As we approach the higher forms of life reproduction gradually
dies down. The animals nearest to man produce few offspring, but they
surround them with parental care, until they are able to lead
independent lives with a fair chance of surviving. The whole process
may be regarded as a mechanism for slowly subordinating quantity to
quality, and so promoting the evolution of life to ever higher stages.
This process, which is plain to see on the largest scale throughout
living nature, may be more minutely studied, as it acts within a
narrower range, in the human species. Here we statistically formulate
it in the terms of birth-rate and death-rate; by the mutual relationship
of the two courses of the birth-rate and the death-rate we are able to
estimate the evolutionary rank of a nation, and the degree in which it
has succeeded in subordinating the primitive standard of quantity to
the higher and later standard of quality.
It is especially in Europe that we can investigate this relationship by
the help of statistics which in some cases extend for nearly a century
back. We can trace the various phases through which each nation passes,
the effects of prosperity, the influence of education and sanitary
improvement, the general complex development of civilisation, in each
case moving forward, though not regularly and steadily, to higher
stages by means of a falling birth-rate, which is to some extent
compensated by a falling death-rate, the two rates nearly always
running parallel, so that a temporary rise in the birth-rate is usually
accompanied by a rise in the death-rate, by a return, that is to say,
towards the conditions which we find at the beginning of animal life,
and a steady fall in the birth-rate is always accompanied by a fall in
the death-rate.
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