Outspoken Essays Part 3

The French have their own form of this pseudo-science in their doctrine of the persistence of national characteristics. Each nation may be summed up in a formula: England, for example, is 'the country of will.'

A few instances may, no doubt, be quoted in support of this theory.

Julius Caesar said: 'Duas res plerasque Gallia industriosissime prosequitur, rem militarem et argute loqui'; and these are still the characteristics of our gallant allies. And Madame de Stael may be thought to have hit off the German character very cleverly about the time when Bismarck first saw the light. 'The Germans are vigorously submissive. They employ philosophical reasonings to explain what is the least philosophic thing in the world, respect for force and the fear which transforms that respect into admiration.' But the fact remains that the characters of nations frequently change, or rather that what we call national character is usually only the policy of the governing cla.s.s, forced upon it by circ.u.mstances, or the manner of living which climate, geographical position, and other external causes have made necessary for the inhabitants of a country.

To found patriotism on h.o.m.ogeneity of race is no wiser than to bound it by frontier lines. As the Abbe Noel has lately written about his own country, Belgium,

the race is not the nation. The nation is not a physiological fact; it is a moral fact. What const.i.tutes a nation is the community of sentiments and ideals which results from a common history and education. The variations of the cephalic index are here of no great importance. The essential factor of the national consciousness resides in a certain common mode of conceiving the conditions of the social life.

Belgium, the Abbe maintains, has found this national consciousness amid her sufferings; there are no longer any distinctions between French-speaking Belgians and Walloons or Flemings. This is in truth the real base of patriotism. It is the basis of our own love for our country. What Britain stands for is what Britain is. We have long known in our hearts what Britain stands for; but we have now been driven to search our thoughts and make our ideals explicit to ourselves and others. The Englishman has become a philosopher _malgre lui_, 'Whatever the world thinks,' writes Bishop Berkeley. 'he who hath not much meditated upon G.o.d, the human soul, and the _summum bonum_, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman.' These words, which were quoted by Mr.

Arthur Balfour a few years ago, may seem to make a large demand on the average citizen; but in our quiet way we have all been meditating on these things since last August, and we know pretty well what our _summum bonum_ is for our country. We believe in chivalry and fair play and kindliness--these things first and foremost; and we believe, if not exactly in democracy, yet in a government under which a man may think and speak the thing he wills. We do not believe in war, and we do not believe in bullying. We do not flatter ourselves that we are the supermen; but we are convinced that the ideas which we stand for, and which we have on the whole tried to carry out, are essential to the peaceful progress and happiness of humanity; and for these ideas we have drawn the sword. The great words of Abraham Lincoln have been on the lips of many and in the hearts of all since the beginning of the great contest: 'With malice towards none; with charity for all: with firmness in the right as G.o.d gives us to see the right--let us strive on to finish the work we are in.'

Patriotism thus spiritualised and moralised is the true patriotism.

When the emotion is once set in its right relations to the whole of human life and to all that makes human life worth living, it cannot become an immoral obsession. It is certain to become an immoral obsession if it is isolated and made absolute. We have seen the appalling perversion--the methodical diabolism--which this obsession has produced in Germany. It has startled us because we thought that the civilised world had got beyond such insanity; but it is of course no new thing. Machiavelli said, 'I prefer my country to the salvation of my soul'--a sentiment which sounds n.o.ble but is not; it has only a superficial resemblance to St. Paul's willingness to be 'accursed' for the sake of his countrymen. Devil-wors.h.i.+p remains what it was, even when the idol is draped in the national flag. This obsession may be in part a survival from savage conditions, when all was at stake in every feud; but chiefly it is an example of the idealising and universalising power of the imagination, which turns every unchecked pa.s.sion into a monomania. The only remedy is, as Lowell's Hosea Biglow reminds us, to bear in mind that

our true country is that ideal realm which we represent to ourselves under the names of religion, duty, and the like.

Our terrestrial organisations are but far-off approaches to so fair a model; and all they are verily traitors who resist not any attempt to divert them from this their original intendment. Our true country is bounded on the north and the south, on the east and west, by Justice, and when she oversteps that invisible boundary-line by so much as a hair's breadth, she ceases to be our mother, and chooses rather to be looked upon _quasi noverca_.

So Socrates said that the wise man will be a citizen of his true city, of which the type is laid up in heaven, and only conditionally of his earthly country.

The obsession of patriotism is not the only evil which we have to consider. We may err by defect as well as by excess. Herbert Spencer speaks of an 'anti-patriotic bias'; and it can hardly be disputed that many Englishmen who pride themselves on their lofty morality are suffering from this mental twist. The malady seems to belong to the Anglo-Saxon const.i.tution, for it is rarely encountered in other countries, while we had a noisy pro-Napoleonic faction a hundred years ago, and the Americans had their 'Copperheads' in the Northern States during the civil war. In our own day, every enemy of England, from the mad Mullah to the mad Kaiser, has had his advocates at home; and the champions of Boer and Boxer, of Afridi and Afrikander, of the Mahdi and the Matabele, have been usually the same persons. The English, it would appear, differ from other misguided rascals in never being right even by accident. But the idiosyncrasy of a few persons is far less important than the comparative insensibility of whole cla.s.ses to the patriotic appeal, except when war is actually raging. This is not specially characteristic of our own country. The German Emperor has complained of his Social Democrats as 'people without a fatherland'; and the cry 'a bas la patrie' has been heard in France.

It is usual to explain this att.i.tude by the fact that the manual workers 'have no stake in the country,' and might not find their condition altered for the worse by subjection to a foreign power. A few of our working-men have given colour to this charge by exclaiming petulantly that they could not be worse off under the Germans; but in this they have done themselves and their cla.s.s less than justice. The anti-militarism and cosmopolitanism of the ma.s.ses in every country is a profoundly interesting fact, a problem which demands no superficial investigation. It is one result of that emanc.i.p.ation from traditional ideas, which makes the most important difference between the upper and middle cla.s.ses on the one side and the lower on the other. We lament that the working-man takes but little interest in Christianity, and rack our brains to discover what we have done to discredit our religion in his eyes. The truth is that Christianity, as a dogmatic and ecclesiastical system, is unintelligible without a very considerable knowledge of the conditions under which it took shape. But what are the ancient Hebrews, and the Greeks and Romans, to the working-man? He is simply cut off from the means of reading intelligently any book of the Bible, or of understanding how the inst.i.tution called the Catholic Church, and its offshoots, came to exist. As our staple education becomes more 'modern' and less literary, the custodians of organised religion will find their difficulties increasing. But the same is true about patriotism. Love of country means pride in the past and ambition for the future. Those who live only in the present are incapable of it.

But our working-man knows next to nothing about the past history of England; he has scarcely heard of our great men, and has read few of our great books. It is not surprising that the appeal to patriotism leaves him cold. This is an evil that has its proper remedy. There is no reason why a sane and elevated love of country should not be stimulated by appropriate teaching in our schools. In America this is done--rather hysterically; and in Germany--rather brutally. The Jews have always made their national history a large part of their education, and even of their religion. Nothing has helped them more to retain their self-consciousness as a nation. Ignorance of the past and indifference to the future usually go together. Those who most value our historical heritage will be most desirous to transmit it unimpaired.

But the absence of traditional ideas is by no means an unmixed evil. The working-man sees more clearly than the majority of educated persons the absurdity of international hatred and jealousy. He is conscious of greater solidarity with his own cla.s.s in other European countries than with the wealthier cla.s.s in his own; and as he approaches the whole question without prejudice, he cannot fail to realise how large a part of the product of labour is diverted from useful purposes by modern militarism. International rivalry is in his eyes one of the most serious obstacles to the abolition of want and misery. Tolstoy hardly exaggerates when he says: 'Patriotism to the peoples represents only a frightful future; the fraternity of nations seems an ideal more and more accessible to humanity, and one which humanity desires.' Military glory has very little attraction for the working-man. His humanitarian instincts appear to be actually stronger than those of the sheltered cla.s.ses. To take life in any circ.u.mstances seems to him a shocking thing; and the harsh procedure of martial law and military custom is abhorrent to him. He sees no advantage and no credit in territorial aggrandis.e.m.e.nt, which he suspects to be prompted mainly by the desire to make money unjustly. He is therefore a convinced pacificist; though his doctrine of human brotherhood breaks down ignominiously when he finds his economic position threatened by the compet.i.tion of cheap foreign labour. If an armed struggle ever takes place between the nations of Europe (or their colonists) and the yellow races, it will be a working-man's war. But on the whole, the best hope of getting rid of militarism may lie in the growing power of the working cla.s.s. The poor, being intensely gregarious and very susceptible to all collective emotions, are still liable to fits of warlike excitement. But their real minds are at present set against an aggressive foreign policy, without being shut against the appeals of a higher patriotism.

And yet the irritation which is felt against preachers of the brotherhood of man is not without justification. Some persons who condemn patriotism are simply lacking in public spirit, or their loyalty is monopolised by some fad or 'cause,' which is a poor subst.i.tute for love of country. The man who has no prejudices in favour of his own family and his own country is generally an unamiable creature. So we need not condemn Moliere for saying, 'L'ami du genre humain n'est pas du tout mon fait,' nor Brunetiere for declaring that 'Ni la nature ni l'histoire n'ont en effet voulu que les hommes fussent tous freres.' But French Neo-catholicism, a bourgeois movement directed against all the 'ideas of 1789,' seems to have adopted the most ferocious kind of chauvinism. M. Paul Bourget wrote the other day in the _echo de Paris_, 'This war must be the first of many, since we cannot exterminate sixty-five million Germans in a single campaign!' The women and children too! This is not the way to revive the religion of Christ in France.

The practical question for the future is whether there is any prospect of returning, under more favourable auspices, to the unrealised ideal of the Middle Ages--an agreement among the nations of Europe to live amicably under one system of international law and right, binding upon all, and with the consciousness of an intellectual and spiritual unity deeper than political divisions. 'The nations are the citizens of humanity,' said Mazzini; and so they ought to be. Some of the omens are favourable. Militarism has dug its own grave. The great powers increased their armaments till the burden became insupportable, and have now rushed into bankruptcy in the hope of shaking it off. In prehistoric times the lords of creation were certain gigantic lizards, protected by ma.s.sive armour-plates which could only be carried by a creature thirty to sixty feet long. Then they died, when neither earth, air, nor water could support them any longer. Such must be the end of the European nations, unless they learn wisdom. The lesson will be brought home to them by Transatlantic compet.i.tion. The United States of America had already, before this war, an initial advantage over the disunited states of Europe, amounting to at least 10 per cent. on every contract; after the war this advantage will be doubled. It remains to be seen whether the next generation will honour the debts which we are piling up.

Disraeli used to complain of what he called 'Dutch finance,' which consists in 'mortgaging the industry of the future to protect property in the present.' Pitt paid for the great war of a hundred years ago in this manner; after a century we are still groaning under the burden of his loans. We may hear more of the iniquity of 'Dutch finance' when the democracies of the next generation have a chance of repudiating obligations which, as they will say, they did not contract. However that may be, international rivalry is plainly very bad business; and there are great possibilities in the Hague Tribunal, if, and only if, the signatories to the conference bind themselves to use force against a recalcitrant member. The conduct of Germany in this war has shown that public opinion is powerless to restrain a nation which feels strong enough to defy it.

Another cause which may give patriots leisure to turn their thoughts away from war's alarms is that the 'swarming' period of the European races is coming to an end. The unparalleled increase of population in the first three quarters of the 19th century has been followed by a progressive decrease in the birth-rate, which will begin to tell upon social conditions when the reduction in the death-rate, which has. .h.i.therto kept pace with it, shall have reached its natural limit. Europe with a stationary population will be in a much happier condition; and problems of social reform can then be tackled with some hope of success.

Honourable emulation in the arts of life may then take the place of desperate compet.i.tion and antagonism. Human lives will begin to have a positive value, and we may even think it fair to honour our saviours more than our destroyers. The effects of past follies will then soon be effaced; for nations recover much more quickly from wars than from internal disorders. External injuries are rapidly cured; but 'those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves.' The greatest obstacle to progress is not man's inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency to parasitism. The true patriot will keep his eye fixed on this, and will dread as the state's worst enemies those citizens who at the top and bottom of the social scale have no other ambition than to hang on and suck the life-blood of the nation. Great things may be hoped from the new science of eugenics, when it has pa.s.sed out of its tentative and experimental stage.

In the distant future we may reasonably hope that patriotism will be a sentiment like the loyalty which binds a man to his public school and university, an affection purged of all rancour and jealousy, a stimulus to all honourable conduct and n.o.ble effort, a part of the poetry of life. It is so already to many of us, and has been so to the n.o.blest Englishmen since we have had a literature. If Henry V's speech at Agincourt is the splendid gasconade of a royal freebooter, there is no false ring in the scene where John of Gaunt takes leave of his banished son; nor in Sir Walter Scott's 'Breathes there a man with soul so dead,'

etc. 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.' We cannot quite manage to subst.i.tute London for Zion in singing psalms, though there are some in England--Eton, Winchester, Oxford, Cambridge--which do evoke these feelings. These emotions of loyalty and devotion are by no means to be checked or despised. They have an infinite potency for good. In spiritual things there is no conflict between intensity and expansion. The deepest sympathy is, potentially, also the widest. He who loves not his home and country which he has seen, how shall he love humanity in general which he has not seen? There are, after all, few emotions of which one has less reason to be ashamed than the little lump in the throat which the Englishman feels when he first catches sight of the white cliffs of Dover.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] In his _Introduction to Social Psychology_.

[9] The reasons of their irresistible strength have been explained in a most brilliant manner by Dr. Peisker in the first volume of the 'Cambridge Medieval History.'

THE BIRTH-RATE

(1917)

The numbers of every species are determined, not by the procreative power of its members, which always greatly exceeds the capacity of the earth to support a progeny increasing in geometrical progression, but by two factors, the activity of its enemies and the available supply of food. Those species which survive owe their success in the struggle for existence mainly to one of two qualities, enormous fertility or parental care. The female cod sp.a.w.ns about 6,000,000 eggs at a time, of which at most one-third--perhaps much less--are afterwards fertilised. An infinitesimal proportion of these escapes being devoured by fish or fowl. An insect-eating bird is said to require for its support about 250,000 insects a year, and the number of such birds must amount to thousands of millions. As a rule there is a kind of equilibrium between the forces of destruction and of reproduction. If a species is nearly exterminated by its enemies, those enemies lose their food-supply and perish themselves. In some sheltered spot the survivors of the victims remain and increase till they begin to send out colonies again. In some species, such as the mice in La Plata, and the beasts and birds which devour them, there is an alternation of increase and decrease, to be accounted for in this way. But permanent disturbances of equilibrium sometimes occur. The rabbit in Australia, having found a virgin soil, multiplied for some time almost up to the limit of its natural fertility and is firmly established on that continent. The brown rat (some say) has exterminated our black rat and the Maori rat in New Zealand. The microbe of the terrible disease which the crews of Columbus brought back to Europe, after causing a devastating epidemic at the end of the fifteenth century, established a kind of _modus vivendi_ with its hosts, and has remained as a permanent scourge in Europe. Other microbes, like those of cholera and plague, emigrate from the lands where they are endemic, like a horde of Tartars, and after slaying all who are susceptible disappear from inanition. The draining of the fens has driven the anopheles mosquito from England, and our countrymen no longer suffer from 'ague.' Cleanlier habits are banis.h.i.+ng the louse and its accompaniment typhus fever.

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 diminis.h.i.+ng 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 gra.s.sland 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 gra.s.slands 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 h.e.l.lenes 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 h.e.l.lenes kept the numbers down to some extent; but Greek battles were not as a rule very b.l.o.o.d.y, 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 flouris.h.i.+ng 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 prost.i.tution, 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 cla.s.ses;[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 h.e.l.lenic 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 h.e.l.lenisation 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 t.i.tus 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 ma.s.sacres, 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 inst.i.tution 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 pa.s.sive resignation, it will not regard children as a heritage and gift that cometh from the Lord, but rather as an enc.u.mbrance. 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 a.n.a.logy 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 a.s.sisi 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 s.e.x 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 G.o.d, of every human life, and of the sanct.i.ty of the body as the 'temple of G.o.d.' 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 diminis.h.i.+ng h.o.m.os.e.xual 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 n.o.blest in each generation; but this tendency was advent.i.tious 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 h.e.l.lenistic 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 ma.s.sacre 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 cla.s.ses of the people. Until the decline began, large families were the rule in all cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.ses 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.