Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1250

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Henry Pratt Fairchild, c/o Town Hall Club, 123 West 43rd Street, New York NY

June 12, 1939

Dear Doctor Fairchild:

As you possibly know, I am very much interested in trying to understand and analyze that natural phenomena which, in its simpler aspects, we call population and which so far as it possesses integrative relationships, we call Society.

Knowing of your professional and also, I hope, your esthetic interest in the same general field, I have thought for some time that it might interest you to read and, possibly, comment upon what I have thought fit to call “The Energy Concept of Population” which I have very tersely and, I hope, precisely outlined in about a thousand words under that caption. I am sending you one of these with my compliments and in the hope that it may disclose a ground of mutual interest upon a fundamental as well as a very absorbing topic.

A number of people more or less academic and sociological to whom I have shown this little piece, have very kindly commended it as being of fundamental value. One of the generalizations here, namely, that for a given quantity of population, that is, of life energy manifested in a population, reproduction is inverse to security and, hence, length of days, – this I have found somewhat obliquely referred to in your major work among those considerations which tend to limit or impair the validity of the Malthusian formulation. I am wondering if you will not find this generalization worthy of some of the development and significant application that I have given it here.

I suppose your academic duties and year are now drawing to a close, and you will soon be enjoying the recreation and refreshment that should follow upon a strenuous season. Wherever you go and whatever you are doing, it is my sincere hope that you will have a very happy vacation which I am sure your many services deserve.

                          Cordially yours,

Enc.