The facts above mentioned, and other facts of the same nature which will be disclosed in the progress of our consideration of the matter in the present book, have evidently been overlooked, deliberately or otherwise, by the fanatics in this country and in Europe who have been preaching to the people that a falling birth-rate means a decaying nation. Careful students of sociology now dismiss altogether the statement so often made that a falling birth-rate means "an old and decaying community." The Germans for years have contemptuously been making this remark about France, but today they have been forced to recognize an unexpected vitality in the French, while, in fact, their own birth-rate has been falling more rapidly than that of France.
Nor is it true that a falling birth-rate means a falling population. The French birth-rate has been steadily falling for a number of years, yet the French population has been steadily increasing all the time, though less rapidly than it would had not the death-rate been abnormally high. It is not the number of babies born that counts, but the net result in surviving children. An enormous number of babies are born in China; but an enormous number die while still babies. So that it is better to have a few babies of good quality than a large number of indifferent quality, for the falling birth-rate is more than compensated by the falling death-rate. In England, as the statistics show, while the birth-rate is steadily falling, the population has been steadily growing.
Small families and a falling death-rate are not merely no evil—they are a positive good. They are a gain for humanity. They represent an evolutionary rise in Nature and a higher stage in civilization. We are here in the presence of a great fundamental principle of progress which has been working through life from the beginning.
At the beginning of life on the earth, reproduction ran riot. Of one minute organism it is estimated that, if its reproduction were not checked by death or destruction, in thirty days it would form a mass a million times larger than the sun. The conger-eel lays fifteen million eggs, and if they all grew up, and reproduced themselves on the same scale, in two years the whole sea would become a wriggling mass of eels. As we approach the higher forms of life, reproduction gradually dies down. The animals nearest to man produce few offspring, but they surround them with parental care, until they are able to lead independent lives with a fair chance of surviving. The whole process may be regarded as a mechanism for slowly subordinating quantity to quality, and to promoting the evolution of life to even higher stages.
This process, which is plain to see on the largest scale throughout living nature, may be more minutely studied, as it acts within a narrower range, in the human species. Here we statistically formulate it in the terms of birth-rate and death-rate; by the mutual relationship of the two courses of the birth-rate and death-rate we are able to estimate the evolutionary rank of a nation, and the degree in which it has succeeded in subordinating the primitive standard of quantity to the higher and later standard of quality.
Especially in Europe we can investigate this relationship by the help of statistics which in some cases extend back for nearly a century. We can trace the various phases through which each nation passes, the effects of prosperity, the influence of education and sanitary improvement, the general complex development of civilization, in each case moving forward, though not regularly and steadily, to higher stages by means of a falling birth-rate, which is to some extent compensated by a falling death-rate, the two rates nearly always running parallel, so that a temporary rise in the birth-rate is usually accompanied by a rise in the death-rate, by a return, that is to say, towards the conditions which we find at the beginning of animal life, and a steady fall in the birth-rate is always accompanied by a fall in the death-rate.
It is thus clear that the birth-rate combined with the death-rate constitutes a delicate instrument for the measurement of civilization, and that the record of their combined curves registers the upward or downward course of every nation. The curves, as we know, tend to be parallel, and when they are not parallel we are in the presence of a rare and abnormal state of things which is usually temporary or transitional.
A study of the statistics of European countries furnishes us with evidence of the facts above stated. It is instructive to perceive how closely the birth-rate and the death-rate of the several European countries agree. It is perceived that the eight countries of Europe which register the highest birth-rate are the identical countries registering the highest death-rate. This is as might be expected, for a very high birth-rate seems fatally to involve a very high death-rate. The study of the following table may prove interesting—it certainly is instructive. In the following table the European countries having the highest birth-rate are stated in the order of rank according to size of such rate; and the countries having the heaviest death-rate are stated in the order of their rank in size of such rate:
| Highest European Birth-Rate. | Highest European Death-Rate. |
|---|---|
| Russia. | Russia. |
| Roumania. | Roumania. |
| Bulgaria. | Hungary. |
| Serbia. | Bulgaria. |
| Hungary. | Spain. |
| Italy. | Serbia. |
| Austria. | Austria. |
| Spain. | Italy. |
Moreover, Japan, with a rather high birth-rate, has the same death-rate as Spain; and Chile, with a still higher birth-rate, has a higher death rate than Russia. So, we see, that among human peoples we find the same laws prevailing as among animals, and the higher nations of the world differ from those which are less highly evolved precisely as the elephant differs from the herring, though within a narrower range, that is to say, by producing fewer offspring and taking better care of them.