In these States the birth-rate is low; in three there are actually more deaths than births; and in all five the proportion of Catholics is comparatively small. These States may be compared with five others, in which the Catholic and the foreign elements are well represented:
TABLE V
State. Population Chief Religious Birth and Birthrate
(1910) Bodies Deaths per 1000
New York. 9,113,000 R.C. 2,280,000 b. 213,000 22.0
Jews (?) 1,000,000 d. 147,000
Methodist 300,000
Presbyterian 200,000
Rhode Island 540,000 R.C. 160,000 b. 13,000 24.0
Baptist 20,000 d. 8,000
Prot.
Episcopalian 15,000
Massachusetts 3,336,000 R.C. 1,080,000 b. 84,000 25.0
Congregational 120,000 d. 51,000
Baptist 80,000
All Protestants
together 450,000
Michigan 2,800,000 R.C. 490,000 b. 64,000 23.0
Methodist 128,000 d. 36,000
Lutheran 105,000
Connecticut 1,114,000 R.C. 300,000 b. 27,000 24.0
Congregational 66,000 d. 17,000
Prot.
Episcopalian 37,000
In these States the birth-rate is very much higher than in the former. Furthermore, a New York paper [40] investigated the birth-rate in that city with special reference to religious belief, and concluded that the different bodies could be graded as follows with respect to the number of children per marriage: (1) Jews, (2) Catholics, (3) Protestants (Orthodox), (4) Protestants (Liberal), and (5) Agnostic. Professor Meyrick Booth, who is himself a Protestant, concludes his survey of the evidence as follows:
"looking at the situation as a whole, there is good reason to think that the Protestant Anglo-Saxons are not only losing ground relatively, but must, at any rate in the East and middle East, be suffering an actual decrease on a large scale. For it has been shown by more than one sociologist (see, for example, the statement in The Family and the Nation) that no stock can maintain itself with an average of less than about four children per marriage, and from all available data (it has not been found possible to obtain definite figures for most of the Western and Southern States) we must see that the average fertility of each marriage in this section of the American people falls far short of the requisite four children. Judging by all the figures at hand, the modern Anglo-Saxon American, with his high standard of comfort, his intensely individualistic outlook on life, and his intellectual and emancipated but child-refusing wife, is being gradually thrust aside by the upgrowth of new masses of people of simpler tastes and hardier and more natural habits. And, what is of peculiar interest to us, this new population will carry into ascendancy those religious and moral beliefs which have moulded its type of life.