facts concerning the fecundity of women among
savages in various parts of the world are brought together by Ploss and
Bartels, _Das Weib_, Vol I, chap. XXIV.

[125] The proportion of doctors to the population is very small, and the
people still have great confidence in their quacks and witch-doctors.
The elementary rules of sanitation are generally neglected, water
supplies are polluted, filth is piled up in the streets and the
courtyards, as it was in England and Western Europe generally until a
century ago, and the framing of regulations or the incursions of the
police have little effect on the habits of the people. Neglect of the
ordinary precautions of cleanliness is responsible for the wide
extension of syphilis by the use of drinking vessels, towels, etc., in
common. Not only is typhoid prevalent in nearly every province of
Russia, but typhus, which is peculiarly the disease of filth,
overcrowding, and starvation, and has long been practically extinct in
England, still flourishes and causes an immense mortality. The workers
often have no homes and sleep in the factories amidst the machinery, men
and women together; their food is insufficient, and the hours of labour
may vary from twelve to fourteen. When famine occurs these conditions
are exaggerated, and various epidemics ravage the population.

[126] It must, however, be remembered that in small and unstable
communities a considerable margin for error must be allowed, as the
crude birth-rate is unduly raised by an afflux of immigrants at the
reproductive age.

[127] Arsene Dumont, _Depopulation et Civilisation_, 1890, chap. VI. The
nature of the restraint on fertility has been well set forth by Dr.
Bushee ("The Declining Birth-rate and its Causes," _Popular Science
Monthly_, August, 1903), mainly in the terms of Dumont's "social
capillarity" theory.

[128] Even Dr. Newsholme, usually so cautious and reliable an investigator
in this field, has been betrayed into a reference in this connection
(_The Declining Birth-rate_, 1911, p. 41) to the "increasing rarity of
altruism," though in almost the next paragraph he points out that the
large families of the past were connected with the fact that the child
was a profitable asset, and could be sent to work when little more than
an infant. The "altruism" which results in crushing the minds and bodies
of others in order to increase one's own earnings is not an "altruism"
which we need desire to perpetuate. The benefic