RACE ACENUANCY AND BIRTH-RATE.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIII, Issue 9075, 15 February 1908, Page 7

RACE ACENUANCY AND BIRTH-RATE.

“The publication bf‘French vital statistics has set the world thinking,” says the Broad Arrow. “The decline in the birth-rate is so marked that it is becoming a national .menace. that it is anything new, hut unless it can be arrested France must inevitably fall from her place as one of the leading powers. TJnfortnnatly, she does not stand alone. Only for the alien the United States would be in even worse case than France, and the Australian birth-rate seriously perplexes antipodal statesmen. “In England the future is more promising, owing to the fecundity of the upper and lower classes, the very backbone of the country, which is beginning to limit the family, thereby'accounting for the drop in our birth-rate from 30.4 per 1000 to 27 in 15 years. If it continues, Germany will hold the relative position towards us in population that France did early in the nineteenth century. For whereas our annual increase is'soo,ooo. Germany's is 900,000. As Moltke once said, ‘Every year by our birth-rate we win a battle over France.’ True, but even in the Fatherland the rate has fallen from 86.7 to 31.1 in four years. There is, however, no immediate danger. Hence the need for Germany to find elbow room for her people. With her it must be ‘expansion or explosion. ’ “Nor do the problems raised by the birth-rate involve only the future of France, England, Germany, and the United States. With it is bound up the existence of the white races. It is surely significant that, while the birth-rate is declining in the Western world, it is rising in the East, particularly in Japan, where in twenty-seven years it has almost doubled. In China the population is kept down by infanticide. Now, with the yellow races growing fast, and the white races declining more or less slowly, it is merely a question of time when their relative importance will be’reversed. This was prophesied long ago, when he .was laughed at for a dreamer. But the world does not laugh now. On the whole it would do well to consider whether civilisation, as we understand it, is worth the price. In the multiplicity of our material wants we“are losing vigour without which no nation can stand. ‘ The survival oflthe fittest,’ we flatter ourselves,|is based on a Western standard. In reality, it is based on the capacity to subsist on little, which our overcivilisation abhors. Hence the menaceYf the birth-rate.” The official returns of the populaFrance show a substantial increase in the number of marriages, an enormous rise in divorces, a continued fall in births, and a slight decline in deaths:— In 1881 the number of births in France was 937,057, so that the decrease in 25 years is 130,000.