Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/522

518 as many births in 1904 as the members of 1880 had in that year, there would have been born to them nearly 70,000 babies, instead of 32,000. If the birth rate in these 280,000 families of comparatively prosperous artisans had only fallen in the same degree as that of England and Wales generally, there would have been born to them 58,000 babies instead of 32,000. What was the special influence in these exceptionally thrifty families that prevented the other babies being born?

6. The decline in the birth rate is due to some new cause which was not appreciably operative fifty years ago.

We may, indeed, infer, from the relatively stationary birth-rate, alike of the whole population and of selected classes down to some date between 1861 and 1881, and the steady persistence of the subsequent decline, that the decline is due to some new cause. The same conclusion is reached by the elaborate calculations just published by Mr. Heron.

In 1851, as in 1901, it could have been inferred from a comparison of different districts in the metropolis that 'the more cultured, the more prosperous, healthy, and thrifty classes of the community' were producing fewer children per marriage than the classes of lower social status. But, as regards London in 1851, Mr. Heron is "driven to almost certain conclusion that differences in the mean age of wives were amply sufficient. . . to account for the differential birth rates of districts with divergent social status." The operating cause of a low birth rate was, in fact, at that date, postponement of marriage. We know, however, from Dr. Newsholme's corrected birth rates that no such cause as a greater postponement of mariagemarriage [sic], with the corresponding rise in the age of the average wife, has anything to do with the decline in the birth rate now recorded. This decline is due to some cause other than those that were appreciably in operation in 1851.

7. The decline in the birth rate is principally, if not entirely, the result of deliberate volition in the regulation of the marriage state.

The reader can scarcely have read the foregoing statements without coming to the conclusion that the falling-off in the birth rate, which has during the last twenty years deprived England and Wales of some two hundred thousand babies a year, is the result of deliberate intention on the part of the parents. The persistence and universality of the fall in town and country alike; the total absence of any discoverable relation to unhealthy conditions, mental development, the strain of education, town life or physical deterioration of any kind; the remarkable fact that it has been greatest where it is known to be widely desired; the evidence that it accompanies not extreme poverty but social