HAS IMMIGRATION INCREASED POPULATION? 249 



lation. France is pointed out as an instance wliere the rate of 

 growth has become very low because of the fashion the French 

 have acquired, even in the middle classes, of restricting the size 

 of their families. 



The illustration, however, is not altogether fortunate for those 

 who use it. The French annual rate of increase, it is true, sank 

 very low during the four or five years previous to the Prussian 

 War, being only seven per thousand inhabitants in 1870. But 

 since then it has steadily risen, and in 1890 was thirty-seven per 

 thousand.* In fact, France is an excellent illustration to show 

 how mere ideas and opinions affect the growth of population, and 

 how the rate of increase may be depressed by discontent or disas- 

 ter, or raised by the desire to conquer an old enemy or by the suc- 

 cess of a new form of government. 



But is it true as a general proposition that advanced civiliza- 

 tion decreases the rate of population ? There is a feeling among 

 many people, who have not thought much on the subject, that the 

 more animal-like we become, the more we multiply, and that the 

 lower types of civilization necessarily increase more rapidly than 

 the higher. But this is very far from the truth. 



Savages and uncivilized races are not, as a rule, of very rapid 

 increase. They often recede and whole tribes of them become 

 extinct. If we look at the whole world, it is the uncivilized popu- 

 lations that are disappearing. Before the coming of the English 

 to the United States the red men had held the country with all its 

 natural fertility and resources for hundreds of years, and yet had 

 not been able to increase themselves to a million. During the 

 middle ages, from the year 500 to 1500, a period of a thousand 

 years, we find the population of Europe in all stages of barbarism 

 and low civilization, and yet the increase of population was very 

 slow. In the year 500 Europe was supposed to have something 

 over 40,000,000 people. In the year 1500 the highest estimate is 

 70,000,000. Thus in a thousand years the population had not 

 doubled. But after the year 1500, under the influence of the Refor- 

 mation and modern civilization, the population doubled in three 

 hundred years. f 



Another excellent illustration to show the effect of modern 

 civilization is the growth of the English people. 



1480 3,700,000 



1580 4,600,000 



1680 5,532,000 



1780 9,561,000 



1880 35,004,000 



* Mulhall's Dictionary of Statistics (1892), article Population, p. 442. 

 + Seaman's Progress of Nations (First Series), p. 550. See also Worcester's Problem of 

 Religious Progress, passim^ and Mulhall's Dictionary of Statistics. 



