THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 



Better Classes of Population in United States Marrying more Frequently and at 

 Earlier Age than in the Past, but Number of Births Decreases — Cause 

 of Fall Mainly Psychological — Interests of Individual 

 Versus Interests of Race. 



F. H. Hankins, 



Professor of Political Economy and Statistics, Clark University, Worcester^, Mass. 



IT IS a self-evident fact that when 

 death-rates begin to exceed birth- 

 rates in any race or nation it is 

 only a matter of time until that 

 race or nation is supplanted by another 

 in which there is an annual increase in 

 numbers. History shows that racial 

 stocks with a redundant fertility have 

 flowed out from ancestral homes to take 

 possession of new territory. Likewise 

 military strength and survival have 

 been at times roughly proportional to 

 numbers. Industrial and commercial 

 prestige is also roughly proportional to 

 population among nations of approxi- 

 mately the same stage of economic 

 development. Differential decline in 

 birth-rates therefore tends to upset the 

 comparative standing of races and 

 nations. Moreover and most significant 

 of all, a checked birth-rate reduces 

 the operation of natural selection and 

 thus tends to interfere with the process 

 by which man increased in physical 

 strength and intelligence. 



More than a century ago Mai thus 

 declared that there was a tendency for 

 population to increase faster than the 

 means of subsistence. Observing the 

 great mass of poverty and degradation 

 in contemporary England, he was led 

 to the belief that numbers of a popula- 

 tion must be kept within bounds by 

 famine, pestilence, poverty, vice, crime, 

 and war. Malthus pointed out that 

 the only way to obviate the operation 

 of these positive checks was the intro- 

 duction of the negative check upon 

 population increase. By this he meant 

 moral restraint, including thereunder 

 both postponement of marriage and 

 continence within the marriage relation. 



A century's experience has shown that 

 food supply and the conveniences and 

 comforts of life can be multiplied by 

 man's inventive and industrial capac- 

 ities more rapidly than the population 

 increases. Doubtless no period in the 

 world's history has shown an equal 

 increase in numbers of the white or 

 civilized races. Nevertheless the white 

 world's supply of consumable goods has 

 increased several fold per capita. We 

 are, therefore, today under the necessity 

 of considerably modifying the Mal- 

 thusian formula. There is, experience 

 shows, no inevitable and fatalistic ten- 

 dency among advanced nations for 

 popiilation to increase beyond bounds; 

 but there is in every social rank a con- 

 sciousness of the conflict between repro- 

 ductive forces and the desires for wealth, 

 education, recreation, leisure, social 

 position, foreign travel, and other feat- 

 ures of an advancing standard of living. 



PRESSURE IS INTENSIFIED. 



It is now well established that the 

 pressure of population which Malthus 

 laid so much stress upon is not a pressure 

 upon the means of subsistence, but 

 rather upon the standards of living. 

 Moreover recent experience would seem 

 to indicate that this pressure is intensi- 

 fied rather than reduced by an increase 

 in wealth, so that the size of the family 

 tends to diminish as one ascends the 

 social scale. Malthus's error therefore 

 was in the supposition that population 

 would forever tend to expand with its 

 material basis. At the very time when 

 the thinking people of Western Europe 

 were thrown into a most profound 

 pessimism by his treatise, there was 



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