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The Meaning Of The Birth-Rate |
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Title: The Meaning Of The Birth-Rate Author: Havelock Ellis [More Titles by Ellis] The history of educated opinion concerning the birth-rate and its interpretation during the past seventy years is full of interest. The actual operative factors--natural, pathological, economic, social, and educational--in raising or lowering the birth-rate, are numerous and complicated, and it is difficult to determine exactly how large a part each factor plays. But without determining that at all, it is still very instructive to observe the evolution of popular intelligent opinion concerning the significance of a high and a low birth-rate. Popular opinion on this matter may be said to have passed through three stages. I am referring to Western Europe and more particularly to England and Germany, for it must be remembered that, in this matter, England and Germany are running a parallel course. England happens to be, on the whole, a little ahead, having reached its period of full expansion at a somewhat earlier period than Germany, but each people is pursuing the same course. In the first stage--let us say about the middle of the last century and the succeeding thirty years--the popular attitude was one of jubilant satisfaction in a high and rising birth-rate. There had been an immense expansion of industry. The whole world seemed nothing but a great field for the energetic and industrial nations to exploit. Workers were needed to keep up with the expansion and to keep down wages to a rate which would make industrial expansion easy; soldiers and armaments were needed to protect the movements of expansion. It seemed to the more exuberant spirits that a vast British Empire, or a mighty Pan-Germany, might be expected to cover the whole world. France, with its low and falling birth-rate, was looked down at with contempt as a decadent country inhabited by a degenerate population. No attempts to analyse the birth-rate, to ascertain what are really the biological, social, and economic accompaniments of a high birth-rate, made any impression on the popular mind. They were drowned in the general shout of exultation. That era of optimism was followed by a swift reaction. Towards 1880 the upward movement of the birth-rate began to be arrested; it soon began steadily to fall, as it is continuing to do to-day. In France it is falling slowly, in Italy more rapidly, in England and Prussia still more rapidly. As, however, the fall began earliest in France, the birth-rate is lower there than in the other countries named; for the same reason it is lower in England than in Prussia, although England stands in this respect at almost exactly the same distance from Prussia to-day as thirty years ago, the fall having occurred at the same rate in both countries. It is quite possible that in the future it may become more rapid in Prussia than in England, for the birth-rate of Berlin is lower than the birth-rate of London, and urbanisation is proceeding at a more rapid rate in Germany than in England. The realisation of such facts as these produced a period of pessimism which marks the second stage in this evolution. The great movement of expansion, which seemed to promise so much to ambitious nations anxious for world-power, was being arrested. Moreover, it began to be realised that the rapid growth of a community was accompanied by phenomena which had not been foreseen by the enthusiasts of the first period of optimism. They had argued--not indeed verbally but in effect--that the higher the birth-rate the cheaper labour and lives would become, and the cheaper labour and lives were, the easier it would be for a nation with its industrial armies and its military armies to get ahead of other rival nations. But they had not realised that, with the growth of popular education in modern democratic states, cheap labour is no longer willing to play without protest this humble and suffering part in national progress. The workers of the nations began to declare, clearly or obscurely, as they were able, that they no longer intended to sell their labour and their lives so cheaply. The rising birth-rate of the middle of the nineteenth century coincided with, and to a large extent doubtless produced, the organisation of labour, trades unions, the political activity of the working classes, Socialism, as well as the extreme forms of Anarchism and Syndicalism. It was when these movements began to attain a high degree of organisation and power that the birth-rate began to decline. Thus the pessimists of the second period were faced by horrors on both sides. On the one hand, they saw that the ever-increasing rate of human production which seemed to them the essential condition of national, social, even moral progress, had not only stopped but was steadily diminishing. On the other hand, they saw that, even in so far as it was maintained, it involved, under modern conditions, nothing but social commotion and economic disturbance. There are still many pessimists of this second period alive among us, and actively proclaiming their gospel of despair, alike in England and in Germany. But a new generation is growing up, and this question is now entering a third period. The new generation rejects alike the passive optimism of the first period and the passive pessimism of the second period. Its attitude is hopeful but it realises that mere hope is vain unless there is clear intellectual vision and unless there is individual and social action in accordance with that vision. It is to-day beginning to be seen that the old notion of progress by means of reckless multiplication is vain. It can only be effected at a ruinous cost of death, disease, poverty, and misery. We see this in the past history of Western Europe, as we still see it in the history of Russia. Any progress effected along that line--if "progress" it can be called--is now barred, for it is absolutely opposed to those democratic conceptions which are ever gaining greater influence among us. Moreover, we are now better able to analyse demographic phenomena and we are no longer satisfied with any crude statements regarding the birth-rate. We realise that they need interpretation. They have to be considered in relation to the sex-constitution and the age-constitution of the population, and, above all, they must be viewed in relation to the infant mortality-rate. The bad aspect of the French birth-rate is not so much its lowness as that it is accompanied by a high infantile mortality. The fact that the German birth-rate is higher than the English ceases to be a matter of satisfaction when it is realised that German infantile mortality is vastly greater than English. A high birth-rate is no sign of a high civilisation. But we are beginning to feel that a high infantile death-rate is a sign of a very inferior civilisation. A low birth-rate with a low infant death-rate not only produces the same increase in the population as a high birth-rate with the high death-rate, which always accompanies it (for there are no examples of, a high birth-rate with a low death-rate), but it produces it in a way which is far more worthy of our admiration in this matter than the way of Russia and China where opposite conditions prevail.[1] It used to be thought that small families were immoral. We now begin to see that it was the large families of old which were immoral. The excessive birth-rate of the early industrial period was directly stimulated by selfishness. There were no laws against child-labour; children were produced that they might be sent out, when little more than babies, to the factories and the mines to increase their parents' incomes. The diminished birth-rate has accompanied higher moral transformation. It has introduced a finer economy into life, diminished death, disease, and misery. It is indirectly, and even directly, improving the quality of the race. The very fact that children are born at longer intervals is not only beneficial to the mother's health, and therefore to the children's general welfare, but it has been proved to have a marked and prolonged influence on the physical development of children. Social progress, and a higher civilisation, we thus see, involve a reduced birth-rate and a reduced death-rate; the fewer the children born, the fewer the risks of death, disease, and misery to the children that are born. The fact that civilisation involves small families is clearly shown by the tendency of the educated and upper social classes to have small families. As the proletariat class becomes educated and elevated, disciplined to refinement and to foresight--as it were aristocratised--it also has small families. Civilisational progress is here in a line with biological progress. The lower organisms spawn their progeny in thousands, the higher mammals produce but one or two at a time. The higher the race the fewer the offspring. Thus diminution in quantity is throughout associated with augmentation in quality. Quality rather than quantity is the racial ideal now set before us, and it is an ideal which, as we are beginning to learn, it is possible to cultivate, both individually and socially. The day is coming, as Engel remarks in his useful book on _The Elements of Child Protection_, when fatherhood and motherhood will only be permitted to the strong. That is why the new science of eugenics or racial hygiene is acquiring so immense an importance. In the past racial selection has been carried out crudely by the destructive, wasteful, and expensive method of elimination, through death. In the future it will be carried out far more effectively by conscious and deliberate selection, exercised not merely before birth, but before conception and even before mating. It is idle to suppose that such a change can be exerted by mere legislation, for which, besides, our scientific knowledge is still inadequate. We cannot, indeed, desire any compulsory elimination of the unfit or any regulated breeding of the fit. Such notions are idle. Man can only be bred from within, through the medium of his intelligence and will, working together under the control of a high sense of responsibility. Galton, who recognised the futility of mere legislation to elevate the race, believed that the hope of the future lay in eugenics becoming a part of religion. The good of the race lies, not in the production of a super-man, but of a super-humanity. This can only be attained through personal individual development, the increase of knowledge, the sense of responsibility towards the race, enabling men to act in accordance with responsibility. The leadership in civilisation belongs not to the nation with the highest birth-rate but to the nation which has thus learnt to produce the finest men and women.
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