Newark evening star and Newark advertiser. [volume] (Newark, N.J.) 1909-1916, 1913-02-11
"On Board the
Good Ship Earth "
n n...11-
Is Increase Of Population Good or an E.vil9
BY Herbert Quick

to the orient--to China, Japan, Korea
and India. And here, where popula-
ton presses on subsistence, we find
what we shall one day find in these
dear States of ours If the universal
law of multiplication goes on I'M
checked. We find squalor unspeak-
able. misery Undesirable, fear in the
heart of every man, and four-tifths
of the thoughts of every mind and
If the utterances of every mouth re-
lated 10 food!
Extremes meet. When animal life
began, it began in the amoeba, an
animal which was all stomach. And
in the twentieth century, where
human life has followed the line of
animal increase to the very limit,
man gravitates back to the point of
losing "the upward looking and the
light" and becoming again a crea,
ture so per cent. of whose intellec-
tual activities are monopolized by the
demands of his hunger. He has
again become for all human purposes
an embodied stomach. In all the list
of tragedies there is none so awful.
In these crowded spaces, meat is
scarcely ever eaten, not because of
any belief in vegetarianism, but from
the fact that more than five times
as many people can be fed from the
land with vegetable food as with
meats. Flesh and blood are so cheap
that they drive out steam and steel
in such work as driving piles and
carrying burdens. Animals cannot be
used in tillage where men are SO
plentiful. A man will carry a ton of
canal mud for fertilizer five hundred
feet for three and q half cents. For
this be can buy eight eggs, or five
ounces of pork-so it is clear that
life cannot be supported on animal
food at such wages. The three and
half cents will therefore be spent
for ten ounces of potatoes, or six
pounds of clover to be cooked and
eaten, or two and a half pounds of
beans, or a pound and a half of pea
nuts, or three pounds of shelled corn,
or a pound of bean curd.
Incredibly Small" says DR.. Ross,
"are the portions prepared for sale
by the lluckster. Two cubic inches
of bean curd, four walnuts, five pea
nuts, fifteen roasted chesnuts, twenty
melon seeds-make one portion" No
wonder that in six weeks he saw
only one man reading-and he had
fallen asleep over his book. No Won
der that instead of asking a chance
met person how he makes his living
the Chinese asks, How do you get
through the day."
No wonder that girl babies are ex-
posed and allowed to die. Who shall
say it is not the truest mercy? No
wonder that the chief magistrate of a
Chinese city on being told that the
infection Of bubonic plague could be
kept out asked why 1t should be kept
out. in view of the fact that there are
too many people, The Chinese, their
multiplication unchecked by the wars
they have found out how to avoid,
may be excused if they choose pes
thence rather than famine.
/ know that many readers will say
that this povery must come from the
fact that the people are robbed by
the aristocracy, or by the monopolies,
or by the government, or that they do
not make the best use of their re-
ssources-or that there is some other
reason for this supremacy dreadful
condition of affairs than mere pres
sure of numbers on the possibilities
of food production. If God is not to
be accused of the supreme cruelty of
placing more passengers on this good
ship Earth than she can carry, then
some other reason must be found
for this poverty, you say?
The question-which carries us to
the greatest of all human questions
must be glanced at hereafter. Just
now it is well to remember that in
crease of population is the greatest
evil the world is threatened by.
(See tomorrow's Evening Star for
announcement of the next articles III
this great series.