[[6]] The Declining Birthrate, p. 248:—
Deaths in antenatal period . . . . . . . . . 138,249
Fewer births owing to reduced birthrate . . 467,837
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Total loss for 1914 . . . . . . . . . . . . 606,086
CHAPTER III
THE EMPTY COUNTRYSIDE
In the past the decay of civilisation has been heralded by the decay of the country-side. When the cities had sucked the life of the plains and valleys dry, then came the end. It was thus with Israel. Out of the villages and farms nestling in valleys the people were driven into cities by the rapacity of men eager to be rich. This was the burden that weighed on the prophets, 'Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field till there be no room.' When in the country places there was no room for the common folk, then national decay ensued in Israel. It was so also in Rome. The day came when one magnate owned the 'territories of whole tribes' and left them 'to be trampled under foot by herds or ravaged by wild beasts,' or garrisoned them 'with slave prisons or citizens held in bondage,' and Rome sucked dry the rural life of Italy and of the lands washed by the Mediterranean. Therewith paralysis seized the greatest of the world-empires. In every age overgrown cities have proved themselves the graveyards of civilisation. And the primary cause of the evils which now threaten us is that we have made the countryside waste. Counties and parishes have been depleted of life that cities might grow more and more. It has been calculated that nine out of ten families in England have migrated to the city in the last three generations. In and around Glasgow half of the population of Scotland is concentrated. Three-fourths of the whole population of Scotland has been massed in the industrial belt of country that lies between the Forth and Clyde estuaries, and which includes Edinburgh and Glasgow and the towns round which are centred the iron and coal industries. We have driven our manhood and womanhood out of the sunshine and the clean air and the silent spaces into the foetid, sunless closes of monstrous cities. There the clanging of machinery leaves no place where the soul can be still. And upon us has fallen the woe declared against those who devastate the quiet places, adding field to field, until there is no room for the poor.
I
The greatest tragedy of our day is that the English race which has conquered the fourth of the world's area has lost its own land. In the course of a hundred years the spoliation of well-nigh the whole nation has been consummated. The villages and rural parishes of England which once teemed with life are left to decay. The life and the wealth which reared the parish churches of England—those monuments of vanished piety and of forgotten arts—and which produced with skilled handicraft the 'ornaments and church furniture, bells and candlesticks, crosses and organs, and tapestry and banners,' have ebbed away, leaving behind them only a memory. The world can nowhere show a desolation such as has overtaken rural England. Elsewhere, be it France or Germany, Serbia or Bulgaria, the cottages are scattered over close-tilled land, and the labour of man is rewarded by the earth yielding its increase. But England presents the spectacle of decayed cottages, of vast spaces 'laid down to grass,' of stately houses with the silence of tree-shaded parks round about them, and of a land which yields no longer food but sport. 'As things go now,' writes an observer, 'we shall have empty fields, except for a few shepherds and herdsmen in all the green of England.' In his book, The Condition of England, Mr. C. F. G. Masterman has presented a picture of rural decay which is steeped in tears. 'A peasantry, unique in Europe in its complete divorce from the land, lacking ownership of cottage or tiniest plot of ground, finds no longer any attraction in the cheerless toil of the agricultural labourer upon scant weekly wages'—thus Mr. Masterman. If the life-blood of a nation be derived from the clean countryside, then 'England is bleeding at the arteries, and it is her reddest blood which is flowing away.'