480 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



as is also eastern Prussia. Suicide should be most frequent in 

 Schleswig-Holstein and Hanover, if racial causes were appreciably 

 operative. The argument, in fact, falls to pieces of its own 

 weight. 



A summary view of the class of social phenomena seemingly 

 characteristic of the distinct races in France, if we extend our field 

 of vision to cover all Europe, suggests an explanation for the curious 

 coincidences and parallelisms above noted, which is the exact oppo- 

 site of the racial one. In every population we may distinguish two 

 modes of increase or evolution, which vary according to economic 

 opportunity for advancement. One community grows from its own 

 loins; children born in it remain there, grow up to maturity, and 

 transmit their mental and physical peculiarities unaltered to the 

 next generation. Such a group of population develops from within, 

 mentally as well as physically, by inheritance. Such is the type of 

 the average rural community. It is conservative in all respects, hold- 

 ing to the past with an unalterable tenacity. Compare with that a 

 community which grows almost entirely by immigration. Stress 

 of competition is severe. There is no time for rearing children ; nor 

 is it deemed desirable, for every child is a handicap upon further 

 social advancement. Marriage, even, unless it be deferred until 

 late in life, is an expensive luxury. Population grows, nevertheless; 

 but how? By the steady influx of outsiders. Such is the type 

 known to us in the modern great city. Between these two extremes 

 are all gradations between the progressive and the conservative type 

 of population. To the former are peculiar all those social ills which, 

 as Giddings has rightly urged, are the price paid for such progress. 

 Suicide is a correlative of education; frequency of divorce is an in- 

 evitable concomitant of equality of rights between the sexes, and the 

 decline of the religious sanction of patria potestas. A decreasing 

 birth rate almost always attends social advancement. To prevent 

 such a fall in the birth rate, and at the same time to overcome the 

 devastations of disease, is held by many to be the demographic ideal 

 to which all states should aspire. Not postponed marriages, not 

 childless families, not a high proportion of celibates; not, on the 

 other hand, reckless and improvident unions, with a terrific infant 

 mortality as a penalty therefor; but a self-restrained and steady 

 birth rate in which a high percentage survive the perils of infancy. 

 " Civilization is the baptism of the passions. In the cloister neither 

 does the mother die of fever nor the child of croup; but outside the 

 cloister to find both mothers and children, and bring both well 

 through fever and croup — that is civilization." * Could we for 



* From a very suggestive paper, A Measure of Civilization, in Journal of the Royal 

 Statistical Society, London, lx, 1897, pp. 148-161. 



