Willcox: Fewer Births and Deaths 
months after the influenza epidemic 
was at its height, a marked shortage of 
births. There were at least 200,000 
fewer births in Europe in 1890 than the 
average annual number for the preceding 
five year period. 
THE CHANGE OF TENDENCIES 
Now the most marked change in the 
birth rate during the last half century, 
a change revealed by a comparison 
between the two diagrams, has been the 
gradual decline and almost complete 
disappearance of this reciprocal rela- 
tionship between births and deaths 
and the appearance in its place of a 
tendency for births and deaths to change 
in the same way rather than in opposite 
ways. Before proceeding to consider 
the causes, let me set forth the facts a 
little more fully. 
1. The birth rate and death rate now 
remain approximately the same in any 
given country during any few years. 
The sharp annual variations which 
characterized these rates and which are 
still traceable in the statistics of un- 
developed countries are disappearing. 
2. The tendency of both death rates 
and birth rates is to undergo large and 
important modifications in longer peri- 
ods of time. The sharp up or down 
movements in both curves connected 
with such causes as war, pestilence or 
famine on the one hand, or bountiful 
harvests and cheap food on the other, 
are being succeeded by a steady pro- 
gressive downward movement in the 
death rate and the birth rate. 
Regarding the birth rate in the United 
States we know practically nothing. 
But in default of this information I 
have found an available substitute by 
comparing the number of children under 
five years of age at the date of each 
census with the number of women 
16-44 years of age at the same census. 
The results are given in the following 
table, in which the figures before 1850 
are estimated from such data regarding 
sex and age as the earlier censuses afford. 
During the sixty years 1850-1910 the 
proportion of children to 1,000 women 
of child-bearing age decreased in the 
125 
Children under 5 years of 
age to women 16-445 years 
Date of age 
1800 976 
1810 976 
1820 928 
1830 877 
1840 835 
1850 699 
1860 714 
1870 649 
1880. - s 635 
1890 554 
1900 541 
1910 508 
United States by 191, or an average of 
thirty-two in each decade. There are 
only about seven-tenths as large a 
proportion of children in the United 
States now as there were in 1850. If 
we assume that the change will continue 
in the direction in which it has been 
moving ever since 1860 and at this 
average rate of thirty-two in a decade, 
the number of children under 5 in the 
country to each 1,000 women 16-44 
will be as follows: 
1920 476 
1930 444 
1940 412 
1950 380 
2000 220 
2050 60 
2060 28 
2070 0 
The figures indicate that, if changes 
like those which have been in. progress 
in the United States since 1850 were to 
continue unchecked for a century and a 
half there would be no children left. 
Let me not be understood as predicting 
a continuance of the movement for any 
long period in the future. But often 
the best method of bringing home to 
ourselves the vast sweep and significance 
of the changes revealed by statistics is 
to project them into the future and see 
whither they lead. No doubt social 
movements do not occur along straight 
lines. On the contrary sharp inflections 
in the curves of social change are 
frequent. But it is one of the main 
duties of statistics to point out the trend 
of the stream along which society is 
moving and thus perhaps to arouse a 
desire for a change. 
This tendency to a decline in the 
6In order to reduce estimates to a minimum in the earlier decades ages 16-44 were chosen 
instead of 15-49, the more usual limits. 
