FERTILITY OP SOCIAL CLASSES 833 



ever since 1873, the mean age for eacli group in 1893 being the 

 highest on record. Further evidence that marriage is now 

 deferred to a somewhat later period of life than formerly is 

 afforded by the decline in the proportion of under - age 

 marriages."^ In the Sixty-third Annual Eeport of the Regis- 

 trar-General for 1900 we find a table showing this steady decline 

 in the proportions of marriages imder age since 1871-75. The 

 proportion of such marriages, which was 81-6 per 1,000 for men 

 and 223-2 per 1,000 for women during the period 1871-75, was 

 reduced to 51 per 1,000 for men and 163 per 1,000 for women 

 in 1900. 



Thus there appears to be no doubt that, not only is marriage 

 contracted at a later period of life by the professional and cul- 

 tured classes than by the labouring classes, but that the general 

 age of marriage for the whole community is rising ; and this is, 

 for the physiological reason that early marriage is conducive to 

 greater fertility, and late marriage to lesser fertility, a patho- 

 logical symptom which clearly shows the unhealthy conditions 

 of modem civilisation. In 1892, in the Fifty-fifth Annual Report, 

 the Registrar- General had already noticed " an increasing ten- 

 dency to defer marriage until a somewhat later period of Ufe." 

 In 1898, in the Sixty-first Annual Report, the Registrar-General, 

 after noting that the mean of the recorded ages of bachelors who 

 married was 001 year less in 1898 than in 1897, added that 

 " the general tendency in recent years has been for this figure to 

 increase ; it would be unsafe to infer that the slight decrease 

 during the year under notice (1898) indicates a returning ten- 

 dency towards early marriage. The mean recorded age of 

 spinsters who married was greater in 1897 than it had been in 

 1896, and it again shows an increase in 1898." And, as a matter 

 of fact, in the following year — 1899 — ^in the Sixty-second Annual 

 Report, we read that " if the bachelors who married in 1899 be 



1 Fifty-sixth Annual Report of the Registrar-Oeneral of Births, Deaths, 

 and Marriages, p. viii (1893). 



