Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/498

480 as is also eastern Prussia. Suicide should be most frequent in Schleswig-Holstein and Hanover, if racial causes were appreciably operative. The argument, in fact, falls to pieces of its own weight.

A summary view of the class of social phenomena seemingly characteristic of the distinct races in France, if we extend our field of vision to cover all Europe, suggests an explanation for the curious coincidences and parallelisms above noted, which is the exact opposite of the racial one. In every population we may distinguish two modes of increase or evolution, which vary according to economic opportunity for advancement. One community grows from its own loins; children born in it remain there, grow up to maturity, and transmit their mental and physical peculiarities unaltered to the next generation. Such a group of population develops from within, mentally as well as physically, by inheritance. Such is the type of the average rural community. It is conservative in all respects, holding to the past with an unalterable tenacity. Compare with that a community which grows almost entirely by immigration. Stress of competition is severe. There is no time for rearing children; nor is it deemed desirable, for every child is a handicap upon further social advancement. Marriage, even, unless it be deferred until late in life, is an expensive luxury. Population grows, nevertheless; but how? By the steady influx of outsiders. Such is the type known to us in the modern great city. Between these two extremes are all gradations between the progressive and the conservative type of population. To the former are peculiar all those social ills which, as Giddings has rightly urged, are the price paid for such progress. Suicide is a correlative of education; frequency of divorce is an inevitable concomitant of equality of rights between the sexes, and the decline of the religious sanction of patria potestas. A decreasing birth rate almost always attends social advancement. To prevent such a fall in the birth rate, and at the same time to overcome the devastations of disease, is held by many to be the demographic ideal to which all states should aspire. Not postponed marriages, not childless families, not a high proportion of celibates; not, on the other hand, reckless and improvident unions, with a terrific infant mortality as a penalty therefor; but a self-restrained and steady birth rate in which a high percentage survive the perils of infancy. "Civilization is the baptism of the passions. In the cloister neither does the mother die of fever nor the child of croup; but outside the cloister to find both mothers and children, and bring both well through fever and croup—that is civilization." Could we for