Popular opinion on this matter may be said to have passed through three
stages. I am referring to Western Europe and more particularly to
England and Germany, for it must be remembered that, in this matter,
England and Germany are running a parallel course. England happens to
be, on the whole, a little ahead, having reached its period of full
expansion at a somewhat earlier period than Germany, but each people is
pursuing the same course.
In the first stage--let us say about the middle of the last century and
the succeeding thirty years--the popular attitude was one of jubilant
satisfaction in a high and rising birth-rate. There had been an immense
expansion of industry. The whole world seemed nothing but a great field
for the energetic and industrial nations to exploit. Workers were
needed to keep up with the expansion and to keep down wages to a rate
which would make industrial expansion easy; soldiers and armaments were
needed to protect the movements of expansion. It seemed to the more
exuberant spirits that a vast British Empire, or a mighty Pan-Germany,
might be expected to cover the whole world. France, with its low and
falling birth-rate, was looked down at with contempt as a decadent
country inhabited by a degenerate population. No attempts to analyse
the birth-rate, to ascertain what are really the biological, social,
and economic accompaniments of a high birth-rate, made any impression
on the popular mind. They were drowned in the general shout of
exultation.
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