Autobiographical notes (August 24 1954 to December 31 1968)

I will now say something of what happened to me from and including my 80th birthday up to the end of 1968. I will begin with my 80th birthday.

December 30th., 1967 naturally began with showers of congratulatory letters and telegrams, and with some gifts. Among these, I will single out for mention a telegram from Bertrand Russell, a card of good wishes from the Kitchen Staff, and the gift of a beautiful silver penknife from Dr Husband.

At 4.20 pm, Bradfield fetched me in his car to his home, where I had tea with him and his wife and his son (“The Nord’). There was a superb cake with 80 candles, all of which I managed to blow out with one breath. (The practice of emitting hot air, of which philosophy so largely consists, had no doubt been a good training for me.)

The crowding of town and country, which has become greater and greater in recent years, depends on a combination of two factors, viz., (i) an increase in the number of individual inhabitants and (ii) the more rapid circulation of the existing population. The latter is due to a change in habits, and this has been rendered possible by the growth of motorised transport in the forms of private cars and of public conveyances, such as tourist or ‘sight-seeing’ omnibuses. In many of its effects, an increase in the rapidity of circulation of human beings is equivalent, as in the case of bank notes, to an increase in total numbers. It follows that the optimal maximum number of inhabitants in a country tends to be smaller as the average rate of circulation increases.

The permission of such immigration seems to me to have been a most flagrant example of culpable unforeseeing negligence on the part of those authorities which permitted it. That such a situation would result in severe internal tensions could have been foreseen by any reasonable person who had paused to reflect and who had considered what had happened and is continuing to happen in the United States; and those in authority who failed to foresee this, or, if they did, nevertheless permitted the kind of immigration which would inevitably lead to it, seem to me to be deserving of the most severe censure.