quently, when the rainfall is less than usual, immense numbers perish of starvation. It would of course be possible, for a time, to prevent famines by more scientific methods of agriculture, and to prevent droughts and floods by afforestation. More railways and better roads would give a vastly improved market, and might greatly enrich the peasants for a generation. But in the long run, if the birth-rate is as great as is usually supposed, no permanent cure for their poverty is possible while their families continue to be so large. In China, Malthus's theory of population, according to many writers, finds full scope.[1] If so, the good done by any improvement of methods will lead to the survival of more children, involving a greater subdivision of the land, and in the end, a return to the same degree of poverty. Only education and a higher standard of life can remove the fundamental cause of these evils. And popular education, on a large scale, is of course impossible until there is a better Government and an adequate revenue. Apart even from these difficulties, there does not exist, as yet, a sufficient supply of competent Chinese teachers for a system of universal elementary education.
Apart from war, the impact of European civilization upon the traditional life of China takes two
- ↑ There are, however, no accurate statistics as to the birth-rate or the death-rate in China, and some writers question whether the birth-rate is really very large. From a privately printed pamphlet by my friend Mr. V.K. Ting, I learn that Dr. Lennox, of the Peking Union Medical College, from a careful study of 4,000 families, found that the average number of children (dead and living) per family was 2.1, while the infant mortality was 184.1. Other investigations are quoted to show that the birth-rate near Peking is between 30 and 50. In the absence of statistics, generalizations about the population question in China must be received with extreme caution.
