EVERY CLASS DWINDLING

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 June 1934, Page 9

EVERY CLASS DWINDLING

the Falling birthrate. “How soon is the public mind likely to become seriously scared at the prospect of a falling population? At the moment there is little or no evidence of any such anxiety. But, as Sir William Beveridge observed recently in expounding his new deal for Britain, there are excellent grounds for fearing (or hoping) that a fall in the population of this and many other industrialised countries may very soon begin, says “The Economist.” ‘Some time soon after 1870 the knowledge and practice of birth control began to spread, as is well known, through larger and larger circles of the human race. “From this moment the birth-rate in practically all European countries turned steeply downward. For a long time the movement was concealed by the success of medical science in rapidly reducing the deathrate. Consequently a great many reformers, oblivious of what is to come, have been able to go on bewailing the evils of over-population and proposing remedies varying with their temperaments and predilections. “In this country the more radicallyminded believers in hope to cure unemployment, by disseminating a knowledge of birth control among the working classes. Tory-minded over-populationists, on the other hand, recommend (or did until recently) emigration as a cure for over-population, and would' like to ship the unemployed to Canada or Australia forthwith. And there are even a few extreme reactionaries like Dean Inge who believe that the working classes in all industrialised States consist of a huge mass of biologically inferior humanity rapidly multiplying at the expense of the intelligent and virtuous, but lamentably infertile, richer classes.

' “If the propaganda, of cugenical reformers has any effect in reducing the population, that effect will almost certainly be to turn a stream into a torrent. For the movement begun in the ’seventies has proceeded with unabated vigour throughout Europe ever since; and the last birth-rate return published in this country was, as usual, the lowest ever recorded. “What is more, one of the most remarkable features of the fall in the birth-rate during the lust 30 years has been its rapid extension to the poorer classes of the community. Somewhere about 1910 the birth-rate among the poorer classes began to fall rapidly. By about 1925 in various large towns of Northern Europe it was almost as low as the rate among the richer classes. The picture of a sterile middle class and a rapidly multiplying proletariat is becoming as mythical as the Nordic race. “The wheel has indeed come full circle since the days of Malthus and his critics. Since medical science cannot retard the death-rate indefinitely, the population is almost certain to begin falling in Western countries in five or ten years’ time.