66o THE PHYSIOLOGY OF REPRODUCTION 



Victoria, and New Zealand among the British Colonies, and for 

 France among Continental nations. Indications pointing apparently 

 in the same direction are to be observed in the United States, 

 Germany (especially Saxony, and certain of the big cities), as well as 

 in Belgium and Italy. The German rural population are apparently 

 still unaffected, while the British and Irish Catholics are almost so, 

 since any regulation of the married state is forbidden by their 

 religion, but in other Catholic countries this prohibition does not 

 appear to be so strongly insisted on, and is often altogether ignored. 

 On the other hand, Udny Yule has shown that in some countries 

 (e.g. Belgium before 1875) the fall in the birth-rate began at a time 

 when artificial methods of contra-conception were not generally 

 practised, and his general conclusion is that the recent decrease has 

 not been effected mainly or solely by such a cause.^ 



To the political economist of seventy years ago the decline in 

 the production of children would have been regarded as the 

 fulfilment of an aspiration, but the modern . economist takes a 

 different view. He believes that a mere limitation of numbers 

 cannot be a factor in the improvement of social conditions, and the 

 student of Eugenics never tires of urging that the real danger 

 before society is not over-multiplication, but multiplication of the 

 unfit. As Sidney Webb has said : " Modern civilisation is faced by 

 two awkward facts ; the production of children is rapidly declining 

 and this decline is not uniform, but characteristic of the more 

 prudent, foreseeing, and restrained members of the community. . . . 

 The question is whether we shall be able to turn rotind with 

 sufficient sharpness and in time. For we have unconsciously based 

 so much of our social policy — so many of our habits, traditions, 

 prejudices, and beliefs — on the assumption that the growth of 

 population is always to be reckoned with, and even feared, that a 

 genuine realisation of the contrary position will involve great 

 changes. There are thousands of men thinking themselves educated 

 citizens to-day to whose whole system of social and economic beliefs 

 the discovery will be as subversive as was that announced by 

 Copernicus. We may at last understand what the modern economist 

 means when he tells us that the most valuable of the year's crops, as 

 it is the most costly, is not the wheat harvest or the lambing, but 

 the year's quota of adolescent young men and women enlisted in the 

 productive service of the community ; and that the due proportion 

 and best possible care of this particular product is of far greater 

 consequence to the nation, than any other of its occupations." ^ 



^ Yule, loc. dt. Pell has come to a similar conclusion. The Law of Births 

 and Deaths, London, 1921. 



2 Sidney Webb, he. cit. Cf. also Whetham, The Fa/mily and the Nation, 

 London, 1909 ; and Inge, Outspoken Essays, London, 1920. 



