The science of social adjustment / by Sir Josiah Stamp.

  • Josiah Stamp, 1st Baron Stamp
Date:
1937
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The science of social adjustment / by Sir Josiah Stamp. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    89/192 page 77
    KrOKNK’ IXFLUKNTCES IX KCOXOMIOS to endanger the social or national conditions of this O life, then possibly the eugenic optimum is passed. We can conceive a community with the ideal density and concentration for adequate and happy government, becoming, without loss of economic well-being, by increase of population, too cumbrous for the methods and organization in force. Taking an analogy, con¬ sider a succession of cars along a highway, the occupants perfectly happy and free from care and well provided with provisions. Now multiply the number a hundredfold, each car’s occupants just as well provided as before with good things, but the congestion and discomfort of the traffic rendering the journey unhappy and anxious. As material economic progress frees our leisure and attention for the other values of life, the conception of a good life will contain more and more of those values in proportion, and an optimum popidation from an economic point of view is less and less likely to coincide with the optimum population from the other points of view. Something also depends upon whether the ‘ other points of view ’ include an exercisable right to all kinds of satisfaction, on the principle of equality. If the solitude of Cheddar Corge or Glencoe and its inspiration is a higher type of ' good ’, and we presuppose that everyone should have the right to enjoy it, it is destroyed ipso facto by the millions. I am reminded of a railway advertise¬ ment : “ Do you dislike crowds ? If so, come to X.” Again, in the absence of complete free trade, and free movement of surplus populations to the areas relatively most eligible, those parts of the world with the best developed natural resources will have a higher density of o])timum population, or, at any rate, a higher standard for their optimum density than the
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