Land Settlement and Resource Development*

Abstract

Choice of Essentials IT may be assumed that well-organized peoples work within the limits of more or less deliberate choices of essentials as modified by the accidental and the unpredictable. To-day the people of the United States insist on a high standard of living as one choice among a number of essentials, because access to the world's wealth, or the power to create it, are now taken for granted, thanks chiefly to geographical discovery, the inventions that have grown out of modern physics and chemistry and the crop changes due to plant introductions and plant breeding. In Britain, the post-war standard of living has at times seemed as important as the War itself. Housing now has first priority in post-war plans, civilian supplies second, and manufacture for overseas trade third. It is held that the War will not seem won to the returning soldiers if decent places to live in are not assured.