Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/519

Rh 3. The decline in the birth rate is exceptionally marked where the inconvenience of having children is specially felt.

There is not much evidence to be adduced under this head, but what there is is of some significance. Where married women habitually go to work in factories, and where their earnings form an important element in the weekly income of the family, the interruption caused by maternity is probably most acutely felt. The enforcement by the factory and workshops acts of 1891 and 1901 of four weeks' absence from employment after child-birth comes as an additional objection. Moreover, in the factory districts the later age at which children can now become productive wage-earners has certainly rendered large families less economically desirable than of yore. It is, therefore, of some significance that the ten towns in all England in which the relative fall in the birth rate between 1881 and 1901 is most startingly great are Northampton, Halifax, Burnley, Blackburn, Derby, Leicester, Bradford, Oldham, Huddersfield and Bolton—all towns in which an exceptionally large proportion of married women are engaged in factory work, in textiles, hosiery or boots. I can adduce no statistics of the decline in the birth rate among the married women teaching in schools; but it is known to be great.

4. The decline in the birth rate appears to be specially marked in places inhabited by the servant-keeping class.

It is significant that Brighton shows a relatively heavy falling off from a birth rate which was already a low one. But a comparison between various districts of London gives us further indications. Let us take, as a convenient index of relative wealth, the percentage of domestic servants to population. The corrected birth rate of Bethnalgreen—the district of London in which there are fewest non-Londoners and in which fewest of the inhabitants keep domestic servants—fell off, between 1881 and 1901, by 12 per cent, (or exactly as much as that of the North Riding of Yorkshire). But that of Hampstead—where most domestic servants are kept—fell off by no less than 36 per cent., and attained the distinction of reaching the lowest of all the corrected birth rates that Dr. Newsholme has computed. Second only to Hampstead in this respect come Kensington and Paddington, which have statistically to be taken together, and which, keeping nearly as high a proportion of domestic servants as Hampstead, saw their corrected birth rates, already lower than that of Hampstead, fall off by 19 per cent., and sink to less than two thirds of that of the Bethnal-green of 1881. It would be interesting to extend this comparison, taking all the districts of London in the order of their average poverty, as shown by such indices as the proportion of the inhabitants who live in one or two-room tenements, by the rateable value per head, and by the percentage keeping domestic servants. But the variations in the registration areas in nearly all these cases prevent accurate comparison of birth