WiLLcox: Differential Fecundity 



143 



tries has been the gradual decline and 

 almost complete disappearance of this 

 reciprocal relation between births and 

 deaths, whereby the most significant 

 changes were those between one year 

 and the next and these changes were 

 usually in opposite directions, and the 

 appearance in its place of a tendency 

 for birth rates and death rates to de- 

 crease slowly but steadily for a long 

 series of consecutive years. The annual 

 variations are much less, but the total 

 change in ten or twenty years much 

 greater than under the earlier condi- 

 tions. Usually the decline began with 

 the death rate and in that case its effect 

 would necessarily be to magnify the 

 natural increase. But a decline in the 

 birth rate soon began and is proceeding 

 now in most civilized countries about 

 as fast as the death rate. Indeed, 

 such a change was inevitable, if the 

 natural increase was not to be more 

 rapid than the increase in wealth or 

 food. We must never forget that the 

 decline in the birth rate and that alone 

 has enabled mankind to hold fast the 

 advantages promised by the advance of 

 civilization and the sharp fall in the 

 death rate. The serious and disturbing 

 fact is not the mere decline in the birth 

 rate, but the differential decline. Appar- 

 ently many strains or lines of descent 

 which one might most desire to see 

 continued and increased are strains 

 which are losing ground relatively, if 

 not absolutely, by a decrease of the 

 birth rate more rapid than that of the 

 death rate. 



The largest and in some respects the 

 most important population groups about 

 whose rates of natural increase I wish 

 to speak this morning are the great 

 races of man, the European, Asiatic, 

 and African. Their increase has been 

 and still is in the main dependent upon 

 differences in the certainty and suffi- 

 ciency of the food supply. The great 

 reason for the rapid multiplication of 

 the European folk and their descendants 

 in other parts of the world from per- 

 haps 130 millions in the middle of the 

 eighteenth century, to more than 550 

 millions now, while during the same 

 period the numbers of other races have 

 altered but little, is found in the fact 



that new territorial discoveries and new 

 methods of stimulating agricultural pro- 

 duction and the transportation of per- 

 sons and goods have concurred to 

 increase enormously the supplies of food 

 available for the white race. There is 

 no reason to suppose that the fecundity 

 or fertility of this race is greater than 

 that of other races or greater than it 

 formerly was; its natural increase has 

 been unprecedented not because its 

 birth rate has risen but because its 

 death rate has fallen, and fallen more 

 rapidly than its birth rate. 



HOW THE NEGRO LOSES GROUND. 



In our own country and especially in 

 the southern states this divergence in 

 rates of natural increase is working out 

 results of interest for the two great 

 races. That the white race is slowly 

 displacing the Negroes in the United 

 States is now well known. That this 

 is due to differences in the rates of 

 total increase is equally familiar. But 

 the whites are being constantly rein- 

 forced by immigrants and the Negroes 

 are not. Where migration is a potent 

 factor, total increase is an untrust- 

 worthy clue to natural increase. For 

 this reason we may get nearer the truth 

 by confining attention to the southern 

 states. Under the slavery regime and 

 the saturnaHa of reconstruction which 

 followed, i. e., from 1790 to 1880, the 

 increase of the two races in the South, 

 and, so far as we may disregard the 

 effects of migration and identify natural 

 increase with total increase, their natural 

 increase was at about the same rate. 

 During this ninety years, when the 

 Negroes were fewest relatively they were 

 35% of the total population of the 

 South; when they were most numerous 

 they were 38%, a difference of only 3%. 

 But since 1880 the southern whites have 

 increased much more rapidly than the 

 southern Negroes and as a result the 

 proportion of the latter is dwindHng. 

 In 30 years that proportion has de- 

 creased more than 6%, or more than 

 2% in each decade. 



In the United States as a whole the 

 more rapid increase of the whites is due 

 not only to the influx of hundreds of 

 thousands of white immigrants, but also 



