Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/666

 650 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

existence can be increased and improved, to multiply faster than these. There remain, then, the two other checks, in which we at once recognize Mai thus' preventive and positive checks.

It is plain, on the one hand, that, if every person married and had as many children as he could have, the immediate effect would be, or tend to be, an enormous surplus of population, whose demands for food could not be met by the best means of production known to our civilization, and must of necessity be kept down by an equally enormous rate of premature death ; and, on the other hand, that, by a moderate exercise of the repro- ductive power, multiplication could take place at such a rate as not to require or to cause the intervention of the positive check — premature death. Between these two theoretically conceiv- able extremes, both of which are realized in the animal world, there may exist all possible gradations ; and, if it is true that we are far from the former, we are, perhaps, equally far from the latter, as is shown by the great mortality still taking place among the lower classes, which are also the more prolific.

Malthus repeatedly insisted on the obvious truth that the poor classes multiply much more rapidly than the rich; and, as might be expected, it is among them that disease and mortality are greater. As early as 1839 Hippolyte Passy called attention to the fact that, from statistical data, it appeared that the num- ber of births per marriage was much larger where, as in the maritime and manufacturing towns, the majority of the people belonged to the working classes. He also found that in Paris the number of births per marriage averaged 1.97 among the rich, and 2.86, or about one more, among the poor; a difference which he ascribed to the greater prudence and foresight preva- lent among the wealthy.' In 1888 it was estimated by Drys- dale that 100 women of Montmartre, the democratic part of the city, had, on an average, 175 children, while in the Champs Elysees, the quarter of the aristocracy, the same number of women had only eighty-six children, or only half as many.'' The average birth-rate for 1,000 inhabitants has been estimated to

'See ^DOUARD VAN DER Smissen, La population (Paris, 1893), pp. 349-53- » M. G. MULHALL, Dictionary of Statistics (London, 1892), s. v. " Births," p. 93.

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