These results confirm what has been learnt from previous researches of the fertility of different social classes, but they go further in that they show that the difference is not exclusively dependent on income.
In general there are more children per family in the families of workmen than in the families of employers, and the latter contain more than those of employees other than workmen. Further, one finds industries in which the number of children in the employers' families is larger than in the families of workmen in other industries. Thus, differences are introduced by the occupation. Industries employing many hands seem the more favourable to the production of large families, both among workmen and among employers. Agriculture, in which a large number of persons are engaged in France, does not seem to conduce to fertility. Fishermen and sailors in the merchant service, on the other hand, appear to form the class in which fertility is the most considerable.
The importance of the occupational factor is such that we could place its influence on the same plane as that of "concentration" of population, with which it is in close relation, since persons following certain classes of occupation, as, for instance, the members of the liberal professions, and clerks and other salaried employees are most numerous in towns.
It does not appear that in France casual and unskilled labourers, persons in the receipt of Poor Law relief, etc., are specially prolific. There is not thus in reality too much risk of seeing the renewal of the population carried out in a dangerous manner by its least valuable section. However, even among the working classes, the most highly paid occupations are not those among which one finds the greatest number of children.
The economic, social, or moral burden of children is a factor bound up in a complex manner, not only with the individual conditions of existence, but also with the transformations of society, progress in manners and customs, and the conception which one forms of life.
It is this burden which must be allieviated where allieviation would be most effective and produce the best results, in order to put a stop to a movement which may be dangerous to civilisation.
(Abstract.)
By Vernon L. Kellogg.
(Professor in Stanford University, California.)