112 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
Morison’s cry, made only a generation ago, that all would be well if only 
we could stop for a few years ‘the devastating torrent of babies’ now 
seems grotesque, for we do not now expect rapid increase of population 
to continue much longer, even if it becomes progressively easier to obtain 
subsistence. 
The approach of reduction in the rate of growth of population began 
to show itself in England in the second half of the 1871-80 decade, when 
the annual number of births became nearly stationary after the rapid 
increase recorded down to 1876. But the public takes little notice of the 
supply of people furnished by the births. Just in the wooden way in 
which illiterate farmers and unbusinesslike old ladies look at their balances 
at the bank, so the public looks at the censuses. The census of 1881 
showed an increase of 14°36 per cent. in the decade, which was higher 
than that shown by any of the censuses except those of 1821 and 1831, 
which were probably unduly swollen by the diminishing incompleteness 
of the enumerations. In 1881-91, in spite of high emigration, the rate of 
increase only dropped to 11°65 per cent, so rapid increase of population 
was still regarded as the normal thing which everyone should expect. 
The Royal Commission on the Water Supply of the Metropolis in 1893 
deliberately rejected the reasonable suggestion that the rate of increase 
in Greater London might continue to fall as it had already begun to do, 
and relying on a continuance of observed increase, put the probable 
population in the present year, 1931, two and three-quarter millions more 
than the recent census has shown it to be. 
But I had noticed that the old rapid increase in the annual number of 
births seemed to have come to an end, and working on the ages of the 
people as recorded in successive censuses, I put before this Section of the 
Association at its meeting in Ipswich in 1895, a paper (subsequently 
published in the Economic Journal for December in that year) in which I 
estimated the number of persons who would be living at each census up 
to that of 1951 on the assumptions that migration, mortality, and (not 
the rate, but the absolute number of births) remained stationary. I 
found that on these hypotheses the population of England and Wales 
would stop increasing during the present century, and would have only a 
trifling increase after 1941. The paper suggested that this was, at any 
rate, not improbable, 
Hostile critics derided what they called my ‘ prophecy,’ and for some 
time events were unfavourable to me. Emigration fell off enormously, 
mortality decreased, and the births increased slightly, so that the census 
of 1901 showed an increase of 12°17 per cent. in the decade, the absolute 
increase of three and a half millions being the largest recorded. But the 
situation was not fundamentally altered, since the increase of births was 
due entirely to the drop in emigration, which had caused a larger pro- 
portion of persons of parental age to remain in the country. In the 
Fortnightly Review of March 1902, I returned to the charge with an 
article on the ‘ Recent Decline of Natality in Great Britain,’ in which, using 
a method of weighting the annual numbers of marriages by their proximity 
to the births recorded for each year—a method which seems to have been 
beneath the notice of the mathematical statisticians of that period—I was 
able to show, I think, conclusively, that the number of children resulting 
