Ethics and some modern world problems / by Willam McDougall.

  • William McDougall
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ethics and some modern world problems / by Willam McDougall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    reduction of that standard; and it will not bring children into the world to live according to a reduced standard.1 If the immigration of some few millions of Europeans of slightly lower standards of living has had a profound effect of this kind in America, even before the end of the nineteenth century, 1 Of European countries, France, whose people have for so many centuries led the vanguard of civilization, is already the scene of a strongly working tendency to substitution of population. Mr. Sisley Huddleston, in a recent article (Christian Science Monitor, August 4, 1923) writes of “the dwindling native popula¬ tion [of France], with the corresponding encouragement to immi¬ gration” as “one of the gravest problems which presents itself to France.” “It is estimated,” he says, “that 150,000 Polish workers are with their families in France. The other Slav countries have not yet sent many workers to France, but the inflow is beginning and it is easy to foresee that in a few years there will be at least 1,000,000 Slavs. . . . There are Greeks and Turks, Hungarians and men of the Levant; there are scattered all over the country contingents of Italians.” He says nothing of the contingents of colored “French¬ men”; but he writes: “While the native population remains unequal to the proper exploitation of the potential resources of France, it will be obligatory to recruit labor power from beyond the French frontiers.” Even from his narrow economic standpoint (which leads him to use the word “obligatory” in the absurd way in which other economists speak of “economic laws” as something beyond the control of human will) he discerns a danger in this process. “The danger from the point of view of the French artisan is that these immigrants are generally subdued and amenable, and must tend, therefore, to reduce the whole standard of living which has been hardly won by the French trade-unions.” But he does not seem to be aware of the greater danger, namely, that the process is a vicious circle, that not only does the low birth-rate encourage immigration, but that also the swelling tide of immigration discourages the na¬ tive birth-rate.
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