16th December.
Forty millions, as compared with four hundred millions, sounds small and insignificant; but when the smaller number has to find means of subsistence within an area one-twentieth the size of that allotted to the larger the insignificance at once vanishes. This is the case when the British Isles are put into the balance with the Celestial Empire. How crowded China is in places we all know; how to dispose of the surplus, troubles usin the homeland just as much as the same problem would worry the statesmen of China did they ever think of it, In both countries there are large tracts uncultivated; in England because, asa rule, these areas are below "the margin of cultivation," to use the phrase sanctioned by our older economists, in China partly for this and pittly for other reasons. There has not in Ghina been quite the same rush to the cities which has been the bane of English country life. Men have stayd "on the land," and it would not be amiss if those who are clam-outing for the retura of our people would carefully study what has been the result to China of the policy they strongly recommend to England.
It cannot be denied that in many aces the "old country," as England Is affectionately named by her cul-anies and even by the United States, has within her borders many people with whom she could easily dispense to her own benefit and their good. Go where one will, there is the same old story of, for instance, the overplus of the gentler sex. North, south, east, and west, without any trouble one finds, according to the married section of the ladies' world, that the city in which they live is "a paradise of old maids." Scarborough is one, Chester is another, Bournemouth a third, to take three typical examples at three opposite corners of thy country. The reasons are obvious. Not a less birth-rate, as a rule, on the masculine side, but a greater mortality in the first place, a greater emigration rate in the second, and an increasing disinclination to marry, mainly due to the ever-growing extravagance of modera life for which women may or may not be responsible, but which cannot be ignored when man seriously sets himself the problem: "Can I or can I not afford to increase my expenditure two, three, or four times?"
Perhaps no better example can be given of the tendency of modern England to condense in spots than the continuous growth not only of London, Manchester, and other large cities, which are continuously swallowing up all the smaller towns and villages round about them, but also of many of the smaller and more attractive Country towns; which have
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.