194 BRITISH FERTILITY. 



not easily checked or driven out, in fact, charac- 

 terized by greater persistence and fecundity. This 

 fact is sure, sooner or later, to strike the American 

 in Britain. There seems to be an aboriginal push 

 and heat in animate nature there, to behold which is 

 a new experience. It is the Old World, and yet it 

 really seems the New in the virility and hardihood 

 of its species. 



The New Englander who sees with evil forebod- 

 ings the rapid falling off of the birth-rate in his own 

 land, the family rills shrinking in these later genera- 

 tions, like his native streams in summer, and who 

 consequently fears for the perpetuity of the race, 

 may see something to comfort him in the British 

 islands. Behold the fecundity of the parent stock ! 

 The drought that has fallen upon the older parts of 

 the New World does not seem to have affected the 

 sources of being in these islands. They are appar- 

 ently as copious and exhaustless as they were three 

 centuries ago. Britain might well appropriate to 

 herself the last half of Emerson's quatrain : 



" No numbers have counted my tallies, 



No tribes my house can fill ; 

 I sit by the shining Fount of Life, 

 And pour the deluge still." 



For it is literally a deluge ; the land is inundated 

 with humanity. Thirty millions of people within 

 the area of one of our larger states, and who shall 

 say that high-water mark is yet reached? Every- 

 thing betokens a race still in its youth, still on the 



