civilization is thus evolved is a selfish and immoral process. To
procreate large families, it is said, is unselfish and moral, as well as
a patriotic, even a religious duty. This assumption, we now find, is a
little too hasty and is even the reverse of the truth; it is necessary
to take into consideration the totality of the social phenomena
accompanying a high birth-rate, more especially under the conditions of
town life. A community in which children are born rapidly is necessarily
in an unstable position; it is growing so quickly that there is
insufficient time for the conditions of life to be equalized. The state
of ill-adjustment is chronic; the pressure is lifted from off the
natural impulse of procreation, but is increased on all the conditions
under which the impulse is exerted. There is increased overcrowding,
increased filth, increased disease, increased death. It can never
happen, in modern times, that the readjustment of the conditions of life
can be made to keep pace with a high birth-rate. It is sufficient if we
consider the case of English towns, of London in particular, during the
period when British prosperity was most rapidly increasing, and the
birth-rate nearing its maximum, in the middle of the great Victorian
epoch, of which Englishmen are, for many reasons, so proud. It was
certainly not an age lacking in either energy or philanthropy; yet, when
we read the memorable report which Chadwick wrote in 1842, on the
_Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain_, or
the minute study of Bethnal Green which Gavin published in 1848 as a
type of the conditions prevailing in English towns, we realize that the
magnificence of this epoch was built up over circles of Hell to which
the imagination of Dante never attained.
As reproductive activity dies down, social conditions become more
stable, a comparatively balanced state of adjustment tends to be
established, insanitary surroundings can be bettered, disease
diminished, and the death-rate lowered. How much may thus be
accomplished we realize when we compare the admirably precise and
balanced pages in which Charles Booth, in the concluding volumes of his
great work, has summarized his survey of London, with the picture
presented by Chadwick and Gavin half a century earlier. Ugly and painful
as are many of the features of this modern London, the vision which is,
on the whole, evoked is that of a community which has attained
self-consciousness, which is growing into some faint degree of harmony
with its environment, and is seeking to gain the full amount of the
satisfaction which an organized urban life can yield. Booth, who
appears to have realized the significance of a decreased fertility in
the attainment of this progress, hopes for a still greater fall in the
birth-rate; and those who seek to restore the birth-rate of half a
century ago are engaged on a task which would be criminal if it were not
based on ignorance, and which is, in any case, fatuous.
The whole course of zoological evolution reveals a constantly
diminishing reproductive activity and a constantly increasing
expenditure of care on the offspring thus diminished in number.[141] Fish
spawn their ova by the million, and it is a happy chance if they become
fertilized, a highly unlikely chance that more than a very small
proportion will ever attain maturity. Among the mammals, however, the
female may produce but half a dozen or fewer offspring at a time, but
she lavishes so much care upon them that they have a very fair chance
of all reaching maturity. In man, in so far as he refrains from
returning to the beast and is true to the impulse which in him becomes a
conscious process of civilization, the same movement is carried forward.
He even seeks to decrease still further the number of his offspring by
voluntary effort, and at the same time to increase their quality and
magnify their importance.[142]
When in human families, especially under civilized conditions, we see
large families we are in the presence of a reversion to the tendencies
that prevail among lower organisms. Such large families may probably be
regarded, as Näcke suggests, as constituting a symptom of degeneration.
It is noteworthy that they usually occur in the pathological and
abnormal classes, among the insane, the feeble-minded, the criminal, the
consumptive, the alcoholic, etc.[143]
This tendency of the birth-rate to fall with the growth of social
stability is thus a tendency which is of the very essence of
civilization. It represents an impulse which, however deliberate it may
be in the individual, may, in the community, be looked upon as an
instinctive effort to gain more complete control of the conditions of
life, and to grapple more efficiently with the problems of misery and
disease and death. It is not only, as is sometimes supposed, during the
past century that the phenomena may be studied. We have a remarkable
example some centuries earlier, an example which very clearly
illustrates the real nature of the phenomena. The city of Geneva,
perhaps first of European cities, began to register its births, deaths,
and marriages from the middle of the sixteenth century. This alone
indicates a high degree of civilization; and at that time, and for some
succeeding centuries, Geneva was undoubtedly a very highly civilized
city. Its inhabitants really were the "elect," morally and
intellectually, of French Protestantism. In many respects it was a model
city, as Gray noted when he reached it in the course of his travels in
the middle of the eighteenth century. These registers of Geneva show, in
a most illuminating manner, how extreme fertility at the outset,
gradually gave place, as civilization progressed, to a very low
fertility, with fewer and later marriages, a very low death-rate, and a
state of general well-being in which the births barely replaced the
deaths.
After Protestant Geneva had lost her pioneering place in civilization,
it was in France, the land which above all others may in modern times
claim to represent the social aspects of civilization, that the same
tendency most conspicuously appeared. But all Europe, as well as all the
English-speaking lands outside Europe, is now following the lead of
France. In a paper read before the Paris Society of Anthropology a few
years ago, Emile Macquart showed clearly, by a series of ingenious
diagrams, that whereas, fifty years ago, the condition of the birth-rate
in France diverged widely from that prevailing in the other chief
countries of Europe, the other countries are now rapidly following in
the same road along which France has for a century been proceeding
slowly, and are constantly coming closer to her, England closest of all.
In the past, proposals have from time to time been made in France to
interfere with the progress of this downward movement of the
birth-rate--proposals that were sufficiently foolish, for neither in
France nor elsewhere will the individual allow the statistician to
interfere officiously in a matter which he regards as purely intimate
and private. But the real character of this tendency of the birth-rate,
as an essential phenomenon of civilization, with which neither moralist
nor politician can successfully hope to interfere, is beginning to be
realized in France. Azoulay, in summing up the discussion after
Macquart's paper[144] had been read at the Society of Anthropology,
pointed out that "nations must inevitably follow the same course as
social classes, and the more the mass of these social classes becomes
civilized, the more the nation's birth-rate falls; therefore there is
nothing to be done legally and administratively." And another member
added: "Except to applaud."
It is probably too much to hope that so sagacious a view will at once be
universally adopted. The United States and the great English colonies,
for instance, find it difficult to realize that they are not really new
countries, but branches of old countries, and already nearing maturity
when they began their separate lives. They are not at the beginning of
two thousand years of slow development, such as we have passed through,
but at the end of it, with us, and sometimes even a little ahead of us.
It is therefore natural and inevitable that, in a matter in which we are
moving rapidly, Massachusetts and Ontario and New South Wales and New
Zealand should have moved still more rapidly, so rapidly indeed, that
they have themselves failed to perceive that their real natural increase
and the manner in which it is attained place them in this matter at the
van of civilization. These things are, however, only learnt slowly. We
may be sure that the fundamental and complex character of the phenomena
will never be obvious to our fussy little politicians, so apt to
advocate panaceas which have effects quite opposite to those they
desire. But, whatever politicians may wish to do or to leave undone, it
is well to remember that, of the various ideals the world holds, there
are some that lie on the path of our social progress, and others that do
not there lie. We may properly exercise such wisdom as we possess by
utilizing the ideals which are before us, serenely neglecting many
others which however precious they may once have seemed, no longer form
part of the stage of civilization we are now moving towards.
IV
What are the ideals of the stage of civilization we of the Western world
are now moving towards? We have here pushed as far as need be the
analysis of that declining birth-rate which has caused so much anxiety
to those amongst us who can only see narrowly and see superficially. We
have found that, properly understood, there is nothing in it to evoke
our pessimism. On the contrary, we have seen that, in the opinion of the
most distinguished authorities, the energy with which we move in our
present direction, through the exercise of an ever finer economy in
life, may be regarded as a "measure of civilization" in the important
sphere of vital statistics. As we now leave the question, some may ask
themselves whether this concomitant decline in birth-rates and
death-rates may not possibly have a still wider and more fundamental
meaning as a measure of civilization.
We have long been accustomed to regard the East as a spiritual world in
which the finer ends of living were counted supreme, and the merely
materialistic aspects of life, dissociated from the aims of religion and
of art, were trodden under foot. Our own Western world we have humbly
regarded as mainly absorbed in a feverish race for the attainment, by
industry and war, of the satisfaction of the impulses of reproduction
and nutrition, and the crudely material aggrandizement of which those
impulses are the symbol. A certain outward idleness, a semi-idleness, as
Nietzsche said, is the necessary condition for a real religious life,
for a real æsthetic life, for any life on the spiritual plane. The
noisy, laborious, pushing, "progressive" life we traditionally associate
with the West is essentially alien to the higher ends of living, as has
been intuitively recognized and acted on by all those among us who have
sought to pursue the higher ends of living. It was so that the
nineteenth-century philosophers of Europe, of whom Schopenhauer was in
this matter the extreme type, viewed the matter. But when we seek to
measure the tendency of the chief countries of the West, led by France,
England, and Germany, and the countries of the East led by Japan, in the
light of this strictly measurable test of vital statistics, may we not,
perhaps, trace the approach of a revolutionary transposition? Japan,
entering on the road we have nearly passed through, in which the
perpetual clash of a high birth-rate and a high death-rate involves
social disorder and misery, has flung to the winds the loftier ideals it
once pursued so successfully and has lost its fine æsthetic perceptions,
its insight into the most delicate secrets of the soul.[145] And while
Japan, certainly to-day voicing the aspirations of the East, is
concerned to become a great military and industrial power, we in the
West are growing weary of war, and are coming to look upon commerce as a
necessary routine no longer adequate to satisfy the best energies of
human beings. We are here moving towards the fine quiescence involved by
a delicate equipoise of life and of death; and this economy sets free an
energy we are seeking to expend in a juster social organization, and in
the realization of ideals which until now have seemed but the
imagination of idle dreamers. Asia, as an anonymous writer has recently
put it, is growing crude, vulgar, and materialistic; Europe, on the
other hand, is growing to loathe its own past grossness. "London may yet
be the spiritual capital of the world, while Asia--rich in all that gold
can buy and guns can give, lord of lands and bodies, builder of railways
and promulgator of police regulations, glorious in all material
glories--postures, complacent and obtuse, before a Europe content in the
possession of all that matters,"[146] Certainly, we are not there yet, but
the old Earth has seen many stranger and more revolutionary changes than
this. England, as this writer reminds us, was once a tropical forest.
FOOTNOTES:
[90] It must be understood that, from the present point of view, the term
"Anglo-Saxon" covers the peoples of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, as
well as of England.
[91] The decline of the French birth-rate has been investigated in a
Lyons thesis by Salvat, _La Dépopulation de la France_, 1903.
[92] The latest figures are given in the Annual Reports of the
Registrar-General for England and Wales.
[93] Newsholme and Stevenson, "Decline of Human Fertility as shown by
corrected Birth-rates," _Journal of the Royal Statistical Society_,
1906.
[94] Werner Sombart, _International Magazine_, December, 1907.
[95] A.W. Flux, "Urban Vital Statistics in England and Germany," _Journ.
Statist. Soc._, March, 1910.
[96] German infantile mortality, Böhmert states ("Die
Säuglingssterblichkeit in Deutschland und ihre Ursachen," _Die Neue
Generation_, March, 1908), is greater than in any European country,
except Russia and Hungary, about 50 per cent greater than in England,
France, Belgium, or Holland. The infantile mortality has increased in
Germany, as usually happens, with the increased employment of women,
and, largely from this cause, has nearly doubled in Berlin in the course
of four years, states Lily Braun (_Mutterschutz_, 1906, Heft I, p. 21);
but even on this basis it is only 22 per cent in the English textile
industries, as against 38 per cent in the German textile industries.
[97] In England the marriage-rate fell rather sharply in 1875, and showed
a slight tendency to rise about 1900 (G. Udny Yule, "On the Changes in
the Marriage-and Birth-rates in England and Wales," _Journal of the
Statistical Society_, March, 1906). On the whole there has been a real
though slight decline. The decline has been widespread, and is most
marked in Australia, especially South Australia. There has, however,
been a rise in the marriage-rate in Ireland, France, Austria,
Switzerland, Germany, and especially Belgium. The movement for decreased
child-production would naturally in the first place involve decreased
marriage, but it is easy to understand that when it is realized the
marriage is not necessarily followed by conception this motive for
avoiding marriage loses its force, and the marriage-rate rises.
[98] _Medicine_, February, 1904.
[99] Davidson, "The Growth of the French-Canadian Race," _Annals of the
American Academy_, September, 1896.
[100] T.A. Coghlan, _The Decline of the Birth-rate of New South Wales_,
1903. The New South Wales statistics are specially valuable as the
records contain many particulars (such as age of parents, period since
marriage, and number of children) not given in English or most other
records.
[101] C. Hamburger, "Kinderzahl und Kindersterblichkeit," _Die Neue
Generation_, August, 1909.
[102] Looked at in another way, it may be said that if a natural increase,
as ascertained by subtracting the death-rate from the birth-rate, of 10
to 15 per cent be regarded as normal, then, taking so far as possible
the figures for 1909, the natural increase of England and Scotland, of
Germany, of Italy, of Austria and Hungary, of Belgium, is normal; the
natural increase of New South Wales, of Victoria, of South Australia, of
New Zealand, is abnormally high (though in new countries such increase
may not be undesirable) while the natural increase of France, of Spain,
and of Ireland is abnormally low. Such a method of estimation, of
course, entirely leaves out of account the question of the social
desirability of the process by which the normal increase is secured.
[103] Johannsen, _Janus_, 1905.
[104] Rubin, "A Measure of Civilization," _Journal of the Royal
Statistical Society_, March, 1897. "The lowest stage of civilization,"
he points out, "is to go forward blindly, which in this connection means
to bring into the world a great number of children which must, in great
proportion, sink into the grave. The next stage of civilization is to
see the danger and to keep clear of it. The highest stage of
civilization is to see the danger and overcome it." Europe in the past
and various countries in the present illustrate the first stage; France
illustrates the second stage; the third stage is that towards which we
are striving to move to-day.
[105] Baines, "The Recent Growth of Population in Western Europe,"
_Journal of the Royal Statistical Society_, December, 1909.
[106] Various facts and references are given by Havelock Ellis, _The
Nationalization of Health_, chap. XIV.
[107] These are the figures given by the chief Japanese authority,
Professor Takano, _Journal of the Royal Statistical Society_, July,
1910, p. 738.
[108] E.A. Ross, "The Race Fibre of the Chinese," _Popular Science
Monthly_, October, 1911. According to another competent and fairly
concordant estimate, the infantile death-rate of China is 90 per cent.
Of the female infants, probably about 1 in 10 is intentionally
destroyed.
[109] J.J. Matignon, "La Mère et l'Enfant en Chine," _Archives
d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, October to November, 1909.
[110] Arsène Dumont, for instance, points out (_Dépopulation et
Civilization_, p. 116) that the very early marriages and the reckless
fertility of the Chinese cannot fail to cease as soon as the people
adopt European ways.
[111] The confident estimates of the future population of the world which
are from time to time put forward on the basis of the present birth-rate
are quite worthless. A brilliantly insubstantial fabric of this kind, by
B.L. Putnam Weale (_The Conflict of Colour_, 1911), has been justly
criticized by Professor Weatherley (_Popular Science Monthly_, November,
1911).
[112] It is sometimes convenient to use the term "Neo-Malthusianism" to
indicate the voluntary limitation of the family, but it must always be
remembered that Malthus would not have approved of Neo-Malthusianism,
and that Neo-Malthusian practices have nothing to do with the theory of
Malthus. They would not be affected could that theory be conclusively
proved or conclusively disproved.
[113] We even find the demand that bachelors and spinsters shall be taxed.
This proposal has been actually accepted (1911) by the Landtag of the
little Principality of Reuss, which proposes to tax bachelors and
spinsters over thirty years of age. Putting aside the arguable questions
as to whether a State is entitled to place such pressure on its
citizens, it must be pointed out that it is not marriage but the child
which concerns the State. It is possible to have children without
marriage, and marriage does not ensure the procreation of children.
Therefore it would be more to the point to tax the childless. In that
case, it would be necessary to remit the tax in the case of unmarried
people with children, and to levy it in the case of married people
without children. But it has further to be remembered that not all
persons are fitted to have sound children, and as unsound children are a
burden and not a benefit to the State, the State ought to reward rather
than to fine those conscientious persons who refrain from procreation
when they are too poor, or with too defective a heredity, to be likely
to produce, or to bring up, sound children. Moreover, some persons are
sterile, and thorough medical investigation would be required before
they could fairly be taxed. As soon as we begin to analyse such a
proposal we cannot fail to see that, even granting that the aim of such
legislation is legitimate and desirable, the method of attaining it is
thoroughly mischievous and unjustifiable.
[114] J.G. Engelmann, "Decreasing Fecundity," _Philadelphia Medical
Journal_, January 18, 1902.
[115] It has, further, been frequently denied that Neo-Malthusian
practices can affect Roman Catholic countries, since the Church is
precluded from approving of them. That is true. But it is also true
that, as Lagneau long since pointed out, the Protestants of Europe have
increased at more than double the annual rate of the Catholics, though
this relationship has now ceased to be exact. Dumont states
(_Dépopulation et Civilisation_, chap. XVIII) that there is not the
slightest reason to suppose that (apart from the question of poverty)
the faithful have more children than the irreligious; moreover, in
dealing with its more educated members, it is not the policy of the
Church to make indiscreet inquiries (see Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the
Psychology of Sex_, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," p. 590). A
Catholic bishop is reported to have warned his clergy against referring
in their Lent sermons to the voluntary restriction of conception,
remarking that an excess of rigour in this matter would cause the Church
to lose half her flock. The fall in the birth-rate is as marked in
Catholic as in Protestant countries; the Catholic communities in which
this is not the case are few, and placed in exceptional circumstances.
It must be remembered, moreover, that the Church enjoins celibacy on its
clergy, and that celibacy is practically a Malthusian method. It is not
easy while preaching practical Malthusianism to the clergy to spend much
fervour in preaching against practical Neo-Malthusianism to the laity.
[116] McLean, "The Declining Birth-rate in Australia," _International
Medical Journal of Australasia_, 1904.
[117] Thus in France the low birth-rate is associated with a high
infantile death-rate, which has not yet been appreciably influenced by
the movement of puericulture in France. In England also, at the end of
the last century, the declining birth-rate was accompanied by a rising
infantile death-rate, which is now, however, declining under the
influence of greater care of child-life.
[118] Sidney Webb, _Times_, October 11 and 16, 1906; also _Popular Science
Monthly_, 1906, p. 526.
[119] It is important to remember the distinction between "fecundity" and
"fertility." A woman who has one child has proved that she is fecund,
but has not proved that she is fertile. A woman with six children has
proved that she is not only fecund but fertile.
[120] They have been worked out by C.J. Lewis and J. Norman Lewis,
_Natality and Fecundity_, 1905.
[121] Newsholme and Stevenson, _op. cit._; Rubin and Westergaard,
_Statistik der Ehen_, 1890, p. 95.
[122] D. Heron, "On the Relation of Fertility in Man to Social Status,"
_Drapers' Company Research Memoirs_, No. 1, 1906.
[123] The recognition of this relationship must not be regarded as an
attempt unduly to narrow down the causation of changes in the
birth-rate. The great complexity of the causes influencing the
birth-rate is now fairly well recognized, and has, for instance, been
pointed out by Goldscheid, _Höherentwicklung und Menschenökonomie_, Vol.
I, 1911.
[124] In a paper read at the Brunswick Meeting of the German
Anthropological Society (_Correspondenzblatt_ of the Society, November,
1898); a great many facts concerning the fecundity of women among
savages in various parts of the world are brought together by Ploss and
Bartels, _Das Weib_, Vol I, chap. XXIV.