Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/262

250 The English, it will be observed, never succeeded in doubling themselves in any hundred years until 1780 to 1880, when they almost quadrupled.

Civilization, then, does not appear to be a very serious hindrance to rapidity of growth; and the reason is evident. As compared with barbarism, it produces a larger food supply, greater variety of it, better houses, better sanitary arrangements, better health, longer life, and stronger reasons for wanting to live and wanting to enable others to live. The people of the middle ages lacked skill in producing the comforts and necessaries of life, their sanitary arrangements were shocking and their lives despondent. They were visited with plagues and epidemics which have not now been known for four hundred years. Their minds were clouded with dreadful delusions, superstitions, and terrors which produced the "dance of death" and the continual slaughter of witches. A large proportion of their children died, and even adult life was short.

Long living and many who live long is as important an element in the increase of population as numerous births. All the children born in the United States in the year 1891, who die before they are eight years old, will not increase the population either in numbers or effective strength so much as one man born in that year who lives to be thirty. The man, independently of his greater usefulness, will be counted as an inhabitant in three censuses; the children will be counted in none.

Paupers, savages, and other people of low life are often supposed to multiply very fast because they seem to be so reckless in the number of children that are born to them. But the same shiftlessness which brings the children into the world surrounds them with conditions that destroy them. Negroes are supposed to be very prolific; but the death-rate among them in cities is almost double the death-rate among whites; and the death-rate among negro children is more than double the death-rate among white children. The woman of the slums, who was recently reported to have said that she ought to know something about the nurture of children because she had buried fourteen of her own, was doubtless a person of excellent intentions; but she has not done so well for the republic as some less boastful mother who has raised one son to maturity.

It is often thoughtlessly asserted that modern city life decreases population. But, as compared with ancient city life, it very much increases it. Previous to the year 1790, in all large cities, the death-rate always exceeded the birth-rate. In London the death-rate was often double the birth-rate. Immigration from the rural districts and not their own power of reproduction kept these cities from decay. Our modern cities contain certain