The natural increase of a nation is not the result of its birth-rate, but of its birth-rate minus its death-rate. * A low birth-rate with a low death-rate (as in Australasia) produces a far greater natural increase than a low birth-rate with a rather high death-rate (as in France), and may even produce as great an increase as a very high birth-rate with a very high death-rate (as in Russia). Many worthy people might have been spared the utterance of foolish and mischievous jeremiads, if, instead of being content with a hasty glance at the crude birth-rate, they had paused to consider this fairly obvious
There is an intimate connection between a high birth-rate and a high death-rate, between a low birth-rate and a low death-rate.
It may not, indeed, be an absolutely necessary connection, and is not the outcome of any mysterious "law." But it usually exists, and the reasons are fairly obvious.
We have already encountered the statement from an official Canadian source that the large infantile mortality of French Canadian families is due to parental carelessness, consequent, no doubt, not only on the dimly felt consciousness that children are cheap, but much more on inability to cope with the manifold cares involved by a large family.
Among the English working class every doctor knows the thinly veiled indifference or even repulsion with which women view the seemingly endless stream of babies they give birth to.
Among the Berlin working class, also, Hamburger's important investigation has indicated how serious a cause of infantile mortality this may be.
By taking 374 working-class women, who had been married twenty years and conceived 3183 times, he found that the net result in surviving