cts
with which they are intimately related, we are able to see how foolish
has been the outcry against a falling birth-rate, and how false the
supposition that it is due to a new selfishness replacing an ancient
altruism.[128] On the contrary, the excessive birth-rate of the early
industrial period was directly stimulated by selfishness. There were no
laws against child-labour; children were produced that they might be
sent out, when little more than babies, to the factories and the mines
to increase their parents' income. The fundamental instincts of men and
women do not change, but their direction can be changed. In this field
the change is towards a higher transformation, introducing a finer
economy into life, diminishing death, disease, and misery, making
possible the finer ends of living, and at the same time indirectly and
even directly improving the quality of the future race.[129] This is now
becoming recognized by nearly all calm and sagacious inquirers.[130] The
wild outcry of many unbalanced persons to-day, that a falling birth-rate
means degeneration and disaster, is so altogether removed from the
sphere of reason that we ought perhaps to regard it as comparable to
those manias which, in former centuries, have assumed other forms more
attractive to the neurotic temperament of those days; fortunately, it is
a mania which, in the nature of things, is powerless to realize itself,
and we need not anticipate that the outcry against small families will
have the same results as the ancient outcry against witches.[131]

It may be proper at this stage to point out that while, in the foregoing
statement, a high birth-rate and a high marriage-rate have been regarded
as practically the same thing, we need to make a distinction. The true
relation of the two rates may be realized when it is stated that, the
more primitive a community is, the more closely the two rates vary
together. As a community becomes more civilized and more complex, the
two rates tend to diverge; the restraints on child-production are
deeper and more complex than those on marriage, so that the removal of
the restraint on marriage by no means removes the restraint on
fertility. They tend to diverge in opposite directions. Farr considered
the marriage-rate among civilized peoples as a barometer of national
prosperity. In former years, when corn was a great national product, the
marriage-rate in England rose regularly as the price of wheat fell. Of
rece