00 or 22.5 per cent, in
1900, when the total population was 62,462 or nearly the same, the
number of children was only 9453, or a reduction in numbers of nearly
5000 children. In many of the small cities of New York State, the fact
that there is a constantly decreasing number of children in the
community is well recognized, the greater proportion of the population
being past middle life. The death-rate, therefore, is lower, from this
very fact.

_Death-rates of children._

That the general death-rate is directly affected by the number of
children living in a community is shown by the following table:--

TABLE V. SHOWING DEATHS FROM ALL CAUSES IN THE UNITED STATES FOR THE
YEARS 1901-1905, AT VARIOUS AGE PERIODS

================================================
No. at Each Per Cent of Total
Age Age Population
------------------------------------------------
Aggregate 529,630 ----
Under 1 year 100,268 18.93
Under 5 years 143,684 27.13
5-9 years 13,679 2.58
10-19 years 23,234 4.38
20-29 years 46,685 8.81
30-39 years 49,501 9.34
40-49 years 48,811 9.21
50-59 years 51,787 9.77
60-69 years 59,856 11.31
70-79 years 56,544 10.68
80-89 years 29,408 5.55
90 and over 6,441 1.21
================================================

This table shows two things: first, that children have a hard time
reaching five years, as nearly one third of all the children born in any
year die under five years, and second, that from five to twenty years is
the healthiest--that is, safest--time of a person's life, since after
twenty the constitutional diseases make themselves felt so that death
becomes almost uniformly distributed from twenty to eighty. It is plain,
then, that in any community a change in the relative proportion of
children born in any year would change the death-rate, since with a
smaller number of infants there could not be so many to die.

No statistics are available to determine the number of small children in
the country as compared with that in the city, but it is probable that
they are in excess in the latter, since the highest birth-rates are
found in the congested districts of cities where foreigners congregate.
If this is so, it will