There has, however, been a steady postponement of the average age at which marriage takes place. On the whole, the main fact that emerges is, that nowadays in England we marry less and have fewer children.
This is now a familiar fact, and perhaps it should not excite very great surprise. England is an old and fairly stable country, and it may be said that it would be unreasonable to expect its population to retain indefinitely a high degree of fertility. Whether this is so or not, there is the further consideration to be borne in mind that, during nearly the whole of the Victorian period, emigration of the most vigorous stocks took place to a very marked extent. It is not difficult to see the influence of such emigration in connection with the greatly diminished population of Ireland, as compared with Scotland; and we may reasonably infer that it has had its part in the decreased fertility of the United Kingdom generally.
But we encounter the remarkable fact that this decreased fertility of the Anglo-Saxon populations is not confined to the United Kingdom. It is even more pronounced in those very lands to which so many thousand shiploads of our best people have been taken. In the United States the question has attracted much attention, and there is little disagreement among careful observers as to the main facts of the situation. The question is,
indeed, somewhat difficult for two reasons: the registration of births is not generally compulsory in the United States, and, even when general facts are ascertained, it is still necessary to distinguish between the different classes of the population.
Our conclusions must therefore be based, not on the course of a general birth-rate, but on the most reliable calculations, based on the census returns and on the average size of the family at different periods, and among different classes of the population.