342 THE TREND OF THE RACE 
The life tables for 1880-81, 1885-6 and 1895-6 showed for 
most age periods, except those of old age, that the death rate in 
general decreased with the size of the city and was markedly less 
in the rural districts. (Ballod.) In Berlin in the years 1890, 1895 
and 1890, although the crude death rate was lower than it was in 
Prussia, there was a shorter average duration of life. 
In certain regions the rural districts may be actually more 
unwholesome than the city. During the last few decades many 
cities have made remarkable records in the improvement of their 
sanitary conditions. And infant mortality which until recently 
continued in most cities to be inexcusably high has been rapidly 
reduced in the last decade. It is not surprising that many rural 
districts which have been relatively backward in adopting meas- 
ures for improving the health of their inhabitants should have a 
death rate higher than that of near-by cities. The health record 
of cities has improved more rapidly than that of the country 
because there was more room for improvement; and we may look 
forward to much greater advances in the near future. But despite 
the great progress which has actually been made, and the exist- 
ence of statistics which so often place the health of the urban 
population in too favorable a light, there is little doubt that cities 
have been and still are deleterious to the physical welfare of 
their inhabitants. 
Besides their enhanced death rate, the unwholesomeness of 
cities is indicated by a number of other symptoms. As has been 
pointed out in a previous chapter, their birth rate is generally 
below that of the surrounding country, and where the crude urban 
birth rate exceeds the rural, it is usually owing to the presence 
of a relatively large proportion of women of child-bearing age in 
the city population. The average number of children per married 
woman of 15-45 years of age is, in most places, lower in the cities 
than in the country. Suicides are notoriously more prevalent in 
cities, their frequency diminishing with the size of the city. Cities 
usually show also a relatively high percentage of crime. Prosti- 
tution is prevailingly an urban vice, and associated with this is, as 
has been discussed in Chapter VII, a relatively high percentage 
