An interesting sidelight on the apparent tendency of the country to have an increasing death-rate, year by year, is shown by the meager figures which are available on the subject of the number of small children in the different towns. The Chief Clerk in the Census Office, Mr. William S. Rossiter, has investigated the proportion of children in two rural counties of New York State, Otsego and Putnam, and has discovered the startling fact that while the population in those counties has hardly changed since 1860, the proportion of young children has decreased almost one third in the forty years ending with 1900, as shown by the following table:—
Table IV. Table showing Percentage of Children in Otsego and Putnam Counties, 1860-1900
| 1900 | 1860 | |||||
| County | Total White Population | Under 10 Years | Per Cent | Total White Population | Under 10 Years | Per Cent |
| Otsego | 48,793 | 7,121 | 14.5 | 49,950 | 10,988 | 22.0 |
| Putnam | 13,669 | 2,332 | 16.9 | 13,819 | 3,333 | 24.1 |
| Total | 62,462 | 9,453 | 15.0 | 63,769 | 14,321 | 22.5 |
This shows that while in 1860, when the total population was about 64,000, the number of children was about 14,000 or 22.5 per cent, in 1900, when the total population was 62,462 or nearly the same, the number of children was only 9453, or a reduction in numbers of nearly 5000 children. In many of the small cities of New York State, the fact that there is a constantly decreasing number of children in the community is well recognized, the greater proportion of the population being past middle life. The death-rate, therefore, is lower, from this very fact.
Death-rates of children.
That the general death-rate is directly affected by the number of children living in a community is shown by the following table:—
Table V. Showing Deaths from all Causes in the United States for the Years 1901-1905, at Various Age Periods
| Age | No. at Each Age | Per Cent of Total Population |
| Aggregate | 529,630 | —— |
| Under 1 year | 100,268 | 18.93 |
| Under 5 years | 143,684 | 27.13 |
| 5-9 years | 13,679 | 2.58 |
| 10-19 years | 23,234 | 4.38 |
| 20-29 years | 46,685 | 8.81 |
| 30-39 years | 49,501 | 9.34 |
| 40-49 years | 48,811 | 9.21 |
| 50-59 years | 51,787 | 9.77 |
| 60-69 years | 59,856 | 11.31 |
| 70-79 years | 56,544 | 10.68 |
| 80-89 years | 29,408 | 5.55 |
| 90 and over | 6,441 | 1.21 |
This table shows two things: first, that children have a hard time reaching five years, as nearly one third of all the children born in any year die under five years, and second, that from five to twenty years is the healthiest—that is, safest—time of a person's life, since after twenty the constitutional diseases make themselves felt so that death becomes almost uniformly distributed from twenty to eighty. It is plain, then, that in any community a change in the relative proportion of children born in any year would change the death-rate, since with a smaller number of infants there could not be so many to die.
No statistics are available to determine the number of small children in the country as compared with that in the city, but it is probable that they are in excess in the latter, since the highest birth-rates are found in the congested districts of cities where foreigners congregate. If this is so, it will account for and justify a higher rate of death in the city because of the larger number of children, as has been explained above, and the lower rate in the country may be due, not to better sanitary surroundings, but solely to fewer children.