(THE GALTON LECTURE, 1919)
In the year 1890 Sir Charles Dilke ended his survey of 'Greater Britain' and its problems with the prediction that 'the world's future belongs to the Anglo-Saxon, the Russian, and the Chinese races.' This was in the heyday of British imperialism, which was inaugurated by Seeley's 'Expansion of England' and Froude's 'Oceana,' and which inspired Mr. Chamberlain to proclaim at Toronto in 1887 that the 'Anglo-Saxon stock is infallibly destined to be the predominant force in the history and civilisation of the world.' It was an arrogant, but not truculent, mood, which reached its climax at the 1897 Jubilee, and rapidly declined during and after the Boer war. These writers and statesmen were utterly blind to the German peril, though the disciples of Treitschke were already working out a theory about the future destinies of the world, in which neither Great Britain nor Russia nor China counted for very much. There were illusions on both sides of the North Sea, which had to be paid for in blood. In both countries imperialism was a sentiment curiously compounded of idealism and bombast, and supported by very doubtful science. In the case of Germany the distortion of facts was deliberate and monstrous. Not only was every schoolboy brought up on cooked population statistics and falsified geography, but the thick-set, brachycephalous Central European persuaded himself that he belonged to the pure Nordic race, the great blond beasts of Nietzsche, which, as he was taught, had already produced nearly all the great men in history, and was now about to claim its proper place as master of the world. Political anthropology is no genuine science. Race and nationality are catchwords for which rulers find that their subjects are willing to fight, as they fought for what they called religion four hundred years ago. In reality, if we want to find a pure race, we must visit the Esquimaux, or the Fuegians, or the Pygmies; we shall certainly not find one in Europe. Our own imperialists had their illusions too, and we are not rid of them yet, because we do not realise that the fate of races is decided, not in the council-chamber or on the battle-field, but by the same laws of nature which determine the distribution of the various plants and animals of the world. It may be that by approaching our subject from this side we shall arrive at a more scientific, if a more chastened, anticipation of our national future than was acceptable to the enthusiasts of expansion in the last twenty years of Queen Victoria's reign.
The history of the world shows us that there have been three great human reservoirs which from time to time have burst their banks and flooded neighbouring countries. These are the Arabian peninsula, the steppes of Central Asia, and the lands round the Baltic, the original home of the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples. The invaders in each case were pastoral folk, who were driven from their homes by over-population, or drought and famine, or the pressure of enemies behind them. It is easy for nomads to 'trek,' even for great distances; and till the discovery of gunpowder they were the most formidable of foes. The Arabs and Northern Europeans have founded great civilisations; the Mongol hordes have been an unmitigated curse to humanity. The invaders never kept their blood pure. The famous Jewish nose is probably Hittite, and certainly not Bedouin. There are no pure Turks in Europe, and the Hungarians have lost all resemblance to Mongols. The modern Germans seem to belong mainly to the round-headed Alpine race, which migrated into Europe in early times from the Asiatic highlands. In England there is a larger proportion of Nordic blood, because the Anglo-Saxons partially exterminated the natives; but the old Mediterranean race, which had made its way up the warm western coasts, still holds its own in Cornwall, Wales, Ireland, and the Western Highlands; and within the last hundred years, owing to frequent migrations, has mixed so thoroughly with the Anglo-Saxon stock that the English are becoming darker in each generation. This is not the result of a racial decay of the blonds, as the American, Dr. Charles Woodruff, supposes, but is to be accounted for by the fact that dark eyes seem to be a Mendelian dominant, and dark hair a more potent character than light. The inhabitants of these islands are nearly all long-headed, this being a characteristic of both the Nordic and Mediterranean races. The round-headed invaders, who perhaps brought with them the so-called Celtic languages at a remote period, and imposed them upon the inhabitants, seem to have left no other mark upon the population, though their type of head is prevalent over a great part of France.
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 _ædicephalous 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 Achæans 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 régime 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.
The causes of shrinkage in population are the opposites of those which we have found to promote its increase. The production of food may be diminished by the exhaustion of the soil, or by the progressive aridity caused by cutting down woods. The manufacture of goods to be exchanged for food may fall off owing to foreign competition, a result which is likely to follow from a rise in the standard of living, for the labourer then demands higher wages, and consumes more food per head, which of itself must check fertility, since the same amount of food will now support a smaller number. The delusion shared by the whole working class that they can make work for each other, at wages fixed by themselves, is ludicrous; a community cannot subsist 'by taking in each other's washing.' Or the supply of importable food may fail by the peopling up of the countries which grow it. Any conditions which make it no longer worth while to invest capital in business, or which destroy credit, have the same effect. One of the causes of the decay of the Roman Empire was the drain of specie to the East in exchange for perishable commodities. When trade is declining a general listlessness comes over the industrial world, and the output falls still further. There have been alleged instances of peoples which have dwindled and even disappeared from
taedium vitae. This is said to have been the cause of the extinction of the Guanches of the Canary Islands; but the symptoms described rather suggest an outbreak of sleeping-sickness.
Paradoxical as it may seem, neither voluntary restriction of births, nor famine, nor pestilence, nor war, has much effect in reducing numbers. Birth-control instead of diminishing the population, may only lower the death-rate. France in 1781, with a birth-rate of 39, had much the same net increase as in the years before the war with a birth-rate of 20. The parallel lines of the births and deaths in this country have already been mentioned. Famine and pestilence are followed at once by an increased number of births. India and China, though frequently ravaged by both these scourges, remain super-saturated. Of course, if the famine is chronic, the population must fall to the point where the food is sufficient; and a zymotic disease which has become endemic may be too strong for the natural fertility of the nation attacked, as has happened to several barbarous races; but an invasion of plague, cholera, or influenza has no permanent effect on the numbers of Europeans. War resembles plague in its action upon population. When, as in the late war, nearly the whole of the able-bodied men are on active service, the loss of population caused by cessation of births is greater than all the fatal casualties of the battle-field. A rough calculation gives the result that twelve million lives have been lost to the belligerent nations by the separation of husbands and wives during the war. And yet it may be predicted that these losses, added to the eight millions or so who have been killed, would be made good in a very few years but for the destruction of capital and credit which the war has caused. If we study the vital statistics of a country like Germany, which has engaged in several severe wars since births and deaths began to be registered, we shall find that the contour-line representing the fluctuations of the birth-rate indicates a steep ravine in the year or years while the war lasted, followed by a hump or high table-land for several years after. In a short time, as far as numbers are concerned, the war is as if it had never been. When we remember that the number of possible fathers is much reduced by casualties, this rise in the birth-rate after a war offers a strong confirmation of the thesis which we have been maintaining, that the ebb and flow of population are not affected by conscious intention, but by increased or diminished pressure of numbers upon subsistence. If the German people, who before the war consumed more food than was good for them, have been habituated by our blockade to a reasonable abstemiousness, we shall have contributed to the eventual increase of the German people, in spite of all their soldiers whom we killed in France, and the civilians whom we starved in Germany. And if our success leads to a greater consumption by our working class, our population will show a corresponding decline. Emigration, as we have seen, does not diminish the home population by a single unit; and so, while there are empty lands available for colonisation, it is by far the best method of adding to the numbers of our race.
It should now be possible to form a judgment on the prospects of the Anglo-Saxon race in various parts of the world. In India, Burma, New Guinea, the West Indian Islands, and tropical Africa there is no possibility of ever planting a healthy European population. These dependencies may grow food for us, or send us articles which we can exchange for food, but they are not, and never can be, colonies of Anglo-Saxons. The prospects of South Africa are very dubious. The white man is there an aristocrat, directing semi-servile labour. The white population of the gold and diamond fields will stay there till the mines give out, and no longer. Large tracts of the country may at last be occupied only by Kaffirs. The United States of America are becoming less Anglo-Saxon every year, and this process is likely to continue, since in unskilled labour the Italian and the Pole seem to give better value for their wages than the Englishman or born American, with his high standard of comfort. In Canada, the temperate part of Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania the chances for a large and flourishing English-speaking population seem to be very favourable, though in these dominions the high standard of living is a check to population, and in the case of Australasia the possibility of foreign conquest, while these priceless lands are still half empty, cannot be altogether excluded.
Even more interesting to most of us is the future of our race at home. As regards quality, the outlook for the present is bad. We have seen that the destruction of the upper and professional classes by taxation directed expressly against them has already begun, and this victimisation is certain to become more and more acute, till these classes are practically extinguished. The old aristocracy showed a tendency to decay even when they were unduly favoured by legislation, and a little more pressure will drive them to voluntary sterility and extermination. Even more to be regretted is the doom of the professional aristocracy, a caste almost peculiar to our country. These families can often show longer, and usually much better pedigrees than the peerage; the persistence of marked ability in many of them, for several generations, is the delight of the eugenist. They are perhaps the best specimens of humanity to be found in any country of the world. Yet they have no prospects except to be gradually harassed out of existence, like the
curiales of the later Roman Empire. The power will apparently be grasped by a new highly privileged class, the aristocracy of labour. This class, being intelligent, energetic, and intensely selfish, may retain its domination for a considerable time. It is a matter of course that, having won its privilege of exploiting the community, it will use all its efforts to preserve that privilege and to prevent others from sharing it. In other words, it will become an exclusive and strongly conservative class, on a broader basis than the territorial and commercial aristocracies which preceded it. It will probably be strong enough to discontinue the system of State doles which encourages the wastrel to multiply, as he does multiply, much faster than the valuable part of the population. We are at present breeding a large parasitic class subsisting on the taxes and hampering the Government. The comparative fertility of the lowest class as compared with the better stocks has greatly increased, and is still increasing. The competent working-class families, as well as the rich, are far less fertile than the waste products of our civilisation. Dr. Tredgold found that 43 couples of the parasitic class averaged 7.4 children per family, while 91 respectable couples from the working class averaged only 3.7 per family. Mr. Sidney Webb examined the statistics of the Hearts of Oak Benefit Society, which is patronised by the best type of mechanic, and found that the birth-rate among its members has fallen 46 per cent, between 1881 and 1901; or, taking the whole period between 1880 and 1904, the falling off is 52 per cent. This decline proves that the period of industrial expansion in England is nearly over. It would be far better if our birth-rate were as low as that of France, as it would be but for the reckless propagation of the 'submerged tenth,' England being now a paradise for human refuse, the offscourings of Europe (170,000 in 1908) take the place of the better stocks, whose position is made artificially unfavourable. These doles are at present paid by the minority, and this method may be expected to continue until the looting of the propertied classes comes to an enforced end. This will not take long, for it is certain that the amount of wealth available for plunder is very much smaller than is usually supposed. It is easy to destroy capital values, but very difficult to distribute them. The time will soon arrive when the patient sheep will be found to have lost not only his fleece but his skin, and the privileged workman will then have to choose between taxing himself and abandoning socialism. There is little doubt which he will prefer. The result will be that the festering sore of our slum-population will dry up, and the gradual disappearance of this element will be some compensation, from the eugenic point of view, for the destruction of the intellectual class. This process will considerably, and beneficially, diminish the population: and there are several other factors which will operate in the same direction. High wage industry can only maintain itself against the competition of cheaper labour abroad by introducing every kind of labour-saving device. The number of hands employed in a factory must progressively diminish. And as, in spite of all that ingenuity can do, the competition of the cheaper races is certain to cripple our foreign trade, the trade unions will be obliged to provide for a shrinkage in their numbers. We may expect that every unionist will be allowed to place one son, and only one, in the privileged corporation. A man will become a miner or a railwayman 'by patrimony,' and it will be difficult to gain admission to a union in any other way. The position of those who cannot find a place within the privileged circle will be so unhappy that most unionists will take care to have one son only. Another change which will tend to discourage families will be the increased employment of women as bread-winners. Nothing is more remarkable in the study of vital statistics than the comparative birth-rates of those districts in which women earn wages, and of those in which they do not. The rate of increase among the miners is as great as that of the reckless casual labourers, and the obvious reason is that the miner's wife loses nothing by having children, since she does not earn wages. Contrast with these high figures (running up to 40 per thousand) the very low birth-rates of towns like Bradford, where the women are engaged in the textile industry and earn regular wages in support of the family budget. If the time comes when the majority of women are wage-earners, we may even see the pressure of population entirely withdrawn. Thus in every class of the nation influences are at work tending to a progressive decrease in our national fertility. It must be remembered, however, that at present the annual increase, in peace time, is 9 or 10 per thousand, so that it may be some time before an equilibrium is reached. But if our predictions are sound, a positive decrease, and probably a rapid one, is likely to follow. For our ability to exchange our manufactures for food will grow steadily less, as the self-indulgent and 'work-shy' labourer succeeds in gaining his wishes. If the coal begins to give out, the retreat will become a rout.
We are witnessing the decline and fall of the social order which began with the industrial revolution 160 years ago. The cancer of industrialism has begun to mortify, and the end is in sight. Within 200 years, it may be--for we must allow for backwashes and cross-currents which will retard the flow of the stream--the hideous new towns which disfigure our landscape may have disappeared, and their sites may have been reclaimed for the plough. Humanitarian legislation, so far from arresting this movement, is more likely to accelerate it, and the same may be said of the insatiate greed of our new masters. It is indeed instructive to observe how cupidity and sentiment, which (with pugnacity) are the only passions which the practical politician needs to consider, usually defeat their own ends. The working man is sawing at the branch on which he is seated. He may benefit for a time a minority of his own class, but only by sealing the doom of the rest. A densely populated country, which is unable to feed itself, can never be a working-man's paradise, a land of short hours and high wages. And the sentimentalist, kind only to be cruel, unwittingly promotes precisely the results which he most deprecates, though they are often much more beneficial than his own aims. The evil that he would he does not; and the good that he would not, that he sometimes does.
For, much as we must regret the apparently inevitable ruin of the upper and upper middle classes, to which England in the past has owed the major part of her greatness, we cannot regard the trend of events as an unmixed misfortune. The industrial revolution has no doubt had some beneficial results. It has founded the British Empire, the most interesting and perhaps the most successful experiment in government on a large scale that the world has yet seen. It has foiled two formidable attempts to place Europe under the heel of military monarchies. It has brought order and material civilisation to many parts of the world which before were barbarous. But these achievements have been counterbalanced by many evils, and in any case they have done their work. The aggregation of mankind in large towns is itself a misfortune; the life of great cities is wholesome neither for body nor for mind. The separation of classes has become more complete; the country may even be divided into the picturesque counties where money is spent, and the ugly counties where it is made. Except London and the sea-ports, the whole of the South of England is more or less parasitic. We must add that in the early days of the movement the workman and his children were exploited ruthlessly. It is true that if they had not been exploited they would not have existed; but a root of bitterness was planted which, according to what seems to be the law in such cases, sprang up and bore its poisonous fruit about two generations later. It is a sinister fact that the worst trouble is now made by the youngest men. The large fortunes which were made by the manufacturers were not, on the whole, well spent. Their luxury was not of a refined type; literature and art were not intelligently encouraged; and even science was most inadequately supported. The great achievements of the nineteenth century in science and letters, and to a less degree in art, were independent of the industrial world, and were chiefly the work of that class which is now sinking helplessly under the blows of predatory taxation. Capitalism itself has degenerated; the typical millionaire is no longer the captain of industry, but the international banker and company promoter. It is more difficult than ever to find any rational justification for the accumulations which are in the hands of a few persons. It is not to be expected that the working class should be less greedy and unscrupulous than the educated; indeed it is plain that, now that it realises its power, it will be even more so. In some ways the national character has stood the strain of these unnatural conditions very well. Those who feared that the modern Englishman would make a poor soldier have had to own that they were entirely wrong. But as long as industrialism continues, we shall be in a state of thinly disguised civil war. There can be no industrial peace while our urban population remains, because the large towns are the creation of the system which their inhabitants now want to destroy. They can and will destroy it, but only by destroying themselves. When the suicidal war is over we shall have a comparatively small population, living mainly in the country and cultivating the fruits of the earth. It will be more like the England of the eighteenth century than the England which we know. There will be no very rich men; and if the birth-rate is regulated there should be no paupers. It will be a far pleasanter age to live in than the present, and more favourable to the production of great intellectual work, for life will be more leisurely, and social conditions more stable. We may hope that some of our best families will determine to survive,
coûte que coûte, until these better times arrive. We shall not attempt to prophesy what the political constitution will be. Every existing form of government is bad; and our democracy can hardly survive the two diseases which generally kill democracies--reckless plunder of the national wealth, and the impotence of the central government in face of revolutionary and predatory sectionalism.
Meanwhile, we must understand that although the consideration of mankind in the mass, and the calculation of tendencies based on figures and averages, must lead us to somewhat pessimistic and cynical views of human nature, there is no reason why individuals, unless they wish to make a career out of politics (since it is the sad fate of politicians always to deal with human nature at its worst), should conform themselves to the low standards of the world around them. It is only 'in the loomp' that humanity, whether poor or rich, 'is bad.' There are materials, though far less abundant than we could wish, for a spiritual reformation, which would smooth the transition to a new social order, and open to us unfailing sources of happiness and inspiration, which would not only enable us to tide over the period of dissolution, but might make the whole world our debtor. No nation is better endowed by nature with a faculty for sane idealism than the English. We were never intended to be a nation of shopkeepers, if a shopkeeper is doomed to be merely a shopkeeper, which of course he is not. Our brutal commercialism has been a temporary aberration; the quintessential Englishman is not the hero of Smiles' 'Self-help'; he is Raleigh, Drake, Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, or Wordsworth, with a pleasant spice of Dickens. He is, in a word, an idealist who has not quite forgotten that he is descended from an independent race of sea-rovers, accustomed to think and act for themselves. Mr. Havelock Ellis, one of the wisest and most fearless of our prophets to-day, quotes from an anonymous journalist a prediction which may come true: 'London may yet be the spiritual capital of the world; while Asia--rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord of lands and bodies, builder of railways and promulgator of police regulations, glorious in all material glories--postures, complacent and obtuse, before a Europe content in the possession of all that matters.' For, as the Greek poet says, 'the soul's wealth is the only real wealth.' The spirit creates values, while the demagogue shrieks to transfer the dead symbols of them. 'All that matters' is what the world can neither give nor take away. The spiritual integration of society which we desire and behold afar off must be illuminated by the dry light of science, and warmed by the rays of idealism, a white light but not cold. And idealism must be compacted as a religion, for it is the function of religion to prevent the fruits of the flowering-times of the spirit from being lost. Science has not yet come to its own in forming the beliefs and practice of mankind, because it has been so much excluded from higher education, and so much repressed by sentimentalism under the wing of religion. The nation that first finds a practical reconciliation between science and idealism is likely to take the front place among the peoples of the world. In England we have to struggle not only against ignorance, but against a deep-rooted intellectual insincerity, which is our worst national fault. The Englishman hates an idea which he has never met before, as he hates the disturber of his privacy in a steam-ship cabin; and he takes opportunities of making things unpleasant for those who utter indiscreet truths. As Samuel Butler says: 'We hold it useful to have a certain number of melancholy examples whose notorious failure shall serve as a warning to those who do not cultivate a power of immoral self-control which shall prevent them from saying, or even thinking, anything that shall not be to their immediate and palpable advantage.' To do our countrymen justice, it is often not self-interest, but a tendency to deal with the concrete instance, in disregard of the general law, that blinds them to the larger aspects of great problems. Those who are able to trace causes and effects further than the majority must expect to be unpopular, but they will not mind it, if they can do good by speaking. The logic of events will justify them, and science has a new weapon in official statistics which will register at once the disastrous effects upon wealth and trade which the insane theories of the demagogue will bring about. No agitator can explain away ascertained figures; if we go down hill, we shall do it with our eyes open. It may be that reactions will be set up which will render the anticipations in this article erroneous. Things never turn out either so well or so badly as they logically ought to do. Prophecy is only an amusement; what does concern us all deeply is that we should see in what direction we are now moving.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] In the small islands round our coast increase has
ceased for some decades. The vital statistics of these
islands furnish an excellent illustration of automatic
adjustment to a state of supersaturation.
[The end]
William Ralph Inge's essay: Future Of The English Race