Outspoken Essays by William Ralph Inge

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Fertility and care for offspring seem as a rule to vary inversely. The
latter is the path of biological progress, and is characteristic of all
viviparous animals. That any degree of parental attention is
incompatible with the immense fecundity of the lower organisms needs no
demonstration. Such fertility is not necessary to keep up the numbers of
the higher species, which find abundant food in the swarming progeny of
the lower types, and are not themselves exposed to wholesale slaughter.
Speaking of fishes, Sutherland says:

Of species that exhibit no sort of parental care, the
average of forty-nine gives 1,040,000 eggs to a female each
year; while among those which make nests or any apology for
nests the number is only about 10,000. Among those which
have any protective tricks, such as carrying the eggs in
pouches or attached to the body, or in the mouth, the
average number is under 1000; while among those whose care
takes the form of uterine or quasi-uterine gestation which
brings the young into the world alive, an average of 56 eggs
is quite sufficient.

Man is no exception to these laws. His evolution has been steadily in
the direction of diminishing fertility and increasing parental care.
This does not necessarily imply that the modern European loves his
children better than the savage loves his. It is grim necessity, not
want of affection, which determines the treatment of children by their
parents over a great part of the world, and through the greater part of
human history. The homeless hunters, who represent the lowest stage of
savagery, are now almost extinct. In these tribes the woman has to
follow the man carrying her baby. Under such conditions the chances of
rearing a large family are small indeed. Very different is the life of
the grassland nomads, who roam over the Arabian plateau and the steppes
of Central Asia. These tribes, who really live as the parasites of their
flocks and herds, depending on them entirely for subsistence, often
multiply rapidly. Their typical unit is the great patriarchal family, in
which the _sheikh_ may have scores of children by different mothers.
These children soon begin to earn their keep, and are taken care of. If,
however, the patriarch so chooses, Hagar with her child is cast adrift,
to find her way back to her own people, if she can. The grasslands are
usually almost as full as they can hold. A period of drought, or
pressure by rivals, in former times sent a horde of these hardy
shepherds on a raid into the nearest settled province; and if, like the
Tartars, they were mounted, they usually killed, plundered, and
conquered wherever they went, until the discovery of gunpowder saved
civilisation from the recurrent peril of barbarian inroads. Barbarians
of another type, hunters with fixed homes, seldom increase rapidly,
partly because the dangers of forest-life for young children are much
greater than on the steppe.

In the primitive river-valley civilisations, such as Egypt and
Babylonia, the conditions of increase were so favourable that a dense
population soon began to press upon the means of subsistence. In Egypt
the remedy was a centralised government which could undertake great
irrigation works and intensive cultivation. In Babylonia, for the first
time in history, foreign trade was made to support a larger population
than the land itself could maintain. There was little or no infanticide
in Babylonia, but the death-rate in these steaming alluvial plains has
always been very high.

When we turn to poor and mountainous countries like Greece, the
conditions are very different. It was an old belief among the Hellenes
that in the days before the Trojan War 'the world was too full of
people.' The increase was doubtless made possible by the trade which
developed in the Minoan period, but the sources of food-supply were
liable to be interfered with. Hence came the necessity for active
colonisation, which lasted from the eighth to the sixth century B.C.
This period of expansion came to an end when all the available sites
were occupied. In the sixth century the Greeks found themselves headed
off, in the west by Phoenicians and Etruscans, in the east by the
Persian Empire. The problem of over-population was again pressing upon
them. Incessant civil wars between Hellenes kept the numbers down to
some extent; but Greek battles were not as a rule very bloody, and every
healthy nation has a surprising capacity of making good the losses
caused by war. The first effect of the check to emigration was that the
old ideal of the 'self-sufficient life,' which meant the practice of
mixed farming, had to be partially abandoned. The most flourishing
States, and especially Athens, had to take to manufactures, which they
exchanged for the food-products of the Balkan States and South Russia.
The result was an increasing urbanisation, and a new population of free
'resident aliens.' Conservatives hated this change and wished to revive
the old ideal of a small self-supporting State, with a maximum of 20,000
or 30,000 citizens. Plato, in his latest work, the 'Laws,' wishes his
model city to be not too near the sea, the proximity of which 'fills the
streets with merchants and shopkeepers, and begets dishonesty in the
souls of men.' On the other side Isocrates, the most far-seeing of
Athenian politicians, realised that the day of small city-states was
over, and that the limited, 'self-sufficient' community would not long
maintain its independence. He urged his countrymen to pursue a policy of
peaceful penetration in Western Asia, as the Greeks were soon to do
under the successors of Alexander. But the prejudice against
industrialism was very strong. Greece in the fifth century remained a
poor country; her exports were not more than enough to pay for the food
of her existing population; and that population had to be artificially
restricted. The Greeks were an exceptionally healthy and long-lived
race; their great men for the most part lived to ages which have no
parallel until the nineteenth century. The infant death-rate from
natural causes may have been rather high, as it is in modern Greece, but
it was augmented by systematic infanticide. The Greek father had an
absolute right to decide whether a new-comer was to be admitted to the
family. In Ephesus alone of Greek cities a parent was compelled to prove
that he was too poor to rear a child before he was allowed to get rid of
it.[10] Even Hesiod, centuries earlier, advises a father not to bring up
more than one son, and daughters were sacrificed more frequently than
sons. The usual practice was to expose the infant in a jar; anyone who
thought it worth while might rescue the baby and bring it up as a slave.
But this was not often done. At Gela, in Sicily, there are 233 'potted'
burials in an excavated graveyard, out of a total of 570.[11] The
proportion of female infants exposed must have been very large. The
evidence of literature is supported by such letters as this from a
husband at Oxyrhynchus: 'When--good luck to you--your child is born, if
it is a male, let it live; if a female, expose it.'[12] Besides
infanticide, abortion was freely practised, and without blame.[13] The
Greek citizen married rather late; but as his bride was usually in her
'teens this would not affect the birth-rate. Nor need we attach much
importance, as a factor in checking population, to the characteristic
Greek vice, nor to prostitution, which throughout antiquity was
incredibly cheap and visited by no physical penalty. As for slaves,
Xenophon recommends that they should be allowed to have children as a
reward for good conduct.[14]

A rapid decline in population set in under the successors of Alexander.
Polybius ascribes it to selfishness and a high standard of comfort,
which is doubtless true of the upper and middle classes;[15] but the
depopulation of rural Greece can hardly be so accounted for. Perhaps
the forests were cut down, and the rainfall diminished. It was the
general impression that the soil was far less productive than formerly.
The decay of the Hellenic race was accelerated after the Roman conquest,
until the old stock became almost extinct. This disappearance of the
most gifted race that ever inhabited our planet is one of the strangest
catastrophes of history, and is full of warnings for the modern
sociologist. Industrial slavery, indifference to parenthood, and
addiction to club-life were certainly three of the main causes, unless
we prefer to regard the two last as symptoms of hopelessness about the
future.

The same disease fell upon Italy, and was coincident not with the
murderous war against Hannibal and the subsequent campaigns, costly
though they were, in Spain, Syria, and Macedonia, but with the
Hellenisation of social life. Lucan, under Nero, complains that the
towns have lost more than half their inhabitants, and that the
country-side lies waste. Under Titus it was estimated that, whereas
Italy under the Republic could raise nearly 800,000 soldiers, that
number was now reduced by one-half. Marcus Aurelius planted a large
tribe of Marcomanni on unoccupied land in Italy. In the fourth century
Bologna, Modena, Piacenza, and many other towns in North Italy were in
ruins. The land of the Volscians and Aequians, once densely populated,
was a desert even in Livy's time. Samnium remained the wilderness that
Sulla had left it; and Apulia was a lonely sheep-walk.

The causes of this depopulation have been often discussed, both in
antiquity and in our own day. Slavery, infanticide, celibacy, wars and
massacres, large estates, and pestilence have all been named as causes;
but I am inclined to think that all these influences together are
insufficient to account for so rapid a decline. The toll of war was
lighter by far than in periods when the population was rising;
infectious disease (unless we suppose, as some have suggested, that
malaria became for the first time endemic under the Roman domination)
invaded the empire in occasional and destructive epidemics, but a
healthy population recovers from pestilence, as from war, with great
rapidity. The large grazing ranches displaced farms because corn-growing
in Italy was unprofitable, but there was a large supply of grain from
Sicily, Africa, and other districts. Slavery undoubtedly accounts for a
great deal. This institution is excessively wasteful of human life; it
is never possible to keep up the numbers of slaves without slave-hunting
in the countries from which they come. And we must remember that ancient
civilisation was almost entirely urban. The barbarians found ample waste
lands between the towns, which they did not as a rule care to visit,
probably because those who did so soon fell victims to microbic
diseases. The sanitary condition of ancient cities was better than in
the Middle Ages; but the death-rate was probably too high to permit of
any increase in the population. But after admitting that all these
causes were operative, it may be that we shall be obliged to acknowledge
also a psychological factor. If a nation has no hopes for the future, if
it is even doubtful whether life is worth living, if it is disposed to
withdraw from the struggle for existence and to meet the problems of
life in a temper of passive resignation, it will not regard children as
a heritage and gift that cometh from the Lord, but rather as an
encumbrance. That such was the temper of the later Roman Empire may be
gathered not only from the literature, which is singularly devoid of
hopefulness and enterprise, but from the rapid spread of monasticism and
eremitism in this period. The prevalence of this world-weariness of
course needs explanation, and the cause is rather obscure. It does not
seem to be connected with unfavourable external conditions, but rather
with a racial exhaustion akin to senile decay in the individual. But
there is no real analogy between the life of an individual and that of a
nation, and it would be very rash to insist on the hypothesis of racial
decay, which perhaps has no biological basis.

The influence of Christianity on population is very difficult to
estimate. Nothing is more unscientific than to collect the ethical
precepts and practices of nations which profess the Christian religion,
and to label them as 'the results of Christianity.' The historian of
religion would indeed be faced by a strange task if he were compelled to
trace the moral ideals of Simeon Stylites and of Howard the
philanthropist, of Francis of Assisi and Oliver Cromwell, of Thomas
Aquinas and Thomas a Becket, to a common source. The only ethical and
social principles which can properly be called Christian are those which
can be proved to have their root in the teaching and example of the
Founder of Christianity. But the Gospel of Christ was a product of
Jewish soil. It is historically connected with the Jewish prophetic
tradition, which it carried to its fullest development and presented in
an universalised and spiritualised form. Its social teaching consists
chiefly of general principles which have to be applied to conditions
unlike those contemplated by its first disciples, who were under the
influence of the apocalyptic expectations prevalent at the time. Jewish
morality was in its origin the morality of a tribe of nomad Bedouins;
and we have seen that infant life is held sacred by these peoples.
Marriage is regarded as a duty, and childlessness as a misfortune or a
disgrace. The forward look, characteristic of the Hebrews from the
first, made every Jew desirous to leave descendants who might witness
happier times, and one of whom might even be the promised Deliverer of
his people. No Hebrew of either sex was allowed to be a servant of vice;
abnormal practices, though screened by Canaanite religion, were far less
common than in Greece or Italy. To this wholesome morality Christianity
added the doctrines of the value, in the sight of God, of every human
life, and of the sanctity of the body as the 'temple of God.' To the
Pagans, the continence of the Christians was, next to their affection
for each other, their most remarkable characteristic. From the first,
the new religion set itself firmly against infanticide and abortion, and
won one of its most signal moral triumphs in driving underground and
greatly diminishing homosexual vice. Its encouragement of celibacy,
especially for those who followed the 'religious' vocation, was an
offset to its healthy influence on family life, and ultimately, as
Galton has shown, worked great mischief by sterilising for centuries
many of the gentlest and noblest in each generation; but this tendency
was adventitious to Christianity, and would never have taken root on
Palestinian soil. The cult of virginity has lasted on, with much else
that belongs to the later Hellenistic age, in Catholicism.

In the Middle Ages the population question slumbered. The miserable
chaos into which the old civilisation sank after the barbarian
invasions, the orgies of massacre and plunder, the almost total oblivion
of medical science, and the pestiferous condition of the medieval walled
town, which could be smelt miles away, averted any risk of
over-population. Families were very large, but the majority of the
children died. Millions were swept away by the Black Death; millions
more by the Crusades. Such books as that of Luchaire, on France in the
reign of Philip Augustus, bring vividly before us the horrible condition
of society in feudal times, and explain amply the sparsity of the
population.

The early modern period contains another notable example of a sudden and
unaccountable decline in population. The scene is Spain, which, after
playing an active and very prominent part in the world's history, sank
quickly into the lethargy from which it has never recovered. It may be
noted that here, as in the case of Rome, the decay of population and
energy followed a great influx of plundered wealth. On the other hand,
the increase of population in our newly-planted North American colonies
must have been extremely rapid for two or three generations.

The enormous multiplication of the European races since the middle of
the eighteenth century is a phenomenon quite unique in history, and
never likely to be repeated.[16] It was rendered possible by the new
labour-saving inventions which immensely increased the exports which
could be exchanged for food, and by the opening up of vast new
food-producing areas. The chief method by which the increase was
effected, especially in the later period, has been the lengthening of
human life by improved sanitation and medical science.[17] Since 1865
the average duration of life in England and Wales has been raised by a
little more than one-third. Other European countries show the same ratio
of improvement. This astonishing result, so little known and so seldom
referred to, was bound to have a great effect on the birth-rate. So long
as the swarming period continued at its height, a net annual increase of
15 or even 20 per thousand could be sustained; but the expansion of the
European peoples has now passed its zenith, and a tendency to revert to
more normal conditions is almost everywhere observable. One of the most
advanced nations, France, has already reached the equilibrium towards
which other civilised nations are moving. The old-established families
in the United States are believed to be actually dwindling.

The student of international vital statistics will be struck first by
the very wide differences in the birth-rate of different countries. He
will then notice that the more backward countries have on the whole a
considerably higher birth-rate than the more advanced. Thirdly, he will
observe the parallelism between the birth-rate and death-rate, which
makes the net increase in countries with a high birth-rate very little
larger than that of countries with a low birth-rate. The following
figures will illustrate these points; they are taken from the
Registrar-General's Blue Book for 1912.

Birth-rate Death-rate Net rate of
increase
United Kingdom 23.9 13.8 10.1
Australia 28.7 11.2 17.5
Austria 31.3 20.5 10.8
Belgium 22.9 16.4 6.5
France 19.0 17.5 1.5
Germany 28.6 17.3 11.3
Italy 32.4 18.2 14.2
New Zealand 26.5 8.9 17.6
Norway 25.4 13.4 12.0
Roumania 43.4 22.9 20.5
Russia 44.0 28.9 15.1

It will be seen that Australia and New Zealand, with low birth-rates and
the lowest death-rates in the world increase more rapidly than Russia
with an enormous birth-rate and proportionately high death-rate. No one
can doubt that our colonies achieve their increase with far less
friction and misery than the prolific but short-lived Slavs.
Civilisation in a high form is incompatible with such conditions as
these figures disclose in Russia. The figures for Egypt and India are
similar to the Russian, but in India, which is overfull, the mortality
is greater than even in Russia, and the same is true of China, in which
we are told that seven out of ten children die in infancy. It has been
suggested that the fairest measure of a country's well-being, as regards
its actual vitality, is the square of the death-rate divided by the
birth-rate.

It is well known that a decline in the birth-rate set in about forty
years ago in this country, and has gone on steadily ever since, till the
fall now amounts to about one-third of the total births. It thus
corresponds very nearly to the fall in the death-rate during the same
period. It is also well known that this decline is not evenly
distributed among different classes of the people. Until the decline
began, large families were the rule in all classes, and the slightly
larger families of the poor were compensated by their somewhat higher
mortality. But since 1877 large families have become increasingly rare
in the upper and middle classes, and among the skilled artisans. They
are frequent in the thriftless ranks of unskilled labour, and in one
section of well-paid workmen--the miners. The highest birth-rates at
present are in the mining districts and in the slums. The lowest are in
some of the learned professions. In the Rhondda Valley the birth-rate is
still about forty, which is double the rate in the prosperous
residential suburbs of London. In the seats of the textile industry the
decline has been very severe, although wages are fairly good; among the
agricultural labourers the rate is also low. It will be found that in
all trades where the women work for wages the birth-rate has fallen
sharply; the miner's wife does not earn money, and has therefore less
inducement to restrict her family. In agricultural districts the housing
difficulty is mainly responsible; in the upper and middle classes the
heavy expense of education and the burden of rates and taxes are
probably the main reasons why larger families are not desired. We may
add that in almost all the professions old men are overpaid and young
men under-paid. Mr. and Mrs. Whetham[18] have found that, before 1870,
143 marriages of men whose names appear in 'Who's Who' resulted in 743
children, an average of 5.2 each; after 1870 the average is only 3.08.
Celibacy also is commoner among the educated. 'From the reports issued
by two Women's Colleges, it appears that, excluding those who have left
college within three years or less, out of 3000 women only 22 per cent.
have married, and the number of children born to each marriage is
undoubtedly very small.' The writers consider that this state of things
is extremely dangerous for the country, inasmuch as we are now breeding
mainly from our worst stocks (the feeble-minded are very prolific),
while our best families are stationary or dwindling. Without denying the
general truth of this pessimistic conclusion,[19] it may be pointed out
that the miners are, physically at least, above the average of the whole
population, and that the very low birth-rate of residential districts is
partly due to the presence in large numbers of unmarried domestic
servants. The death-rate of the slums is also very high.

The fears of the eugenist about the quality of the population are far
more reasonable than the invectives of the fanatic about its defective
quantity. Of the latter class we may say with Havelock Ellis that 'those
who seek to restore the birth-rate of half a century ago are engaged in
a task which would be criminal if it were not based on ignorance, and
which is in any case fatuous.' And yet I hope to show before the close
of this article that for two or three generations the British Empire
could absorb a considerable increase, and that the Government might with
advantage stimulate this by schemes of colonisation. The lament of the
eugenist resounds in all countries alike. The German complains that the
Poles, whom he considers an inferior race, breed like rabbits, while the
gifted exponents of _Kultur_ only breed like hares. The American is
nervous about the numbers of the negro; he has more reason to be nervous
about the fecundity of the Slav and South Italian immigrant. Everywhere
the tendency is for the superior stock to dwindle till it becomes a
small aristocracy. The Americans of British descent are threatened with
this fate. Pride and a high standard of living are not biological
virtues. The man who needs and spends little is the ultimate inheritor
of the earth. I know of no instance in history in which a ruling race
has not ultimately been ousted or absorbed by its subjects. Complete
extermination or expropriation is the only successful method of
conquest. The Anglo-Saxon race has thus established itself in the
greater part of Britain, and in Australasia. In North America it has
destroyed the Indian hunter, who could not be used for industrial
purposes; but the temptation to exploit the negro and the cheaper
European races was too strong to be resisted, and Nature's heaviest
penalty is now being exacted against the descendants of our sturdy
colonists. We did not lose America in the eighteenth century; we are
losing it now. As for South Africa, the Kaffir can live like a gentleman
(according to his own ideas) on six months' ill-paid work every year;
the Englishman finds an income of L200 too small. There is only one end
to this kind of colonisation. The danger at home is that the larger part
of the population is now beginning to insist upon a scale of
remuneration and a standard of comfort which are incompatible with any
survival-value. We all wish to be privileged aristocrats, with no serfs
to work for us. Dame Nature cares nothing for the babble of politicians
and trade-union regulations. She says to us what Plotinus, in a
remarkable passage, makes her say: 'You should not ask questions; you
should try to understand. _I am not in the habit of talking._' In
Nature's school it is a word and a blow, and the blow first. Before the
close of this article I will return to the eugenic problem, and will
consider whether anything can be done to solve it.

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