THE DECADENCE OF RACES.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4892, 18 September 1901, Page 1

THE DECADENCE OF RACES.

Many a time has the story of tbe decadence of the Roman Empire been used to show that the vice and effeminacy which so often accompany high civilisations provide an automatic check to their extension, leaving the cultured races, as in the case of Rome, at the mercy of G-oths and Hnu. Nowadays it would seem as if the triumph of tbe savage is to be Becnred in otber ways. No longer do we wait for outer barbarians to descend upon us. We merely arrange that the more brainy portion of the population shall retire from the task of peopling the world — a simple check to the overgrowth of hereditary genius. So, at least, it would appear from the facts detailed in a paper read at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association by ,Dr Engelman in regard to the increasing sterility of American women. France has long .bewailed the unwillingness of her daughters to become mothers of soldiers ; lately England, the champion mother of nations, has also discovered that her fecundity is diminishing ; and now* ife in the Ame»6&n woman, that final product of an exalted civilisation, who declines the common task and hands over to a crowd of immigrants from many nations of all degrees the surely noble duty of peopling the American continent. Tears ago, on the publication of a once famous (or infamous) ! pamphlet entitled the • Fruits of Philosophy,' there was a great outcry. The protest was chiefly based upon moral grounds ; but we are now beginning to find out how serious a canker immortality of the kind therein dealt with may prove to a whole nation. We aro told that the fecundity o£ the American woman was five children per family in the eighteenth century 45 in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that at the end of that ceatury it was between 1.8 and 2.1 per family, as against more than twice that figure among the immigrant population. Thus even in his own land the American is constantly being displaced by a mixture of Americanbora Irish and Germans, Italians, Scandinavians, Russians, and Pole?, beside the constant stream of, immigrants. We do not say a word against these people. They are no doubt good, lusty Goths and Huns. But if there is anything to. be prond of in being an American, a soion of that wonderful race (a mixture if yon like, but still practically by this time a race) by whom America has been made, it surely is matter for regret tfi at at the present day the sterility of the American woman is greater and her fecundity is leas than that of the women of any other natioa except France. So much for the laws of evolution. This is the modern way in which a great -people which has done its work tends to become ousted by more sexually vigorous races. The tree of knowledge is indeed full of danger to those who pick too freely of its fruit. — ' The Hospital.'