of returning, under more favourable auspices, to the unrealised ideal
of the Middle Ages--an agreement among the nations of Europe to live
amicably under one system of international law and right, binding upon
all, and with the consciousness of an intellectual and spiritual unity
deeper than political divisions. 'The nations are the citizens of
humanity,' said Mazzini; and so they ought to be. Some of the omens are
favourable. Militarism has dug its own grave. The great powers increased
their armaments till the burden became insupportable, and have now
rushed into bankruptcy in the hope of shaking it off. In prehistoric
times the lords of creation were certain gigantic lizards, protected by
massive armour-plates which could only be carried by a creature thirty
to sixty feet long. Then they died, when neither earth, air, nor water
could support them any longer. Such must be the end of the European
nations, unless they learn wisdom. The lesson will be brought home to
them by Transatlantic competition. The United States of America had
already, before this war, an initial advantage over the disunited states
of Europe, amounting to at least 10 per cent. on every contract; after
the war this advantage will be doubled. It remains to be seen whether
the next generation will honour the debts which we are piling up.
Disraeli used to complain of what he called 'Dutch finance,' which
consists in 'mortgaging the industry of the future to protect property
in the present.' Pitt paid for the great war of a hundred years ago in
this manner; after a century we are still groaning under the burden of
his loans. We may hear more of the iniquity of 'Dutch finance' when the
democracies of the next generation have a chance of repudiating
obligations which, as they will say, they did not contract. However that
may be, international rivalry is plainly very bad business; and there
are great possibilities in the Hague Tribunal, if, and only if, the
signatories to the conference bind themselves to use force against a
recalcitrant member. The conduct of Germany in this war has shown that
public opinion is powerless to restrain a nation which feels strong
enough to defy it.
Another cause which may give patriots leisure to turn their thoughts
away from war's alarms is that the 'swarming' period of the European
races is coming to an end. The unparalleled increase of population in
the first three quarters of the 19th century has been followed by a
progressive decrease in the birth-rate, which will begin to tell upon
social conditions when the reduction in the death-rate, which has
hitherto kept pace with it, shall have reached its natural limit. Europe
with a stationary population will be in a much happier condition; and
problems of social reform can then be tackled with some hope of success.
Honourable emulation in the arts of life may then take the place of
desperate competition and antagonism. Human lives will begin to have a
positive value, and we may even think it fair to honour our saviours
more than our destroyers. The effects of past follies will then soon be
effaced; for nations recover much more quickly from wars than from
internal disorders. External injuries are rapidly cured; but 'those
wounds heal ill that men do give themselves.' The greatest obstacle to
progress is not man's inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency
to parasitism. The true patriot will keep his eye fixed on this, and
will dread as the state's worst enemies those citizens who at the top
and bottom of the social scale have no other ambition than to hang on
and suck the life-blood of the nation. Great things may be hoped from
the new science of eugenics, when it has passed out of its tentative and
experimental stage.
In the distant future we may reasonably hope that patriotism will be a
sentiment like the loyalty which binds a man to his public school and
university, an affection purged of all rancour and jealousy, a stimulus
to all honourable conduct and noble effort, a part of the poetry of
life. It is so already to many of us, and has been so to the noblest
Englishmen since we have had a literature. If Henry V's speech at
Agincourt is the splendid gasconade of a royal freebooter, there is no
false ring in the scene where John of Gaunt takes leave of his banished
son; nor in Sir Walter Scott's 'Breathes there a man with soul so dead,'
etc. 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her
cunning.' We cannot quite manage to substitute London for Zion in
singing psalms, though there are some in England--Eton, Winchester,
Oxford, Cambridge--which do evoke these feelings. These emotions of
loyalty and devotion are by no means to be checked or despised. They
have an infinite potency for good. In spiritual things there is no
conflict between intensity and expansion. The deepest sympathy is,
potentially, also the widest. He who loves not his home and country
which he has seen, how shall he love humanity in general which he has
not seen? There are, after all, few emotions of which one has less
reason to be ashamed than the little lump in the throat which the
Englishman feels when he first catches sight of the white cliffs of
Dover.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] In his _Introduction to Social Psychology_.
[9] The reasons of their irresistible strength have been
explained in a most brilliant manner by Dr. Peisker in the
first volume of the 'Cambridge Medieval History.'
THE BIRTH-RATE
(1917)
The numbers of every species are determined, not by the procreative
power of its members, which always greatly exceeds the capacity of the
earth to support a progeny increasing in geometrical progression, but by
two factors, the activity of its enemies and the available supply of
food. Those species which survive owe their success in the struggle for
existence mainly to one of two qualities, enormous fertility or parental
care. The female cod spawns about 6,000,000 eggs at a time, of which at
most one-third--perhaps much less--are afterwards fertilised. An
infinitesimal proportion of these escapes being devoured by fish or
fowl. An insect-eating bird is said to require for its support about
250,000 insects a year, and the number of such birds must amount to
thousands of millions. As a rule there is a kind of equilibrium between
the forces of destruction and of reproduction. If a species is nearly
exterminated by its enemies, those enemies lose their food-supply and
perish themselves. In some sheltered spot the survivors of the victims
remain and increase till they begin to send out colonies again. In some
species, such as the mice in La Plata, and the beasts and birds which
devour them, there is an alternation of increase and decrease, to be
accounted for in this way. But permanent disturbances of equilibrium
sometimes occur. The rabbit in Australia, having found a virgin soil,
multiplied for some time almost up to the limit of its natural fertility
and is firmly established on that continent. The brown rat (some say)
has exterminated our black rat and the Maori rat in New Zealand. The
microbe of the terrible disease which the crews of Columbus brought back
to Europe, after causing a devastating epidemic at the end of the
fifteenth century, established a kind of _modus vivendi_ with its hosts,
and has remained as a permanent scourge in Europe. Other microbes, like
those of cholera and plague, emigrate from the lands where they are
endemic, like a horde of Tartars, and after slaying all who are
susceptible disappear from inanition. The draining of the fens has
driven the anopheles mosquito from England, and our countrymen no longer
suffer from 'ague.' Cleanlier habits are banishing the louse and its
accompaniment typhus fever.
Fertility and care for offspring seem as a rule to vary inversely. The
latter is the path of biological progress, and is characteristic of all
viviparous animals. That any degree of parental attention is
incompatible with the immense fecundity of the lower organisms needs no
demonstration. Such fertility is not necessary to keep up the numbers of
the higher species, which find abundant food in the swarming progeny of
the lower types, and are not themselves exposed to wholesale slaughter.
Speaking of fishes, Sutherland says:
Of species that exhibit no sort of parental care, the
average of forty-nine gives 1,040,000 eggs to a female each
year; while among those which make nests or any apology for
nests the number is only about 10,000. Among those which
have any protective tricks, such as carrying the eggs in
pouches or attached to the body, or in the mouth, the
average number is under 1000; while among those whose care
takes the form of uterine or quasi-uterine gestation which
brings the young into the world alive, an average of 56 eggs
is quite sufficient.
Man is no exception to these laws. His evolution has been steadily in
the direction of diminishing fertility and increasing parental care.
This does not necessarily imply that the modern European loves his
children better than the savage loves his. It is grim necessity, not
want of affection, which determines the treatment of children by their
parents over a great part of the world, and through the greater part of
human history. The homeless hunters, who represent the lowest stage of
savagery, are now almost extinct. In these tribes the woman has to
follow the man carrying her baby. Under such conditions the chances of
rearing a large family are small indeed. Very different is the life of
the grassland nomads, who roam over the Arabian plateau and the steppes
of Central Asia. These tribes, who really live as the parasites of their
flocks and herds, depending on them entirely for subsistence, often
multiply rapidly. Their typical unit is the great patriarchal family, in
which the _sheikh_ may have scores of children by different mothers.
These children soon begin to earn their keep, and are taken care of. If,
however, the patriarch so chooses, Hagar with her child is cast adrift,
to find her way back to her own people, if she can. The grasslands are
usually almost as full as they can hold. A period of drought, or
pressure by rivals, in former times sent a horde of these hardy
shepherds on a raid into the nearest settled province; and if, like the
Tartars, they were mounted, they usually killed, plundered, and
conquered wherever they went, until the discovery of gunpowder saved
civilisation from the recurrent peril of barbarian inroads. Barbarians
of another type, hunters with fixed homes, seldom increase rapidly,
partly because the dangers of forest-life for young children are much
greater than on the steppe.
In the primitive river-valley civilisations, such as Egypt and
Babylonia, the conditions of increase were so favourable that a dense
population soon began to press upon the means of subsistence. In Egypt
the remedy was a centralised government which could undertake great
irrigation works and intensive cultivation. In Babylonia, for the first
time in history, foreign trade was made to support a larger population
than the land itself could maintain. There was little or no infanticide
in Babylonia, but the death-rate in these steaming alluvial plains has
always been very high.
When we turn to poor and mountainous countries like Greece, the
conditions are very different. It was an old belief among the Hellenes
that in the days before the Trojan War 'the world was too full of
people.' The increase was doubtless made possible by the trade which
developed in the Minoan period, but the sources of food-supply were
liable to be interfered with. Hence came the necessity for active
colonisation, which lasted from the eighth to the sixth century B.C.
This period of expansion came to an end when all the available sites
were occupied. In the sixth century the Greeks found themselves headed
off, in the west by Phoenicians and Etruscans, in the east by the
Persian Empire. The problem of over-population was again pressing upon
them. Incessant civil wars between Hellenes kept the numbers down to
some extent; but Greek battles were not as a rule very bloody, and every
healthy nation has a surprising capacity of making good the losses
caused by war. The first effect of the check to emigration was that the
old ideal of the 'self-sufficient life,' which meant the practice of
mixed farming, had to be partially abandoned. The most flourishing
States, and especially Athens, had to take to manufactures, which they
exchanged for the food-products of the Balkan States and South Russia.
The result was an increasing urbanisation, and a new population of free
'resident aliens.' Conservatives hated this change and wished to revive
the old ideal of a small self-supporting State, with a maximum of 20,000
or 30,000 citizens. Plato, in his latest work, the 'Laws,' wishes his
model city to be not too near the sea, the proximity of which 'fills the
streets with merchants and shopkeepers, and begets dishonesty in the
souls of men.' On the other side Isocrates, the most far-seeing of
Athenian politicians, realised that the day of small city-states was
over, and that the limited, 'self-sufficient' community would not long
maintain its independence. He urged his countrymen to pursue a policy of
peaceful penetration in Western Asia, as the Greeks were soon to do
under the successors of Alexander. But the prejudice against
industrialism was very strong. Greece in the fifth century remained a
poor country; her exports were not more than enough to pay for the food
of her existing population; and that population had to be artificially
restricted. The Greeks were an exceptionally healthy and long-lived
race; their great men for the most part lived to ages which have no
parallel until the nineteenth century. The infant death-rate from
natural causes may have been rather high, as it is in modern Greece, but
it was augmented by systematic infanticide. The Greek father had an
absolute right to decide whether a new-comer was to be admitted to the
family. In Ephesus alone of Greek cities a parent was compelled to prove
that he was too poor to rear a child before he was allowed to get rid of
it.[10] Even Hesiod, centuries earlier, advises a father not to bring up
more than one son, and daughters were sacrificed more frequently than
sons. The usual practice was to expose the infant in a jar; anyone who
thought it worth while might rescue the baby and bring it up as a slave.
But this was not often done. At Gela, in Sicily, there are 233 'potted'
burials in an excavated graveyard, out of a total of 570.[11] The
proportion of female infants exposed must have been very large. The
evidence of literature is supported by such letters as this from a
husband at Oxyrhynchus: 'When--good luck to you--your child is born, if
it is a male, let it live; if a female, expose it.'[12] Besides
infanticide, abortion was freely practised, and without blame.[13] The
Greek citizen married rather late; but as his bride was usually in her
'teens this would not affect the birth-rate. Nor need we attach much
importance, as a factor in checking population, to the characteristic
Greek vice, nor to prostitution, which throughout antiquity was
incredibly cheap and visited by no physical penalty. As for slaves,
Xenophon recommends that they should be allowed to have children as a
reward for good conduct.[14]
A rapid decline in population set in under the successors of Alexander.
Polybius ascribes it to selfishness and a high standard of comfort,
which is doubtless true of the upper and middle classes;[15] but the
depopulation of rural Greece can hardly be so accounted for. Perhaps
the forests were cut down, and the rainfall diminished. It was the
general impression that the soil was far less productive than formerly.
The decay of the Hellenic race was accelerated after the Roman conquest,
until the old stock became almost extinct. This disappearance of the
most gifted race that ever inhabited our planet is one of the strangest
catastrophes of history, and is full of warnings for the modern
sociologist. Industrial slavery, indifference to parenthood, and
addiction to club-life were certainly three of the main causes, unless
we prefer to regard the two last as symptoms of hopelessness about the
future.
The same disease fell upon Italy, and was coincident not with the
murderous war against Hannibal and the subsequent campaigns, costly
though they were, in Spain, Syria, and Macedonia, but with the
Hellenisation of social life. Lucan, under Nero, complains that the
towns have lost more than half their inhabitants, and that the
country-side lies waste. Under Titus it was estimated that, whereas
Italy under the Republic could raise nearly 800,000 soldiers, that
number was now reduced by one-half. Marcus Aurelius planted a large
tribe of Marcomanni on unoccupied land in Italy. In the fourth century
Bologna, Modena, Piacenza, and many other towns in North Italy were in
ruins. The land of the Volscians and Aequians, once densely populated,
was a desert even in Livy's time. Samnium remained the wilderness that
Sulla had left it; and Apulia was a lonely sheep-walk.
The causes of this depopulation have been often discussed, both in
antiquity and in our own day. Slavery, infanticide, celibacy, wars and
massacres, large estates, and pestilence have all been named as causes;
but I am inclined to think that all these influences together are
insufficient to account for so rapid a decline. The toll of war was
lighter by far than in periods when the population was rising;
infectious disease (unless we suppose, as some have suggested, that
malaria became for the first time endemic under the Roman domination)
invaded the empire in occasional and destructive epidemics, but a
healthy population recovers from pestilence, as from war, with great
rapidity. The large grazing ranches displaced farms because corn-growing
in Italy was unprofitable, but there was a large supply of grain from
Sicily, Africa, and other districts. Slavery undoubtedly accounts for a
great deal. This institution is excessively wasteful of human life; it
is never possible to keep up the numbers of slaves without slave-hunting
in the countries from which they come. And we must remember that ancient
civilisation was almost entirely urban. The barbarians found ample waste
lands between the towns, which they did not as a rule care to visit,
probably because those who did so soon fell victims to microbic
diseases. The sanitary condition of ancient cities was better than in
the Middle Ages; but the death-rate was probably too high to permit of
any increase in the population. But after admitting that all these
causes were operative, it may be that we shall be obliged to acknowledge
also a psychological factor. If a nation has no hopes for the future, if
it is even doubtful whether life is worth living, if it is disposed to
withdraw from the struggle for existence and to meet the problems of
life in a temper of passive resignation, it will not regard children as
a heritage and gift that cometh from the Lord, but rather as an
encumbrance. That such was the temper of the later Roman Empire may be
gathered not only from the literature, which is singularly devoid of
hopefulness and enterprise, but from the rapid spread of monasticism and
eremitism in this period. The prevalence of this world-weariness of
course needs explanation, and the cause is rather obscure. It does not
seem to be connected with unfavourable external conditions, but rather
with a racial exhaustion akin to senile decay in the individual. But
there is no real analogy between the life of an individual and that of a
nation, and it would be very rash to insist on the hypothesis of racial
decay, which perhaps has no biological basis.
The influence of Christianity on population is very difficult to
estimate. Nothing is more unscientific than to collect the ethical
precepts and practices of nations which profess the Christian religion,
and to label them as 'the results of Christianity.' The historian of
religion would indeed be faced by a strange task if he were compelled to
trace the moral ideals of Simeon Stylites and of Howard the
philanthropist, of Francis of Assisi and Oliver Cromwell, of Thomas
Aquinas and Thomas à Becket, to a common source. The only ethical and
social principles which can properly be called Christian are those which
can be proved to have their root in the teaching and example of the
Founder of Christianity. But the Gospel of Christ was a product of
Jewish soil. It is historically connected with the Jewish prophetic
tradition, which it carried to its fullest development and presented in
an universalised and spiritualised form. Its social teaching consists
chiefly of general principles which have to be applied to conditions
unlike those contemplated by its first disciples, who were under the
influence of the apocalyptic expectations prevalent at the time. Jewish
morality was in its origin the morality of a tribe of nomad Bedouins;
and we have seen that infant life is held sacred by these peoples.
Marriage is regarded as a duty, and childlessness as a misfortune or a
disgrace. The forward look, characteristic of the Hebrews from the
first, made every Jew desirous to leave descendants who might witness
happier times, and one of whom might even be the promised Deliverer of
his people. No Hebrew of either sex was allowed to be a servant of vice;
abnormal practices, though screened by Canaanite religion, were far less
common than in Greece or Italy. To this wholesome morality Christianity
added the doctrines of the value, in the sight of God, of every human
life, and of the sanctity of the body as the 'temple of God.' To the
Pagans, the continence of the Christians was, next to their affection
for each other, their most remarkable characteristic. From the first,
the new religion set itself firmly against infanticide and abortion, and
won one of its most signal moral triumphs in driving underground and
greatly diminishing homosexual vice. Its encouragement of celibacy,
especially for those who followed the 'religious' vocation, was an
offset to its healthy influence on family life, and ultimately, as
Galton has shown, worked great mischief by sterilising for centuries
many of the gentlest and noblest in each generation; but this tendency
was adventitious to Christianity, and would never have taken root on
Palestinian soil. The cult of virginity has lasted on, with much else
that belongs to the later Hellenistic age, in Catholicism.
In the Middle Ages the population question slumbered. The miserable
chaos into which the old civilisation sank after the barbarian
invasions, the orgies of massacre and plunder, the almost total oblivion
of medical science, and the pestiferous condition of the medieval walled
town, which could be smelt miles away, averted any risk of
over-population. Families were very large, but the majority of the
children died. Millions were swept away by the Black Death; millions
more by the Crusades. Such books as that of Luchaire, on France in the
reign of Philip Augustus, bring vividly before us the horrible condition
of society in feudal times, and explain amply the sparsity of the
population.
The early modern period contains another notable example of a sudden and
unaccountable decline in population. The scene is Spain, which, after
playing an active and very prominent part in the world's history, sank
quickly into the lethargy from which it has never recovered. It may be
noted that here, as in the case of Rome, the decay of population and
energy followed a great influx of plundered wealth. On the other hand,
the increase of population in our newly-planted North American colonies
must have been extremely rapid for two or three generations.