Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/518

 502 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the species, nor, in short, that the species "is to be" preserved at all. It must be remembered that the process of evolution itself shows us that instincts, feelings, ideas, no less than organs, begin, grow, change, and die, and that, in this perpetual flux, we often find an order of facts gradually transforming itself into what seems to be its entire opposite. Nor must it be forgotten that there is a law of dissolution as well as a law of evolution; and who can foresee what causes will accelerate the human race in its downward motion of retrogression ?

The biological doctrine of Mr. Spencer, as presented in some passages of his Sociology, and more at length in his Priticiples of Biology — the doctrine, namely, that fecundity decreases as organization develops — does not seem sufficient to account for a very notorious fact — the growing decrease of the birth-rate in civilized countries. Some writers, wishing to refute the theories of Malthus, have maintained that the purely biological law is in itself a check on the increase of population ; that statistics prove very conclusively that the decline of fecundity is a biological consequence of civilization, and that there is in the race an "organic tendency" to keep its numbers within the means of subsistence.' This, however, is not a complete interpretation of the real phenomena exhibited by society, as it leaves out of con- sideration the most potent factor — the psychic factor operating in the form of selfishness. We are not to suppose that the growing "infecundity " is real barrenness, or physiological impotence, or that this physiological deficiency increases with civilization to such an extent as to be the only explanation, or an adequate explanation, of the reduction in the birth-rate. Mr. Nitti himself, after his defense of the Spencerian theory, ends with surprising inconsistency by saying : " In general, however, we must agree with Bertillon that 'the French birth-rate is reduced

■See F. NiTTI, Population and the Social System (London and New York, 1894), pp. 171-4, 94-5 (an interesting book, but very poorly translated). He mentions the well-known fact that in France the number of births per marriage was 4.24 in 1800-1805, 4.08 in 1816-20, 3.26 in 1836-40, 2.96 in 1886-9, and gives many other data. Statistics for longer periods may be found in Mulhall's Dictionary of Statistics (London, 1 892), s. v. "Births," from which it appears that, in general, the birth-rate of civilized countries has been decreasing during the century.