so far that the population is
reaching a point where it will be difficult to secure adequate food
supplies from abroad. Rather than starve or live under the {286}
constraint of scarce food and high food prices, the West European
powers will fight for new territory from which to feed their people.

With the industrial development of Asia, and especially of China, this
danger will be enhanced. Of the three great nuclei of population in
the world, Eastern Asia, Southern Asia and Western (and Central)
Europe, only one has been able to draw upon the surplus food of the
world. Eight hundred million Asiatics have been forced to live on
their own meagre home resources. As China begins to export coal, iron,
textiles and other manufactured products, however, she will be able,
whether politically independent or not, to compete with Europe for the
purchase of this food supply. Not only will China's population
probably increase with the advent of industrialism but the standard of
living of her population will rise, and her competition with Europe for
the sale of manufactured products and the purchase of food will become
intense. The cheap, patient, disciplined labour of China's hundreds of
millions will be fighting with the Belgian, the German and the Italian
wage-earners to secure the food which it will be necessary to import.

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 {287} 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 alrea