Thus while Coghlan, the Government Statistician of New South Wales, concludes that the decline in the birth-rate in the Australian Commonwealth was due to "the art of applying artificial checks to conception," McLean, the Government Statistician of Victoria, concludes that it was "due mainly to natural causes."
He points out that when the birth-rate in Australia, half a century ago, was nearly 43 per 1000, the population consisted chiefly of men and women at the reproductive period of life, and that since then the proportion of persons at these ages has declined, leading necessarily to a decline in the crude birth-rate.
If we compare the birth-rate of communities among women of the same age-periods, McLean argues, we may obtain results quite different from the crude birth-rate. Thus the crude birth-rate of Buda-Pesth is much higher than that of New South Wales, but if we ascertain the birth-rate of married women at different age-periods (15 to 20, 20 to 25, etc.) the New South Wales birth-rate is higher for every age-period than that of Buda-Pesth.
McLean considers that in young communities with many vigorous immigrants the population is normally more prolific than in older and more settled communities, and that hardships and financial depression still more depress the birth-rate. He further emphasizes the important relationship, which we must never lose sight of in this connection, between a high birth-rate and a high death-rate, especially a high infantile death-rate, and he believes, indeed, that "the solution of the problem of the general decline in the birth-rate throughout all civilized communities lies in the preservation of human life." The mechanism of the connection would be, he maintains, that prolonged suckling in the case