ease 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 fact.

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 children was
relatively more than twice as great among the women who had only had one
child when compared to the women who had had fifteen children. The women
with only one child brought 76.47 per cent of these children to
maturity; the women who had produced fifteen children could only bring
30.66 of them to maturity; the intermediate groups showed a gradual fall
to this low level, the only exception being that the mothers of three
children were somewhat more successful than the mothers of two children.
Among well-to-do mothers Hamburger found no such marked contrast
between the net product of large families as compared to small
families.[101]

It we look at the matter from a wider standpoint we can have no
difficulty in realizing that a community which is reproducing itself
rapidly must always be in an unstable state of disorganization highly
unfavourable to the welfare of its members, and especially of the
new-comers; a community whic