Outspoken Essays by William Ralph Inge

W >> William Ralph Inge >> Outspoken Essays

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24

The ability of races to flourish in climates other than their own is a
question of supreme importance to historians and statesmen, and, it need
not be said, to emigrants. But it is only lately that it has been
studied scientifically, and the results are still tentative. German
ethnologists, of what we may call the _aedicephalous_ school, already
referred to, regard it as one of the tragedies of nature that the noble
Nordic race, to which they think they belong, dies out when it
penetrates southwards. In accordance with this law, the yellow-haired
Achaeans decayed in Greece, the Lombards in North Italy, the Vandals in
Spain and Africa. After a few generations of life in a warm climate the
Aryan stock invariably disappears. We shall show reasons for thinking
that this theory is much exaggerated; but there is undoubtedly some
truth in it. It has been found to be impossible for white men to
colonise India, Burma, tropical America, and West Africa. It has been
said that 'there is in India no third generation of pure English blood.'
It is notoriously difficult to bring up even one generation of white
children in India. The French cannot maintain themselves without race
admixture in Martinique and Guadaloupe, nor the Dutch in Java, though
it is said that the expectation of life for a European in Java is as
good as in his own country. It seems to be also true that the blond race
suffers most in a hot climate. In the Philippines it was observed that
the fair-haired soldiers in the American army succumbed most readily to
disease. In Queensland the Italian colonists are said to stand the heat
better than the English, and Mr. Roosevelt, among other items of good
advice which he bestowed so liberally on the European nations, advised
us to populate the torrid parts of Australia with immigrants from the
Latin races. In Natal the English families who are settled in the
country are said to be enervated by the climate; and on the high
plateaux of the interior our countrymen find it necessary to pay
periodical visits to the coast, to be unbraced. The early deaths and not
infrequent suicides of Rand magnates may indicate that the air of the
Transvaal is too stimulating for a life of high tension and excitement.
There are even signs that the same may be true in a minor degree of the
United States of America. Both the capitalist and the working man, if
they come of English stock, seem to wear out more quickly than at home;
and the sterility of marriages among the long settled American families
is so pronounced that it can hardly be due entirely to voluntary
restriction of parentage. The effects of an unsuitable climate are
especially shown in nervous disorders, and are therefore likely to tell
most heavily on those who engage in intellectual pursuits, and perhaps
on women rather more than on men. The sterilising effects of women's
higher education in America are incontrovertible, though this inference
is hotly denied in England. At Holyoake College it was found that only
half the lady graduates afterwards married, and the average family of
those who did marry was less than two children. At Bryn Mawr only 43 per
cent, married, and had 0.84 children each; the average family per
graduate was therefore 0.37. If it be objected that new immigrants and
their children are healthy and vigorous in America, it may be truly
answered that the effects of an unfavourable climate are manifested
fully only in the third and later generations. The argument may be
further supported by the fate of black men who try to settle in Europe.
Their strongly pigmented skin, which seems to protect them from the
actinic rays of the tropical sun, so noxious to Europeans, and their
broad nostrils, which inhale a larger number of tubercle bacilli than
the narrow nose-slits of the Northerner, are disadvantages in a
temperate climate. In any case, of the many thousands of negro servants
who lived in England in the eighteenth century, it would be difficult to
find a single descendant.

But there are other factors in the problem which should make us beware
of hasty generalisations. It is obvious that since the American Republic
contains many climates in its vast area, there may be parts of it which
are perfectly healthy for Anglo-Saxons, and other parts where they
cannot live without degenerating. Very few athletes, we are told, come
from south of the fortieth parallel of latitude. But the decline in the
birth-rate is most marked in the older colonies, the New England States,
where for a long period the English colonists, living mainly on the
land, not only throve and developed a singularly virile type of
humanity, but multiplied with almost unexampled rapidity. The same is
true not only of the French Canadian farmers, but of the South African
Boers, who rear enormous families in a climate very different from that
of Holland. The inference is that Europeans living on the land may
flourish in any tolerably healthy climate which is not tropical.

There are, in fact, two other causes besides climate which may prevent
immigrants from multiplying in a new country. The first of these is the
presence of microbic diseases to which the old inhabitants are wholly or
partially immune, but which find a virgin soil in the bodies of the
newcomers. The strongest example is the West Coast of Africa, of which
Miss Mary Kingsley writes: 'Yet remember, before you elect to cast your
lot with the West Coasters, that 85 per cent, of them die of fever, or
return home with their health permanently wrecked. Also remember that
there is no getting acclimatised to the Coast. There are, it is true, a
few men out there who, although they have been resident in West Africa
for years, have never had fever, but you can count them on the fingers
of one hand.' There can be no acclimatisation where the weeding out is
as drastic as this. Either the anopheles mosquito or the European must
quit. There are parts of tropical America where the natives have
actually been protected by the malaria, which keeps the white man at
arm's length. But more often the microbe is on the side of the civilised
race, killing off the natives who have not run the gauntlet of
town-life. The extreme reluctance of the barbarians who overran the
Roman Empire to settle in the towns is easily accounted for if, as is
probable, the towns killed them off whenever they attempted to live in
them. The difference is remarkable between the fate of a conquered race
which has become accustomed to town-life, and that of one which has not.
There are no 'native quarters' in the towns of any country where the
aborigines were nomads or tillers of the soil. To the North American
Indian, residence in a town is a sentence of death. The American Indians
were accustomed to none of our zymotic diseases except malaria. In the
north they were destroyed wholesale by tuberculosis; in Mexico and Peru,
where large towns existed before the conquest, they fared better. Fiji
was devastated by measles; other barbarians by small-pox. Negroes have
acquired, through severe natural selection, a certain degree of
immunisation in America; but even now it is said that 'every other negro
dies of consumption.' There are, however, two races, both long
accustomed to town-life under horribly insanitary conditions, which have
shown that they can live in almost any climate. These are the Jews and
the Chinese. The medieval Ghetto exterminated all who were not naturally
resistant to every form of microbic disease; the modern Jew, though
often of poor physique, is hard to kill. The same may be said of the
Chinaman, who, when at home, lives under conditions which would kill
most Europeans.

The other factor, which is really promoting the gradual disappearance of
the Anglo-Saxons from the United States, is of a very different
character. The descendants of the old immigrants are on the whole the
aristocracy of the country. Now it is a law which hardly admits of
exceptions, that aristocracies do not maintain their numbers. The ruling
race rules itself out; nothing fails like success. Gibbon has called
attention to the extreme respect paid to long descent in the Roman
Empire, and to the strange fact that, in the fourth century, no
ingenuity of pedigree makers could deny that all the great families of
the Republic were extinct, so that the second-rate plebeian family of
the Anicii, whose name did appear in the Fasti, enjoyed a prestige far
greater than that of the Howards and Stanleys in this country. Our own
peerage consists chiefly of parvenus. Only six of our noble families, it
is said, can trace their descent in the male line without a break to the
fifteenth century. The peerage of Sweden tells the same tale. According
to Gallon, the custom or law of primogeniture, combined with the habit
of marrying heiresses who, as the last representatives of dwindling
families, tend to be barren, is mainly responsible for this. Additional
causes may be the greater danger which the officer-class incurs in war,
and, in former times, the executioner's axe. In our own day the
reluctance of rich and self-indulgent women to bear children is
undoubtedly a factor in the infertility of the leisured class.

This brings us naturally to the second part of our discussion--the
consideration of the causes which lead to the increase or decrease of
population. It is the most important part of our inquiry; for it is
usually assumed that the British Isles will continue to send out
colonists in large numbers, as it did in the last century, and the hopes
of the imperialist that a large part of the world will speak English for
all time depend on the untested assurance that the swarming-time of our
race is not yet over. Our starting-point must be that the pressure of
population upon the means of subsistence is a constant fact in the human
race, as in every other species of animals and plants. There is no
species in which the numbers are not kept down, far below the natural
capacity for increase, by the limitation of available food. It may not
always be easy to trace the connection between the appearance of new
lives and the passing away of old, nor to say whether it is the
birth-rate which determines the death-rate, or the death-rate the
birth-rate. But it is well known that, wherever statistics are kept, the
numbers of births and of deaths rise and fall in nearly parallel lines,
so that the net rate of increase hardly alters at all, unless some
change, which can easily be traced, occurs in the habits of the people
or in the amount of the food supply. In civilised countries the greater
care taken of human life, and its consequent prolongation, has reduced
the birth-rate, just as in the higher mammals we find a greatly
diminished fertility as compared with the lower, and a much higher
survival-rate among the offspring born. The average duration of life in
this country has increased by about one-third in the last sixty years,
and the birth-rate has fallen in almost exactly the same proportion. The
position of a nation in the scale of civilisation may almost be gauged
by its births and deaths. The order in Europe, beginning with the lowest
birth-rate, is France, Belgium, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Switzerland,
Norway, Denmark, Holland, Germany, Spain, Austria, Italy, Hungary, the
Balkan States, Russia. The order of death-rates, again beginning at the
bottom, is Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United
Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Serbia, Spain,
Bulgaria, Hungary, Roumania, Russia. These two lists, as will be seen,
correspond very nearly with the scale of descending civilisation, the
only notable exception being the low position of France in the second
list. This anomaly is explained by the fact that France having a
stationary population, the death-rate in that country corresponds nearly
with the mean expectation of life, whereas in countries where the
population is increasing rapidly, either by excess of births over deaths
or by immigration, the preponderance of young lives brings the
death-rate down. We must, therefore, be on our guard against supposing
that countries with the lowest death-rates are necessarily the most
healthy. In New Zealand, for example, the death-rate is under 10 per
1000, the lowest in the world; and though that country is undoubtedly
healthy, no one supposes that the average duration of life in New
Zealand is a hundred years. To ascertain whether a nation is long-lived,
we must correct the crude death-rate by taking into account the average
age of the population. When this correction has been made, a low
death-rate, and the low birth-rate which necessarily accompanies it, is
a sign that the doctors are doing their duty by keeping their patients
alive. If our physicians desire more maternity cases, they must make
more work for the undertaker. Large families almost always mean a high
infant mortality; and it is significant that a twelfth child has a very
much poorer chance of survival than a first or second. The agitation for
the endowment of motherhood and the reduction of infant mortality is
therefore futile, because, while other conditions remain the same, every
baby 'saved' sends another baby out of the world or prevents him from
coming into it. The number of the people is not determined by
philanthropists or even by parents. Children will come somehow whenever
there is room for them, and go when there is none. But other conditions
do not remain the same, and it is in these other conditions that we must
seek the causes of expansion or contraction in the numbers of a
community.

At the end of the sixteenth century the population of England and Wales
amounted to about five millions, and a hundred years later to about six.
There is no reason to think that under the conditions then existing the
country could have supported a larger number. The birth-rate was kept
high by the pestilential state of the towns, and thus the pressure of
numbers was less felt than it is now, since it was possible to have,
though not to rear, unlimited families. Occasionally, from accidental
circumstances, England was for a short time under-populated, and these
were the periods when, according to Professor Thorold Rogers, Archdeacon
Cunningham, and other authorities, the labourer was well off. The most
striking example was in the half-century after the Black Death, which
carried off nearly half the population. Wages increased threefold, and
the Government tried in vain to protect employers by enforcing
pre-plague rates. Not only were wages high, but food was so abundant
that farmers often gave their men a square meal which was not in the
contract. The other period of prosperity for the working man, according
to our authorities, was the second quarter of the eighteenth century. It
has not, we think, been noticed that this also followed a temporary
set-back in the population. In 1688 the population of England and Wales
was 5,500,520; in 1710 it was more than a quarter of a million less. The
cause of this decline is obscure, but its effects soon showed themselves
in easier conditions of life, especially for the poor. Such periods of
under-saturation, which some new countries are still enjoying, are
necessarily short. Population flows in as naturally as water finds its
level.

It was not till the accession of George III that the increase in our
numbers became rapid. No one until then would have thought of singling
out the Englishman as the embodiment of the good apprentice. Meteren, in
the sixteenth century, found our countrymen 'as lazy as Spaniards'; most
foreigners were struck by our fondness for solid food and strong drink.
The industrial revolution came upon us suddenly; it changed the whole
face of the country and the apparent character of the people. In the far
future our descendants may look back upon the period in which we are
living as a strange episode which disturbed the natural habits of our
race. The first impetus was given by the plunder of Bengal, which, after
the victories of Clive, flowed into the country in a broad stream for
about thirty years. This ill-gotten wealth played the same part in
stimulating English industries as the 'five milliards,' extorted from
France, did for Germany after 1870. The half-century which followed was
marked by a series of inventions, which made England the workshop of the
world. But the basis of our industrial supremacy was, and is, our coal.
Those who are in the habit of comparing the progressiveness of the
North-Western European with the stagnation or decadence of the Latin
races, forget the fact, which is obvious when it has once been pointed
out, that the progressive nations are those which happen to have
valuable coal fields. Countries which have no coal are obliged to
import it paying the freight, or to smelt their iron with charcoal This
process makes excellent steel--the superiority of Swedish razors is due
to wood-smelting--but it is so wasteful of wood that the Mediterranean
peoples very early in history injured their climate by cutting down
their scanty forests, thereby diminishing their rainfall, and allowing
the soil to be washed off the hillsides. The coasts of the Mediterranean
are, in consequence, far less productive than they were two thousand
years ago. But in England, when the start was once made, all
circumstances conspired to turn our once beautiful island into a chaos
of factories and mean streets, reeking of smoke, millionaires, and
paupers. We were no longer able to grow our own food; but we made masses
of goods which the manufacturers ware eager to exchange for it; and the
population grew like crops on a newly-irrigated desert. During the
nineteenth century the numbers were nearly quadrupled. Let those who
think that the population of a country can be increased at will, reflect
whether it is likely that any physical, moral, or psychological change
came over the nation coincidently with the inventions of the
spinning-jenny and the steam-engine. It is too obvious for dispute that
it was the possession of capital wanting employment, and of natural
advantages for using it, that called these multitudes of human beings
into existence, to eat the food which they paid for by their labour. And
it should be equally obvious that the existence of forty-six millions of
people upon 121,000 square miles of territory depends entirely upon our
finding a market for our manufactures abroad, for so only are we able to
pay for the food of the people. It is most unfortunate that these
exports must, with our present population, include coal, which, if we
had any thought for posterity, we should guard jealously and use
sparingly; for in five hundred years at the outside our stock will be
gone, and we shall sink to a third-rate Power at once. We are
sacrificing the future in order to provide for an excessive and
discontented population in the present. During the present century we
have begun to be conscious that our foreign trade is threatened; and so
sensitive is the birth-rate to economic conditions that it has begun to
curve very slightly downward in relation to the death-rate, instead of
descending with it in parallel lines.[23] This may be partly due to the
curtailment of facilities for emigration, owing to the filling up of the
new countries. For emigration does not diminish the population of the
country which the emigrants leave; it only increases its birth-rate.

We are now in a position to enumerate the causes which actually lead to
an increase in the population of a country. The first is an increase in
the amount of food produced in the country itself. If the parks and
gardens of the gentry were ploughed up or turned into allotments, a few
hundred thousands would be added to the population of the United
Kingdom, at the cost of one of the few remaining beauties which make our
country attractive to the eye. The introduction of the potato into
Ireland added several millions of squalid inhabitants to that
ill-conditioned island, and when the crop failed, large numbers of them
inflicted themselves on the United States, to the detriment of that
country. The richest countries to-day are those which produce more food
than they require, such as the United States, Canada, Australia,
Roumania, and the Argentine. (We need hardly say that throughout this
survey we are using the statistics of the years immediately before the
war.) But this state of things cannot last long, for the net increase in
such countries is invariably high, either by reason of a very high
birth-rate, as in Roumania, or because newcomers flock in to enjoy a
land of plenty. Another condition which leads to abnormally rapid
increase is found when a civilised nation conquers and administers a
backward country, introducing better methods of agriculture, and
especially irrigation and the reclamation of waste lands. The alien
Government also gives greater security, without raising the standard of
living among the natives, since the dominant race usually monopolises
the lucrative careers. In this way we are directly responsible for
increasing the population of Egypt from seven millions in 1883 to nine
and three-quarter millions in 1899, an augmentation which, in the
absence of immigration, illustrates the great natural fertility of the
human race in the rare circumstances when unchecked increase is
possible. Still more remarkable is the rise in the population of Java
from five millions in 1825 to twenty-eight and a half millions in the
first decade of this century. The cause of this increase is the
augmented supply of food combined with a very low standard of living, a
combination which is specially characteristic of Asia, where extreme
supersaturation exists in India and China. A third cause is production
of goods which can be exchanged for food grown abroad. This exchange, as
we have seen, is stimulated by the presence of capital seeking
employment. Our large towns are the creation of the capitalist, much
more than if he had populated their depressing streets with his own
children. Fourthly, a reduction in the standard of living of course
makes a larger population possible. The misery of the working class in
the generation after the Napoleonic Wars was a condition of the
prosperity of our export trade at this period; and conversely, the
prosperity of our export trade was necessary to the existence of the new
inhabitants. Capitalism is the cause of our dense population; and the
proletariat would infallibly cut their own throats by destroying it.

It is an important question whether a crowded population adds to the
security of a nation or not. Numbers are undoubtedly of great importance
in modern warfare. The French would have been less able to resist the
Germans without allies in 1914 than they were in 1870. But we must not
suppose that France could support a much larger population without
reducing her standard of living to the point of under-deeding; and an
under-fed nation is incapable of the endurance required of first-class
soldiers. A nation may be so much weakened in physique by under-feeding
as to be impotent from a military point of view, in spite of great
numbers; this is the case in India and China. Deficient nourishment also
diminishes the day's work. If European and American capital goes to
China, and provides proper food for the workmen, we may have an early
opportunity of discovering whether the supporters of the League of
Nations have any real conscientious objection to violence and bloodshed.
We may surmise that the European man, the fiercest of all beasts of
prey, is not likely to abandon the weapons which have made him the lord
and the bully of the planet. He has no other superiority to the races
which he arrogantly despises. Under a regime of peace the Asiatic would
probably be his master. To return from a short digression, we must note
further that a nation with a low standard has no reserve to fall back
upon; it lives on the margin of subsistence, which may easily fail in
war-time, especially if much food is imported when conditions are
normal. It can hardly be an accident that in this war the nations with a
high birth-rate broke up in the order of their fecundity, while France
stood like a rock. The sacrifice of comfort to numbers, which we have
seen to be possible by maintaining a low standard of living, not only
diminishes the happiness of a nation, and keeps it low in the scale of
civilisation; it may easily prove to be a source of weakness in war.

The expedients often advocated to encourage denser population--which
those who urge them thoughtlessly assume to be a good thing--such as
endowment of parenthood, and better housing at the expense of the
taxpayer--have no effect except to penalise and sterilise those who pay
the doles, for the benefit of those who receive them. They are intensely
dysgenic in their operation, for they cripple and at last eliminate just
those stocks which have shown themselves to be above the average in
ability. The process has already advanced a long way, even without the
reckless legislation which is now advocated. The lowest birth-rates,
less than half that of the unskilled labourers, are those of the
doctors, the teaching profession, and ministers of religion. The
position of this class, intellectually and often physically the finest
in the kingdom, is rapidly becoming intolerable, and it is the wastrels
who mainly benefit by their spoliation.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24