It is not a yellow, but a human peril; a mere addition to the hungry mouths that are to be fed. The supply of exportable food that can be raised in the world has of course not reached its maximum, but beyond a certain point every increase in agricultural production means a more than proportional increase in the cost of the product. To feed eight hundred millions costs much more than twice as much as to feed four hundred millions. Even though China secure only a minor part of the exportable food, it will by just so much increase the strain upon the industrial populations of Europe.
It is a crisis for European industrialism, a slowly preparing crisis with infinitely tragic possibilities. What it involves is not a mere re-distribution of wealth and income but an adjustment of population to the available home and foreign resources in food. Collectivism will not permanently save the European wage-earner from hunger if he continues to multiply his numbers faster than the visible food supply increases. A decline in the rate of population growth is essential.
Fortunately this decline is already in progress. All the nations of Western and Central Europe are moving towards a lower birth-rate and in France this diminution has reached a point where there is no longer a natural increase. In a few decades the birth rate will probably begin to fall everywhere faster than the death rate declines. An adjustment of the population to its probable resources will be in progress.
In this progressive decline in the birth rate is to be found the greatest of all the factors making for internationalism and peace. It is a development which takes away the edge from the present frantic effort of industrial nations to secure a monopolistic control of foreign resources. It permits the gradual creation of an equilibrium between the nation's population and its physical resources at home and abroad.
Powerful forces in the world are at present slowly making for an economic internationalism to supplant the economic nationalism which to-day makes for war. The problem that faces the United States is what shall be its policy and action in view of the present nationalistic strife and of the slowly maturing economic internationalism.
[[1]] November, 1916.
[[2]] The proposal to boycott Germany after the war is sometimes based upon weirdly moral rather than economic considerations. "Is it possible," writes one C. R. Enoch, "that trade relations with the nation that has outraged every tenet of international and moral decency, every consideration of humanity, and has committed unspeakable atrocities, as has Germany in her conduct of the war, can be taken up again at the point where they were broken off? ... There is only one procedure compatible with honour and justice—namely, that no ordinary commercial dealings should be carried out with Germany until the generation of Teutons that did these things has passed away, unless absolute penitence and reparation—if reparation be possible—is done therefor." "Can We Set the World in Order." London, 1916, p. 197. (My italics.)
[[3]] The granting of permission to the people of the disputed district to decide their own allegiance is a good general principle, but, unfortunately, does not carry us far. The main difficulty lies in determining what shall be the unit of territory and population which is to decide. If Ireland votes as a unit, all Ireland will have home rule; if each county is to have the right of self direction, Ulster will be detached from the rest of the island. If Alsace-Lorraine votes to become French, whole districts, which will have voted to remain German, will be dissatisfied. Moreover, in the latter case, should all the residents of the two provinces be permitted to vote or only those people and their descendants who were living there in 1870? If the first plan is adopted a premium is placed upon the policy of legally dispossessing the inhabitants of a conquered land and filling their places with loyal immigrés; if the latter is chosen, the principle of the right of a population to determine its allegiance is abandoned. Finally, if the decision of the population of the disputed district were adverse to the interests of Europe as a whole, it would be irrational to validate such a result. The interests of Europe are superior to those of any nation, however powerful, and vastly superior to those of a Luxemburg, Ulster or Alsace-Lorraine.