A rejoinder to Mr. Petersen

Abstract

The historian's province covers all of time past and the recent is as fair game as the remote, but equally his responsibility remains constant and if he is to extend his writings from chronicling events and opinions to evaluating them he must do so within the historical context. No historian would criticise Columbus for having set out without equipping himself with accurate charts of the Western Atlantic. Yet it is this kind of attitude which colours much of the recent criticism of inter-war demographic studies, and which is also visible in Mr. Petersen's paper in this journal.¹ It is the purpose of this note to suggest that the British demographers of the 1930's castigated by him were in fact curiously perspicacious and that their prognosis was, when we consider the scarcity of their source data, a very fair and critical appreciation of the portents. If to-day we may avoid some of their methods and some of their mistakes, it is for the same reason that we now have maps of lands that once were beyond the ends of the earth.²