POPULATION, Growth of World Popu lation from 1800 to 1919. One of the most striking facts which we encounter in searching for the causes of the wonderful growth of world commerce in the past century is the dis covery that world population has doubled within that period. In all the untold centuries in which man had existed on the globe, the number of people in the world in 1830 was but 850,000,000; to-day the world total is 1,700,000,000, or double that at the time when the application of steam to transportation enabled population to expand into hitherto unpopulated areas and supplied the means by which the products of those areas could be transferred to the continents where population exceeded the food-producing power.
World Population Doubled in 100 Years.— We may fairly fix the date of the practical ap plication of steam to transportation at the year 1830. Fulton had shown the use of the steam boat on rivers as early as 1807, and the little American steamer Savannah made the first steam voyage across the Atlantic in 1819, but it was not until 1838 that steam transportation across the ocean was regularly established. Steam engines had moved wagons on lines of rail as early as 1804 but it was not until 1825 that the first railway for the regular transporta tion of freights, the Stockton and Darlington Railway in England was put into practical operation. The world's railways in existence in the year 1830 were but 200 miles; the world's steamships but 100,000 tons and none of those crossing the ocean.
So we shall do no violence to history if we fix the year of the practical application of steam to freight movement on land and sea at about the year 1830, in which the world's population was 850,000,000 or just one-half of that to-day. The total world population in 1919 is set down by the best authorities at approximately 1,700,000,000 and most of this totalization is by actual count, for countries representing more than two-thirds of the people of the world now take periodical censuses of The above estimates of areas of North and South America, Europe and Australasia, and of populations are compiled from the
The latest estimate of the earth's fertile region in square miles is 29,000,000; steppe, 14,000,000; desert, 4,861,000; polar, 6,970,000.
The population of the earth according to race is based on an estimate by John Bartholo mew, F.R.G.S., Edinburgh, revised to 1910: Chief Causes of Growth in Last Century. —What are the causes of this wonderful growth in world population in the past century, the addition in less than 100 years of as many as had been accumulated in all the centuries pre ceding? While there are many causes the most important is that implied by the fact already mentioned that this growth is coincidental with the development of steam power for transporta tion on land and ocean. Before the advent of steam transportation, man was entirely de pendent upon his immediately surrounding area for food, manufacturing materials and manu factures. When the population of a city or community became greater than the food pro ducing power of the surrounding area, the peo ple went hungry, diseases developed and life was shortened. When bad crop years came, there was suffering and starvation, and epi demics swept off population by millions. Life was short, infant mortality high, epidemics fre •uent, emigration from the congested districts cult, immigration into the unpopulated areas equally difficult. The walled cities of Europe and Asia with their insanitary conditions and underfed population were popularly designated 'man destroyers,' and yet men still thought it necessary to congregate in walled cities or towns for mutual protection, and even those engaged in agriculture lived in little villages, going out to their fields in the morning and re turning to their unsanitary homes at night. Of the 850,000,000 people on the globe in ap proximately 700,000,000 existed on the single continent of Eurasia (which we now subdivide into °Europe) and while the remainder of the world, Africa, North America, South America, Australia and all the islands of the seas had but about 150,000,000, though it should be added that population figures at that date are necessarily based in a considerable degree on estimates of the best experts upon this subject.