post-Malthusian developments
emboldens me to tackle the dynamics of population as if
Malthus had not already left his enduring mark upon it.
EDWARD AtswoRTH Ross.
Madison, Wisconsin,
July, 1927.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I wish to thank President Glenn Frank, Dr. Haven Emerson,
Professor L. J. Cole, and Professor Selig Perlman for critically
reading parts of the manuscript of this book.
I also wish to acknowledge permission to reprint three articles
that have appeared in the Century Magazine under the titles,
"The Man-Stifled Orient," "Dulling the Scythes of Azrael,"
and "The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe"; "Population
Optimism," reprinted from Social Forces; "The PopuJation
Boosters,'' from the Journal of Applied Sociolog ; "How Fast
y
Can Man Increase?" from the Scientific Monthl ; "Deuca­
y
lion and Company, Ltd.," from the Saturday Evening Post,·
and an article from Scribner's Magazenititlneed "Population
Pressure and War."
ix
CONTENTS
PART ONE
POPULATION
P.&a•
INTRODUCTION
I HOW FAST CAN MAN INCREASE? J
II THE MORTALITY OF OLDEN TIME 12V
Ill THE MUZZLING OF FAMINE • • 23
IV THE CONQUEST OF DISEASE • 33
V THE THROTTLIN'G OF PESTILENCE • 47
VI PUBLIC HEALTH PROMOTION 57
VII RESULTS OF THE WAR ON DISEASE 71
VIII THE GROWTH OF POPULATION • 84
IX PROSPECTS OF AUGMENTING THE FOOD SUPPLY • 106
X THE REALITY OF POPULATION PRESSURE 119
XI THE CHARACTERISTIC SIGNS OF POPULATION
PRESSURE • 127
XII PROVOCATIVES OF POPULATION PRESSURE 142
XIII PENALTIES OF POPULATION PRESSURE • 153
XIV POPULATION PRESSURE AND WAR 165
xv POPULATION PRESSURE AND ECONOMIC PR.OGRESS 177
XVI POPULATION PR.ESSUR.E AND POLITICAL DEMOC-
RACY . 184
XVII POPULATION OPTIMISM • 189
XVIII THE POPULATION BOOSTERS • • 200
:xi
xii CONTENTS
OBAP'l'lla PA8•
XIX THE RISE AND SPREAD OF AN ADAPTIVE :rERm.-
ITY • 208
XX J'ACl'ORS OF AN ADAPTIVE FERl'ILITY • 220
XXI WOMEN AND ADAPTIVE FERTn.ITY • . 237
XXII RELIGION AND ADAPTIVE FERTILITY • 253
XXIII PROBLEMS OF ADAPTIVE FERl'ILITY •2 65
PART TWO
INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION
XXIV POPULATION TENDENCIES OF THE ORIENT •2 85
XXV FLOWING MYRIADS • 304
XXVI EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION UPON THE DISTRIBU­
TION OF NATIONAL WEALTH AND WELFARE 314
XXVII DISPLACEMENT OF NATIVE STOCK BY WMI-
GRANT STOCK • • 318
XXVIII LOSS OF LIXE-MINDEDNESS BY A MOTLEY IMMI-
GRATION • 3 26
XXIX CLOSING GATES • 332
XXX THE COMING GREAT BAIUUEJl • 341
INDEX • 357