TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 595
consequently requisite cultural changes have failed to keep pace. These
assumptions require us to imagine that the peasant three-quarters of
Mankind will not yet have lost their immemorially old habit of repro-
ducing their kind up to the limits of their means of.subsistence; and this
assumption in turn requires us to imagine them still to be expending on
increases in their head of population all the additional means of sub-
sistence that will have been placed in their hands by the establishment of
a World Order that will have brought in its train the benefits of peace,
police, hygiene, and the application of Science to the production of food.

Such prognostications would not be fantastic; they would merely be
projections of current tendencies into the future. In China, for example,
increases in the head of population had swallowed up increases in the
means of subsistence which had been bestowed on the peasantry in
China by the introduction of previously unknown food crops from the
Americas in the sixteenth century of the Christian Era and by the estab-
lishment, in the seventeenth century, of a Pax Manchuana. Thanks to
the naturalization of maize in China circa A.D. 1550, of sweet potatoes
circa A.D. 1590, and of pea-nuts at the turn of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, the population had risen from the 63,599,541 indi-
cated by the returns in the census of A.p. 1578 to an estimated figure of
108,300,000 in Ax>. 1661—and this in spite of the fact that in the interval
between these two dates this spurt in the growth of population had been
partly offset by the mortality arising from Chinese civil disorders and
Manchu military operations in the anarchic transition to the Manchu
regime from the Ming.1 Thereafter, under the Manchu Peace, the popu-
lation had continued to rise to 143,411,559 *n A-D* I74I an<ito a figure of
the order of 300 million by the time when, half-way through the nine-
teenth century, the decline of the Manchu regime in its turn had brought
with it a fresh bout of anarchy that had taken another heavy toll of
Chinese life. This prompt conversion of additional resources into addi-
tional population in China under the Ming and Manchu dispensations
had been duplicated in a comparably portentous increase in the popula-
tions of India under a British Raj and of Java under Dutch rule; and it
was significant that all recent increases in Asian peasant populations
were ultimately traceable to the oecumenical effects of Modern Western
enterprise, since even in China, which had never come under the direct
rule of any Western Power, the increase in the food-supply through the
introduction of new crops had been a consequence of the West Euro-
peans' discovery of the Americas.

If the effect of Modern Western enterprise in enabling Asian peoples
to indulge their habit of increasing their populations up to the limit had
been so great, yesterday and the day before, in the local and temporary
incubators constituted by a Manchu, a Dutch, and a British Peace, it
seemed safe to predict that the same effect of the same cause would be
powerfully enhanced tomorrow if the whole OikoumenS were to be united
politically under an American Peace and if, within this global Earthly
Paradise, the beneficent medical applications of a still advancing Western

* See Goodrich, L. C.: A Short History of the Chinese People (London 1948, Allen &
Unwin), pp. 198-9.