CIVILIZED NATIONS. 157 



self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, 

 spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intel- 

 ligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, 

 marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land 

 originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand 

 Celts and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the popu- 

 lation would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of 

 the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth 

 of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ^ struggle for e: 

 istence ' it would be the inferior and less favored race tha| 

 had prevailed and prevailed by virtue not of its gooc 

 qualities but of its faults. ^^ 



There are, however, some checks to this downward ten- 

 dency. We have seen that the intemperate suffer from a 

 high rate of mortality, and the extremely profligate leave 

 few offspring. The poorest classes crowd into towns, and 

 it has been proved by Dr. Stark from the statistics of ten 

 years in Scotland* that at all ages the death rate is higher 

 in towns than in rural disticts, '' and during the first five 

 years of life the town death rate is almost exactly double 

 that of the rural districts." As these returns include both 

 the rich and the poor, no doubt more than twice the 

 number of births would be requisite to keep up the number 

 of the very poor inhabitants in the towns relatively to those 

 in the country. With women, marriage at too early an 

 age is highly injurious; for it has been found in France 

 that ^^ twice as many wives under twenty die in the year 

 as died out of the same number of the unmarried." The 

 mortality, also, of husbands under twenty is " excessively 

 high,"t but what the cause of this may be seems doubtful. 

 Lastly, if the men who prudently delay marrying until 

 they can bring up their families in comfort were to select, 

 as they often do, women in the prime of life, the rate of 

 increase in the better class would be only slightly lessened. 



It was established from an enormous body of statistics, 

 taken during 1853, that the unmarried men throughout 

 France, between the ages of twenty and eighty, die in a 



* ** Tentli Annual Report of Births, Deaths," etc., in Scotland, 

 1867, p. 29. 



f These quotations are taken from our highest authority on such 

 questions, namely. Dr. Farr, in his paper " On the Influence of Mar- 

 riage on the Mortality of the French People," read before the Nat. 

 Assoc, for the Promotion of Social Science, 1858. 



