THE DECLINING BIRTHRATE 



163 



Our people of all classes are therefore becoming persuaded that univer- 

 sity training is almost a necessity and the time which the students must 

 spend in securing it requires that the date of their marriage be postponed. 

 When marriages occur later in life the possibility of a large family is 

 reduced; hence, a declining birthrate. This is clearly shown by the 

 following table: 



Number of Births Annually per 1,000 Married Women by Ages* 



* March, L., ' 'Families parisiennes en 1901," Journal de la Sociele de Statistique de Paris, p. 30, February 

 1894. [Given in Bailey, Modern Social Conditions, p. 184.] 



The above table shows that the birthrate is much higher when the 

 wife is young and that the younger the mother the greater the number 

 of births except in Norway and Berlin and in these two cases the rate 

 decreases rapidly after the mother has reached the age of 25 years. In 

 the other cases the rate decreases steadily from the earliest age at which 

 marriage occurs. This shows that the delay in marriage is not important 

 in that it shortens the period of child-bearing during the years of married 

 life, but the importance of the advancing age at which marriage takes 

 place lies in the fact that it eliminates from married life those years in 

 which there is the greatest probability of births. The likelihood of a 

 number of children being born is twice as great when the wife marries 

 at 20 as when she delays her marriage till 30. In the light of the above 

 figures the fact that " the last child in the average family arrives eleven 

 and a half years after marriage," 1 and that child-bearing ceases long 

 before the expiration of the possible fertile period, does not prove that 

 the advancing age of marriage is not a powerful cause of the lower 

 birthrate. 



It is true that in the civilized countries of Europe where there is no 

 frontier and has not been for many generations the birthrate has been 



1 Ross, "Western Civilization and the Birthrate," p. 80. 



