Thus Ewart found in
a northern English manufacturing town that children born at an interval
of less than two years after the birth of the previous child remain
notably defective, even at the age of six, both as regards intelligence
and physical development. When compared with children born at a longer
interval and with first-born children, they are, on the average, three
inches shorter and three pounds lighter than first-born children.[13]
Such observations need to be repeated in various countries, but if
confirmed it is obvious that they represent a fact of the most vital
significance.
Thus when we calmly survey, in however summary a manner, the great
field of life affected by the establishment of voluntary human control
over the production of the race, we can see no cause for anything but
hope. It is satisfactory that it should be so, for there can be no
doubt that we are here facing a great and permanent fact in civilised
life. With every rise in civilisation, indeed with all evolutionary
progress whatever, there is what seems to be an automatic fall in the
birth-rate. That fall is always normally accompanied by a fall in the
death-rate, so that a low birth-rate frequently means a high rate of
natural increase, since most of the children born survive.[14] Thus in
the civilised world of to-day, notwithstanding the low birth-rate which
prevails as compared with earlier times, the rate of increase in the
population is still, as Leroy-Beaulieu points out, appalling, nearly
half a million a year in Great Britain, over half a million in
Austro-Hungary, and three-quarters of a million in Germany.
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