Seligman, supported by an army of carefully marshalled facts, brushes past this danger-sign set out by Malthus, stating calmly, “The doctrine of over-population has therefore lost its terrors for modern society.”[1]
China and India are cited often as proofs of the Malthusian Law overcrowding is assumed and other factors,—such as the lack of order and foresight—are ignored. Are these countries really overcrowded or ill-organised? What are the two most densely crowded countries in the world? Not China and India, as the sentimentalist would state off-hand, but Belgium and England. Seligman gives the figures per square mile for 1901 as follows:
Belgium 589
England 437
Compare these with China and India, which come 8th and 12th respectively on the list:
China 266
India 167[2]
As average individual intelligence climbs slowly above the zero-mark, and there is sufficient love of order and fair-play to allow need and inducement to exercise their full beneficent functions, then population—or potential effort—becomes an asset and not a liability, provided always there is no unnecessary friction induced by the embryo intelligence of the individual citizen, or imposed from above, which, after all, is the same thing historically.
Population, by itself, is not value; but it is a further measurable dimension of value.
Time. This is clearly one of the essential limits of human effort, just as it is one of the determining limits of any other phase of energy. It measures duration by seconds,
