lation. France is pointed out as an instance where the rate of growth has become very low because of the fashion the French have acquired, even in the middle classes, of restricting the size of their families.
The illustration, however, is not altogether fortunate for those who use it. The French annual rate of increase, it is true, sank very low during the four or five years previous to the Prussian War, being only seven per thousand inhabitants in 1870. But since then it has steadily risen, and in 1890 was thirty-seven per thousand.[1] In fact, France is an excellent illustration to show how mere ideas and opinions affect the growth of population, and how the rate of increase may be depressed by discontent or disaster, or raised by the desire to conquer an old enemy or by the success of a new form of government.
But is it true as a general proposition that advanced civilization decreases the rate of population? There is a feeling among many people, who have not thought much on the subject, that the more animal-like we become, the more we multiply, and that the lower types of civilization necessarily increase more rapidly than the higher. But this is very far from the truth.
Savages and uncivilized races are not, as a rule, of very rapid increase. They often recede and whole tribes of them become extinct. If we look at the whole world, it is the uncivilized populations that are disappearing. Before the coming of the English to the United States the red men had held the country with all its natural fertility and resources for hundreds of years, and yet had not been able to increase themselves to a million. During the middle ages, from the year 500 to 1500, a period of a thousand years, we find the population of Europe in all stages of barbarism and low civilization, and yet the increase of population was very slow. In the year 500 Europe was supposed to have something over 40,000,000 people. In the year 1500 the highest estimate is 70,000,000. Thus in a thousand years the population had not doubled. But after the year 1500, under the influence of the Reformation and modern civilization, the population doubled in three hundred years.[2]
Another excellent illustration to show the effect of modern civilization is the growth of the English people.
| 1480 | 3,700,000 | |
| 1580 | 4,600,000 | |
| 1680 | 5,532,000 | |
| 1780 | 9,561,000 | |
| 1880 | 35,004,000 |
