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Of course the obvious remedy is marriage; but one cannot marry from prudence, or from a sense of duty, or even to increase the birth-rate, which I am concerned to see is diminishing. I am, moreover, to be perfectly frank, a transcendentalist on the subject of marriage.
But, to return more directly to what we were saying, was it not observed that, after the great battles of the Napoleonic era, the birth-rate increased in an extraordinary manner, as though the lives suddenly cut short in their prime were not really dead and were eager to be back again in our midst and complete their career?
Motherhood is rapidly declining as a numerical fact in civilized communities generally. Not merely does the birth-rate fall persistently and without the slightest regard to the commentators thereon, but it will continue to do so for many years to come.
"Very serious thing this decline of the birth-rate in Manchester." "I beg your pardon?" "Very serious thing this decline of the birth-rate in Manchester," repeated Mr. Cunningham, tapping the Sunday paper, in which the calamity in question had just been announced to him. "Ah, yes," said Leonard, who was not going to let on that he had not bought a Sunday paper.
Special care should be taken that taxation is so adjusted as not to penalise parenthood in the socially valuable middle class. For some time to come we are likely to see, in all the leading nations, a restricted birth-rate, prompted by desire for social betterment, combined, however, with concessions to the rival policy of commercial expansion, growing numbers, and military preparation.
Russia has always had a latent force of development; there is within her a vis inertiae equivalent to a mysterious energy of expansion. Her birth-rate is higher than that of any other European country; she does not progress, she increases.
What, however, even at the outset, more births most distinctly and most unquestionably imply is more deaths. It is nowadays so well known that a high birth-rate is accompanied by a high death-rate the exceptions are too few to need attention that it is unnecessary to adduce further evidence.
Harnack somewhere, in discussing the comparative success or failure of various early Christian sects, makes the illuminating remark that the main determining cause in each case was not their comparative reasonableness of doctrine or skill in controversy for they practically never converted one another but simply the comparative increase or decrease of the birth-rate in the respective populations.
But first also stands the same city for infant mortality, which is three times greater than in some other cities in the Province with a low birth-rate. Sault Ste. Marie, again with an enormous birth-rate, stands third for infant mortality.
The way of Nature has also been the way of humanity so far, and except when a temporary alleviation is obtained through an expansion of the general stock of sustenance by invention or discovery, the amount of starvation and of the physical misery of privation in the world, must vary almost exactly with the excess of the actual birth-rate over that required to sustain population at a number compatible with a universal contentment.
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