Let us now consider the reasons for the steps in the increments of population in the past. Primitive man was limited by his methods of collecting food. Food collecting—wandering about picking up acorns and snails and frogs and things—obviously can support an extremely small population. When hunting becomes organized—when you have flint arrows, when you have invented the bow, and when you have fire hunts and organize whole tribes to chase the game—then considerably more people can be supported. So the experts think that the population doubled at that time.
With the invention of agriculture, there is immediately a very great population increase, as it becomes possible to go on to a much higher level of production and to found cities, to create the division of labour, and to create what we call civilization. The proto-agricultural era lasted with very few changes until the later seventeenth century, when we got the beginning of the industrial revolution coupled with the first results of the exploitation of virgin lands in the New World.
Without the supply of cheap food from the New World it probably would have been impossible for Europe to industrialize as it did; but the historical accident by which vast lands were suddenly opened up made it possible to take a great many peasants off the land in Europe and put them into factories and keep them fed while they were building up the new industrial society. It was this extra supply of food which initiated the modern advance in population; all species live up to their supply of food and then are wiped out as the numbers outrun the supply.
A new factor based upon discoveries in physiology and medicine has entered the picture in recent years: the factor of public health. What is happening now is not that the birth rate is increasing—in fact in many cases it has decreased slightly—but that the death rate has been lowered to a startling extent, mainly by public health measures. The change began in the nineteenth century, with people realizing, for example, that they had to have clean water. Even before Pasteur’s discovery of bacteria, it had begun to dawn on people that it was a good thing to be clean.
It is interesting in this context to read about the early efforts of the disciples of Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher, to clean up London. The rich, who lived in their own part of the town, had been entirely indifferent to the appalling conditions which prevailed in the eastern part of the City. But when cholera and other diseases like typhus, which raged in the East End, began to invade the smarter sections of the West End, they decided that something had better be done. Men like Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth succeeded in about forty years in transforming London from a pest-hole of the most revolting character into a relatively clean city. The result was a dramatic rise in the expectation of life: the average expectation of life in ancient Rome was about thirty years, as in modern Asia; the average expectation of life in the United States and Great Britain is now about seventy years.
Today, with the newest weapons in the public health armoury, the most amazing revolutionary changes can be brought about in an extraordinarily short time. The two most powerful weapons are the antibiotics and the insecticides—coupled with the discovery that malaria and yellow fever, for example, are insect-carried diseases and that other tropical diseases are also carried by small animals. Consider the case of Ceylon, where the population was held almost stationary by endemic malaria. After the end of the Second World War public health teams were sent into Ceylon with DDT, and malaria was completely stamped out in less than five years. In Europe, on the other hand, malaria had been endemic for centuries (you will find it referred to constantly in the plays of Shakespeare as ‘ague’). In London it took at least three hundred years of draining soil and drying up the area all along the Thames estuary to get rid of the mosquito and thus get rid of malaria.
While it took about three centuries of hard work in Britain to get rid of malaria, it took only five years with modern methods in Ceylon! And what have been the results? We have saved people from the miseries of malaria, a large proportion of whom would have died in early life or in middle age from the disease. But while the death rate has fallen very nearly to European levels, the birth rate has remained what it was when three or four out of every five children regularly died and it was necessary to produce large families in order to preserve the race at the existing levels. The result is that the population of Ceylon is now increasing at the rate of 3 per cent per annum, which means that it will double in twenty-four years.
The land, however, is not elastic. Although some new land will come into production owing to the fact that it can now be ploughed under because of the destruction of the malaria mosquito, it will not be enough; and meanwhile, incredible problems have already arisen. It is more and more difficult to feed the population on local resources and the exportable crops such as tea and rubber do not suffice to buy sufficient foods. Capital is extremely difficult to come by because there simply isn’t enough money circulating for people to save. And nobody quite knows what on earth is going to happen when the population doubles.
This same situation is particularly striking on many islands, where there is no possibility of expansion. It is very striking in Mauritius; it is very striking on some of the Mediterranean islands such as Sardinia and Sicily; it is a fearful problem throughout the Caribbean. I was talking last year with the Prime Minister of the New Commonwealth of the Caribbean, Sir Grantley Adams (who previously was the Prime Minister of Barbados), and he was telling me about the state of his home island. Barbados now has a population of 1400 to the square mile with only one industry—sugar—and no other resources at all, and nobody has the faintest idea of how they are going to get on in the future; and Barbados is in only slightly worse condition than many other islands.
One has to confront the painful fact that this newly independent community is probably non-viable from an economic point of view, and the situation will probably become worse as time goes on owing to the increasing pressure of population upon resources. The same situation can be seen in Egypt, where at the present time something like 25 million people are trying to make a living off 5.25 million acres of arable land. Here one can put in, parenthetically, the fundamental reason why Egyptian policy has been so troublesome to the West in recent years: It is a biological reason; these people cannot live on their resources and they must throw their weight around so as somehow to get people who have capital to invest in their country. It is completely pointless to envisage the politics of such a country as Egypt, and indeed of many other countries of the world, from a purely political point of view. You have to think in terms of biology to gain any understanding and to formulate any sensible policy.
Let us now ask ourselves what the practical alternatives are as we confront this problem of population growth. One alternative is to do nothing in particular about it and just let things go on as they are, but the consequences of that course are quite clear: the problem will be solved by nature in the way that nature always solves problems of over-population. When any animal population exceeds the resources available to it, the population tends (a) to starve and (b) to suffer from severe epidemic and epizootic diseases. In the human population, we can envisage that the natural check on the unlimited growth of population will be precisely this: there will be pestilence, famine, and, since we are human beings and not animals, there will be organized warfare, which will bring the numbers down to what the earth can carry. What nature teaches us is that it is extraordinarily dangerous to upset any of its fundamental balances, and we are in the process of upsetting a fundamental balance in the most alarming and drastic manner. The question is: Are we going to restore the balance in the natural way, which is a brutal and entirely anti-human way, or are we going to restore it in some intelligent, rational, and humane way? If we leave matters as they are, nature will certainly solve the problem in her way and not in ours.
Another alternative is to increase industrial and agricultural production so that they can catch up with the increase in population. This solution, however, would be extremely
