Whatever our importation of food an increase in agricultural efficiency is also probable. We have already improved and cheapened our farm machinery and have disseminated agricultural education and information. But much progress remains to be made. We can use better seeds, raise better crops and cattle, and work more co-operatively instead of individualistically. Our transportation system can be better co-ordinated with our agriculture, so that food, now wasted because it will not pay the freight, can be brought to market.[[15]] A better knowledge of the science of farming would greatly increase our agricultural production. If our country roads were improved, if we varied our crops more intelligently, if we refrained from impoverishing our soils, if we drained some tracts and irrigated others, we should speedily discover a vast increase in our agricultural productiveness, a larger return to the farmers, a greater home demand for manufactured products, and a better opportunity for capital at home. If by putting more capital and intelligence upon our farms, we were to add several billions to the value of their output, we should broaden the base of our whole economic life, enlarge the volume of our non-competitive exports, and in the end approximate conditions that would make for a peaceful foreign policy and for the promotion of an economic internationalism.
But though we widen our agricultural base, our population unless its rate of progress is checked, will eventually, and perhaps soon, overtake any extension.[[16]] Though we increase agricultural knowledge and substitute mechanical for animal power and gasoline for hay, the law of diminishing returns will remain. Ten men cannot secure as large a per capita product from a given area as five, or twenty as large as ten. But if our population were to maintain its present geometrical increase we should have 200,000,000 inhabitants in 1953 and, to assume the almost impossible, 400,000,000 in 1990. Long before the latter figure could be reached there would be positive and preventive checks to further growth, but if these checks were late in being applied, there would come increased inequality, misery and economic uncertainty, and an enhanced liability to war.
For us as for other nations a too rapid increase in population spells this constant danger of war. Our farms cannot absorb more than a certain proportion of our population without causing lowered wages and increasing poverty, and we cannot expand our export trade without entering into the range of international conflict. While therefore an improved agriculture with high food prices will permit of an increase in our population, it is advantageous that that increase does not proceed too rapidly. If we grow to two hundred millions in seventy-five or one hundred years instead of in thirty-seven, we shall still be strong enough to protect our present territories and shall have less occasion to fight for new.
Fortunately our rate of population increase, despite immigration, is steadily decreasing. In the decade ending 1860 our population increased 35.6 per cent., in the period 1860 to 1879 at an average decennial rate of 26.3 per cent., and in the three following decades 25.5 per cent., 20.7 per cent. and 21.1 per cent respectively. The fall in our natural increase was even greater. While the death rate has declined[[17]] the birth rate has fallen off even more rapidly. Our birth statistics are inadequate, but we can gain some idea of this decline by comparing the number of children under 5 years of age living at each census year with the number of women between the ages of 16 to 44 inclusive. In 1800 there were 976 children per 1,000 women in these ages; in 1830, 877; in 1860, 714; in 1890, 554; in 1910, 508.[[18]]
For a number of decades a continuation in this falling off in the birth rate is probable. It is rendered necessary by the fall in the death rate and possible by the fact that birth has ceased to be a mere physiological accident and is coming under human control. "The most important factor in the change," says Dr. John Shaw Billings, "is the deliberate and voluntary avoidance or prevention of child-bearing on the part of a steadily increasing number of married people who prefer to have but few children."[[19]] The spreading of the knowledge of birth control and the increasing financial burden of children in an urbanised society composed of economically ambitious people will probably prevent our population from ever again increasing as rapidly as it did half a century ago.[[20]]
In the meanwhile our immigration (until the outbreak of the present war) continued to increase. In the ten years ending June 30, 1914, over ten million immigrant aliens arrived in the United States, of whom approximately seven millions remained. Nor has the high point in immigration been surely attained. The European population increases so rapidly that the excess of births over deaths is between three and four times the entire emigration. Immigration tends to flow from countries where the pressure of population is greater to countries like the United States, where the pressure is less. Unless there is restriction we may witness within the next decades a new vast increase in immigration, which will result in a rapid growth of our population and a resulting pressure upon our agricultural (and other natural) resources, that will vastly increase the intensity and bitterness of our competition for the world's markets and the world's investment opportunities.
By thus increasing our agricultural product, and developing our home market and our less directly competitive industries and by slackening an increase in our population, which would otherwise force us into foreign adventures, we tend to approach a balanced economic system and a parallel growth of extractive and manufacturing industries. Such a dependence in the main on home resources for the nation's primal needs is in the circumstances the best preventive of an imperialistic policy that might lead to war. But there is an even closer-lying incentive to imperialism and war. A nation may have a sufficiently wide base and an efficient industrial development but because of internal economic mal-adjustments may be driven into imperialistic courses. A policy not dictated by national needs may be forced upon the nation by the necessities and ambitions of its dominating class.
[[1]] "There was," he (President Jefferson) said, "one spot on the face of the earth so important to the United States that whoever held it was, for that very reason, naturally and forever our enemy; and that spot was New Orleans. He could not, therefore, see it transferred to France but with deep regret. The day she took possession of the city the ancient friendship between her and the United States ended; alliance with Great Britain became necessary, and the sentence that was to keep France below low-water mark became fixed."—John Bach McMaster, "History of the People of the United States," Vol. II, p. 620.
[[2]] Agriculture is not essentially pacific; in various stages of historical development agricultural nations war upon each other in order to secure more land or to levy tribute of grain. The pacific tendency of our present agricultural development arises out of the needs of industrial Europe. Our agricultural progress, however, is peaceful only in so far as it increases the product of our fields; it would not be peaceful, and might be the exact reverse, if we sought to increase our acreage by, let us say, a conquest of Canada.
[[3]] By this is not meant that the nation should be preponderatingly agricultural, but only that where agriculture is sufficiently developed to maintain a large industrial population working for the home market the competition for foreign markets and foreign investment fields becomes less intense.