The Task of Social Hygiene

During recent years the question of the future of the human race has been brought before us in a way it has never been brought before. The great expansive movement in civilized countries is over. Whereas, fifty years ago, France seemed to present a striking contrast to other countries in her low and gradually falling birth-rate, to-day, though she has herself now almost reached a stationary position, France is seen merely to have been the leader in a movement which is common to all the more highly civilized nations. They are all now moving rapidly in the direction in which she moved slowly. It was inevitable that this movement, world-wide as it is, should call forth energetic protests, for there is no condition of things so bad but it finds some to advocate its perpetuation. There has, therefore, been much vigorous preaching against "race suicide" by people who were deaf to the small voice of reason, who failed to understand that this matter could not be settled by mere consideration of the crude birth-rates, and that, even if it could, we should have still to realize that, as an economist remarks, it is to the decline of the birth-rate only that we probably owe it that the modern civilized world has been saved from economic disaster. [147]

But whatever the causes of the declining birth-rate it is certain that even when they are within our control they are of far too intimate a character for the public moralist to be permitted to touch them, even though we consider them to be in a disastrous state. It has to be recognized that we are here in the presence, not of a merely local or temporary tendency which might be shaken off with an effort, but of a great fundamental law of civilization; and the fact that we encounter it in our own race merely means that we are reaching a fairly high stage of civilization. It is far from the first time, in the history of the world, that the same phenomenon has been witnessed. It was seen in Imperial Rome; it was seen, again, in the "Protestant Rome," Geneva. Wherever are gathered together an exceedingly fine race of people, the flower of the race, individuals of the highest mental and moral distinction, there the birth-rate falls steadily. Vice or virtue alike avails nothing in this field; with high civilization fertility inevitably diminishes.