THE BIRTH-RATE 135 



honourable assets of a nation, while the ability which 

 encourages a low standard of life and thought, though 

 it does untold harm through the workings of environ- 

 ment, is usually too rare, too selfish, and too self-seeking 

 to do great harm nowadays through the action of 

 heredity. 



We have said already that the decrease in the 

 birth-rate shows itself equally in urban and rural dis- 

 tricts.^ It is true that between 1881 and 1901 the 

 corrected birth-rate of the towns of Northampton, 

 Burnley, and Halifax fell off by 32 per cent, but 

 the birth-rates of the agricultural counties of Cornwall 

 and Rutland dropped by 29 and 28 per cent respect- 

 ively. As there is much less decline in Liverpool and 

 Manchester, Salford and Glasgow — cities, be it noted, with 

 a large Roman Catholic population — than in Brighton, 

 Westmoreland, or Devonshire, we cannot attribute the 

 falling off to " urbanization." But it is very significant 

 that the decline is greatest in those towns where the 

 married women are habitually employed in the factories, 

 and where their earnings are an important element in 

 the weekly income of the family. On the other hand, 

 says the Local Government Board, " the majority of 

 mining districts form a striking contrast with other 

 industrial districts, the birth-rate in the former being fre- 

 quently considerably in excess of that obtaining in either 

 ordinary towns or rural districts." In the Rhondda 

 district, a centre of the Welsh mining industry, the 

 birth-rate in 1909 still stands at 40.9 per thousand ; 

 at Middlesborough and Tynemouth its value is 35.5, 



^ Some of the figures in this and the succeeding paragraphs are taken from the 

 Decline of the Birth-Rate, by Sidney Webb, Fabian Tract, No. 131, London, 1907 



