[122] D. Heron, "On the Relation of Fertility in Man to Social Status," Drapers' Company Research Memoirs, No. 1, 1906.
[123] The recognition of this relationship must not be regarded as an attempt unduly to narrow down the causation of changes in the birth-rate. The great complexity of the causes influencing the birth-rate is now fairly well recognized, and has, for instance, been pointed out by Goldscheid, Höherentwicklung und Menschenökonomie, Vol. I, 1911.
[124] In a paper read at the Brunswick Meeting of the German Anthropological Society (Correspondenzblatt of the Society, November, 1898); a great many facts concerning the fecundity of women among savages in various parts of the world are brought together by Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib, Vol I, chap. XXIV.
[125] The proportion of doctors to the population is very small, and the people still have great confidence in their quacks and witch-doctors. The elementary rules of sanitation are generally neglected, water supplies are polluted, filth is piled up in the streets and the courtyards, as it was in England and Western Europe generally until a century ago, and the framing of regulations or the incursions of the police have little effect on the habits of the people. Neglect of the ordinary precautions of cleanliness is responsible for the wide extension of syphilis by the use of drinking vessels, towels, etc., in common. Not only is typhoid prevalent in nearly every province of Russia, but typhus, which is peculiarly the disease of filth, overcrowding, and starvation, and has long been practically extinct in England, still flourishes and causes an immense mortality. The workers often have no homes and sleep in the factories amidst the machinery, men and women together; their food is insufficient, and the hours of labour may vary from twelve to fourteen. When famine occurs these conditions are exaggerated, and various epidemics ravage the population.
[126] It must, however, be remembered that in small and unstable communities a considerable margin for error must be allowed, as the crude birth-rate is unduly raised by an afflux of immigrants at the reproductive age.
[127] Arsène Dumont, Dépopulation et Civilisation, 1890, chap. VI. The nature of the restraint on fertility has been well set forth by Dr. Bushee ("The Declining Birth-rate and its Causes," Popular Science Monthly, August, 1903), mainly in the terms of Dumont's "social capillarity" theory.
[128] Even Dr. Newsholme, usually so cautious and reliable an investigator in this field, has been betrayed into a reference in this connection (The Declining Birth-rate, 1911, p. 41) to the "increasing rarity of altruism," though in almost the next paragraph he points out that the large families of the past were connected with the fact that the child was a profitable asset, and could be sent to work when little more than an infant. The "altruism" which results in crushing the minds and bodies of others in order to increase one's own earnings is not an "altruism" which we need desire to perpetuate. The beneficial effect of legislation against child-labour in reducing an unduly high birth-rate has often been pointed out.
[129] It may suffice to take a single point. Large families involve the birth of children at very short intervals. It has been clearly shown by Dr. R.J. Ewart ("The Influence of Parental Age on Offspring," Eugenics Review, October, 1911) that children born at an interval of less than two years after the birth of the previous child, remain, even when they have reached their sixth year, three inches shorter and three pounds lighter than first-born children.
[130] For instance, Goldscheid, in Höherentwicklung und Menschenökonomie; it is also, on the whole, the conclusion of Newsholme, though expressed in an exceedingly temperate manner, in his Declining Birth-rate.
[131] If, however, our birth-rate fanatics should hear of the results obtained at the experimental farm at Roseville, California, by Professor Silas Wentworth, who has found that by placing ewes in a field under the power wires of an electric wire company, the average production of lambs is more than doubled, we may anticipate trouble in many hitherto small families. Their predecessors insisted, in the cause of religion and morals, on burning witches; we must not be surprised if our modern fanatics, in the same holy cause, clamour for a law compelling all childless women to live under electric wires.