Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/220

213 sole progeny of buoyant national pride. Perhaps, therefore, any sober argument on this inevitable theme is better than none.

Probably the safest approach is by comparison, for thus we avail ourselves of such experience as has come to our race in different parts of the world. But let us avoid China and Java, even though they seem such available examples of a great population, of high density, with small percentage of exchange and hence almost self-sufficient. But their standards of living—could we, even with our superior skill and progressiveness, take the same resources and support an equal number of people up to American standards of comfort and efficiency? We do not know those resources well enough to tell, hence we dismiss oriental nations and turn to people more like ourselves.

We have elsewhere made a brief comparison between England and that part of the United States which lies east of the Dakotas, Kansas and Texas. It was suggested that this region, about two fifths of the chief continental area of the United States, averages in resources of every sort as well as England, and it was shown that if we could in these 1,200,000 square miles reach the present density of England, we should have, east of the meridian of Omaha, 742,000,000 people. To have put this in print should at once, it would seem, shatter all pretension to soberness. We are quite willing to scale down the figure, while taking refuge under the fact that these computations were not offered as prophecy. With such an enormous population, we, like England, could not feed half our mouths, and should have to exchange other products for food. But other lands might not have the surplus in those days, to send to us. And our underground resources might be seriously reduced, if not exhausted, and we could not produce the exchange values. We thus see how fascinating and how futile is the hundred million tendency. Let us divide our total by three, and arrive at a population which we might hope to feed from our own soil, a little under 250,000,000. It will be seen that in this estimate we leave the Great Plains and Cordilleras to be peopled according to the dictates of a cold conservatism, or of a lively enthusiasm.

An instructive comparison can be made with Italy, whose area is 110,550 square miles, and whose population is reckoned to have been, on January 1, 1907, 33,640,710. The density was 304.3, not far from half that of England or Belgium, and about twelve times as great as that exhibited by the United States in 1900.

We may first take the comparative density of agricultural workers. In Italy, of persons, male and female, over nine years of age, there were at work in the fields, in 1900, 9,611,003. In our own country in 1900 there were, over ten years of age, 10,438,219. When we remember that the smaller country contained a little more than 30,000,000 people at that time and we had 76,000,000, the figures show their meaning. This comes out with force if we look at the ratio of workers to a given surface of production. In the United States east of the arid regions there was