essential parts of the problem have been dismissed as briefly as possible in order to economise space for the main purpose of the work. Among the most puzzling facts of anthropology and history have been the small apparent advance in intellect made by the human race during thousands of years, and the invariable decline of ancient races after reaching a high pinnacle of wealth and civilisation. The facts cease to be very mysterious, however, in the presence of a law which causes the birthrate to decline with the deathrate, and renders the race sterile when a certain stage of development has been reached. Humanity has been likened to a candle which perpetually burns away at the top and is renewed from below. It is obvious that, if this is so, progress beyond a certain level will be impossible unless the difficulty be grappled with, the obstacle to further evolution overcome, and an intelligently regulated birthrate among the abler sections of the community secured. It is time that the matter was thoroughly threshed out. The problem of the declining birthrate is now a critical one for the French nation. In a decade or so, at the present rate of progress, we shall have reached the point where France stands now. So it behoves us to make up our minds whether we will initiate an intelligently directed inquiry, determined to leave no stone unturned to solve the problem, or persist in barking up the wrong tree until our civilisation crumbles beneath our feet. The whole future of the human race depends upon the solution of the problem of the birthrate and population. Compared with it, troubles in Ireland, unemployment, or even such events as the recent great war, are merely passing ripples on the surface of our civilisation. It is a problem which has interested every great thinker upon social questions, from Plato and Aristotle down to Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Failure to grapple with it successfully seems to have been the chief cause of the decline of many ancient empires, the names of which have come down to us out of the remote past, or whose remains still lie scattered over the surface of the earth. This was almost certainly the case with Ancient Rome and Greece, for even where there has been no actual decline of population there has been a replacement of the homogeneous native race by a heterogeneous collection of aliens. Neither of these alternatives can be contemplated by a high-spirited nation with equanimity; yet either may overtake the leading nations of the world within a measurable period unless the problem of the birthrate be successfully grappled with. This work will have fulfilled its purpose if it assists inquiries directed towards that end, and if the problem is brought one step nearer solution. I would like to express here my obligations to Dr. Halford Ross, Dr. John Brownlee, and Dr. Leonard Hill, who have been among the foremost in pointing out the inadequacy of the "race-suicide" theory to explain the facts, and to whom I am indebted for valuable help in various ways. They are, of course, in no way committed to the particular theories and interpretations expounded in this work. Also I am indebted to old friends-in particular to Mr. Horace F. Bastings, Mr. W. H. Trimble, and Mr. G. Richardson-in Dunedin, New Zealand. CALIFORNIA THE LAW OF BIRTHS AND DEATHS CHAPTER I RACE SUICIDE OR A NATURAL LAW? So accustomed are we to the small families usual in the more prosperous European countries, that we seldom realise how vast is the gap which separates the full potential fertility of the human race from its actual or realised fertility. A family of five or six is looked upon as quite large in England, while a family of ten or a dozen is regarded as enormous. Yet the average family among the French-Canadians is said to be over nine, and Dr. C. E. Woodruff asserts that there are fifteen to twenty births per family among the Philippinos even yet.1 The period of potential fertility among the women of civilised communities is from fifteen to about fifty years. A rate of even one child per annum would thus give a potential fertility of about thirty children for a woman who married before twenty and lived until past fifty years of age. Nor is this the full story. "Aristotle mentions a woman who had five children at a birth four 1 Expansion of Races, Woodruff, p. 177. |