SECTION CCXLVI.. History of Population.--in Highly Civilized Times.

HISTORY OF POPULATION.--IN HIGHLY CIVILIZED TIMES.

The conditions of population among mature and flourishing nations is characterized by this, that the moral and rational preventive tendencies counter to over-population decidedly preponderate. Here so much value is attached to the life, and to the healthy and comfortable life of human beings already in existence that even the majority of the lower classes take care to bring no more children into the world than can be properly supported, nor to bring them into being in advance of food. Here, too, mortality is relatively small, which when population is stationary is found in connection with a higher average duration of human life.[246-1] While among savage and semi-savage nations, travelers are struck by no phenomenon as much as by the total absence of old men,[246-2] in most European nations the average duration of life has, during the last centuries, seemed to noticeably increase. In France, for instance, between 1771 and 1780, on a population of 29,000,000 at most, there were as many deaths as on 35,000,000 between 1844 and 1853.[246-3] In Sweden, the classic land of statistics relating to population, mortality from 1749 to 1855 had diminished 0.107 per cent. per annum.[246-4] [246-5]

No reasonable man considers mere living the highest good; but, from an average prolongation of life, we may with great probability infer an improvement in the means of subsistence, in hygienic measures, etc., even for the lower classes, who everywhere constitute the great majority of the population. Aisance est vitalité!--at least on the supposition that morality remains the same.[246-6] How great may not have been the effect, for instance, of the healthier mode of the building of modern cities, of the disappearance of the greater number of fortifications etc., the more rational character of the healing art, the extension of vaccination,[246-7] the hygienic measures adopted by governments,[246-8] the better care of the poor and especially the asylums for small children! The modern system of agriculture and of the corn trade make famines less destructive of life.[246-9] (§ 115). The modern quarantine-system has protected us entirely against a number of plagues; and the worst epidemics of our day cannot be compared with those of earlier periods or in less civilized countries. In the second half of the 17th century, it was estimated in London that a plague would occur once in every 20 years, each of which swept away one-fifth of the entire population.[246-10] And in that very city the annual mortality between 1740 and 1750 varied three-fifths, during the second half of the 18th century only one-third, during the 19th century only one-fifth in the same decade; a clear proof of the diminished fatality of epidemics.[246-11] [246-12]

Compare Kopf, in the 3d edition of Kolb's Handbuch der Statistik, and the solid works of G. F. Knapp, Ueber die Ermittelung der Sterblichkeit (1868) and Die Sterblichkeit in Sachsen (1869). Price's mode of calculation of which Deparcieux is the real author, which divides the number of the living by the arithmetical mean of the number of births and deaths is not only inaccurate (Meyer, loc. cit., 43 ff.) but erroneous in principle, since it allows two countries of equal population to be the same, the one of which has 120,000 births and a mortality of 80,000, and the other, on the contrary, 80,000 births and a mortality of 120,000. Engel recommends as the measure of real vitality the ratio between the "living years" and the "dead years," meaning by the former the sum of the years which those still living have lived through, and by the latter the sum of the years lived through by those who have died within a given period. (Preuss. Statist. Zeitschr., 1861, 348 ff.) But the inference which may be drawn from a high or a low average of life is altogether ambiguous. A high average may as well be produced by a great mortality among children as by a favorable mortality among those of mature age; and a low average as well by a relatively small number of births as by a relatively short duration of life. (Meyer, loc. cit., 23, 24.)]