COMING DECLINE IN POPULATION

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 159, 2 April 1937, Page 5

COMING DECLINE IN POPULATION

“Only Girls Count”

Sir William Beveridge, director of the London School of Economics, spoke to the Sheffield Luncheon Club recently about the trend of population in Great Britain, and quoted figures given by Dr. R. Kuczynski, the German statistician, to siiow how the population would begin to fall. “The future of any population depends,’’ he said, “not. on the balance of births and deaths of all ages and both sexes, but on what is happening to the potential mothers. Boy babies matter very little, except that it seems as if we could not have 100 girl babies without having also 100 boys. It is unnecessary to count anyone except the girls.”

In Britain to-day the total population was still increasing slowly, but that was a temporary phenomenon due to high birth-rates a generation ago. For every 100 potential mothers of the present generation, there would be only 75 in the next generation. If that went on, in a hundred years’ time the population of England would be 20.000,000; in 200 years’ time it would be about 5,000,000.

Sir William pointed out that nothing much could be done to cheek the fall of population by saving the lives of women, as mortality was already so low. Increasing knowledge and application of birth control would almost certainly lower fertility still further if nothing else changed. For the survival of any race every couple in it must have, on an average, two descendants to replace them. To allow for people who have none, or fewer than two, and to allow for children dying before they grow up, a large proportion of parents must have not two children but three or four children.

Something could be done by making maternity safe and painless. A second reason for small families was the cost of roaring children. The question of family allowances would before long be in the centre of all discussions of social policy. He suggested that I lie most lio|x<ul way toward getting Ibose children without whom we could not survive as a nation was to make larger and better homes.