FRANCE'S SAD STORY

Evening Post, Volume LXXXII, Issue 123, 21 November 1911, Page 7

FRANCE'S SAD STORY

DECLINING BIRTH-RATE.

STARTLING FIGURES.

DEATHS LARGELY EXCEED BIRTHS.

Oy Telegraph.—Press Association.—Copyrlgh*,

(Received November 21, 8.5 a.m.) PARIS, 20th November.

The deaths in France during the first half of 1911 numbered 18,279 above the births, compared with an excess oi 21,189 births, over deaths in the first half of 1910. [Will the French nation live to tho twenty-first or twenty-second century, or will they by that,time have committed suicide? asked, last year, Pierre Leroy-Beaulieu, French Deputy, professor in the Free School of Political Science, and assistant editor of the Econoniiste Francais. "There is no doubt whatever that the French people are rushing to suicide," he says. "If they continue on this course, the French nation, those of French stock, will have lost a fifth of their number before the expiration of the present century, and will absolutely have vanished from Europe 'by the end of the twenty-second century—-that is, in two hundred years. While people ■ arc eternally discussing the advantages of secular education anil the beauty of the income tax, and all the grand democratic refornis that 'are to come, amid all tho fine speeches of sophistical cranks, the French people are gradually committing suicide. ... When we come to the birth-rate of France, here we find the hurt, the deadly hurt, from which our country suffers. The birth-rate in France has been declining for a century. This decline has become so accelerated during the past ten or fifteen years that, as I feel bound to repeat, we stand confronted by an impending suicide of the nation. During the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, France recorde! more than thirty b'">*tlis per thousand inhabitants; from 1835 to 1869 the birthrate oscillated between thirty and twentysix per thousand. Leaving out the depopulating years of the Franco-Prussian war, 1870*71, and years succeeding, which suffered from this scourge, w« find that from 1876 to T9OO the birthrate was on the decline, and ranged from twenty-six to twenty-two per thousand. In 1900 it h#d sunk to twentyone, and by the latest statistics it is at present only twenty per thousand inhabitants." The annual average of the birth and death-rates of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany from 1905 to 19,08 _ were :—Birth-rate, per thousand — '<■ United Kingdom, 26.5; France, 20.3; Germany j 552.4. DeathKingdom, 15.4; France, 19.7; Germany," 18.4.]