Human Over-Production

DANGER SPOTS IN WORLD POPULATION-- Warren S. Thompson--Knopf ($3.50).

The children of today may grow up to witness the magnificent spectacle of a metropolis uprooted overnight with all its residents mad, dead or chemically diseased by next morning. This will be the next World War. How, when, why will it start?

To make war, declares Author Thompson, people are needed. The more people, the more friction. There are 1,792,000,000 people in the world. Chinese and Russians are 18% each; European Russians, 8%; U. S. citizens, 5%; Germans, 4%; Japanese and British, 3% each; French, 2%. Such a scale should provoke the thought of those who rate low. Author Thompson's study embraces the following danger spots: Japan, China, Australia, the Western Pacific, India, South Africa, Italy, Central Europe, Great Britain. They are dangerous because "it so happens that the peoples who are already feeling keenly the need of new lands and resources are also the ones who are likely to have large increases [in population] for the next few decades," and "never has any previous civilization shown a rapacity that compares even remotely to our own." For instance: "The question of whether any white people should hold and exploit a tropical country with native labor as is now being done is going to become one of the burning questions. . . ." Segregation or wholesale deportation are poor remedies. Assimilation of the few by the many is more logical. But race friction usually hinders assimilation. Thus closes the vicious circle making another war inevitable. One Thompson remedy for population troubles: the dissemination of birth control information among growing peoples such as Italians, Chinese, East Indians.

Author Thompson, 42, born at Weeping Water, Neb., turned carpenter, then college professor. In 1923 he visited the Orient on the yacht of the late Edward Wyllis Scripps, founder of the Scripps-Howard newschain, through whom he became Director of the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems.