Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/477

Rh among the native population, by means of the disastrous competition introduced. Indeed the arrival during the years from 1830 to 1840, of large numbers of Irish and German peasants who had a much lower standard of living, and so lowered the general level of wages, was nothing less than an economic disaster for our old American stock. They shrank from the inferior competition, and were naturally loth to bear children, who must compete in the labor market with these unwelcome invaders. There is overwhelming evidence that the birth rate in all countries has always been much affected by economic changes. Professor Richmond Mayo Smith, for example, says in his "Statistics and Sociology" that a sudden fall in the birth rate is the result of war or of commercial distress or of economic disaster. We have seen that the rapid immigration of European peasants about 1830 was truly an economic disaster for the native New Englanders; and there is no reason to doubt that these unfavorable economic conditions were responsible for the great fall in their birth rate. Benjamin Kidd has said in this connection: "The unwillingness of men to marry and bring up families in a state of life lower than that into which they themselves were born is one of the most powerful of known influences working to restrict the birth rate." The causal connection between this immigration into New England and the decline in the native birth rate is deduced especially from the fact that this decline appeared first and most markedly in those verv states and counties into which the immigrants chiefly went.

This check in the increase of the native population was so effective that in 1850, in spite of the immigration of nearly two million persons during the preceding decade, our total population was only 0.03 per cent, more than it would have been from natural increase alone at the former birth rate. This check on the native increase has persisted, indeed strengthened, with the passing decades and the ever-increasing immigration of poorer and poorer stock from Europe and Asia; so that in the Report of the Industrial Commission in 1901 Mr. Walker maintained that "if there had been no immigration into this country during the past ninety years, the native element would long have filled the place the foreigners have usurped."

I shall consider the method of action of economic conditions on the birth rate during the latter half of the last century, togthertogether [sic] with their action at the present time. But I must explain at the outset that there is this important distinction between the two periods with regard to the operation of economic forces: namely, during the former period, when modern methods of limiting families were generally unknown, economic pressure produced an involuntary reduction of the number of children by postponing the age of marriage and by preventing many marriages altogether; while during recent years, as Neo-malthusianism