In recent years the statistics of emigration and population tell a fairly plain story. In Norway and Sweden alike the excess of births over deaths reached nearly its highest in 1887, the figures being 63,942 for Sweden and 29,233 for Norway. In 1887, however, emigration was about its maximum in both countries, 50,786 leaving Sweden and 20,706 leaving Norway. Thereafter the birth-rate rapidly fell, and the emigration, though fluctuating, has never again risen in Sweden to the volume of 1887-88, though it has in Norway. But when, after falling to 43,728 in 1892, the excess of Swedish births over deaths rises to 60,231 in 1895, while the emigration falls from 45,000 in 1892 to 13,000 in 1894, it is clear that the lesson of regulation is still very imperfectly learned. Norway shows the same fluctuations, the excess of births rising from 23,600 in 1892 to nearly 32,000 in 1896, and again from 27,685 in 1908 to 29,804 in 1909, doubtless because of ups and downs in the harvests, as shown in the increase of marriages from 12,742 in 1892 to 13,962 in 1896.
In Denmark the progression has been similar. There the excess of births over deaths was so far at its maximum in 1886, the figures being 29,986 in a population of a little over 2,000,000; whereafter they slowly decreased, till in 1893 the excess was only 26,235. All the while emigration was active, gradually rising from 4,346 in 1885 to 10,382 in 1891; then again falling to 2,876 in 1896, when the surplus of births over deaths was 34,181—a development sure to force more emigration. In 1911 the population was 2,775,076—a rapid rise; and in 1910 the surplus of births over deaths was 40,110. The Scandinavians are thus still in the unstable progressive stage of popular well-being, though probably suffering less from it than either Germany or England.
Here, then, is a group of kindred peoples apparently at least as capable of reaching a solution of the social problem as any other, and visibly prospering materially and morally in proportion as they bring reason to bear on the vital lines of conduct, though still in the stage of curing over-population by emigration. Given continued peaceful political evolution in the direction first of democratic federation, and further of socialisation of wealth, they may reach and keep the front rank in civilisation, while the more unmanageably large communities face risks of dire vicissitude.
FOOTNOTES:
[638] As in Carlyle's Early Kings of Norway, the caput mortuum of his historical method. Much more instructive works on Scandinavian history are available to the English reader. The two volumes on Scandinavia by Crichton and Wheaton (1837) are not yet superseded, though savouring strongly of the conservatism of their period. Dunham, who rapidly produced, for Gardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia series, histories of Spain and Portugal (5 vols.), Europe during the Middle Ages (4 vols.), and the Germanic Empire (3 vols.), compiled also one of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway (3 vols. 1839-40), of inferior quality. But Geijer's History of Sweden, one of the standard modern national histories of Europe, is translated into English as far as the period of Gustavus Vasa (3 vols. of orig. in one of trans. 1845); and the competent History of Denmark by C.-F. Allen is available in a French translation (Copenhagen, 2 tom. 1878). Otté's Scandinavian History, 1874, is an unpretending and unliterary but well-informed work, which may be used to check Crichton and Wheaton. The more recent work of Mr. R. Nisbet Bain, Scandinavia: a Political History of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden from 1513 to 1900 (Camb. Univ. Press, 1905), is useful for the period covered, but has little sociological value. For the history of ancient Scandinavian literature, the introduction to Vigfusson and Powell's Corpus Poeticum Boreale (1883), and Prof. Powell's article on Icelandic Literature in the 10th ed. of the Encyclopædia Britannica, are preferable to Schweitzer's Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur (1886, 2 Bde.), which, however, is useful for the modern period.
[639] See Geijer's History of the Swedes, Eng. tr. of pt. i, 1-vol. ed. p. 30, as to the special persistence in Scandinavia of the early religious conception of kingship. Cp. Crichton and Wheaton's Scandinavia, 1837, i, 157.
[640] Such New Testament passages as Rom. xiii, 1-7, and Titus iii, 1, seem to have been penned or interpolated expressly to propitiate the Roman government.
[641] It was by entirely overlooking this historic fact that M. Fustel de Coulanges, in the last chapter of his Cité antique, was able to propound a theory of historic Christianity as something extra-political. He there renounced the inductive method for a pure ecclesiastical apriorism, and the result is a very comprehensive sociological misconception.
[642] Geijer, pp. 31, 33; Crichton and Wheaton, i, 102, 104, 183, 184.
[643] Tacitus, Germania, cc. 7, 11.