516 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



rates between 1881 and 1901. Dr. Newsholme and Dr. Stevenson, on 

 the one hand, and Mr. Udny Yule, on the other, do, indeed, compare 

 the corrected birth rates for 1901 of five separate groups of metro- 

 politan boroughs, arranged in grades of average poverty. This com- 

 parison gives us the interesting result that the small group of three 

 ' rich ' boroughs have, per 100,000 population (corrected) 2,004 legiti- 

 mate births; the four groups comprising nineteen intermediate bor- 

 oughs have almost identical legitimate birth rates of between 2,362 

 to 2,490 per 100,000; whilst the poorest group of seven boroughs has 

 a legitimate birth rate of no less than 3,078, or 50 per cent, more than 

 that in the ' rich ' quarters. From these figures it has been inferred 

 that we are, in London at any rate, multiplying most prolifically from 

 our most inferior stocks. It should, however, be noticed that the group 

 of seven ' poor ' boroughs happens to include, not only those containing 

 the greatest numbers of Irish Eoman Catholics, but also those in which 

 the great bulk of the Jews are to be found. Practically half the mar- 

 riages that take place in the registration districts of Whitechapel and 

 Mile-end Old Town are solemnized according to the Jewish rite. It is 

 against all the influences of the Jewish religion, tradition and custom 

 to limit the family, and the birth rate among Jews of all classes and 

 all nationalities is known to be large. We can not, therefore, infer 

 from these statistics, either that the birth rate of the poorest strata of 

 the English race in London is greater than that of the artisan or lower 

 middle class. The remarkable evenness of the corrected birth rate 

 throughout the nineteen ' intermediate ' metropolitan boroughs, though 

 they vary from having about 15 up to about 45 per cent, of servant- 

 keeping households, is rather an indication to the contrary. This is in 

 accordance with the fact that the decline in the corrected birth rate 

 appears to be as great in the counties made up preponderatingly of the 

 poorly paid agricultural laborers, as in those districts in which the 

 average level of wages is much higher. 5 



5. The decline in the birth rate appears to be much greater in those 

 sections of the population which give proofs of thrift and foresight 

 than among the population at large. 



Here we have to leave the carefully corrected birth rates supplied 

 by Dr. Newsholme, and fall back upon evidence which is statistically 

 less perfect. What would be desirable would be to have precise and 

 ' corrected ' birth rates for different years of two sections of the popula- 



6 The failure to take into account the special aggregation of the Jewish 

 and the Irish population in the districts of greatest poverty, and the limitation 

 of the investigation to London, appears to me to diminish the validity of some of 

 Mr. David Heron's implications in the recent publication ' On the Relation of 

 Fertility in Man to Social Status, and on the changes in this relation that have 

 taken place during the last fifty years,' 1906. But these calculations point in the 

 same direction as those cited. 



