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It was simply an economic question of supply and demand. Labour was wanted in America at any price. The emigration had the same effect in Bosnia as in Montenegro. A large surplus of women remained behind, and the birth-rate of illegitimate children rose high and, as is perhaps inevitable with a military occupation, prostitution was common.
We may agree that a natural factor comes into the recent fall in the human birth-rate.
It is the contemporary settling-down of the birth-rate in this class, combined with the novel consequences of modern industrialism, especially in the form of married women's labour, that makes the question so important. Before we go any further, the proposition may be laid down that married women's labour, as it commonly exists, is an intolerable evil, condemned already by our first principles.
So that if it were not for this fall in illegitimate births the period 1896-1900 would show a positive rise in the effective rate of increase of .8 per thousand. The eminent persons therefore who ascribe our falling birth-rate to irreligion and so forth, either speak without knowledge or with some sort of knowledge beyond my ken.
If, however, we wish to consider the real significance of the facts, without regard for the wild cries of ignorant cranks, it is scarcely necessary to point out here that neither the birth-rate taken by itself, nor the death-rate taken by itself, will suffice to give us any measure even of the growth of the population, to say nothing of the progress of civilisation or the happiness of humanity.
The births fill up the vacancies, and the prince who increased the population before vacancies arose would simply increase the rate of mortality. If you want to increase your birth-rate without absolutely producing famine, as he remarks afterwards, make your towns unhealthy, and encourage settlement by marshes.
Immediately on the cessation of hostilities it arose to its former number, while the actual return of the troops brought an increase of 2000 per month. The maximum was reached in March, 1872, when it was 18,450. The war of 1866 seems to have passed over Germany without any great influence, the birth-rate in 1865 being 39.2; in 1866, 39.4; in 1867, 38.3; in 1868, 38.4.
Paradoxical as it may seem, neither voluntary restriction of births, nor famine, nor pestilence, nor war, has much effect in reducing numbers. Birth-control instead of diminishing the population, may only lower the death-rate. France in 1781, with a birth-rate of 39, had much the same net increase as in the years before the war with a birth-rate of 20.
At the present time, when an apparently internecine conflict is raging between the British Empire and Germany, a more detailed comparison of the vital statistics of the two countries will be read with interest. In England and Wales the birth-rate culminated in 1876 at a little over 36, after slowly rising from 33 in 1850.
But to lower the Orient's prodigious birth-rate is quite another matter. As a matter of fact, that birth-rate keeps up with undiminished vigour, and the consequence has been a portentous increase of population in nearly every portion of the Orient under Western political control.
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